Edward Feser's Blog, page 33

What is religion?

The question is notoriously controversial.  Consider a definition like the following, from Bernard Wuellner’s Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy :

religion, n. 1. the sum of truths and duties binding man to God. 2. personal belief and worship in relation to God.  Religion includes creed, cult, and code.

By “creed,” what Wuellner has in mind is a system of doctrine.  A “cult,” in this context, has to do with a system of rituals of the kind associated with worship and the like.  The “code” referred to has to do with a system of moral principles.  So, the definition is telling us that doctrines, rituals, and moral principles are among the key elements of religion.

Perhaps some would quibble over that part, though it seems safe to say that the best-known examples of religions all involve somedoctrinal, ritual, and moral components, even if some religions emphasize some of these more than others do.  But the standard objection to this kind of definition has to do instead with the reference to God.  For aren’t there religions (such as Buddhism) in which the notion of God does not feature, or is even rejected?

In light of such considerations, it is common these days to define religion more broadly so as to include non-theistic religions.  The trick is to avoid defining the term so broadly that it ends up including things that aren’t really religions.  The desired happy medium would be something like the following definition, from John Carlson’s Words of Wisdom: A Philosophical Dictionary for the Perennial Tradition:

Set of beliefs, relations, and activities by which people are united, or regard themselves as being united, to the realm of the transcendent (often, although not always, with a focus on Absolute Being or God).

The idea here would be that, although not all religions affirm the existence of God, they do all affirm that there is somereality transcending the material world.  A view that denied any such transcendent reality (such as scientism, whether in its positivist form or its scientific realist form) would not fall under a plausible definition of “religion.”  This seems reasonable enough.  For example, however we spell out Buddhist notions like karma, nirvana, etc., they are probably not going to be expressible in terms acceptable to a Rudolf Carnap or an Alex Rosenberg. 

Nominal or real definition?

Having said that, it doesn’t actually follow that Wuellner’s definition is wrong.  For it depends in part on what kind of definition we’re looking for.  Scholastic philosophers distinguish between nominal definitions and real definitions.  A nominal definition aims to capture how people use a certain word, whereas a real definition aims to capture the nature of the reality that the word refers to.  Hence, suppose I ask you to define “water.”  I might be asking for an explanation of how the term “water” is used by English speakers – in which case you might respond that it is used to refer to the clear liquid that fills lakes and rivers, etc.  But I might instead be asking about what it is to be the actual stuff, water (whether we refer to it as “water,” “Wasser,” “agua,” or whatever) – in which case you might discuss its chemical composition and the like.

Now, nominal definitions are essentially descriptive.  They are trying to tell us how people do in fact use words.  There may be certain normative implications to the extent that we are aiming to track actual usage.  We may find out that the way we use a certain word in is contrary to currently prevailing usage, and therefore “wrong,” but if a critical mass of people start using the term this way it will end up no longer being wrong but merely an alternative usage.

Real definitions, by contrast, are essentially normative.  They are not trying to capture actual usage, even when they are not in conflict with it.  Again, they are trying to capture the nature or essence of the reality itself, which doesn’t change with changes in usage.  And there is an objective fact of the matter about that, even if there is no objective fact of the matter about how a word (considered merely as a string of letters or phonemes) should be used.  (Anti-essentialist views often rest on a fallacious conflation of real definitions and nominal ones – as if a change in the usage of words could change reality itself.  In fact, the most it can do is muddle our thinking about reality.) 

Now, to evaluate a definition like Wuellner’s, we’d need first to know whether he intends it as a nominal or a real definition.  Considered as a nominal definition, it would indeed be defective in just the way described, since people use the term “religion” to refer to non-theistic systems of belief as well as to theistic ones. 

But that is surely not how Wuellner meant it.  Rather he was, as a Scholastic and a Catholic, trying to capture the objective reality behind the phenomena we call “religion.”  He would probably say that in light of the fact that God exists and that we are by nature oriented to seeking and worshipping him, religion arises in various cultures as a byproduct of this natural tendency.  Like everything else in nature, this tendency is subject to distortion and frustration.  Sometimes our religious inclinations might be directed toward an improper object, as in idolatrous or non-theistic religions.  Sometimes they may be altogether stifled, as in atheism.  But the natural inclination toward God is there all the same, and should inform any attempt at a real definition of religion.

Naturally, a real definition of a phenomenon like religion is bound to be controversial.  But it is not a serious objection to such a definition to point out that it doesn’t correspond exactly to actual usage.  It isn’t trying to do that.

Consider another example.  Marx famously said: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.  It is the opium of the people.”  Suppose this was meant as a definition of religion.  I certainly think it is wrong.  But it would be a stupid objection to say: “Marx, that’s not how people actually use the term.  Most people don’t think of religion as analogous to a drug that enables them to deal with oppressive socioeconomic conditions.”  Marx was well aware of that, of course.  He was not doing lexicography, but rather what he considered to be a kind of scientific explanation of the function that religion performs in the sociopolitical order.  He held that, whatever people think religion is about, the objectively true explanation of why it exists is that it helps to fortify an existing economic order by reconciling people to that order’s harsher aspects. 

This is a functional explanation, just like an explanation a biologist might give of a bodily organ – and just like Wuellner’s explanation, albeit he and Marx attribute very different functions to religion (in Wuellner’s case, it functions to orient us in a certain way to God, and in Marx’s it functions to orient us in a certain way to the established economic order).  And just as a biologist might appeal to an organ’s function in giving a real definition of it, Wuellner and Marx are each appealing to the function they attribute to religion in giving a real definition of it. 

I think that Wuellner’s definition happens to be correct and Marx’s wrong, but that’s a separate issue.   The point, again, is that we need to know what kind of definition a theorist is proposing before we can evaluate it, and that in the case of real definitions it misses the point to note that a definition doesn’t correspond exactly to actual usage.

Religions or philosophies?

But there’s another potential problem with the standard objection to definitions like Wuellner’s, even when considered as nominal rather than real definitions.  For why should we count examples like Buddhism as religions in the first place?  Well, everyone does so, you might say.  But there’s a problem with that.

Suppose the purported counterexample raised against Wuellner’s definition was Epicureanism rather than Buddhism.  That is to say, suppose the critic said: “You can’t define religion in general in terms of the worship of God or gods, because Epicureanism doesn’t feature the worship of God or gods.”  A defender of the definition would no doubt respond by saying that Epicureanism is not a religion in the first place, but a philosophy, so that it isn’t a genuine counterexample.

But why not count it is a religion?  After all, even if the worship of the gods doesn’t feature in it, the existence of the gods does, at least insofar as it isn’t denied.  So, arguably the existence of some kind of “transcendent” realm is allowed.  Of course, this particular transcendent realm doesn’t play a role in the moral life of the Epicurean, so that might be thought to justify not counting it as a religion.  But now consider the example of Stoicism.  Here too we have something like a transcendent reality – the divine logos or world soul – and one’s proper orientation to it does play a role in the moral life of the Stoic.  Yet Stoicism too is usually classified as a philosophy rather than a religion.

Now, someone might conclude: “OK, so maybe we shouldclassify these systems as religions rather than philosophies.”  But why not instead conclude that Buddhism too is not after all a religion, but rather a philosophy?  True, it has aspects that usually bring to mind religion rather than philosophy, such as certain rituals.  But why not just say that it is a philosophy with which certain religion-like elements have come to be associated, just as Marxism is (with its personality cults in cases like the Stalinist and Maoist versions of Marxism)?

The point is that the range of the actual use of the term “religion” seems to be somewhat arbitrary.  People don’t actually apply it to a clearly demarcated set of phenomena, but rather in a way that reflects criteria that are loose at best and maybe even inconsistent.  Now, sometimes with nominal definitions, when we encounter usage that is loose or inconsistent in this way, we propose a stipulative definition to tighten usage up at least for some particular purpose (as in a legal context).  And you could read a definition like Wuellner’s that way.  Someone could say: “Sure, we don’t use ‘religion’ to refer only to systems that feature belief in a God or gods.  But then, the ordinary usage of the term is a mess anyway.  I propose that we reform existing usage by tightening it up and relegating systems that don’t involve the worship of a God or gods to the ‘philosophy’ category.” 

Maybe that’s a good idea, and maybe not.  But the point is that the actual usage of the term “religion” is indeed messy enough that even considered as a nominal definition, a definition like Wuellner’s can’t reasonably be dismissed tooquickly on the basis of alleged counterexamples.  For the counterexamples might reflect a problem with actual usage, no less than a problem with the definition.

Inventing “religion”

These problems are not surprising given the history of the usage.  For as scholars of religion often point out, the category of “religion” as we understand it today is actually a modern invention.  Brent Nongbri’s book Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept is a useful study.  As Nongbri points out, we tend today to think of “religion” by way of contrast with “secular” matters, as if these are two clearly demarcated spheres of human life.  But that is an invention of modern Europeans, and indeed an artifact of Protestant vs. Catholic and Enlightenment-era polemic.  Non-Western and pre-modern Western thinking on the subject drew no such distinction. 

True, there were distinctions like the distinction between Church and State and between the spiritual and temporal realms.  But those distinctions are very different from the modern “religious” versus “secular” distinction.  To be sure, and as I have discussed elsewhere, the idea of Church and State as clearly demarcated institutions with distinctive functions is central to Christianity, though foreign to religions like Islam.  But this was not taken to entail a separationof Church and State, any more than the fact that the soul and the body are distinct and clearly demarcated aspects of human nature entails that the body can exist in separation from the soul. 

In ordinary human life, we have a variety of concerns – what to have for dinner, how to earn a living, where to send our children to school, who to vote for, how to fix a car, and so on.  And we also have concerns about getting ourselves right with God, doing right by our fellow religious believers, and so on.  Now, no one thinks that the fact that the concerns in the first set are very different in nature entails that there are clearly demarcated and hermetically sealed off realms like the “culinary,” the “economic,” the “educational,” the “automotive,” etc. that can or ought to be kept totally separate.  No one calls for a “separation of economics and state” or a “separation of the automotive from the state.”  That would, or course, be ridiculous.  Yet modern Westerners pretend that the “religious” is some clearly demarcated and hermetically sealed off realm, an aspect of human life that can be (and, in the view of many, should be) conducted separately from those other aspects, which are purely “secular.”  That conception of religion is, as Nongbri points out, a modern invention.

How did it arise?  To understand this, we need to begin by considering the set of attitudes that Nongbri says it replaced.  First, though the term “Europa” is ancient, medieval Europeans did not conceptualize themselves as “Europeans” – that is itself a modern secular category.  Rather, they thought of their homeland as Christendom or as the respublica Christiana.  And they didn’t speak of a variety of “world religions.”  Rather, groups like Manicheans and Muslims were classified as heretics, insofar as they shared some beliefs in common with Christians but rejected others and (from the point of view of Christianity) distorted the ones they did share.  And those who worshipped gods like those of Greece and Rome were classified as pagans, whose deities were in reality demons. 

In other words, matters of “religion” were conceptualized from a distinctively Christian point of view.  Now, Nongbri does in fact oversimplify things here.  From the beginning, Christians did recognize a category of natural theology by which pagans were capable of some imperfect knowledge of the true God.  All the same, he is correct to say that they took Christianity as normative, and certainly did not conceptualize it as one option alongside the others in a “world religions” smorgasbord.  And the point is not that they thought of it as the best or even as the correct option.  The point is that they didn’t think in terms of options at all.  In particular, they didn’t think in terms of “religions,” any more than modern people think of physics, astrology, acupuncture, Star Trek lore, etc. as different possible “sciences,” with physics being the best or correct one.  Rather, they thought in terms of there being (a) the truth about God and his relationship to the human race, and (b) greater or lesser deviations from this truth.

But then came Protestantism, which destroyed this unified view of the matter.  And it did so not only at the intellectual level, but at a practical and political level – so much so that the sequel to the Reformation was decades of war.  Thinkers like John Locke judged that a political solution to the problem of restoring peace would be to relegate theological disagreements to the realm of private opinions that ought to have no influence on public affairs, and can be safely tolerated to the extent that they are segregated from politics.  And therein, Nongbri argues, lies the origin of the conceptualization of “religion” as an idiosyncratic sphere of subjective belief sealed off from the “secular.”  I would add that this “subjectivizing” of religion was facilitated by a strongly fideistic strain within Protestantism that was hostile to the notions of natural law and natural theology.  (See chapter 5 of my book Lockefor critical discussion of Locke’s theory of toleration.)

What happened next was that this compartmentalized conception of “religion” was projected by post-Enlightenment Westerners onto the rest of the world.  Western scholars would look at, say, the ancient and complex set of philosophical ideas, devotions to various deities, moral attitudes, sociopolitical institutions, etc. to be found in India, lump them all together as if they were part of some unified system, and slap the label “Hinduism” on this imagined system.  They would do the same with “Buddhism,” “Confucianism,” and so on, and then announce that these various “world religions” are all instances of some general phenomenon called “religion.”  Then they would look at now defunct sets of practices and ideas of the past, lump them together, and classify them as various examples of “ancient religions,” further species of the same general phenomenon of “religion.”  And again, this general phenomenon was conceived of as an idiosyncratic, subjective thing in a sphere of its own only contingently connected to politics, morality, and the rest of human life – even though the ideas and practices in question had never been understood that way, outside the imaginations of post-Protestant, post-Enlightenment Westerners.

Now, one can debate whether the demarcations of the various so-called “world religions” are actually as arbitrary as writers like Nongbri imply.  I think we need to be careful not to overstate things.  All the same, there is some non-trivial degree of arbitrariness here, and it is certainly arbitrary to characterize “religion” in general as some idiosyncratic and subjective sphere separable from the rest of human life, the way that modern Westerners now reflexively tend to do.

The rhetoric of “religion”

The reason this characterization survives is the same as the reason it was introduced in the first place by early modern thinkers like Locke.  It serves politicaland polemical purposes.  It is a rhetorical weapon by means of which certain ideas can be put at a political and/or intellectual disadvantage right out of the gate.

Think, for example, of the double standard that many contemporary academic philosophers apply to arguments for God’s existence.  Any other idea in philosophy, no matter how insane – for example, that the material world is an illusion, that consciousness does not really exist, that infanticide and euthanasia are defensible, that the distinction between the sexes is a mere social construct, that it might be morally wrong to have children, and so on and on – is treated as “worthy of discussion,” something we must at least hear out with respect even if we suspect we will not be convinced.  But if a philosopher gives an argument for God’s existence, then in at least many academic circles, every eyebrow is immediately raised, every eye rolls, and it’s smirks all around – as if such a philosopher had just passed gas, or proposed wearing a tinfoil hat to protect against mindreading.

This is, historically speaking, extremely odd and idiosyncratic.  In first-rate thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Avicenna, Anselm, Al-Ghazali, Maimonides, Aquinas, Scotus, Suarez, Descartes, Leibniz, Clarke, et al. one finds arguments for God’s existence that are no less central to their thought than any other arguments they give for conclusions of a metaphysical, epistemological, or ethical nature.  There is absolutely no objective reason to treat the arguments with any less interest and respect than anything else they say.  And this would have been generally acknowledged as recently as just a few decades ago.  But in recent decades, those who don’t have a special interest in philosophy of religion often not only neglect such arguments, but treat them as having a second-class status to which other philosophical ideas and arguments are not consigned.

The reason for this, I would suggest, has to do with the hegemony of the modern idea that “religion” is an idiosyncratic and subjective sphere having no essential connection to the rest of human life.  It leads people reflexively to be suspicious of any argument for a religious conclusion, no matter how sophisticated and subtle, as if it were “really” “nothing but” an exercise in rationalization.  Hence we have the absurd situation where a philosopher can give slipshod arguments for the most morally depraved conclusions whatever, and no one is ever supposed to think: “Hmm, I guess I’ll hear it out, but you do kind of wonder if he’s trying to justify being a pervert.”  But if, say, an Alex Pruss or Rob Koons presents a theistic proof, no matter how rigorously, the circumstantial ad hominem suddenly becomes a decisive refutation: “Oh come on, we all know that he’s just trying to rationalize his religious prejudices!”

Or think of the rhetorical game New Atheist types play in order to cast doubt on the rational and moral credibility of the general phenomenon of “religion.”  They will lump together, as representative samples of “religion,” ideas, practices, and people as diverse as: Thomistic metaphysics, sola fide, snake handling, Zen Buddhism, jihadists, the Tridentine Mass, Gödel’s ontological proof, the Heaven’s Gate cult, the Norse gods, the six schools of Indian philosophy, Lao-Tzu, Jimmy Swaggart, Pope St. Pius X, Kirk Cameron, Deepak Chopra, Adi Shankara, Joseph Campbell, Averroes, etc.  The more embarrassing things on the list are supposed to make us doubt the worthiness of the others. 

But you could play this same rhetorical game with anysubject matter in order to make it look disreputable.  For example, suppose we gave the following list as a representative sample of “science” and “scientists”: general relativity, phlogiston theory, caloric theory, the Periodic Table, pre-Copernican astronomy, phrenology, Lysenkoism, quantum mechanics, parapsychology, Lamarckian evolution, Darwinian evolution, Paul Dirac, Rupert Sheldrake, Alfred Wegener, Immanuel Velikovsky, etc. Suppose we kept Isaac Newton off the “science” list and put him on the “religion” list, since he wrote more about the latter topic than the former.  Suppose we took Deepak Chopra off the “religion” list and put him on the “science” list, on the grounds that he uses the word “quantum” a lot.  And suppose we did the same with the Heaven’s Gate cult, because they talked about comets and extraterrestrials.  We could by such a tactic make science look pretty stupid to people who didn’t know much about it, just as New Atheist types are able to make religionlook stupid to people who don’t know much about it. 

Hence we have a further reason why “religion” has turned out to be a difficult concept to define, which lies in the political and polemical interest some have in making the definition come out a certain way.  And this interest has its roots – like so much else in modernity – in the apostate project of supplanting what once was Christendom.

Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia on soul-body interaction

The letters exchanged between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia – especially their 1643 exchange on the interaction problem – are among the best-known correspondences in the history of philosophy.  And justly so, for they help to elucidate the true nature of that crucial problem and the inadequacy of Descartes’ response to it.  Though I think that in at least one important respect, Elisabeth errs in her characterization of the issue.

You can find the relevant letters in several anthologies, such as Margaret Atherton’s (which is the source from which I’ll be quoting).  You can also find them online.  What follows is a summary of the key points in their back-and-forth, with some comments.

Round one

Elisabeth begins by noting that if we think of efficient causation on the model of one extended object making contact with another and pushing against it (which would have been natural for those working with the then-ascendant Mechanical Philosophy’s conception of matter), then the interaction between soul and body – when conceived of in Cartesian terms – is hard to understand.  For whereas Descartes takes the body to be pure extension, he takes the soul to be pure thought devoid of extension.  Elisabeth suggests that clarification requires an account of the nature of the substanceof the soul, apart from its activity of thought.

Descartes responds by saying that our notions of the soul, of the body, and of the union of the two are each primitive, and that we must be careful not to attribute what is true of one of these to the others.  Now, this is what happens when we try to conceive of the manner in which the soul moves the body on the model of the way in which one physical object moves another.  This is, as philosophers would say today, a “category mistake,” and it seems that Descartes is implying that Elisabeth is guilty of such a mistake in formulating her puzzlement over the nature of soul-body interaction.

Descartes also suggests that such a category mistake is committed by the Aristotelians of his day who thought of physical objects as, by virtue of their weight, drawn toward the center of the earth – where it seems that it is the teleology or final causality posited by this account that he has primarily in mind.  He says that this account wrongly attributes to a physical object’s relation to the earth’s center what in fact holds of the body-soul relationship.  His point seems to be that while the notion of teleology has (in his view) no application in physics, it does provide us with a way of understanding how the soul acts on the body.

Descartes’ reply to Elisabeth is not entirely unhelpful.  Certainly he is right to emphasize that he would not say, and is not forced by his commitments to say, that soul-body interaction is correctly modeled on efficient causation between two physical substances.  However, his reply is not entirely helpful either…

Round two

In her response, Elisabeth suggests that it is not clear how the weight analogy provides a better model by which to understand how the soul moves the body.  And Descartes’ explanation is indeed not entirely lucid, though one can imagine ways to develop it that Elisabeth does not consider.  Presumably the analogy goes like this: On Aristotle’s model, the center of the earth is the end toward which a physical object moves by nature; and on Descartes’ model, the soul is the end toward which the body moves by nature.  And though Descartes rejects the teleological account of the movement of physical objects relative to the earth, teleology does provide a way of modeling the movement of the body relative to the soul.

In any case, though Descartes himself doesn’t explicitly say all that, it seems to me to be a way of interpreting him that accounts for why he would think the weight analogy at all helpful.  But immediately, problems arise.  Part of the point of Descartes’ adoption of a mechanistic conception of matter was to get teleology out of it.  But now he seems to be putting teleology back into matter again, at least for the purpose of solving the interaction problem if not for purposes of general physics.  Isn’t this ad hoc?

Elisabeth also still regards the case of soul-to-body causation as so puzzling that she says she finds it “easier… to concede matter and extension to the soul, than the capacity of moving a body… to an immaterial being.”  This is in my view her main mistake, for reasons I will explain presently.  But she immediately makes another point which is correct, extremely important, and widely neglected.  For it is not just the soul’s capacity for moving the body that Descartes has to explain, but also its “capacity… of being moved” by it.  She continues:

It is, however, very difficult to comprehend that a soul, as you have described it, after having had the faculty and habit of reasoning well, can lose all of it on account of some vapors, and that, although it can subsist without the body and has nothing in common with it, is yet so ruled by it.

End quote.  In short, whatever one thinks of soul-to-body causation, causation in the other direction – that is to say, body-to-soul causation – is really mysterious if one accepts a Cartesian account of soul and body.  And the reason why it is so mysterious is, in my view, linked to the reason why soul-to-body causation is not in fact as problematic as Elisabeth thinks it is, or at least not problematic in the specific wayshe thinks it is. 

But I’ll come back to all that too in a moment.  First let’s consider the rest of the exchange.  Descartes’ response is once again to comment on the differences between our notions of the soul, of the body, and of the union between them.  He appeals to the traditional distinction between the intellect or understanding, the imagination, and the senses.  He says that the soul is properly known by the understanding alone, the body by the understanding together with the imagination, and the union between them by the understanding together with the imagination and the senses.

The idea here seems to be that since the soul is, as Descartes understands it, pure thought devoid of extension, it is the abstractness of purely intellectual apprehension by which we most accurately understand it.  The body qua extension, however, is best understood by the intellect together with the sort of mental imagery we entertain when doing geometry.  And the closeness of the union between soul and body is evident in attributes which, in Descartes’ view, neither soul nor body can have on its own – namely, appetites, emotions, and sensations, which he takes to be hybrid attributes of a kind that exist only insofar as a res cogitansand a res extensa get into a causal relationship.  Hence, Descartes seems to be saying, we need to rely on our experiences of bodily sensations, affective states, and the like – and not just on intellect and imagination – properly to understand the causal relationship between soul and body.

How is this an answer to Elisabeth?  Descartes’ point seems to be that the causal relation between soul and body seems mysterious if we rely on the intellect alone, or on the intellect together with the imagination, in order to understand it – but that it will be less so if we rely on the senses too. 

The suggestion is certainly interesting, but that doesn’t mean that it is, as it stands, compelling.  If Descartes meant only that, as a matter of phenomenology, the close relationship between soul and body seems perfectly obvious and natural to us, then he would certainly be correct.  But of course, that isn’t really what Elisabeth is asking about.  Her question is not about whether soul and body seemto us to interact, but rather about how they could in fact do so given what Descartes claims about the natures of each.

Elisabeth’s last word

Though Elisabeth and Descartes exchanged other letters in later years, in this particular exchange on the interaction problem we only know of one further letter, which is from Elisabeth – to which, as far as we can tell, Descartes did not reply.  She was not convinced by his answer, for exactly the reason I mentioned.  She writes: “I too find that the senses show me that the soul moves the body; but they fail to teach me (any more than the understanding and the imagination) the manner in which she does it” (emphasis added).

Her own proposed solution is to suggest that “although extension is not necessary to thought, yet not being contradictory to it, it will be able to belong to some other function of the soul less essential to her.”  In other words, she proposes that soul and body can interact because the soul has, after all, extension as one of its attributes, and by means of it can cause changes in and be affected by the body in the same way that any two physical objects interact.

This is an interesting proposal that amounts to a version of what is these days called property dualism, but of a very different kind than the sort usually on offer today.  Contemporary property dualists suggest that a material substance, the human body, can have both physical and non-physical attributes.  What Elisabeth is suggesting is that an immaterial substance, the soul, might have both physical and non-physical attributes.

But there are two problems with this idea considered as a solution to the interaction problem facing Descartes.  First, it turns out that even body-to-body interaction is not as unproblematic as Elisabeth (and most other people who comment on the interaction problem) assume.  For Descartes’ abstract mathematical conception of matter is so desiccated that it is hard to see how it can have any efficacy at all with respect to anything, whether physical or non-physical.  Occasionalism – attributing all causality to God rather than to anything in the created order – was a natural position for Cartesians like Malebranche to take, and Descartes himself arguably took it with regard to everything except soul-body interaction.

A second problem is that if you are going to attribute physical properties to the soul in order to explain how it interacts with the body, why not go the whole hog and make the whole body itself an attribute of the soul?  That way you don’t have to posit any interaction between soul and body at all, because they will no longer be distinct substances.

Indeed, you’d be very close to returning to precisely the Scholastic conception of soul and body that Descartes was trying to replace.  You’ll be treating a human being as onesubstance, not two, but a substance with both incorporeal powers (thinking and willing) and corporeal ones (seeing, hearing, digesting, walking, etc.).  And I would say that that is indeed the correct solution to the interaction problem: to dissolve it by giving up the Cartesian thesis that soul and body are distinct substances, so that there aren’t any longer two things that need to “interact.”

Further comments

As I have often suggested, the real problem with Descartes’ position is not that he has trouble explaining how soul and body interact. The problem is that he thinks of them as interacting in the first place.  It is that he posits twosubstances rather than one.  And the reason this is a problem is that he thereby simply fails to capture the truth about human nature.  For his model makes of the soul something like an angelic intellect, and the body merely one physical object in the world alongside others that an angel might push about, the way that a demon pushes about an object that it possesses (as in the case of the Gadarene swine).  It makes of the body something entirely extrinsic to us (though this was certainly not his intent).

This is the force of Gilbert Ryle’s famous characterization of Descartes’ position as the theory of the “ghost in the machine.”  The problem isn’t: “How does an immaterial substance have any effect on the body?”  That’s no problem at all for something immaterial – after all, God and angels do it, as both Descartes and Elisabeth would have agreed.  The problem is rather: “How, if soul and body are two independent substances, can the soul affect the body in the specific way that it does (rather than in the way a ghost or an angel would)?”  The problem is explaining how the body could be a true partof you rather than a mere extrinsic instrument that is no more part of you than any other physical object.

Elisabeth was mistaken, then, to make a big deal of the question of soul-to-body causation as such.  Of course, it is easy to think such causation mysterious if you model all causation on push-pull causation between physical objects, but as Descartes rightly says, it is a mistake to do that.  (To be sure, it helps if you’re looking at the issue in the light of the complex theory of causation that the Scholastics had developed – and which Descartes himself was familiar with and had not entirely abandoned, as later modern philosophers would.)

Here’s a geometrical analogy that might be helpful.  (It’s only an analogy.  I am notsaying that immaterial substances are higher-dimensional objects.)  Consider two-dimensional creatures of the kind described in Edwin Abbott’s Flatland.  They might find talk of three-dimensional entities quite mysterious and not understand how such things could possibly “interact” with their own world.  But in fact, of course, a three-dimensional entity generating effects in a two-dimensional world would be no problem at all.  Similarly, while we lapse into thinking in terms of a crude push-pull model of causation and wonder: “Gee, how could an immaterial substance have any effect on matter? It’s so mysterious!”, the angels and demons look on thinking: “Seriously?  How pathetic.”  As the Scholastics would say, immaterial substances exist and operate at a higherontological level than we do, not a lower one.  And higher orders have no difficulty affecting lower ones.  We might find it mysterious how they do so, but that is unremarkable considering that our cognitive faculties are primarily geared toward understanding the lower, material order.

What would be truly problematic is a lower order affecting a higher one.  For example, a two-dimensional entity would have great difficulty having any effect on a three-dimensional one, at least if the three-dimensional one doesn’t cooperate.  And in an analogous way, it is mysterious how a purely material substance could have any effect on an immaterial substance. 

This is why Elisabeth’s point about body-to-soul causation is so important.  If soul and body are two distinct substances, then even if the soul could, as a substance of a higher ontological order, produce effects in the body (even if only in the way an angel might), it is nevertheless entirely mysterious how the body could produce effects in the soul (any more than a stone or a tree could have any effect on an angel or demon). 

This problem does not arise for the Scholastic conception of soul and body, because, again, it does not regard them as distinct substances in the first place.  A human being is one thing, not two, albeit a thing with both corporeal and incorporeal activities.  And since it is one thing, the question of interaction does not arise. 

Related posts:

Mind-body interaction: What’s the problem?

Cartesian angelism

The two Cartesian worlds

Was Aquinas a property dualist?

How to animate a corpse

What is a soul?

So, what are you doing after your funeral?

Koons on time and relative actuality

Rob Koons has reactivated his Analytic Thomist blog, which you must check out if you are interested in metaphysics done in a way that brings analytic philosophy and Thomism into conversation.  Rob was also recently interviewed on the What We Can’t Not Talk About podcast on the topic of Aristotle and modern science.  That topic is the focus of his recent work, and he has been especially interested in how Aristotelians ought to approach quantum mechanics and the nature of time. 

The latter subject is the focus of some of his latest blog posts, and also something about which Rob and I recently had an exchange in the pages of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.  In Aristotle’s Revenge, I argue that while Aristotelianism can in principle be reconciled with either the A- or the B-theory of time, the A-theory is by far the more natural view to take, and the presentist version of the A-theory especially.  Rob disagrees, and argues that Aristotelian metaphysics is equally compatible with either theory or with some third, intermediate theory.  We hash this out in some depth in the ACPQexchange, and Rob repeats some of his main theses in the recent blog posts.  Here I’ll reiterate some of my own misgivings about his position.

The B-theory of time holds that past, present, and future things and events are all equally real, and that temporal passage and the nowor present are illusory.  The A-theory, by contrast, takes temporal passage and the now or present to be real.  The presentist version of the A-theory also holds that, where time is concerned, only present things and events are real.  (A presentist could allow that there are also things that exist altogether outside of time, either eternally or aeviternally.)  The “growing block” version of the A-theory holds that present and past events are real.  The “moving spotlight” version of the A-theory allows that past and future events are as real as present ones.

One of the issues that arises in the ACPQexchange is whether the B-theory can accommodate notions of change and efficient causation robust enough for an Aristotelian.  I argue that it cannot.  Change and efficient causation, on an Aristotelian account, entail the actualization of potentiality.  But it seems that on a B-theory, since all past, present, and future things and events are equally real, everything is actual, and there is no real potentiality.  Hence there is no real efficient causation or change.  The theory collapses into an essentially Parmenidean position, at least with respect to time and change.

Rob’s response to this is to suggest that a B-theorist could affirm both actuality and potentiality by speaking of relativeactualities and potentialities.  Consider a banana that is green at time t1, yellow at time t2, and brown at time t3.  True, the B-theory holds that from an absolutepoint of view, times t1, t2, and t3 are equally real, and that the greenness, yellowness, and brownness of the banana are all equally actual.  Nevertheless, relative to t1, only the greenness is actual and the yellowness and brownness are merely potential; relative to t2, the greenness is no longer actual but the yellowness is actual, and the brownness remains potential; and so on.  Rob develops this proposal in his ACPQ article and briefly summarizes it in his recent blog posts.

But I don’t think this works.  Here’s one problem with it.  Suppose someone suggested that time was nothing more than a spatial dimension.  I reject this view, and Rob wants to avoid it too.  One problem with it is that it also seems incompatible with the existence of real potentialities in the world.  If past, present, and future events are equally real in exactly the same way that the spatially separated hot and cold ends of a fireplace poker are (to borrow a famous example from McTaggart), then it seems that they are equally actual, just as the hot and cold ends of the poker are equally actual.  There is no real potentiality in a spatialized conception of time, and thus no real change – and thus, really, no timeeither. 

But suppose our imagined spatializer of time defended his view by saying that there is potentiality of at least a relative sort on his conception of time.  Suppose he appealed to the poker analogy, and suggested that we could say that relative to the left side of the poker, the poker was actually cold but potentially hot, whereas relative to the right side, it was actually hot and potentially cold.  Suppose he suggested that there was therefore a kind of “change” in the poker from left to right.  And suppose he suggested that a similar kind of relative actuality and potentiality could be attributed to things and events at his spatialized points of time, and that a similar kind of change could therefore be attributed to them too.

In my view this would be clearly fallacious, involving little more than a pun on the word “change.”  (See Aristotle’s Revenge for detailed criticism of spatialized conceptions of time.)  I imagine Rob might agree, since, as I say, he too wants to avoid spatializing time, or at least denies that the B-theory need be interpreted as spatializing it.  But I fail to see how Rob’s notion of relative actuality and potentiality captures real potentiality, and thus real change, any more than my imagined spatializer of time does.

Here’s another way of thinking about the problem.  How does talk about relative actuality and potentiality capture real change or efficient causation any more than if we were to describe the objects and events of a fictional story as “relatively actual” (that is, relative to the story) even if they are from an absolute point of view merely potential (since the story is fictional)?  We need to know what it is, specifically, about Rob’s conception of the relation between the banana’s being green at t1and yellow at t2 that makes the transition from the one to the other any more a case of real change involving real causation than the events of a fictional story are. 

In short, talk of “relative actuality” and “relative potentiality” by itself doesn’t seem sufficient to do the job Rob needs it to do.  For we could use such language to describe an entirely spatialized conception of time, and yet it wouldn’t really give us genuine potentiality.  Or we could use it to describe an entirely fictional world, and yet it wouldn’t give us genuine actuality.   The notion of being “relatively” actual or potential seems – by itself, with no further elaboration – too thin to do the needed metaphysical work.  (I criticize Rob’s position in more detail in the ACPQpaper.)

Related posts:

Cundy on relativity and the A-theory of time

Gödel and the unreality of time

Vallicella on the truthmaker objection against presentism

Vallicella on existence-entailing relations and presentism

Aristotelians ought to be presentists

More on presentism and truthmakers

Craig contra the truthmaker objection to presentism

Presentism and analogical language

Time, space, and God

Narrative thinking and conspiracy theories

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you” is one of the most famous lines from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.  I propose a corollary: Just because they’re after you doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid.

In a pair of articles at Rorate Caeli (hereand here), traditionalist Catholic historian Roberto de Mattei offers some illuminating observations about paranoid modes of thinking trending in some right-wing circles, such as the QAnon theory.  These are usually criticized as “conspiracy theories,” but as De Mattei points out, that they posit malevolent left-wing conspiracies is not the problem.  Left-wing ideas really do dominate the news media, the universities, the entertainment industry, corporate HR departments, and so on.  Left-wing politicians and opinion makers really are extremely hostile to traditional moral and religious views, and in some cases threaten people’s freedom to express them.  A transformative project like The Great Reset is not the product of right-wing fantasy – it has its own official website, for goodness’ sake.  Left-wingers in government, the press, NGOs, etc. have common values and goals and work together to advance them.  The “conspiring” here is not secret or hypothetical, but out in the open.

Disordered minds

The problem is rather that the specific kinds of conspiracy theory De Mattei has in mind are epistemologically highly dubious.  Now, one way a conspiracy theory might be epistemologically problematic has to do with the structure of the theory itself.  For example, I have argued that a problem with the most extreme sorts of conspiracy theory is that they are like the most extreme sorts of philosophical skepticism, in being self-undermining.  De Mattei’s focus, by contrast, is on the psychological mechanism by which such theories come to be adopted.  He writes:

The characteristic of false conspiracy theories is that they cannot offer any documentation or certainty.  To compensate for their lack of proofs, they use the technique of narration, which takes hold of the emotions, more than reason, and seduces those, who by an act of faith, have already decided to believe the far-fetched, propelled by fear, anger and rancor.

De Mattei elaborates on the cognitive mechanism involved in his other article, as follows:

Bad use of reason leads to the precedence of the imagination, a form of knowledge which does not follow logical steps, but [is] often determined by an emotional state.  Reason is substituted by fantasy and demonstration is substituted by narration.  To explain the significance of the term phantasia, Aristotle indicates its derivation from light (pháos).  Just as luminous stimulus generate visual sensations, thus the mind produces internally “phantasms” (phantásmata) or images that don’t always correspond to reality.  Every image that makes an impression on our mind therefore, must be verified by the light of reason, which is the highest faculty of the soul…

These ideas circulating in the blog-sphere appear seductive to many, but are expressed in the form of “narration”, more than argumentation.  What renders them fallacious is not the conspiratorial theory underlying them, but the presumption of establishing a theory through arguments of a merely circumstantial nature… Those who sustain these theses then, often use “flash sophism”, which consists in having recourse to generic phrases and peremptory sentences, which do not convince the sage, but make an impression on the uneducated.

End quote.  Let’s unpack what De Mattei is saying here.  First, he appeals to the standard Aristotelian-Thomistic distinction between the imagination, the passions, and the intellect.  The imagination is that faculty by which we form and entertain mental images or “phantasms,” which can be thought of as faint copies of what has been, or could be, experienced through the senses.  Examples would be the images you call to mind of what your mother’s face looks like or what her voice sounds like, or of the smell or taste of the Christmas dinner you shared when you last saw her.  The passions are affective states that incline us toward or away from various actions or objects – a flash of anger that inclines us to lash out at someone, a twinge of nostalgia that leads us to open up the photo album, the feeling of joy that follows the hearing of a favorite piece of music, and so on.

The imagination and the passions have their own principles of operation, and they are the kind typically emphasized by (and overgeneralized by) empiricist and associationist theories in psychology.  For example, the appearance in consciousness of one image will naturally tend to trigger the appearance of other images which it has in the past been associated with.  You hear mom’s voice on the answering machine, and the next thing you know, you “see” the image of her face with your mind’s eye.  That in turn triggers warm feelings of affection and nostalgia.  Those may in turn generate memories of childhood events, which in turn trigger other emotions.  And so on.  None of this is irrational or per se contrary to reason, but it is not rationaleither – that is to say, the progression from one image or passion to another is not a matter of logical inference or even, necessarily, of conceptual connections, but rather of contingent habituation.

The intellect, by contrast, is concerned precisely with abstract concepts, complete thoughts or propositions, and their logical interrelationships.  To be sure, in human beings the intellect operates in tandem with the imagination and the passions.  But the content of a concept, of a proposition, or of the string of propositions that make up an argument, outstrip anything that can even in principle be captured in imagery or in any affective state.  What the intellect does differs in kind, and not merely in degree, from anything the imagination and the passions do. 

Again, this is just standard Aristotelian-Thomistic psychology.  And it is absolutely essential to understanding human nature and the moral life.  We share the imagination and passions with non-human animals.  But the intellect is what sets us apart from them, the angelic side of the mashup of angel and ape that is the human being.  And it transforms and ennobles our imaginations and passions, imposing an overlay of conceptual and logical order on what would otherwise be an instinctive and habitual, but strictly unintelligent, play of images and passions.

Now, when a human mind is properly ordered, the imagination and passions conform themselves to the intellect.  But when the intellect is instead pushed around by an excessively powerful imagination and/or passions, all sorts of irrationality and immorality can result.  A person given to excessive anger will see offenses and bad motives where there are none, or see great offenses where there are really only small ones.  A person given to excessive worry will foresee difficulties where there are none, or insurmountable difficulties where there are in fact perfectly manageable ones.  And so on.

These are examples of how imagination and passion can distort rational judgment in the individual.  But disordered habits of imagination and feeling can become so widespread that they come to characterize a whole society.  An example would be the extreme sexual depravity that surrounds us today – indeed, in which contemporary human minds are veritably marinating, with the effect of rotting out their capacity for sober rational judgment (as Aquinas warns that sexual vice has, of all vices, the greatest propensity to do).  A major contributor to this is the near omnipresence of online pornography, which habituates the user to highly disordered and unrealistic imaginative scenarios and passions.  The depth of the disorder is evidenced by the fact that the very idea that there are two sexes and that the sexual act is of its nature oriented to procreative and unitive ends – blindingly obvious for all of previous human history to even the least educated of rational minds – has now come to be regarded by millions of people as a hateful lie, a mark of bigotry that must be shouted down or even censored.  This is mass psychosis.  (To quote Catch-22 again: “Insanity is contagious.”)

Narrative thinking

What does all this have to do with the kinds of epistemologically untethered conspiracy theories that De Mattei is criticizing?  In a key insight, De Mattei says that such theories are rooted in a kind of “narration” rather than “argumentation.”  What does he mean by this?

Think of the differences between a story and a line of philosophical argument.  The parts of a story are not connected together in the way that the steps of an argument are.  In an argument, one proposition is logically entailed by, or made probable by, another.  That is not the way one event is related to another in a story.  Of course, we might speak in a loose way of there being a logical progression of events in a good story, but what we mean by that is that the progression is well-plotted, or true to the characters’ motivations, or what have you.  Ultimately, we judge the story by criteria of aesthetics and personal taste that differ from the dry and dispassionate logical criteria by which we evaluate an argument.  And those criteria of aesthetics and personal taste have much to do with the affective reaction a story produces in us, and the pleasant or striking imagery it generates.

De Mattei’s point is that conspiracy theories of the kind he has in mind stand in need of dry and dispassionate logical evaluation, but in fact tend to be embraced for reasons similar to the kind that are operating when we are attracted to a good story or narrative.  And this occurs because those drawn to such theories are excessively given to passion and imagination and allow these to dominate their intellects. 

Of course, since even a person with overdeveloped passions and imagination is still a rational animal, his intellect is also engaged in evaluating the theory.  But the problem is that, pushed around by his imagination and passions, his intellect is too easily satisfied with arguments that are actually far from logically compelling – with what De Mattei calls merely “circumstantial” evidence and with “generic phrases and peremptory sentences,” e.g. clichés about the motives of those in power, and the confident pronouncements of purported experts.  Everything seems to “fit,” but only because the narrative is highly attractive given one’s passions and general background beliefs, not because the evidence and arguments are actually as powerful as is assumed.  By means of the mechanisms whereby phantasms are generated and come to be associated, images of one sort (of real injustices occurring, of real and widespread expressions of hostility to one’s values, etc.) tend to prompt further images (e.g. of shadowy conspirators in smoke-filled rooms).  The psychological ease with which one image tends to generate another in consciousness is mistaken for a logicalconnection between premises and conclusion.

A person who has fallen in love with such a narrative may even start to feel part of it himself, like a character in an action film who is going to assist in bringing the story to a climax.  Before you know it, he’s drunk the QAnon Kool-Aid and is ready to throw the Georgia Senate elections in order to stick it to the RINOs, or to invade the Capitol building. 

Conspiracy theorizing of this kind involves something like the Slippery Slope fallacy in reverse.  In a Slippery Slope fallacy, one judges too hastily that some action or policy A will lead to some bad outcome Z, but without explaining how to fill in the causal gaps by which A would plausibly lead to Z.  In paranoid thinking of the kind evident in extreme conspiracy theories, one starts with some genuinely bad phenomenon Z (say, bureaucratic resistance to policies that would help the working class and end pointless wars) and posits a bizarre cause A (for example, a conspiracy of cannibalistic Satan-worshipping pedophiles), without explaining why the series of causes leads back to A, specifically, as opposed to some less exotic principal cause.  What the conspiracy theorist doesn’t realize is that even though the phenomenon Z is real and is bad, it doesn’t follow that he’s not reacting to it in a paranoid way.

The tendency De Mattei is describing is not a deterministic one.  The point isn’t that passion and imagination become so powerful that the intellect is left utterly helpless.  A sufficiently powerful intellect or will can resist the errors into which even deep-seated disordered fleshly desires might otherwise lead one, as the examples of Plato and St. Augustine show.  Similarly, a person given to paranoid delusions can come to know that he is, and try to correct for it (a famous extreme case being that of John Nash).  But given the pull of the passions and the imagination, a paranoid narrative can become addictive.  And as the AA folks tell us, the first step is to admit the problem. 

Gnostic narratives

Narrative thinking not only reinforces crackpot conspiracy theories, but can also facilitate disorders of the passions and the imagination of the other kinds mentioned above.  Indeed, narrative thinking is a major factor behind the now widespread acceptance and celebration of sexual desires and practices that have traditionally been considered aberrant.  One concocts a story like the following: “These aren’t just weird desires and feelings.  They reflect who I am, my identity.  Those who criticize them are therefore trying to hurt me.  Indeed, they are part of a long history of oppression of people like me.  Our story is one of victimization, and the climax of the story must be liberation.”  Repeat this little narrative to yourself over and over and you’ll almost believe it.  Yell it in other people’s faces with enough worked-up outrage, and it starts to feel natural.  Get other people to repeat it back to you and to share in the yelling, and you’re not only fully convinced, but have the makings of a pseudo-moralistic crusade.  It helps if you’re part of a generation raised on social media, video games, cosplay, Critical Theory, and other insulations from objective reality.  The narrative provides meaning in a world from which traditional meanings have disappeared, and license to violate norms that have collapsed with the disappearance of those traditional meanings.

This is true of “woke” thinking more generally.  In an earlier post I discussed how Critical Race Theory and QAnon alike are contemporary manifestations of the same paranoid mindset that underlies the ancient Gnostic heresy.  Now, Gnosticism is nothing if not a narrative-oriented rather than rational mode of discourse.  And Critical Race Theory is explicitly and self-consciously so.  Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s widely read primer on the subject devotes a chapter to surveying the ways that CRT writers deploy “narrative” and “storytelling” as rhetorical weapons – in particular, the spinning of “counterstories” and “alternative realities” as devices for undermining people’s confidence in the “narratives” CRT claims to be oppressive.  All in the context of badmouthing rationalism, objectivity, etc. as masks for “white supremacy.”  This is nothing less than the making of textbook logical fallacies (appeal to emotion, hasty generalization, the genetic fallacy, poisoning the well, begging the question, etc.) the methodological foundation of an entire academic industry.  The whole thing is no less a sick fantasy world than the QAnon lunacy is.  The difference is that QAnon doesn’t get shoved down your throat by the HR department, 10 million dollar corporate grants, New York Times bestseller status, etc.

All the same, QAnon is not harmless crankery, as the appalling events at the Capitol show.  And it is, in any event, a waste of time and energy to try to ferret out hidden left-wing malevolence when what we ought really to worry about is the kind that is already being frankly expressed.  From Catch-22 again:

“Subconsciously there are many people you hate.”

“Consciously, sir, consciously,” Yossarian corrected in an effort to help.  “I hate them consciously.”

But let’s give the last word to De Mattei:

The existence of a conspiracy aiming at the destruction of the Church and Christian Civilization is in no need of new theories, since it has already been proven by history; neither does it need secrecy, since the Revolution now acts boldly, openly.

Related posts:

The Gnostic heresy’s political successors

The Bizarro world of left-wing politics

The trouble with conspiracy theories

Brin on conspiracy theories

Epstein on conspiracies

McGinn on the question of being

Colin McGinn is a philosopher whose work I always find interesting even when I disagree with it, which is often.  His book Philosophical Provocations: 55 Short Essays is made to be dipped into when one is in the mood for something substantive but not too heavy going.  And it is accurately titled, since on reading it I was indeed provoked – specifically, by the article on “The Question of Being.”

McGinn characterizes the issue as:

the question [of] …what it is for something to have being.  What does existence itself consist in – what is its nature?  When something exists, what exactly is true of it?  What kind of condition is existence?  How does an existent thing differ from a nonexistent thing? (p. 211)

He makes several important observations about this question.  First, it is a serious philosophical question, but one that is distinct from the issues that analytic philosophers tend to confine themselves to when discussing existence.  In particular, it is distinct from questions about whether “exists” is a first- or second-level predicate, and it is distinct from questions about what sorts of things we should allow into our ontology (material objects, numbers, moral values, universals, etc.).  Analytic philosophers have a lot to say about those questions, but little to say about the question of being.

Second, McGinn says that the question is not plausibly addressed by philosophical views which are essentially anthropocentric (such as verificationism, pragmatism, and some versions of idealism).  Since human beings could have failed to exist, it cannot be correct to think of existence in terms of what we could empirically verify, or what is useful to us, or what we perceive.

Third, McGinn correctly notes that empirical science cannot answer the question either.  There can be a science of particular sorts of existing things – plants, animals, chemical elements, basic particles, and so on.  But “there cannot be an empirical science of existence-as-such” (p. 213).  He does not elaborate, but since part of what is involved in the question of being is whether what exists outstrips what is material or empirically detectable, it obviously cannot be answered by way of methods that confine themselves to matter and the empirical.

So far so good.  McGinn also correctly notes that even if we take the view that the notion of existence is primitive and unanalyzable, “it should be possible to say somethingilluminating about it – not provide a classical noncircular analysis, perhaps, but at least offer some elucidatory remarks” (p 211).

Analytic myopia?

So why was I provoked?  Because McGinn also claims that in the history of philosophy, the question of being “has been ignored, evaded perhaps” (p. 212).  Indeed:

There is a huge gap at the heart of philosophy: the nature of existence.  In fact, we might see the history of (Western) philosophy as a systematic avoidance of this problem.  We have not confronted the question of being, not head on anyway. (p. 211)

and:

When philosophers started to organize and educate, a few thousand years ago, they would be tacitly aware of the problem but had nothing useful to communicate, so they left it alone, kept it off the syllabus, and discouraged students from raising it.  And today we still have no idea what to say, beyond the two questions I mentioned earlier. (p. 213)

Seriously?!  Has McGinn not heard of Parmenides?  Plato on being and becoming?  Avicenna?  Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia?  Heidegger’s Being and Time?  Sartre’s Being and Nothingness?  Gilson’s Being and Some Philosophers?  Obviously he must have.  And that’s just scratching the surface.  Nor has the question in fact been ignored by all analytic philosophers, as evidenced by books like Barry Miller's The Fullness of Being and Bill Vallicella’s A Paradigm Theory of Existence.  So, what the hell is McGinn talking about?

Of course, Heidegger famously alleged that Western philosophy after Plato had evaded the question of being.  But McGinn can’t mean what Heidegger meant, since he cites neither the Pre-Socratics nor Heidegger himself as exceptions to the charge that philosophers have “ignored” or “evaded” the question of being.

My guess is that McGinn simply has the myopia stereotypical of analytic philosophers (even if not actually fairly attributable to all of them).  To be sure, McGinn’s work often does engage seriously with the history of philosophy, though his range of knowledge of and interest in it seems not to extend before the early modern period.  And it would be churlish to criticize him too harshly, since, as I say, he doestake the question seriously (which a truly myopic analytic philosopher would not do). 

Still, the fact remains that it is hard to see how anyone even vaguely familiar with ancient and medieval philosophy could make the assertions he does.  And even analytic philosophers should know better – and as I have said, often do know better.  For example, thinkers like Wilfrid Sellars and Richard Rorty seriously engaged with the pre-modern history of philosophy.  Indeed, though they couldn’t be farther from Thomism, they knew of and to some extent engaged with the Thomist tradition as it existed in their day (mainly as filtered through writers like Gilson, Maritain, and Mortimer Adler).

One of the big themes of the Thomism of those days was the way that Thomism offered a deeper analysis of the nature of existence than the existentialism that was then all the rage.  For example, Maritain’s Existence and the Existent is devoted to that theme.  Now, as a Thomist whose training was originally in analytic philosophy, even I find Maritain’s style sometimes a bit hard to take.  So, you can be sure that McGinn would find it even more so.  All the same, such books evidence just how deeply the question of being was in fact being addressed by thinkers whose work earlier analytic thinkers engaged with.  And even some prominent contemporary analytic philosophers whose work McGinn would know are still engaging with them – consider, for example, Anthony Kenny’s book Aquinas on Being.

So, we’re not talking even six degrees of separation here.  Even given analytic myopia, it is remarkable that McGinn would make statements so bold, sweeping – and embarrassingly easy to prove false – as he did.  A few minutes of Googling should have dissuaded him.

The Thomist account

You don’t have to read far into a book like Maritain’s to see that he offers exactly what McGinn asks for – an account (drawn, of course, from Aquinas) that tries to be “illuminating” and “elucidatory” even if it takes being to be in a sense primitive.  We have the classic Thomistic themes:

- Being is a broader notion than existence.  After all, the essence of a thing has a kind of being or reality, but it is (as the classic Thomistic doctrine holds) really distinct from the existence of a thing. 

- Potentiality is a kind of being that is really distinct from actuality, and intermediate between actuality on the one hand and nothingness on the other.  Recognizing this distinction is essential to avoiding Parmenidean static monism on the one hand (which posits a world of pure being with no becoming), and Heraclitean dynamism on the other (which posits a world of pure becoming with no being).

- Connecting these two distinctions, the essence of a thing, considered in isolation, is a kind of potential being, and the existence of a thing is what actualizes that potential.

- Being is an analogical notion, where analogy is a literal middle ground usage between the univocal and the equivocal use of terms.  A substance, its attributes, its form, its matter, its essence, its existence, etc. all have being, but not all in exactly the same sense (even if not in equivocal senses either).

- Being is not a genus nor a universal of any kind.  The relationship between individual beings and Being Itself is not the relation between instances of a kind and the abstract kind of which they are instances.  It is rather a causal relation between that which requires that existence be added to its essence in order for it to be part of the world, and that which does not.

And so on.  You might reject all this.  You might judge that, at the end of the day, it doesn’t hold up, perhaps for reasons like Kenny’s.  (Though you shouldn’t – see my Scholastic Metaphysics for exposition and defense of the Thomist position.)  But you can’t deny that it amounts to exactly the sort of thing McGinn says we need and claims that philosophers have studiously avoided – a worked-out attempt to elucidate the nature of being.  And of course, Thomism is not the only school of thought that has tried to offer that, as the history of ancient and medieval philosophy (and even much modern philosophy) shows.

Contra antirealism

McGinn himself has some illuminating remarks to make in another article in the volume titled “Antirealism Refuted.”  To be sure, they’re not presented as an attempt to elucidate the question of being.  All the same, one of the ways that both common sense and philosophy try to understand reality is by contrast with thought.  For example, if you ask the average person what it means to say that unicorns are not real, he is likely to say that they are merely imaginary – that they cannot be found outside the mind. 

Now, antirealist views in philosophy treat various phenomena that common sense takes to be real as if they had no existence outside thought, or outside language, or outside cultural practice, or what have you.  For example, an antirealist about moral value might say that morality has no foundation in objective reality, but reflects only our emotional states or cultural practices.  An antirealist about physical objects might say that physical substances are mere fictions that allow us to organize our experiences, or that the very notion of a substance (physical or otherwise) is a shadow of the subject-predicate structure of language but corresponds to nothing in reality.

McGinn points out that an antirealist view about some subject matter is essentially an error theory.  It holds that we systematically just get things wrong about that subject matter.  But interestingly, none of the usual sources of error can plausibly explain why we would be subject to the errors antirealism attributes to us.  Nor do antirealist theories offer plausible alternative suggestions about the source of the purported error.

McGinn points out, for example, that errors in astronomy might arise from perceptual illusion, errors in morality from prejudices, errors in politics from indoctrination, and so on.  But none of these sources plausibly explain the sorts of errors posited by metaphysical antirealism.  For example, even when none of the usual sources of perceptual illusion are operating, the antirealist about physical objects says we are still erring in judging them to be real.  But how?  What exactly is the source of this error if it is not (say) bad lighting, refraction, malfunctioning eyeballs, etc.?  We might claim, with more or less plausibility, that some specificmoral opinion arises from prejudice.  But how exactly would the more general belief that there is such a thing as objective morality in the first place arise from prejudice? 

McGinn’s basic argument against antirealism, then, is that it is an error theory that has no workable theory of error.  How might this elucidate the nature of being or reality?  Again, McGinn himself does not apply his argument to that particular question.  But it is relevant.  For error presupposes the distinction between truth and falsity.  And antirealism itself implicitly supposes that error – the failure to attain truth – entails a lack of correspondence between thought and reality, whereas there would be such a correspondence if we were not in error.

So, the realism/antirealism debate itself presupposes a conception of being or reality as something extra-mental, to which the mind conforms when it attains truth.  Being is a correlate of truth.  That gives us at least the beginnings of the kind of “illuminating” or “elucidatory” account of being that McGinn wants.  And here too the Thomistic tradition – which, in its endorsement of the medieval notion of the “transcendentals,”also says of being that it is convertible with truth (and with goodness, unity, etc.) – provides ingredients for developing the analysis further.

Related reading:

Does existence exist?

Fifty Shades of Nothing

Parfit on brute facts

Greene on Nozick on nothing

A first without a second

McGinn on mind and space

The Gnostic heresy’s political successors

The Western world is the creation of the Church, and the crisis of the West is always at bottom the crisis of the Church.  This is especially so where the Church has receded into the background of the Western mind – where men’s plans are hatched in the name of progress, science, social justice, equity, or some other purportedly secular value, and make little or no reference to religion.  For liberalism, socialism, communism, scientism, progressivism, identity politics, globalism, and all the rest – this Hydra’s head of modernist projects, however ostensibly secular, is united by two features that are irreducibly theological.

First, they are all essentially apostateprojects, enterprises that have arisen in the midst of Christian civilization with the aim of supplanting it.  And they could have arisen only within the Christian context, because, second, these projects are all heretical in the broad sense of that term.  That is to say, they are all founded on some idea inherited from Christianity (the dignity of the individual, human equality, a law-governed universe, a final consummation, etc.) but removed from the theological framework that originally gave it meaning, and radically distorted in the process.

As an essentially apostate and heretical phenomenon, modernity is also an Oedipal phenomenon.  Its series of grand, mad schemes amount to the West fitfully seeking – now this way, now that – finally to free itself from the authority of its heavenly Father and to defile the doctrine of its ecclesiastical Mother.  And in the process, the would-be parricides always make themselves over into parodies – remolding the world in their image, suppressing dissent, and otherwise acting precisely like the oppressive God and Church that haunt their imaginations.

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) was among the most important thinkers to analyze modernity under the category of heresy, and the specific heresy he regarded as the key to the analysis was Gnosticism.  The Gnostic heresy is one that has recurred many times in the long history of the Church, under various guises – Marcionism, Manicheanism, Paulicianism, Albigensianism, Catharism, and so on.  Like Hilaire Belloc, Voegelin regarded Puritanism as a more recent riff on the same basic mindset.  And he argued that modern ideologies like communism, National Socialism, progressivism, and scientism are all essentially secularized versions of Gnosticism.  Voegelin’s best-known statement of this thesis appears in The New Science of Politics, though he revisited and expanded upon it in later work. 

Now, what Voegelin saw in these ideologies is manifestly present in Critical Race Theory and the rest of the “woke” insanity now spreading like a cancer through the body politic.  But it is also to be found in certain tendencies coming from the opposite political direction, such as the lunatic QAnon theory.  Voegelin’s analysis is thus as relevant to understanding the present moment as it was to understanding the mid-twentieth-century totalitarianisms that originally inspired it.  It reveals to us the true nature of the insurgency that is working to take over the Left, and will do so if more sober liberals do not act decisively to check its influence.  But it also serves as a grave warning to the Right firmly to resist any temptation to respond to left-wing Gnosticism with a right-wing counter-Gnosticism.

Notes of the Gnostic mindset

The Gnostic mentality – considered at a high level of abstraction that leaves out the many differences between the various specific Gnosticizing movements that have arisen over the centuries – can be characterized in terms of tendencies like the following:

First, it sees evil as all-pervasive and nearly omnipotent, absolutely permeating the established order of things.  You might wonder how this differs from the Christian doctrine of original sin.  It differs radically.  Christianity teaches the basic goodness of the created order.  It teaches that human beings have a natural capacity for knowledge and practice of the good – the idea of natural law.  It teaches that basic social institutions like the family and the state are grounded in the natural law, and are therefore good.  To be sure, it also teaches that original sin has massively damaged our moral capacities and social life.  But it has not obliterated the good that is in them.  And its damage has been mitigated by special divine revelation since the beginning of the human race, as recorded in scripture.  The Gnostic mindset takes a much darker view.  The original Gnostic movements regarded the material world as essentially evil.  They saw marriage and family as evil.  They regarded the God of the Old Testament as the malign creator and ruler of the present sinister order of things.  The Gnostic mentality is thus one of radical alienation from the created order.  It sees that order as something to be destroyed or escaped from rather than redeemed.

Second, the Gnostic mentality holds that only an elect who have received a special gnosis or “knowledge” from a Gnostic sage can see through the illusory appearances of things to the reality of the incorrigible evil of this world.  You might wonder how this differs from Christian appeal to special divine revelation.  Once again, the difference is radical.  Christian teaching is essentially exoteric.  Christianity holds, first, that at least the basic truths of natural law and natural theology are available in principle to everyone and at any time, just by using their natural rational powers.  Second, it holds also that even special divine revelation is publicly available to all, and backed by evidence that anyone can examine, viz. the evidence that a prophet claiming a revelation has performed genuine miracles.  Gnostic teaching, by contrast, is esoteric.  It holds that the truth cannot be known from the appearances of things or from any official sources, but has been passed along “under the radar” and is accessible only to the initiated.  The Gnostic epistemology is what today would be called a “hermeneutics of suspicion.”

Third, the Gnostic mindset sees reality in starkly Manichean terms, as a twilight struggle between the sinister forces that rule this evil world and those who have been “purified” of it and armed with gnosis.  Once again, you might think this differs little from Christian teaching, but once again you’d be wrong.  Christian doctrine holds that natural reason and natural law provide common ground by which the Christian and the unbeliever can debate their differences and cooperate in pursuing common ends.  And it holds that the righteous and the wicked – the wheat and the tares – will in any event always be intermingled in this life, to be separated only at the Last Judgment.  The Gnostic mindset is not interested in such common ground or tolerant of such differences.

Fourth, the Gnostic lives in what Voegelin calls a “dream world.”  This is inevitable given the subjectivism and irrationality entailed by the Gnostic’s esotericism, and the paranoia entailed by his Manicheanism.  The Gnostic sees the manifestation of evil forces everywhere.  He inverts common sense and everyday morality, seeing these as reflective of the evil order of things and the sinister forces behind it.  Nothing that happens is taken to falsify his beliefs, because any bad effects are interpreted as merely further manifestations of the evil forces, rather than reflecting any defect in the Gnostic’s belief system.  Voegelin writes:

The gap between intended and real effect will be imputed not to the Gnostic immorality of ignoring the structure of reality but to the immorality of some other person or society that does not behave as it should behave according to the dream conception of cause and effect. (The New Science of Politics, pp. 169-70)

Fifth, Gnostic moral practice veers between the extremes of puritanism and libertinism.  Initially this might seem puzzling, but it makes perfect sense given the Gnostic’s other commitments.  On the one hand, given the Gnostic hatred of the created order and of conventional moral and social life, what the normal person takes to be permissible or even necessary to ordinary life is prissily condemned.  Hence, Gnostic heretical movements over the centuries famously emphasized vegetarianism, pacifism, the purported evil of capital punishment, and similarly utopian attitudes, pitting the “mercy” of a Gnosticized interpretation of Jesus against what they regarded as the sinister Old Testament God of justice.  On the other hand, since the material world is taken by the Gnostic to have no value, nothing that happens within it ultimately matters, and the most licentious behavior can be excused.  Hence, sexual immorality was often tolerated in practice – as long as it was not associated with marriage and procreation, which would tie us to the ordinary material and social order.

Sixth, the Gnostic posits a final victory of the “pure” over the evil forces that govern everyday reality.  For Gnostic heretical movements of the past, this entailed an ultimate release from the material world.  But the modern political successors of Gnosticism tend to be materialist, seeing no hope for a life beyond this one.  Here is where Voegelin sees the greatest difference between ancient and modern forms of Gnosticism.  As Voegelin famously put it, modern forms of Gnosticism “immanentize the eschaton” – that is to say, they relocate the final victory of the righteous in this world rather than the next, and look forward to a heaven on earth.

Modern Gnosticisms

The many variations on the Gnostic heresy that arose in the ancient and medieval worlds did so in a context where the reality of the supernatural was taken for granted.  The influence of classical philosophical traditions like Neo-Platonism and the dominance of the Church made this reflexive supernaturalism possible.  But the Enlightenment radically changed the basic cultural situation, breaking the power of the Church over Western civilization and putting Western philosophy and intellectual life in general on a trajectory toward naturalism. 

Voegelin’s deep insight is that this by no means destroyed the Gnostic mindset, but merely transformed it.  Gnosticism didn’t disappear with the decline of supernaturalism; instead, it adapted to the new cultural situation by naturalizing itself.  “Immanentizing the eschaton” is the most obvious adaptation, but all the other elements of the Gnostic mindset were also transformed in various ways in the different modern forms of Gnosticism.

Hence, consider Marxism from the point of view of Voegelin’s analysis.  Here the all-pervasive and near omnipotent evil that the Gnostic sees in the world becomes capitalism and the bourgeois power that it sustains.  This power is taken to permeate every aspect of life, on the Marxist analysis, insofar as the legal, moral, religious and general cultural “superstructure” of society are all held to reflect the capitalist economic “base.”  Everyday moral assumptions are mere ideologies that mask the interests of bourgeois power, religion is a mere opiate to reconcile the oppressed to that power, and so on.  Marxist theory is the gnosis that reveals this dark and hidden truth about the world, and Marx, Engels, Lenin and Co. play the role that Gnostic sages like Valentinus, Marcion, and Mani did in the Gnosticisms of the past.  The Manichean roles of the forces of darkness and of light are played by the bourgeois oppressor on the one hand, and the proletariat and its intellectual vanguard on the other. 

The Marxist position is made as subjectivist and unfalsifiable as that of earlier Gnostics to the extent that criticism of the Marxist analysis is dismissed as an ideological mask for bourgeois power, and the critics are tarred as “objective allies” of that power (even when they happen to be left-wing themselves).  The paradoxical puritan/libertine dynamic is evident in the moralistic rejection of bourgeois moral norms.  The final victory over evil – the “immanentized eschaton” – is the realization of communism, in which exploitation will disappear, alienation will be overcome, the state will wither away, and liberated man will (as Marx famously put it) “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, [and] criticize after dinner.”

Or consider the analysis of Nazism as a kind of Gnosticism.  Here it is the Jews who are cast in the role of omnipotent villain, portrayed in Nazi propaganda as the puppet masters behind capitalist exploitation and communist oppression alike, and as alien and subhuman parasites who subvert the health and moral order of the German nation.  The gnosis that claims to reveal this is the teaching of the Führer.  The Führer and the Aryan people he leads on the one hand, and the Jews and their allies on the other, play the familiar Manichean roles.  The cultural relativism of Nazi ideology gives it an essentially subjectivist and irrationalist character.  The libertine/puritan dynamic finds expression in the Nazi’s contempt for ordinary notions of justice and rights on the one hand, and an austere ethos of self-sacrifice for the German Volk on the other.  (See Claudia Koonz’s book The Nazi Conscience for an illuminating account of Nazi pseudo-moralism.)  The Nazis’ own depraved “immanentized eschaton” involved the “Final Solution” and the “Thousand Year Reich.”

Woke Gnosticism

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is in exactly the same mold.  The difference is that, unlike Marxism and Nazism, it has not (yet?) been implemented as a political program.  But the ravings of an Ibram Kendi or Robin DiAngelo manifest the same paranoia, irrationalism, and Manichean fanaticism as any other form of Gnosticism.  And CRT’s violent implications have already been seen on the streets of Washington, Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, New York, Kenosha, and other American cities during the summer of 2020 – an echo of Gnostic mobs of the past (SA Brownshirts, Young Maoists, and the like) and a foretaste of things to come.

For CRT, the all-pervasive and near omnipotent source of evil in the world is the “racist power” of “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” and indeed “whiteness” itself.  This racism is “systemic” in a Foucauldian sense – it percolates down, in capillary fashion, into every nook and cranny of society and the unconscious assumptions of every citizen.  It is especially manifest in all “inequities,” which result from the “implicit biases” lurking even in people who think of themselves as free of racism.  And it is to be found even in the most seemingly innocuous of offenses, which are in reality “micro-aggressions.”  Even self-consciously “anti-racist” CRT adepts themselves are not free of racism, but must constantly engage in a Maoist-style self-critical struggle to root out and confess ever deeper and unexamined racist assumptions.

In CRT, this imagined totalitarian “white supremacy” plays the role that the God of the Old Testament does in the original forms of Gnosticism, that the bourgeois does in Marxist theory, and that the Jews play in Nazi mythology.  It is the devil figure on which every misfortune can be blamed and to which every hatred and resentment can be directed, the bogeyman lurking under every bed and in every shadowy corner, waiting to terrorize.  Indeed, as critics of CRT point out, if you take a work of Critical Race Theory and replace terms like “whiteness” and “white supremacy” with “Jewishness” and “Jewry,” the result reads chillingly like a work of Nazi propaganda.

Other forms of woke Gnosticism have their own bogeymen – “patriarchy,” “heteronormativity,” etc. – which, like “whiteness,” are abstractions spoken of as if they were concrete demonic powers.  And just when you thought you’d heard of every kind of “oppression” imaginable, the Critical Theorists come along with the notion of “intersectionality,” by which ever more exotic forms can be fantasized into being.  For example, if you are a transgender lesbian woman of color, you suffer a special kind of oppression – one defined by the “intersection” of oppressions suffered by each of the groups to which you belong – that is different from the kind suffered by (say) a gay immigrant with disabilities.  (Wokesters don’t play the victim card; they play a whole 52 card deck.)

The gnosis that purportedly reveals all of this suffocating oppression is to be found in the writings of gurus like Kendi and DiAngelo, whose main difference from the likes of Marcion and Mani is the size of their royalty checks.  Their books are almost entirely free of any actual argumentation.  There is, instead, page after tedious page of sheer tendentious and question-begging assertion, with all disagreement preemptively dismissed a priori as “racist,” the expression of “white fragility,” and so on.  CRT claims are textbook examples of Popperian unfalsifiability: Everything is interpreted as evidence for them, and nothing is permitted to count as evidence against them. 

Of course, there really is racism in the world, just as capitalists really do sometimes exploit their workers.  And such racism ought indeed to be condemned.  Naturally, CRT authors do cite some actual examples of racism.  But that racists exist comes nowhere close to establishing the entire paranoid CRT worldview, any more than the existence of exploitative capitalists suffices to establish the truth of Marxism.

It is no accident that CRT adepts think of themselves as “woke.”  For it is not rational argumentation that compels them but a kind of conversion experience, and Kendi, DiAngelo, et al. are essentially Gnostic preachers rather than philosophers or social scientists.  Their reliance on inflammatory rhetoric, preemptive dismissal of all criticism as racist, and insistence on putting the most sinister imaginable interpretation on every aspect of social life, create a “dream world” of exactly the kind Voegelin describes.  As Greg Lukianoff has noted, “wokeness” inculcates distorting and paranoid habits of thought of precisely the sort that Cognitive Behavioral therapists warn their patients to avoid.

The Gnostic libertine/puritan dynamic manifests in the shrill condemnation of traditional institutions and morals as oppressively “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” etc. – which gives license both to violate existing norms in the name of “social justice,” and self-righteously to condemn and “cancel” anyone who objects.  The Manichean element is manifest in Kendi’s notorious insistence that there is no “non-racist” neutral middle ground.  You must either be “anti-racist” in Kendi’s understanding of that term, or you are a racist.  In general, the “woke” or “social justice warrior” mentality is absolutely intolerant of nuance or dissent.  You are either on their bandwagon, or you are part of the “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” etc. enemy.  The immanentized eschaton of the wokester is a radically egalitarian world that has been purified of every last trace of “inequity,” “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” etc., whether in deed or in thought.  Though, since there are always new and ever more exotic strata of “oppression” to be identified and confessed to, that eschaton is very far off indeed.

A war of Gnosticisms

With wokeness suddenly flooding universities, high schools, the medical profession, the military, business, and seemingly everywhere else, we are seeing something comparable to the Arian crisis of the 4th century or the Albigensian crisis of the 13thcentury – the alarmingly rapid spread of a toxic religious cult that threatens the general sociopolitical order no less than it does the Church.  As in these earlier crises, there are many Christians, already heterodox anyway, who are happy to cave in to the madness.  And there are also some otherwise orthodox Christians who, out of cowardice and/or muddle-headedness, try to accommodate themselves to it.  In the secular context, we see a similar dynamic among conservatives.

But the vast majority of orthodox Christians and of conservatives see the insanity for what it is, and are alarmed by it.  Applying Voegelin’s analysis, which I think reveals the true nature of the phenomenon, shows that they ought to be very alarmed by it.  But Voegelin’s analysis also shows how not to respond to the crisis – namely, with any sort of counter-Gnosticism.  Yet the bizarre QAnon phenomenonon the Right appears to be exactly that.  It has all the key marks of the Gnostic mindset – the positing of unseen malign forces, the hermeneutics of suspicion and “dream world” theorizing, Manicheanism and shrill intolerance of all dissenters, even something like an immanentized eschaton (“The Storm”). 

In the long run, Critical Race Theory and other forms of “wokeness,” though not much more intellectually substantive than the QAnon lunacy, are manifestly far more dangerous, given their pseudo-academic nature and appeal to the temper of mainstream opinion.  Again, “woke” ideas now pervade media, universities, high schools, churches, corporate board rooms and HR departments, and on and on – the commanding heights of the mainstream social and economic order.  QAnon, by contrast, while having some mass appeal, extends no higher up among those with power and influence than a handful of crank lawyers and congressmen.  And unlike CRT and the other elements of wokeness, it has no intellectual lineage or cultural framework that could give it the heft to extend much farther than that.  Here’s the acid test:  Few Republican politicians want to associate themselves with QAnon.  But few Democratic politicians dare to disassociate themselves from CRT and other forms of wokeness.  That shows you which of these warring Gnosticisms has the upper hand.

All the same, in its short life, the QAnon madness has already caused enormous harm, both by rotting out minds and by playing a role in both the Republican loss of the Georgia Senate elections and in the breach of the U.S. Capitol.  And as the history of Weimar Germany teaches us, a war of Gnosticisms does not end well.

Gnostic woke madness will not be remedied by aping it.  On the contrary, more than ever, what the times call for is conservative sobriety.  And orthodoxy.  Heresies not only aim to subvert the Church, but they fill the vacuum that opens up when the Church loses its self-confidence, its fidelity to its traditional teaching, and its sense of mission – and as a consequence, loses its attractiveness.  The crisis of the West is the crisis of the Church.  The West will not be restored to health until the Church is restored to health.  And that is a project that requires us to see beyond election cycles, and indeed beyond politics.

Lawlessness begets lawlessness

As someone who is on record condemning lawlessnessand sedition, I am appalled and horrified by what happened today in Washington, D.C.  It is indefensible and inexcusable, and the rioters and vandals ought to be prosecuted.  But then, the rioting and vandalism that occurred in Washington last summer – and in Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and other major cities – was also appalling, horrifying, indefensible, and inexcusable, and itsinstigators should have been prosecuted.  Yet some of the people who are now talking tough about law and order were then blathering on about “mostly peaceful protests,” “defunding the police,” and other such lunacy.  We are reaping what they sowed.  If you are going to tolerate and excuse left-wing political violence, you are opening the door to right-wing political violence.  But if you rightly condemn the latter, then to be consistent, you must condemn the former.  You must insist that all citizens respect law and order – your political allies no less than your political enemies.

Then there is the cause in the name of which the Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, viz. a refusal to accept the results of the election.  Here too the left-wing hypocrisy is breathtaking.  After the 2016 election, some on the Left attempted, through recountsand intimidation of members of the Electoral College, to reverse the outcome.  Many more left-wingers spent the next three years trying to delegitimize the outcome by pushing a groundless conspiracy theory according to which the Russians had helped steal the election for Trump.  Some plotted impeaching Trump before he was even sworn in, and spent his entire administration looking for pretexts for doing so.  Some warned darkly of the possibility of future election fraud through hacked voting machines, just as some left-wingers had insisted that George W. Bush had stolen the 2004 election by such means.  When raising doubts might benefit left-wing candidates, some characterized the flaws in the voting system as “staggering,”indeed a “crisis for American democracy,” and questioned the agendas of the companies that manufacture voting machines.  Some insisted that the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election was “stolen” from Stacey Abrams.  Hillary Clinton said, before the recent presidential election, that Joe Biden “should not concede under any circumstances” if it is close.

And yet, in 2020, left-wingers nevertheless pushed through a mail-in voting system that was sure to increase the risk of fraud and open the door to endless litigation.  And they made arbitrary changes in the rules for accepting mail-in ballots in states like Pennsylvania.  Such moves guaranteed that the legitimacy of the outcome in any state where the vote was close would come to be widely doubted. 

In short, the Left spent four years making the questioning of an election’s legitimacy a routine political tactic, and then in 2020 produced conditions where such questioning would be a priori more plausible than usual.  Again, we are reaping what they sowed.

Not only has the Left itself inadvertently created this bear of a mob they now decry, they have insisted on poking it relentlessly.  They have imposed on the country open-ended lockdowns that have destroyed the livelihoods of working class people while enriching the Left’s corporate allies.  These same corporate allies have imposed, on the Left’s behalf, a regime of political censorship and information control.   Left-wingers shrilly and ceaselessly demonize their opponents as racists and bigots who cannot be compromised with but must be “cancelled” and driven into the cultural and political margins.  And they have talked of securing indefinite one-party rule by ending the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, and admitting into the Union new states whose voters could guarantee perpetual left-wing control of the Senate.

In these ways, left-wingers have worked to make their political enemies feel boxed in and desperate.  They can hardly be surprised when those enemies start acting in the ways that desperate people tend to act.  Trump’s rise was in the first place a reaction against left-wing excess.  Yet while he is now leaving the stage (albeit kicking and screaming), that excess has in four years massively increased.  While liberals piously pretend to fret about extremism, they have tolerated left-wing extremism and created the conditions for a backlash of right-wing extremism.

If Joe Biden is anything remotely close to a statesman, or even just politically savvy, he will do what is in his power to arrest this spiral of lawlessness and mutual hatred.  He will enforce the law against both right-wing and left-wing rioters, and insist that every governor and mayor do the same.  He will act to rein in the lunacy of the wokesters now cancelling and indoctrinating their way through every institution of American society.  He will urge the lifting of lockdowns that have no proven efficacy in controlling the virus, but have produced widespread economic devastation, psychological stress, and social unrest.  He will put an immediate end to Democratic talk of court-packing and other power grab schemes that will only pour gasoline on the fire.  And he will, as Jonathan Turley recommends, set up a commission to investigate the integrity of the election, and work to reverse the lax election rules that opened the door to doubt.

Year-end open thread

Let’s bring this annus horribilis to an end with an open thread.  That annoyingly off-topic comment of yours I keep deleting?  It’s now on-topic, so bring it.  From Richard Rorty to Get Shorty, from Bend Sinister to Yes Minister, from Tanqueray to Ricky Jay… nothing now stands in your way.  Apart from basic blog etiquette, naturally.  Trolls are still kindly invited to get lost.  (Previous open threads archived here.)

The access problem for mathematical Platonism

Mathematical Platonism takes numbers and other mathematical objects to exist in a third realm distinct from the material and mental worlds, after the fashion of the Forms of Plato’s famous theory.  A common objection to this view, associated with philosophers like Paul Benacerraf, is epistemological.  In order for us to have knowledge of something, say these philosophers, we must be in causal contact with it.  But if numbers are abstract objects outside of space and time, then we cannot be in any such contact with them, because they would be causally inert and inaccessible to perception.  So, if Platonism were true, we couldn’t have knowledge of them.  Yet we do have such knowledge, which (the argument concludes) implies that Platonism is false.  This is known as the “access problem” for mathematical Platonism.

Brown’s defense

Is this a serious problem?  No and yes.  On the one hand, the way the problem is often framed is too underdeveloped and question-begging to worry a sophisticated Platonist.  The idea seems to be that, when we know a chair, for example, that is because light travels from the chair to our eyes, resulting in retinal stimulation, which in turn generates neural activity that brings about a conscious perception of the chair.  But nothing like this is possible where Platonic objects are concerned.

But there are several problems with leaving it at that.  First, as James Robert Brown points out, the objection presupposes that we have a clear and uncontroversial account of how neural processes generate conscious perceptual experiences.  But of course, we don’t, which is why there is such a thing as a mind-body problem.  Now, with occasional exceptions (such as Berkeley), philosophers tend not to take the mind-body problem to be a reason to doubt the existence of the material world.  Though there is no agreement about how conscious experiences can be caused by material objects and processes, they don’t take that to be a reason for us to doubt that there really are material objects and processes, that our experiences are in causal contact with them, and that those experiences therefore give us knowledge of them.  But in that case, Brown quite reasonably concludes, such philosophers can hardly take the absence of an account of how we can get in causal contact with abstract mathematical objects to be a reason to doubt that there are such objects.

Brown also suggests (less plausibly, I think) that quantum mechanics gives us reason to doubt that a causal connection with what is known is really a necessary condition for our knowing it.  He has in mind J. S. Bell’s famous nonlocality result.  Consider an EPR scenario in which two photons arrive at different locations, B and C, from a common source A.  When the photons arrive at their destinations, measurements will show that one has the property spin-up and the other the property spin-down, though nothing about what is happening at A could tell us which photon will have which property.  Furthermore, supposing that B and C are outside of each other’s light cones, information about what is happening at one of these locations cannot get to the other.  Nevertheless, if I know, for example, that the photon that arrives at B has the property spin-up, then I can know that the one that arrives at C will have the property spin-down.  But nothing about any causal relation between A on the one hand and B and C on the other, or between B and C, will have told me this.  And that, Brown says, refutes the assumption that a causal connection is necessary for knowledge. 

But this seems to me not quite right.  After all, if the photons had never been emitted from A, they would not have arrived at B and C, and had I not been there to take the measurement at B, I would not have been able to infer from it what was going on at C.  And these are causal facts.  So, the right conclusion to draw from Bell’s result is not that there are no causal connections at all involved in my knowing what I know, but rather that the causal connections are very weird.  This raises many questions, of course, but I don’t see that they need to be addressed in order to make the narrow point that Bell’s result doesn’t provide a compelling way to respond to the access problem.

Plato’s defense

Another problem with the way the access problem is usually framed is that it rather shamelessly begs the question against Plato himself.  After all, it is hardly as if Plato was unaware of the difficulty of modeling our knowledge of Platonic abstract objects on perceptual knowledge of physical objects.  Indeed, Plato himself insists that knowledge of the Forms cannot work that way.  That’s why he thinks that we must have come to know them prior to embodiment in this life, and why he thinks the soul must be unlike perceptual organs in being immaterial.

In short, Plato is well aware that there is an access problem, but thinks he’s solved it.  Contemporary naturalists don’t like the solution, but part of Plato’s point is that the reality of Platonic objects, and of our knowledge of them, give us reason to reject naturalism.  To object to mathematical Platonism on the grounds that it is hard to square with naturalism is simply to assume, without argument, precisely what is at issue.

Plato would also reject the naturalist’s assumption that explanation is at bottom a matter of identifying relations of efficient causation between material objects.  For Plato, the participation relation that he thinks holds between particular things and the Forms provides another mode of explanation, and teleology yet another.  Of course, the Platonist would have to spell out exactly how Plato’s richer account of explanation can be deployed to solve the access problem.  But the point is that, by simply assuming, without argument, a broadly naturalistic metaphysics and epistemology, the usual way of presenting the access problem does not constitute as powerful an objection as is often supposed, because it simply begs the question against Plato.

Aristotle’s critique

But that doesn’t mean that the mathematical Platonist is out of the woods.  We Aristotelians also reject Platonism, for several reasons, and some of these are relevant to the access problem.  In particular, Aristotle too is critical of the idea that an entity like a Platonic Form could be an efficient cause.  In Metaphysics, Book XII, Part 6, he writes:

But if there is something which is capable of moving things or acting on them, but is not actually doing so, there will not necessarily be movement; for that which has a potency need not exercise it.  Nothing, then, is gained even if we suppose eternal substances, as the believers in the Forms do, unless there is to be in them some principle which can cause change; nay, even this is not enough, nor is another substance besides the Forms enough; for if it is not to act, there will be no movement.

Aristotle’s point here is, first, that something can function as an efficient cause only if it both has an active causal power (which is what a “potency” is in this context), and that power is actually exercised on some particular occasion.  For example, I can cause the pen in front of me to move just by touching it, but I cannot cause it to dissolve just by touching it.  For I have an active causal power of the first sort, but not a power of the second sort.  But in addition to my having the first power, I have to exercise it in order for the pen actually to move.  If I don’t decide to touch the pen, it will just sit there motionless, despite my having the power to move it.

Similarly, Aristotle says, in order for a Platonic Form (or a mathematical object conceived of on the model of a Form) to function as an efficient cause, it would have to have the active causal power to do so, and it would have to be actually exercising that power on some particular occasion.  And Aristotle’s implication is that these conditions don’t hold in the case of the Forms.  They don’t function as efficient causes.  But why not?

Well, think about what, from an Aristotelian point of view, is true of me that makes it the case that I can function as an efficient cause of the movement of the pen.  I am part of a larger system of substances with their own causal powers, the exercise of which contributes to triggering the operation of my own.  For example, the phone rings, which leads me to pick it up, which is followed by somebody on the other end of the line telling me something I want to write down, which leads me in turn to exercise my power to pick up the pen.  All of this unfolds in time and involves my being changed in various ways by the substances I interact with, leading me in turn to bring about changes in them.

These circumstances do not hold of the Forms.  The Forms (and mathematical objects conceived of on the model of the Forms) are eternal and unchanging.  So, nothing could happen to them to trigger the operation of their causal powers, if they have any.  Now, you might respond that God, in Aristotelian-Thomistic theology, is eternal and unchanging, yet he is still said to be an efficient cause.  So why couldn’t the same thing be said of the Forms?

But there is a crucial difference.  There is in God something analogous to intellect and will, but that is not true of the Forms, which are impersonal.  The reason this matters is evident from a point Aristotle makes in On Generation and Corruption, Book II, Part 9, where he writes:

Some… thought the nature of ‘the Forms’ was adequate to account for coming-to-be.  Thus Socrates in the Phaedo first blames everybody else for having given no explanation; and then lays it down that ‘some things are Forms, others Participants in the Forms’, and that ‘while a thing is said to “be” in virtue of the Form, it is said to “come-to-be” qua sharing in, to “pass-away” qua “losing,” the ‘Form’.  Hence he thinks that ‘assuming the truth of these theses, the Forms must be causes both of coming-to-be and of passing-away’…

[But] if the Forms are causes, why is their generating activity intermittent instead of perpetual and continuous – since there always are Participants as well as Forms?

The idea, as I read Aristotle here, is this.  Consider, for example, the Form of Triangle.  It never comes into being or passes away, nor does it change in any other respect.  So, if it is functioning as an efficient cause, its effects – particular triangles – should be similarly temporally unbounded.  They should simply always exist, past, present, and future.  But they don’t – they come into being and pass away.  The point even more obviously holds of living things like Tyrannosaurus Rex, which came into existence at some point and have now gone extinct – even though the Platonic Form of Tyrannosaurus Rex, like every other Form, is eternal.

Now, if we were to attribute something like rationality and free choice to the Forms – as we can to God – we could find a way to make sense of how an eternal cause could have a temporally limited effect.  All we need is the idea there is some reasonwhy the cause saw fit to produce an effect that is temporally bounded in just the way it is.  We don’t need to know what the reason is; the mere fact that there could be one is sufficient to make intelligible the possibility of an eternal cause having such an effect.  (Readers familiar with William Lane Craig’s work might recognize this as among the arguments he gives for the claim that the cause of the beginning of the universe must be personal rather than impersonal.)

But we can’t do this with numbers and other Platonic objects, because, again, they are impersonal.  Hence that way of answering Aristotle’s criticism is not open to the Platonist. 

Aristotelianizing Plato

The problem, to sum up, is that if a thing really has active causal powers, then there has to be something that accounts for how those powers get triggered in the ways they do.  Now, we have such accounts in the case of physical substances (in terms of their relations to other physical substances) and in the case of immaterial mental substances (in terms of their rationality and free choice).  But there is no account available in the case of the purported occupants of Plato’s “third realm” – immaterial but impersonal entities. 

Factor in the Scholastic principle agere sequitur esse (“action follows being”) – that the way a thing acts reflects what it is – and we have the ingredients for an argument to the effect that Platonic Forms would have to be causally inert.  For if there is no way in principle that the causal powers of such Forms could ever be exercised, in what sense would they even have such powers in the first place?

Now, the passages from Aristotle I cited do not address the access problem, specifically, but their relevance to it should by now be obvious.  If mathematical objects conceived of on the model of Platonic Forms would have to be causally inert, then they cannot be what causes us to have knowledge of them.  But then, how do we have knowledge of them?  (Notice that it won’t do to posit some third thing – call it X – that has access to the Forms and then in turn imparts knowledge of them to us.  For that just kicks the problem back a stage.  How could X gain knowledge of the Forms if they are causally inert, and thus cannot be what causes X to know about them?)

Notice that the problem does not arise for the Augustinian position that the Forms (and numbers and other mathematical objects) are to be identified with ideas in the divine intellect.  For then it wouldn’t be the Forms per se that directly act on the world, but rather God, who is not causally inert. 

This position, adopted by later Scholastics like Aquinas and thus sometimes labeled “Scholastic realism” (as opposed to Platonic realism and Aristotelian realism) can be interpreted as a kind of Aristotelianizing of Plato.  Plato posits three realms, the material, the mental, and the Platonic third realm.  Aristotle holds that only the first two are real.  Scholastic realism agrees with Aristotle that there is no third mode of being apart from the material realm and the mental realm.  But it agrees with Plato that truths about mathematical objects and other Forms can’t be grounded in truths about material substances or even in truths about finite mental substances.  Hence it takes the infinite, divine mind to be their ultimate ground.

Exactly how our knowledge of these objects works is another question.  Augustine says it is by illumination, but there are problems with that account.  Whatever the right answer, though, it needn’t be saddled with the difficulties facing Platonism.

Related reading:

Review of Craig’s God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism

Frege on what mathematics isn’t

Rucker’s Mindscape

David Foster Wallace on abstraction

Augustine on divine illumination

Plato’s affinity argument

Five Proofs of the Existence of God, chapter 3

District Attorney Michel Foucault

In the diabolical new disorder of things metastasizing around us, churchmen subvert doctrine rather than teaching it, and public authorities subvert law and order rather than maintaining it.  To be sure, these cancers have been slowly spreading throughout the bodies ecclesiastical and politic for many decades.  What is new is the sudden ghastliness with which an aggressive heterodoxy and criminality have broken through to the surface, making the reality of the disease evident to all but the most deluded of minds. 

What is its source?  Part of the story is natural, part supernatural.  There is, for one thing, the tyrannical degeneracy which is, as Plato warns us, the ironic fate of societies which value freedom and equality above virtue.  And for another, there is the chronic sickness of heresy which has for centuriesperiodically ravaged the Church before being vomited out, and the severity of which can sometimes approximate the predicted final apostasy. 

But all of that is rather “big picture.”  It doesn’t quite answer a more mundane question, to wit: What the hell is going through the minds of these people?  For example, how do persons who have at least a minimal degree of sanity (just enough to hold a job, to use the toilet, etc.) nevertheless convince themselves that abolishing the police would be a good idea?  How do you explain a lunatic like new Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, who has begun to visit upon my beloved city the destruction he inflicted upon San Francisco? 

General observations about the nature of egalitarian or apostate societies don’t suffice.  We want to know what the connecting link is that gets you from general social decadence to a specific official’s decision to stop enforcing the law.  The answer appears to be Critical Theory, broadly construed and in its many malign permutations – once confined to the most intellectually slovenly and irrelevant academic backwaters, but now sweeping through city governments, corporate HR departments, college administrations, and the like by way of an army of activists and bureaucrats whose minds have been rotted out by it.

The most important thinker in this connection is surely Michel Foucault.  Now, Foucault was critical of, and more insightful than, his less subtle Marxist predecessors.  He is also certainly a more interesting thinker than the mediocrities through whom his ideas are often filtered (Critical Race Theorists, et al.) – and, though he was a man of the Left, he was not entirely unambiguously so.  But the fundamental Critical Theoretic project of unmasking the sinister powers and interests lurking behind purportedly innocuous institutions is the Foucauldian project, and he famously applied it to an analysis of the modern penal system.

For Foucault, the purportedly objective systems of knowledge that characterize the mainstream thinking of a society or historical period reflect the interests of whatever power dominates it.  So far this is Marx’s theory of ideology filtered through Nietzsche, and thereby expanded beyond a crudely economic analysis.  A characteristically Foucauldian elaboration of the idea is that this power acts in a “capillary” fashion, seeping down into every nook and cranny of the social order and, indeed, of the individual psyche, in ways of which we are unaware until they are revealed by Critical Theory adepts.  The Critical Race Theorist’s paranoid delusion that absolutely everything is permeated by racism – so that even seemingly innocent remarks and actions are unmasked as “micro-aggressions” and “implicit bias” – is essentially Foucault read through a racial lens.

Foucault himself applied the idea to an analysis of mental illness as well as criminal justice.  Madness is interpreted as a concept by which those who do not conform to bourgeois standards of thought and behavior are designated as abnormal, and the confinement by which they might be controlled is thereby given a rational justification.  The purportedly objective science by which all of this is made intelligible is really a mask for bourgeois power – a way of cementing that power by pathologizing any alternative to bourgeois standards. 

The modern system of penal justice and imprisonment is alleged to perform a similar function.  Foucault interprets it as a manifestation of a broader tendency of bourgeois power not merely to discourage behaviors it regards as abnormal, but positively to mold individuals so that their behavior will come spontaneously to conform to bourgeois norms.  The penal system is in this way continuous with the curricula and examination regime of the educational system, with standard capitalist business practices, and so forth.  It is all of a piece, a system by which bourgeois power extends itself in “capillary” fashion through to the extremities of society.

Now, in an emendation of Foucault’s analysis, sociologist Loïc Wacquant takes this line of thinking in a direction that brings it even closer to the mentality that we are now seeing in state and municipal officials across the U.S.  Wacquant notes, first, that things have not gone the way Foucault’s analysis led him to expect them to.  Foucault had thought that as social institutions in general take on the prison’s function of molding individual behavior in order to make it conform to bourgeois norms, the institution of the prison itself will decline.  Building on an analysis developed by Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant argues that the opposite has happened.

First, he suggests that the welfare state and the prison system should be seen as two means – the first maternal and nurturing, the second paternal and punitive – by which the modern capitalist state “manages” what he calls “urban marginality,” i.e. “the unruly poor” and minority communities.  Now, with the rise, beginning in the 1980s, of policies of a “neoliberal” or free market nature (he might as well have said “bourgeois”), the institutions of the welfare state went into decline, increasing “social insecurity,” especially among poor and minority communities.  And this has led to an expansion of the other, punitive method of “managing” them – to what Wacquant calls a “remasculinization of the state.”   Thus the penal system has expanded rather than declined, contrary to Foucault’s expectation.  And its focus has been on minorities and the poor, specifically, rather than on the molding of attitudes and behaviors in the general population.

Second, Wacquant says, this expanding penal system has not aimed at molding the attitudes and behaviors even of the individuals it does target – once again defying Foucault’s expectations – but rather merely at “warehousing” them, thereby neutralizing the danger they might pose to the “neoliberal” order of things, but in a way that is indifferent to what goes on in their heads.  And the general public is inured to this callous treatment by way of what Wacquant calls “law-and-order pornography” – entertainments that glorify law enforcement officials and demonize their targets (reality shows like Cops and America’s Most Wanted, dramas like Law and Order and CSI, and so forth).  Thus,Wacquant says, do we have the structure of a “neoliberal” or capitalist system of “punishing the poor.”

Now, is there something to such Foucauldian analyses of power and punishment?  Well, sure.  But there is also the studied imprecision, massive oversimplification, and tiresome melodrama that seem endemic to contemporary continental philosophy and fields influenced by it.  There is the refusal to think beyond the false binary choice of being either a broadly Randian pro-capitalist or a broadly Marxoid anti-capitalist.  There is the vaguely idealist-cum-voluntarist metaphysics that tends to lie implicit and unexamined behind such analyses.  There is the hermeneutics of suspicion, of which we should always be suspicious.  And all of that greatly overshadows any insight to be found in these analyses.

But yes, there is something to them.  For example, it is true that there is a link between bourgeois and “neo-liberal” economics and politics on the one hand, and the nature of modern penal and welfare systems on the other.  But the link is not what Critical Theorists and other leftists think it is.  The link is that the same individualism that drives the economics and politics destroys the stability of the traditional family, which in turn generates an underclass that is “managed” by the welfare state and the penal system.  The remedy is the restoration of the traditional family.  But of course, the contemporary Left will have none of that, because its hatred for traditional sexual morality is far stronger than its hatred of capitalism. 

It is also true that a just society ought to avoid merely “warehousing” offenders, and that the welfare system ought not to treat human beings as mere “cases” to be managed.  The Left is right to criticize the impersonal bureaucratic nature of modern welfare and penal systems.  But here too it would refuse the correct remedy.  The remedy requires welfare and penal systems to be informed by the spirit of what Catholics call the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.  As Pope Leo XIII taught in Rerum Novarum, in dealing with such problems “no satisfactory solution will be found unless religion and the Church have been called upon to aid,” and without them “human striving will be in vain.”  But if there is anything the Left hates even more than traditional sexual morality, it is traditional religious belief.

It is also true that the basic assumptions about reality that are inculcated through the culture of a society – through its educational system, its entertainments, its corporate culture, and so on – tend to reflect the perspective of the powers that dominate it, and that dissent from these assumptions tends to be pathologized.  But under contemporary capitalism those assumptions have moved ever further to the left, not to the right.  For example, in contemporary academic, corporate, and political culture, there is no one more “pathologized” – treated as a crank, as wicked, as not to be listened to or given a platform – than the person who dares to defend traditional religious belief or traditional sexual morality.  It is by way of this pathologization that secularist and Sexual Revolutionary “power” maintains its hegemony.

The Left does not see the fulfilment of our social nature in the places it is in fact primarily to be found – in the family and the community of faith.  It looks for it instead in collectivist political action, which is inevitably even more impersonal, alienating, and oppressive than market forces.  The Left wants to get us out of the liberal individualist frying pan, but only so that we might fall into the socialist fire.  It’s alterative to “bad” is always “worse.” 

But I digress.  Our topic is the origin of the Bizarro-world approach to law and order of the police defunders and George Gascóns of the world, and I think we’ve found it.  Foucauldian analysis yields a picture of the mental health and criminal justice systems as means by which malign bourgeois power exerts its control, especially over the poor and minorities, by pathologizing behavior.  This paranoid and simpleminded view of the world, first developed with cleverness by a thinker like Foucault, is retailed through second- and third-rate academics who add their own little details to the story.  It is then popularized by the fourth-rate minds who imbibe it in university, then regurgitate it through their activism, their Twitter feeds, their screenplays and journalism, their work as HR bureaucrats or high school teachers, or what have you. 

Eventually this worldview trickles (in “capillary” fashion, you might say) into the head of some dumb politician, who’s read a book or a New York Times profile of some Critical Race Theorist.  He gets it into his head that the way to free the oppressed is to defund the police, or in Gascón’s case to “stop filing first-time misdemeanor offenses associated with poverty and mental health.”  Before you know it, crime skyrockets, and garbage, rats, discarded needles, and human feces line the streets your children can no longer safely walk down.  This actually helps no one at all, least of all the homeless, drug-addicted, and mentally ill – now “warehoused” by the Leftist state below freeway underpasses – or the minority communities whose stores are looted and burned down and whose children are killed in gang crossfires.

But none of that matters to the unmaskers of “power.”  What matters is only ever to épater la bourgeoisie.