Edward Feser's Blog, page 24

Unjust war and false masculinity

I commend to you three excellent articles by traditionalist Catholic scholars on the grave injustice of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: historian Roberto de Mattei’s “Russia's War and the Message of Fatima”; philosopher John Lamont’s “Putin’s Attack on Ukraine”; and theologian Pater Edmund Waldstein’s “The War in Ukraine in the Light of Just War Principles.”  There is a reason why I emphasize that the injustice is grave, as I have in my earlier commentary on the war.  Few among those who have expressed sympathy with the Russian side in the conflict have claimed that the invasion meets just war criteria (unsurprisingly, since it manifestly does not).  They have tended instead to emphasize Putin’s purported virtues and the vices of Zelensky and his Western supporters – as if these somehow balance out the destruction of cities and the deaths of thousands of human beings. 

This is madness.  Failure to meet just war criteria is not a mere technical foible or procedural lapse.  An unjust war is among the very greatest of evils.  It is mass murder.  Yet some people who rightly decry the slaughter of the unborn, fret over potential health hazards of mandatory Covid-19 vaccination, and condemn the economic destruction of lockdowns can barely muster a disapproving shake of the head for the dead, the wounded, and the dispossessed of Ukraine.  Again, this is madness.  What accounts for it?

We find clues in the articles linked to – specifically, in what Lamont has to say about Putin’s false masculinity, in de Mattei’s critique of the oikophobia of Putin’s Western apologists, and in Waldstein’s remarks about the role of the passions in people’s reaction to the war.  These factors are united in the delusion that Putin’s actions somehow reflect manful resistance to Western decadence and apostasy. 

To be sure, there is no question that the West is indeed decadent and largely apostate.  There is no question that liberalism is foolish and feckless at best, and that wokeness is positively wicked and insane.  It is nauseating to watch Western politicians, CEOs, and educators routinely grovel before wokeness’s “smelly little orthodoxies” (to borrow Orwell’s phrase), rather than doing everything in their power forever to expunge them from our institutions, root and branch.  It is understandable that decent people would be tempted to admire a leader who instead treats woke dogma with the contempt it deserves. 

But the temptation must be resisted, and to think that a few traditional-sounding words and gestures make Putin’s invasion of Ukraine one iota less evil is about as stark an example of a non sequitur as can be imagined.  Nor is it actually true that he represents a salutary masculine counterpoint to Western effeminacy.  Noting the brutality with which Putin targets civilians in war, and the violence and manipulation by which he maintains himself in power, Lamont writes:

This feature of Putin’s rule should be kept in mind by Catholics and conservatives who see him as in some way a defender of traditional or Christian values.  Putin’s opposition to gender and LGBT etc. ideology is no doubt genuine.  It is of course not a mark of Christian commitment, since Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung also either opposed these things or would have opposed them if they had known about them.  The nature and significance of Putin’s opposition to this ideology needs to be understood.  It is the opposition of one evil to the evil at the opposite extreme from it.  Gender ideology denies manhood entirely.  Putin’s actions and ideology spring from an unregenerate masculinity that is twisted into an evil form, that takes the masculine characteristics of aggression and assertion and perverts them into an extreme of brutality and merciless cruelty.

End quote.  If the admiration some Catholics and conservatives have for Putin is rash, so too is their apparent forsaking of their own civilization.  De Mattei notes how, even when the Western Roman Empire was steeped in decadence, Christians dutifully rallied to its defense against more virile barbarian invaders.  They did not let the sins of their homeland blind them to the reality that it was their homeland.

By contrast, some contemporary traditionalists, rather than fighting for the West against all enemies, foreign and domestic, seem more inclined to abandon her to the domestic enemies and root against her in her rivalry with the foreign ones.  But genuine masculinity would eschew such defeatism and oikophobia, in favor of filial loyalty and fighting spirit.  De Mattei writes:

The West is the firstborn son of the Church, today increasingly disfigured by Revolution, but still the firstborn.  A European who disowns it on the pretext of fighting the New World Order is like a son who disowns his mother…

In the fifth century the Goths, the Vandals, and the Huns invaded the Roman Empire to divide its spoils.  Today Russia, China, Turkey, and the Arab world want to seize the rich heritage of the West, which they consider, as has been said, “terminally ill.”

Someone may say: where are you, Stilicho who resisted to the Goths; where are you, Boniface who defended Africa from the Vandals; where are you, Aetius who defeated the Huns?  Where are you, Christian warriors who took up arms to defend a world that was dying?

End quote.  Now, apart from the situation in Ukraine, the battles most contemporary Christians and traditionalists face are not the violent ones our forebears confronted.  They are cultural and political in nature.  Yet, as woke insanity spreads throughout government, corporations, the military, and universities, as police are defunded and workers harassed with pointless mandates, the response of some of the people most impressed by Putin’s purported manliness seems to be a “Benedict Option” style retreat: “Flee the blue states!  Shun the military and the police force!  Run from academia!  Quit the corporations!  Don’t even bother to vote, the system is rigged!  These institutions are all rotten; abandon them to the wokesters!”

Put aside for the moment the irony that a mass exodus of traditionally-minded people from these institutions is exactly what the wokesters want.  Put aside the glaringly obvious strategic problem that the more territory you abandon, the smaller and more vulnerable is any area to which you might retreat.  The salient question for present purposes is: How is this defeatism manly? 

I don’t deny that the circumstances of some particular individuals and families may require relocating, seeking new employment, or what have you.  But abandoning institutions to the woke should be the exception rather than the rule.  The rule should be fighting tooth and nail for every square inch of cultural and political territory.  If an institution is lost, it should never be because it was surrendered.  Premature capitulation is not masculine.  And, to echo de Mattei, a true son of the West will not despair of her and her institutions or flee from them in fear, but redouble his efforts to reclaim them.

That brings us to some remarks from Fr. Waldstein’s essay:

The passions were given us by our Creator to assist us in acting, to help us respond rightly to the goods and evils that we encounter in this life.  The passions are like powerful horses pulling the chariot of the soul toward action.  But of course, passion is not a sufficient guide to human action.  In order to be good guides to action, passion must be informed and guided by reason.  The virtuous man “is not passion’s slave.”  This does not mean that he lacks passions, but rather that he feels them in the right way, and toward the right objects, so as to preserve the true good apprehended by reason.  Reason is like the charioteer who controls the horses of the passions with reigns and whip, so that they draw the chariot in the right direction, and at the right speed, so that it does not capsize at a corner.

There is a danger in human life of being swept along by passion beyond the measure of reason.  This is danger is certainly strong in war time.

End quote.  Now, there are certainly some on the anti-Putin side who have let passion cloud their reason – most especially, those eager for NATO to enter the war, which, as Fr. Waldstein argues (and as I have argued too), would violate just war criteria no less surely than Putin’s invasion does.  And some of this fanaticism is clearly motivated by grievances having nothing to do with Ukraine, such as rage at Putin’s anti-LGBT policies and the delusion that the Russians somehow tipped the 2016 U.S. presidential election against Clinton.

But the faults of some of Putin’s critics simply don’t make his invasion of Ukraine any less evil.  And those who pretend otherwise have also let passion cloud their reason.  If downplaying the gravity of Putin’s crime as a way to “own the libs” has appeal for some, that appeal can only be emotional rather than rational.  Needless to say, that too hardly fits any stereotype of masculinity. 

At the end of the day, even genuine masculine fortitude and sobriety can only ever be an instrumental cause.  From a Catholic point of view, the true solution to the crisis of our age must come from above – from (to give de Mattei the last word) “the triumph of [Our Lady’s] Immaculate Heart over the rubble of the Putin regime, the Chinese communist regime, the Islamic regimes, and those of the corrupt West.  Only she can do it; of us she asks an unshakable trust that this will happen, because She has infallibly promised it.  This is why our resistance continues.”

Conspiracy theories, spontaneous order, and the hermeneutics of suspicion

Nobody denies that conspiracies occur.  They happen every time two or more people collude in order to secure some malign end.  When people criticize “conspiracy theories,” it is a particular kind of conspiracy that they find implausible.  I’ve written several times before about some of the marks of conspiracy theories of this dubious kind.  They tend to be grounded in “narrative thinking” rather than a rigorous and dispassionate consideration of the merits and deficiencies of all alternative possible explanations.  They tend to violate Ockham’s razor, posit conspiracies that are too vast and complicated to be psychologically and sociologically feasible, and reflect naiveté about the way modern bureaucracies function.  The vastness of the posited conspiracy often has implications for the reliability of news media and other sources of information that make the theory epistemically self-defeating and unfalsifiable.  (For simplicity’s sake, from here on out I’ll use the expression “conspiracy theories” to refer, specifically, to theories having vices like these – acknowledging, again, that there are conspiracies of a more plausible kind, and thus conspiracy theories of a more plausible kind.)

A superficially similar but at bottom very different sort of theory is represented by examples of the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”  Theories of this kind posit forces which might seem analogous to the malign actors imagined by conspiracy theorists, but which ultimately operate in an impersonal manner.  Hence Marxism analyzes prevailing moral and cultural institutions as ideologies functioning to uphold dominant economic interests, Foucault regards them as expressions of power, Critical Race Theory as expressions of “white supremacy,” and so on.

Such theories share some of the flaws of conspiracy theories.  Like conspiracy theories, they rely on “narrative thinking” rather than rigorous argumentation, oversimplify complex social phenomena, and read sinister meaning into what is innocuous.  They also tend to dismiss criticism and counterarguments as merely the expression of the purported sinister forces, rather than evaluating them logically and dispassionately.  (“That’s just what the interests of [power, capital, white supremacy, etc.] want you to think!”)  Like conspiracy theories, they thereby open themselves up to the charge of being self-defeating.  If everything is “nothing but” the expression of some economic interest and can be dismissed as having no objective validity, why can’t we say the same of Marxism?  If it is merely the expression of the interests of power, what power interests does Foucault’s analysis itself serve?  If it is the expression of racism, how can Critical Race Theory itself be exempt?

All the same, instances of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” are not conspiracy theories, because they don’t attribute the phenomena they analyze to any sort of plotting or design.  The claim is not that a cabal of capitalists, racists, or other powerful interests got together in a smoke-filled room to map out how cultural and social institutions would be set up.  Rather, the malign forces such a theory posits are treated as impersonal abstractions that (somehow) nevertheless operate as if they were concrete, personal entities.  Accordingly, such theories tend to commit a fallacy of hypostatization or reification.  Where conspiracy theories attribute too much to human agency, the hermeneutics of suspicion attributes too little to it.  Abstractions like “capital,” “power,” “white supremacy,” etc. don’t exist over and above specific individuals and institutions who could intelligibly be said, whether correctly or incorrectly, to exercise power, to have economic interests, to harbor racist attitudes, or whatever.  Hence, to the extent that an analysis cannot be cashed out in terms of the motives and activities of such specific individuals and institutions, it fails to capture anything real.

Now, there is a third kind of theory which claims to explain the same sorts of phenomena as conspiracy theories and the hermeneutics of suspicion, but does not have the problems that those approaches exhibit.  Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a commonly accepted label for this approach.  Borrowing from F. A. Hayek, I’ll label them theories of “spontaneous order,” though I’m not entirely happy with the phrase.  In addition to Hayek, the best-known representatives of this sort of approach are the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson.  Smith’s “invisible hand” principle is one application, as is Hayek’s elaboration of how prices generated in the free market encapsulate scattered bits of information that would otherwise be inaccessible to economic actors.  In an earlier post, I suggested that Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s “propaganda model” of mass media, when abstracted from the specific political assumptions they bring to bear on it, counts as another application.

What analyses of this kind describe are, as Ferguson famously put it, “the results of human action but not of human design.”  Smith argues that when economic agents act in their own best interests, society in general reaps unforeseen benefits insofar as production, innovation, services, etc. are efficiently fitted to actual demand.  Hayek argues that when consumers are guided by market prices, economic information is communicated and used as effectively as possible.  Herman and Chomsky argue that the incentives built into a corporately-owned media system tend naturally to filter out information and opinions awareness of which would be contrary to the common interests of corporations and governments. 

Now, you may or may not agree with one or more of these theories of “spontaneous order.”  That’s fine.  I’m neither defending nor criticizing any of them here, but just using them as examples of a general style of analysis.  Note, however, that you don’t need to agree with the use these theorists make of these theories in order to find the theories themselves of interest.  Smith and Hayek are favorable to the market economy, and Herman and Chomsky are unfavorable to corporate media.  But that is irrelevant to the cogency (or lack thereof) of their analyses.  Someone could agree that the effects described by Smith and Hayek are real and still be unfavorable toward the free market, and someone could agree that the effects described by Herman and Chomsky are real and still favor corporate media.  It all depends on what other premises and values are factored into one’s overall political or economic view of things.

Anyway, the thing to emphasize for present purposes is that theories of “spontaneous order” are neither conspiracy theories nor instances of the hermeneutics of suspicion.  The effects described by Smith, Hayek, and Herman and Chomsky are brought about by specific human beings and specific institutions acting in clearly identifiable ways according to explicit motives.  There is no reference to reified abstractions acting in ways that only personal or other concrete entities can.  (The “invisible hand” is no exception, because Smith’s whole point is that there is no such hand.  It’s only as if there were.)  At the same time, these specific agents and institutions are not acting with the intention or design of bringing about the specific effects that Smith, Hayek, and Edward and Chomsky describe.  There is no conspiracy.  Consumers are not consciously trying to increase the efficiency with which economic information is transmitted, reporters are not consciously trying to uphold the interests of corporations, and so on.  Again, the whole point of theories of this kind is to explain how complex social patterns can be “the results of human action” and at the same time “not of human design.”

We might think of the systems posited by “spontaneous order” theorists on the model of what philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright calls “nomological machines.”  A nomological machine is a system of substances whose causal powers, when acting in tandem, generate patterns which approximate laws of nature.  For example, the solar system is a nomological machine.  What it is fundamentally made up of are objects like our sun, the various planets and asteroids, etc., all with their distinctive properties and powers.  Given that such objects are in the right sort of proximity to one another and mutually trigger the operation of their causal powers, the result is a system that more or less operates in the way described by Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.  Cartwright’s point is that laws of nature are not fundamental to physical reality.  Rather, what are fundamental to physical reality are various concrete physical substances, and their distinctive properties and causal powers.  When these substances get into the right configuration, the result is a pattern that approximates a law.  Laws are, accordingly, idealized descriptions of phenomena that are themselves derivative from something more fundamental.  Treating laws as themselves the fundamental facts about physical reality just gets the natural world badly wrong.  (See chapter 3 of my book Aristotle’s Revenge for detailed exposition and defense of this sort of view.)

The processes posited by theories of “spontaneous order” are like this.  Given a collection of individual economic actors responding to market forces, the result (the theory says) will be the patterns described by Smith and Hayek.  It’s as if these economic actors are following economic laws, but really they are not.  Any purported economic laws are really only approximations at best of complex patterns that arise when economic actors interact in certain ways under certain conditions.  Something similar can be said of the behavior of media personnel, government officials, etc. in the context described by Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model.  It’s as if they are following some law of corporate media behavior, though really they are not.

Because human beings and social phenomena are vastlymore complex than (say) the solar system, the “laws” in these cases are only very remote approximations and idealizations, rather than closely conforming to what actually happens (since human beings, after all, are moved by far more than merely economic considerations, political incentives, etc.).  There are and can be no strict “laws” where human beings and social phenomena are concerned.  But the “spontaneous order” models are still useful, because they do capture real systemic features and tendencies, even if meretendencies (rather than exceptionless patterns) is all they are. 

I would suggest that Cartwright’s account provides one way of seeing what is wrong with conspiracy theories and the hermeneutics of suspicion.  Cartwright’s neo-Aristotelian view of laws is what you might call a “bottom-up” view.  Again, what are fundamental to nature are concrete substances and their powers, and laws are derivative abstractions, and typically approximations at best.  (This is true, as Cartwright famously argues, even of laws of physics.)  The view she opposes takes a “top-down” view of laws, according to which laws are the fundamental physical reality and imposed from above on the rest of nature – whether by a divine designer, or as just a brute fact about the world.

Conspiracy theories and the hermeneutics of suspicion are, I submit, comparable to “top-down” views about laws of nature, and are especially comparable to attempts to identify strict “laws” governing economic or other social phenomena.  They both try to wedge what is really a very messy, complex social reality into a simplistic model that abstracts from how human beings and human institutions actually operate.  Conspiracy theories do so by identifying a “designer” of the patterns they claim to explain, whereas the hermeneutics of suspicion takes those patterns to be something like a brute fact about the social world rather than the product of design.  (I don’t claim that my analogy here is terribly exact, only that it is suggestive.)

The Substack writer Eugyppius has written some helpful articles (e.g. here and here) about why the manner in which governments have handled the Covid-19 situation is best understood in “spontaneous order” terms rather than in terms of conspiracy.  In particular, the stubbornly incompetent and callous nature of pandemic policy reflects the incentives, values, and information flow that prevail in modern bureaucracies, rather than centralized planning.  As Eugyppius emphasizes, this by no means entails that those responsible for making policy don’t often have bad motives.  That’s not the point.  The point is that in order effectively to counter destructive policies and corrupt and incompetent authorities, we need to understand how social institutions, including governments, actually work.  Conspiracy theories and the hermeneutics of suspicion darken our understanding – and thereby inadvertently give aid and comfort to bad policymakers whom we can effectively resist only with sobriety.

Related posts:

Chomsky’s “propaganda model” of mass media

Narrative thinking and conspiracy theories

The Gnostic heresy’s political successors

The Bizarro world of left-wing politics

The trouble with conspiracy theories

Brin on conspiracy theories

Epstein on conspiracies

We the sheeple? Why conspiracy theories persist

Chomsky’s “propaganda model” of mass media

A common mistake people make when evaluating a theory is to fail to keep in mind the distinction between the theory itself, its application to particular cases, and the auxiliary assumptions an advocate of the theory makes when developing that application.  People will often reject a theory because they find some particular application problematic, where if they thought about the matter more carefully they would see that the problem is only with that application and/or with the auxiliary assumptions, and not with the theory itself. 

For example, and as I’ve often emphasized, philosophers and historians of science commit this error when they claim that the key theses of Aristotelian philosophy of nature (concerning substantial form, natural teleology, etc.) were refuted by modern science.  As I have argued, what modern science has refuted are really only certain auxiliary empirical assumptions that medieval Aristotelians took for granted when applying these ideas, but not the ideas themselves.

Naturally, it would also be fallacious to judge that some application of a theory, or some auxiliary assumption made when developing that application, must be correct simply because the theory itself is sound.  A modern Aristotelian would be committing such a fallacy if, for example, he judged that, since Aristotelian philosophy of nature is after all still defensible, we should conclude that medieval empirical science too is still defensible and that Galileo and company were all wrong. 

A very different example is provided by the “propaganda model” of mass media famously associated with Noam Chomsky, and developed by Chomsky and Edward Herman in their book Manufacturing Consent.  Chomsky is well-known for applying this model to media coverage of U.S. foreign policy, in the service of his particular (anarchosyndicalist) brand of left-wing politics and economics.  Many right-wingers dismiss Chomsky’s model because they reject his left-wing assumptions and the claims he makes about U.S. foreign policy in the name of the model.  Many left-wingers, finding the model itself plausible and already sympathetic to some the political and economic assumptions Chomsky brings to bear when applying it, judge that the applications must be sound.  But here too the three factors – the model itself, the auxiliary political and economic assumptions in question, and the various applications to particular cases – must be distinguished.  Acceptance (or rejection) of one doesn’t entail acceptance (or rejection) of the others.

Wholesale acceptance or rejection is nevertheless common, and tends to be vehement, for Chomsky is a polarizing figure.  This is unsurprising.  On the one hand, he is obviously brilliant and has made important contributions to modern intellectual life – to linguistics, of course, but also to philosophy, as I have noted here before.  Even when you think what he is saying is batty, he is always interesting to listen to, and is independently-minded enough to annoy even his fans from time to time.  On the other hand, especially on political matters he is, to say the least, prone to wild overstatement and sweeping remarks.  He has an annoying habit of reeling out long strings of peremptory assertions, some of them reasonable, some unreasonable, but in any case largely tendentious and controversial yet presented as if no rational and well-informed person could possibly disagree.  He is himself also insufficiently careful to distinguish his “propaganda model” from the left-wing political and economic assumptions that influence his application of it.

My own political and economic views are most certainly not left-wing, though I also reject the libertarian or doctrinaire free-market position that is Chomsky’s usual target.  In my opinion, capitalism is a mixed bag.  You needn’t either accept the whole thing or reject the whole thing.  Left-wingers are too quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and right-wingers are too willing to swallow the bathwater in the name of saving the baby.  In any event, my fundamental political principles are subsidiarity, solidarity, and pietas rather than, say, liberty, equality, and fraternity (much less diversity, equity, and inclusion).  My basic economic principles are those of popes Leo XIII and Pius XI.  In short, I approach these issues from the point of view of Catholic social teaching and Thomistic natural law theory.

Naturally, since my political and economic commitments are very different from Chomsky’s, I disagree with much of what he says when he applies his “propaganda model” to specific cases.  For example, while I agree with him that business interests are not always as benign as too many free-marketers suppose, I do not think that U.S. anti-communist foreign policy was essentially malign, as Chomsky supposes.  But you’d have to go case by case when evaluating his various applications of the model, and that’s not what I’m interested in here.  What I do want to address is the “propaganda model” itself, which can be disentangled from Chomsky’s own applications and his background auxiliary political and economic assumptions.

The model

Chomsky and Herman’s “propaganda model” is intended to explain and predict how mass media operate in capitalist countries like the United States, where the feature of capitalism they are most concerned with is the domination of the economic system by large private business corporations.  They hold that mass media in such countries exhibit a systematic tendency to select and convey information, formulate matters of controversy, and frame what counts as respectable alternative positions on those matters, in a way that reflects and upholds the basic ideological presuppositions of the overall corporate order of things.  This basic idea is pretty simple, and may even seem almost trivially true.  Indeed, Chomsky himself takes the basic thesis to be really more of an observation about a fairly obvious feature of the system rather than a “theory.”  But it is an observation that many people do not make, and its implications are insufficiently appreciated.

Chomsky and Herman hold that there are, specifically, five “filters” that determine what information and ideas tend to be conveyed through mass media and how they are presented.  The first concerns the ownership of the media.  In the United States, the main media outlets are themselves owned by large private corporations.  Accordingly, they have a direct interest in upholding the ideological presuppositions of the overall corporate-dominated economic order.  There are, of course, smaller and more local media companies as well.  But they have a strong tendency to reflect the view of things that prevails in the larger mass media.  For the larger companies have much greater resources and thus can generate the information and opinion content that smaller companies draw on in putting together their own content.  The larger companies also have brand-name recognition and prestige that gives smaller and more local media an incentive to follow their lead.

The second filter concerns advertising as the primary source of the income of media companies.  This feature makes media companies inclined to cater primarily to the interests of advertisers rather than to those of readers or viewers (who provide much less in the way of revenue via subscriptions and the like).  Advertisers themselves are primarily interested in appealing to those with purchasing power.  The overall result is that media companies have a strong incentive not to offend the sensibilities of the wealthy, and indeed to frame news and opinion in a way that upholds the basic presuppositions of the system that keeps them wealthy.

The third filter concerns the sources of the information and opinions that are propagated by mass media, which are primarily government officials, business interests, and the experts who are approved of and often funded by government and business.  News media require government and business sources to provide most of the day-to-day information that serves as the content of news stories and programs.  That reporters can draw on “official” sources like these saves them much work and gives the information a prima facie credibility, especially since the government and business sources have more direct knowledge of the events and policies being reported on.  Media also have a natural incentive to want to stay on good terms with these sources.  Government and business sources, meanwhile, obviously have a strong incentive to present information in a way that is maximally consistent with furthering their own interests, and also to stay on good terms with media.  The result is that media, government, and business tend to converge in the picture of events that they present to the public, in a kind of tacit collusion of bureaucracies.

Universities are also a source of expert information, but these, Chomsky notes, are themselves largely dependent for their funding on government and on corporate donations.  Hence they inherit the tendency not to challenge the basic ideological presuppositions shared by government and corporations.  We might note also that, just as smaller media companies follow the lead of the big corporations, so too do smaller academic institutions tend to follow the lead of the most prestigious universities vis-à-vis what ideas are judged respectable, who are the sorts of faculty who ought therefore to be hired, and so on.  And the most prestigious universities are, of course, the ones that cater to the wealthiest segment of society, and whose graduates provide the personnel that dominate media, business, and government.  The result of all this is that it is what is in the common interest of these institutions (government, big corporations, mass media companies, and prestige universities) that will be reflected in the sources that shape the content of news and opinion outlets.

The fourth filter has to do with the “flak” or negative feedback that mass media companies get when their content conflicts with these common interests.  Flak can of course include angry letters to the editor from unhappy readers and the like, but this is not the sort of thing that makes much of a difference to media content.  The flak that counts is the flak that comes from powerful people and institutions – corporations who might threaten lawsuits or pull their advertising from a program or publication, government officials who might stop providing information or threaten hostile regulation, experts whose criticism of a media outlet might entail a loss of prestige, boycotts organized by well-funded interest groups, and so on.

The fifth and final filter is “fear.”  The idea here is that mass media have an interest in selecting and conveying information, and in molding what counts as a respectable range of opinion, in a manner that is conducive to generating fear and hostility toward anyone who would challenge the shared basic ideological presuppositions of the overall government-corporate-media complex.  News stories will, accordingly, tend to characterize people who criticize these presuppositions as ill-informed and irrational, will portray these critics as a constant threat to social order, will play up stories that make this threat seem grave and imminent, and so on. 

Naturally, these critics will also tend to be portrayed as villainous in the popular entertainment content provided by mass media companies.  But Chomsky sees such entertainment as playing essentially a “bread and circuses” role in the corporate economic order.  The function of the ideas that prevail in news media, expert opinion, and universities is to mold the thinking of those who will become future leaders in government, business, media, etc., so that they will act in a way that positively upholds the ideological presuppositions of the status quo.  The function of the ideas conveyed in popular entertainment is to keep the masses acquiescent in this status quo, but primarily by way of providing endless distractions that keep most people from even thinking about the nature of the political and economic system and its ideological presuppositions.

Common misunderstandings

In order properly to understand this “propaganda model” of mass media, it is crucial to note that it is not saying what people often mistakenly accuse it of saying.  For example, Chomsky is often accused of peddling a “conspiracy theory.”  But that is precisely what he is not doing.  Indeed, Chomsky has, much to the frustration of some of his fans, been consistently critical of the best-known conspiracy theories of recent times, such as those that posit U.S. government involvement in the JFK assassination, those that claim that 9/11 was an “inside job,” and those that allege “collusion” between Trump and Russia during the 2016 election.

Chomsky is not positing a cabal of sinister operatives who gather in smoke-filled rooms to plot out what will be said in mass media.  He is instead describing economic incentives, cultural attitudes and mores, and the like, which shape the thinking of opinion-makers mostly without their even realizing it.  He is also not claiming that most of the people who write news stories and express opinions on issues of the day are lying, or that they have bad motives.  On the contrary, he says that for the most part they sincerely believe themselves to be conveying the unvarnished facts and to be providing reasonable and responsible commentary about those facts.  The trouble is rather that, in determining what facts are important and worth reporting, which experts to trust, which alternative opinions are respectable and worth a hearing, and so forth, they are guided by assumptions they are mostly unaware of and never seriously question, and that these assumptions conform to the basic ideological presuppositions of the overall governmental-corporate order of things.  Hence they never seriously reflect on whether that order is itself problematic, and indeed find it very difficult even to consider the possibility that it might be and that those who challenge it might have serious reasons for doing so.

Nor is Chomsky positing a self-defeating “hermeneutics of suspicion” that undermines the possibility of knowing anything, including the propaganda model itself.  Chomsky is not a skeptic who thinks that we can never get at the truth.  On the contrary, he thinks that the relevant information about important controversies is available, sometimes in media and government sources themselves.  The trouble is that most people, including journalists and opinion makers, either don’t bother to look for it or misunderstand its significance.  The reason is, again, that their decisions about what is worth looking for, about how to interpret the relevant information, etc. are shaped by assumptions that uphold the interests of the corporate-government-media order and which they never seriously question. 

Chomsky also acknowledges that there are dissident voices and alternative sources of information.  He does not think that the U.S. political system is like that of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, violently quashing dissent.  He emphasizes that that is not how suppression of criticism of those in power works in capitalist societies with democratic political structures.  Rather, it works in the much more subtle ways described by the propaganda model.  Indeed, the point of the model is in part to explain how violent suppression is not the only way for powerful political and economic forces to sustain themselves.  Chomsky is not claiming that dissent cannot or does not exist in the political and economic order he criticizes, but rather that voices and institutions that challenge the basic presuppositions of that order are at a massive disadvantage.  Hence it is not a serious criticism of the propaganda model to point out that there do exist anti-establishment media, that critics like Chomsky are able to get their books and articles published, etc.

Chomsky also does not deny the obvious fact that there is media criticism of government policy and of business, vigorous debate between the political parties over policy, and so on.  His point is that the criticism and debate are all kept within certain boundaries.  Criticism occurs when government or business does not live up to principles that reflect the basic ideological presuppositions of the state-corporate-media order of things.  Policies are considered worthy of debate when they are consistent with those presuppositions.  What does not occur is criticism or debate about those basic presuppositions themselves.  Chomsky also acknowledges that corporations do not always pursue profit, for an idea might be profitable in the short term but have a tendency to undermine the basic presuppositions of the government-corporate-media order in the long run.  Hence corporations and media will forego profits in a particular case if doing so helps to uphold that order.

It is also very important to see that there is nothing essentially left-wing in the model as I have described it so far.  Indeed, the model as I have described it so far is for the most part politically neutral.  One can even imagine someone who approves of the existing political and economic order of things and judges it good and proper that it is upheld in the way that Chomsky describes.  But of course, for someone who is critical of that order, what the propaganda model describes is seriously problematic, a major structural impediment to achieving a more just society.

Chomsky, again, criticizes the prevailing political and economic order from a left-wing point of view – in particular, from a veryfar-left point of view that he describes as “libertarian socialist” or anarchosyndicalist.  Hence the examples he uses to illustrate the “propaganda model” reflect that point of view.  For instance, his examples of the “fear” filter include anti-communism and the war on terror, and he routinely characterizes the government-corporate-media complex that the propaganda model upholds as “right-wing.” 

Conservative critics of Chomsky often find this mystifying.  They point to the liberal bias of news outlets like CNN and The New York Times, and the fact that one of the two main U.S. political parties is liberal, as if such facts obviously refuted him.  But what Chomsky is criticizing is what mainstream Democrats and Republicans alike agree on.  Both parties uphold a capitalist economic order dominated by large corporations, and thus neither is socialist, despite the fact that Democrats tend to favor more regulation and redistributive taxation than Republicans do.  From Chomsky’s perspective, that makes them both “right-wing” (even if the Republicans are further right than the Democrats) and thus he is critical of liberals and conservatives alike.  From a right-wing point of view that may be an idiosyncratic use of the term “right-wing,” but the substantive point is that to refute Chomsky it does not suffice merely to point out that mainstream media outlets tend to be liberal.

Appropriating the model

One could, in any case, object to the U.S. government-corporate-media complex from a right-wing perspective that is not as uncritical of capitalism as Chomsky’s usual conservative targets tend to be.  For example, one could object to it from a populist point of view, or from the point of view of Catholic integralism or some other brand of throne-and-altar conservatism.  Or one could simply object to features of the system for reasons drawn from Catholic social teaching and Thomistic natural law theory, even if one does not go in for populism, integralism, etc.  And one could adopt something like Chomsky’s “propaganda model” as a tool for analysis and criticism.  Needless to say, the particular features of contemporary mass media and state and corporate behavior that a right-wing version of the “propaganda model” would object to would be very different from the things Chomsky emphasizes.  But the basic model would be similar.  It would simply be a matter of applying it to different cases than the ones that interest Chomsky, and bringing different auxiliary political and economic assumptions to bear on the application.

Nor is it difficult to see obvious applications in recent history.  Consider the lockdowns that afforded no significant net benefit in dealing with Covid-19, but inflicted staggering economic damage and harm to children’s education and mental health.  Consider the 2020 riots that destroyed many businesses and neighborhoods, and the spike in crime that predictably followed in the wake of the imbecilic “defund the police” movement.  Consider the stubborn insistence on Covid-19 vaccine mandates even after it became clear that vaccination was no longer effective in stopping transmission, despite the fact that many who refused to comply have lost their jobs as a result.  Mass media outlets were in general not only supportive of these manifestly destructive policies, but shamelessly censored critics of the policies and demonized them as “anti-science,” “anti-vax,” “racist,” etc.

Given all of this enormous damage and how predictable it was, what explains the government-corporate-media complex’s support for the policies that led to it?  Well, consider some further facts.  Large corporations did extremely well during the lockdowns, especially media corporations and the tech companies that provide them their platforms.  It is the small businesses that compete with big corporations that suffered.  Wealthy and educated people who largely work and live online anyway had a relatively easy economic and psychological transition to lockdown conditions.  Working-class people, by contrast, either lost their jobs, or had to put themselves at risk of getting the virus in order to make it possible for the affluent to work from home while still getting their food and groceries delivered, their plumbing and electrical problems solved, and so on.  Wealthy people also had the financial wherewithal and technological resources to stay at home and make sure their children learned online, whereas poorer people had to go out to work or lacked the resources to provide reliable online access to class materials and Zoom sessions.  It was primarily poor neighborhoods that suffered when rioting occurred and when police presence was reduced.  Mandatory vaccination made enormous profits for pharmaceutical companies, and entailed unprecedented control by government-corporate-media bureaucracies over citizens, consumers, and public opinion.  Those who lost their jobs for resisting were largely working class people, as were the bulk of those demonized as “racist,” “anti-vax,” etc. 

In short, the social chaos of the last two years yielded increased wealth for corporations, increased power for governments, increased control over information flow for the mass media, and increased financial rewards and cost-free virtue-signaling opportunities for the affluent – while at the same time imposing economic hardship, decreased public safety, educational setbacks, psychological stress and humiliation on the working class and the poor. 

It is largely right-of-center voices who have been calling attention to this breathtaking social injustice, though there are many honorable exceptions on the left – some, like Glenn Greenwald, precisely in a Chomskian spirit.  In any event, the “propaganda model” makes good sense of what happened.  And again, it has nothing to do with any conspiracy.  It is instead a matter of a class of people with certain common interests and ideological presuppositions naturally converging on policies that serve those interests and support those presuppositions, while being blind or indifferent to the costs imposed on people with different interests or presuppositions. 

Unfortunately, too many right-wingers have over the last couple of years nevertheless fallen for crackpot “narratives” and woolly conspiracy theories.  The patterns they see in recent events are real, and they are correct to judge that these patterns are not accidental, but they reason fallaciously when they infer from this that there must therefore be some cabal that planned things to go the way they have.  The fallacy is similar to the one committed by egalitarians when they judge that economic disparities must have come about by discrimination. 

The truth is that complex social phenomena have structural features that can generate patterns without anyone having intended them.  They are, as Hayek liked to say, “spontaneous orders” which (as Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson famously put it) are “the products of human action but not of human design.”  Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is one such mechanism, and Chomsky’s “propaganda model” describes another.  That does not mean, either with the patterns Smith described or those that the “propaganda model” describes, that the patterns are necessarily benign or that we can’t work to counteract them.  That’s not the point.  The point is that before you can properly evaluate such a pattern, you need to understand how it actually comes about.  Conspiracy theories don’t aid us in understanding this, but only obscure what is really going on.  Into the bargain, they actually helpthose who are responsible for bad policies, by making their critics look paranoid and stupid.  (The Substack writer Eugyppius has written some helpful articles – e.g. hereand here– about why what has been happening over the past couple of years is best understood as malign instances of “spontaneous order,” rather than in terms of conspiracy.)

The foolish things being said by a few (by no means all) Catholic traditionalists in defense of Vladimir Putin are the latest fruit of this muddleheaded “narrative thinking” and conspiracy theorizing.  The narrative has it that the people who favored lockdowns and vaccine mandates, and who are imposing “wokeness” on the country, have also long hated Putin because of his hostility to wokeness and because of their lunatic belief that he somehow stole the 2016 election for Trump.  And that much is true enough.  The problem is that the Putin defenders think this somehow shows that the invasion of Ukraine is defensible, or at least maybe not so bad, and that to oppose it somehow puts one in league with the woke conspiracy.  If you’re having trouble following the logic here, that’s because there isn’t any.  Whatever one thinks of Putin’s anti-woke and pro-Christian rhetoric, the fact remains that his invasion of Ukraine manifestly doesn’t meet just war criteria, and an unjust war is among the most grave of injustices.  Hence Putin is perpetrating great evil, and the fact that he has said some nice things in favor of Christianity and against wokeness doesn’t change that for a moment.

Of course, it doesn’t follow that NATO intervention in the war is a good idea.  Since it would risk nuclear war, it is an extremely bad idea, and itself would not meet just war criteria.  That there is even a debate about this is, I think, a consequence of the anti-Russian hysteria that has been ginned up within the mass media over the last few years.  That brings us back to Chomsky, who has long been critical of this hysteria and who I’ll give the last word.  In a recent interview, he addresses the Ukrainian situation.  On the one hand, he notes that peaceful, diplomatic means of addressing Russia’s concerns about NATO expansion were available before the war, and thus condemns Putin’s “criminal invasion” of Ukraine.  On the other hand, he warns against actions that can only make the situation far worse, such as the NATO no-fly zone requested by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.  Says Chomsky:

Zelensky’s plea is understandable.  [But] responding to it would very likely lead to the obliteration of Ukraine and well beyond.  The fact that it is even discussed in the U.S. is astonishing.  The idea is madness.  A no-fly zone means that the U.S. Air Force would not only be attacking Russian planes but would also be bombing Russian ground installations that provide anti-aircraft support for Russian forces, with whatever “collateral damage” ensues.  Is it really difficult to comprehend what follows?

Related reading:

Chomsky on the mind-body problem

Liberty, equality, fraternity?

The trouble with capitalism

Hayek’s tragic capitalism

Continetti on post-liberal conservatism

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part IV: Marx

Scientism: America’s state religion

Narrative thinking and conspiracy theories

The trouble with conspiracy theories

Just war theory and the Russo-Ukrainian war

Just war theory and the Russo-Ukrainian war

One of the striking features of the catastrophe in Ukraine is how unambiguously the principles of just war doctrine seem to apply.  On the one hand, Russia’s invasion cannot be justified given the criteria of just war theory.  On the other hand, NATO military action against Russia cannot be justified either.  Here are the criteria for just military action as set out in section 2309 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

At one and the same time:

- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

- there must be serious prospects of success;

- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.  The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

End quote.  I submit that Russia’s invasion clearly fails to meet the first, second, and fourth criteria, and NATO military action against Russia would clearly fail to meet the second, third, and fourth criteria.

The injustice of the invasion is obvious even given the most generous interpretation of Putin’s motives.  Hence, suppose we conceded for the sake of argument that Russia has a legitimate interest in keeping Ukraine out of NATO.  Suppose that, as some have argued, the United States and her allies have long been needlessly poking the bear, and that Russia would have been far less likely to invade Ukraine had they not done so.  Even given those premises, it simply doesn’t follow that Ukraine is an “aggressor,” that Russia has suffered any “lasting, grave, and certain” damage from Ukraine, or that “all other means” of remedying Russia’s concerns “have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.”  Nor is the extreme harm inflicted on innocent Ukrainians by war proportionate to whatever grievances Russia has.  Hence Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cannot be said to meet the first, second, and fourth criteria for a just war, and therefore is manifestly gravely unjust.

For that reason, military action to repel Russia’s invasion clearly is legitimate, and justice requires favoring the Ukrainian side in the war.  In the abstract, support for Ukraine could include military action against Russia by any nation friendly to Ukraine.  However, the justice of the cause of defending Ukraine fulfills only the first of the four criteria set out by the Catechism.  What about the other three?

Putin has not-so-subtly threatened to use nuclear weapons if the United States or other NATO countries intervene militarily in the conflict.  The realistic prospect of such extreme escalation makes it impossible for such intervention to meet the Catechism’s fourth criterion, which emphasizes that “the power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.”  The use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine, to which Russia might resort if NATO intervenes, would surely “produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”  Graver still would be a situation where Ukraine, other nearby NATO states, and Russia (as a result of NATO nuclear retaliation) were all attacked with nuclear weapons.  And worst of all would be a scenario where what started out as a local war in Ukraine spiraled into an all-out global nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States.

Even a localized nuclear exchange would also render unlikely the fulfillment of the third condition for just war, viz. the “serious prospects of success.”  If Russia uses nuclear weapons against Ukraine or NATO itself, would NATO countries really retaliate in kind?  If they did not, it seems that Russian victory would be assured.  But if they did retaliate in kind, it is very far from clear that this would not spiral into a conflict that no one could win.  Nor can it be said that all the less extreme alternatives to NATO intervention have been exhausted, as the second criterion for just war requires.

It is therefore irresponsible in the extreme to suggest, as some have, that NATO impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which would entail direct military confrontation between NATO and Russia.  The problem is not just that this is foolish and reckless.  The problem is that such escalation cannot be justified by just war criteria, and would therefore itself be gravely unjust.  Any public authorities who take action that risks nuclear war – and thus the deaths of millions of innocent people – would be no less guilty of violating the moral principles governing war than Putin is.

Just war doctrine’s counsel to the United States and her NATO allies thus seems clear: Cheer Ukraine on and provide whatever assistance is possible consistent with avoiding the risk of a nuclear escalation.  Otherwise, stay the hell out of it.  Damon Linker seems to me to have the right idea: Putin’s actions must be unequivocally condemned and Ukraine supported, but Western policy should emphasize diplomacy, and work to create for Putin some feasible “off-ramp” from the path he has taken – rather than ratcheting up the rhetoric and entertaining reckless military scenarios and that can only make a nuclear confrontation more likely.

Now, you don’t need to be a Catholic or a natural law theorist to see all this.  Indeed, I think that probably most people have arrived at more or less the same view of the crisis that I have been arguing for here.  Yet there are some commentators who have rejected this view in favor of one extreme alternative or another – some downplaying the gravity of Putin’s evildoing, others reacting instead with excessive bellicosity and animus against all things Russian.  What accounts for this?

The answer, I would suggest, has largely to do with the extreme partisanship that has in recent years led too many people to drag irrelevant preexisting grievances into every new controversy.  When a crisis occurs, partisans succumb to the temptation to fit it into some general background narrative that explains “what is really going on” in terms of the machinations of evil forces on the opposite political extreme from the one they favor.  The Manichean ideologies that have gained influence on both sides of the political spectrum in recent years exacerbate this “narrative thinking,” as does the strong propensity of social media to foster irrational habits of thought. 

Hence, consider the strange new belligerence to be found today in some liberal circles.  When I was a teenager in the 1980s, it was still routine to fling against conservatives the longstanding accusations that they were prone to demonize Russia, were paranoid about Russian influence within American institutions, were eager to get into armed conflict with the “Russkies,” were frighteningly glib about the survivability of limited nuclear war, and were inclined to resort to McCarthyite tactics and charges of treason against anyone who objected to all of this.  These accusations were made despite the fact that Russia had recently invaded Afghanistan – not to mention the earlier invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, or all the proxy wars Russia was engaged in throughout the Cold War.  None of this, in liberal eyes, justified right-wing anti-Russian bellicosity or paranoia.

Yet now it is liberals who are most prone to exhibit exactly these traits they once attributed to conservatives.  What accounts for this bizarre reversal?  I would submit that it has to do, in part, with Putin’s predilection for traditionalist Christian and anti-LGBT rhetoric (as Richard Hanania has pointed out), and in part with persistent left-wing attachment to fantasies about Russian interference with American elections.  These factors had already transformed Putin into a bogeyman in the liberal imagination, so that his immoral invasion of Ukraine has made it seem justifiable to some to risk even nuclear war in order to destroy him.

And it is, I would suggest, overreaction to these liberal excesses that has led some on the opposite extreme end of the political spectrum to refuse to face up to the full gravity of the evil that Putin has done.  They have been tempted by the thought that if liberals hate Putin with such intensity, he can’t be that bad, and that opposition to his invasion must therefore have something essentially to do with the Great Reset, the woke agenda, the Covid healthcare dictatorship, etc. etc.

This is all bonkers.  The key facts to keep firmly before one’s mind are (a) that Putin’s invasion is unjustifiable, has caused the deaths of hundreds of innocent people so far and will almost certainly result in thousands more, and maybe worse, and (b) that NATO military engagement with Russia would entail a serious risk of nuclear war and therefore cannot be justified.  Longstanding political obsessions cannot alter these facts, but only blind us to them.

Taylor on cognition, teleology, and God

In his book Metaphysics , a classic brief and lucid introduction to the subject, Richard Taylor devotes a chapter to the topic of God.  Most of the attention philosophers have paid to it seems to focus on his version of the cosmological argument, which is indeed a fine brief exposition and defense.  But Taylor also presents a second argument, of a broadly teleological sort.  It is decidedly not a variation on Paley’s design argument (of which, as longtime readers know, I am not a fan).  It is much more interesting and metaphysically deep than that, and at least in a general way closer to the spirit of Aquinas’s Fifth Way(even if it is not quite the same as Aquinas’s argument either).

Stones and semantics

Taylor begins by asking us to consider a couple of scenarios.  Suppose you are traveling by train through the UK and, peering out the window, you see an arrangement of stones in a pattern that looks like this: THE BRITISH RAILWAYS WELCOMES YOU TO WALES.  You would naturally assume that the stones had been deliberately arranged that way by someone, in order to convey the message that you are entering Wales.  Now, it is possible in theory that the stones got into that arrangement in a very different way, through the operation of impersonal and purposeless natural causes.  Perhaps, over the course of centuries, the stones gradually tumbled down a nearby hill, and each one stopped in a way that generated just that pattern.  This is, of course, extremely improbable, but that is irrelevant to Taylor’s point and he allows for the sake of argument that it could happen.

Taylor’s point is rather this.  Even if you could reasonably entertain the latter possibility, what you could not reasonably do is both accept it as the correct explanation of the arrangement of stones and at the same time continue to regard that arrangement as conveying the message that you are entering Wales.  The arrangement could intelligibly be conveying that message only if there is some intelligencebehind its origin, which brought it about for the purpose of conveying the message.  If, instead, the arrangement came about through unintelligent and purposeless causes, then it cannot intelligibly be said to convey that message, because it could not in that case intelligibly be conveying any message at all.

Or, to take Taylor’s second example, suppose a rock were dug up from the ground and found to be covered with an interesting set of marks, of roughly the same size and arrangement that the letters and sentences of a book might exhibit.  One explanation of the marks might be that they had been formed by some impersonal and purposeless natural process, such as glaciation or volcanic activity, which simply happened by chance to result in a pattern that looked like writing.  Whether or not this is likely is, again, not to the point, and Taylor allows for the sake of argument that it might be a perfectly reasonable explanation. 

Another possible explanation, of course, is that it really is writing.  Suppose some scholar studied the stone on this assumption, and proposed that the correct translation of the marks would be: HERE KIMON FELL LEADING A BAND OF ATHENIANS AGAINST THE FORCES OF XERXES.  Now, Taylor allows for the sake of argument that you could opt either for the first explanation or the second.  But what you cannot reasonably do is suppose both that the marks arose through an entirely impersonal and purposeless natural process and at the same time that they really do convey the message represented by the proposed translation.  For if they arose through an impersonal and purposeless process, they cannot convey any message at all.

I hasten to emphasize again that Taylor’s point has nothing whatsoever to do with probabilities, and in particular nothing to do with how likely or unlikely it is for arrangements of the kind in question to form via natural processes.  He allows, for the purposes of the argument, that that could happen.  His point is rather that, no matter how complex and orderly are the arrangements of physical components that might be generated by purely impersonal and purposeless natural processes, they could never by themselves generate something with intentional or semantic content.  (This way of putting things is mine rather than Taylor’s.)  This is not a point about probabilities, but rather a conceptual and metaphysical truth.  Neither stones nor marks on a rock have any inherent connection with any semantic content we might decide to convey through them.  The content they might have must derive from a mind which uses them for the purpose of conveying such content.  Delete such a mind from an explanation of the arrangements of stones or marks, and you delete the semantic content along with it.

Minds and meaning

Taylor then asks us to consider our perceptual and cognitive faculties.  These too we take to have intentional or semantic content.  We have visual experiences such as the perception that there is a cat on the mat, auditory experiences such as the perception that someone has just rung the doorbell, and so on.  We have the thought that there will be rain tomorrow, the thought that two and two make four, and so on.  We take it that a visual experience like the one in question is not merely the presentation to the mind of an array of colors and shapes, and that the auditory experience in question is not merely a sequence of sounds, but that the experiences convey the messages that the cat is on the mat and that someone is at the door.  Of course, we might be misperceiving things, but that is not to the point.  The point is that the experiences do convey those messages, whether or not the messages are accurate.  Similarly, we take it that when we “see” or “hear” a sentence like “There will be rain tomorrow” as it passes through our imaginations, this is not a mere string of internally apprehended sounds or shapes, but conveys the meaning that there will be rain tomorrow.

Now, Taylor is happy to allow for the sake of argument that, as with the arrangement of stones you see out the train window and as with the series of marks on the rock that has been dug up, our sensory organs and neural structures may have arisen through entirely impersonal and purposeless natural processes, such as evolution by natural selection.  He is not interested in challenging the probability of such explanations.  He writes:

The mere complexity, refinement, and seemingly purposeful arrangement of our sense organs do not, accordingly, constitute any conclusive reason for supposing that they are the outcome of any purposeful activity.  A natural, nonpurposeful explanation of them is possible, and has been attempted – successfully, in the opinion of many.  (p. 117 of the second edition)

Notice that he includes the “seemingly purposeful arrangement” of our sense organs as among the considerations that do not suffice to show real purpose.  The arrangement of stones you see out the train window and the marks you see on the rock seem purposeful, but Taylor allows that that may be an illusion.  Similarly, he allows that our sense organs could seem to have a purposeful arrangement and yet be purposeless for all that.  His argument has nothing at all to do with how likely or unlikely it is that the appearance of purpose could arise from purposeless impersonal process.

What he is concerned about instead is the case where we suppose our sense organs and neural processes to have genuinepurpose, and in particular where we suppose our perceptual experiences and thoughts to have genuine intentional or semantic content.  And he wants to make a point that parallels the point he made about the arrangement of stones and the marks on the rock.  We could take the deliverances of our sense organs and neural states to have genuine intentional or semantic content.  Or we could take those organs and states to have arisen through entirely impersonal and purposeless natural processes.  What we cannot reasonably do is both of these things at once.  In particular, we cannot intelligibly both take these cognitive faculties to have arisen through entirely impersonal and purposeless processes and at the same time regard them as having genuine intentional or semantic content – as conveying any message about cats on mats, the ringing of doorbells, rain tomorrow, or anything else. 

The cases, Taylor argues, are in all relevant respects parallel.  Delete mind and purpose from your account of the origin of the arrangement of stones or the marks on the rock, and you delete any semantic content along with them.  Similarly, if you delete mind and purpose from your account of the origin of our cognitive faculties, then you delete any intentional or semantic content along with them.  You can have one or the other account, but not both. 

Now, our cognitive faculties do in fact have intentional or semantic content.  We really do have perceptual experiences with the content that the cat is on the mat, thoughts with the content that it will rain tomorrow, and so on.  Since this is intelligible only on the supposition that our cognitive faculties originated via some mind and its purposes, there must be some intelligent being that brought us about with the aim of having our cognitive faculties convey to us information about the world around us. 

Taylor does not elaborate further.  Presumably he would identify this mind with the necessary being whose existence he argues for earlier in the chapter, by way of a version of the cosmological argument.  But if so, he does not explain how.  Indeed, he makes only modest claims for his arguments, and leaves it an open question what relevance they might have for religion.  If the chapter can be said to defend theism, it is a purely philosophical theism that does not entail (though it also does not rule out) a specifically Jewish, Christian, or Muslim conception of God and his relationship to the world.

Some bad objections

Taylor does address several objections that he suggests some readers might take to be obvious, but which in fact simply miss the point.  For example, some may point out that our cognitive faculties are not always reliable.  As Taylor says, this is irrelevant.  The point isn’t that our cognitive faculties convey accurate messages, but rather that they convey any message at all.  Consider once again the case of the arrangement of stones that you see out the train window.  If you suppose that it arose through purely impersonal and purposeless processes, then it isn’t just that you can’t regard it as accuratelytelling you where you are.  The point is rather that you can’t intelligibly regard it as telling you anything at all.  By the same token, Taylor argues, if you suppose that your cognitive faculties arose through purely impersonal and purposeless processes, then what would follow is not merely that they don’t accurately represent the world but rather that they don’t represent anything at all, whether accurately or inaccurately.

A second bad objection would be to suggest that Taylor is presenting an inductive argument from analogy, which is no stronger in this case than when Paley presents such an argument.  As Taylor emphasizes, he is not, in the relevant sense, presenting an argument from analogy.  In particular, he is not making a point about how improbable it is that a certain complex natural structure arose apart from intelligent design, given how similar it is to human artifacts.  On the contrary, he explicitly concedes that the complexity, refinement, and appearance of purpose that our sensory and cognitive faculties exhibit could have arisen through unintelligent processes, just as the arrangement of stones could have.

True, he does draw an analogy between the arrangement of stones on the one hand and our cognitive faculties on the other.  But the point of the analogy is simply to illustrate the general principle that it is metaphysically impossible for something to have actual intentional or semantic content (as opposed to the mere appearance of such) if it arose entirely from impersonal and purposeless processes.  He is not giving an inductive “argument from analogy” of the form: “A is like B, so the cause of A is probably like the cause of B.”  Again, probabilities are not what is in question.

A third bad reply, Taylor says, would be to suggest that, even if our faculties arose through entirely impersonal and purposeless processes, we have good inductive grounds for taking them to be reliable.  One problem with this, as he points out, is that such an argument would be circular.  For in order to get such an inductive argument off the ground, you’d have to rely on your cognitive faculties, and whether they are reliable in that case is precisely what is in question.

But the problem is deeper than that (and I think that in his response to this particular objection Taylor could have made the point clearer).  For as I have said, the point is not merely that our cognitive faculties would not reliablyconvey messages if they arose via purely impersonal and purposeless processes.  The point is that they would not convey any messages at all, that they would be as utterly devoid of intentional or semantic content as an arrangement of stones that formed via impersonal and purposeless processes.  And they would first have to have such content for us to be able to get any inductive argument, or any argument at all, off the ground.  Hence this third objection to Taylor simply misses the point.

A fourth bad objection addressed by Taylor would be to appeal to survival value as a reason to think that our cognitive faculties are reliable.  Taylor notes in response that the deliverances of our sensory and cognitive faculties far outstrip anything that could plausibly be said to have survival value.  But here too I think he could and should have made a stronger point, which is that the appeal to survival value also misses the point.

Suppose that the power to become immaterial at will would afford my descendants tremendous survival value.  (I’ve seen this example used by someone else, by the way, but I do not recall where.)  Does it follow that, through mutation, natural selection, and the like, such a power might arise in the generations that follow me?  No, because there is no plausible mechanism by which that power, specifically, might arise through such processes.  Or suppose that an organism would gain tremendous survival value from being a round square.  Does it follow that round squares might evolve via mutation, natural selection, and the like?  Of course not, because round squares are logically impossible.  Appeal to “survival value” is mere hand-waving without some plausible process by which a property or power could actually arise.

Now, the deep point behind Taylor’s argument is that you simply aren’t going to get intentional or semantic content from entirely impersonal and purposeless processes any more than you are going to get immateriality or round squares out of them, so that appeal to the survival value of having such content is a red herring. 

Evolution and cognition

Notice that, though Taylor is not explicit about it, this is compatible with an evolutionary story about the origin of our cognitive faculties.  It just isn’t compatible with a materialistic-and-mechanisticevolutionary story about the origin of our cognitive faculties – one that entirely excludes mind and purpose from the story. 

Daniel Dennett characterizes Darwinian evolutionary theory as a style of explanation that excludes any “mind first” account of the world, viz. an account that takes mind to be a fundamental feature of reality, rather than one that derives from non-mental phenomena.  But while this is true of Dennett’s preferred style of evolutionary explanation, it is not true of evolutionary explanations as such, not even Darwinian ones.  (See chapter 6 of Aristotle’s Revenge for discussion of this issue.)  And Taylor’s point is that whether or not evolutionary processes are part of the story of the origin of our cognitive faculties, we must in fact affirm a “mind first” account of the world.  There would simply be no minds like ours at all if there were not a more fundamental kind of mind to bring them into being.

Some readers will have noted that Taylor’s argument is reminiscent of the “Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism” that Alvin Plantinga would develop years later (and which I have discussed in other places, such as this one).  But there are some important differences, and differences that, in my view, make Taylor’s argument the metaphysically deeper and more interesting one.  In Plantinga’s argument, there is a lot of heavy-going about probabilities.  But as I’ve been emphasizing, the point really has nothing essentially to do with probabilities at all, and in my opinion Plantinga’s emphasis on them just muddies the waters.  Second, Plantinga focuses on the question of whether our cognitive faculties would be reliable if they arose through entirely impersonal and purposeless natural processes.  But the deeper question is whether they would have any intentional or semantic content at all (whether reliable or not) if they arose in that manner.

Sex and metaphysics

My essay “The Metaphysical Foundations of Sexual Morality” appears in The Palgrave Handbook of Sexual Ethics , edited by David Boonin.  You can view the anthology’s table of contents and other information about it at the publisher’s website.  The book is, unfortunately, as expensive as academic books tend to be, and thus hard to get hold of for those without access to an academic library.  But you can at least read a big chunk of it via the preview at Google Books.

The failure of Johnson’s critique of natural theology

At the Reformed Baptist Blog, Jeffrey Johnson has responded to my  First Things review of his book The Failure of Natural Theology: A Critical Appraisal of the Philosophical Theology of Thomas Aquinas .  He makes nine points, none of which is any more convincing than the book itself is.  What follows is a point-by-point reply. 

1.

I noted in my review that Johnson attributes to Aquinas the view that God “does not have any potencies.”  (The quote is from p. 120 of his book.)  I also noted that this is a misunderstanding of Aquinas.  Aquinas distinguishes between “passive potency” (which is the capacity to undergo change) and “active potency” (which is the power to bring about effects in other things).  What Aquinas actually holds is that God does not have any passive potencies, but is supreme in active potency.  (Cf. Summa Theologiae I.25.1.)  Hence it is not correct to say that for Aquinas, God “does not have anypotencies.”  Aquinas insists that God does have active potency.  It is only passive potency that he lacks.

Johnson claims that he did not overlook this distinction and that I have missed his point.  But he did overlook it, and I did not miss his point.  Note first that the words from p. 120 of Johnson’s book that I quoted were directed at something I had written in my book Scholastic Metaphysics, where I noted that for Scholastics like Aquinas, efficient causation is a matter of a thing exercising “its own active potencies or powers.”  Johnson argues that Aquinas cannot coherently take God to be an efficient cause in this sense.  The reason, he says in the full sentence from which I took the words quoted, is this: “How does God exercise his ‘own active potencies’ if he does not have any potencies?”  Obviously, Johnson could think this a telling response to Aquinas only on the assumption that Aquinas denies that God has potencies of any kind – an assumption that is, again, false.  Hence, I did not misunderstand Johnson.  I simply called attention to what he himself explicitly said in his book.

Nor is his misunderstanding of Aquinas’s position confined to this one line.  As I noted in my review, Johnson repeatedly attributes to Aquinas the thesis that God is “immobile.”  Now, Aquinas certainly thinks that God is immutable in the sense that he does not undergo change, and that he is impassiblein the sense that nothing external to him can have a causal influence on him.  But Johnson says (at p. 137 of his book) that “immobility” involves something more than immutability and impassibility.  Here’s one explanation by Johnson of what else it involves:

Thomas added to God’s simple and immutable nature an additional attribute not taught in the Scriptures: divine immobility. 

Aquinas made the assumption that mobility – the willful exertion of power – is an essential characteristic of imperfection, finiteness, and temporality.  Because God can’t be any of these things, mobility must not be in God. (p. 5)

So, according to Johnson, Aquinas denies that there is any “willful exertion of power” in God.  And this is, again, simply false.  Indeed, its falsehood is very easily demonstrated.  For example, Aquinas says that “in God there is active power in the highest degree” (ST I.25.1); that God “wills… other things to be” (ST I.19.2); that “God is first in the order of agents” and that “his inclination to put in act what His intellect has conceived appertains to the will” so that “the will of God is the cause of things” (ST I.19.4); and so on.  All of this entails precisely that God does willfully exert power, contrary to what Johnson claims is Aquinas’s view.  Hence Aquinas denies that God is “immobile” in Johnson’s sense.

Moreover, Aquinas even allows that there is a sensein which God is moved.  For example, he writes:

Since the will of God is His essence, it is not moved by another than itself, but by itself alone, in the same sense as understanding and willing are said to be movement.  This is what Plato meant when he said that the first mover moves itself. (STI.19.1)

Of course, Aquinas is speaking here only of something remotely analogous to what we call “movement” in us, since it does not involve any actualization of passive potency nor any causal influence from without.  But it further underlines how far Aquinas is from attributing to God “immobility” in Johnson’s sense.

Now, in his reply to me, Johnson insinuates that his point was simply to argue that, whatever Aquinas’s actual intentions, he is unable to reconcile an affirmation that God has active causal power with his Aristotelian approach to arguing for God’s existence and spelling out the divine nature.  But there are two problems with this.  First, Johnson does not merely say that Aquinas’s views implythat God lacks active causal power (even if Aquinas does not intend this result).  Rather – and as we have just seen – Johnson claims that Aquinas himself actually holds that God lacks such power.  Again, not only is that not true, but in fact Aquinas explicitly says the opposite.  So, Johnson has badly misrepresented Aquinas’s position.  Aquinas simply does not believe what Johnson claims he does. 

Second, Johnson also does not establish that the Aristotelian premises Aquinas is working from actually entail divine “immobility.”  Why does Johnson suppose otherwise?  One reason appears to be that Aristotle himself conceived of God as moving the world as a final cause rather than as an efficientcause.  And Johnson seems to think that anyone working from Aristotle’s premises must conclude that it is only as a final cause that God can move the world, that God cannot act as an efficient cause. 

But that is certainly not Aquinas’s view, and Johnson does not show that it follows from anything Aquinas says.  Johnson thinks he shows that this follows because he thinks that Aquinas claims that there is no potency of any kind in God and that God is “immobile.”  But as we have just seen, not only does Aquinas not claim these things, in fact he holds the opposite.  Hence he is not committed to the premises from which it would follow that God cannot act as an efficient cause. 

Indeed, even Johnson allows that the “immobility” of the unmoved mover “is not a necessary conclusion” of Aquinas’s First Way (p. 116) and that it is “inconsistent” with the conception of God that results from the Second and Fifth Ways (pp. 118 and 130).  Johnson thinks this shows that Aquinas’s position is inconsistent, but that would only be true if Aquinas had, in other places, explicitly or implicitly committed himself to divine “immobility.”  And as we have seen, he does not do so.  In his response to my review, Johnson writes:

Feser, however, didn’t attempt to answer this dilemma that I raised over and over in my book.  I assume that he leapt over it because it can’t be answered.  Thomas wasn’t able to reconcile this contradiction, and I am not convinced that anyone is able to do so.

End quote.  But Johnson misses the point.  I didn’t attempt to “reconcile this contradiction” for the simple reason that there is no such contradiction in the first place.  Johnson supposes otherwise only because he is attacking a straw man rather than Aquinas’s actual views.

Into the bargain, by the way, Johnson misunderstands Aquinas’s First Way.  He writes that “Aquinas’s first proof... is based on God being the final cause of the universe” (p. 115).  Now, as the reader of the First Way can easily verify from ST I.2.3, there is no reference to final causality anywhere in it.  Nor does anything Aquinas says there entail that the unmoved mover must move things by way of final causality rather than by way of efficient causality.  In fact, the text of the argument implies precisely the opposite.  To illustrate the kind of motion he has in mind, Aquinas refers to fire making wood hot and a hand causing a staff to move.  And fire and hand function precisely as efficient causes.  I would guess that Johnson is assuming that because (A) Aristotle presented a version of the argument from motion, and (B) Aristotle thought the unmoved mover moved the world as a final cause, then (C) Aquinas’s version of the argument from motion must be based on final causality.  But (C) does not follow from (A) and (B).

2.

I noted in my review that Johnson claims that by allowing for the sake of argument that the universe may not have had a temporal beginning, Aquinas makes God and the universe equally absolute.  I also noted that this claim is false, since Aquinas’s view is that, even if the universe had had no beginning, it could not persist in being even for a moment without divine conserving causality.  Hence even an infinitely old universe would depend for its being on God, who would be the sole absolute reality.  In his response, Johnson claims that I have misrepresented him, writing: “Of course, Aquinas made this claim.  I state this over and over in my book… No doubt, Aquinas believed that without God, there is no universe.  I wonder how Feser could have missed me saying all of this in the book.”

Here is what Johnson actually said in his book.  Commenting on Aquinas’s view that philosophical arguments cannot establish that the world had a temporal beginning, he wrote: “This is where Aquinas’s natural theology breaks down… Aristotelian metaphysics on its own merit cannot establish a temporal universe.   And without a temporal universe, God ceases to be absolute” (pp. 124-25, emphasis added).  He also says that “according to Aquinas, a temporal and unnecessary universe is not the logical conclusion of natural theology but, like the doctrine of the Trinity, is an article of faith that can only be received by divine authority” (p. 134).

So, according to Johnson, Aquinas holds that philosophy alone cannot establish that the universe is unnecessary – that is to say, that its existence is contingentupon some cause outside it.  And only if that were indeed Aquinas’s view would his allowance for an infinitely old universe entail that the universe and God are equally absolute.

But of course, Aquinas does not think that philosophy is incapable of showing that the universe is unnecessary or contingent.  On the contrary, he argues, on purely philosophical grounds, that anything whose essence and existence are distinct requires a cause, and is therefore contingent.  And he argues, again on purely philosophical grounds, that this cause must be something whose essence is identical with its existence, and that such a cause would be unique.  It follows – again, on purely philosophical grounds – that everything other than this cause depends for its existence upon it (so that the entire universe depends for its existence upon it).  This holds true whether or not the universe had a beginning (which is why Aquinas thinks that establishing that the world depends for its existence on God does not require arguing for a temporal beginning).

This is, rather famously, one of the main themes of De Ente et Essentia, and it also appears in many other places in Aquinas’s works.  For example, in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas writes:

It must be said that every being in any way existing is from God.  For whatever is found in anything by participation, must be caused in it by that to which it belongs essentially… [But] all beings apart from God are not their own being, but are beings by participation.  Therefore it must be that all things which are diversified by the diverse participation of being, so as to be more or less perfect, are caused by one First Being, Who possesses being most perfectly…

From the fact that a thing has being by participation, it follows that it is caused.  Hence such a being cannot be without being caused. (ST I.44.1)

Notice that the argument here appeals to philosophical premises, not to special divine revelation.  So, contrary to what Johnson says in his book, Aquinas does think that the contingency of the universe can be established via purely philosophical arguments, and thus he doesthink that it can be proved by such arguments that God alone is absolute, even though such arguments cannot in Aquinas’s view establish a temporal beginning of the universe.

Whether Johnson acknowledges elsewhere in his book that Aquinas takes the universe to depend on God is irrelevant.  For the point is that Aquinas holds (contrary to what Johnson says in the passages I quoted above) that philosophy by itself, apart from special divine revelation, can establish this dependence of the world on God.

3.

In my review of his book, I noted that Johnson claims that for Aquinas, we can only ever know a representation of God rather than God himself, and can only speak of God metaphorically or symbolically rather than literally.  And I cited specific passages in which Aquinas actually says precisely the opposite of these claims – for example, passages in which he says that the blessed in heaven know the very essence of God, and in which he says that some terms do apply to God literally.  As I pointed out, Johnson misses the latter point because he conflates metaphor and analogical language (which can be metaphorical but need not be).

In his response, Johnson does not deny that he is guilty of these errors – and they are very basic and serious errors of scholarship – even if he doesn’t quite admit it either.  Instead he tries to change the subject.  He notes, for example, that Aquinas holds that God’s attributes are identical, and suggests that this makes it difficult to understand what terms like “good” mean when applied to God.  But there are several problems with this sort of move.  First, it is completely irrelevant to the point I was making, viz. that Johnson misrepresented Aquinas’s views about theological language and what we can know about God.

Second, the reason Aquinas identifies the divine attributes is because he is committed to the doctrine of divine simplicity – to which Johnson is also committed.  So, if the identity of the divine attributes that divine simplicity entails is a problem for Aquinas, it is also a problem for Johnson.  To be sure, Johnson indicates at p. 164 of his book that he would not himself identify the divine attributes with one another.  But what he needs to explain is how he can avoid doing so while at the same time affirming divine simplicity.

Third, Johnson raises this issue as if it were not something that Thomists and others have addressed many times in the large literature on divine simplicity.  If Johnson doesn’t find what they have to say convincing, then fine, he is free to raise objections to it.  But he seems not even to be aware of it. 

Johnson also suggests that, even if Aquinas does affirm that some terms are applied to God literally, he was not “consistent with himself” insofar as he also denied that we can know God’s essence in this life, and instead have to represent God using terms we learn from their application to created things.  But there is no inconsistency here at all, because the latter claim does not entail that no language about God is literal.  Indeed, it doesn’t even imply that the inadequate ways we represent God using terms originally applied to created things are non-literal. 

Again, Johnson clearly just doesn’t understand what Thomists mean when they talk about the analogical use of terms.  That’s no sin – unless you’re going to make absurdly overconfident pronouncements about the “failure” of Aquinas’s philosophical theology, without first bothering to learn what Aquinas actually says. 

4.

In my review, I noted that Johnson took a remark of mine out of context (specifically, from my essay “Natural Theology Must Be Grounded in the Philosophy of Nature, Not in Natural Science,” which appears in my anthology Neo-Scholastic Essays).  His misuse of the quote, I pointed out, rested on a failure to distinguish between science as it is generally understood today and philosophy of nature.  In his response, Johnson suggests that he was not really saying anything different in substance from the point I was making in that essay.  Really?  Here is what he actually said in his book, in the context of commenting on Aquinas’s First Way:

[W]e cannot know for certain, based on Aquinas’s first proof, if God moves himself or not.  Herman Bavinck placed his finger on the problem when he stated, “We have no right… to apply the law of causality to such a first cause, and that we therefore cannot say anything specific about it.”  The cosmological argument collapses because it jumps from physics to metaphysics, from science to philosophy, without having any epistemological warrant for such a leap.  It may appear that God’s nature can be derived from sense experience, from natural science, but such a conclusion is only a philosophical assumption.  Even one of the leading Thomistic scholars of our day, Edward Feser, admits to this: “I do deny that arguments grounded in natural science alone can get you to classical theism.”

This is the breaking point.  This is where the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas fails.  (pp. 117-18)

I don’t think anyone who has read the essay of mine quoted from, or indeed who knows anything about my work on natural theology, could say with a straight face that I would agree that “the cosmological argument collapses,” or that we “cannot say anything specific” about the divine nature based on such an argument, or that such an argument cannot be grounded in “sense experience.”  What I actually believe, of course, is that Aquinas’s First Way is a successful proof of God’s existence, that it is grounded in sense experience, and that following out its implications tells us much about the divine nature.  True, I don’t think that natural science, as that is generally understood today, can provide the foundation of such an argument.  But Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy of nature (the main principles of which were included as part of “science” as Aristotle and Aquinas understood it) can provide such foundations.

(Johnson says, in his response: “I would like to know what these broader principles are.”  But if he really read the essay of mine he quoted from, and the other works of mine that he cites in his book, then he should already know the answer to that question.  The principles in question include ideas like the Aristotelian theory of act and potency.)

Johnson also now claims that he was merely noting, in the passage I quote from his book, that you can’t get to everything the Biblesays about the divine nature from science alone.  But as you can see from the quote above, that is not what he said in that passage.  What he actually said is something much stronger than that – that if science doesn’t provide a basis for the First Way, then Aquinas’s argument “collapses,” that his natural theology therefore “fails” altogether, that you “cannot say anything specific” about the divine nature on the basis of Aquinas’s argument, and so on.  (And of course, no one ever claimed in the first place that the First Way gets you all the way to everything the Bible says about God.  That’s a straw man.)

5.

Revisiting the topic of the “immobility” that he says Aquinas attributes to God, Johnson writes:  “Yes, Aquinas claimed God exerted willful power in creation.  I cite him saying such statements.  I never denied this about Aquinas.”  But as I showed above, by citing specific passages, Johnson does in fact deny this in his book.  (Johnson says: “I actually wonder if Feser read or merely skimmed my book.”  Well, I did read it, every word.  But I’m starting to wonder if Johnson read it!)

6.

In my review, I noted that some of the things Johnson doesn’t like about Aquinas’s account of the Trinity derive, not from the thesis of divine “immobility,” but rather from the doctrine of divine simplicity, which Johnson himself accepts.  In response, Johnson writes:“I go to great lengths to explain the difference between the two forms of simplicity – a simplicity rooted in philosophy (which I reject,) and a simplicity rooted in Scripture (which I accept).”

But this is no answer at all.  For one thing, what matters in the present context is not thesource of the idea of divine simplicity (whether philosophy or scripture) but rather the content of the idea.  For it is the content of the doctrine of divine simplicity that some claim to be incompatible with Trinitarianism.  For another thing, though Johnson would claim that the content he would give to the notion of divine simplicity is different from the content Aquinas would give to it, what we need to know is exactly howsuch a difference would make a difference to the specific issue at hand.  For example, exactly why is Trinitarianism compatible with Johnson’s conception of simplicity if it is not compatible with Aquinas’s?  (At least part of the answer, for Johnson, would be that Aquinas attaches the idea of “immobility,” in Johnson’s sense of the word, to divine simplicity.  But I have already shown that Aquinas is not in fact committed to “immobility” in that sense.)

7.

I noted in my review that Johnson merely asserts, without argument, that the Bible does not recognize the legitimacy of natural theology, but only of what he calls “natural revelation.”  In his response, he essentially just repeats this question-begging assertion.  He cites passages like the following:

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. (Psalms 19:1) 

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.  So they are without excuse.  (Romans 1:19-20)

But there is (contrary to what Johnson alleges) nothing in such passages that entails that the knowledge of God we get from nature is entirely non-inferential and does not require argumentation.

8.

Johnson admits that his assertion that “Plotinus didn’t leave behind any writings” (p. 75) was an error. 

9.

Johnson also admits that he made a “copy/paste error” when purporting to quote the text of the Second Way from Summa TheologiaeI.2.3, at p. 101 of his book.  Unfortunately, he also claims that “the substance of what was communicated by Aquinas was not compromised” by this error.  But that is not the case.  The passage Johnson wrongly presented as the text of the Second Way from the Summacontains the following lines:

If the series of efficient causes extends ad infinitum into the past, then there would be no things existing now.  That is plainly false (i.e., there are things existing now that came about through efficient causes).  Therefore efficient causes do not extend ad infinitum into the past.

End quote.  Not only is this not what the Second Way says, it directly contradictsAquinas’s view that it cannot be proved through philosophical arguments that accidentally ordered series of efficient causes do not extend ad infinitum into the past.  (That is, after all, why, as we saw above, Aquinas thinks that philosophical arguments cannot prove that the universe had a beginning in time.)  This is a pretty egregious error of scholarship.

Johnson sums up his response by emphasizing once again his main theme that “divine immobility is incompatible with the God of the Bible.”  But as I have shown, Aquinas is not committed in the first place to “divine immobility” in Johnson’s sense.  His main objection, like his other criticisms, is directed at a straw man.

Johnson contra Aquinas

My review of Jeffrey D. Johnson’s book The Failure of Natural Theology: A Critical Appraisal of the Philosophical Theology of Thomas Aquinas appears in the March issue of First Things.  You can read it online here.

McDowell’s Aristotelian near miss

John McDowell’s paper “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space” made a big impression on me in graduate school, around the same time his influential book Mind and World was published.  Like a lot of philosophers, I thought there was something deep going on in McDowell’s work, though (also like a lot of philosophers, I think) I was not quite sure what to make of it.  Part of this has to do with the difficulty of McDowell’s style, but that difficulty reflects, at least in part, the difficulty of the subject matter.  The nature of thought and of experience is so close to us – like the tip of one’s nose, always in one’s field of vision, and thus rarely noticed – that it can be, precisely for that reason, harder to get hold of than the extra-mental world is. 

Hence, other than briefly alluding to his work in my doctoral dissertation, I moved on to other matters in the years immediately after first encountering it.  It wasn’t until years later, after getting hip deep into Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy, that I realized that what was going on in McDowell was a partial rediscovery of an essentially Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of knowledge.  That is not how McDowell himself presents it, though.

The Cartesian prison

One of McDowell’s major themes is an attack on the Cartesian conception of the mind.  I’m not talking about Descartes’s substance dualism, though McDowell does reject that.  What is in view is rather what McDowell describes as follows:

In a fully Cartesian picture, the inner life takes place in an autonomous realm, transparent to the introspective awareness of its subject; the access of subjectivity to the rest of the world becomes correspondingly problematic, in a way that has familiar manifestations in the mainstream of post-Cartesian epistemology…

[It is] the idea of the inner realm as self-standing, with everything within it arranged as it is independently of external circumstances. (“Singular Thought,” pp. 146 and 152)

On this Cartesian picture, our conscious experiences could be exactly as they are, without there actually being any external world corresponding to them (as in Descartes’s scenario where these experiences are hallucinations caused by an evil spirit).  You might think that the worry here is the familiar one that this picture of the mind makes the external world unknowable.  But though that is closer to the point, McDowell is primarily concerned with an even deeper problem, which is that the Cartesian conception makes external reality unthinkable.  It’s not merely that we’re locked in a Cartesian theater, having direct access only to mental representations of the external world, and cannot be certain that there really is anything outside the theater, anything which corresponds to the representations.  It’s also that the Cartesian picture threatens to make it unintelligible how our experiences could count as true representations in the first place – how they could have the intentionalitythey do, how they could so much as stand for or be about external objects (whether or not those objects exist).

The problem is the contingency of the connection between mind and world posited by the Cartesian picture.  Here’s an analogy (mine, not McDowell’s).  Words like “dog” and “cat” have no inherent or necessary connection to dogs and cats.  They are, of themselves, just meaningless strings of shapes or noises (depending on whether they are written or spoken).  The connection of these symbols to the dogs and cats they represent is a matter of convention.  Now, the convention gets set up because our thoughts about dogs and cats do have some kind of necessary connection to the things they are about, and the linguistic symbols inherit this connection by standing in for the thoughts – or so it seems.  But on the Cartesian model of the mind, mental states too have only a contingent connection to external reality.  For, again, the model holds that the mental realm could be exactly as it is even if there were no external world corresponding to it.  So, how do mental states have, in that case, any more power to represent external reality than meaningless strings of shapes or sounds do?  How can they have what philosophers call any “intentional content” at all?

McDowell concludes that “it [is] quite unclear that the fully Cartesian picture is entitled to characterize its inner facts in content-involving terms – in terms of its seeming to one that things are thus and so – at all,” so that the mental realm it posits is “blank or blind” rather than having any genuine intentionality or aboutness (“Singular Thought,” p. 152).  If the Cartesian conception were correct, our own experience would have the character of what William James called, in another context, “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”  It would not even seem to be an experience of a world of tables, chairs, dogs, cats, trees, clouds, and people. 

Note that this has nothing essentially to do with Descartes’s view that the mind is immaterial.  As McDowell emphasizes, modern materialism has inherited this broadly Cartesian conception of the mind and just relocates the mind so conceived in the brain rather than in Descartes’s res cogitans.  It typically retains the idea that there is no inherent connection between mental states and the external objects mental states are said to represent.  It posits a causal correlation between mental representations and external objects (just as Cartesian dualism does) while allowing that the representations might in principle fail to represent the world as it really is – in which case, again, it is hard to see what makes them true representations at all.  Material states no less than states of a res cogitans should, given the Cartesian picture, be “blank or blind” rather presenting the world to us in the way consciousness actually does.

Opening up the mind

Hence McDowell concludes that the Cartesian picture is not correct.  He argues that we ought “to picture the inner and outer realms as interpenetrating, not separated from one another by the characteristically Cartesian divide” (“Singular Thought,” p. 150).  What does that amount to?  McDowell proposes several ways of spelling the idea out.  One of them involves the notion of a singular proposition(also sometimes called a Russellian proposition after Bertrand Russell, who developed the idea).  A singular proposition is a proposition about some particular individual thing, where the thing itself is a constituent of the proposition.  For example, the proposition that the Wilshire Grand Center is the tallest building in Los Angeles will be a singular proposition in this sense if the Wilshire Grand Center itself really is a constituent of that proposition.  (Whether a particular individual thing really can be a constituent of a proposition, and thus whether there really are singular propositions, is a matter of controversy.)

A singular thought (using “thought” here to refer to a psychological episode of the familiar sort) would be a thought whose content is a singular proposition – and thus a thought which has, as a constituent, some particular individual thing.  For example, if I am thinking that the Wilshire Grand Center is the tallest building in Los Angeles, then the Wilshire Grand Center itself would be a constituent of my thought.  On this conception, suggests McDowell, we could take the “inner space” of the mind to extend outward to include such external objects themselves.   And in that case, “there is now no question of a gulf… between the realm of subjectivity and the world of ordinary objects” insofar as “objects themselves can figure in thoughts which are among the contents of the mind” (“Singular Thought,” p. 146).

Another way of spelling out the “interpenetration” of mind and world is developed in Mind and World, where McDowell rejects the idea that there is a sharp divide between the content of a thought, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the facts in the world that the thought is about.  He writes:

[T]here is no ontological gap between the sort of thing one can mean, or generally the sort of thing one can think, and the sort of thing that can be the case.  When one thinks truly, what one thinks iswhat is the case… [T]here is no gap between thought, as such, and the world. (Mind and World, p. 27)

Commenting on passages like these, Tim Thornton attributesto McDowell an “identity theory of thoughts and facts.”  And if thoughts and facts are identical, that would (so the argument goes) rule out a conception of the mind that makes it “blank or blind,” devoid of intentionality.  We cannot say that the contents of the mind would be just as they are, independently of whether there was an external world, if those contents just are the same things as the facts comprising the external world.

Developing the argument of Donald Davidson’s classic paper “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” McDowell rejects the conception of experience as devoid of structure or intelligibility apart from some conceptual scheme we impose upon it from outside, as if the former could exist apart from the latter.  Only what is already conceptualized could ever serve as a rational justification for anything, so that if experience was, considered by itself, devoid of conceptual structure, it could never play any justificatory role in anything we believe.  What McDowell calls “the space of reasons” (a phrase he picks up from Wilfrid Sellars) – the order of logically interrelated concepts, beliefs, and inferences – would thus float free of empirical reality.

The right way to think about human experience, then, is as already, of its nature, saturated with conceptual content, and the right way to think about the external world that experience reveals to us is as itself having a structure that corresponds to this conceptual content.  McDowell contrasts this with the “disenchanted” view of nature we’ve inherited from early modern science, and from empiricists like Hume.  He writes:

[W]e cannot suppose that intelligible order has completely emigrated from the world we take to be mirrored by intellectual states… We have to suppose that the world has an intelligible structure, matching the structure in the space of logos possessed by accurate representations of it.  The disenchantment Hume applauds can seem to point to a conception of nature as an ineffable lump, devoid of structure or order.  But we cannot entertain such a conception.  If we did, we would lose our right to the idea that the world of nature is a world at all (something that breaks up into things that are the case), let alone the world (everything that is the case).  (“Two Sorts of Naturalism,” in Virtues and Reasons, edited by Hursthouse, Lawrence, and Quinn, at p. 160)

But it isn’t really science itself that presents us with such a picture of nature.  It is the interpretation of science put forward by scientism and reductionistic brands of naturalism that does so.  “This kind of naturalism tends to represent itself as educated common sense, but it is really only primitive metaphysics” (Mind and World, p. 82).

Kant or Aristotle?

Even those sympathetic to McDowell’s position might have at least two concerns about it.  The first is that it seems to rely too much on metaphorical ways of characterizing the position McDowell wants to put in place of Cartesianism and reductionistic naturalism.  How exactly should we cash out talk about the mind and world “interpenetrating”?  What is the nature of the “inner space” of the mind, given that it is not like the literal space that material objects outside the mind occupy?  What exactly does the Wilshire Grand Center being a constituent of my thought about it amount to?  Obviously it is not a constituent of my thought in the same sense in which it is, say, a constituent of a certain city block in Los Angeles. 

A second concern is that attributing to the world something like the conceptual structure of thought, and making external things constituents of the mind, might seem to entail a kind of idealism that collapses the world into the mind.  This worry is only exacerbated by the fact that McDowell finds inspiration in Kant and post-Kantian idealism, albeit he does not characterize his own position as idealist.

Now, as I said at the beginning, it seems to me that there are, in McDowell’s work, clear gestures in the direction of what amounts to an Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the mind’s relation to the world.  And resources from that conception would, I suggest, rescue McDowell from the two difficulties I’ve referred to.  To be sure, McDowell does cite Aristotle prominently in his exposition of his preferred conception of nature.  But his focus is on Aristotle’s ethicsas a model of how to conceive of human beings in a way that is broadly naturalistic without being reductionist.  He does not make use of the relevant Aristotelian epistemological and metaphysical ideas.

The key theme here is the Aristotelian-Thomistic idea that when the intellect understands something, it takes on the thing’s form– the same form that, when informing a bit of matter, makes of that matter a particular instance of the kind of thing the form defines.  For example, when the intellect understands what it is to be a triangle, it takes on the form of a closed plane figure with three straight sides, which is the same form that, when taken on by a bit of ink, makes of that ink a triangle. 

The reason the intellect does not itself become a triangle by virtue of taking on this form is that it takes on the form without matter, and a triangle is a kind of material thing.  Hylemorphism – the thesis that physical substances are composites of form and matter – is thus a crucial metaphysical component of this epistemological story.  It makes it possible to say that the intellect is identical to the objects of thought formally, but not materially.  Why is this important?

Not too long ago I reviewed Raymond Tallis’s book Logos: The Mystery of How We Make Sense of the World.  Tallis notes how modern attempts to close the divide between mind and world opened up by Descartes tend either to collapse the mind into the world (as reductionistic naturalism does) or to collapse the world into the mind (as idealism does).  The trick to avoiding both extremes, he rightly argues, is to preserve the distinction between mind and world without opening up the unbridgeable gapbetween them that the Cartesian picture entails.  We need, as Tallis says, to preserve “connection-across-separation.”  As I noted in the review, the Aristotelian-Thomistic position does precisely this.  Because a thought and the thing thought about are formally identical, the mind has such an intimate connection with the world that there is no epistemic and semantic gap of the kind deplored by thinkers like McDowell.  But because they are nevertheless not materially identical, there is no collapse of mind and world.

McDowell is by no means unfamiliar with this account.  In his collection Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars, he discusses it in an essay with the intriguing and playful title “Sellars’s Thomism.”  I say “playful” because Sellars was, of course, hardly a Thomist.  But like McDowell, he was keen on making dialogue partners of great thinkers of the past, including those with very different philosophical commitments than his own, and Aquinas was no exception.  McDowell discusses the use Sellars made in his essay “Being and Being Known” of the Aristotelian-Thomistic account of knowledge I just sketched. 

Sellars’s concern was the relationship between the intentionality of thought and the meaningfulness of language, and he thinks there is an interesting connection between his own views about these matters and Aquinas’s notion of the “mental word.”  McDowell tells us that his main concern in his own essay is with understanding Sellars’s use of Aquinas rather than with Aquinas himself, but he does suggest that Sellars’s naturalistic presuppositions lead him to misread Aquinas.  And he closes the essay with the following paragraph:

Now Aquinas, writing before the rise of modern science, is immune to the attractions of that norm-free conception of nature.  And we should not be too quick to regard this as wholly a deficiency in his thinking.  (Of course in all kinds of ways it is a deficiency.)  There is a live possibility that, at least in one respect, Thomistic philosophy of mind is superior to Sellarsian philosophy of mind, just because Aquinas lacks the distinctively modern conception of nature that underlies Sellars's thinking.  Sellars allows his philosophy to be shaped by a conception that is characteristic of his own time, and so misses an opportunity to learn something from the past.  (p. 255)

All the same, McDowell himself mostly just describes the Aristotelian-Thomistic position in the course of discussing Sellars’s treatment of it, rather than either endorsing or rejecting it.  Nor (as far as I know) does he discuss the matter elsewhere.  So, McDowell’s salutary critique of Cartesianism seems, for all its strengths, insufficiently attentive to an important approach to the matter – a pre-Cartesian perspective, which is importantly different from the post-Cartesian perspective represented by the thinkers who have most influenced McDowell (Kant, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Davidson, et al.).

Related posts:

Truth as a transcendental

Fodor and Aquinas on the Extended Mind Thesis

Putnam on causation, intentionality, and Aristotle

Putnam and analytical Thomism, Part I

If you’ve been missing links

David S. Oderberg asks “Is Prime Matter Energy?” in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.  Also, Oderberg on the “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion , edited by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro.

At the Claremont Review of Books, Joseph M. Bessette sets out a critique of the Eastman memos.

Aidan Nichols on the Herbert McCabe he knew, at The Lamp.

At UnHerd, Thomas Fazi and Toby Green make the left-wing case against vaccine mandates.  At The Tablet, Alex Gutentag on the continual, unacknowledged, shifts in expert opinion about Covid-19.  “Mandatory panic”: Freddie deBoer on Covid as the liberal 9/11.  A Johns Hopkins University study concludes that lockdowns did no good and caused much damage.

One famed cartoonist’s graphic novel about another.  Forbes on the strange story of The Strange Death of Alex Raymond.  At The Nation, J. Hoberman reviewsPaul Hirsch’s Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism. 

Tim Crane on why science can’t state all the facts, at IAI.

At The European Conservative, Hélène de Lauzun on the myth that medieval Europeans believed the Earth to be flat.

James Dominic Rooney on “Being a ‘not-quite-Buddhist theist,’” in Religious Studies.

At Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Bryan Reece reviewsDavid Charles’ book The Undivided Self: Aristotle and the ‘Mind-Body’ Problem.

At Substack, Richard Hanania on why liberals have come to view Russia as the Great Satan.

John Tierney on alcohol and civilization, at City Journal.

Thomas Chatterton Williams on encountering Thomas Sowell, at AIER.

Don Devine on the conservative debate over John Locke, at The American Spectator.

Cathy Young on when the transgender movement jumped the shark, at Arc Digital.  At Areo, Richard Dawkins on why sex is pretty damn binary.  Philosopher and U.S. Army veteran Michael Robillard on transgenderism in the military.

New papers by Thomas Pink: “Final Causation”and “On Dignitatis Humanae: A Reply to Thomas Storck.”

At The Postliberal Order, Chad Pecknold on the therapists of decline and Patrick Deneen on conservatism as hospice care.

Francis Sempa on Spengler, Toynbee, Burnham, and the decline of the West, at The University Bookman.  At The New Criterion, Andrew Roberts considers what a world without the West would have been like.

In Religious Studies, Enric Gel asks: “How many and why? A question for Graham Oppy that classical theism can answer.”

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus at 100: a symposium at IAI.

A conference on Second Scholasticism, Analytical Metaphysics, and Christian Apologeticswas hosted by the Catholic Theological Faculty in Prague last October, with presentations by Gyula Klima, Michael Gorman, and many others.  Via YouTube, you can still watch the first, second, and third sessions.

The Pull Request interviews historian Niall Ferguson: part 1 and part 2.

At 3:16, Richard Marshall interviews Benjamin Lipscomb about his book The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics.  The book is reviewed at Prospect.  Thomas Nagel comments in the London Review of Books.

On the Classical Theism Podcast, John DeRosa interviews James Dolezal about the Trinity and divine simplicity, Chris Tomaszewski about divine simplicity and William Lane Craig, and John Knasas about Aquinas’s metaphysics.

The story behind Steely Dan's “Rikki Don't Lose That Number,” at Far Out.  Vulture on how the Eagles’ Don Henley almost did vocals for Steely Dan’s “Peg.”

Yujin Nagasawa is interviewed at What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? 

Commonweal on Pope Pius XII and John Courtney Murray.  At Eerdword, Matthew Levering discusseshis new book The Abuse of Conscience: A Century of Catholic Moral Theology.

At UnHerd, philosopher Arif Ahmed on how our universities became sheep factories.  At Spiked, Ahmed on how Cambridge University uncancelled Jordan Peterson.  At the National Post, Peterson on why he is no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto.

Connor Grubaugh on Hannah Arendt on anti-racism as a totalitarian ideology, at the Tablet.  Critical Race Theory indoctrination: the kids don’t like it, reports Robby Soave at Reason.  John McWhorter, author of Woke Racism, is interviewed about the book and about Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi.  At The Upheaval, N. S. Lyons argues that woke insanity is nowhere close to being over.

Australian Catholic University has launched the Ethics Finder website.  A video explains.

At The Spectator, Sam Leith argues that the modern economy is built on addiction.