Edward Feser's Blog, page 28

Ioannidis on the politicization of science

Like other academics, I first became aware of John Ioannidis through his influential 2005 paper “Why Most Published Research Findings are False.”  That essay was widely praised as a salutary reminder from one scientist to his fellows of the need for their field to be self-critical.  With the COVID-19 pandemic, Ioannidis would become far more widely known, this time for expressing skepticism about some of the scientific claims being made about the virus and the measures taken to deal with it.  His warnings were in the same spirit as that of his earlier work, and presented in the same measured and reasonable manner – but this time they were not so warmly received.  In a new essay at The Tablet, Ioannidis reflects on the damage that has been done to the norms of scientific research as politics has corrupted it during the pandemic.

The specific norms Ioannidis has in mind are, he says, “the Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism.”  The reference is to an influential account of scientific method proposed by sociologist Robert Merton.  Science should be communal in the sense that research ought to be communicated to and shared with all scientists.  It should be universal in the sense of being judged by objective and impersonal criteria.  It should be disinterested in the sense that research should be pursued for its own sake rather than for the purpose of promoting some political agenda or personal aggrandizement.  It should be skeptical in the sense that scientists should make testable claims and welcome critical evaluations of their research.

Ioannidis notes several respects in which these norms have been violated over the last year and a half.  I want to call attention to two of his points in particular: the deleterious role that social media have played, and the damage that the politicization of science has done to science itself and to public health. 

The first is not entirely the fault of scientists.  Over the course of the pandemic, people of all political persuasions have confidently asserted that “the science” says this or says that, when in fact most of them have not read what scientists themselves have written and wouldn’t know where to find it if they wanted to.  Rather, what they know is what politicians and journalists have claimed about what “the science” says.  Worse, they know the simplified versions of what politicians and journalists have said that they find at Twitter, Facebook, and the like.  The doubly indirect nature of this knowledge of the scientific research already entails significant distortions.  Politicians and journalists of all stripes have biases, lack relevant expertise, etc. and this inevitably distorts their presentation of scientific findings.  And when their own presentations are reduced to sound bites by social media, there is bound to be further distortion. 

But it’s worse even than that.  For one thing, social media do not merely oversimplify complex issues.  They positively foster irrational habits of thought – snap judgments, snark and one-upmanship in place of dispassionate debate, groupthink, and so on.  And too many scientists active on social media have succumbed to these temptations, which erodes the Mertonian norm of disinterestedness.  Ioannidis writes:

Anonymous and pseudonymous abuse has a chilling effect; it is worse when the people doing the abusing are eponymous and respectable.  The only viable responses to bigotry and hypocrisy are kindness, civility, empathy, and dignity.  However, barring in-person communication, virtual living and social media in social isolation are poor conveyors of these virtues.

End quote.  Then there is the further distortion that follows from the political and financial interests that the owners of social media have in pushing certain scientific claims and censoring criticism of them.  As Ioannidis says:

Big Tech companies, which gained trillions of dollars in cumulative market value from the virtual transformation of human life during lockdown, developed powerful censorship machineries that skewed the information available to users on their platforms… Organized skepticism was seen as a threat to public health.  There was a clash between two schools of thought, authoritarian public health versus science – and science lost.

End quote.  We are constantly told to “follow the science,” but what we are given is not science itself but science as reflected in the funhouse mirror of contemporary media.  And everyone knows it.  The Big Tech companies and their allies in science who bemoan the skepticism that non-experts show toward pandemic-related scientific claims largely have themselves to blame for it. 

Regarding the damage that the politicization of science has done, Ioannidis says:

Politics had a deleterious influence on pandemic science.  Anything any apolitical scientist said or wrote could be weaponized for political agendas.  Tying public health interventions like masks and vaccines to a faction, political or otherwise, satisfies those devoted to that faction, but infuriates the opposing faction.  This process undermines the wider adoption required for such interventions to be effective.  Politics dressed up as public health not only injured science.  It also shot down participatory public health where people are empowered, rather than obligated and humiliated.

End quote.  The importance of these points cannot be overstated.  Genuine science must of its nature be coolly dispassionate, appeal to our reason, and eschew partisanship.  When you try to browbeat people into accepting some scientific claim, insult them for raising questions about it, loudly make a political statement out of adherence to it, etc., then you are inevitably only going to increasepeople’s doubts about its scientific status.  For if it really had the evidence and the best arguments on its side, what need would there be for the pressure tactics? 

Next to the enormous destruction caused by pointless lockdowns, the political factionalism Ioannidis refers to has been, in my view, the most depressing thing about the response to the virus.  Almost from the beginning, both sides have been reacting more to each other than to the facts.  Attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccines are the latest example.  On the Left, some of the same people who were skeptical of the vaccines when Trump was in office and working to fast-track them are now insisting that everyone take them and condemn all reservations about them as unscientific.  Some who indignantly claim to favor sovereignty over one’s body when abortion is in question now favor making the vaccines mandatory.  Some of them talk as if unvaccinated people who get sick or die are getting what they deserve, though they would never show such hatefulness toward people who become ill as a result of eating too much or risky sexual behavior. 

On the conservative side, some who had no problem with the vaccines when Trump was working to get them developed quickly now regard them as if they arose as part of a sinister left-wing plot.  The Catholic Church has long taught that the use of vaccines developed using cell lines originally derived from aborted fetuses can be justifiable under certain circumstances.  But some conservative Catholics, though they had no qualms about this teaching when it was promulgated under popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, now claim that use of the COVID-19 vaccines necessarily conflicts with opposition to abortion – even though (as the CDF, the USCCB, and conservativeand traditionalistCatholic scholars have noted) the same reasoning that the Church endorsed under those earlier popes applies to the COVID-19 vaccines too.  (My own view is that of the CDF – that use of the vaccines can be justifiable, but that they also ought to be voluntary.  Catholic readers who suppose that the vaccines cannot be justified might want to read this, this, this, and this.)

Each side is, in my view, largely reacting in kneejerk fashion to the other.  This is no more rational or defensible when right-wingers do it than when left-wingers do.  However, it is the Left that dominates the commanding heights in academia, journalism, and popular culture.  When the left politicizes science, as it manifestly has done through the course of the pandemic, it has itself to blame for sparking a reaction and generating the skepticism about science that it decries.

Related reading:

Scientism: America’s State Religion

Dupré on the ideologizing of science

Grisez on balancing health against other considerations

Preventive war and quarantining the healthy

Lockdowns versus social justice

The rule of lawlessness

The experts have no one to blame but themselves

What “the science” is saying this week

The lockdown is no longer morally justifiable

The lockdown and appeals to authority

The burden of proof is on those who impose burdens

The lockdown’s loyal opposition

Some thoughts on the COVID-19 crisis

Make-believe matter

Materialism can at first blush seem to have a more commonsensical and empirical character than Cartesian dualism.  The latter asks you to believe in a res cogitans that is unobservable in principle.  The former – so it might appear – merely asks you to confine your belief to what you already know from everyday experience.  You pick up an apple and bite into it.  Its vibrant color, sweet taste and odor, feel of solidity, and the crunch it makes all make it seem as real as anything could be.  Anyone who says that all that exists are things like that might, whether or not you agree with him, at least seem to have the evidence of the senses in his corner. 

The trouble is that that is not what the materialist is saying.  The matter to which he would reduce everything is not the matter of common sense, not the hard earth of daily experience.  It is instead a highly abstract theoretical construct which – just like Descartes’ res cogitans – is not and indeed cannot be known directly via perception (nor, unlike the res cogitans, by introspection either).  Moreover, it is a conception the materialist has inherited from Cartesian dualism itself.  And it is that conception of matter, rather than the Cartesian’s commitment to a non-empirical res cogitans, that has made it so difficult for Cartesians and materialists alike to account for how conscious awareness relates to the physical world.

Longtime readers of this blog will recognize these themes.  They are also among the themes of philosopher William Barrett’s interesting 1986 book Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer.  Barrett writes:

Oddly enough, the trouble with the Cartesian dualism comes from the side of the body.  The body, as Descartes conceives it, is not such that it can accommodate the soul.  It cannot, so to speak, be penetrated by the soul; it can only remain in external contact with it.  This body is not the physical body, our physical body, as we know it in our daily intimacy with it.  It is the body of physics – that is, of the science of physics; a piece of matter, and particularly as Descartes conceived of matter.  But the body of physics is remote and unknown to us and is not the body we live in in our day-to-day existence.  The body we know is rarely sharply distinguishable from the soul: in our moods and feelings we are not often sure what part is physical and what not.  There is no sharp dividing line between.  The life of flesh and blood is particularly focused about the feelings and emotions.  So long as there is no adequate conception of the concrete or lived body, our theories of mind cannot deal adequately with the life of feeling. (pp. 19-20)

Let’s pause over the second half of this passage.  Consider the feelings and emotions people experience every day – the warmth in the throat that results from a swig of hot coffee, a twinge of pain in the knee or lower back, an itch from a rash that won’t go away, a pinch from tight clothing, the twinge of excitement that spikes in the chest upon being startled, the tightness and heaviness in the chest that can result from worry or depression, the uncomfortable fullness that results from having overeaten, the pressure of having too full a bladder or colon, the agitation of sexual arousal, anxiety, fear, or anger, and so on.  All of this is experienced as bodily.  It has the feel of knowing a particular bit of matter from the inside, as it were, from a place deep within the marrow and viscera.  If you were unacquainted with the way modern philosophers talk and one of them told you that these features of daily life were “mental” or “in the mind,” you would suppose that what he meant is that they were somehow unreal or imaginary, which sounds crazy.

But that they are in the mind rather than in the body is precisely what post-Cartesian philosophers, whether dualist or materialist, do say.  They take matter to be devoid of anything but primary qualities such as size, position in space, motion, and in general what can be given a purely mathematical characterization.  Anything else is treated as merely a projection of consciousness.  Hence the redness, sweetness, fragrance, and crunchy sound of the apple are taken to be nothing more than the qualia of our experience of the apple, and not to correspond to anything in the apple itself.  And in the same way, warmth, pain, itches, twinges, sensations of pressure, tightness, fullness, arousal, and the like are taken to exist only as the qualia of our conscious experience of the body, and to reflect nothing in the intrinsic nature of the body itself.  The matter of the apple and that of the body alike are taken to comprise nothing more than colorless, odorless, tasteless particles moving through space.  The purely mathematical description of matter afforded by particle physics exhausts their nature. 

Hence, on this view, introspection no more reveals to you the nature of the flesh than perception reveals to you the nature of the apple.  Apple and flesh alike are strictly unobservable.  What we perceive and introspect are really just the mind’s representations of the apple or the flesh, and not the real McCoy.  Physical theory, as interpreted through a mechanistic philosophy of nature, tells us their real nature. 

Now, Berkeley had a field day with this picture of matter and our knowledge of it.  Though he famously denied the reality of matter, the matter he denied was already a pretty ghostly thing anyway – matter stripped of all the concrete reality perception and common sense attribute to it, leaving only a desiccated mathematical husk.  And Berkeley’s point was in part that there is nothing left for the mathematical structure described by physics to be the structure of when all of those concrete features are abstracted away. 

We are accustomed to treating Berkeley’s philosophy as slightly (or more than slightly) mad, when the truth is that he was merely drawing out the implications of the mad conception of nature bequeathed to him by Descartes, Locke, and company.  As Barrett writes:

The real world of our common experience contains trees, grass, singing birds; houses and other people; chairs and tables; etc., etc.  In our daily life these are evidently and substantially there, and not at all “subjective” appearances of something else; and for Berkeley, too, they are evidently and substantially there.  It is Locke who would undermine their reality, and make it secondary to some underlying abstractions of physics.  And here Berkeley turns Locke’s own empiricist weapons back upon their originator.  (p. 39)

Specifically, Locke and company had appealed to the way that the appearances of color, sound, and the like are relative to the perceiver as a reason to judge them mere secondary rather than primary qualities of matter.  Our ideas of motion, position in space, etc. correspond to something really out there in mind-independent reality, but our ideas of color, sound, etc. do not.  Berkeley argued that the appeal to relativity can be deployed against all the so-called primary qualities as well.  And that includes what the Newtonians naively took to remain objectively out there after the mechanists were done with their desiccation of matter.  Here Barrett is worth quoting at length:

Here Berkeley introduces the principle of relativity in a bold and thoroughgoing form that was not to emerge again until Einstein in the twentieth century.

The motion or rest of material particles had been taken as absolute by Locke because there was the absolute space of Newton in which they moved or remained at rest.  And here Berkeley performs one of his most audacious acts of analysis, as he seeks to pull down one of the sacred pillars of the Newtonian world.  Space – the absolute space of Newton, container of all that is – is not given as a reality in and of itself.  It is built up as a high-level abstraction from our perceptions of touch and vision.  It is derived from experience; it is not the container of experience.  We invert the proper order by taking the abstraction as a concrete reality.

In sum, the whole world of matter, which Locke would make the substratum, or underlying reality, for the world of our common experience, is in fact a high-level intellectual construction.  It is a case of misplaced concreteness, as the philosopher A. N. Whitehead in our century has called it: the abstract concepts of physics are taken as ultimately concrete in place of the ordinary world of common experience.  Berkeley stands with this ordinary world, and he consistently reassures his ordinary reader that he is on his side against the materialism of sophisticated philosophers.  (p. 40)

The trouble, of course, is that Berkeley himself is not entirelythe friend of common sense, to say the least.  For he denies that tables, chairs, and the like continue to be there when no one perceives them, and that thesis is no part of common sense.  Like common sense, Berkeley holds that there is no real distinction between primary and secondary qualities.  But whereas common sense takes all of these qualities to be out there independent of the mind, Berkeley takes them all to be equally mind-dependent.  Like his philosophical predecessors, he buys into the basic move of the moderns, which is to relocate the qualities of physical objects into the mind.  It’s just that, unlike those predecessors, he relocates all of them there.  Hence even Berkeley is in fact insufficiently radical in his critique of his predecessors, precisely because he is insufficiently reactionary. 

Barrett makes the important point (at pp. 40-41) that the contemporary materialist’s obsession with the computer model of the mind in no way remedies the tendency of the modern conception of matter to collapse matter into mind.  For the notion of a computer is itself the notion of something essentially mind-dependent.  Nothing counts as hardware or software apart from an intelligence which has designed them to function as such.  (This is a theme that John Searle would go on to develop in detail a few years later, in argumentation that I have discussed and defended at length elsewhere.)

When I say that the moderns either partially or wholly move the qualities of physical objects into the mind, what I mean, to be more precise, is that they move them into the intellect (albeit the empiricists on the list, unlike Descartes, collapse the intellect and the imagination, but put that aside for present purposes).  That is why Descartes notoriously takes non-human animals to be insensate automata.  They lack rationality, hence they lack a res cogitans.  Thus, since for Descartes the only other kind of substance there is is res extensa, which is pure extension devoid of any consciousness, that is what animals must be. 

This too is contrary to the commonsense conception of matter.  Consider again what you experience in your own body, and experience precisely as bodily phenomena – sensations of warmth, flashes of pain, twinges of excitement, arousal, fear, and anger, and so on.  Common sense takes something like all this to exist in dogs, horses, bears, and other non-human animals, even though these creatures lack rationality and are entirely corporeal in nature.  For again, from the point of view of common sense, these features are bodily in nature, not mere representations in the intellect, so that other bodily but non-intellectual creatures are as capable of exhibiting them as we are.

Some contemporary philosophers, cognizant of the problems with the early modern mechanistic and mathematicized conception of matter, have reinserted into matter the qualities common sense attributes to it, but then fallaciously draw the conclusion that this entails panpsychism.  They are making a mistake similar to Berkeley’s, and like him they are insufficiently radical precisely because they are insufficiently reactionary, accepting as they do too much of the modern conception of matter they claim to be rejecting.  For like the early moderns, they take the qualities of ordinary physical objects to be partially or wholly mind-dependent, i.e. to be identified with the qualia of conscious experience.  Unlike the early moderns, they take these qualities to exist in physical objects themselves, and not just in our minds.  The result is that they conclude, absurdly, that there must be something analogous to conscious awareness even in rocks, dirt, tables, chairs, etc.  (The poor moderns.  They just can’t do anything right!)

Another part of the problem is that they implicitly buy into the modern reductionist idea that all matter is essentially of the same one type.  Hence if there really is consciousness in the matter that makes up non-human animal bodies, then (the fallacious implicit inference goes) there must be something like it too in rocks, dirt, tables, chairs, etc.

The sober, boring truth – enshrined in Aristotelian philosophy and common sense alike – is that some kinds of purely material substances (namely non-human animals) are conscious, and others (like rocks and dirt) are not.  The latter really do possess qualities like color as common sense conceives of it, but that does not entail panpsychism, because (contra Descartes, Berkeley, and company) those qualities are not entirely mind-dependent.  Not all matter is reducible to one, lowest-common-denominator type, and none of it is reducible to the purely mathematical description afforded by physics.  That description is merely an abstraction from concrete physical reality.  It captures part of that reality, to be sure, but not the whole of it. 

To think otherwise is somewhat like thinking that “the average person” of the statistician really exists, but that the various individual people we meet from day to day do not.  The reality is that those individuals do exist, and that the notion of “the average person,” while it captures important aspects of reality and is therefore useful for certain purposes, is a mere abstraction that does not correspond to any concrete entity.  And in the same way, the concrete physical objects of everyday experience also really do exist, whereas the mathematical description afforded by physics, despite its undeniable predictive and technological utility, does not capture the entirety of concrete reality.  To pretend otherwise is, we can agree with Berkeley, a kind of make-believe. 

Related posts:

Metaphysical taxidermy

Aristotle’s Revenge and naïve color realism

The particle collection that fancied itself a physicist

Materialism subverts itself

Concretizing the abstract

Chomsky on the mind-body problem

Nagel and his critics, Part VIII

Schrödinger, Democritus, and the paradox of materialism

Aquinas on humor and social life

In Summa Theologiae II-II.168.2-4, Aquinas discusses the essential role that play and humor have in human life.  They are necessary for the health of the individual, insofar as in their absence the mind becomes weary and tense.  And they are necessary for the health of social life, which would be similarly strained without the ability to laugh and play together.  The virtue of wittiness is the character trait that facilitates this human need.  Naturally, as in every other area of human life, we can sin by excess, as when we joke in an inappropriate manner or at an inappropriate time, or are in our general manner of life insufficiently serious about serious matters.  But we can also sin by deficiency, by being insufficiently pleasant and willing to engage in play with our fellows.  Aquinas writes:

Anything conflicting with reason in human action is vicious.  It is against reason for a man to be burdensome to others, by never showing himself agreeable to others or being a kill-joy or wet blanket on their enjoyment.  And so Seneca says, “Bear yourself with wit, lest you be regarded as sour or despised as dull.”  Now those who lack playfulness are sinful, those who never say anything to make you smile, or are grumpy with those who do.  (ST II-II.168.4, Gilby translation)

Addressing the question whether “comedians” or “play-actors” sin by excess by virtue of devoting themselves entirely to mirth, Aquinas answers in the negative:

As stated, play is necessary for the intercourse of human life.  Now whatever is useful to human intercourse may have a lawful employment ascribed to it.  Wherefore the occupation of play-actors, the object of which is to cheer the heart of man, is not unlawful in itself; nor are they in a state of sin provided that their playing be moderated, namely that they use no unlawful words or deeds in order to amuse, and that they do not introduce play into undue matters and seasons.   And although in human affairs, they have no other occupation in reference to other men, nevertheless in reference to themselves, and to God, they perform other actions both serious and virtuous, such as prayer and the moderation of their own passions and operations, while sometimes they give alms to the poor.  Wherefore those who maintain them in moderation do not sin but act justly, by rewarding them for their services. (ST II-II.168.3)

In light of such considerations, we can see that the current tendency toward the politicization of every aspect of social life, including even sports and entertainment, is evil.  And it would remain evil even if the political causes in question were themselves good (as, these days, they typically are not).  You cannot have the fellow-feeling required for a society to hold together without some area of life in which disputes are put on hold, tensions are eased, and common goods are enjoyed.  In American life, sports, popular culture, holidays, and the like have long performed that function, especially as the country has gotten more secular.  But as “wokeness” has extended its tentacles into even these areas of life, there is little if anything left to do the job. 

In the case of humor, this has manifested itself in the prevalence of “clapter” comedy, where the point is not to be funny and to get the audience to laugh, but rather to signal your purported political virtue and invite the audience to show theirs by applauding.  The result is not to mitigate social tensions but to exacerbate them.  Such “comedians” no longer function to smooth social interaction between people of different opinions, values, and backgrounds.  Rather, their purpose is to lead one faction in denigrating another.  It’s the “Two Minutes Hate” of Orwell’s 1984, but with strained chuckles rather than full-throated shrieks. 

This is inevitable given the nature of woke politics and its paranoid vision of human life.  When everything is interpreted as “oppression,” “micro-aggressions,” and the like, everything becomes deadly serious.  Even comedy is no laughing matter.  Envy is often said to be the only sin that gives the sinner no pleasure.  That envy is the deep root of wokeness is evidenced by, among other things, the fact that the woke are so humorless, angry, and miserable – that the wokester is, to borrow Aquinas’s words, “burdensome,” “grumpy,” a “kill-joy or wet blanket” on the enjoyments of the fellow members of his society.

“Clapter” “comedy” contrasts sharply with the essentially non-partisan approach of late night comics like Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, or even David Letterman in his earlier years.  That style of comedy is often mocked or dismissed today, but it performed the important social function of helping to soften tensions between citizens of diverse values and opinions and shore up a sense of common humanity and citizenship.  Not that Carson et al. saw matters in so highfalutin a way.  They just had the normal, healthy human being’s visceral understanding that not everything is political, and that their audiences were entitled at the end of a long day to relax and have a laugh rather than to be hectored.

However, it is important to emphasize that the point is not that all comedy ought to be non-political, and it is not an essentially “right-wing” point either.  Larry David (for example) is almost always funny, even when his targets are right-of-center.  The reason is that his aim is to be funny rather than to make some political statement, and when such political humor is done well even its targets can (if they have a sense of humor about themselves) appreciate it.  And right-wingers too are certainly capable of being humorless and of politicizing everything.  But it is wokeness rather than any right-wing pathology that is currently in the ascendency in comedy and other areas of mainstream entertainment, as Bill Maher, Joe Rogan, Jerry Seinfeld, and other non-right-wingers have lamented.

Related posts:

Thomas Aquinas, Henry Adams, Steve Martin

Meta-comedy

Is it funny because it’s true?

The comedy keeps coming

Risible animals

Pop culture roundup

Confucius on our times

What is essential to a well-functioning society?  In a famous passage from The Great Learning traditionally attributed to Confucius (551-479 B.C.), the philosopher says:

The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states.  Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families.  Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons.  Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts.  Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts.  Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge.  Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

Things being investigated, knowledge became complete.  Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere.  Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified.  Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated.  Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated.  Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed.  Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy.

From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.  It cannot be, when the root is neglected, that what should spring from it will be well ordered.

End quote.  These words from the great man of the East would be warmly endorsed in the West by ancient thinkers like Plato and Aristotle and medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas.  But they run counter to the modern West’s liberalism, including the libertarian brand of liberalism that too often passes for “conservatism.”  The liberal attitude is that the moral character of individuals does not matter for social order so long as the right rules and institutions are in place.  Part of Confucius’s point, and that of any conservatism worthy of the name, is that rules and institutions are ineffectual without individuals willing to subordinate their desires to them.  And individuals who do not seek the good (so as to “rectify their hearts”) and the true (thus pursuing the “investigation of things”) can neither curb bad desires nor cultivate good ones.  The brute force of legal coercion cannot substitute for this missing moral fiber.  As we read in chapter 2 of The Analects:

The Master said: “Lead them by political maneuvers, restrain them with punishments: the people will become cunning and shameless.  Lead them by virtue, restrain them with ritual: they will develop a sense of shame and a sense of participation.” (Simon Leys translation)

And again:

Someone said to Confucius: “Master, why don’t you join the government?”  The Master said: “In the Documents it is said: ‘Only cultivate filial piety and be kind to your brothers, and you will be contributing to the body politic.’  This is also a form of political action; one need not necessarily join the government.”

And in chapter 12:

The Master said: “I could adjudicate lawsuits as well as anyone.  But I would prefer to make lawsuits unnecessary.” (Leys translation)

In such passages, Confucius reminds us that the personal is the political, not in the totalitarian sense that absorbs the personal up into the political and tries to mold attitudes and actions via state coercion, but on the contrary in the humane sense that devolves the political down to the personal level, in the recognition that social order depends more fundamentally on prevailing morals and mores than on legislation.

In Our Oriental Heritage, the first volume of his famous Story of Civilization series, Will Durant glosses the passage quoted above from The Great Learning as follows:

This is the keynote and substance of the Confucian philosophy; one might forget all other words of the Master and his disciples, and yet carry away with these “the essence of the matter,” and a complete guide to life.  The world is at war, says Confucius, because its constituent states are improperly governed; these are improperly governed because no amount of legislation can take the place of the natural social order provided by the family; the family is in disorder, and fails to provide this natural social order, because men forget that they cannot regulate their families if they do not regulate themselves; they fail to regulate themselves because they have not rectified their hearts – i.e., they have not cleansed their own souls of disorderly desires; their hearts are not rectified because their thinking is insincere, doing scant justice to reality and concealing rather than revealing their own natures; their thinking is insincere because they let their wishes discolor the facts and determine their conclusions, instead of seeking to extend their knowledge to the utmost by impartially investigating the nature of things. (p. 668)

If this analysis applied in Confucius’s day 2,500 years ago, and when Durant wrote these words in 1935, it applies a thousandfold today.  Consider what, specifically, Confucius would regard as among the marks of either a well-ordered character or a disordered one.  Chapter 1 of The Analects expresses what is perhaps the best-known of Confucian themes:

Master You said… “To respect parents and elders is the root of humanity” …

Master Zeng said: “When the dead are honored and the memory of remote ancestors is kept alive, a people’s virtue is at its fullest.”(Leys translation)

Chapter 4 admonishes us as follows:

The Master said: “Do not worry if you are without a position; worry lest you do not deserve a position.  Do not worry if you are not famous; worry lest you do not deserve to be famous.” (Leys translation)

Chapter 12 advises:

The Master said: “The practice of humanity comes down to this: tame the self and restore the rites… The practice of humanity comes from the self, not from anyone else.” (Leys translation)

In chapter 16, we read:

Confucius said, “There are three things which the superior man guards against.  In youth, when the physical powers are not yet settled, he guards against lust.  When he is strong and the physical powers are full of vigor, he guards against quarrelsomeness.  When he is old, and the animal powers are decayed, he guards against covetousness…

There are three things of which the superior man stands in awe.  He stands in awe of the ordinances of Heaven.  He stands in awe of great men.  He stands in awe of the words of sages.  The mean man does not know the ordinances of Heaven, and consequently does not stand in awe of them.  He is disrespectful to great men.  He makes sport of the words of sages.”

And in chapter 17, we’re told:

The Master said: “I detest purple replacing vermilion; I detest popular music corrupting classical music; I detest glib tongues overturning kingdoms and clans…

I cannot abide these people who fill their bellies all day long, without ever using their minds!” (Leys translation)

Needless to say, the modern character type is the opposite of that of which Confucius would approve.  Youthful insolence is esteemed and ancestors and tradition are held in contempt. “Irreverent,” “subversive,” “rebel,” and the like are stock terms of approbation.  Power and fame are prized for their own sakes, regardless of merit.  The self is not tamed but indulged, driven by covetousness, lust, and the filling of the belly.  Tastes become ever more vulgar; the very notions of great men and sages, let alone heavenly ordinances, are sneered at; and popular opinion is molded instead by the glib tongues of a relentlessly cynical, mocking, and quarrelsome commentariat.  Longstanding morals and customs have been shredded and social order increasingly depends instead on legislation, regulation, and the threat of litigation.  Confucius, like Plato in his analysis of democratic egalitarianism, might as well have been describing twenty-first century America.

As hearts are ever further from rectification and thoughts from sincerity, people increasingly conform their ideas about the nature of things to their wishes, rather than conforming their wishes to the nature of things.  Among the consequences is the ideologization of language, so that it distorts reality rather than revealing it and becomes a tool for manipulation rather than rational discourse.  Confucius warned of this too, in a famous passage from chapter 13of The Analects:

Tsze-lu said, “The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you, in order with you to administer the government.  What will you consider the first thing to be done?”  The Master replied, “What is necessary is to rectify names.”  “So! Indeed!” said Tsze-lu. “You are wide of the mark!  Why must there be such rectification?”  The Master said, “How uncultivated you are, Yu!  A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve.  If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.  If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

Unfortunately, we are very far from having a government capable of rectifying names.  Nor could disillusioned citizens trust it to do so if it tried.  One more passage from The Analects, from chapter 12:

Tsze-kung asked about government.  The Master said, “The requisites of government are that there be sufficiency of food, sufficiency of military equipment, and the confidence of the people in their ruler.”  Tsze-kung said, “If it cannot be helped, and one of these must be dispensed with, which of the three should be foregone first?” “The military equipment,” said the Master.  Tsze-kung again asked, “If it cannot be helped, and one of the remaining two must be dispensed with, which of them should be foregone?”  The Master answered, “Part with the food.  From of old, death has been the lot of all men; but if the people have no faith in their rulers, there is no standing for the state.”…

The Duke Ching, of Ch’i, asked Confucius about government.  Confucius replied, “There is government, when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son.”  “Good!” said the duke; “if, indeed, the prince be not prince, the minister not minister, the father not father, and the son not son, although I have my revenue, can I enjoy it?”

End quote.  Ours is indeed an age in which fathers do not act like fathers, and authorities in general do not act like authorities.  They either shirk their duties and flatter the mob, or go to the opposite extreme of exerting power in an arbitrary and despotic way.  But that is, in the long run, inevitable in a liberal polity, where neither citizens nor rulers understand leadership in paternal terms, but rather as merely one more prize to be competed for in the marketplace.  Sovereign individuals get the leaders they deserve – good and hard, as one of our own sages once put it.

Oppy and Feser after-party

After the first exchange Graham Oppy and I had on Cameron Bertuzzi’s show Capturing Christianity two years ago, Cameron hosted an after-show Q & A for his patrons.  He has now made it available to the general public on YouTube.  It runs for over half an hour and ranges over a wide variety of topics – the laws of logic, fundamental particles, divine simplicity and modal collapse, divine freedom, the “what caused God?” objection, dualism versus materialism, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Thomism versus theistic personalism, potentiality versus actuality, and even capital punishment.  Check it out.

You can see the first exchange Graham and I had on Capturing Christianity here, and the second one here.  The debate has continued in print: Graham’s article “On stage one of Feser's ‘Aristotelian proof’” and my article “Oppy on Thomistic cosmological arguments” both appear in the latest issue of the journal Religious Studies. 

Sterba on the problem of evil

Recently my article “The Thomistic Dissolution of the Logical Problem of Evil” appeared in the journal Religions.  It was part of a special issue devoted to critical responses to James Sterba’s book Is a Good God Logically Possible?   Sterba has now replied to his critics.  What follows are some remarks about what he says about my own contribution.  (Keep in mind that what I have to say below presupposes my earlier essay and that I’m not going to repeat here everything I said there.)

Analogical language

Sterba makes five main points.  The first has to do with the Thomistic view that language about God has to be understood in an analogical way.  He writes:

Now Feser recognizes that when we apply predicates to God and ourselves, such as being just or merciful or permitting evil, claiming our assertions are true, we have to be speaking analogically.  Even metaphorical statements made about God… which also purport to be true have to be conveying their truth, when they are true, through nonliteral, analogical language.  Yet what Feser fails to recognize is that I am always using the same analogical language of which he approves, as is illustrated, for example, by my repeated appeal to “the analogy of an ideally just and powerful state” throughout my book.

End quote.  It seems to me that Sterba here misunderstands what Thomists mean by analogy.  For one thing, he at least appears to conflate “analogical” language with “nonliteral” language.  But nonliteral or metaphorical language is only one kind of analogical language, and when Thomists say that we need to understand predications of power, knowledge, goodness, etc. to God in an analogical way, they are not saying that these predications are nonliteral.  They are literal.  They just aren’t univocal.  (On the other hand, and in fairness to Sterba, he does seem to use “metaphorical” in a way that is possibly meant to distinguish it from other kinds of analogical language.  So I’m not certain about whether Sterba does suppose that all analogical language is nonliteral.)

Sterba also seems to conflate (a) using language in an analogical sense with (b) drawing an analogy.  That is also a mistake, as can be seen from the fact that even thinkers who insist that theological language is univocal rather than analogical (such as Scotists) are not saying that we should never draw analogies when talking about God.

Again, the key here is to understand that when Thomists say that language about God is to be understood analogically, they do notmean that it should be understood nonliterally.  They insist that there is a third literalsort of linguistic usage in between the equivocal and univocal uses.  God is, for example, literally powerful, not merely metaphorically powerful.  It’s just that the word “power” doesn’t have exactly the same sense as it does when we say e.g. that a corporate executive is powerful or that a cannon is powerful, even if it doesn’t have an entirely disconnected sense either.

Naturally, this raises questions about exactly what literal but analogical usage involves, and crucial to understanding that is to note the distinction between the analogy of attribution and the analogy of proportionality, and, where the latter is concerned, the further distinction between proper proportionality and improper (or merely metaphorical) proportionality.  I spell out these distinctions in Scholastic Metaphysics, at pp. 256-63, and of course there is a huge literature on the topic.  (Here is a useful primer from Joe Trabbic.)  The point to emphasize for present purposes is that for the Thomist, the key to understanding theological language is the analogy of proper proportionality and, to some extent, the analogy of attribution – and not the analogy of improper or metaphorical proportionality.

Yet the latter is what Sterba seems to have in mind when he talks about “analogical” language.  This is evident not only from his apparent conflation of “analogical” and “nonliteral,” but also from the example he gives.  He says that he is using analogical language when he compares God to “an ideally just and powerful state.”  But God is not literally a state, so that this is a case of merely metaphorical or improper proportionality.  And again, that is not the kind of analogical language that the Thomist has in mind in characterizing theological language as analogical.

There are deep semantic and metaphysical issues here the neglect of which vitiates not only Sterba’s argument, but much that is written today on the problem of evil by theists and atheists alike.

Drawing good out of evil

In my article I appealed to Aquinas’s view that God permits evil to exist because he draws a greater good out of it, and that no amount of evil could possibly outweigh the supreme good of the beatific vision.  Sterba responds:

Here, Feser understands, as do I, the beatific vision to be friendship with God.  However, I also argue that God’s offer of friendship cannot be logically dependent on his permission of horrendous evil consequences because if it were, his power would be impossibly limited.  So, it must always be logically possible for God to offer us his friendship without first permitting horrendous evil consequences of immoral actions to be inflicted on ourselves or anyone else, and if God were all-good, then he would always be doing just that.

End quote.  This seems to me to beg the question.  Thomists, like most other theists, hold that omnipotence does not include the power to do the logically impossible.  And they would also hold that the particular goods that God draws out of the evil that exists would not otherwise be logically possible.  Sterba seems here simply to assume, without argument, that one or both of these suppositions are false. 

In general, Sterba’s approach to the problem of evil both in his reply and his book seems to take for granted a conception of human life that Thomists, and indeed traditional Christian theology in general, simply would not agree with.  In particular, he writes as if determining whether things go well overall for a human being is a matter of determining how they go for him in this life.  But from the point of view of traditional Christian theology, what ultimately matters is the next life, not this one.  This life is merely a preparation for the next.  Hence, to judge the overall quality of a human life requires, most importantly, reference to the afterlife.  If you considered only what happened in this life to, say, the Christian martyrs, you might think they lived among the most unfortunate of lives.  But if instead you consider the reward this gained them in Heaven, they would have to be judged as having the most fortunate of lives.

Of course, the atheist will not agree that there is such a thing as an afterlife.  But the point is that if he simply assumes this as a component of his atheistic argument from evil, then the argument will beg the question.

Sterba also seems to assume that if God exists, there is at least a very strong presumption that there would be no suffering, so that the fact that there is suffering is very surprising and indeed problematic if theism is true.  But Thomists and traditional Christian theology more generally would reject that assumption too.  They would say that suffering is to be expectedgiven our nature as finite and corporeal creatures in a world interacting with other finite creatures.  To be sure, our nature is good as far as it goes.  But it is limited, and given those limits we are subject to injury, disease, ignorance, error, and the ramifications of those.  We are also liable to moral failures, and as these mount, the damage done to the character of individuals and to the social orders of which they are parts also snowballs and ramifies.  Given the facts of the natural moral law, we also come to merit the positive infliction of further harms as punishment for our evildoing.  In these ways, suffering is deeply ingrained into the very nature of human life, and therefore precisely what we should expect.

It would take supernatural assistance – that is to say, special divine action to raise us beyond the limits of our nature – to prevent this outcome from occurring.  And such assistance was indeed offered to our first parents.  Had they not rejected the offer, nature would not have taken its course.  That is the sense in which the evil that afflicts us is the consequence of Original Sin.  It’s not that the Fall introduced into the natural order evil that would not have otherwise been there.  It’s rather that it lost for us the supernatural prevention of evil that would have been there.

So, again, suffering is to be expected given our nature, rather than something that should surprise us.  But then, why is it nevertheless not removed given that through Christ we can be restoredto grace?  There are several reasons.  One of them is that grace, the supernatural order of things, builds on nature rather than smothering it.  By leaving in place much of the effects of Original Sin, God allows us to see much more clearly than would otherwise be possible the unbridgeable gap between what we are capable of just given our own limited nature, and what we require in order to achieve the beatific vision.  We see our need for grace better than we otherwise would.

For another thing, since we have in fact sinned, we merit punishment.  Even the repentant do not get off scot-free.  We need to do penance, either in this life or in Purgatory.  And the evils we accept in a penitential spirit in this life are preferable to those we face in Purgatory.  We can also accept unmerited suffering in the spirit in which Christ did so, as a sacrifice for others who need penance.  More generally, we can gain virtues such as patience, compassion, and courage.

Much more could be said, but that is enough to make the point that from the point of view of traditional Christian theology, suffering is an integral part of the natural and supernatural order of things, rather than something we should be surprised by.  That’s part of why the Cross is so central a symbol in Christian spirituality.  If you look at the world the way that the heroes of scripture, the Fathers of the Church, and the saints do, the idea that what we should expect from God is (say) some kind of bourgeois consumer paradise – and that we should shake an accusing fist at him for failing to provide it – just seems bizarre, even superficial in the extreme.

I’m well aware that this view of things is bound to seem very strange to an atheist or indeed to the average citizen of modern, affluent, secularized Western society.  But the point is that by approaching the problem of evil as if this traditional Christian view of things weren’t true, the atheist once again simply begs the question.  Sure, if you look at the nature and purpose of human life the way the secularist does, then the existence of suffering seems baffling.  But traditional Christian theology does not look at things that way.  And Sterba has given us no non-question-begging reason to do so.

Freedom from what?

In response to my point that those who are deprived of political freedoms and the like by oppressors do not thereby lose their free will, and that that is what matters most to their salvation, Sterba objects:

Yet the failures of even the most brutal and oppressive dictators to take away the inner freedom of their subjects does nothing to exonerate them for the evil they do by depriving their subjects of their external freedom.  Why should it be any different for God who could prevent all horrendous evil consequences, as needed, and thereby secure our external freedom as needed?

End quote.  Sterba’s analogy fails, for two reasons.  First, because unlike the dictator, God merely permits rather than inflicts the loss of freedom in question.  Second, because unlike the dictator or any other human being, God is capable of drawing out from this loss a good that infinitely outweighs it.

Sterba’s objection also greatly exaggerates the significance of the worldly freedoms that are lost, relative to what we gain in the hereafter.  That too may sound shocking from a modern secularist liberal point of view, but then, neither Thomism nor traditional Christian theology more generally looks at human life from that point of view in the first place.  Freedom to vote, to criticize state policy, to have a job one likes, etc. are all well and good.  But they are ultimately much less important than freedom from moral vice (a freedom which is still possible, even when political freedoms are lost, as long as we have free will).  

As St. Augustine says, we have as many masters as we have vices, and they enslave us in a much worse way than human tyrants do.  The reason is that losing the freedom to vote, to work, etc. won’t keep us from the beatific vision, but losing the freedom from bondage to sin will keep us from it.  And that is what matters most in the end.  So, if a world where the loss of freedoms of the kind Sterba is talking about is part of an overall order where there is an increase in freedom of the kind Augustine is talking about – with the salvation that that entails – then that is a much greater overall good than one in which the former, lesser freedoms are maximized and the latter, greater ones are less in supply.

Divine authorship

In response to my comparison of the created world to a story and of God to the author of the story, Sterba writes:

No doubt an author who chooses to fill his novel with an endless string of holocausts each worse than the last has not done anything morally wrong.  Yet it does not follow that a God who permits the horrendous consequences of a similar endless string of holocausts which he could have easily prevented without loss of greater good consequences or prevention of greater evil consequences has likewise not done anything morally wrong.

End quote.  This misses the point I was making with the author analogy.  The point is not that God is blameless for the specific reasons an author is blameless (which include the fact that the characters, unlike us, are not real).  Rather, the point is that God’s causality differs from ours in something like the way an author’s causality differs from that of his characters, and this difference in causality entails that laws of nature and the natural moral law do not intelligibly apply to God.  He is outside the causal order in something like the way an author is outside the order of the story.  But the relevant moral categories in terms of which the “logical problem of evil” judges God to be guilty of wrongdoing can intelligibly apply only to creatures withinthat order.

Divine morality

Replying to my claim that, since God is not a rational animal and therefore not governed by natural law, the Pauline Principle does not apply to him, Sterba says:

Yet, earlier, Feser recognized that certain virtues, such as being just and merciful, which do not make any direct reference to our appetites, do apply to God.  Likewise, here, the Pauline Principle, which does not make any direct reference to our appetites, applies analogically to God in the same way that being just and merciful apply analogously to God.

End quote.  It seems to me that Sterba has missed my point, which was that God’s being rational and our being rational does not by itself entail that the same predicates can in every case intelligibly be applied both to us and to God.  I am not saying that none of the same predicates can intelligibly be applied.  But those that do apply must be understood in a way that reflects the differences between God and created things (e.g. God is not in the created order, does not fall under a genus, etc.).  God’s lack of appetites is one of the differences, but it is hardly the only one.  The problem with applying the Pauline Principle to God is that it could intelligibly apply to him only if God were part of the moral community – which, since he is not even part of the causal order of which the moral community is a component, he is not.

That’s enough for now, and no doubt Sterba would have had more to say in response to my paper if had had time and space.  As it is, he had to reply to fifteenother contributors!  I thank him for his good sportsmanship and for an intelligent, civil, and productive exchange.

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part V: Woody Allen

So far in this series we’ve considered Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud, and Marx.  None of them is exactly a laugh riot.  So let’s now take a look at the lighter side of atheistic disenchantment and nihilism, in the work of that most philosophical of American comic filmmakers, Woody Allen.  We’ve noted how one of the features that distinguishes the New Atheism from the Old is its shallow optimism.  New Atheists typically refuse to see any good in religion at all, and thus can foresee no loss whatsoever in the prospect of its disappearance.  Allen is as free of that sophomoric attitude as any Old Atheist, which gives him at least some of the relative sobriety of the members of that club.

Not that Allen is Captain Gravitas.  The loss of meaning and morality in a world without God is a longstanding theme of his movies.  But it is played strictly for laughsin a goofball comedy like Love and Death, whereas in a drama like Hannah and Her Sisters it is remedied for one character who is going through an existential crisis by watching a Marx Brothers movie and deciding to try to enjoy life to the extent he can.  This is pretty banal stuff, albeit those are both very good movies.  And the atrocious Whatever Worksexhibits the same banality, but on steroids.  (How bad a flick is it?  So bad that Allen somehow managed to make Larry David unfunny.) 

All the same, Allen has also explored the theme in a more serious way, in the marvelous Crimes and Misdemeanors.  Martin Landau’s character Judah Rosenthal is a successful ophthalmologist whose life is unraveling because the woman with whom he has been committing adultery threatens to expose the affair to his wife.  He wrestles with his gangster brother’s proposal to solve the problem by having the woman killed, at first appalled by it but eventually consenting.  He is then racked with guilt, the religious teaching of his father, which he had always rejected, now coming alive for him at last.  He toys with the idea that God does exist after all and that he stands under divine judgment, and considers confessing his crimes.  In the end, however, when he realizes that he is not going to be caught, he gets over his guilt, abandons his tentative belief in God, and cynically returns to his life of affluence.

Meanwhile, Judah’s friend and patient Ben, played by Sam Waterston, is a rabbi who gradually loses his eyesight but remains devout and hopeful.  Woody Allen’s own character Cliff Stern is also going through a crisis, as his marriage is collapsing and his filmmaking career is going nowhere.  Unlike Judah, though, Cliff is not a cynic, and is trying to get a documentary made about a philosophy professor whose ideas he finds inspiring.  But his rival Lester, a fellow filmmaker played by Alan Alda, is a phony and a blowhard but one who nevertheless achieves the recognition and financial and romantic successes that elude Cliff.

One of the themes of the movie, then, is that in a Godless universe there is no moral order, so that the wicked prosper and the good suffer.  The good, and the religious in particular, are also portrayed as naïve and in thrall to wishful thinking.  As this interesting analysispoints out, the wearing of eyeglasses serves in the movie as a subliminal marker of those who are, either permanently or temporarily, dominated by moral or religious illusions.  The characters who do not wear them are those who, though hard and cynical, nevertheless see reality for what it is.

All the same, one of the most interesting features of Crimes and Misdemeanors is that, despite its atheistic worldview, the movie does not portray the devout with contempt, and even affords them a certain nobility.  Ben, the rabbi, is represented throughout as admirable, gentle, and a voice of moral reassurance.  Sol, Judah’s father, is stolid and even patient with, if exasperated by, his skeptical relatives.  He defends his faith with stubborn confidence, but in a manner that is nevertheless measured and without anger or fanaticism.  Meanwhile, the characters whose atheism is most pronounced, Judah’s aunt May and Judah himself, are represented as coldly amoral.

This is a far cry from the simplistic picture of the dispute between atheism and religion that one finds in a Dawkins or a Hitchens.  And the point is not that all atheists are like Judah – of course they aren’t – but rather that Allen is, unlike your central casting New Atheist, able to take a critical distance on his unbelief (at least in this movie – in Whatever Works, not so much).  He is willing to entertain the possibility that even if atheism is true, it may have horrific implications, and that even if no religion is true, religion may afford moral depth and consolation that is otherwise unavailable.

In one of the film’s best scenes, Judah imagines being back at one of the Seder meals of his childhood, listening to his father Sol spar with his atheist aunt May.  May insists that the hard truth is that “might makes right.”  Sol, meanwhile, serenely affirms that “if necessary, I will always choose God over truth.”

Naturally, this can be read as simple irrationalism, but there is another way to interpret it.  To me, it is reminiscent of Socrates’ famous remark in Plato’s Republic:

The good therefore may be said to be the source not only of the intelligibility of the objects of knowledge, but also of their being and reality; yet it is not itself that reality, but is beyond it, and superior to it in dignity and power. (p. 234 of the Desmond Lee translation)

For “the good,” read Sol’s reference to God, and for “being and reality,” read his reference to truth.  Plato takes the Form of the Good to be so fundamental to the order of things that it is prior even to being and reality themselves, being their source.  It is a kind of super-reality or super-being.  Sol, arguably, thinks of God in a similar way.  So fundamental is the notion of God to the very intelligibility of things that, for Sol, he is a more ultimate reality even than truth of the ordinary sort.  That is, admittedly, to read into Allen’s scene more than he probably had in mind.  It seems clear enough, though, that Sol is portrayed as more than merelyputting forward irrationalism or fideism – that Allen acknowledges in him a kind of dignity and moral gravitas despitehis eschewal of logic and evidence as May (and Allen) understand them.

These remarks are, of course, not intended to be metaphysically rigorous.  At the end of the day, I don’t think it makes sense to think of the good as beyond being or truth.  On the contrary, as the doctrine of the transcendentals holds, being, truth, and goodness are really all the same thing looked at from different points of view.  And as longtime readers know, I also think that the relationship between morality and theism is more complicated than either Allen or pop Christian apologists suppose.  The point is that, however one works out the philosophical details, there is a nuance in the treatment of religion in Crimes and Misdemeanors that is absent from New Atheist polemic, or even from some of Allen’s other work.

In chapter 2 of his recent book The Meaning of Belief: Religion from an Atheist’s Point of View, Tim Crane draws a distinction between pessimistic and optimistic atheist responses to the disenchantment of the world.  Both responses urge that we resolutely do our best to supply some sort of meaning and morality to the inherently meaningless and amoral world revealed by science (more accurately, by the philosophical naturalist’s interpretationof science).  But the optimistic atheist thinks that the situation could never really have been other than this, and that the religious view of the world is simply based on a confusion.  To abandon religion is to abandon something that never made sense in the first place, and thus involves no real loss.  The transcendent meaning and morality the religious believer affirms is simply unintelligible on analysis, and thus could never have existed.

The pessimistic atheist, by contrast, thinks that the religious view of things is intelligible, and that the world couldin principle have had the transcendent meaning and moral order that the religious believer attributes to it.  It’s just that, as it turns out, that’s not the way the world happens to be.  Hence the pessimistic atheist, unlike the optimistic atheist, feels a real sense of loss upon the abandonment of religious belief.  Allen’s attitude toward disenchantment is clearly of the pessimistic sort, as is, arguably, the attitude of most of the best-known Old Atheists in general.

Oppy on Thomistic cosmological arguments

My article “Oppy on Thomistic cosmological arguments” has just been published in the latest issue of the journal Religious Studies.  (It’s behind a paywall, sorry.)  It is a reply to all of the criticisms Graham Oppy has leveled over the years against arguments of that sort, not only in his Religious Studiesarticle on my Aristotelian proof, but also in his books Arguing about Gods and Naturalism and Religion and elsewhere.  (Regular readers will recall the two YouTube exchanges I had with Oppy on the program Capturing Christianity, which you can view here and here.)

Anaximander and natural theology

The idea of natural theology is the idea of knowledge of God’s existence and nature that is attainable through purely philosophical arguments, entirely independently of any special divine revelation.  (This is usually contrasted with revealed theology, which is knowledge of God’s existence and nature attainable through some special divine revelation – for example, through a prophet sent by God whose veracity is backed by miracles.)  In Western philosophy, natural theology goes back to the very beginning, to the Greeks – and not just to Plato and Aristotle, but to the Pre-Socratics.  Arguably it begins with the second of them, Anaximander of Miletus (610 – 546 B.C.).

The Pre-Socratics inaugurated the search for what they called the archē of all things, where the term “archē” originally connoted either a beginning point or a position of authority.  An archē is a principle of order, and the search for the archē of all things is essentially the attempt to find an ultimate source and explanation for the order of the world.  Anaximander’s predecessor Thales famously proposed wateras the source from which all else derives.  His view seemed to be that the ordinary objects of our experience are all water in various configurations.  Perhaps he had in mind the idea that just as water can in everyday experience take on a liquid, solid, or gaseous form, so too the other objects of our experience are just further transformations of it (an idea analogous to Anaximenes’ later proposal that all things are air in various forms).

However, and Anaximenes notwithstanding, the tradition largely and quickly moved beyond such crudely materialistic models.  Even those Pre-Socratics who took the archē to be in some way material came to see that it had to be radically unlike any of the objects of ordinary experience.  And as Lloyd Gerson notes in his book God and Greek Philosophy, the trajectory of the Greek tradition was toward locating the ultimate explanation of things in a single archē that exists of necessity.  The theistic implications of this line of thought are obvious, and some thinkers did indeed arrive at conceptions of the archē that would deeply influence the classical theist tradition – for example, Xenophanes’ non-anthropomorphic philosophical monotheism, Parmenides’ Being, Plato’s Form of the Good, Aristotle’s Prime Unmoved Mover, and Plotinus’s One. 

Arguably we see something like a germ of classical theism already in Anaximander’s notion of the apeiron as the source from which all else derives.  The apeiron is the “unbounded” or “unlimited.”  The things of our experience are all bounded or limited in various ways – to being water and having the specific range of properties and powers distinctive of water, to being fire and having the properties and powers of fire, to being a tree with its characteristic properties and powers, or a dog with its properties and powers.  The ultimate source of things must notbe bounded or limited in any of these ways, or it could not be the ultimate source of things.  For example, if it was limited to being water, then it could not be the explanation of things that are beyond the powers of water; if it was limited to being fire, it could not be the explanation of things that are beyond fire’s powers; and so on.

Anaximander took the apeiron to be unbounded or unlimited in duration as well.  It cannot have a beginning, or it would have come from something else, in which case that other thing would be the true source of all things.  It cannot have an end, for only things that are bounded or limited in some way can have that.  For example, because of the properties and powers to which fire is limited, it can be put out by water; because of the properties and powers to which a tree is limited, it can be chopped down and burned; and so forth.

More could be said about the properties Anaximander attributes to the apeiron, and why he does so (though given the limited textual evidence, some of this would have to be speculative).  But as Werner Jaeger emphasizes in The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, these properties – being unbounded, beginningless and endless, immortal and indestructible, all-encompassing and all-governing, the source from which everything comes and to which everything returns – are precisely the sorts which the Greeks regarded as marks of the divine.  Indeed, Aristotle tells us that Anaximander took the apeironto be divine. 

To be sure, the apeiron does not seem to be personal in nature.  But in the Greek tradition, whether the source of all things was to be regarded as personal or impersonal is essentially treated as a question about the nature of God, not the existenceof God.  Aristotle, for one, treats the divine as personal, insofar as he attributes thought to the Prime Unmoved Mover.  But that Anaximander does not make such an attribution to the apeirondoes not by itself make of him any less a theist than Aristotle was.  It just makes of him a theist of a different kind (even if one who, from the point of view of us Aristotelian-Thomists, understood the divine nature less well than Aristotle did).

We should note a couple of further points about Anaximander’s theism, if indeed we want to assign that label to his views.  First, and as Jaeger notes, “his theology is a direct outgrowth from the germ of his new intuition of φύσις” (p. 23).  That is to say, his theism was not incidental to or detachable from his work as a natural philosopher or physicist.  On the contrary, he took the reality of the apeironand its divine properties to be the inevitable conclusion of the search for a complete explanation of the natural order.  Second, however, as David Roochnik points out in his excellent book on Greek philosophy, Retrieving the Ancients, Anaximander also thought that the search for the archē of all things required going beyond what was knowable by observation.  He was in this sense engaged in a kind of rationalist metaphysics, rather than merely in empirical hypothesis formation. 

I make these points and cite these experts on our topic because they are at odds with the impression the unwary reader would get from popularizations like Carlo Rovelli’s book Anaximander.  When treating Anaximander’s views about the apeiron and the project of ultimate explanation, Rovelli seems to me to get things badly wrong.  For one thing, he characterizes Anaximander’s notion of the apeiron as if it were different from or even at odds with a theological explanation – completely ignoring both the testimony of Aristotle that Anaximander regarded the apeiron as divine, and what actual experts on the Pre-Socratics’ views about religion such as Jaeger and Gerson have to say.

Why would Rovelli put forward such a view, and so matter-of-factly?  For one thing, he seems to have the simplistic view of theology that too many scientists evince when they write popular works attempting to relate science and religion.  Following Augustine, Gerson notes in God and Greek Philosophy that to understand the views of the ancients on matters of religion, we need to distinguish (1) civic theology, or the cultic practices of various ethnic and political groups, (2) mythical theology, such as stories about the Greek and Roman pantheons, and (3) natural theology, or rational argumentation concerning the existence and nature of God of the kind developed by philosophers. 

Too many writers of pop science books treat all discourse about God as if it were of type (1) or (2), either ignoring (3) altogether or quickly dismissing it without serious examination as if it could only ever be a feeble attempt to prop up (1) or (2).  This is a little like dismissing all of physics on the grounds that it can only ever be a feeble attempt to patch up the crude and failed theories of Thales and Anaximenes.  Certainly it does not do justice to the arguments of a Xenophanes, an Aristotle, or a Plotinus.  Those thinkers did not regard the crudities of mythical theology as a reason to give up theology, but rather as a reason to give up mythand replace it with a rational theology.  (You might think that even if arguments of type (3) at one time had some plausibility, they have now been refuted by science or otherwise been shown to be no longer defensible or interesting.  But as I have demonstrated at length elsewhere, nothing could be further from the truth.) 

Rovelli seems to be of the mindset that cannot see beyond (1) and (2) to give a fair shake to (3).  Because Pre-Socratic thinkers are clearly trying to move beyond myth as a way of making sense of the world, he appears to suppose that they must therefore be moving beyond theology as a way of making sense of it.  Hence he does not consider the possibility that the notion of the apeironmight be a concept in natural philosophy andat the same time a theological concept.  To be sure, it is only fair to note that Rovelli is admirably willing to think beyond clichés about the ancients in other contexts.  Unfortunately, his imagination seems to fail him when theology is at issue.

A second problem is that Rovelli explicitly declines to consider exactly what Anaximander might have meant by the term “apeiron.”  He tells us that this is no more important than determining the meaning of the term “quark,” which physicist Murray Gell-Mann borrowed more or less at random from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.  Modern particle physics would be no different if Gell-Mann had borrowed some other word instead, and Rovelli claims that “in the same fashion, had Anaximander called his principle something other than ‘infinite’ or ‘indistinct,’ the scientific relevance of his idea would have been strictly the same” (p. 66).

This is quite a bizarre claim.  That Gell-Mann’s bit of terminology was picked more or less at random and could easily be exchanged with something else doesn’t entail that all terminology in physics or natural philosophy is like that.  That is just a non sequitur.  And Anaximander’s term “apeiron” was most definitely not chosen at random.  Again, what he was trying to convey is the idea that the ultimate source of all things cannot be bounded or limited in any of the ways the things of our experience are, or it too would be in need of precisely the sort of explanation they require.  It would in that case not be ultimate.  To fail to see this is simply to miss Anaximander’s whole point. 

That Rovelli does entirely miss it is clear from his suggestion that the atoms of Leucippus and Democritus “are the direct descendants of Anaximander’s apeiron.  They are natural objects (nothing is particularly divine about atoms) that escape our direct perception but in terms of which we understand the constitution of matter” (p. 68).  Rovelli also claims that Faraday’s notion of the field is similarly comparable to the apeiron.

In fact, these notions are in no way comparable to Anaximander’s.  It is true that the atomists took the atoms to be the fundamental reality, but one of the difficulties with their position is that it is hard to see how anything having the properties attributed to the atoms could possibly befundamental.  An atom is extended, and thus could in principle be smaller than it actually is, in which case it is hard to see how it could be (as the atomists claimed it was) unbreakable in principle.  It has a certain specific shape, speed, and trajectory, and all of these could in principle have been different.  In short, the atoms are contingent in various respects, and they are so precisely because they are limited or bounded in various respects.  Hence they are no more like Anaximander’s apeiron than the water of Thales’ natural philosophy is.

Analogous problems afflict the suggestion that Faraday’s notion of the field is in any interesting way like the apeiron.  In general, if it is even intelligible to ask “Where did it come from?” or “Could it have been otherwise?” or any questions of a comparable sort, then we are not talking about the apeiron, because we are not talking about an ultimateexplanation of things.  Again, to fail to see this is to miss the whole point.

Now, when contemporary physicists make a stab at ultimate explanations, this typically involves positing some fundamental laws of nature.  The trouble with this, as longtime readers of this blog know, is that laws of nature are simply not the kinds of thing that could possibly befundamental, for reasons Aristotelian philosophers have set out (and which I survey at pp. 177-190 of Aristotle’s Revenge and in this talk).  Hence they too cannot be the ultimate explanation of things, and thus cannot be the sort of thing Anaximander had in mind in putting forward the notion of the apeiron.

Indeed, you aren’t ever going to understand what Anaximander was up to if you interpret him as doing only natural science as that is understood today (even if that was, of course, part of what he was doing).  And that brings us to a third problem with Rovelli’s treatment, which is precisely that this is how he (mis)interprets Anaximander.  He essentially remakes Anaximander in the image of a contemporary academic scientist, and one whose views on matters of methodology and religion are apparently very similar to those of Rovelli.  That Anaximander was no less a metaphysician and, as some scholars of Pre-Socratic philosophy argue, a natural theologian too, is thus lost on him.

Pope Francis’s scarlet letter

Consider two groups of Catholics:  First, divorced Catholics who disobey the Church’s teaching by forming a “new union” in which they are sexually active, thereby committing adultery.  And second, traditionalist Catholics attached to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass (i.e. the “Latin Mass”), some of whom (but by no means all) hold erroneous theological opinions about the Second Vatican Council and related matters.  In Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis radically altered the Church’s liturgical practice in order to accommodate the former group.  And in Traditionis Custodes, he has now radically altered the Church’s liturgical practice in order to punish the latter group. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letterfamously portrays an unmerciful society in which adulterers are forced to mark themselves off from others by wearing a scarlet A on their clothing.  Pope Francis clearly would disapprove of such cruelty, and rightly so.  Yet the cruel treatment of the community of those attached to the old form of the Mass – the innocent majority of them no less than the minority with problematic theological opinions – amounts to something analogous to the affixing on them of a scarlet letter: the letter T for “traditionalist,” the one group to which the pope’s oft-repeated calls for mercy and accompaniment appear not to apply.

Accompanying adulterers?

Let us consider just how radical each of these papal moves is.  The Church has consistently taught that a valid sacramental marriage does not end until the death of one of the spouses, and has condemned as gravely sinful any sexual relationship with anyone except one’s spouse.  Hence those in such a marriage who divorce a spouse and then form a sexual relationship with someone else are guilty of grave sin, and cannot be absolved in confession without a firm resolution not to continue the sexual relationship.  This is grounded in Christ’s teaching on marriage and divorce in passages like Matthew 19:3-12 and Mark 10:2-12.

The gravity of this teaching cannot possibly be overstated.  Christ acknowledges that “Mosesallowed” for divorce.  But then he declares: “And I say to you” that divorce is forbidden.  Now, the law of Moses was given to Moses by God himself.  So who has the authority to override it?  Who would have the audacity to declare: “Moses allowed” such-and-such but “I say” differently?  Only God himself.  Christ’s teaching against divorce is therefore nothing less than a mark of his very divinity.  To put ourselves in opposition to that teaching would thus implicitly be either to deny Christ’s divinity or, blasphemously, to put our authority above even his.  It would be to declare: “Christ said such-and-such, but I say differently.”  Absolutely no one other than God himself, not even a pope (whose mandate is precisely only ever to safeguard Christ’s teaching), has the right to do that. 

If the teaching in question sounds “rigid,” blame Christ.  His own disciples thought it so, going so far as to opine that if that is how things are, it would be better not to marry (Matthew 19:10).

Now, no Catholic in a state of mortal sin is permitted to receive Holy Communion until he is validly absolved in confession.  And no Catholic can be validly absolved who is aware of the Church’s teaching on marriage and divorce, violates that teaching by having a sexual relationship with someone other than his spouse, and refuses to end this sexual relationship.  Hence no Catholic who refuses to end such a relationship is permitted to receive Holy Communion. 

This teaching too is extremely grave, grounded as it also is in scripture, specifically in the words of St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 11: 27-29.  According to St. Paul’s teaching, to take Holy Communion while refusing to end such a sexual relationship is nothing less than to profane Christ’s very body and blood and therefore to bring judgment upon oneself. 

These doctrines are as clear, consistent, and authoritative as any Catholic teaching is or could possibly be.  They are as ancient as the Church herself, are presented by her as infallible and absolutely binding, and have been unambiguously reiterated again and again and again.  This is, of course, why Amoris Laetitia was so controversial.  For it seems to allow that, in at least some circumstances, those who refuse to stop engaging in adulterous sexual activity can nevertheless take Holy Communion.  To be sure, Pope Francis has not explicitly rejected any of the teachings summarized above.  But he has also notoriously refused requests from several of his own cardinals (in the famous “dubia”) explicitly to reaffirm that traditional teaching, and thereby decisively put to rest any worries about the consistency of Amoris with that teaching. 

That the Holy Father himself is aware of how grave the issue is, and has even had his conscience troubled by it, is evident from a conversation recounted by one of his defenders, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn.  Crux magazine (not exactly a traditionalist outlet) reported:

Schönborn revealed that when he met the Pope shortly after the presentation of Amoris, Francis thanked him, and asked him if the document was orthodox.

“I said, ‘Holy Father, it is fully orthodox’,” Schönborn told us he told the pope, adding that a few days later he received from Francis a little note that said: “Thank you for that word. That gave me comfort.”

End quote.  Note that the pope himself had at least some doubt about the document’s orthodoxy – enough that he took “comfort” in being reassured about it – even after it had already been finalized and published!

My point here is not to rehearse all the details of the controversy over Amoris.  The point is simply to note the extreme lengths to which the pope was willing to go to try to accommodate the weaknesses even of those who obstinately refuse to obey the teaching of Christ and St. Paul.  Even if you think Amoris itself does not cross the line of heterodoxy with regard to that teaching, it cannot be denied that the document is extremely gentle with and accommodating to those who docross it. 

Shaming traditionalists

The contrast with the treatment of traditionalist Catholics in Traditionis Custodes could not be more stark.  Note first that, in the accompanying letter explaining his decision, Pope Francis claims that attachment to the old form of the Mass “is often characterized by a rejection… of the Vatican Council II itself, claiming, with unfounded and unsustainable assertions, that it betrayed the Tradition and the ‘true Church.’” 

The first thing to say about this is that, even if it is true that some people attached to the old form have this attitude, it is by no means true that all of them do.  On the contrary, as Pope Francis himself notes in the same document, his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI affirmed that many who are attached to the old form “clearly accepted the binding character of Vatican Council II and were faithful to the Pope and to the Bishops.”  All the same, Pope Francis’s severe restriction of the old form of the Mass punishes these innocent Catholics along with the guilty.

Secondly, we need to consider the precise nature of the purported heterodoxy and/or schismatic tendencies of which some of these traditionalists are accused.  There are, of course, some extreme traditionalists who deny that we have had a valid pope for decades (namely the sedevacantists), and others who are in some less radical way in imperfect communion with the pope (such as the SSPX).  But precisely because they are not in regular communion, the errors of these groups are irrelevant to the intended audience of Traditionis Custodes – namely, traditionalist Catholics who are in regular communion with the pope (such as the FSSP, and attendees at Extraordinary Form Masses offered at ordinary diocesan parishes). 

By definition, the latter groups are not in schism.  And though there are no doubt some among this small group within the Church who might nevertheless be said in some sense to have a “schismatic mentality,” the same is true of the untold millions of liberal Catholics who casually dismiss the pope’s authority to tell them what to believe or how to act – including the adulterous Catholics the pope accommodated in Amoris.  Clearly, the pope feels no urgency about dealing with the schismatic mentality among countless liberals.  So, why the urgency in dealing with the schismatic mentality of a small number of traditionalists?

Then there is the question of what it meansexactly to “reject” Vatican II.  Typically, with those traditionalists who are in full communion with the pope, what this means is that they reject some particular teaching of the Council, such as its teaching about religious liberty.  Now, I disagree with those who reject that teaching.  My view is that Vatican II’s teaching on religious liberty can and should be reconciled with the teaching of the pre-Vatican II popes on the subject.  (My favored way of doing so is the one developed by Thomas Pink.)  But for one thing, the teaching of Vatican II on this subject is not one that has been proposed infallibly (even if, of course, that does not entail that we do not owe it assent); and for another, how exactly to interpret it in light of traditional teaching has been a matter of controversy among theologians faithful to the Magisterium.  So, if the pope is going to be gentle and accommodating with those who obstinately defy the ancient and infallible teaching of Christ and St. Paul on marriage and Holy Communion, then how can he reasonably be less gentle and accommodating with those who have problems with a non-infallible teaching that is only a little over fifty years old?

So, the offense of which the traditionalists to whom Traditionis Custodes is addressed are accused is (a) not one of which all of them are guilty, and (b) manifestly less grave than that of Catholics who reject the Church’s teaching on marriage, divorce, and Holy Communion.  Yet those who reject that teaching are shown mercy, whereas traditionalists, the innocent as well as the guilty, are shown harshness. 

And the punishment is very harsh.  The pope aims to banish the Extraordinary Form of the Mass from ordinary parish communities, to restrict future ordinations of priests interested in celebrating it, and effectively to quarantine from the rest of the Church those communities which are still permitted to use the old form of the Mass until such time as they are prepared to adopt the new form.  As Cardinal Gerhard Müller observes, “the clear intent is to condemn the Extraordinary Form to extinction in the long run.”  The pope is essentially telling traditionalist Catholics attached to the old form of the Mass that as individuals they are suspect, and as a group they are slated eventually to disappear.  As Cardinal Müller writes:

Without the slightest empathy, one ignores the religious feelings of the (often young) participants in the Masses according to the [old] Missal… Instead of appreciating the smell of the sheep, the shepherd here hits them hard with his crook.  It also seems simply unjust to abolish celebrations of the “old” rite just because it attracts some problematic people: abusus non tollit usum.

This is bad enough when the harm done to traditionalists alone is considered.  But it is the whole Church that suffers from this decision, not just traditionalists.  For one thing, Pope Benedict XVI made it clear that the preservation of the Extraordinary Form was by no means a matter merely of catering to the needs of a certain group within the Church.  Rather, it had to do with reestablishing the connection of the Church as a whole with her own past in the liturgical context.  That is why, though Benedict too hoped that there would in the future be only a single form of the Mass, he wanted the old form to exert an influence on the new no less than the new would exert influence on modifying the old.  This was part of Benedict’s general insistence on a “hermeneutic of continuity.”  Traditionis Custodes shows no sensitivity whatsoever to this dimension of the issue.

For another thing, while the pope says that he took this decision in order to foster greater unity in the Church, it is manifestly likely to foster instead only greater disunity.  That is inevitable in any family when a father shows a double standard toward his children.  Indeed, it is precisely this double standard, and not the old form of the Mass, that has generated the disunity of recent years.  What has done more to lead some traditionalists to question Pope Francis’s orthodoxy?  The fact that they hear the Latin Mass every week?  Or Amoris Laetitia and the pope’s refusal to answer the dubia?  To ask the question is to answer it.  Traditionis Custodes will not put out the fire Amorisstarted.  If anything, it will pour gasoline on it.

He is still the Holy Father

Some will say that the pope is merely acting like the father in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32).  The resentful older son in the parable, on this interpretation, represents traditionalists, whereas the prodigal son represents Catholics who do not obey the Church’s teaching on marriage and divorce.

But the analogy is ridiculous.  For one thing, the prodigal son in the parable repents and explicitly declines special accommodation.  He does not say “I intend to keep living an immoral life, but I demand some of that fattened calf anyway.”  For another, the father does not treat the older son at all harshly, but rather gently reassures him that he loves him no less than he loves the prodigal son.

All the same, the pope is, when all is said and done, a father – indeed, he is still the Holy Father of all Catholics, traditionalists included.  And while the Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances, this cannot properly be done except with humility, respect, and restraint.  The pope is not some politician or corporate executive whom we might see fit to mock or to fire or vote out of office.  He is the vicar of Christ, and he has no superior on earth.  We may respectfully urge him to reconsider some course of action, but if he refuses, then we have to leave it to Christ to resolve the problem in the manner and at the time he chooses. 

Moreover, because he is the pope, we must in this case even more than in any other follow Christ’s command to turn the other cheek and pray for those who harm us.  We must be willing to embrace the suffering this entails and to offer it up for others – including for Pope Francis himself.

Related posts:

Pope Victor redux?

Aquinas on bad prelates

Do not abandon your Mother

The Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances

Papal fallibility

Two popes and idolatry

The strange case of Pope Vigilius

Some comments on the open letter

Popes, heresy, and papal heresy

Denial flows into the Tiber