Digressions&Impressions

On the Polemics against Religious Philosophy in Analytic Philosophy

The views which have been noticed thus far attempt to limit the scope of scientific methods on the basis of considerations that are at least nominally scientific in character. The criticisms of science to which attention must next be directed do not even pretend to adduce scientific grounds for their claims, and are frankly based upon explicit theological and metaphysical commitments for which no experimental evidence is invoked. The chief burden of their complaints is that science offers no ‘'ultimate explanation” for the facts of existence; and their chief recommendation is the cultivation of “ontological wisdom” as the sole method for making “ultimately intelligible” both the order of the cosmos and the nature of the good life.

Some citations from recent writers will exhibit more clearly than would a paraphrase the unique mixture of pontifical dogmatism, oracular wisdom, and condescending obscurantism which seems to be the indispensible [sic] intellectual apparatus of this school of criticism. Ernest Nagel (1943) "Malicious Philosophies of Science" reprinted in Sovereign Reason, 37.

One of the sad spectacles of our age is to see otherwise mild-mannered and virtue-seeking religious philosophers cheer on the at times intemperate polemics of, say, Anscombe, Geach, and Plantinga. To say that it not to deny their philosophical contributions and skill in many contexts. And since I am not a stranger to polemics (and willing to grant I make fewer contributions to philosophy), even ill-tempered ones on the role of religion in philosophy, I am not casting stones that couldn't be thrown harder at me! 

It took me a long time to recognize that the championing of philosopher-brawlers (which is still endemic in wider analytic philosophy despite moves toward niceness), and the not infrequent closing of factional ranks, was itself a reflection of the sense of beleaguered-ness. And the reason I found it so hard to enter into that mind-set is that it seemed so self-evident to me that in the wider culture, Stateside, Christianity was by no means going extinct. But in riper age, I have come to recognize that behind all the aggressive political bluster, Christianity today exhibits all the signs of a world-historical implosion in the wealthier parts of the world. (That's compatible with phenomenal growth of Christianity elsewhere on the Planet.)* If I were Hegelian, I would say that the recent joyous flowering of analytic Christian, metaphysics is a sign of this! 

But I am not Hegelian. One oddity, however, is that if one goes over the classics of analytic philosophy, there is little explicit engagement with the status of theology and the role of religion in philosophy. Even Russell, who clearly was no friend of organized religion, claims, in a surprising moment of candor (not the least for the willingness to admit to an esoteric/exoteric distinction), that were he "speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God." ("Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic? A Plea For Tolerance In The Face Of New Dogmas," 1947.)

And while I do not deny that verificationism undoubtedly also had an anti-Christian element to it, it was, as philosophical doctrines go, short-lived. Even so, it may well have reflected a broader climate that was very slow to disappear. One telling data-point for this thought, and to get a sense of that philosophical climate, it is notable that Gödel never published his ontological proof even after safely ensconced at the Institute for Advanced Studies. 

Okay, with that in place, I return (recall) to Nagel's "malicious philosophies of science." (See also, this post on the role of its companion piece, "Recent Philosophies of Science," in the displacement of dialectical materialism.) The role of 'malicious' in the title of the paper, gives a sense of its tenor. 

Nagel's paper itself has many virtues. He shows that many philosophical discussions -- which are still familiar -- about the purported gulf between mind and world; or how to make the qualitative nature of experience compatible with the purportedly mathematical character of modern science; or  the ways in which mechanistic (and/or deterministic) and physicalist science are taken to be incompatible with an orientation toward (emergentist) life or mind, all tend to rest on impoverished conceptions of the nature of science and the practice of experimentation in which much of science is rooted. 

But, it is notable, in the quoted passage above, that Nagel simply assumes that "experimental evidence" is required to ground or justify "explicit theological and metaphysical commitments." And while one can grant Nagel that science itself need not offer "ultimate explanation" for the "facts of existence" -- and, perhaps, in his day wisely does not try to do so [modern cosmology is frequently not so self-limiting] --, it follows straightforwardly from the undeniable possibility that experimental evidence may not settle all philosophical questions.+

The previous paragraph is not to excuse pontifical dogmatism or oracular wisdom. It's Thursday, and I carry my analytic membership proudly today. Nagel goes on to quote a number of eminent neo-Thomists (Gilson, Maritain and, although no neo-Thomists, Whitehead). I have to admit I do not find what they say especially puzzling or obscure. (But you may disagree.) What these positions have in common is a demand for (i) forms of explanation that go beyond efficient causes; (ii) an ultimate ground for existence beyond experience; (iii) and some connection between (i-ii) that conforms to cannons of intelligibility and a PSR.

The more interesting point I wish to make is that when Nagel shows, correctly, that science itself often goes beyond efficient causation, and even offers answers to 'why' questions, he himself notes that these (tentative) scientific answers are not themselves based on direct experiment: "in science the answer to the question "why" is...always a theory, from which the specific fact at issue may be deduced when suitable initial conditions are introduced." (SR: 29) And Nagel grants that these initial conditions are going to be arbitrary or brute in some sense on so at odds with (iii). (In addition, the theory may well go beyond the experimental evidence that helped generate and confirm it.)

That Nagel recognizes the significance of (iii) is itself made clear when he insists that the appeal to causa sui is itself "mystery." (SR 30) And while I have some sympathy with Nagel's point -- which echoes, in a curious reversal, Clarke's Newtonian response to Spinoza -- that there is something unsatisfactory, especially to those familiar with science's ability to explain surprising difference makers in the world, about the fact that "no matter what the world were like, no matter what the course of events might be, the same Ultimate Cause is offered an "explanation,"" (SR 30) it is a mistake to charge this 'explanation' with mystery. That something is relatively bad at explaining particulars does not make it oracular or mysterious. 

I do not mean here to re-litigate Nagel's polemics. But it is easier to understand that in an intellectual milieu dominated by ideas like, and presumably influenced by, Nagel's a certain kind of counter-polemic may have been welcome. 

Now, so far I have done little to make the animus behind Nagel's position intelligible. But there is no mystery there. Nagel fundamentally objects to two ideas: first, that "only one conception of spiritual excellence is valid." (SR 33) And Nagel clearly believes, not without reason, that his targets promote such (ahh) spiritual monism. And, second, he rejects the dogmatism about such spiritual monism ground in a kind of intellectual hierarchy. The second point is more implied (but see what he says about Maritain).

For, Nagel the two ideas he rejects have no standing because they are not "based upon objective measures of well-being." (SR 33) And such measures must, according to Nagel be ground in careful experimental practice. To be sure it is in virtue of his commitment to this that he lets the reader grasp that shares with the neo-Thomists a rejection of the utilitarian tendency toward eugenics (SR 32). So, unlike many friends of science and experimental practice, Nagel does not deny that science is implicated in many contemporary problems. But he believes that a kind of anti-scientism, "rejects the one instrument from which a resolution of these difficulties may reasonably be expected." (SR 33)**

Of course, even somebody sympathetic to Nagel, like myself, may note that he has no experimental (or historical/conceptual) ground to suppose there is just "one instrument" that can offer such a resolution. He smuggles a lot into what is 'reasonable' to expect. 

Let me wrap up. So while Nagel's heart is in the right place -- after all in line with (recall) his pluralism, he is defending the diversity of spiritual excellence! --, Nagel's argument goes off the rails because he thinks that the neo-Thomists (and other fellow travelers" unfairly take advantage of the fact that in "“in the midst of actual and impending disaster” and in “period of social crisis, when rational methods of inquiry supply no immediate solution for pressing problems” people are to listen to those that disparage or stress the limitations of the sciences. (SR: 18; see also “the mounting economic and political tensions of our age,” further down the page). That is to say Nagel echoes the epicurean and Humean polemic against superstition that it takes advantage of fear. But we don't need to be Yoda, to recognize that countering polemic with polemic is no path to wisdom.

 

 

 

Clarity, Analytic Marxism, and the Purported Sinking of dialectics (by Sidney Hook)

The only alternative to this procedure is to present one's own theory of dialectic....I shall argue that it would be best in the interests of clarity to let the term sink into the desuetude of archaisms; in fact, I shall try to show that this is the legitimate moral that can be drawn from any critical investigation of the assumptions and types of procedure most frequently designated as dialectical in the history of thought...

There are two generic conceptions of dialectic under which the various meanings of dialectic may be subsumed. The first is the conception of dialectic as a pattern of existential change either in nature or society or man where the "or" is not exclusive. The second is the view that dialectic is a special method of analyzing such change. Usually, but not always, it is held that the method of dialectical analysis in some sense "reflects" or "corresponds to" the dialectical pattern of change. In any case, there is always a distinction drawn, though with no great regard for consistency, between the dialectical type of change and other kinds. When the dialectic is identified with change as such, it is explicitly contrasted with some other natural or supernatural element which is regarded as undialectical, e.g., unchanging form or pattern. Similarly, with the conception of dialectic as method. Whether taken as a method of analysis or discovery or both it is always distinguished from other methods called undialectical, i.e., metaphysical, scientific, commonsensical, etc. This last distinction is of the first importance. For the alleged justification of the dialectic method consists in its power to lead us to the discovery of new truths or to a deeper and more adequate understanding of old truths, not accessible to us by any other method-- Sidney Hook (1939) "Dialectic in Social and Historical Inquiry" The Journal of Philosophy 36(14), 365-366.

A while ago (recall), I remarked with sardonic bemusement -- I am a liberal bourgeois intellectual, after all -- that analytic marxism is founded in an original sin, that is, an unearned dismissal of the dialectical method. That behind the brilliant rhetoric (recall) of G.A Cohen, Elster and the whole gang lies an appeal to clarity often linked to the stipulated superiority of the existing methods of social science. And while their embrace of clarity and rigor helped their careers in professional philosophy, and -- (let's stipulate) advanced academic discussion in a number of important scholarly fields -- it is by no means obvious they advanced marxism as a revolutionary doctrine to be feared by folks like me. For, while clarity is undoubtedly an important value that can be embraced by Marxists (see my treatment of Korsch's articulation of dialectics) it does not have, let's say, lexical priority over overthrowing capitalism.

In fact, I took considerable pleasure in pointing out that analytic marxists' dismissal of dialectics was unoriginal. For the rhetoric and whole style of pseudo-argument dismissing dialectics were anticipated by (recall here; and, for broader context, here and more recently here) the very bourgeois liberal philosopher, Ernest Nagel (who plays a non-trivial role in shaping analytic philosophy as such). But I noted that Nagel was, in turn, relying on Hook's efforts; and so it is worth looking at Hook.  

I often joke (with a note of ruefulness) that oblivion is the fate of all philosophers since the hegemony of analytic philosophy. But I was pleased to learn that our institutional collective memory, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, has an informative entry on Hook, which treats him as a "leading interpreter and proponent of Deweyan pragmatic naturalism" and "polemicist." Hook was once one of the leading New York intellectuals. And, pertinent for us, Hook became after trying initially to synthesize pragmatism and marxism a leading anti-communists as time passes. (His anti-communism increasingly has a McCarthyite tendency.) A key step in Hook's attempted synthesis and eventual turn against marxism is his rejection of the dialectical method.

Now, if we look at Hook's "Dialectic in Social and Historical Inquiry" all dialectic is dismissed. But strikingly we find only a single explicit mention of Marx's dialectic in a footnote: "I have omitted specific discussion of Marx in this paper because, whether or not we regard his findings as valid, I think it can be shown that he made no distinction between the dialectic method, as he understood it, and scientific method as applied to the historical and cultural sciences." (370) The footnote is more informative than it may seem. 

For, Hook's main strategy is to compare dialectics to ordinary "scientific method" which has a "basic unity" (378), and to find dialectics wanting in comparison to scientific method (371-379). But oddly, when he does so, he takes for granted that the metric/measure of comparison are the cannons of success internal to that scientific method. And to give a flavor of these cannons, among the criteria he identifies are "piece-meal verification" (371) and "predicting as closely as we can the specific form of the institutions of to-morrow" (375). 

Now, I don't mean to remind you constantly I am no Marxist, but even I can see that Hook is rigging the comparison against the dialectician. For Hook presupposes, oddly, that the "alleged justification of the dialectic method consists in its power to lead us to the discovery of new truths or to a deeper and more adequate understanding of old truths." But while undoubtedly dialecticians make such claims, and from my bourgois perspective often exaggeratedly so, this is not what the dialectician, is fundamentally interested in. For she is, I quote, Korsch (recall) committed to articulating "a theory of social revolution." It is plausible that if that is one's aim, one may well find that at times one has deeper understanding of social reality than those with more, say, armchair sensibilities.

Even a bourgeois intellectual like me can discern that in/with the ordinary scientific method as embraced by Hook, revolution is at best an afterthought. The scientific method (which is good at describing and predicting states of affairs) then functions as a kind of input into a different process  (i.e., changing the world). But while nobody denies that in this way science can contribute to enormous social transformations, including many unanticipated ones, this way of conceiving it allows capital to have a more than fair shot at shaping these outcomes.+ People like me would consider that a virtue of Hook's approach! 

By contrast, a key methodological move the dialectician asserts to make revolution really possible,  is "the coincidence of reality and consciousness." This coincidence makes marxist dialectic often seem weird. But as Bertell Ollman shows in Dance of the Dialectic,* the weirdness merely echoes the kind of things one finds in the whole tradition of what he calls the 'philosophy of internal relations' -- with Spinoza as one of the paradigmatic exemplars --  which simply rejects what since Tarski has come to be known as the classical account of truth. And so it is, also, no surprise, again quoting Korsch, this is "bound to appear to [critics of dialectics] as theoretically false and unscientific."

I do not mean to suggest there are no other arguments in Hook. But while all of them land serious blows, none of them take 'conduciveness to the revolution' as a fundamental aim. So, I regret to say we have returned to where started. I ruefully conclude that those purportedly most in the know about marxist dialectics (Hook, the analytic marxists, etc.) have produced refutations that ought not convince the would be revolutionary.** And while I have no standing as a score-keeper on such matters, I report as a psychological fact that it strikes me as a true scandal that these purported refutations are so obviously (to use a technical term) Quatsch. 

 

 

 

Newton, Spinozism, and mind/body interaction

Every sentient soul, at different times and in different organs of senses and motions, is the same indivisible person. There are parts that are successive in duration and coexistent in space, but neither of these exist in the person of man or in his thinking principle, and much less in the thinking substance of God. Every man, insofar as he is a thing that has senses, is one and the same man throughout his lifetime in each and every organ of his senses. God is one and the same God always and everywhere. He is omnipresent not only virtually but also substantially, for active power [virtus] cannot subsist without substance. In him all things are contained and move, but he does not act on them nor they on him, experiences nothing from the motions of bodies; the bodies feel no resistance from God's omnipresence.---Newton, "General Scholium" Principia, translated by Cohen & Whitman (1999), 941-942

The first three sentences of the quoted paragraph were inserted into the  third (and final) edition of the Principia (while the rest was added to the second edition). They have become subject of intense scholarly scrutiny because of the light they might share on the constraints on any possible explanation of the cause of gravity. So, for example, my good friend Andrew Janiak thinks that in the quoted passage there is a hidden premise that 'a substance cannot act where it is not substantially present' and this reinforces his argument that Newton (always) rejects unmediated action at a distance (Hylarie Kochiras has also argued this; in context my work is one of their targets.) Here I want to bracket that debate (but will return at the very end to it), and reflect a bit on Newton's underlying metaphysics of mind and mind-body interaction.

In context, in the last sentence of the previous paragraph, Newton has just asserted that God is eternal and omnipresent ("will not be never or nowhere," (941)) And in the paragraph following the one just quoted he claims that "the supreme God necessarily exists, and by the same necessity he is always and everywhere." (942; emphasis in original) That is to say, Newton's God is immanent in the universe. Quite a few more remarks in the General Scholium suggest this.

And, in fact, as 'the same necessity' suggests Newton's God's relationship to space and time is very tight (I would say an internal relation). Rather than creating space and time, by an act of will, they exist when he exists in virtue of the same necessity. How to think of Newton's modal metaphysics here is no simple matter (and I have devoted some space to it recall here; here; here). In an early text, De Gravitatione, Newton had tried to characterize this relationship in terms of an emanation doctrine, and there, too, it signals that space and time are not created (or so I argue here).

It's crucial to Newton's general argument that space and time are not nothing or merely ideal or useful conventions. (In De Gravitatione he makes a point of emphasizing this. In the General Scholium it's treated as self-evident.) And it follows from this that there are structural features of the universe (space and time) that are as infinite and eternal as God is. My interest is in trying to characterize one of the relationships between sentience and this spatial-temporal structure.

Now, a few paragraphs before  Newton had explicitly denied, and he added a second denial to the third edition, that God is a world soul (940). But a natural reading of the quoted passage at the top is that God is sentient with a soul. (I return to this below.) And such ensouled sentience makes a person. But unlike say, in Descartes' metaphysics, Newtonian ensouled sentience can be spread out in space and time. Yet, like a Cartesian soul, such a Newtonian ensouled sentience does not, despite existing in space and time, itself have parts or is even divisible.

As an aside, my own view is that Newton is a substance monist. For Newton, a substance is a directed source of activity, that is an agent.* (Janiak and I agree about this. But we differ on the monism.) And that the only truly active agent in his metaphysics is God. I grant that Newton uses the plural 'substances' (942) in order to deny, in Lockean fashion, that we have knowledge of their essences (and even less of God's essence). But when he uses 'substances' he means it in the more innocent sense of a 'material entity' not an 'agent.' 

Now, an obvious way to make sense of the contours of Newton's position on ensouled sentience in the General Scholium is that he thinks sentience is a kind of emergent property of matter immanent in nature. And so Newton articulates a kind of property dualism.+ This works well for what he says about human persons. 

In fact, Newton returns to the question of ensouled sentience in his fascinating closing paragraph of the General Scholium:

A few things could now be added concerning a certain very subtle spirit pervading gross bodies and lying hidden in them; by its force and actions, the particles of bodies attract one another at very small distances and cohere when they become contiguous; and electrical [i.e., electrified] bodies act at greater distances, repelling as well as attracting neighboring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is excited, and the limbs of animals move at command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this spirit being propagated through the solid fibers of the nerves from the external organs of the senses to the brain and from the brain into the muscles. But these things cannot be explained in a few words; furthermore, there is not a sufficient number of experiments to determine and demonstrate accurately the laws governing the actions of this spirit. (943-944)

As Dempsey has argued, building on I.B. Cohen's interpretation of some draft manuscripts while Newton was developing a response to Leibniz (published in 1715 Account), Newton explicitly refers to experiments done by Hauksbee. Here it looks like Newton is sketching how sentience itself is ground in a powerful, "very subtle spirit" that pervades bodies. In particular, the presence of this spirit helps explain the exciting of sensation in beings like us. Now ''spirit" is a fluid (we use it in that sense when we describe liquor as 'spirits'). And for Newton a kind of (subtle) matter. So, this fits with the emergentism I attribute to Newton. (To be sure, I agree with Stein (2002) and Dempsey that Newton viewed this as a research program because we simply know to little about the nature of mind--so my claim is not meant to be doctrinaire, although Newton is an adamant critic of some positions he rejects.)

In particular, Dempsey calls attention to a passage, "if this spirit may receive impressions from light and convey them into the sensiorium & there act upon that substance which sees & thinks, that substance may mutually act upon this spirit for causing animal motions’" (quoted by Cohen in Newton 1999: 282) I agree with Dempsey that Newton thinks this spirit is a key element in mental causation. But the most natural reading of the passage is, I think, that this subtle spirit is a mechanism by which mental causation takes place. It is not obvious that this spirit also helps constitute or ground the substance which sees and thinks.

Interestingly, Dempsey argues it is likely that Newton is "not here endorsing the independent existence of the mind, but rather is distinguishing it from the organs of sense and the brain. What is more, one straightforward explanation of the natural interaction of this spirit and the mind is precisely that the mind and the spirit with which it interacts are quite similar in nature." (Dempsey 2006: 438) And this fits very nicely with my own emergentist reading. But as I note this very monistic interpretation of Newton's metaphysics of mind is rather speculative.

In fact, I often read Newton in Spinozistic fashion in which God is the one and only substance. (This is, in fact, Clarke's position in 1704, which is what made him a juicy target for Leibniz.) And the universal quantifier in the first sentence of the quoted paragraph, seems to suggest that what Newton says about human minds must fit also God's mind: "Every sentient soul, at different times and in different organs of senses and motions, is the same indivisible person." And if this 'every' includes God, this suggest that God is not just immanent nature, but also material (e.g., "motions").

But I have always hesitated about this because in the General Scholium Newton rejects, as I noted above, the idea of God as a world soul and he writes shortly hereafter that God "totally lacks any body and corporeal shape" (942). So, I think it is not obvious that God's sentience is an emergent property of matter. For (a) God's sentience cannot be grounded in such matter, and (b) in various places, Newton seems to suggest that conceptually and temporally God precedes matter. (In the General Scholium that is not explicit, but it is a kind of implication of his claims about the designed nature of the visible universe.)  And so if this is right God's sentience and personhood is not ensouled. But something altogether mysterious.

The passage in which I take him to reject God as the world soul reads as follows:

But, in looking again  He rules all things, not as the world soul but as the lord of all. And because of his dominion he is called Lord God Pantokrator. [Newton adds a note: 'that is, universal ruler.'] For "god" is a relative word and has reference to servants, and godhood is the lordship of God, not over his own body fas is supposed by those for whom God is the world soul, but over servants. (940)

Drawing on early work by Dobbs, Rudolf De Smet & Karin Verelst have convincingly argued that here (and in a few other places of the General Scholium) Newton is echoing Lipsius's attack, inspired by Philo, on the old stoic notion  of anima mundi. The effect of this Lipsian reading is that God remains immanent to nature, but is not ground in body. 

In re-reading the passage, it is not obvious to me anymore that Newton rejects conceiving God as the world soul as such. Rather, he is rejecting analyzing God's rule in terms of the world soul because it does not capture the hierarchical nature of God's dominion.

So, it is possible that Newton thinks God's sentience in the pervasive more subtle (electric) fluid/spirit. Even so, given that Newton is explicit that God "totally lacks any body and corporeal shape" (942). it seems unlikely that we're supposed to read Newton as claiming that God's sentience is ground in, and emergent of a, subtle electric (etc.) spirit.++ So, I don't think it is correct to treat God's sentience in terms of emergent properties (in the way, say, Spinoza's parallelism encourages).**  Even though Newton and Spinoza agree that thought is a something like an attribute of substance.

So, where does this leave us? First, rather than seeing Newton as relying on a principle of local action, he is articulating an account of the relationship between sentience and body. For human sentience this is ground in a kind of emergent quality of body, especially a subtle fluid. Second, God is immanent in nature, and features of his existence can be derived from the study of nature. Ordinarily,** bodies are not hindered by his presence, and "he does not act on them nor they on him." In so far as God does interact with the bodies and spirits in nature this is fundamentally mysterious, as mysterious as his substance. In fact, in a passage that echoes a skeptical trope in Locke, Newton really stresses the fact that we really have no epistemic access, not even analogical, to God's sentience.

he is all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all force of sensing, of understanding, and of acting, but in a way not at all human, in a way not at all corporeal, in a way utterly unknown to us. As a blind man has no idea of colors, so we have no idea of the ways in which the most wise God senses and understands all things. (942)

Third, rather than positing a principle of local action, Newton is developing an account of sentience that may be illuminated by experiments on electricity. But leaves us without any resources to make claims about God's agency.

 

 

Beattie on Hume's Imperialism, Christianity, Moderation

I wonder at those men who charge upon Christianity all the evils that superstition, avarice, sensuality, and the love of power, have introduced into the Christian world, and then suppose, that these evils are to be preyented, not by suppressing criminal passions, but by extirpating Christianity, or weakening its influence. In fact, our religion supplies the only effectúał means of suppressing these passions, and so preventing the mischief complained of; and this it will ever be more or less powerful to accomplish, according as its influence over the minds of men is greater or less; and greater or less will its influence be, according as its doctrines are more or less firmly believed: It was not because they were Christians, but because, they were covetous, and cruel, that the first invaders of America, perpetrated those diabolical cruelties in Peru and Mexico, the narrative of which is insupportable to humanity. Had they been Christians in any thing but in name, they would have loved their neighbour as themselves. No man who loves his neighbour as himself, will ever cut his throat, or roast him alive; in order to get at his money.--James Beattie, postscript, 1778 (1770) An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (sixth edition) p. 460

ln his response to Hume's infamous racist footnote, Beattie notes, among other arguments, that "The empires of Peru and Mexico could not have been governed, nor de metropolis of the latter built after so singular matter, in the middle of a lake, without men eminent both for action and speculation." (427) I assume Beattie is here referring to Tenochtitlan the capital of the Aztec empire. In noticing Beattie's use of 'metropolitan,' I wondered whether he was the first to use it in this sense. But it was, according to the OED, not unusual by his time.  Not unlike (recall) Descartes, perhaps, Beattie assumes that great imperial cities, or perhaps empires, grow according to some plan. It is notable that Beattie does not imagine the possibility of an Aztec women facilitating the rise of Tenochtitlan.

As can be seen in the quoted passage above, in the postscript, Beattie returns to the empires of Peru and Mexico. And here he is addressing the great, post-Spinozist debate (recall here) of the eighteenth century whether a polity of atheists is possible. This is, in fact, central to the purposes of his book. Beattie de facto grants that it such a society is possible, but asserts that if so it will engage in inhumanity and "diabolical cruelties." And he treats the conquest of the Americas as an example of this.

There is no sign in his Essay (but perhaps elsewhere) that Beattie thought that the conquest of the Americas is any sense providential, or (as Las Casas hoped) itself an opportunity of spreading the gospel, or (as Adam Smith suggested) an opportunity for mutual gain. It's pretty clear he thinks conquest was a disaster for the locals. As I have noted before, it's not entirely clear that Hume rejects the violent extension of civilization.

Now, Beattie asserts that Christian "religion supplies the only effectúał means of suppressing these passions," (emphasis added) that lead to violent conquest. That claim is compatible with two further facts Beattie acknowledges: (i) that many self-described Christians are not true Christians in this sense; and (ii) that even Christians who do not engage in imperial projects and have sincere faith can become so dogmatic in their Christianity (he offers as an example Valla and Scaliger (p. 451)) such that they become inhumane partisan sectarians and develop what he calls a "persecuting spirit" (p. 125).

So, while genuine adherence to Christian doctrine is necessary to suppress the acquisitive passions it is not sufficient for a humane and pacific temperament. There has to be what we may call a 'principle of moderation' such that true Christianity is possible in those that are sincere doctrinal Christians. And it is pretty clear that Beattie thinks that despite presenting himself as a friend of moderation, Hume's skeptical philosophy undermines this very principle of moderation (p. 448; and p. 125).

Even if we were to grant, and not everybody will, Beattie his criticism of Hume (recall also yesterday's post), Beattie does not seem to explain in the Essay how to cultivate the principle(s) of moderation in would-be-true-Christians beyond getting doctrine right (which he admits is insufficient). This is a shame because it might have benefited the would be reader, even a would-be-humanitarian legislator.

 

 

 

 

The History of Federalism, More's Utopia, Spinoza, and Quentin Skinner (II)

It is acknowledged, however, that self-government in this literal sense poses some almost insurmountable difficulties. Of these the most obvious, as Harrington observes, is that 'the whole body of the people' is 'too unwieldy a body to be assembled'.

Sir Thomas More had put forward one possible solution in his Utopia of 1516, at the time when the ideal of the civitas libera was first being seriously canvassed in England. A genuine res publica, More suggests, must take the constitutional form of a federated republic. One of the first things we learn about the newly discovered island of Utopia is that its citizens live in fifty-four self-governing cities that manage their own affairs by means of annually elected magistrates chosen from among themselves. Milton enthusiastically takes up the idea in his Ready and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, in which he ends by proposing that 'every countie in the land' should become a kinde of subordinate Commonaltie'. The effect will be to enable the body of the people 'in all things of civil government' to have justice in thir own hands', so that they will have none then to blame but themselves, if it be not well administerd'.--Quentin Skinner (1998) Liberty Before Liberalism, 30-31

The other day, I kind of promised a post in which I disagree with Skinner. And since I know readers love polemics, I thought It warn you that this post is no polemic. The comment quoted above is an aside in Skinner's overall argument. But I like the aside. And it got me musing a bit about two issues.

First, Part I of Utopia is framed by a purportedly autobiographical introduction, where the narrator (More) is sent to Flanders as an ambassador by Henry VIII. And the first paragraph tells us the first stop is Bruges. Now, Bruges was a major city at the time. But I have always been puzzled about why the brief stop in Bruges is even mentioned because the action quickly moves on to Antwerp, where the conversation takes place in Peter Giles's garden.  

Here's a suggestion: in 1464 Bruges was (see here) the site of what is now known as "The Estates General of 1464," which was an was the first assembly of the estates of the Burgundian Netherlands  as wikipedia nicely puts it, now parts of France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.  Now, historically that's an important event because it was part of (not entirely successful) Burgundian state-building. In Belgium and Dutch history it's important because it is treated (not very prominently) as the origins of Dutch/Belgian parliamentary/representative democracy. (Of course, that takes some twisting and anachronistic interpreting.) But from our perspective what matters is that it is the first really serious modern attempt to bring together representatives of peoples that are formerly represented already on a provincial level in a federative structure.*

So, starting the intellectual journal of Utopia in Bruges is laden with symbolism to then contemporary readers. It is not only a cosmopolitan town of trade, it's also the site of momentous political innovation then less than a half century old, and still unfolding. Of course, Charles the Bold already dead when More's visit to Bruges is supposed to take place. And the streamlined Utopian federation is nothing like the messy affair of the reality of the Estates General of 1464.

Second, I noted a few weeks ago that Spinoza's Political Treatise has a clear plan of federation, in which sovereign states contract joint treaties of peace and so escape the mutual state of war (3.15-16,) Undoubtedly Spinoza is influenced by the political experiences of the then United Provinces, his admiration for the constitution of the Kingdom of Aragon (Political Treatise, 7.30), and his interpretation of the Hebrew State described in the Hebrew Bible. By 1677 this idea was not wholly novel, and there would have been multiple sources that could have inspired it.+

But, even so, (recall) at the start of the Political Treatise, Spinoza makes a point of alerting the reader that More's Utopia is in his sight in the very first paragraph. The allusion is not naturally taken as a compliment: "Whence it has come to pass that, instead of ethics, [philosophers have generally written satire, and that they have never conceived a theory of politics, which could be turned to use, but such as might be taken for a chimera, or might have been formed in Utopia, or in that golden age of the poets when, to be sure, there was least need of it." And as I have noted, Spinoza seems to create (or, perhaps, echo) a trope in which Utopia is ridiculed as useless at the start of an ambitious purportedly more realist reform tract.

But it doesn't follow from this that the mechanisms described in Utopia or the philosophy behind Utopia is rejected entirely. I have already noted that More anticipates Spinoza's (recall) stadial analysis of Mozes' legislation; Utopia anticipates Spinoza's approach to freedom of religion and civic religion; and in other respects here and, also, here]. Without denying the non-trivial differences, the both promote a work ethic in which the corrosive effects of inequality and luxury are held at bay through the use of cleverly designed mechanisms that use incentives to foreseeable ends. All I am suggesting here, echoing Skinner, is that there is a pre-history to thinking about federates states at a large scale in which More and Spinoza figure.+

A thread from Spinoza to James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, via Knut Wicksell (and Christian Wolff)

It should not be surprising, therefore, that the most “sympathetic” or “congenial” works are to be found among the “realists” in the history of political doctrine. Initially we look to Glaucon in Plato’s Republic, to Thomas Hobbes, and to Benedict Spinoza. Of these, and others within this tradition, only Spinoza’s work seems to have much in common with our own, and only his seems deserving of special comment.
In his Tractatus Politicus, published posthumously in 1677, Spinoza approaches the whole study of political organization in a way that seems surprisingly modern by our standards. First of all, men are assumed to be motivated solely by considerations of interest. This is an underlying assumption of the models through which Spinoza examines alternative organizational arrangements. He states, quite specifically, that human behavior is taken as an empirical fact and that he makes no attempt to attach either praise or condemnation to the behavior that he observes. Spinoza examines the various political institutions in terms of their efficacy in producing results which he holds to be desirable. To him, political institutions are variables subject to change and perfection, and he conceives the primary task of the political scientist to be that of analyzing the workings of alternative organizational structures and of making such recommendations for change as seem indicated. His work on the political order anticipates, in many respects, that of David Hume and that of Adam Smith on the economic order. Spinoza deliberately sets out to construct political institutions in such a fashion that individuals acting in pursuit of their own interests will be led, by the institutional structure within which such action takes place, to further the interests of their fellow members in the political group.
The constitutional and the operational levels of collective decision-making are clearly separated in Spinoza’s work. For the latter, at least in his aristocracy model (his discussion of democracy was not completed), simple majority rule is acknowledged as appropriate for reaching decisions in legislative assemblies. For changes in the constitution, in the basic laws, “common consent” or relative unanimity is suggested. Spinoza’s work, in many respects therefore, may be taken as the most appropriately chosen classical precursor to that of this book. It should be stated, however, that Spinoza’s influence on our own ideas has been limited to his general and indirect effects on the Western intellectual tradition. In a specific sense, we have carefully reviewed Spinoza only after the completion of an initial draft of the main body of this book.
Although Spinoza is often described as a follower of Hobbes, we do not find Hobbes’ work at all similar to Spinoza’s in relation to our own construction. As we have suggested above, it seems essential that some separation of the constitutional and the operational level of decision be made before politics, as a social science, can be satisfactorily divorced from moral philosophy. If sovereignty is conceived as being necessarily undivided and indivisible, this essential separation cannot be made readily. The contractual apparatus, to Hobbes, becomes an excuse or a justification for political obedience of the individual and little more. Hobbes’ construction is aimed at establishing a basis for political obligation, whereas Spinoza’s construction becomes a genuine theory of political order that, more than most others, is largely divorced from all issues of obligation.

At this point, as elsewhere in this Appendix, it is necessary to refer to the work of David Hume.

....

We find a similar emphasis in the writings of Christian Wolff in 1750. Wolff’s work is also noteworthy because of his clear conception of the collective organization as a set of rules or institutions that are subject to analysis, to modification, and to reform. His method, like that of Spinoza, was that of examining alternative political institutions on which members of the community of rational individuals might agree jointly.--James M. Buchanan, "Marginal Notes on Reading Political Philosophy" (1962) The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, By James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock  [HT Hartmut Kliemt]

The Calculus of Consent launched Public Choice theory and Constitutional Political Economy, and was a major milestone (recall) toward Buchanan's (1986) Nobel. I was sent back to it by Hartmut Kliemt, who had generously commented on a draft paper that I had sent him. In my paper I argue that (recall) Spinoza is concerned with the problem of luxury in the TTP (a key issue in 18th century political economy). And that in the Political Treatise Spinoza shows what mechanisms (recall) might be used to prevent luxury from corrupting the state. I noted in my paper that Spinoza anticipates (recall also here) Hume and James Buchanan in uncanny ways. I noted that I was not the first to muse about this connection. (In particular I cite Doug Den Uyl and Kliemt.)

The Calculus of Consent has two appendices. The one that I quoted above is by James Buchanan. The Appendix is explicitly designed to forestall a certain kind of objection: "Our work could, quite properly, be charged with serious omission if we should fail to include what must be, at best, relatively uninformed commentary on the classical treatment of some of these problems....We hope that these notes will be helpful in relating our analysis to what has gone before and in pointing up the differences which, in our view, make the analysis contained in the main text of this book essentially unique." Buchanan then goes on to describe the "relation of political science to moral philosophy" and how to situate Buchanan & Tullock's achievement. I hope to return to that some day. He then turns to Spinoza, who is explicitly recognized as anticipating their own approach.

First, Spinoza is treated as a proto-rational choice theorist.* In particular, he treats Spinoza (correctly) as a theorist of  alternative organizational structures (hereafter: mechanism design or mechanism). This is exactly right (and also anticipates another Chicago trained Nobel, George Stigler). And, more important what Spinoza's mechanisms have in common is the attempt not to reform human nature, or to turn people into the wise, but rather to make human nature serve the common good; as Spinoza puts it in the Political Treatise, “I conclude that those common perils of peace of which we here speak , must never directly but indirectly be prohibited , namely by making the fundamental principles of the government such as to have for result not that the mass of the people strive to live wisely  ( for this is impossible ) but be led by such dispositions as will promote the state's weal. (TP 10.6; translated by William McCall, 1854--this is the translation Buchanan used.)+ This indeed anticipates Hume (Smith, and Buchanan).

Second, Buchanan is even more struck by the anticipation of his distinction between constitutional level and operational levels of collective decision-making in Spinoza's treatment of aristocracy. At the constitutional level Buchanan and Tullock require unanimity, and he sees Spinoza's use of “common consent”  as a kind of ("relative") unanimity. It is worth noting that in McCall's translation, Spinoza only uses the phrase in 2.17. But that precedes the treatment of aristocracy. And, indeed, what Spinoza says there is true not just of aristocracy, but for all kinds of  constitutions: "This right,which is determined by the power of the multitude, is usually called government. And he possesses this right absolutely and without limitation, who by common consent has the guidance of the commonwealth, which consists in establishing, interpreting, abolishing laws, fortifying cities, deciding on war and peace, etc." (TP 2.17) And so one can see why Buchanan was primed to read this as equivalent to his constitutional level. 

It is worth noting that Spinoza anticipates Hume's account of the genesis of the institution of justice (which really is for him the political founding:  "that justice is the sense that “all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules” (3.2.2.10). This is also a unanimity requirement. But here (in Spinoza and Hume), the distance with Hobbes is not far. For, in Leviathan, the commonwealth is, when not founded through conquest, instituted by a unanimous covenant “of every man with every man . . . as if every man should say to every man, I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing myselfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men.”  Of course, Buchanan would not deny that. 

Buchanan makes two related claims about the difference between Hobbes and Spinoza.One is an odd mistake, the other is perceptive. In reverse order, first, he implies that Spinoza allows for divided sovereignty. That's strictly speaking false. Spinoza is as unitary about sovereignty as Hobbes is (which is revealed in Spinoza's treatment of the need for the sovereign to control the church). But it's true that Spinoza thinks there are benefits to be derived from functional division of powers that make it look as if he is willing to allow for division of powers.  But, on a more fundamental level Buchanan is right, Hobbes offers an account of obligation whereas Spinoza does not.** By contrast in Spinoza, and now I quote a perceptive treatment by Justin Steinberg, "The commonwealth must be structured so as to promote compliance; when there is excessive vice or non-compliance, the blame must be “laid at the door of the commonwealth.” 

Interestingly enough, the contrast between Hobbes and Spinoza on obligation is not in J. W. Gough's The Social Contract, which is the authority Buchanan claims to follow when he describes Wolff's debts to Spinoza. (In the first (1936) edition,  Gough writes: "The most important of the followers of Hobbes was Spinoza, who constructed a theory of political obligation which in most essentials corresponds closely to Hobbes's." (107))++ So, Buchanan read his sources with independent mind.++

Okay, let me wrap up. Buchanan says explicitly that Spinoza did not influence the development of his thought. He does repeatedly credit (also in The Calculus of Consent), the great Swedish economist, Wicksell, with decisive influence on him (including the point about unanimity). So, this naturally made me wonder, whether Wicksell could have been influenced by Spinoza. Thanks to Google my search was brief and fruitful. Below I picture the closing lines of Wickell's (1917) fascinating review of the revised, second Swedish translation of Mill's On Liberty. To be continued:

 

Spinoza's Critique of Moses; On Luxury

Scripture itself also establishes that ceremonies contribute nothing to blessedness, but only concern the temporal prosperity of the state [imperii temporaneam foelicitatem]. For it promises nothing in return for ceremonies except the comforts of the body and its promised delights [corporis commoda, et delicias promittit,], and promises blessedness only in return for following the universal divine law. For in the five books commonly attributed to Moses nothing else is promised (as we have said above) than this temporal prosperity [foelicitas], i.e., honors or reputation, victories, wealth [divitiae], delights and health.---Spinoza, Theological Political Treatise [hereafter TTP], chapter V.6, [p. 139-140; translated by Curley with modest changes. Page-numbers refer to Collected Works.]

Lurking in the quoted passage is the controversy over the identity of the author of the Hebrew Bible, which is one of the main themes of the TTP. But here I want to focus on Spinoza's analysis. Not unlike Al-Farabi (recall), Spinoza treats what we would call religion in sociological, that is, functional terms. In particular, he ascribes to the elaborate rituals of the Hebrew Bible a this worldly-end. In particular, it supports the prosperity, to use Hobbes' phrase, the commodious living of and within the state. As Spinoza puts it a few lines below: "the whole law of Moses, was
concerned with nothing but the Hebrew state, and consequently, with nothing but corporeal advantages," (V.31, p. 146; this point is repeated throughout chapter V.)

Of course, part of the point is a critical one:the ritials contribute nothing to blessedness, which is the only authentic or true form of happiness. So, from Al-Farabi's (and, it seems, Spinoza's) perspective this means it is not a true religion. And indeed, while the Old Testament does teach true religion, it is not located in the Hebraic ceremonies, which, and here Spinoza is explicitly siding with the New Testament (V.14), are dispensable once the Jewish state collapses: "there is no doubt that after their state was dissolved the Jews were no more bound by the law of Moses." (V.15, p. 142) For

Now, Spinoza's account is sociological in another sense. For Spinoza inserts his account into what we may call a stadial theory of history. For, he contextualizes even historicizes* the period in which the Jews accept the Covenant with God and receive their ceremonies as follows:  "they were quite incapable of establishing legislation wisely and keeping the sovereignty in their own hands, as a body. Almost all of them were coursened in their  dispositions [rudis fere ingenii] and weakened by wretched bondage." (V.27; this recalls Thomas More's analysis in Part I of Utopia ( also, here] and here).+ The underlying idea is that after a period of slavery, the Jews were mentally incapable of wise self-government. 

From a political perspective, the significance of this passage is (and this looks forward to Montesquieu) that Spinoza thinks a constitution must fit the material and social circumstances of a people. But for present purposes what matters is that the rituals are, in part, a means toward cultivating better dispositions in order to secure the survival even flourishing of the polity. Let's grant Spinoza this reading of the Hebrew Bible. Here I am interested in the connection between the religion and their economic prosperity. Spinoza explains this in a passage that has, naturally, attracted attention from those (see, for example, Beth Lord's paper, which also makes  the point above context noted above) with an interest in egalitarianism and debt jubilees:

There was something else very unyielding in this state, which must have been the most important factor to prevent its citizens from thinking of defection or wanting to desert their country: the principle of advantage/interest [ratio utilitatis], the mainstay and life of all human actions. That force was exceptionally strong in this state. Nowhere did the citizens possess their property with a greater right than did the subjects of this state, who, with the leader, had an equal share of the lands and fields. Each one was the eternal lord of his own share [suae partis aeternus dominus erat]. If poverty compelled anyone to sell his estate or field, it had to be restored to him once again when the jubilee year came. They instituted other similar practices, so that no one could be alienated from his real property. XVII.84-85, p. 315

Spinoza introduces the claim in this passage as a contrast to opinion [opinione], and the implication is that the mechanism he is describing is a part of solid [solidissimum] knowledge. And the reason for this is that is ground in an enduring feature of human nature that exerts a powerful pull over us, our pursuit of interest [ratio utilitatis]. Spinoza's phrase here is striking because reason of public utility [ratio Publicae Utilitatis] was supposed to govern the state's dealing with its citizens (and with other state authorities). This notion of utility, as public interest, was re-interpreted in the eighteenth century (e.g., in Hume, Beccarria, and Adam Smith). But here Spinoza ascribes a notion of interest to the individuals as the most powerful human motive, and, thereby, secure a public flourishing.

What he is describing involve secure property rights,  where land remained inalienably within a family, that is, a system of entails.** And these lots, in turn, are equal, just as the division of tribes had been equal. It is noticeable that such a system is understood to be unstable. For in addition to the Jubilee, multiple (unnamed) other institutions are required to prevent property from accumulating in some and others losing their family possessions.** Lurking here are claims about the role of debt, the effects of bad harvests, and prudent/imprudent and lucky/unlucky behavior in human affairs.

This setup created a fundamental equality centered on perpetual land-ownership. Obviously, the fact that a jubilee was necessary meant that one could through life without enjoying its fruits. But one could live in hope that one, or one's offspring, would return to it. And because the religion preaches charity to the poor "Nowhere could poverty be more bearable." (XVII.87) Another key feature is that such a system would promote long-term investment in one's family land because one could assume that one's family would reap the rewards. This created an attachment to land and fatherland, which prospered. 

This naturally raises the question why this was not enduring. Lord suggests, not implausibly, that Spinoza thinks the system was undermined when inequality was allowed to enter in, first by the institution of the Levites, a parasitic elite class living of taxes and donation, and then, ultimately, by the institution of a King. But while this is well grounded in the text, I do not think this is the whole story.  (In particular, Spinoza is explicit that the Levites could have been accomodated in this order (17.102, p. 319) In particular, Spinoza suggests that luxury is if not the source of corruption, then a hallmark of its impending arrival:

And that’s what happened, as everyone knows. That’s why there were great changes, and a great license to do anything, and extravagant living, and negligence [magnaque ad omnia licentia, luxus et socordia], with everything going from bad to worse, until, having often been subjugated, they completely broke away from the divine law, and wanted a mortal king. XVII.106, p. 320. 

It's true that Spinoza does not mention luxury [luxus] very much in the context of the first Hebrew state (and it is easy to miss in Curley's translation). But he also attributes the decline of the Canaanites (III.49, p. 123) and Tartars (III.56, p. 125) to the embrace of luxury. And Spinoza presents it as the general source of decline (XVII.14, p. 299). In the latter context it is clear he has the Roman Republic in mind.

So, to sum up: lurking in Spinoza, is a traditional republican suspicion of luxury as a source of corruption and decay. The property arrangements of the Hebrew State were fundamentally unstable not just because people could be (temporarily) indebted, impoverished, and enslaved, but also, and more importantly, because it created the conditions of accumulation and the sort of prosperity that leads to ruin. So, while much of the TTP is naturally read as an attack on the pretensions of theology and dangerous fanaticism, there is a clear warning to the merchants of Holland. Next week (but recall here), I'll explore Spinoza's proposed solutions to the dangers of luxury. 

 

 

Cancel Culture Just is the Market-Place of Ideas

1. Free expression is probably at an all-time high right now, at least in the West. There is a huge variety of different venues for your writing, there’s a whole new world podcasts for speeches, and an ever-increasing supply of video outlets. The availability of these platforms and publishers doesn’t guarantee you an audience, but that’s not what free expression means.
2. Related to that, some of the technologies that have enabled easy speech have made counter-speech extraordinarily easy as well.
3. There are a lot more people who are not you than there are people who are you, and so easy counter-speech means that it’s entirely possible to get inundated with unpleasantness.
4. Because of (2 and 3), people are often careful about what they say, and may feel burdened by this.
5. It is hard to get (1) without (2). The ability to broadcast to others means that they can broadcast back.
6. (4) may hit socially well-positioned people, but it hits vulnerable people far more.--Ryan Muldoon "Free Expression and Evolving Standards" @Radical Classical Liberals

By 'cancel culture' I mean the organized efforts to silence others (e.g., their invitations rescinded, and their honorary doctorates denied, moved to assignments with other duties, etc.) without recourse to violence and state authority (that would be censorship).* I have defined it like this to be permissive to efforts that would also be classified as civil disobedience. In this sense cancel culture just is the marketplace of ideas at work. The currency in this market is approval/disapproval (or credit/discredit in the old sense). There is, thus, nothing especially new in cancel culture, although thanks to social media the mechanisms by which it operates are more virtual than ever before. Obviously, for some this is a reason to reject markets; these are the very people that still pine for Betamax.

That is, cancel culture is a disorderly market. It is very much at odds with a picture of democracy that emphasizes reasoned (and civil) debate. And so on a certain (deliberative) conception of democracy cancel culture is problematic as a mechanism of public opinion formation and preparing of collective action. This is why (they treat it as a virtue not a bug) deliberative democrats spend so much time on the pre-conditions of deliberative spaces. 

But cancel culture is one of the ways in which otherwise dispersed and often disorganized individuals can make the more powerful take notice of their views. Sometimes it is very intimidating. I have been on the receiving end of such efforts, and it is no fun (especially when you realize the folk filling your inbox are affiliated with neonazis).  And there is no doubt that cancel culture can shade into threats of violence or misfire at targets who are in no sense worthy of public opprobrium (just unlucky). 

The previous two paragraphs elide a distinction; marxists (see William Clare Roberts) view cancel culture as crowds in action whereas the critics (e.g., Dan Crenshaw, who is one of the more thoughtful Republicans in the House) use 'mob'. I prefer to see cancel culture (and here I am indebted to Tyler Cowen) as a thin association--sometimes there is coordination, mostly -- in the headline grabbing cases -- it seems to be individuals who come together to express their indignation. If the association is durable, we start (recall) calling it a faction or a party.+ (I return to this below.)

So far I have given a broadly Millian interpretation of cancel culture. He thought (recall here and here) that public opinion was needed to check the abuses of the powerful. But the price for that is, as he worried, the danger of conformism (policed by "vituperative" speech). And, there is no doubt that the cumulative effects of cancel culture, like all widely used preference aggregation mechanisms, may be conformism (yes, VHS displaced Betamax). So, while cancel culture is a possibly effective means in breaking up a cozy cartel, it may lead to a homogeneous landscape.

Now, one may think that indignation is the problem here. Indignation seems inimical to liberal political life. Yet, as Adam Smith reminds us, such sense of "sympathetic indignation" is at the root of justice. In its institutions this sense is sublimated and through the rules of evidence and reason redirected to proper ends. (Recall this post on Srinivasan and the aptness of anger.) But this pushes the problem back because such sympathetic indignation may well be corrupted, and is often corrupted, by other commitments and interests. So, perhaps, on balance, and this is my own inclination, liberals should be weary of anything that encourages the crowd? 

This is too easy because such indignation may well be at the root of political life. As Spinoza puts it in his Political Treatise: "men are led...more by passion than reason, it follows, that a multitude comes together, and wishes to be guided, as it were, by one mind, not at the suggestion of reason, but of some common passion...or the desire of avenging some common hurt." (6.1)  Somewhat surprisingly, as Chantal Jaquet has noted, this very desire is at the root of political authority  "the right of the commonwealth is determined by the common power of the multitude" and it is ground in the "desire to avenge some common hurt." (3.9) Political life is a kind of sublimation and domestication of this subsisting indignation. The effect of righteousness is social peace.

What is noticeable in nearly all the critics of cancel culture is that they refuse to engage with the grounds of indignation. Tactically, one understands this move because it helps ferment polarization (and so opportunities for profit) and cement group identity. Morally it is a mistake because one fails to heed the call of justice. Strategically, it is a worse mistake because one, thereby, misses the causal forces that shape the changing directions of the tectonic plates, which are the sediments of and constraints on the marketplace of ideas, of political life.

In December 2015 (look at that date!) I noted that Trump's rise to power within the Republican party was clearly an effect of the sense of indignation in that tribe and a loss of faith in its elites. I tend to view cancel culture in American public life as doing something similar to the intellectual opinion leaders of our time. Since our for profit public culture and media feed on indignation, we should expect a turbulent time ahead.**  The market giveth and taketh away, and it dances to the tune of fortune.**  

 

Spinoza on Incentives, Human Nature, and Church Corruption

To do this it was necessary to indicate the main prejudices regarding religion, i.e., the traces of our ancient bondage, and then also the prejudices regarding the right of the supreme 'powers. Many, with the most shameless license, are eager to take away the greater part of that right, and under the pretext of religion to turn the heart of the multitude (who are still at the mercy of pagan superstition) away from the supreme 'powers, so that everything may collapse again into slavery. I’ll indicate briefly in what order I show these things; but first I must say what reasons have impelled me to write.
[14] I’ve often wondered that men who boast that they profess the Christian religion—i.e., love, gladness, peace, restraint, and good faith toward all—would contend so unfairly against one another, and indulge daily in the bitterest hatred toward one another, so that each man’s faith is known more easily from his hatred and contentiousness than from his love, gladness, etc. Long ago things reached the point where you can hardly know what anyone is, whether Christian, Turk, Jew, or Pagan, except by the external dress and adornment of his body, or because he frequents this or that Place of Worship, or because he’s attached to this or that opinion, or because he’s accustomed to swear by the words of some master. They all lead the same kind of life.
[15 What’s the cause of this evil? Doubtless that religion has commonly consisted in regarding the ministries of the Church as positions conferring status, its offices as sources of income, and its clergy as deserving the highest honor. For as soon as this abuse began in the Church, the worst men immediately acquired a great desire to administer the sacred offices; the love of propagating divine religion degenerated into sordid greed and ambition; and the temple itself became a Theater, where one hears, not learned ecclesiastics, but orators, each possessed by a longing, not to teach the people, but to carry them away with admiration for himself, to censure publicly those who disagree, and to teach only those new and unfamiliar doctrines which the common people most wonder at. This had to lead to great dissension, envy, and hatred, whose violence no passage of time could lessen.

[16] It’s no wonder, then, that nothing has remained of the old (or ancient) Religion [antiquae Religionis] but its external ceremony externum cultum, by which the common people seem more to flatter God than to worship him. No wonder faith is nothing now but credulity and prejudices.--Spinoza, Theological Political Treatise, "preface" translated by E. Curley

The quoted passage is the start of a curious aside within the preface of the TTP. In the lines before it Spinoza has announced the celebrated thesis; at the conclusion of the argument, he offers a summary of the book. The main point of the aside is the conclusion that the existing church has lost its way; nothing [nihl] remains of the religion; it's an empty shell with some adornment [externum cultum]. And before Spinoza goes on to give the summary of the book, he offers examples of this state of affairs. 

My present interest is in Spinoza's diagnosis and explanation of a church that has become an empty shell. For, this is not just a story of decline. It is a story of corruption from within, with a potentially good resource wasted [abusus], with a clear institutional cause. And Spinoza is explicit on the first cause: that Church office (of the common people [vulgo religioni]) has highest status [summo honore] and a source of material benefits [beneficia].

As an aside, Spinoza's conceptual point is clear, butI think Spinoza's wording is ambiguous between two historical possibilities: (i) allowing an uncorrupted early church that got corrupted by a norm/institutional change (which I describe below) or (ii) that the people's church has always been corrupt, once institutionalized, because their shepherds always gain status and other benefits. In what follows I assume (i) because it reveals something interesting about Spinoza's conception of human nature.

Spinoza's argument assumes that once incentives shift toward status and income, different kinds of people will want to become church leaders. For there is a clear shift from people motivated by love of preaching the gospel [amor divinae religionis propagandae] to sordid people who are vain (eager for attention), avaricious, and demagogues [sordidam avaritiam, et ambitionem]. (Recall this post why, in Spinoza, I read 'ambition' as demagoguery.] So, when the incentive structure changes, the labor pool for pastoral care jobs is changed, and the kinds of people that rise to the top within the church is utterly transformed if not corrupted. 

It is important that Spinoza does not think that the pastors are corrupted by and in their jobs. (This is clearly Adam Smith's view later.) He thinks, rather, that people with excessive longings [ingens libido] will become attracted to careers in the clergy. I don't want to put too much emphasis on Spinoza's use of 'libido' but it's clear he thinks that once such people enter the Church a species of love is displaced and it becomes infused with a fetishized energy where spectacle and sensuality reign. 

Now, at this stage I want to backtrack to Spinoza's fascinating claim that now  all lead the same kind of life [vita eadem omnibus est]. Long before Sombart and Marcuse, Spinoza diagnoses a flattening of human kind such that within modernity the differences among people become very narrow and track shallow exterior features, opinions, and religious practices. Spinoza's polemical point, anticipating Swift, is that people kill each other over trivial differences egged on by bad people that exploit religion to malicious self-interested ends. 

Spinoza does not say whether in some previous age human diversity reached into, as it were, our interior. So, he leaves open whether ancient human diversity was due to radically different practices (at, say, the level of cultural anthropology), or whether he is entertaining the possibility of a diversity of human origins and so kinds (at the level of physical anthropology).+ Either way, there is a common (and now i use, recall Susan James' terminology) "thin" human nature now. 

Even so, more than, say, Hobbes or Adam Smith, Spinoza is willing to distinguish among human kind. So, as I noted last week, while commenting on the Political Treatise, he clearly thinks there is a rather steep cognitive hierarchy among men (with about three percent of folk being outstanding in leadership qualities) and he thinks women are subordinate to men even in potential. And, here, in the preface to the TTP, Spinoza clearly distinguishes between humans oriented toward love of the gospel and the more vicious kind of humans with excessive libido.

To be sure, in each case, it is possible to construct a Spinozistic narrative that looks at social causes, at nurture, to explain revealed human differences. But it is notable Spinoza does not do so himself. So, while Spinoza clearly rejects Aristotle's claim that there are natural slaves, the natural reading of Spinoza is that while there is a thin, rather passionate human nature that is governed by unchanging laws, within that nature human diversity reigns.

So, let me wrap up. For Spinoza the mechanism of corruption of the Church is a shift in incentives that attract the wrong sort of people motivated by status and possessiveness of material goods; once such people are in charge, they displace those motivated by love and gift-giving, and the very institution is transformed into one in which office holding takes on a complex transactional character where the church becomes a source of material benefi. It has lost its original mission and can easily destabilize society. This diagnoses also suggests a solution: to ensure that remuneration and benefits of Church offices are controlled (but about some other time).

For now, I just want to note that for Spinoza account of the corruption of the church fits a larger pattern. As the Political Treatise shows, Spinoza thinks lots of institutions are vulnerable to corruption, including outright bribery.* What is key here is that for Spinoza, in institutional design one should not just be alert to the incentive structure of the institutions in shaping behavior, but also in the way these incentives attract people one ought to keep out.

On Spinoza's Patriarchal Sexism and E1P16

But, perhaps, someone will ask, whether women are under men’s control [potestate] by nature or institution [natura an ex instituto]? For if it has been by mere institution, then we had no reason [ratio] compelling us to exclude women from government. But if we consult experience itself, we shall find that the origin of it is in their weakness. For there has never been a case of men and women reigning together, but wherever on the earth men are found, there we see that men rule, and women are ruled, and that on this plan, both sexes live in harmony. But on the other hand, the Amazons, who are reported to have held rule of old, did not suffer men to stop in their country, but reared only their female children, killing the males to whom they gave birth. But if by nature women were equal to men, and were equally distinguished by fortitudinous spirit [animi fortitudine] and ability/talent [ingenium], in which human power [potentia] and therefore human right chiefly consist; surely among nations so many and different some would be found, where both sexes rule alike, and others, where men are ruled by women, and so brought up, that they can make less use of their abilities. And since this is nowhere the case, one may assert with perfect propriety, that women have not by nature equal right with men: but that they necessarily give way [necessario cedere,] to men, and that thus it cannot happen [fieri non posse], that both sexes should rule alike, much less that men should be ruled by women. But if we further reflect upon human passions, how men, in fact, generally love women merely from the passion of lust, and esteem their cleverness and wisdom in proportion to the excellence of their beauty, and also how very ill-disposed men are to suffer the women they love to show any sort of favour to others, and other facts of this kind, we shall easily see that men and women cannot rule alike without great hurt to peace [magno pacis detrimento fieri]. But of this enough.--Spinoza, Political Treatise, 11.4, translated by Elwes

In a recent paper, Susan James (70) has rightly called attention to Spinoza's rejection, earlier in the Political Treatise, of Aristotle's stance that there are natural masters and slaves,  and his embrace of the reality of a common nature. (7.27) Even so, an attentive reader of the Political Treatise will, perhaps, be dismayed by the final paragraph (quoted above), but not wholly surprised.  For, in his treatment of Aristocratic government, Spinoza had quite clearly asserted that out of any given population of hundred patrician men, "hardly three are found that excel in skill and counsel." [ vix tres reperiuntur, qui arte et consilio pollent vigentque, ] (8.2)  This does not seem intended, in the first instance, as criticism of aristocratic education (although he may well (recall) be critical of it), but rather as a kind of statistical regularity of the distribution of cognitive abilities in populations of males.

What is more surprising is given his explicit elitist embrace of the reality of cognitive hierarchy that, unlike so-called Platonic feminists (male and female), Spinoza denies that there are similar number of women with such cognitive excellence. For, in the Ethics Spinoza had appeared to claim, in the context of his retelling of Adam & Eve story (E4P68S), that men and women agree in nature, or, in James' terms "thin" conception  of human nature. But unlike the platonic feminists, Spinoza does not avail himself of pointing to the reality of known excellent women. Spinoza is not just an elitist, but a male chauvenist.

Now, there has been enormous number of excellent and insightful work on the quoted passage above. Some, like Beth Lord, claim that while in this passage the "disempowerment of women is ‘part of nature’. Spinoza does not seek to justify or condemn that fact, but he does seek to explain it." And according to her, he explains it through socio-economic structures. The real question then is if we can imagine a democracy together that is more equal. (1105) Others, like Moira Gatens, who finds Spinoza's philosophy useful in imagining a feminist future, nevertheless read the passage as suggesting that according to Spinoza woman are "rightly excluded from the body politic because men are by nature superior to them," (47)  I am inclined to agree with Gatens' (and James') interpretation.

As an aside, it is worth noting that the quoted passage above is one of four paragraphs on the nature of democracy. Even if one grants the universal consensus that the chapter (and so the book) is unfinished, it is notable that Spinoza thought it important to write/draft this paragraph at the start of the chapter on democracy. And while I grant James, in commenting on he passage, that something "psychologically complicated" is going, it is fair to say that for Spinoza entertaining the very idea of mass democracy seems to demand a stance of excluding women from the franchise. This reaction is clearly not Spinoza's alone; as Eileen O'Neill notes, Gouges, when confronted with the possible revival of mass democracy during the French revolution, recognizes that this exclusion is a temptation for newly enfranchised men (and, against her warnings, she was right and guillotined for it).

Now, I do not have anything to add to Spinoza's one-sided, unimaginatively sexist interpretation of the historical evidence about the relationship between the political possibilities of men and women. But the passage also gives us a glimpse, in its strange treatment of the historical evidence, of a peculiarity in Spinoza's metaphysics of time. For, in the quoted passage, Spinoza fundamentally assumes that in human history, all possible permutations in the sex distribution of political rulerships that can occur have occurred. 

To be sure, Spinoza cannot mean that all possible political organizations have occured because the Political Treatise itself proposes three or four institutional arrangements that have not been tried out in the configurations Spinoza proposes even by his own lights.* We know this because Spinoza thinks that some of these would be (uncurruptable and) enduring (10.1). But apparently, when it comes to figuring out whether females are capable of ruling history's verdict is final. 

Spinoza's use of 'necessity' reminded me of a famous passage in the Ethics: "from the necessity of the Divine nature infinite things must follow in infinite ways (i.e. all things that can fall under an infinite intellect)" (E1p16) And, if we glance back to the quoted passage at the end of the Political Treatise, it is notable that Spinoza does not help himself to an idea he could have borrowed from Al-Farabi or Ibn Rushd, that the gender properties of political rulership need not fall under the infinite intellect. 

Now, it is a feature and not a bug in Spinoza's necessitarianism that eternity is in a sense all alike. This is why the very idea of creation, which singles out one moment as special, as the start of a series, is a superstitious fantasy. (Spinoza's deist and theist critics make a point of suggesting that this leave Spinoza without a viable cosmogony for the visible universe.) Let's call this the homogeneity of time thesis. Of course, there is such a thing as duration but it is not an attribute of substance (as one might have expected), but a mere consequence of the existence of causal interactions (E2p30S & E2p28], that is, the human mind's finitude or (sorry this is puzzling) negation.  

In addition, E1P16 seems to suggest that all possibilities occur. Let's call this modal density. Of course, in some sense, and from the perspective of, say, Leibniz, Spinoza must mean something relative narrow with the 'possible.' But given that for Spinoza extension and mind are infinite, and that there are, perhaps, infinite further attributes, we should also not underestimate how much is genuinely possible for Spinoza. 

Now given the homogeneity of time and modal density, and the reality of human history, it is not obvious that one has any right to assume that there are (knowable) possibilities that have not been tried out yet. For, that would suggests that there is temporal asymmetry between future and past. But that also means that at any given time one knows what one can know of the world (and the past). There is no reason to think one will be in a better position at a later date. And, in fact, this fits with a more general strain of skepticism about the limits of empirical knowledge that I have diagnosed in Spinoza. 

In my view, what this suggests is that in some respects it is odd that Spinoza has become a mascot for progressives everywhere. Because there is a sense in which Spinoza's metaphysics is not, to put it mildly, especially hospitable toward any form of soft providence, including historical progress.+ If history has no fundamental direction things could get better and worse. Of course, just because there is no reason to think  there is a temporal asymmetry between future and past, it does not follow there is a good reason to think the past has exhausted all the possible human permutations.  For at no point could one be secure in that because that would privilege a moment of duration, and single out that moment. And, so while I have tried to point to the peculiarities of Spinoza's metaphysics that may partially account for his thinking in the final paragraph of the Political Treatise, I doubt these necessitate it; Spinoza seems to have underestimated women's capacity for rule and male capacity to adapt to it.