Hegel, History, and the Future

From Michael Sugrue's excellent lecture on Hegel's philosophy of history:

The big concern of the nineteenth century is history. Utopian socialists, people like Comte and Fourier, are people who are essentially interested in ending history. They said that previous centuries, previous societies, previous governments, the way they have treated human beings, have all be a scandal, a disgrace. We have now gotten to an enlightened state of consciousness where we can create a new society, where we can abolish that earlier society and have true human relations and a truly human world. Marx's philosophy is shot through with the idea that the industrial revolution makes possible a new epoch in human history, which is fundamentally different from all the other phases of human history.

Hegel saw himself as representing a key moment in human history, when the whole evolutionary process became aware of itself. His philosophy represented, therefore, a radical break, prehaps the very culmination of history, one might say the end of history. And people have been announcing the end of history ever since. Sugrue lists a bunch, including post-modernists and deconstructionists and so on who believed they had understood something about western thought that everyone had missed before, that texts actually have no meanings or communication is actually impossible or what have you:

Modern intellectual trends and practices are, with varying degrees of comprehension, the heirs of Hegel's end of history argument, that something fundamentally new and important is happening to us right now that makes us fundamentally different from all the other generations who have been stuck and enchained in earlier traditions. But this is nothing new; we have been doing this since Hegel. All of these crypto end of history arguments are homage to Hegel, homage to the idea that even if human history can no longer be seen as a necessary progression toward the final state of human existence, there is something fundamentally different about us that allows us to recognize that fact. The idea that we have fundamentally turned a corner sounds like it is new and exciting and it thrills undergraduates when you tell them stuff like that, but my point is that it is at least 150 years old.

My question is this: is the modernist belief in radical change dead? Have we stopped imagining that we have the power to enter an entirely different mode of human existence, when everything will be better? Are there any thinkers who see their ideas as marking a radical break with everything that came before?

The only contemporary school I can think of that fits this pattern is the AI guys with their "singularity." But nobody can agree on whether that will be good for us or terrible, so that seems a bit different. Thoughts?

Scott Siskind (and Bedell) on Artificial Intelligence

Over the past 60 years, starting with the original Turing Test, people have kept setting up tests that would show us computers were truly intelligent, but then when some computer passes the test, nobody cares. After going over a bunch of these, Siskind writes:

Now we hardly dare suggest milestones like these anymore. Maybe if an AI can write a publishable scientific paper all on its own? But Sakana can write crappy not-quite-publishable papers. And surely in a few years it will get a little better, and one of its products will sneak over a real journal’s publication threshold, and nobody will be convinced of anything. If an AI can invent a new technology? Someone will train AI on past technologies, have it generate a million new ideas, have some kind of filter that selects them, and produce a slightly better jet engine, and everyone will say this is meaningless. If the same AI can do poetry and chess and math and music at the same time? I think this might have already happened, I can’t even keep track.

So what? Here are some possibilities:

First, maybe we’ve learned that it’s unexpectedly easy to mimic intelligence without having it. This seems closest to ELIZA, which was obviously a cheap trick.

Second, maybe we’ve learned that our ego is so fragile that we’ll always refuse to accord intelligence to mere machines.

Third, maybe we’ve learned that “intelligence” is a meaningless concept, always enacted on levels that don’t themselves seem intelligent. Once we pull away the veil and learn what’s going on, it always looks like search, statistics, or pattern matching. The only difference is between intelligences we understand deeply (which seem boring) and intelligences we don’t understand enough to grasp the tricks (which seem like magical Actual Intelligence).

I endorse all three of these. The micro level - a single advance considered in isolation - tends to feel more like a cheap trick. The macro level, where you look at many advances together and see all the impressive things they can do, tends to feel more like culpable moving of goalposts. And when I think about the whole arc as soberly as I can, I suspect it’s the last one, where we’ve deconstructed “intelligence” into unintelligent parts.

I am most interested in the last one. As a materialist, I do not think there is anything magical about intelligence. It must arise from physical/electrical/chemical stuff going on in our brains. It must, therefore, be simulatable with a big enough computer. And whenever we do understand something our brains are doing, it turns out that there are a lot of subroutines doing fairly simple things that add up to something bigger.

The higher mental activity that I have thought the most about is of course writing. I have a strong sense that the words I type out when I am trying to write fast are emerging from multiple subsystems, one of which does exactly what LLMs do: predicting the next word from those that come before. I am one of the writers whose prose appears in my brain as a rhythm of sounds before the words form, after which some other module chooses words that fit the rhythm but convey the meaning; what brings me to a halt is when the modules clash. At that point, some more conscious module has to intervene to sort things out. This feels amazing when it happens right, words just pouring out of me, but I never have any sense that they are emerging from a deep and true soul. I have a module that remembers how millions of sentences from thousands of books go, and it takes elements from that training data to fit the story I am trying to tell. To the extent that this works well, it is pretty close to automatic.

Apparently when writers take questions from the public, the most common one is, "Where do you get your ideas?" I find this utterly unmysterious. Like an LLM, writers have a huge set of training data: other stories, their own lives, things they have read about in the news. If you went through the average long novel with enough knowledge of the writer's life and a big enough computer you could probably trace the source of every element. The secret to "creativity" is 1) know a diverse set of things, and 2) combine them in interesting ways. I find that this is particularly true when writers are trying to be intensely personal, as in their memoirs; there is nothing in the average memoir that has not been in a hundreds memoirs already.

LLMs can mimic much human behavior because there is nothing magical about what humans do.

A Bit of Philosophy: Truth and the Modern Condition

I've spent some of this long, blazingly hot weekend huddling inside, playing inane computer games while I listen to people read old philosophy lectures on YouTube. One that grabbed my attention was Bertrand Russell's lecture on Pragmatism, which he published as an essay in 1907. Russell was in many ways a pragmatist himself, but he could not go all the way with them. The Pragmatists discarded any hope of our knowing the capital T metaphysical Truth of the universe. Russell resisted this, not because he thought he knew much about the Truth, but because he very much feared that abandoning our search for the Truth would have terrible effects in the real world.

Here's a brief summary of Pragmatism as formulated by William James and John Dewey; I have more here if you want to know more about Pragmatism's creators.

The Pragmatists held that the real measure of an idea's value is not whether it is "true" in some absolute sense. What we care about is, what good is the idea? How does it benefit us to hold it? Ideas, said James, are tools that we use to get on with our lives. It is easiest to see what this means in science. Science rests, ultimately, on all sorts of unprovable notions like causality and the unity of physical law across time and space, but we mainly just ignore all of that because science clearly works. Even when we know that some theory is imperfect, like Newtonian mechanics, we still teach it in school if we find that it is useful. The real truths of the universe are far deeper and weirder, but when it comes to putting a man on the moon, none of that matters. As my late father-in-law once said, "I believe in science because when I flip the switch, the lights come on."

The Pragmatists had a complicated relationship to religion. They were not strong believers themselves, but they sometimes used their approach to truth to defend religious belief. If believing in God and Heaven makes you happy, and causes no trouble for either your day-to-day life or anyone else's, then why not believe? (Russell hated this; one of the founders of the modern British atheist movement, he despised James' work on religion, and he all but accused James of pandering to the common belief to get a better reception for his books.)

The Pragmatists were proponents of democracy and human rights. Since they held to no absolute political principles – no blood and soil nationalism, no divine right of kings – they all thought that people should be ruled according to their own desires. The best government, they thought, is the one that most improves people's lives. And because they did not think any belief was known sufficiently to justify forcing it on anyone, they all believed in freedom of thought, speech, and assembly. Dewey coined the term "pluralism" to describe his belief that we should be as tolerant as possible toward any belief or social system.

As I said, Russell was quite close to Pragmatism in many ways. Here is a bit of his famous essay, The Will to Doubt:

None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate. These methods are practised in science, and have built up the body of scientific knowledge. Every man of science whose outlook is truly scientific is ready to admit that what passes for scientific knowledge at the moment is sure to require correction with the progress of discovery; nevertheless, it is near enough to the truth to serve for most practical purposes.

But.

Russell was active in politics throughout his life, and his experience led him to think that the Pragmatists' wishy-washy liberalism was insufficient to really promote human flourishing. Russell often took on unpopular causes. During World War I he was jailed for his pacifism, and he was later fined for demonstrating on behalf of Indian independence. He was an early proponent of gay rights. He was also a proponent of world government, one of the authors of the world constitution that was proposed by an association of like-minded dreamers in 1968. Meanwhile his criticism of Soviet communism got him expelled from several left-wing groups. He was attacked by Noam Chomsky for arguing that while American dominance of the world was far from ideal, it was better than either Soviet dominance or an anarchic war of all against all.

So Russell was an expert on holding unpopular opinions, and on the other people who held them. Reading the Pragmatists, he had a strong sense that they were putting the truth up for a vote. If all that matters is what "works," then any mass society will end up promoting the views that seem sensible to the majority. And that, as Russell knew from personal experience, easily slides over into oppressing people whose ideas seem like threats to a working system. Russell had written a book on German politics, and twice in his essay on Pragmatism he mentions that some of James' statements could have been made by Bismarck.

What motivates people to take unpopular positions in public, even at great personal cost? Russell thought they did so because they believed they had had a glimpse of the Truth. Not truth as approximation, or truth as tool, but Truth as moral imperative, as something higher and better than what is debated in Parliaments or newspapers. People like Gandhi and Martin Luther King were not Pragmatists. They laid their lives on the line to fight injustice because they believed with intensity in the Truth. Abandon this, Russell implies, and the world will be a much worse place, with too much compromise and too little real devotion to the good. The philosophical arguments in his essay did not impress me much, but his fear of losing the passion of the activist and the revolutionary shines out.

The Pragmatists did not live in a political vacuum any more than Russell did. However, their experience pointed in a different direction. The movement's founders had lived through the American Civil War, and they reacted against that slaughter by becoming intensely suspicious of intellectual passion that might lead to murder. To people like William James and his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes (a Supreme Court Justice), anyone who believed passionately in the certainty of his political vision was inherently suspect as a likely architect of future bloodshed.

But while it may be true that the first generation of pragmatists espoused a rather bland majoritarianism, that is not true of the next generation. John Dewey was every bit a Pragmatist in his rejection of absolutes ("the ultimate nature of things – God, the Universe, Man, Reason" as he cataloged them) but much more interesting politically. In fact his politics were very similar to Bertrand Russell's.  In his famous essay on Pluralism, he argued that accepting “heterogeneous elements” was essential to democracy, and he himself embraced and advocated for progressive causes like women's rights and racial equality.

I understand what drove Russell to question Pragmatism. It feels like surrender. We must give up the quest, not only for the Truth about God, but final theories in physics, true justice in society, permanent peace between nations, and many other things we would like to have. It feels right that a passionate advocate for a better world should question this surrender.

But it still might be the best, most honest description of human reality.

The Perils of Desire

Wes Cecil is a philosophy professor with a big following on YouTube. His lectures are at an undergraduate level but they are clear and often amusing, so if there is some philosopher or topic you want an introduction to, he is a good option. Two of my sons are big fans.

I was moved to write about Cecil by this lecture, The Accursed Share. The topic here is desire. As Cecil notes, all traditional societies are intensely suspicious of desire. The Buddhists have taken this the farthest, arguing that the supreme goal of human life is to completely extinguish desire. But skepticism about desire runs in different ways through Stoicism, Confucianism, Christianity, and so on. When nineteenth-century romantic rebels tried to come up with the most radical slogan they could imagine, they hit on "Do what thou wilt."

Cecil says that most cultures practiced arranged marriage because they absolutely did not trust young people to choose mates rationally, since the young are blinded by desire. We've all seen this happen, he says, people hooking up because of intense sexual attraction even though everyone around them can see disaster looming: "pain coming in 5, 4, 3, 2 . . ."

But we celebrate desire. Cecil says he is fascinated by the lies cultures tell their children. In our society, the big lie is, "You can be anything you want." That is, our big lie foregrounds desire. The most important thing you can do is figure out what you want, so you can get it.

Cecil spends much of this lecture asking where our desires come from, especially our desires for material things. These cannot, he says, really come from inside us, because we evolved in societies where none of the thing we covet even existed. You can't have a natural desire for a flashy car. These desires must come from outside us, from our society.

All of which is basically true. It is true that all the old philosophical traditions are suspicious of desire, and that many of the things we covet are recent inventions of dubious value. But note the anti-freedom agenda here; traditional cultures are especially dubious of any desire to be other than what you are. If you are born a peasant, you should strive to be a good peasant, by imitating the ways of your forebears. If you are born an aristocrat, you should strive to be a good aristocrat, by imitating your aristocratic ancestors. And if you happen to be an outsider or newcomer, well, then you had better hide that as best you can by imitating the old families around you.

Which raises questions for me about the extent to which frowning on desire is at base a mechanism of control. I have long wondered if the evolutionary point of our sometimes outrageous sexuality is to shake things up, to break up these mechanisms of control and spread genes around in a more random way.

I certainly acknowledge that from a historical perspective it is bizarre that we use up so much breath telling young people to pursue their dreams.  But what is the alternative? We don't have ancestral plots of land that we can tend, or ancestral houses we can preserve. We can't work in the same factories our fathers worked in. Not only can we choose our own careers, we must; there is nobody else to do it for us. I work in a field that did not even exist when my father was young. 

I am not sure there is much value in thinking too much about the strangeness of our obsession with desire, because I think we are stuck with it.

Nor do I see much point in wondering which desires are somehow our own and which come from outside us. We all live in societies and take our notions of the good life from what we see around us. On the other hand I don't think there is anything more deeply rooted in our evolutionary selves than the desire for respect. So if you want a vacation house because all your colleagues have vacation houses, is that internal or external? An absurd concoction of consumer capitalism, or a deep-seated desire to be thought worthy by your peers? I think this is a meaningless question.

I would sum up the situation in wealthy western countries like this: we are wealthier than anyone in the past, and have more freedom than anyone in the past, but instead of filling us with joy this makes us anxious. No matter how much we have, we always want more; no matter how safe and secure our homes, we lie awake worrying. So far as we can tell we are not any happier than our ancestors. For every person who is thriving in our rapidly changing world, seizing opportunities that never before existed, another is floundering in indecision at the array of choices and outcomes before us.

Philosophy lectures will not solve any of this. What good would it do us to be suspicious of our desires? What could we rely on instead? Part of me cringes at song lyrics like, "How will I know? Trust your feelings. . . ." But what else could we trust? Many of the people who complain about our consumerism and general cult of desire also mock our advice industry, the explosion of self-help books and happiness gurus and so on. Of course the problem with advice gurus is that they disagree about everything, so you still have to pick the advice that best suits your own desires.

I think we have proved by now that neither freedom nor material abundance will make us happy. But neither will hewing to tradition. We need to find new paths, because history's storm surge has washed away the old ones. By all means, interrogate your desires; try to figure out which ones are reasonable, and which ones point toward shipwreck. But don't give up on them, because in the end they are all we have to guide us.

Knausgaard on Fatherhood and Limits

The most interesting part of this John Baskin essay on fatherhood is his summary of what Knausgaard said on the subject in My Struggle:

Knausgaard is desperate to avoid being like his father, whose arbitrary temper and alcoholism had terrified him for most of his childhood, but, having seen only this defective model up close, he is unsure what it would take to improve upon it. “Being a father is a commitment,” he hazards. “But what are you committing yourself to?”

Knausgaard’s conclusion is that a true father is committed to being present for his family, which means above all that he abides by the “limit” that having a family places on him. “You have to be at your post; you have to be at home,” he writes. “Yearnings and aspirations are irreconcilable with this because what you hunger for is limitless and what home does is set limits. A father without limits is no father, but a man with children. A man without limits is a child, that is, the eternal son.”

Although the father-son dichotomy comes late in My Struggle, it can be read back into the long conflict that the narrator of the novels has undergone between his desire to become a writer, which is tied up with all his inner dreams and yearnings for what he calls the “unlimited”—and therefore with his status as a son—and his desire to become a father, which is to say a good man as his society and his wife Linda define it. Yet in contrast to the crisis-of-men shows, whose drama was predicated on their protagonists remaining in a state of immaturity and indecision, Knausgaard makes a choice. At the end of Book Six, he proclaims that he is no longer a son, and therefore no longer a writer. He chooses the role of father over the role of artist. In a sense, he suggests that this is the only defensible choice, that all the rest is egotism, dissipation and role-playing. But having made this choice, he leaves behind him a work of art that documents voluminously, and with a rare honesty, the full spectrum of its consequences. For all he loathes the repetitive tasks of childcare, not to mention the Dantean trials of endurance known as kids’ birthday parties, Knausgaard affirms that his involvement in the everyday lives of his children allows him a “closeness” that never existed between his father and him. He also enumerates, often at length, the cost of this commitment—not only to him as an artist but also to him as a man. “When I pushed the stroller all over town and spent my days taking care of my child,” he writes in Book Two:

“It was not the case that I was adding something to my life, that it became richer as a result, on the contrary, something was removed from it, part of myself, the bit relating to masculinity. It was not my intellect that made this clear to me, because my intellect knew I was doing this for a good reason, namely that Linda and I would be on an equal footing with regard to our child, but rather my emotions, which filled me with desperation whenever I squeezed myself into a mold that was so small and so constricted that I could no longer move.”

One of the reasons I read so much of Knausgaard's monstrous book was that I have also felt keenly the dichotomy between a life embedded in a family and the search for the soaring freedom that Knausgaard called “limitless.”

I have found, though, that no kind of life is really limitless, and that soaring moments are few and brief in human existence. If I had not chosen to raise children I would have written more books and seen more of the world. But I have done enough writing to understand that the pounding out of words and sentences rarely soars into the creative planes like we wish and imagine that it might. I have had moments of wonder while traveling the world, but not many, and I think that the more one travels, the more one habituates to the new and the harder it is to recapture the feeling of stepping into your first gothic cathedral or climbing your first mountain.

The seek the limitless, whether in art, sex, travel, or freedom, is to chase phantoms. I think it is best done in small expeditions from a secure base in the limited world of family, home, and work.

Modern Versions of Ancient Questions

Scott Siskind:

In Matthew 22, the Sadducees (a sect of anti-afterlife Jews) gave Jesus a puzzle. If a man’s wife dies and he remarries, then who will the man be married to after the Resurrection - the first wife, or the second? Jesus responded by saying that people will not be married in Heaven. 

Matthew 22: "You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven." Which is one of the key texts the Catholics long used to argue for the superiority of celibacy, and which Mormons have done a lot of hemming and hawing to explain away.

Siskind continues:

Anyway, I was interested to learn there’s now an atheist version of this conundrum. Robert Ettinger, considered “the founder of cryonics”, had his body frozen after his death in hopes of being resurrected in the far future. His first wife died, he remarried, and both his first and second wives are also cryopreserved. There’s no evidence Ettinger was anything other than monogamous during life, so what happens in the far future? His second wife was an “author, feminist, and marriage counselor”, so I bet she’ll have strong opinions on this.

Augustine's Restless Longing

Fra Angelico, The Conversion of St. Augustine

I read once that there are only two people from the ancient world about whom one can write a real biography: Cicero and St. Augustine. This was my motive in finally taking on Peter Brown's famous biography, Augustine of Hippo (1967): given that there are only two people from that whole era one can truly get to know, I thought I might as well get to know both of them. But while Augustine's life is a fascinating window into his time, I found myself captivated by something else: the way Brown portrays Augustine's intellectual journey. In this telling he evolved from a questioning young philosopher who thought he could personally solve the problems of human existence to an old man convinced that humans, by themselves, can achieve nothing. We are, the mature Augustine believed, completely dependent on God, and any attempts we make to save ourselves are doomed to failure. Indeed God has already decreed whether we will be saved or damned before we are even born. Because he wrote so openly about his struggles, and made no effort to hide the many changes in his thinking over his long life, we can trace this evolution. Because the old Augustine became the Catholic Church's most famous and powerful apologist for the violent suppression of heresy – one of his sobriquets is "the father of the Inquisition" – the story of his life may help us come to grips with other people who end up defending authoritarian violence.

The reason one can write a biography of St. Augustine (354-430) is that so many sources about his life survive. His philosophical and theological works fill seven fat quarto volumes, and his writings make frequent reference to events of his life: works he has read, famous men he has met, troubles he has encountered, contemporary issues to which he is responding. We have a substantial biography from a contemporary who knew him and could include snippets from letters Augustine wrote to him in the text. We have more than a hundred sermons he his is supposed to have preached to his congregation in Hippo, 269 private letters, and his own spiritual autobiography, the famous Confessions. It is more than we have for all but a few people of modern times, and it allows for an amazingly detailed portrait of both his thinking and his material circumstances.

Augustine was born into the kind of family one meets so often in the novels of Jane Austen and the Brontës, the people clinging to the bottom of the genteel class. He received a good education but then had to scramble to earn some kind of living from it; several of his friends became teachers of rhetoric. What he loved above all things was to hang out with his friends and talk. They were a bunch of aesthetes who loved music, sunsets, literature, and philosophy. They kept hatching schemes to withdraw from the world together, perhaps to some country estate, where they would cultivate perfect friendship with each other and seek perfect understanding of the universe and the human soul. They disagreed on many things. Some were Catholics, some Manicheans, some pagans. This did not matter; what mattered was free, open-hearted discussion, all sharing equally in their quest to know.

In this period Augustine became for a while a follower of the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus. I personally find Plotinus' writing to be an impenetrable mishmash of mysticism and jargon, but Augustine was one of thousands who have found this particular mishmash irresistible. Plotinus believed that we could come to understand the universe through logic and introspection. Our interior worlds are vast and enormously complex, and if we come to understand them fully we will come to know what our souls are, where they come from, and where they are going. When God made us, he left enough of himself in our makeup for us to be able to understand his whole creation and our place in it.

That entranced Augustine for a while, but it did not last. He eventually decided that he could not really reason his way to perfect understanding; obstacles kept arising, and he could not honestly say he had overcome them. Brown:

The mold into which Augustine had poured his life as a convert was capable of holding educated Christians of different temperaments, in different parts of the Roman world, for the whole of their lives. Yet Augustine broke this mold in a decade — one suspects, partly because it could not withstand the terrific weight of his own expectations of it. . . . Augustine followed Plotinus in believing that the inner world was vast and complex, but while Plotinus was confident that the wise man could become master of this universe, Augustine had doubts: "There is, indeed, some light in man; but let them walk fast, lest shadows come." (178)

 Augustine once described the place he sought as "a place of rest . . . the full enjoyment of the absolute and true good; breathing the clear air of serenity and eternity." (150) Unable to reach this Eden via philosophy, Augustine tried faith. He threw himself into the study of Scripture, had himself baptized into the Catholic fold, became a priest and then a bishop. Christianity gave him a physical place, and a community, but it did not still his restless soul. He kept worrying over certain problems, especially that of evil: "Above all, there was the burning problem of the apparent permanence of evil in human actions." (148) He realized that he did not really understand human will or human freedom, could not figure out why we can know the right thing to do but still fail to do it, over and over.

He is a man who has realized that he was doomed to remain incomplete in his present existence, that what he wished for most ardently would never be more than a hope, postponed to a final resolution of all tensions, far beyond this life. (156)

He grew obsessed with death. In one of his sermons,

He reminds his listeners that while they are listening to him, their hair is growing, and they are getting older: "while you stand around, while you are here, while you do something, while you talk — you are passing away." (246)

Eventually he ended up with the theological position he argued for in The City of God and Of Grace and Free Will: we are entirely helpless and can only be saved by God's grace, which we can do nothing to merit. We can do nothing but what God wills, which was all fixed at the dawn of time.

Ruins of Hippo, with the Basilica of St. Augustine behind

When Augustine became the bishop of the North African town of Hippo, it was divided between two kinds of Christians: Catholics and a local sect called Donatists. As the Catholic bishop, Augustine preached against the Donatists, and he wrote a tract refuting their arguments, but he did not really do anything about the situation. Then, for reasons of imperial politics, the reigning western Emperor declared the Donatists to be heretics and ordered their suppression. This put Augustine in a tough spot. He was on record arguing that it was wrong to use force in matters of faith, because God only wanted love and devotion that was freely given. But he decided, given his new theological position, that all talk of freely given devotion was meaningless. It would be better for everyone, he thought, if there were only one Christian church to which the whole community belonged. So he lent his weight to the persecution of Donatists, which he justified in two substantial tracts.

People have been arguing ever since about whether Augustine's theology of predestination and his enthusiasm for persecution were related. So far as I can tell, Peter Brown did not take a firm position. But I think they are absolutely linked. Both rely on a dismissal of freedom as an important value. Augustine's personal journey had taught him that his own freedom was meaningless; by himself he could not will himself to happiness or a sense of salvation. Only surrender could save him. Thus it was pointless to care about the freedom of Donatists, since they could not save themselves, either.

I also see in Augustine a contempt for ordinary human life. From his youth he sought to withdraw from human concerns into some rarefied realm of perfection; as a Christian he longed for heaven. This hostility toward life as we generally know it drives many human ambitions, among which is the longing for apocalyptic political change. 

The piece of Augustine's puzzle that most interests me is the way his best characteristics dovetailed with his worst. Intellectually he was the most honest of philosophers, ruthless with his own ideas, always ready to discard his own past work; in the end this drove him to positions that I and many others have found dismaying. He sought, not power or riches, but truth; he struggled all his life toward a blissful vision of human happiness. But in the end he was unable to solve his problems except via surrender, which feels to me like an expression of despair. He accepted cruelty toward Donatists, I think, partly because he was so sensitive to human pain, and so aware that he could not think his way to a better kind of world.

As I see it, what drove Augustine to embrace violence was, ultimately, his inability to reach his "place of rest" by his own free efforts. 

This strikes me deeply because I see in Augustine a perfect paradigm of much that I consider illiberal and antidemocratic: an insistence on finding final answers to question that I think will always remain open, a need for completion in a world where we will always be incomplete, a desire for perfect community in a world of difference. Yes, life is hard, and people do evil; yes, distant political powers hem us in with their decrees. It is true that we cannot will ourselves into heaven. But that is no reason to give up on making the world better and kinder when we can, one small act at a time.

I think Augustine longed too much for heaven. Perhaps that made him a saint, but it made him a very dangerous philosopher.

Dynamic Nominalism

In the May 13 New Yorker, Manvir Singh takes on the DSM and the problem with classifying and naming psychiatric conditions:

In DSM: A History of Psychiatry's Bible (2021), the medical sociologist Allan Horwitz presents reasons for the DSM-5's botched revolution, including infighting among members of the working groups and the sidelining of clinicians during the revision process. But there's a larger difficulty: revamping the DSM requires destroying kinds of people. As the philosopher Ian Hacking observed, labelling people is very different from labelling quarks or microbes. Quarks and microbes are indifferent to their labels; by contrast, human classifications change how "individuals experience themselves – and may even lead people to evolve their feelings and behavior in part because they are so classified." Hacking's best-known example is multiple personality disorder. Between 1972 and 1986, the number of cases of patients with multiple personalities exploded from the double digits to an estimated six thousand. Whatever one's thoughts about the reality of M.P.D., he observed, everyone could agree that, in 1955, "this was not a way to be a person." No such diagnosis existed. By 1986, though, multiple personality disorder was not only a recognized psychiatric lable; it was also sanctioned by academics, popular books, talk shows, and, more importantly, the experiences of people with multiple personalities. Hacking referred to this process, in which naming creates the thing named – and in which the meaning of names can be affected, in turn, by the name bearers – as "dynamic nominalism."

On the subject of identifying with your DSM label, this is from a discussion of a memoir by Paige Layle about being autistic and how much the label has meant to her:

One of the few big changes implemented between the DSM-IV and the DSM-5 was the collapse of "pervasive developmental disorders," including Asperger's, into "autism spectrum disorder." The act that Layle considers such a violation – being deprived of her diagnosis and thus her identity – was inflicted on the entirety of the "Aspie" community. What's more, many people once diagnosed as having Asperger's learned that, under the new criteria, they wouldn't qualify as having as having autism spectrum disorder. The change caused fear and confusion, and, for some, felt like a denial of nature itself. "It surprises me that they'd remove that label when it's very clearly something that exists," a British man formerly diagnosed as having Asperger's told the psychologist Bethan Chambers. "I'm now a member of an endangered species."

The Philosophers' Stolen Castle

Matt Levine explains:

I have always kind of thought that a clever form of effective altruism would be “we build a giant casino for crypto gambling, we skim a percentage of the handle, and we use it to buy mosquito nets to save poor people from malaria.” I once suggested to Sam Bankman-Fried that this might be what he was up to at FTX, his crypto exchange. Just moving money from low-valued uses to high-valued ones, very neat and utilitarian.

A less clever — but faster? — form of effective altruism would be “we build a giant casino for crypto gambling, then we steal all the money and use it to buy mosquito nets.” Arguably that is closer to what Bankman-Fried was actually up to, though that’s not quite right either. FTX actually recovered most of the client money, but also it does not seem to have notably devoted a ton of customer money to effective charitable works on behalf of the world’s poorest.

“We build a giant casino for crypto gambling, steal the money and use it to buy a castle for effective altruist philosophers” is even weirder? Like that’s a good assignment for a philosophy class? “Explain, using utilitarianism, how this is Good.”

Because one of the things that was done with Sam Bankman-Fried's donations to the Effective Ventures Foundation was to buy Wytham Abbey (photo at top) in England for around $18 million. The plan, apparently, was to use the manor house as a retreat where the thinkers of effective altruism would meet with their billionaire funders and come up with ways to make the world better. Unfortunately for that dream, after FTX went bankrupt Effective Ventures decided to return the money Bankman-Friend gave them, and to do that they had to put the house back on the market.

Levine's blog isn't set up so you can link to individual posts, but this is part of his post dated May 9.

Augustine on Friendship

Augustine will never be alone. When he returned to Thagaste, he formed a core of abiding friendships. Boys who had grown up with him as fellow-students now rallied to him. They were a singularly intelligent and priggish group of young men. . . . Augustine, who had lapsed into monogamy, was a rarity among these celibates. They thought that music was a divine gift; they would discuss together the nature of beauty; they felt themselves above the circus. Augustine knew to perfection how to keep such friendships "on the boil from the heat of shared enthusiasms." "All kinds of things rejoiced my soul in their company – to talk and to laugh, and to do each other kindnesses; to read pleasant books together; to pass from lightest jesting to talk of the deepest things and back again; to differ without rancour, as a man might differ with himself, and when, most rarely, dissension arose, to find our normal agreement all the sweeter for it; to teach each other and to learn from each other; to be impatient for the return of the absent, and to welcome them with joy on their homecoming; these, and such-like things, proceeding from our hearts as we gave affection and received it back, and shown by face, by voice, by the eyes, and by a thousand other pleasing ways, kindled a flame which fused our very souls together, and, of many, made us one."

–Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo. Quotations are from The Confessions.

Belief vs. "Belief"

Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?

In the New Yorker, Manvir Singh asks a much better question: how do people believe in conspiracy theories?

"Belief" is a complicated thing. Singh has been reading French philosopher Dan Sperber (born 1942), who drew a sharp line between two different kinds of belief:

Staying with the Dorze people in southern Ethiopia, Sperber noticed that they made assertaions that they seemed both to believe and not to believe. People told him, for example, that "the leopard is a Christian animal who observes the fasts of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church." Nevertheless, the average Dorze man guarded his livestock on fast days just as much as on other days. "Not because he suspects some leopards of being bad Christians," Sperber wrote, "but because he takes it as true both that leopards fast and that they are always dangerous."

Sperber concluded that there are two kinds of beliefs. The first he called "factual" beliefs. Factual beliefs – such as the belief that leopards are dangerous – guide behavior and tolerate little inconsistency; you can't believe that leopards do and do not eat livestock. The second category he called "symbolic" beliefs. These beliefs might feel genuine, but they're cordoned off from action and expectation. We are much more accepting of inconsistency when it comes to symbolic beliefs. We can believe, say, that God is all-powerful and good while allowing for the existence of evil and suffering.

A more recent writer, Neil Van Leeuwen, has extended Sperber's work. To Van Leeuwen, the two kinds of beliefs serve different purposes. We use "factual" beliefs for modeling reality, so we modify them in the face of evidence. "Symbolic beliefs, meanwhile, serve social ends, not epistemic ones, so we can hold them even in the face of contradictory evidence."

The idea that religious beliefs serve mainly a social function is old, but I have never found it convincing. I prefer the notion I associate with Weston La Barre and T.M. Luhrman, that religious beliefs exist because of the way they make us feel. Luhrman wrote an excellent book on British neo-pagans in which she gave up trying to figure out what they believed; they pursued their religious practice, she wrote, because of the way it sometimes made them feel. 

One of the constant themes of Christian practice is the difficulty even committed fundamentalists have taking their own beliefs seriously. They reguarly pray, and have been since the Gospels were written, for God to deepen their faith. Nobody has to pray for more faith in dishwashers.

Anyway it is an old idea, supported by a lot of evidence, that religious belief is something different from more everyday kinds of beliefs.

What category does belief in conspiracy theories fall into? Singh argues, to my mind persuasively, that conspiracy beliefs are like religious beliefs. Thus, they are immune to evidence, and people hold them for reasons that are social or emotional rather than reality-based.

Obviously there are shades to this, because some conspiracies are real, and others might be. Nor is there a hard line between belief in conspiracy theories and a lot of other political beliefs. But you should never be surprised that people believe things for which there is no evidence.

Listening to Nietzsche

During my latest round of "monitoring" I had a long commute and needed something to listen to in the car. I had been doing mainly novels lately and wanted something else. Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human came up, and I had never read it, so I thought, why not? I never tried listening to philosophy before. But that's how all the ancients did it, so I gave it a try. I thought it went really well. I'm sure I missed a lot, but on the other hand I never bogged down and proceeded quickly to the end, which I think might be a better way to experience some books than slogging through a few pages a day for months.

Human, All Too Human was one of Nietzsche's earlier works, from the stage he later called "philosophizing with a hammer." A decade after its first publication in 1878 he reissued it bound together with two other short books, and he wrote a very interesting preface that explained how the book fit into his overall development.

Nietzsche's project his whole career was to stare down the grim reality of human existence, as he saw it – life sucks and then you die, more or less – but to emerge happy. Like many young Romantics he first looked for the answer in art. He especially loved the ancient Greek tragedies because he thought they achieved his goal, boldly confronting the human condition but refusing to be saddened or made afraid. He first came to prominence as an acolyte of Richard Wagner, writing a whole book arguing that Wagner's tragic, pagan operas had recaptured this Greek sense of the tragedy and beauty of life. But then Wagner wrote Parsifal, a sappy Christian opera in which everyone good goes to heaven. Nietzsche felt personally betrayed. More than that, he began questioning European Romanticism as an answer to anything, deciding in the end that it was really just another elaborate scheme for avoiding reality.

So what, then? That is the question he posed in Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. The "free spirits" of the subtitle were the ones who could confront human reality in a spirit of joyous discovery. In that later preface he explained his mindset like this:

So there is a will to the tragic and to pessimism, which is a sign as much of the severity as of the strength of the intellect (taste, emotion, conscience). With this will in our hearts we do not fear, but we investigate ourselves the terrible and the problematical elements characteristic of all existence. Behind such a will stand courage and pride and the desire for a truly great enemy. 

The great enemy he found was, as he summed it up concisely, "the metaphysical significance of morality." 

Many philosophers, he argued, started from the morality they wanted to defend and erected a metaphysical scaffolding – gods, angels, devils, sin, commandments, categorical absolutes, etc. – to hold it up. But Nietzsche had been reading Darwin, and reflecting on human evolution over hundreds of thousands of years he found the claims of the Bible and the Koran rather silly. Surely things that appeared so late in human history cannot be the point of the whole story. He had also been reading physics and chemistry and questioned whether they left any room for anything like free will. Humans do, he decided, whatever they think will help them survive. He found support for this view in the writings of skeptics like La Rochefoucauld, a 17th-century Frenchman whose specialty was pointing out how much of what we interpret as piety or honor is really mere vanity.

Besides the openly religious, there were philosophers in the mid 1800s who claimed to base their  metaphysics in science, but Nietzsche wasn't having it:

The Metaphysicians' Knapsack —To all who talk so boastfully of the scientific basis of their metaphysics it is best to make no reply. It is enough to tug at the bundle that they rather shyly keep hidden behind their backs. If one succeeds in lifting it, the results of that “scientific basis” come to light, to their great confusion: a dear little “God,” a genteel immortality, perhaps a little spiritualism, and in any case a complicated mass of poor-sinners'-misery and pharisee-arrogance.

I find Nietzsche's hammering powerful; he hunted down and called out faith-based ideas and murky spiritual prose wherever he found them, exposing them to his scorn. And he wasn't just skeptical about religion, but went after nationalism, anti-semitism, and various other intellectual castles in the air. As for the second half of his project, finding reasons to be happy about the Death of God, that didn't go so well. So far as anyone can tell, he was never a happy person, and rather than achieving any sort of enlightenment he instead went slowly mad. At first this was a sort of artistic, metaphorical madness, involving lots of opium; one product of this phase was a strange book called Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which Nietzsche tried to become the prophet of his own religion. But things progressed until he went flat-out crazy, and he died in an institution. Most likely this was an organic disease, rather than some fable about a man driven mad by his overly dangerous ideas, but there is no agreement about his actual diagnosis.

Anyway I recommend audiobooks as a way to force yourself through difficult texts you haven't ever gotten around to reading. Worked very well for me in this case.

Inside the Prophet's Hat

One of the first things I posted on my old website, a twenty-five years ago:

The Sioux shaman Black Elk once described the excitement created among the plains Indians by Wovoka, the prophet, or Wanekia, of the Ghost Dance. Intrigued by what they heard of him, the Sioux elders sent four men to meet him and report back on his teachings. The men were impressed. As Black Elk told it,

Once, they said, the Wanekia held out his hat for them to look into. And when they did this, all but one saw there the whole world and all that was wonderful. But that one could see only the inside of the hat, they said.

That would be me. I am the one who would go on a long journey to meet the prophet and see only the inside of his hat. I have a romantic soul and an engineer's mind, and all my life I have been torn between a coarse skepticism and a longing for transcendent wonder. My rational side dismisses everything unmeasured and unseen, but my imagination still roams in search of marvels. I have always loved the worlds of fantasy, often better than the material world I see with my eyes. I used to come close to tears whenever I reflected that there were no dragons in the world, and that no matter how hard I tried I would never become a wizard. I find it unjust that I can't go off on an adventure and find an ogre's castle just over the next hill that my village somehow never knew about. I wish the stars were close enough for us to reach them.

But despite these disappointments I am proud to be the one who sees only the inside of the hat. I know that I am not so smart as many others, and that I am wrong about many things, but it still thrills me to feel the power of my mind. I love understanding and knowing and figuring things out, and I would not trade the free operation of my mind for any comforting faith. I like to think that I am not afraid to face the truth, and I know I have never swerved in my quest for knowledge from fear of what I might find out.

The rational world view requires abandoning many wonders, but it does have others to compensate. Would it be a gain to trade knowledge of dinosaurs and the braided ring of Saturn for faith in dragons? I don't think so. When I seriously compare our world to that of myth, what most impresses me is how much smaller and less rich the mythic world is. The Old Testament describes only a handful of peoples under the eye of God, while the rational narrative speaks of thousands of peoples, hundreds of nations, and swarms of heroes. Black Elk in his vision saw divine beings whose only concerns were the Sioux, the Buffalo, and the rain, and as I read his words I wondered how a man who had seen New York and Paris could cling to a heaven so much smaller than the earth. Taken together, the myths of the world are wonderfully rich, but it is only because of rational scholarship that I have access to more than one set. I find the notion of a personal, caring God absurd. I am interested in the possibility of a creative force that set the universe in motion, but I am comfortable not knowing if such a thing is real. I have no desire to worship, although I do sometimes want to give thanks.

I am no longer afraid of death. When I first came to contemplate death as nothingness—I must have been about 8 or 9—I was terrified. I felt the dread of non-existence at intervals over the next 15 years or so, but I find that the thought has now lost its force. I love my life and I have no wish for it to end, but I no longer fear the end I imagine is coming. One thing I fear for my children is having to confront that nothingness, and I wish there were something I could do to take away their fear. But I think that any other view of death is a lie, and I won't lie to them about something so important.

I am more at peace now than ever before. Perhaps it is only the declining level of some youthful neurotransmitter, but I like to think of it as increasing wisdom. I think perhaps my children have something to do with my increasing appreciation of our mundane world. Really, we have never imagined anything more wonderful than the growth of a person from a single cell, and the flight of dragons cannot be more exciting to watch than a toddler learning to speak or a child learning to read.

I still love imaginary worlds, but it no longer pains me so much that I can't live in them. Given the choice between the worlds of legend and our own, with its unbounded richness, I think I would choose this earth to which I was born.

September 9, 1999

Classical Education, or, the Fearless Pursuit of Which Truths?

The New Yorker has a story this week about "classical education", focusing on middle and high schools, which reminded me that I had something to say about the "classical" curriculum being offered at the new University of Austin. 

In middle and high schools, "classical" education doesn't have much to do with the Greek and Roman classics. Instead it is about a vision of order: uniforms, quiet hallways, classrooms where respectful students memorize poems, diagram sentences, and learn facts about history rather than, I don't know, composing raps about slave revolts. On the one hand this is almost the perfect expression of one of contemporary conservatism's main themes, the fear of disorder; nothing speeds around conservative Twitter/X faster than a story about students assaulting their teacher. But on the other, some schools of this type do very well in poor neighborhoods, because it turns out that what many kids raised in very disorderly environments need is more order.

Besides, I loved memorizing poems, diagramming sentences, and participating in spelling bees.

Of course some of the current interest in education based on old books and old methods is just a reaction to various progressive foibles, and what some parents who send their children to such schools want is for them not to read stories about gay and trans people. But I have been doing my best to ignore that kind of trivia for fifty years now and propose to keep ignoring it, because I find it so peripheral to what education should be about. Education is too important to be left to people who want to fight about Heather's Two Mommies.

When we move to a higher level, whether that is college or the sort of elite prep school where kids really do read the Iliad, there is much more going on. At this level, one goal of a "classical" education is to get students away from their own lives and worlds and induce them to think in a more abstract, generalized way. Once they learn to do that, the theory goes, they can then apply their generalized reasoning skills and broad understanding of themes like justice and liberty to their own situations. There is a great deal of evidence from both the European and Chinese traditions that this can work. We have seen many, many people who were educated by reading 2,000-year-old books and went on to careers as political reformers and even revolutionaries (Jefferson, Robespierre, Talleyrand, Gladstone, Lenin, Yau Lit).

The classical model of education was always opposed, at least in the west (and after 1840 in China) by people who thought it was a gigantic waste of time. Better, the competing theory went, to immerse yourself in actual contemporary problems. This was related to the growing importance of science and engineering, which to many people seemed more useful subjects of study than Plato's ethics.

Which brings me to the University of Austin, a new university that is being opened with the expressed goal of fighting the takeover of American higher education by woke leftists. Their vision of education is "classical" in the sense of trying to get students away from contemporary concerns and toward a higher, more theoretical plane. From their description of the freshman curriculum:

Seminars will examine (among other subjects) the foundations of civilization and political life; the importance of law, virtue, order, beauty, meaningful work and leisure, and the sacred; the unique vibrancy of the American form of government and way of life; and the character and consequences of ideological tyranny. What is knowledge, and how does it differ from wisdom? What does it mean to say that we are modern? What is technology, and what are its intellectual presuppositions, social conditions, benefits, and dangers? Why do we suffer? Does death negate the meaning of life? Works studied will range from Homer, Euclid, Genesis, the Gospel of John, Ibn Tufayl, and Confucius to Descartes, Tocqueville, Orwell, Douglass, and O’Connor.

What I wanted to say when I first read this paragraph is that it is riven with contradictions at the deepest level. Other than being famous, what do these authors have in common? Consider the work from this list I happen to have looked into most recently, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, which translates as something like "Alive, Son of Awake." This medieval Arab work tells the story of a feral boy raised by a gazelle on a desert island, who teaches himself the language of birds and discovers the truths of philosophy by reasoning. In particular, he reasons his way to belief in one supreme god. He also becomes humankind's greatest astrologer, although I got lost in that part and skipped most of it. One might be tempted to call this mysticism, since it implies that an uneducated child, removed from the corruption of society, can work his way to divine understanding more readily than a scholar with a library full of old books. On the other hand, it is full of old philsophical ideas, especially Plato's.

Taken literally, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, is not an argument in favor of "classical" education. It is closer to the opposite, a sort of hippie faith in the innate creativity and goodness of children. It is also ridiculous. One assumes, then, that it is not being taught as a text the students are supposed to believe. 

So why is it being taught? Why are any of these books taught? Once upon a time people said that we assigned them because you needed some familiarity with them to be considered educated, but that is certainly not true now. Is it because they are good texts for introducing students to big ideas? Because the impressive names get students to pay attention in a way that books by Bill Smith and Ralph Jones would not? Because they make for good discussions? 

Do any of them contain some sort of truth that we want students to absorb?

Consider that the U. of Austin offers these two mottoes in parallel:

WE FEARLESSLY PURSUE THE TRUTH
At UATX, we recognize the existence of truth. We seek truth so that we may flourish.

WE CHAMPION ACADEMIC FREEDOM
At UATX, students, faculty and scholars have the right to pursue their academic interests and deliberate freely, without fear of censorship or retribution.

It seems to me that these two statements directly contradict one another. If you believe in the truth, and think that having it leads to flourishing, why do you tolerate falseness? And why do you assign classic works that nobody agrees with any more? Ibn Tufayl may be ridiculous (as I think), but he is far from the worst author in the "Great Books" curriculum. From Aristotle's defense of slavery to Lenin's preaching of violence as a sacred calling, the western tradition is really pretty awful. The Iliad is about how great it is to kill people. If the Gospel of John is true and promotes flourishing, what possible reason could there be to read the Iliad?

What if some student, professor or scholar thinks that the "American form of government and way of life" are not "uniquely vibrant," but monstrous and horrific? What if some student, professor, or scholar thinks contemporary America is a Satan-besotted doomscape due for righteous cleansing by God any day now? What if somebody is a woke Marxist?

Two contradictory visions of education are on offer here and, I think, two contradictory visions of America. In one there is the Truth, and we struggle to understand it and align our lives to it so that we may flourish. Everything else is, by definintion, false. This is the way Jesuit education used to work: yes, a fair amount of intellectual exploration, but always in the service of Catholicism. Some of the conservative intellectuals who have been in the news lately seem to share this perspective, like Sohrab Ahmari, who has argued that since freedom and democracy have made America a godless wasteland, we should discard them. 

You cannot, in a deep, philosophical sense, be for both unfettered debate and a nation that flourishes because it adheres to a certain truth. And you cannot, I submit, simultaneously value the western canon, believe fervently in free inquiry, and operate a university that has any real connection to modern conservatism.

To the extent that the UATX curriculum tries to straddle this divide, it is incoherent. Of course, it might still function ok; the whole program of American higher education is incoherent. But I wonder if UATX can maintain the enthusiasm of its supporters while pursuing both academic freedom and conservatism.

Which gets me back to the two visions of America I alluded to back in November. One kind of American patriotism maintains that there are good and bad Americans. The good ones stand for God, Country, Military Sacrifice, the Constitution, football, barbecue, driving big cars, and Standing On Your Own Feet. The bad ones, well, you know who they are.

I adhere to a different model of patriotism. I think America is great because it holds all kinds of people who agree about nothing. I like the country the way it is, and I would hate to see it evolve into anyone's idea of perfection. This extends to how I feel about education. I like assigning old books partly because they are full of ideas I find horrific. My own educational plan would include subjecting my students to Aquinas on why masturbation is worse than rape, Lenin on revolution, the Iliad or the Hagakure on war, and so on. I think education should shake people up.

But I would be the first to admit that I don't know the truth about the Big Questions, and that my way of teaching probably doesn't help anyone else work that out, either.

I have met various conservatives, going all the way back to Party of the Right guys at Yale, who told me that they celebrate unfettered debate because it inevitably leads to conservatism. I think that's nuts. So far as I can see, unfettered debate inevitably leads to disagreement. If UATX really pursues a policy of complete academic freedom, they are going to end up with Marxists, Maoists, Woke Liberals, Race theorists, Libertarians, and probably Holocaust deniers.

I submit that you cannot simultaneously value the western canon, believe fervently in free inquiry, and operate a university that has any real connection to modern conservatism. I mean, hardly any of the authors in either the UATX list or the similar list at St. Johns believed in democracy; most of them would have been frankly horrified by America. (On the other hand the curriculum for Directed Studies at Yale includes more democrats.)

I suspect that what the rich people backing UATX want is the middle school model, education that is orderly, patriotic, anti-hippie, anti-woke. Some of the professors involved probably do want genuine free inquiry, including taking Marxism or polyamory seriously as ideas. As I said, it is certainly possible that UATX can come into being and thrive despite this contradiction.

But to the extent that UATX really promotes the Fearless Pursuit of the Truth, it will promote, not order or conservatism, but violent disagreement.

Deep Time and Deep Thought

I was just reading a pretty good essay at Aeon on the idea that language shapes thought, so that the speakers of very different languages think, at a deep level, in different ways. In the modern discourse this is called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Here is Sapir himself, writing in 1929:

The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group … The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached … We see and hear and otherwise experience largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

I consider this undeniably true, to some extent. What that extent might be I do not know, and I think this is one of the biggest and most interesting questions about human society. And while the older theorists mostly focused on languages in the big sense – English vs. Chinese vs. Nahuatl – I am fascinated by the ways political and social movements rely on cultish vocabularies, leveraging new expressions like "death tax" or "microaggressions" to focus their supporters' minds. 

But that is an ancient question that goes back at least to Plato and I am not likely to contribute anything new on this blog.

I want to write about something else that interests me: the extent to which my thinking has been shaped by my understanding of time. In the modern world our chronological sciences – astrophysics, geology, archaeology, history – equip us with a past vastly deeper and richer than what any humans ever had before, and I wonder what this does to us. One reason this interests me is that while just about everyone I interact with speaks English, I do not have the impression that most Americans have thought very much about deep time what it might imply about us and our world.

Various anthropologists, notably Vine Deloria, have argued that pre-literate peoples live with a short, simple model of the past: there is the remembered past, stretching to their great-grandparents' time, and beyond that there is only myth. This is not strictly true; for example the Haudenosaunee Iroquois had a detailed oral history that reached back about 300 years to the founding of their league, and the Aztec had an oral history of similar depth. But three centuries is still a paltry thing compared to the chronicles at my disposal, and it does seem to me that oral chronologies all very quickly reach the vague time of the gods and the first people. To me, many of my contemporaries are like this.

For example, even many well-educated Americans think that diamond engagement rings are "traditional," when they did not become common until the 1950s: the time of the great-grandparents, again. I was baffled by the common sentiment that 2016 was "the worst year ever": anybody remember 1942? 1917? 1864? 1348? Ok, so maybe people who said that weren't really making any historical claim. But I still think this matters. I think it is highly consequential that so many Americans think we live in uniquely bad times, and I think it is obvious that you can only believe this by completely ignoring the past.

We have an extended argument in the US about whether living standards or wages have fallen since 1970. To that I say, I remember 1970. Few houses had air conditioning, and air-conditioned cars were a rare luxury. Millions of the working people who appear in this comparison had little black and white televisions that showed three channels, and everyone had one rotary phone. I am not convinced that a comparison of current lifestyles to those of 1970 has any meaning. Which is not to say that our lives are better, just that the economies and societies are too different for a comparison of this or that detail to tell us much.

But let's look farther back. It is common to imagine that we live in a decadent age when change is blocked by deadening bureaucracy and nobody is doing anything exciting and new. But I personally find reading about the supposedly dynamic era of nineteenth-century America depressing. We were a nation of speculators and get-rich quick schemers and almost all of those schemes failed. Read through American property records and you will come across one failed development scheme after another: towns that there platted for two hundred homes but never grew beyond five, factories that ran for only a few years before going bankrupt, mines that bottomed out, railroads that never carried any freight and soon reverted to grass and trees. The American west is full of ghost towns, places that prospered for a few years because of a mine or a trail junction but then vanished. When some new place did thrive –Chicago, say – it was often because industries used up working men by the thousands to enrich the capitalists who owned it all. 

Meanwhile in the South the end of slavery led to new regimes of segregation and oppression and hundreds of thousands of black people ended up as sharecroppers who were materially worse off than they had been as slaves.

So whenever I read that things used to be better, I roll my eyes.

I feel like I am constantly encountering sentiments like "these days having a child is a real economic burden" or "these days it's really hard for people to create political change", and I struggle to keep from laughing. You don't think babies were a burden to peasants or hunter-gathers? Imagine you were part of a highly mobile band that spent six months a yeard roaming your territory in search of food, and now imagining it with a hungry baby strapped to your body. And as for political change, many, many human societies went for centuries without having any at all. So if your reform plan has a one percent chance of reaching fruition, you are miles ahead of almost everyone who lived before 1800.

I also come across, from time to time, the sentiment that this or that problem "can't go on." This makes me think of medieval Europe, which went on for about a thousand years without ever solving any of its big problems, and was for all of that very creative of new institutions and amazing works of art. Problems can, in fact, go on for centuries, and when they really can't go on any more they will stop.

Keep going farther back. Yes, our world is violent, but paleogenetics is making it ever more clear that our ancient history consists mainly of conquest and genocide. 

People want to claim that their tribes or nations are "native" to wherever they happen to live, but 1) there are no pure "peoples", just mixtures with different degrees of time depth, and 2) nobody has lived anywhere for very long in geological time. The Japanese mostly came from Korea about 2500 years ago, driving the previous inhabitants out of the nice parts of the islands, then decided they were autochthonous. Nobody is autochthonous; nobody belongs to a pure race. In the long view, everyone is an immigrant mongrel.

People are upset about climate change, but the changes we have seen, and are likely to see over the next century, are paltry compared to the comings and goings of the Ice Ages, which our kind survived. Keep going farther back and you see even greater catastrophes: asteroid impacts, titanic volcanism, the constant recycling of the earth's surface. There is no solid land.

Again, all of this matters to how I see the world. I refuse to lose sleep over climate change that is certain to be less consequential than changes that humans dealt with just fine; I can't take seriously arguments about preserving cultures or nations that are recent, short-lived islands of (relative) stability in a vast ocean of mixing and change.

I believe that the evolutionary history of humanity refutes the Abrahamic religions in a decisive way: we are animals, and there is no step you can point to in our history when we obviously acquired souls. I think the fundamentalists are right to think that imagining an earth only a few thousand years old is essential to maintaining their faith intact. As John Ruskin put it, the "dreamful hammers" of the geologists have chipped away at Christianity. The billion-year time scale of geology renders our story a recent and small thing in the earth's history, not its central point.

Looking out into the cosmos, we see the 14-billion-year story of trillions of galaxies, each with millions of stars. So far as we can tell, life is rare, intelligent life extremely rare, but with two trillion galaxies over 14 billion years those things can be vanishingly rare yet still exist in millions of examples.

If I have any religion, it is on the cosmic scale; if there is a divine being, it is running a very, very big experiment of which we are a tiny, tiny part.

Many people, I know, find this sad, or alarming, or empty. I don't. I find it amazing to be here at all, I feel blessed to live in a time with so much knowledge and understanding. I revel in knowing all this history, from the formation of galaxies to the movements of the continents to human migrations to small changes in the details of human life. I do not think I inhabit a world impoverished by the decline of faith, the loss of myth, the collapse of tribal communities; I think I live in a time of wonder. And I am certain that I live in the healthiest and safest human era, with a better chance to live to 80, and to see all my children outlive me, than anyone ever had before.

For me, seeing in the long run changes how I feel about almost everything.

Anthony Doerr, "All the Light We Cannot See"

All the Light We Cannot See (2014) is a fine novel in the "saccharine tragedy" genre; bittersweet, I suppose the publisher would call it. I just listened to it and enjoyed it, and I must not be the only one, since it sold 15 million copies. But I have some questions about this kind of book.

All the Light We Cannot see narrates the lives of a blind French girl named Marie-Laure and a German boy named Werner who are, we discover early on, fated to meet in 1944 as war rages around them. The story sets up two moral poles: the horror of Nazism and war, and the enduring wonder of human life. We swing between them, seeing the nightmare loom and then burst upon Europe, but always around and under it are the miracles that we may, Doerr seems to be saying, take too much for granted: the love of family members for each other, the creativity of ordinary people, level-headed bravery in the face of crisis, the long thread of history, the way life endures and goes on no matter what we suffer. Perhaps especially Doerr dwells on the power of radio, of ghostly voices drawn from the ether, the way it can propel a dictatorship or connect two people thousands of miles apart. Thus the title, since radio is light we cannot see.

Terrible things happen in All the Light We Cannot See. Some of them are at least vaguely heroic, but others are drearily random, the humdrum banality of death in a decade when 60 million were killed. We see the horror of Nazism mainly through the eyes of Werner. Werner is a brilliant orphan boy who becomes the neighborhood radio repairman, a conceit lifted from the memoirs of Richard Feynman, at times word for word. This brings him to the attention of a Nazi party functionary who recommends him for a special party school. Thanks to his score on the entrance exam, and his blond hair and blue eyes, Werner is admitted. He thinks this will be a school for the academic elite, but no; it is a training ground for Nazi leaders of the future Reich, with more emphasis on shedding humanity than on learning physics. You are a volley of bullets, the school commandant tells the students; you should not think, but obey with force and fury. The weak are bullied without mercy, but the strong earn only officer's commissions that doom most of them to early death.

Meanwhile, Marie-Laure deals with her existence as a motherless blind girl, to which are then added the grim realities of invasion and occupation, and the deaths of people around her.

There is no shirking of horror here; people we care about die, while those who survive are hardened. And yet alongside the tragedy there is always the sweetness, the devotion, the love, the purity, the reverence for the miracles of life. It has the effect, sometimes, of saying, really, it's not so bad, people still love each other, still marvel at wonderful things.

I can see certain people being irritated by this book; there were a couple of places where I was a little irritated, and I'm basically a sentimental sop.

On the other hand.

It seems to me that if you want to be an optimist about human life, and you don't think God will sort it all out after we die, you have to take a sentimental position something like Anthony Doerr's. You have to say, yes, there is horror, yes, Nazis, yes, World War II, but look at how this old man loves his blind niece. Look at these people from different nations and generations bonding over their love of science, connected by the magic of radio. Look at how we make this suffering into beautiful stories that bring tears to our eyes but joy to our hearts.

I don't think you have to believe that the joy and beauty outweigh the misery and horror; you simply have to think that the misery and horror do not cancel out the joy and beauty, that those things remain wonderful and good no matter what else happens. To some, that is sentimental nonsense; to others, it is art.

Greek Philosophy and the Perils of One-Case Reasoning

Cruising the Greek islands, British writer Adam Nicolson (NY Times) got to wondering about the relationship between the landscape in front of him and the origins of western philosophy:

What we think of now as the mainland of Greece, then filled with communities of farmer-warriors, played essentially no part. Recorded philosophy was almost entirely a harbor phenomenon, a byproduct of trading hubs on the margins of Asia, on the islands, and eventually in the rich lands of Sicily and southern Italy. Its creators were from the mobile edges, merchants in ideas, people from communities in which exchange was the medium of significance and for whom inherited belief was not enough.

Those mercantile qualities of fluidity and connectedness were precisely the governing aspects of the new thought. The philosophers’ emphasis was on interchange and, in Heraclitus in particular, the virtues of tension. Just as in a bow, he wrote, the string pulls against the frame, and would collapse if either string or frame failed; a just society needs to be founded on a tension between its constituent parts. Everything flowed through everything else, multiplicity was goodness and singularity the grounds of either sterility or tyranny.

There is nothing stiff about this way of thinking. These early Greek forms of thought cross all the boundaries between poet and thinker, mystic and scientist, in a rolling, cyclical, wave-based vision of the nature of reality. The thinkers did not provide a set of rationalist solutions nor of religious doctrines, but again and again explored the borderland between those ways of seeing. Possibility and inquiry, the effects of suggestion and implication, rather than unconsidered belief or blank assertion, were the seedbed for the new ideas. 

Which is fine so far as it goes. I have repeatedly emphasized here that creativity in art and thought often springs from interchange, such as Europe's encounters with Asia and the Americas in the early modern period. In Europe, anyway, new ways of thinking have tended to emerge from mercantile regions in touch with other parts of the world. 

And Nicolson is far from the first western writer to  muse over how the Greek landscape encouraged creativity: sea, clear sky, bright light, and so on.

But, you know, there were other centers of philosophical creativity in the classical world. I don't know much about India in that period, but I have never read that Indian philosophy emerged from mercantile cities. I do know something about China, and the origins of Chinese philosophy are almost exactly opposite to everything Nicolson says about the Greeks. It arose in powerful, agricultural, military states with large bureaucracies, and most of its leaders were either court bureaucrats themselves or made their livings training future bureaucrats. They all despised everything non-Chinese and had no interest in trade or the sea.

Nicolson might counter (other people have) that the character of European philosophy is different from the Chinese because of its origins in mercantile city states. Well, maybe, but it seems to me that really creative periods produce all different sorts of philosophy. Nineteenth-century Europe gave us Marx, Lenin, John Stuart Mill, Tolstoy, Stirner, Lord Acton, etc., etc., exponenents of every political theory under the sun. Writing about the 1600s, English and Dutch historians like to emphasize the ties between their thinkers and the mercantile, maritime world, but there were also cutting-edge thinkers in France, Austria, and Prussia.

Simple theories about human progress are almost all wrong.

Oppenheimer on Discipline

From a letter to his younger brother, written in 1932:

You put a hard question on the virtue of discipline. What you say is true: I do value it—and I think that you do too—more than for its earthly fruit, proficiency. I think that one can give only a metaphysical ground for this evaluation; but the variety of metaphysics which gave an answer to your question has been very great, the metaphysics themselves very disparate: the bhagavad gita, Ecclesiastes, the Stoa, the beginning of the Laws, Hugo of St Victor, St Thomas, John of the Cross, Spinoza. This very great disparity suggests that the fact that discipline is good for the soul is more fundamental than any of the grounds given for its goodness. I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation, and charity, and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces. I believe that through discipline we can learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable; that we come a little to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror—But because I believe that the reward of discipline is greater than its immediate objective, I would not have you think that discipline without objective is possible: in its nature discipline involves the subjection of the soul to some perhaps minor end; and that end must be real, if the discipline is not to be factitious. Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude, for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.

Is Cosmology Unraveling? And What Would that Mean?

So far the most intriguing discovery made by the Webb Space Telescope is the six red dots shown in the images above. They seem to be galaxies. They are very far away, and therefore very old, and they seem to be full of mature red stars. If the calculations are correct, they date to 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, which our theories say is nowhere near enough time for such a galaxy to form.

Cosmology has a lot of problems. To create a sensible model of our universe we have to imagine that it is full of Dark Matter that we can't see and infused with Dark Energy that baffles us. General Relativity posits that it is full of Black Holes, and some may have been discovered, but other theories –e.g., about the conservation of information – still show that Black Holes are impossible. The models require that the universe once underwent a period of extraordinarily rapid growth that we call Cosmic Inflation, which is theoretically possible but has certainly never been observed. There are basic issues in how we calculate relatively mundane numbers:

Take the matter of how fast the universe is expanding. This is a foundational fact in cosmological science — the so-called Hubble constant — yet scientists have not been able to settle on a number. There are two main ways to calculate it: One involves measurements of the early universe (such as the sort that the Webb is providing); the other involves measurements of nearby stars in the modern universe. Despite decades of effort, these two methods continue to yield different answers.

When this discrepancy was discovered people thought it would resolve as the data got better, but the data has gotten a lot better and the discrepancy remains.

I have long thought that the litany of special concepts needed to build this model resembles the epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy, the wheels within wheels needed to fit the observed motions of the planets within an earth-centered universe. It is inelegant and bizarre, ripe for a Copernicus to come along and turn the system on its head.

Of course that isn't really an argument; maybe the universe just is inelegant and bizarre. But many scientists these days feel as I do, that something about our science is off, and that it needs to be rethought in a fundamental way. Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser in the NY Times:

Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong. It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science.

In both cosmology and quantum physics, the cutting edges of our quest to understand the universe, physicists feel baffled and stymied. Frustration is growing with existing methods and people are turning to radical models that others say are not really science at all:

There is, however, another possibility. We may be at a point where we need a radical departure from the standard model, one that may even require us to change how we think of the elemental components of the universe, possibly even the nature of space and time.

Cosmology is not like other sciences. The universe is everything there is; there’s only one and we can’t look at it from the outside. You can’t put it in a box on a table and run controlled experiments on it. Because it is all-encompassing, cosmology forces scientists to tackle questions about the very environment in which science operates: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of lawlike regularity, the role of the observers doing the observations.

These rarefied issues don’t come up in most “regular” science (though one encounters similarly shadowy issues in the science of consciousness and in quantum physics). Working so close to the boundary between science and philosophy, cosmologists are continually haunted by the ghosts of basic assumptions hiding unseen in the tools we use — such as the assumption that scientific laws don’t change over time.

We are seeing Nobel Prize caliber scientists throwing out bizarre ideas, such as that the universe is a hologram, or a simulation, or that there are rival systems of laws in the universe that compete against each other and evolve over time.

I am not optimistic that any of this will be resolved in my lifetime. Although I have occasionally fantasized about a Copernican breakthrough, I doubt we will see one. The enormous amount of human and computer brainpower we have thrown at these problems over the past fifty years dwarfs the effort needed to create heliocentrism, or quantum physics and relativity. The problems we face now seem to be orders of magnitude more difficult.

In a sense this is ridiculously arcane; what difference could models of the universe's formation possibly make to our lives? But maybe, just maybe, the unraveling of scientific certainty is already having consequences in our society. 

I am willing to bet that if you looked into the smarter purveyors of conspiracy theories you would find that many of them are interested in bizarre physical theories like the simulation universe or the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Was the elite faith that rationality could make human life better tied, at some deep level, to the constant progress on the frontiers of science? One of the words I see used over and over to describe the elites of the Modern period is confidence: confidence that we could model the whole universe, that we could design cities better than any that grew up by chance, that we could all have flying cars and home nuclear reactors and drugs to cure our woes. The post-modern era has been defined as much as anything by the loss of that confidence. That has had some effects that I think are good, like an end to bulldozing old neighborhoods for concrete high-rises. Unable to defeat depression medically, we are trying ancient spiritual techniques like the guided drug trip. But is the turn away from a hard-edged rationality gnawing at the foundations of our politics, of our social peace?

Is the collapse of certainty in physics helping to drive vaccine denialism or fantasies about trucks full of stolen ballots?

If smart people were convinced that the universe is, in basic ways, simply beyond our understanding, what would change?

I don't know. But I have a deep sense, as I have tried to convey here many times, that societies are wholes. The pieces fit together. Not in any simple sense, and one of the regularities is that in every society there are people who reject its propositions and long for some other path. But I do think things are tied together, and that major changes in one important area of life are quite likely to have echoes in others. I have a sense that one of the foundations of the whole modern era – say, 1770 to 1970 – was faith in science, faith in our ability to learn about and understand the world. When I read about the morass in physics I feel that faith slipping away, and I wonder where that will lead.