Digressions&Impressions

The Aristotelian Causes in Hume

When by natural principles we [humans] are led to advance those ends, which a refined and enlightened reason would recommend to us, we are very apt to impute to that reason, as to their efficient cause, the sentiments and actions by which we advance those ends, and to imagine that to be the wisdom of man, which in reality is the wisdom of God. Upon a superficial view, this cause seems sufficient to produce the effects which are ascribed to it; and the system of human nature seems to be more simple and agreeable when all its different operations are in this manner deduced from a single principle.---Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments 2.2.3.5

Yesterday, I noted that one way to understand Hume's significance to our conceptualization of causation is two-fold: first, that he whittled down four Aristotelian causes to just one kind of cause (previously known as 'efficient causation'); and, second, that he is the source of the modern conception of causation by offering a counterfactual definition of it in the first Enquiry. Hume is also taken to be the source of our modern discussion of convention, (recall here) although a very good argument can be made that Hume is greatly indebted to Locke (see also this more recent post and this one as a follow up). In today's post I suggest that Hume's account of convention itself is greatly indebted to the Aristotelian causes. Let me explain by first re-quoting a familiar passage from Hume: 

But if by convention be meant a sense of common interest; which sense each man feels in his own breast, which he remarks in his fellows, and which carries him, in concurrence with others, into a general plan or system of actions, which tends to public utility; it must be owned, that, in this sense, justice arises from human conventions. For if it be allowed (what is, indeed, evident) that the particular consequences of a particular act of justice may be hurtful to the public as well as to individuals; it follows, that every man, in embracing that virtue, must have an eye to the whole plan or system, and must expect the concurrence of his fellows in the same conduct and behaviour. Did all his views terminate in the consequences of each act of his own, his benevolence and humanity, as well as his self-love, might often prescribe to him measures of conduct very different from those, which are agreeable to the strict rules of right and justice.

In the posts linked above I argued that Hume's analysis of convention has eight parts (most also to be found in Locke's Second Treatise and the Essay):

1. a sense of common interest
2. felt in each person's breast;
3. It (viz, (i)) is observed in others;
4. this fact (the existence of (i&iii) creates collaboration & reliable expectations;
5. the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways;
6. and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society.
7.  A Humean convention is explicitly contrasted with practices founded in explicit promises and/or in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition,
8.  the process (I-III) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit.

I call I-VIII: ‘the Humean template,’ and they are jointly sufficient, although (VII) is not necessary.

Now, the Humean template has quite a few moving parts. And given that in Locke the Humean template is used but, as far I am aware, not explicitly analyzed it's worth asking to what degree he would have been fully conscious of the Humean template. It's always a risk with the kind of structuralist analysis I offer here that it is merely a projection of the historian onto an earlier text. Even if that were so it can still be illuminating, of course, but to use the 'Humean template' about Locke would be straightforward anachronism (albeit useful anachronism).

But even though Locke does not explicitly analyze the Humean template, i don't think it's a mere projection on my part for three reasons (the first two of which outlined in the linked posts): first, as I realized by reflecting on work by Martin Lenz (Socializing Minds) Locke is clearly responding to lacunae in Puffendorf's account of the origin and stability of conventions. Second, the Humean template can be found in the second Treatise and the Essay (and is evoked later in the Essay). These two reasons are internal to Locke's project.

In addition, third, we can discern the portfolio of Aristotle's four causes in the Humean template. For, (VI) is the final cause(s) of a convention.  And (I) is the formal cause. In addition, (II-V) are the efficient and material causes of the convention. I mix these causes here because jointly they tie the formal and final cause together in the workings of the convention.

If Locke's use of the Humean template presupposes the Aristotelian causes then it's also no surprise that he doesn't need to offer an explicit analysis of the Humean template. His readers would have noticed it without his saying so. In Hume, the template is made explicit precisely because a reader familiar with Hume's philosophy cannot take for granted that Hume would draw on the non-efficient Aristotelian causes.

That (VI) is a final cause strikes me as uncontroversial. But it is surprising to find it in Hume, who is really an explicit and implicit critic of final causes (see here also for references). Of course, in virtue of providing the mechanism for its functionality one may well say that the Humean template naturalizes or presupposes a naturalized teleology. One may also claim that in human affairs, a certain kind of intentionality and goal directed is inelimenable.

The real question here is to what degree the common interest that a tacit convention secures is fully foreseaable and articulable ahead of time. For example, Adam Smith famously criticized the deployment of the Humean template in Hume's account of the origin of justice in circumstances that echo a state of nature because Hume's account seems to presuppose awareness of the final cause, or at least assume common interest, in a context where this sense of unity or mutual loyalty, seems unlikely. (See here for the full story.)

The passage at the top of the post is near the conclusion of Smith's diagnosis of the error in Hume. Interestingly enough, in Part II of the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Dugald Stewart notes Smith's criticism of Hume, and quotes the passage in order to illustrate "a common error," which Stewart associates with the "dangerous" revitalisation of utilitarianism (he explicitly discusses Paley and Godwin in context). Stewart praises Adam Smith because "he always treats separately of their final causes, and of the mechanism, as he calls it, by which nature accomplishes the effect; and he has even been at pains to point out to his successors the great importance."

To be sure, Smith's criticism does not touch all instances of Hume's use of the Humean template. For, in some contexts the common interest is knowable even known and the efficient and material causes of the Humean template can do their work without presupposing that all the benefits from the convention are presupposed in the mechanism that gives rise to the convention or that these benefits are or would have to be obscure to the agents involved. 

This problem does not even arise in Locke. For, of course, the natural reading of much of Locke's writings is that he embraces a God given providential order. (But recall this post for the debate.) So, in Locke the use of the Humean template is completely natural and without a blemish of inconsistency.* 

Newton on the laws of nature and interstellar space

Since Space is Divisible in infinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may also be allowed that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions to Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in several Parts of the Universe.--Isaac Newton Opticks Query 31 

The quoted passages dates from the 1706 Latin edition of the Opticks and ended up in Query 31 of the later English edition. As regular readers know (recall here), I am rather fond of it, and I have explored the significance and implications of it also in my scholarly work (including writing with Zvi Biener here; and here solo). Because of a visit to Duke, and my conversations with Katherine Brading and Caleb Hazelwood while there, I had occasion to revisit the passage. 

Before I get to that let me offer some clarification on Newton's terminology for those of you who have never seen this passage before: the universe can (but need not) be composed of different worlds. Ordinarily, when Newton uses 'world,' he means thereby to refer to a solar system. Newton recognizes that the universe could be composed of different worlds that coexist (in the General scholium he remarks [recall] on the beauty of the night sky to aliens in other worlds)! A 'system of worlds' is a collection of solar systems (we would say, a 'galaxy') that, presumably, share in a uniform motion or frame of reference.

But Newton also uses 'world' in a metaphysically richer sense. A world in this richer sense is constituted and characterized by the kinds of “particles of Matter” and forces that are to be found in it. The matter and forces of a world can be described by laws of nature. Newton's attitude toward matter and forces is realist in that they are part of his basic ontology; matter and forces ground the laws of nature, which are derivative from them: note Newton's "thereby."

In fact, as an aside, at the start of the Principia, Newton notes that the "basic problem of philosophy seems to be to discover the forces of nature from the phenomena of motions and then to demonstrate the other phenomena from these forces." So, the ontological priority of forces (and matter) is reflected in his epistemic aims. 

The passage quoted at the top of this post suggests that Newton's laws are not primitive or productive in the sense that, say, Maudlin's treatment of laws implies (recall). In my work with Biener, especially, I have tried to explain how we should think of the metaphysics of laws according to Newton (short version: it's complicated). But in what follows I want to make a further suggestion about what we might call the extension or locality of the laws of nature.

For Newton, at every point of space, there is time and God, and places that might be filled by matter. (Conversely, there are space and God at every moment of time.) But there are also enormous number of otherwise empty spaces, some enormous. Now, we can discern in Newton treatment of four kinds of empty spaces: first, there are (interstitial) empty spaces within bodies. Second, there are empty spaces among (planetary) bodies within worlds. Third, there are vast empty spaces between solar systems. Fourth, there are enormous empty spaces between galaxies. (I think this is the doctrine of the Principia, but Newton did not always think this because he sometimes experimented with aether theories.)

Now, according to the doctrine that I ascribe to Newton based on the passage quote at the top of the post, the properties of bodies, and their forces of interaction generate the laws that govern them. How to think about the grounding relation between laws and the bodies they describe, I leave to others. (In fact, Caleb Hazelwood is circulating a fascinating paper about this.) On my view (see here), and also (say) David Miller Marshall (here), the Newtonian laws really are about interactions of bodies or systems of bodies (in which they are grounded).

So, here comes the pay-off of this discussion. It follows from these features of bodies, forces and laws, that on Newton's views the laws can be said to be present in interstitial spaces. They are also present in the spatial voids within and between solar systems. You may wonder, given the view I am sketching here, why I am so confident this is so between solar systems for Newton. However, on his view light easily and rapidly moves between solar systems, and we know that for Newton light rays themselves are composed of particles (with mass). Moreover, on his view solar systems tend to be part of a galaxy  which follows a uniform motion or has a general frame of reference.

I do not mean to suggest that all the laws of nature that exist in a galaxy are also always present in the vast voids that occupy the spaces of a galaxy. It's possible, after all, some kinds of bodies that can be found in parts of a galaxy are, in principle, unable to move among different solar systems. Notice, that lurking here is genuine lack of knowledge how many kinds of bodies there are in the universe and so how many kinds of laws will be discovered. Newton knew that he was making all kinds of homogeneity assumptions (this was explicit in hypothesis 3 of the first edition), and he also knew that the evidential basis of his claims was limited to a small speck of vast space.

So, on the view that I am sketching here, there need to be no laws of nature present in the vast empty spaces or darkness among galaxies (that is, the fourth kind of spaces). So, for Newton it's possible the total universe is rather dappled (in Nancy Cartwright's sense). Of course, in so far as light also may move among galaxies there may be considerable possibility for uncovering unified laws. (Brading teased me that on my view, as bodies move into empty spaces the laws of nature are simultaneously extended--which I find a lovely implication..) But that's an open question. (Zvi Biener and I argue that methodologically, within physics research, Newton assumes universal laws until there is evidence otherwise. But that's a different register.)

One final thought. Often discussions of Newton assimilate his views of laws of nature to Descartes. In Descartes, the laws are kind of second causes and are universal in scope. The issue I have sketched here does not arise there because, in principle, all bits of matter of the universe are indirectly in contact with each other (and are either part of a universal vortex, or mediate among large solar vortices). Spinoza grasps the significance of this picture with a beautiful treatment in a justly famous letter to Oldenburg (that I suspect shaped Leibniz's metaphysics non-trivially):

all bodies are surrounded by others, and are mutually determined to exist and operate in a fixed and definite proportion, while the relations between motion and rest in the sum total of them, that is, in the whole universe, remain unchanged. Hence it follows that each body, in so far as it exists as modified in a particular manner, must be considered as a part of the whole universe, as agreeing with the whole, and associated with the remaining parts. As the nature of the universe is not limited, like the nature of blood, but is absolutely infinite, its parts are by this nature of infinite power infinitely modified, and compelled to undergo infinite variations. 

While in my writings I tend to bring Newton rather close to Spinoza, it should be clear that on the view sketched here, Newton cannot endorse this lovely picture.

 

 

 

Michael Polanyi on the collapse of liberalism and the Rise of Fascism: Religion and Liberty

Anglo-American liberalism was first formulated by Milton and Locke. Their argument for freedom of thought was twofold. In its first part (for which we may quote the Areopagitica) freedom from authority is demanded, so that truth may be discovered. The main inspiration of this movement was the struggle of the rising natural sciences against the authority of Aristotle. Its programme was to let everyone state his beliefs, and to allow people to listen and form their own opinion; the ideas which would prevail in a free and open battle of wits would be as close an approximation to the truth as can be humanly achieved. We may call this the anti-authoritarian formula of liberty. Closely related to it is the second half of the argument for liberty, which is based on philosophic doubt. While its origins go back a long way (right to the philosophers of antiquity) this argument was first formulated as a political doctrine by Locke. It says simply that we can never be so sure of the truth in matters of religion as to warrant the imposition of our views on others. These two pleas for freedom of thought were put forward and were accepted by England at a time when religious beliefs were unshaken and indeed dominant throughout the nation. The new tolerance aimed pre-eminently at the reconciliation of different denominations in the service of God. Atheists were refused tolerance by Locke, as socially unreliable.

On the Continent, the twofold doctrine of free thought — anti-authoritarianism and philosophic doubt — gained ascendancy somewhat later than in England and moved on straightaway to a more extreme position.--Michael Polanyi (1951) "Perils of Inconsisency" in The Logic of Lberty, p. 117 (in the Libertyfund edition.)

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi popularized (recall here; and here) for many Marxists and progressives a fairly straightforward narrative about the rise of fascism, totalitarianism, and national-socialism (sometimes I'll just use 'fascism' for this whole group): by undermining social cohesion the markets promoted by liberalism give rise to fascism. And (echoing a trope from Adam Smith himself) the workplace in the capitalist economy undermines cognitive proper functioning and the functioning of wider culture (this is especially so when it is accompanied by violence as it was under imperialism and even domestic development). In particular, because markets are also inherently fragile, they generate disruptive crises which fatally undermine the authority of ordinary politicians and open the doors to strongmen of various types (or 'fascism') who take advantage of a wider sense of despair and humiliation.

Sometimes people also add an idea (recall) derived from Lenin to this argument: that is, that capitalist economies naturally become monopolistic. And (partially drawing on the liberal Hobson) such monopoly promotes violent imperialism and/or militarism (and not to mention opens the door to the a concentration of power in the hands of few oligarchs). And from there it is small step to a strongman (if a worker's revolution doesn't stop the process). 

By contrast, market friendly liberals (e.g., Austrians, Ordoliberals, and neoliberals) when confronted with the collapse of liberal civilization after World War I and the aftermath of the Wall Street crisis, offered a different analysis one that also harkened back to Hobson's views: while on the surface the nineteenth century looks liberal, liberals were never so powerful as to defeat mercantilism (which historically preceded it). And depending on the liberal thinker the details will differ, but all agree that in its political guise liberalism suffered setback after setback from the 1870s onward (or even earlier). On this view the early partial success of liberalism actually enhanced the rent-seeking and militaristic forces of mercantile imperialism. On this view, monopoly is not a necessary byproduct of market economies, but the effect of political decisions (tariffs, especially). And one may add, even if monopolies were the consequence of market economies left to themselves, this only shows the need for robust antitrust (ordoliberals especially argued this). The problem for this 'solution' is that it has to prevent rent seeking even though the view itself predicts its likelihood.

It should be noted that both explanations suggest that democracy (broadly conceived) cannot save itself if the economic circumstances are dire enough. And it is no surprise that some theorists thought that democracy inevitably led to Bonepartism (or military dictatorship by plebiscite), also sometimes known as caesarian democracy (recall here). Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon offers a nice expression of the idea, and as I recently learned (recall) it became a staple of the so-called Italian Elite school. 

In particular, as James Burnham notes, while drawing on Michels' (1911) Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy in his (1943) The Machiavellians, because of mechanisms that drive elite capture (recall) and because of the doctrine of the general/popular will, it is actually fairly predictable that a leader of a democracy can turn himself into the true representative of the general will of the people. And so rather than Bonepartism being at odds with democracy it is actually its "logical culmination," (Burnham, p. 145). To be sure Bonepartism itself is not totalitarianism, but the step to it may not be so difficult.

But all these explanations suffer from an obvious problem: some states managed to remain broadly liberal warts and all (Switzerland, Holland, the United Kingdom and many of its Dominions, as well as the United States), despite suffering many of the same evils as the countries that did succumb to various strongmen. And this opens the door to alternative approaches.

As I noted before (recall), Karl Polanyi's brother, Michael Polanyi went in a different direction, one of the attendees of Lippmann Colloquium in 1938. (Today he is primarily known for ideas about tacit knowledge in the philosophy of science. In what follows, i will first be alluding to his (1941) "The Growth of Thought in Society, Economica). He noted that in places where fascism (now broadly conceived) succeeded, there had been a previous successful ideological and violent campaign attacking society's intermediaries: these partially self-governing intermediary societies (within science, art, law, the crafts, engineering, medicine, the press, etc.) are for him constitutive of liberal society. This form of liberalism partially harkens back to features we now more often associate with Burke's little platoons and with continental corporatism. But in his Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, Jacob T. Levy has shown that what I here call Michael Polanyi's move is, in fact, a recurring theme within liberalism (that we can also find in Adam Smith).

And in fact Michael Polanyi thereby provides a mechanism for an observation that had figured prominently in Karl Polanyi's argument: that liberal authority seemed to collapse in the face of an organized but not especially threatening minority.  The collapse may look sudden, but it builds on a period of successful intimidation of the ordinary functioning of lots of intermediaries that stabilize liberal society. And if I can glance obliquely to our own time, one crucial lesson of this is that it is really important to bring the rule of law down on those that intimidate these intermediaries. It's to be feared that our own governments have not really learned Michael Polanyi's lesson.

Michael Polanyi himself must have felt that this account leaves out a crucial bit: motivation. Where do the would-be-elites and early cadres of fascists come from in a liberal society? In "Perils of Inconsistency," first published in his collection The Logic of Liberty (1951), Michael Polanyi tackles this question. Echoing and anticipating themes one finds in Hayek, Polanyi thinks that the difference maker is to be found in differential uptake of certain philosophical ideas. (And this also echoes Russell's views in The History of Western Philosophy then recent.) 

For Michael Polanyi, liberalism has its roots in a rejection of religious fanaticism and Church authority (p. 116). Both were replaced by a conception of liberty involving intellectual freedom. And for Polanyi this conception was internally contradictory (see above).* He claims one cannot simultaneously obtain a market place of ideas in public opinion -- notice that he does not attribute this idea to Mill -- and profess a mitigated skepticism at the same time. 

And simply put: on Polanyi's view, because of the demands of religious toleration (p. 122), Locke taught some places how to live with this inconsistency, while maintaining the authority of conscience and ideals pertaining to reason and justice formerly associated with church authority. (This is the bit, I think, is also in Russell--apologies that I lack an exact reference.) To put this amusingly, Locke taught the virtue of hypocrisy to Anglo-Saxon political culture--one continues to pay more than lip-service to certain ideals and so prevent their popular collapse. (On Polanyi's view this one also sees in Utilitarian practice.) As Polanyi puts it (again echoing Russell): "I believe that the preservation up to this day of Western civilization along the lines of the Anglo-American tradition of liberty was due to this speculative restraint, amounting to a veritable suspension of logic within the British empiricist philosophy." (121) One person's shallowness, is another's heroic self-command.

But, by contrast, under the influence of the French Enlightenment, other places tried to remove the inconsistency and replace Church authority with the authority of a public and objective reason. And to simplify greatly, nineteenth century continental philosophy -- special animus is directed by Polanyi at Hegel and Fichte, and then Marx and Nietzsche -- showed that this cannot be done, and that a species of nihilism is a result:

The process of replacing moral ideals by philosophically less  vulnerable objectives was carried out in all seriousness. This is  not a mere pseudo-substitution, but a real substitution of  human appetites and human passions for reason and the ideals  of man.

This brings us right up to the scene of the revolutions of the twentieth century. We can see now how the philosophies which guided these revolutions and destroyed liberty wherever they prevailed, were originally justified by the anti-authoritarian  and sceptical formula of liberty. They were indeed anti-authoritarian and sceptical to the extreme. They set man free  from obligations towards truth and justice, reducing reason to its own caricature : to a mere rationalization of conclusions, pre-determined by desire and eventually to be secured, or already held, by force. Such was the final measure of this liberation: man was to be recognized henceforth as maker and master, and no longer servant of what had before been his ideals.

This liberation, however, destroyed the very foundations of  liberty. (p. 126)

And this opened the door, on Polanyi's view to fanatics that could mobilize the serious moral passions of individuals who had been taught contempt for public morality. So, crucially, rather than seeing the varieties of fascism as inherently "savage," Polanyi sees fascism as building on a moral inversion  developed by Marxism. On this view, where public reason and public morality are seen as ideological, or merely a fig leave for the operation of power, fascism and authoritarianism can appeal to the moral sensibility of dissatisfied (and ambitious) individuals.

The important point here is that rather than seeing the success of strongmen as merely the success of cynicism, Polanyi glimpses that they can win in contexts where liberal society has lost its inner faith because they (the fascists) manage to channel moral grievance and moral disgust into a politics of violent renewal. 

Polanyi's own conclusion is that that liberalism and certain forms of religion are natural allies. (He is greatly cheered by the Christian Democratic defeat of Communism in Italy, and elsewhere.) Historically this was an important move because it prefigures the fusionism (of market friendly and religious conservative types) that made the Republican Party so successful in the latter half of the twentieth century (and so interestingly studied by Melinda Cooper in Family Values). And confronted by the success of Trumpism, I have been tempted by the idea (recall), in dialogue with Thomas Pink, that liberalism needs the help of religion, a revitalized Catholic Church, especially.+ 

Okay, let me wrap up. I don't mention all of this because I think Polanyi's history of philosophy is especially accurate or insightful. Nor do I mention it because I think we should go back to fusionism Stateside or Christian Democracy in Europe. But rather, I think Polanyi, is insightful that a successful public culture must do some justice to, or find a way to channel to proper public ends, the moral sensibility of the population. This means, I think, that liberal neutrality needs to be rethought without giving up on the virtues of liberalism.

 

On Pynchon on 1984 (pt II): On Jews and Religiosity

Religious fanaticism is in fact strangely absent from Oceania, except in the form of devotion to the party. Big Brother's regime exhibits all the elements of fascism - the single charismatic dictator, the total control of behaviour, the absolute subordination of the individual to the collective - except for racial hostility, in particular anti-Semitism, which was such a prominent feature of fascism as Orwell knew it. This is bound to strike the modern reader as puzzling. The only Jewish character in the novel is Emmanuel Goldstein, and maybe only because his original, Leon Trotsky, was Jewish too. And he remains an offstage presence whose real function in 1984 is to provide an expository voice, as the author of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.
Much has been made recently of Orwell's own attitude towards Jews, some commentators even going so far as to call it anti-Semitic. If one looks in his writing of the time for overt references to the topic, one finds relatively little - Jewish matters did not seem to command much of his attention. What published evidence there is indicates either a sort of numbness before the enormity of what had happened in the camps or a failure at some level to appreciate its full significance. There is some felt reticence, as if, with so many other deep issues to worry about, Orwell would have preferred that the world not be presented with the added inconvenience of having to think much about the Holocaust. The novel may even have been his way of redefining a world in which the Holocaust did not happen.
As close as 1984 gets to an anti-Semitic moment is in the ritual practice of Two Minutes Hate, presented quite early, almost as a plot device for introducing the characters Julia and O'Brien. But the exhibition of anti-Goldsteinism described here with such toxic immediacy is never generalised into anything racial. "Nor is there any racial discrimination," as Emmanuel Goldstein himself confirms, in the book - "Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party . .." As nearly as one can tell, Orwell considered anti-Semitism "one variant of the great modern disease of nationalism", and British anti-Semitism in particular as another form of British stupidity. He may have believed that by the time of the tripartite coalescence of the world he imagined for 1984 , the European nationalisms he was used to would somehow no longer exist, perhaps because nations, and hence nationalities, would have been abolished and absorbed into more collective identities. Amid the novel's general pessimism, this might strike us, knowing what we know today, as an unwarrantedly chirpy analysis. The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have determined too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily.--Thomas Pynchon  (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

The other day (recall) I used Pynchon's "Introduction" as a foil to reflect on the the nature of Newspeak in 1984. And since I will be critical of it today, again, I will note, first, that I find his, "The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have determined too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily," a sublime observation. The claim is not just true of Orwell, but of much of the intelligentsia since 1945. Pynchon does not pause to explain why Orwell, who is just about as astute a commentator on his own age as one can imagine, would fall victim to this mistake. A mistake, I hasten to add, that can be easily avoided if one reflects a bit on, say, Lucian and the admiration More, Hume,  and Adam Smith had for him. I suspect that even in magnanimous Orwell the costly mistake is due to an abiding, progressive view of history in which certain stages are overcome and beyond us.

Be that as it may, Pynchon's claims about the absence of "Jewish matters" in Nineteen Eighty-Four is rather strange. He misses entirely, and, as I have noted before, he is not alone in this, that the first thing Winston Smith writes about in his diary is his experience of going to the movies and watching war films which, upon reflection, turn out to be occasions for the audience to cheer on war crimes against (recall) "a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean."* And, included in it, is a gruesome scene involving a "middle-aged woman [who] might have been a Jewess." And so while I agree with Pynchon that there is a reticence in Orwell about describing the camps -- vaporization occurs off-stage in 1984 --, the allusion to the Holocaust is right there in the opening pages of the book. The whole first diary entry supports, in fact, Pynchon's contention that 1984 is misread if one only sees in it anti-communist, cold-war propaganda, and overlooks the book's major focus, which is on the diagnosis of enduring fascism.

I used 'war crimes' in the previous paragraph. Because one of the notable features of Oceania is that it is constantly hanging enemy soldiers for war crimes. And yet its own entertainment depicts war crimes of one's own as mere spectacle, and a further instance of building social cohesion within it. And put this abstractly, 1984 is as timely as ever. 

When I wrote that Pynchon's claims about absence of "Jewish matters" in Nineteen Eighty-Four are rather strange, I had in mind the fact Pynchon ignores a crucial feature of the Appendix to 1984, despite the fact that Pynchon's own "introduction" is structured on the significance of this "Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak" (and so devotes relatively outsized attention to it).  For in it the nameless implied author, who is (as Pynchon notes) writing a considerable time after the events described in 1984, claims the following:

As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink. Greater precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat the same way, the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible.*

So, rather than being absent, key features of life in Oceania are modelled on a certain interpretation of the Old Testament. Now, if I were in a polemical mood (which I am not) I would note there is a flirt with anti-Semitism here; a trope one could imagine existing among disillusioned intellectual Christian Socialists (a "near Communist" in Orwell's terms) who trace the origin of fascism to the fanatical particularism of the Hebrew Bible in the manner, say, in which (in my life-time) Jabotinsky's and Begin's Zionism were depicted as sharing roots with fascism. But I am not interested in polemics today.

That the Hebrew Bible is a source of political craft, even the elements of a political science, is a central feature of Machiavellian republicanism--this is hinted in The Prince, and fully developed in both the Theological-Political Treatise and, perhaps more important for the purposes of reflection on Orwell, Harrington's Oceana. And as it happens Orwell engaged seriously with the most able Machiavellian of his time, James Burnham, in his (1946) essay, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham," which discusses critically Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians: defenders of Freedom. I am surely not the first to note that plenty of themes of the former -- especially the power-hungry technocrats and intelligentsia who would develop a new kind of oligarchy -- discussed by Orwell found their way into 1984. In fact, one of Pynchon's key themes, viz. that 1984 is concerned with the international division of the world into three gigantic spheres of influence, is central to Orwell's treatment of Burnham. But while in the latter he has some interest in exploring the roots of fanaticism, Burnham does not, I think, trace some of the roots of fascist technique to the Hebrews.

One peculiarity of the claim about the ancient Hebrew by the implied author of the Appendix is that while it is, indeed, central to the whole spirit of Oceania that "the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible," in virtue of the fact that Oceania lacks written laws. The reader learns this in the opening scene when the thing that Winston "was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws)." But this is the exact opposite of the law-saturated life of the ancient Hebrew! And, while the Hebrew Bible is not an instruction manual into a life of service to the false gods, Baal and his priests are mentioned surprisingly frequently in it, and is (for example) central to the narrative about Jezebel in the Book of Kings.

In fact, in Orwell's posthumously published, autobiographical essay, "Such Were the Joys," he writes that "if I had sympathetic feelings towards any character in the Old Testament, it was towards such people as Cain, Jezebel, Haman, Agag, Sisera."** Whatever else they have in common, they are all idolaters in some sense (Cain being a tricky case). So, Orwell presumably knows there is something peculiar about what the implied author of the Appendix says about the "ancient Hebrew." Interestingly enough, Orwell is clear that he finds Christianity "strewn with psychological impossibilities."+  And in context it is clear that the Old Testament does not suffer from these.

Where does this leave us? Pynchon is right within the text of 1984, we are regularly invited to contemplate the religiosity (without religion) of members of the Party and the various forms of social psychological techniques and rituals that facilitate it. But he is wrong to suggest that this is somehow divorced from Judaism. On the contrary, yhe implied author of the Appendix explicitly connects this with the attitude of the "ancient Hebrew." But the text of the Appendix also suggests that its implied author has superficial acquaintance with the book, the Hebrew Bible, that characterizes the life of the ancient Hebrew (something one cannot say about Orwell). And at the risk of overreading, this suggests to me that the vantage point of the Appendix, which is projected much into the future from 1984, and whose implied author is a member of a future intelligentsia -- the official subject matter of the material is the rise and fall of Newspeak -- is one in which the Old Testament is not part of lived experience or knowledge by direct acquaintance, but merely hearsay. As it happens I think (but I would) that this supports my claim (against Pynchon) that the perspective of the Appendix does not hint at (now quoting Pynchon on 1948) "restoration and redemption." But it is, in fact, the state of affairs in much of contemporary life.++

 

 

 

On Wars of Choice, Las Casas, Transatlantic federations, and Reparations

Now the fact that one must refrain from war, and even tolerate the death of a few innocent persons, is proved by arguments and many authorities.
The first argument is this: According to the rule of right reason when we are confronted by two choices that are evil both as to moral guilt and punishment and we cannot avoid both of them, we ought t0 choose the lesser evil. For in comparison with the greater evil, the choice of the lesser evil has the quality of a good. This is what the Philosopher  teaches. Now the death of a small number of innocent persons is a lesser evil than the eternal damnation of countless numbers of persons killed in the fury of war.

Again, the death of the innocent is better or less evil than the complete destruction of entire kingdoms, cities. and strongholds. For not all of them eat the flesh of the innocent but only the rulers or priests, who do the sacrificing, whereas war brings the destruction of countless innocent persons who do not deserve any such thing. Therefore if those evils cannot be removed in any other way than by waging war, one must refrain from it and evils of this kind must be tolerated.
Furthermore, it is incomparably less disastrous that a few innocent persons die than that Christ's holy name be blasphemed by unbelievers and that the Christian religion be brought into ill repute and be hated by those peoples and by others to whom word of this flies, when they hear how many women, children, and aged people of their nation have been killed by the Christians without cause, as will unavoidably happen, and indeed has happened, in the fury of war. What, I ask, will be the result, if not a perpetual barrier to their salvation, so that there will be no further hope for their conversion? Therefore when there is a question of war over a cause of this kind it is better to let a few innocent persons be oppressed or suffer an unjust death. In fact it would be a very great sin, and against the natural, to wage war on these unbelievers for this reason. This is proved in the following way.
According to right reason, and therefore the natural law, it is evident that in every case and in every matter that concerns two evils, especially those involving moral guilt, one must choose that which is less harmful or is thought to be less harmful. Therefore to seek to free innocent persons in the case proposed, within their territories, as has been proposed, would be against the natural la,v and a sin, which, although not mortal, is very serious indeed. This is evident because the greater the damage sin inflicts the more serious it is, according to St. Thomas. And this is true even if that damage is not intended or foreseen, since everything that necessarily follows upon a sin belongs in some way to the very species of the sin. From such a war a countless number of innocent persons of both sexes and all ages will unavoidably perish, and the other evils that have been mentioned will necessarily follow upon that war. Therefore anyone who would try to free those who suffer evils of this type by means of war would commit a very serious mortal sin. ---Las Casas (1550-1552) In Defense of the Indians, chapter 28, translated by Stafford Poole, pp. 191-2. 

During the The Valladolid debate (1550–1551), Sepúlveda, the spokesperson for Spanish landlords in the Americas, articulated (recall) the case for humanitarian intervention on behalf of natives exploited by 'savage' indigenous practices. In particular, Sepúlveda called attention to the way vulnerable natives may be subject to human sacrifice and cannibalism. He, thereby, sketched their existence in terms of a proto-Hobbesian state of nature. At bottom his argument rests on two thoughts: (i) that the violent extension of civilization, conquest, is to be pursued because it ultimately benefits the backward and savage. The benefits include not just protection from local oppression, but also access to Christian conversion. And (ii) that immoral and wicked practices may justifiably invite humanitarian intervention.

There is little doubt that Sepúlveda's argument is offered in bad faith. But, as Las Casas recognizes, that is not sufficient to undermine it. On the question of sacrifice and cannibalism, Las Casas' strategy is not to deny its existence. But, first, he minimizes it frequency. Second, he claims that in many cases what looks like sacrifice is merely a legally sanctioned death sentence (and so unobjectionable). Third, that leaves a small number of victims from practices that serve a religious or (non-juridical) political function in indigenous societies. The question is, then, do these victims justify humanitarian intervention? And this question is pursued both as a contribution to just war theory (in particular, jus ad bellum) as well as a contribution to the borders of the Church and the role of the emperor in imposing these.

Because the natives never posed any threat to the Spanish, and no Christians were present in the Americas, the issue becomes  really a question about to what degree one can choose war under the pretext or in the service of humanitarian intervention. As is clear from the first paragraphs of the quoted passage above, Las Casas' answer is an unambiguous rejection of war under such circumstances. For, in war many  innocents will die necessarily. Las Casas adds many gruesome descriptions of how likely it is that in the fog of war enemy combatants and innocent bystanders are confused (and the latter harmed or killed) and that war always provides cover for other harms (including looting, plunder, rape, etc.). 

In these cases the dead innocent bystanders are harmed twice over: they get killed and they have no chance to be converted (and so receive eternal salvation, etc.). Moreover, while he does not emphasize this as much, the soldiers are put in great temptation to sin and fall into eternal damnation. So, the cost of war of choice in the service of humanitarian intervention is material and spiritual. Even if one does not share Las Casas' theological commitments, it is not difficult to articulate the spiritual costs in more psychological/social terms (PTSDs, broken social ties, etc.) that due justice to a more secular metaphysics.

In addition, and Las Casas is not shy about this point, if the ultimate point is voluntary conversion then exposing would be converted to great risks, even enormous harms, is self-undermining: "war is not a suitable means for spreading Christ's glory and the truth of the gospel, but rather for making the Christian name hateful and detestable for those who suffer the disasters of war." (355) As Las Casas repeatedly notes, the natural response to Spanish conquest and plunder is loathing of Spanish religion. So, while the particular details of the consequences of wars of choice may not be explicitly intended, they are foreseeable in a certain generic (one may be tempted to say statistical) way as belonging to a class of foreseeable "unavoidable" harms (even if the particular detail is not foreseen). Among the harms are epidemic illnesses, as Las Casas recognized.*  

Las Casas' argument presupposes here (and he argues it throughout the book) that because the indigenous are unbelievers  the Church has no prior dominion over them. In fact, because he treats the indigenous as self-governing polities with natural right to self-defense (“Every nation, no matter how barbaric, has the right to defend itself against a more civilized one that wants to conquer it and take away its freedom,” (355)), they also have a natural right to their own religious practices (which he assures his reader are theistic in practice).  In virtue of some such comments, Las Casas comes very close to finding the whole Spanish presence in the Americas illegal. 

He draws back from this conclusion for two reasons, one theological and one political (intimately connected). The political reason is that he needs the power of the emperor to subdue the Spanish landlords (and reform their abuses) and control the conquistadors. But the emperor and his court rely on income from the Americas; the emperor is in a zero-sum competition with other European powers, and the emperor has opportunity to extend his dominion and power by incorporating the American colonies in a pacific, imperial project in which the emperor becomes a protector of self-governing natives against their oppressors in the same way he is a protector of burghers against feudal landlords (see, e.g., the New Laws of Charles V). In addition, and this is connected to the theological reason, the emperor can create conditions for possibility of peaceful missions to convert of the indigenous. This is also the interest of the Church to hold on to colonial enterprise (and is explicitly present in the various papal degrees.)

Before I conclude, and as an aside, it is worth emphasizing that Las Casas develops here the foundations for the pacific federations based on shared and ever closer, converging values and shared interests familiar from the history of liberalism (recall here; and neo-Liberalism  (recall here; here; here)). And this also suggests that we can tell an alternative to Foucault's story. Recall that for Foucault 'Europe' was discovered when the Westphalian, non-zero sum system presupposed a zero-sum extra-European relationship that extracts wealth from would be enemies (in what we may call the Global South). On this view a zone of open-ended progress requires the domination of the backward global. Prior to the development of this system, there were opportunities for a more mutualistic relationships with the Global South.+  

The very possibility of a more mutualist, equitable approach founders on the limitations of imperial state capacity and the power inequality between the natives and Spanish. The Imperial state is, even when willing,** incapable of genuinely controlling the Spanish landlords from afar when their interests align against it. This means that Las Casas' own proposal --  "what has been taken unjustly" must be "restored" (362) -- is doomed to failure. This despite the fact that Las Casas' proposal is itself a compromise with political reality. I put it like that because his arguments entail a more radical conclusion, not just restoration but also, "reparation for injuries." (4)++

Chiang on metahumans (and the great chain of being)

The question is, are these worthwhile undertakings for scientists? Some call them a waste of time, likening them to a Native American research effort into bronze smelting when steel tools of European manufacture are readily available. This comparison might be more apt if humans were in competition with metahumans, but in today's economy of abundance there is no evidence of such competition. In fact, it is important to recognize that — unlike most previous low-technology cultures confronted with a high-technology one — humans are in no danger of assimilation or extinction.

There is still no way to augment a human brain into a metahuman one; the Sugimoto gene therapy must be performed before the embryo begins neurogenesis in order for a brain to be compatible with DNT. This lack of an assimilation mechanism means that human parents of a metahuman child face a difficult choice: to allow their child DNT interaction with metahuman culture, and watch him or her grow incomprehensible to them; or else restrict access to DNT during the child's formative years, which to a metahuman is deprivation like that suffered by Kaspar Hauser. It is not surprising that the percentage of human parents choosing the Sugimoto gene therapy for their children has dropped almost to zero in recent years.

As a result, human culture is likely to survive well into the future, and the scientific tradition is a vital part of that culture. Hermeneutics is a legitimate method of scientific inquiry and increases the body of human knowledge just as original research did. Moreover, human researchers may discern applications overlooked by metahumans, whose advantages tend to make them unaware of our concerns.

For example, imagine if research offered hope of a different intelligence-enhancing therapy, one that would allow individuals to gradually ‘upgrade’ their minds to a level equivalent to that of a metahuman. Such a therapy would offer a bridge across what has become the greatest cultural divide in our species' history, yet it might not even occur to metahumans to explore it; that possibility alone justifies the continuation of human research.

We need not be intimidated by the accomplishments of metahuman science. We should always remember that the technologies that made metahumans possible were originally invented by humans, and they were no smarter than we. Ted Chiang (2000) "Catching crumbs from the table," in Nature.*

The existence of metahumans (or enhanced, human cyborgs) reminds us that developments in technologies generate violations of Descartes' causal principle: what is more perfect can arise from what is less perfect. Technologies change how we conceive of what is humanly possible.+ In addition, technology helps generate violations of the great chain of being; there are  in-commensurable gaps between humans and metahumans.

Whether any technology can remove scarcity may well be doubted unless the metahumans can practice moral checks on themselves and nudge the humans into breeding at a replacement rate. Of course, if the metahumans did so, it's possible the humans would not know about it ([recall] in the way the machines/artificial intelligence nudge humans in Iain Banks' The Culture series).

The narration assumes that scarcity is the main motive for genocide. It also implies that being capable of developing science and technology, including presumably meta weapons of meta mass destruction, would generate an ethics of their proper use. Since metahumans were initially invented by humans no smarter than us, this is to be doubted. Perhaps the thought is that the ability to dominate nature (abundance, etc.) removes the desire to dominate (destroy/exploit, etc.) lesser beings. But let's leave that aside.

When I was reflecting on the story, I was initially unsure parents would indeed choose to be able to communicate with their children, and so continue their traditions even form of life, rather than choosing for their kids to be among the cognitive elite (the metahumans). Often today, it seems, designer babies represent not just the desire for healthy kids, but parents' status and economic aspirations for their children. Such parents appear to act for their childrens' good. 

But, upon second thought, Chiang's moral psychology seems persuasive. Because despite the emphasis on 'choice' in selling human enhancement technologies, our contemporary parents of designer babies are not really showing much respect for the (let's call it) autonomy of their children. Rather what they de facto do is lengthen the odds that the structure of their (parental/social) values/traditions are passed on and reproduced. 

Part of the joke of the story -- which first appeared in Nature -- is that academic journals have stopped being the vehicle for publishing original research. They are now mostly in the business of hermeneutics trying and trailing to understand metahuman science. For us the joke may be less funny because with the opacity of machine learning this possibility may well be shading into reality. Even so, it would indeed be funny if the success of an all-knowing data science would regenerate the felt need for a kind of science of interpretation that could help decode the revelations of a hidden intelligence. When computer science departments start hiring big-data-hermeneuticists, the heirs of Gadamer or Davidson can laugh at our analytic philosophers.++ Of course, with machine algorithms, there may simply be no there, there. And so this hermeneutics may well have to rely on an intentional stance.

Not unlike AL-Farabi's God (at least this is Al-Ghazali's charge), the metahumans may be t uninterested in the physical going-ons of mere mortals. One's position reflects one's choices of research topic. Chiang suggests that faced with the existence of scientifically superior metahumans, scientific humans would embrace if not standpoint epistemology, then the argument from epistemic diversity, from self-interest. If these human scientists are right, then the great chain of being would be restored.

 

On Marilynne Robinson's Edomites

Assmann’s argument is the sort of razzle-dazzle that depends on coinages like “mnemohistory,” which is the exalted and useful discipline of interpreting history that collective memory has displaced and suppressed so thoroughly only the writer has an inkling even of the fact of suppression. In this cognitive implosion a fusion occurs between Moses and the Aton cultus which conventional history simply cannot achieve. Assmann is writing this book in response to Freud’s abysmal question about the origins of anti-Semitism. “Strikingly enough, his [Freud’s] question was not how the Gentiles, or the Christians, or the Germans came to hate the Jews, but ‘how the Jew had become what he is and why he has attracted this undying hatred.’” He paraphrases Freud’s answer thus: “Not the Jew but monotheism had attracted this undying hatred. By making Moses an Egyptian, [Freud] deemed himself able to shift the sources of negativity and intolerance out of Judaism and back to Egypt, and to show that the defining fundamentals of Jewish monotheism and mentality came from outside it.” So we are to concede, apparently, that these are “the defining fundamentals of Jewish monotheism and mentality.” Comment is unnecessary, though I will draw attention here to the notion of victimization I remarked on earlier. We gentiles have the Torah to blame for our worst moments, it would appear.

Like others of these writers, Assmann argues that ancient polytheism was essentially tolerant, “cosmotheism,” and readily accepted other gods, translating them into the terms of the culture that received them. Granting that Melqart, a god of Carthage, did indeed lounge around in a lion skin looking just like Hercules, we have the fact that Rome loathed Carthage, and was despised in turn, and reduced that great city to bare earth and then plowed salt into the ground. Athens and Sparta had just the same pantheon, and they fought to the death. And Rome conquered Greece, whose gods it had thoroughly Latinized. That is to say, whatever the merits of polytheism, at best it only obliged people to find other than religious grounds for hostility, which they were clearly very able to do. How the wars of the Hebrews against the Canaanites are more culpable than the wars of the Romans against the Etruscans I fail to see, or why anyone should imagine that these wars were less formative for European civilization than those distant, inconclusive wars among the Semites. Or, for that matter, why they do not prove that the character of the civilization was already formed when Rome set about the conquest of Italy. Jack Miles attributes the structure of Western consciousness to monotheism on the grounds that “the Bible was the popular encyclopedia of the Middle Ages.” But in fact through most of the Common Era in Europe the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, existed almost exclusively in Latin, a language incomprehensible to the great majority of people, who were in any case illiterate. So its influence is easily overstated. Yet ferocious intolerance has characterized most of Western history in the Common Era.

Polytheism is as fashionable now as it has been since fascism was in its prime. As a corollary to the current tendency to blame monotheism for intolerance and aggression and genocide, there is an assumption that polytheism must have been tolerant, pacific and humane. This notion is old, too. In The Natural History of Religion, Hume says, “by limiting the powers and functions of its deities, [idolatry] naturally admits the gods of other sects and nations to a share of divinity, and renders all the various deities, as well as rites, ceremonies, or traditions, compatible with each other … [By comparison] when one sole object of devotion is acknowedged, the worship of other deities is regarded as absurd and impious.”

It is striking to see how the cultural discourse is circling on itself. Perhaps the real familiarity of their arguments explains why these writers I have looked at offer so little in the way of evidence. For example, Assmann, the most scholarly of them, says the Old Testament is deeply informed by aversion to Egypt, then offers no support from the text. And, coincidentally perhaps, little evidence is to be found in the text. One Mosaic law of unambiguous relevance, which goes unmentioned by him, is Deuteronomy 23:7: “You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother; you shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were a sojourner in his land.” This law provides that both Edomites and Egyptians may enter the assembly of the Lord on favorable terms — after three generations, that is, which seems long, but which is liberal by comparison with the ancient Athenians, for instance, who never naturalized the descendants of foreigners. Nor, as I understand, do the modern Germans. This one verse is sufficient to demonstrate that there was not hatred but in fact a certain bond between Hebrews and Egyptians.

This idea, that the hatred of the Other is the signal preoccupation of the Old Testament, is carried to great lengths by Regina Schwartz..."--Marilynne Robinson, "The Fate of Ideas: Moses" in When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), pp. 114-116. [First published in 1999 in Salmagundi.]

During the Summer my mom called attention to a lovely, recent essay by Robinson in the NYRB. (Thank you mom!) In that essay Robinson vindicates the Puritans and Cromwell as (for example) legal reformists who develop the idea of the rule of law. I may be the only would be aspiring contributor to the Republic of Letters who had missed the impact of Robinson's novels and essays and even Obama's endorsement of her. (Serves me right for skipping the NYRB for a few years!) I am trying to use the remainder of this Summer to catch up on what I missed. When I Was a Child I Read Books contains two essays, "Open thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism" and "The Fate of Ideas: Moses," which are the bedrock on which the recent NYRB essay is built. These two essays are often read in tandem by those with an interest in advancing, what we may call, contemporary political theology (see, e.g., Paul Steaton critically; Scott D. Moringiello admirably).

The long quoted passage is kind of exemplary of Robinson's philosemitism. She is very acute on the ways in which biblical scholars and even very progressive intellectuals have a tendency to attribute bad features of European civilization or today's culture to a disparaged version of the Old Testament.

As an aside, she uses "Old Testament" and not "Hebrew Bible" because they have "very different cultural histories [and] the order of the books is different." (96) En passant, Robinson raises the question to what degree these can be said to be, in fact, the same book(s).*

Be that as it may, Robinson, who is often humane and wise, is pretty compelling that often the unlovely critiques of the Old Testament are grounded in lack of familiarity with the actual text. She notes that for much of the history of Christianity such familiarity cannot be presumed among many. (The revival of knowledge of the Old Testament occurred during the reformation by humanists and reformers.)+  And one of her more endearing features is to quote Scriptures to unmask dangerous nonsense presenting itself as scholarship. I don't mean to suggest she is committed to simpleminded literalism or infallibility of scripture; not unlike her hero, Calvin, she uses sola scriptura as a means to expand one's judgment and sensitivity and to ground what she calls free thought. 

Even so, I think something is off in her reading of Deuteronomy 23:7. And I will suggest it's the kind of offness that characterizes the advocate. Before I get to that, everything she says in the passage quoted above is true -- both true as readings of others and about the larger purported truths to which they refer. More important, given the contemporary scene, the passage she quotes from Deuteronomy helps provide background to the kind of claims my friend (and sometime co-author) Yoram Hazony makes (recall, for example, here and here) about what he calls the order of nation states which co-habit in peace. Hebrew, Egyptian, and (especially?) Edomite can be expected to cohabit. In fact, and again with a nod to the contemporary headlines, this is a Hebraic nationalism that rejects ethnic/racial purity and is open to immigrants becoming part of the community (and intermarry). Hazony himself has written eloquently on this (recall).** 

Okay, with that in place, I would like to quote 23:7 in Deuteronomy's slightly larger context:

3An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the LORD for ever: 4because they met you not with bread and with water in the way, when ye came forth out of Egypt; and because they hired against thee Balaam the son of Beor of Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse thee. 5Nevertheless the LORD thy God would not hearken unto Balaam; but the LORD thy God turned the curse into a blessing unto thee, because theLORD thy God loved thee. 6Thou shalt not seek their peace nor their prosperity all thy days for ever. Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite; for he is thy brother: thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian; because thou wast a stranger in his land.8The children that are begotten of them shall enter into the congregation of the LORD in their third generation. KJV

It's pretty clear that the Old Testament treats Ammonites and Moabites very differently from Egyptian and Edomite. What's especially striking is not the historical rationale offered by Moses,++ but the insistence that one should not aim to make peace or (I think) trade with  Ammonites and Moabites. To put the point anachronistically, in the order of nation states there will be states that are perpetual enemies (e.g., Ammonites and Moabites) and those that are not (e.g., Edomite and Egyptian. Since the Jews had been slaves in Egypt this is indeed remarkable.) It seems that there is something about the national character of perpetual enemies (lack of hospitality and, to sound Hobbesian, war-preparedness) that makes them (these nations) incapable of change.*** 

I think Robinson would be inclined to read, and she would not be wrong to do so, this passage of the Old Testament as showing that an unwillingness to open one's hand to the stranger is, according to it, almost the worst national character-trait. So, the passage supports her larger spirit.  

Even so, I close with a yes, but. 

Even if one allows (for the sake of argument) that national character is fixed, I am unsure what the assumed mechanism is by which flawed national character infects each individual such that it makes members of these nations permanently unwelcome. But it's pretty clear that the passage justifies inhumane treatment of those taken to belong to natural enemies. So, surely Robinson is correct to say that the Old Testament shows no signal preoccupation with hatred of the Other. It would be pleasant if we could all be Edomites. But that's compatible with the injunction to be on guard, in the sense of keeping out, alas, some distinct Others, forever.  

Rousseau's Legislator, Religion, Magnanimity and the Problem of Evil

There is a further difficulty that deserves attention. Wise men, if they try to speak their language to the common herd instead of its own, cannot possibly make themselves understood. There are a thousand kinds of ideas which it is impossible to translate into popular language. Conceptions that are too general and objects that are too remote are equally out of its range: each individual, having no taste for any other plan of government than that which suits his particular interest, finds it difficult to realise the advantages he might hope to draw from the continual privations good laws impose. For a young people to be able to relish sound principles of political theory and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit, which should be created by these institutions, would have to preside over their very foundation; and men would have to be before law what they should become by means of law. The legislator therefore, being unable to appeal to either force or reason, must have recourse to an authority of a different order, capable of constraining without violence and persuading without convincing.

This is what has, in all ages, compelled the fathers of nations to have recourse to divine intervention and credit the gods with their own wisdom, in order that the peoples, submitting to the laws of the State as to those of nature, and recognising the same power in the formation of the city as in that of man, might obey freely, and bear with docility the yoke of the public happiness.

This sublime reason, far above the range of the common herd, is that whose decisions the legislator puts into the mouth of the immortals, in order to constrain by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move.¹⁴ But it is not anybody who can make the gods speak, or get himself believed when he proclaims himself their interpreter. The great soul of the legislator is the only miracle that can prove his mission. Any man may grave tablets of stone, or buy an oracle, or feign secret intercourse with some divinity, or train a bird to whisper in his ear, or find other vulgar ways of imposing on the people. He whose knowledge goes no further may perhaps gather round him a band of fools; but he will never found an empire, and his extravagances will quickly perish with him. Idle tricks form a passing tie; only wisdom can make it lasting. The Judaic law, which still subsists, and that of the child of Ishmael, which, for ten centuries, has ruled half the world, still proclaim the great men who laid them down; and, while the pride of philosophy or the blind spirit of faction sees in them no more than lucky impostures, the true political theorist admires, in the institutions they set up, the great and powerful genius which presides over things made to endure.'--J.J. Rousseau The Social Contract, 2.8

In the quoted passage, Rousseau addresses an instance of the transition problem, that is (recall; recall here and here] how from any status quo to create a normatively desirable or ideal political future with a population raised under bad institutions (or worse, bad breeding). Rousseau's version of the problem is something like, under what conditions can we expect a people capable of exercising the general will to form? And, in fact, Rousseau's answer is rather dramatic, and shows that he recognizes the full nature of the transition problem, namely that people need to be transformed: the legislator must "feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual...of altering man's constitution for the purpose of strengthening it (etc.)" In this instance the transition program is turned into (to echo my homage to L.A. Paul) a Political Transformative experience (PTE see Helen de Cruz; P. Allen; or me). Such a PTE can only succeed with a multitude that already has ‘some unity of origin, interest, or convention’ (SC 2.10).

Rousseau proposes that the agent of transformation (the Legislator) is somebody (not unlike the legislators of Plato's Laws and Moses) who remains outside the new social order (in order to prevent corruption of his preferences/aims) he is bringing into being. For this agent religion (and this echoes Al-Farabi's version of Platonic political theory) becomes a tool for political union. Religion here plays three distinct roles: first its symbols and language are more accessible than philosophy/science and so it is a good vehicle to convey the insights of political philosophy to the lesser educated (and educatable); second, it provides an incentive for people to move beyond their personal interests (that is otherwise absent); third, the political project can piggy back on the authority that is accorded to the divine.

The two intermediate aims (the full one is to create a people capable of exercising a general will), of this transformative process are 1.`’liberty and equality’ (SC 2.11;  and 2. the formation of 'social spirit,' that is a form of civic religion. About both of these more is to be said, but I want to wrap up and point out a feature of the origins of magnanimous legislators.

A magnanimous or great soul is not possible in the state of nature, according to Rousseau, because there we are (as Hobbes thought) roughly equal. Against Plato and Aristotle, Rousseau rejects (recall yesterday) natural hierarchy. (The one nice thing about embracing natural hierarchy is that the existence of great souled people is to be expected in any natural population; these show up on a regular basis.) For Rousseau hierarchies that seem natural are the product of society.  So, a great soul is only possible after (bad societies) have generated (with force) ‘natural seeming’ hierarchies in human nature. That is to say, the fact of historical inequality and injustice is a condition of possibility for the production of magnanimous legislators!

It is sometimes said (correctly) that Rousseau did not accept the gospel of progress. And in the Social Contract religion clearly has an instrumental role to play. This allows him (echoing Machiavelli) to see in Moses and Muhammad successful political legislators. But what seems to have been less noticed is that he does embrace a form of theodicy, a kind of cunning of history, which is (perhaps indirectly) also a (proto-Nietzschean) response to the problem of evil. Past suffering makes possible higher types who will transform us into beings that can be free and equal (and generate legitimate government).

 

 

 

On Not finding the Words to Be in This World

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."--Lincoln (1865) The Second Inaugural.

In trying to find words to organize the jumble of my thoughts on this week's events Stateside, I was reminded of my second visit to Washington DC with the College Democrats in the early 1990s. One bright night I got bored with the networking and the efforts of the under-aged to obtain drinks, and went with a small group to the Lincoln Memorial. I had never been there. I had discerned that professional politics was not for me. One of my companions mentioned that Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream speech," was given at the base of Lincoln's statue.

A few years before I had visited the Jefferson Memorial and I had struggled with my response. The rhetoric gripped me at first, but over time I came to see in the particular choice of words a clumsy effort at propaganda. I was bracing myself for disappointment as I entered the Lincoln Memorial. And at first, I had to suppress laughter--Lincoln looked just like I imagined him to look and I expected him to stand up and play the part in a cartoon or a third rate horror movie. I recognized the Gettysburg address (recall my post), but the words of the Second Inaugural were unfamiliar. I was horrified and astounded by it: while allowing that God's providential plan may be unknowable, he was treating the suffering of the war inflicted on all parties (both North and South) as divine punishment for the evil of slavery.

I was astounded because I could not imagine a politician, certainly not a war-time leader, magnifying the voters' sins back at them. I had come to assume that while democratic political leadership was coextensive with some truth, it primarily entailed a form of flattery of the people by the politician. That Lincoln's stance had seemed impossible to me, made me feel not just physically small in his statue's presence, but I suddenly saw that my purported knowing-ness and realism revealed itself as underestimating democratic, no human, possibility.

I was awestruck, yet angry.

His words horrified and angered me because it reminded me of the Rabbinic argument that I had encountered as a teenager that the Holocaust was divine punishment of the Jews' sins. My teenage (modestly existentialist) self earnestly opted for nihilism given the choice between meaning-less suffering or a God that inflicts such (disproportionate) horrors on his creatures. (I didn't recognize that if God existed, my choice would seem comic to her.) Since, I learned that God is not required for the stance I rejected; I sometimes spot secular versions of a divine retribution theory (e.g., austerity measures inflicted on 'lazy' populations).

I have come to recognize the moral majesty of Lincoln's great sense of shared complicity in evil. And I am impressed by his willingness to entertain, subtly, such public doubt in God's possession of the attribute of justice and his sense of the absurdity even blasphemy of so much prayer. Yet, whether he believed his own words or not, I revolted against the embrace of divine retribution because (as a doctrine/explanatory principle) it seems biased against history's victims--it victimizes them twice over. Even so, while steady in my rejection of this theology, as the years have passed, I have come to wonder whether Lincoln's greatness and his theology are inseparable. (I am not claiming this theology is sufficient for greatness!)

So, here I am, a father of a young child, hoping that he will be surrounded by people willing to cope and adjust to each other without violence, knowing that I have no grounds for expecting this. Out of scholarly duty I look up the full text of Psalm 19, and there just before reaching, "the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether," I read, אֵין-אֹמֶר, וְאֵין דְּבָרִים:    בְּלִי, נִשְׁמָע קוֹלָם. There is no speech, there are no words, neither is their voice heard.*

 

 

Thomas More, Spinozism, and Religious Enlightenment

At the first constitution of their government, Utopus having understood that before his coming among them the old inhabitants had been engaged in great quarrels concerning religion, by which they were so divided among themselves, that he found it an easy thing to conquer them, since, instead of uniting their forces against him, every different party in religion fought by themselves.  After he had subdued them he made a law that every man might be of what religion he pleased, and might endeavour to draw others to it by the force of argument and by amicable and modest ways, but without bitterness against those of other opinions; but that he ought to use no other force but that of persuasion, and was neither to mix with it reproaches nor violence; and such as did otherwise were to be condemned to banishment or slavery. “This law was made by Utopus, not only for preserving the public peace, which he saw suffered much by daily contentions and irreconcilable heats, but because he thought the interest of religion itself required it.  He judged it not fit to determine anything rashly; and seemed to doubt whether those different forms of religion might not all come from God, who might inspire man in a different manner, and be pleased with this variety; he therefore thought it indecent and foolish for any man to threaten and terrify another to make him believe what did not appear to him to be true.  And supposing that only one religion was really true, and the rest false, he imagined that the native force of truth would at last break forth and shine bright, if supported only by the strength of argument, and attended to with a gentle and unprejudiced mind; while, on the other hand, if such debates were carried on with violence and tumults, as the most wicked are always the most obstinate, so the best and most holy religion might be choked with superstition, as corn is with briars and thorns; he therefore left men wholly to their liberty, that they might be free to believe as they should see cause; only he made a solemn and severe law against such as should so far degenerate from the dignity of human nature, as to think that our souls died with our bodies, or that the world was governed by chance, without a wise overruling Providence: for they all formerly believed that there was a state of rewards and punishments to the good and bad after this life; and they now look on those that think otherwise as scarce fit to be counted men, since they degrade so noble a being as the soul, and reckon it no better than a beast’s: thus they are far from looking on such men as fit for human society, or to be citizens of a well-ordered commonwealth; since a man of such principles must needs, as oft as he dares do it, despise all their laws and customs: for there is no doubt to be made, that a man who is afraid of nothing but the law, and apprehends nothing after death, will not scruple to break through all the laws of his country, either by fraud or force, when by this means he may satisfy his appetites.  They never raise any that hold these maxims, either to honours or offices, nor employ them in any public trust, but despise them, as men of base and sordid minds.  Yet they do not punish them, because they lay this down as a maxim, that a man cannot make himself believe anything he pleases; nor do they drive any to dissemble their thoughts by threatenings, so that men are not tempted to lie or disguise their opinions; which being a sort of fraud, is abhorred by the Utopians: they take care indeed to prevent their disputing in defence of these opinions, especially before the common people: but they suffer, and even encourage them to dispute concerning them in private with their priest, and other grave men, being confident that they will be cured of those mad opinions by having reason laid before them.--Thomas More Utopia.

The proper regulation of religion plays a central role in Utopia (recall also here). First, it is recognized that religion can undermine even minimal political unity. So, religion is regulated in such a way that it prevents disunity and promotes unity. This has three key features: (i) there is -- anticipating Hobbes and Spinoza -- complete freedom of thought; (ii) anticipating Spinoza, there is complete freedom of public expressions of religious doctrines (with one exception to be noted below) as long as the manner of expression is civil--religion as a source of public disorder is (anticipating Spinoza) treated severely [for more on Utopia's proto-Spinozism see here and, also, here]; (iii) only Epicurean religious doctrines ("our souls died with our bodies, or that the world was governed by chance, without a wise overruling Providence") are disallowed--the thought being that such doctrines undermine adherence to the law and public norms. To put the significance of (iii) paradoxically: the Utopians agree with Hobbes (or the other way around) that the stability and survival of the law is based on existence of fear in the population at large, but this fear requires religious doctrines for their support. So, the Utopians deny that a (virtuous) society of atheists is possible. That is to say, religion has a political role in securing obedience and, thereby, minimal unity. The previous sentence is important because it calls attention to the significant role of religious institutions of reproducing and stabilizing the morals of Utopia.

Second, a very modern notion of progress is inscribed into the nature of religious toleration as practiced on Utopia: if permanent religious discussion is promoted among those that have the right dispositions then there will be an open ended discovery process about the nature of religion.

Third, by promoting public religious toleration, Utopus is serving the interests of religion because it removes one of the key sources of corruption of religion: the attachment of any religious faction to the trappings of political power. (This is especially clear from Part I of Utopia.) This is reinforced by the fact that the priestly class is chosen by secret ballot by the population (in fact, the electorate is organized around fairly homogeneous districts that get to know the character of would-be-priest quite well due to the near lack of privacy on Utopia).

There are two peculiarities worth noting about this system: first (A), foolish would-be-Epicureans, that is, those that insist on their doctrines in public are punished severely (with loss of public honors), but prudent Epicureans are tolerated and even encouraged to discuss (there are heavy hints of Plato's Laws here) their views behind closed door with the educated elite (priest, politicians, and learned) on Utopia. So, while Epicureans is a public taboo it is privately explored.This is notable because Utopia is not a society that has much space for any other privacy.

Second (B), the Utopians publically think their polity is governed by providence and guided by the wisdom of their founder, King Utopus, we are never told the political source or legislator of the key feature of its regime: the lack of private property. (This is explicitly not attributed to Utopus' wisdom.) And, in fact, at the close of the narrative we are told by Raphael Hythloday (the visitor) that there is an element of chance in the generation of Utopia's institutions: "I am glad that the Utopians have fallen upon this form of government" [Utopiensibus saltem contigisse gaudeo]. So, before I speculate on what this may signify about Utopia's political institutions. It is worth noting that the religious public taboo against the role of chance in natural (and political) history, also prevents the Utopians from fully grasping the nature of their own political order. (It turns out that, in fact, the study of political philosophy about abstract human nature is not available in Utopia.)*

In fact, while King Utopus founded and designed the capital (which is the model for the other cities on Utopia, but there is no reason to believe Utopus was around to found this), "he left all that belonged to the ornament and improvement of it to be added by those that should come after him, that being too much for one man to bring to perfection." This is a further notion of open-ended progress that is inscribed into Utopia: of material improvement (from very poor structures to wealthy structures).

Evidently something happened along the way to  turn Utopia from a state that at its founding is explicitly multi-ethnic and religiously tolerant into one without property. It strikes me there are three options: first, communism was introduced as an unintended consequence of other original institutions; second, there was, in fact, a further political revolution between Utopus and the present; third, a Christlike figure preaching Communism had visited Utopia at some point. There are hints of all three options in the text.