Brett Alan Williams's Blog, page 8

September 5, 2016: Murray Rothbard’s strange and zany world

I sometimes amuse myself by gazing at the brilliant words of Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), framed and hung on my wall: “Every once in a while, the human race pauses in the job of botching its affairs and redeems itself by a noble work of the intellect.” I liked the quote so much and had thought so long about becoming a libertarian that I bought Rothbard’s book, The Ethics of Liberty. It turned out to be among the nuttiest books I ever read by one of the looniest minds I ever encountered — a champion of libertarians now in the U.S. Congress.

Scary.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe introduces us to this volume as one that fills a gap between economics and ethics. Rothbard, he says, integrated the two by a concept of property that guides libertarian action. It was Rothbard’s goal to create a “science of ethics.” Without a science of ethics we are left to the whims of the State with its limits imposed on the individual. And yet, if ethics is about anything, it’s about moral behavior in a world of more than one lone person. In other words, ethics and morality include the concerns of others, not ourselves alone. This smelled like a self-contradiction right from the start, but never could I have imagined what I was in for.

After Rothbard establishes his opposition to postmodern relativism (applause), his defense of natural law (applause), and support of reason (more applause), Rothbard digs into his libertarian thought. He claims legal principles can be established in only three ways, “…by slavish conformity to custom, by arbitrary whim [what he labels ‘rule of the State’], or use of man’s reason.” But are these mutually exclusive? Aren’t custom, the State, and reason all aspects of rational law? While Enlightenment philosophy treated the right to property “as one among a number of liberties that derive from, demonstrate, actualize, and reinforce the fundamental right to freedom from tyranny,” only for Karl Marx, feudal lords, and Rothbard are rights subservient to property alone.

Repeatedly, Rothbard attempts to set the table in terms that satisfy his conclusions. In his chapter “Knowledge, True and False,” we learn that Smith has reported that Jones is a homosexual. Again, there are only three possibilities allowed for this action. One reason Smith says this about Jones is because it’s true. “It seems clear then that Smith has a perfect right to [report this fact]… For it is within his property right to do so,” no matter where he is, writes Rothbard. “Current libel laws make Smith’s action illegal if done with ‘malicious’ intent, even though [it] be true. And yet, surely legality or illegality would depend not on the motivation of the actor, but on the objective nature of the act.” But aren’t an accidental killing and a planned one of a different sort? Of course, they are, and for obvious reasons. In Rothbard’s example, Jones has no right to privacy because there isn’t one he can attach to property. What if Jones lives in a place where his homosexuality would lead to his being ostracized, assaulted, executed? What if Jones were a Jew in Nazi Germany and Smith simply told the truth that Jones is a Jew? Jones’ body — property in Rothbard’s view — would then be lost along with Jones. We needn’t climb too far down the social hole Rothbard digs to find its walls about to collapse on any society using Rothbard’s shovel. In this regard, the “force from disseminating” which Rothbard detests was once called virtue, attached to morality, both aspects of community, which Rothbard seeks to eviscerate for his individualist nightmare.

When it comes to those incapable of coping in Rothbard’s property-centric world, we find little relief. “The parent may not murder or mutilate the child,” writes Rothbard (what a swell guy!), “But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to let the child die.” Yes, that’s a quote. This also applies to abortion and marks a departure from typical conservative platforms. Rothbard supports abortion because if the mother decides to abandon her “freely-granted consent…the fetus [then] becomes a parasitic ‘invader’ of her person…[with] a perfect right to expel the invader from her domain.” As Rothbard teaches, the fetus, or any child, is incapable of a contractual agreement in any parental arrangement, so parents owe them nothing, and even an intended pregnancy can be aborted on a whim. Only the calculus of social contract, no moral responsibility in Rothbard’s world. That the fetus is as dependent on the mother as Rothbard’s idealized man is dependent on his sacred property is ignored.

Naturally, this thinking applies to animals. There can be no moral component to the extermination of eight billion passenger pigeons, the last Yangtze River porpoise, or anything else, because it’s just our nature. “Animals [like children] cannot petition for their rights…,” says Rothbard. While two hundred thirty years ago, Jeremy Bentham asked, “The question is not can they reason, not can they talk, but can they suffer?” In the case of children and animals, Rothbard defends his simplistic ideas by forcing requirements of contract and property on those incapable of meeting them and uses the wrong basis for consideration.

When it comes to the State, Rothbard sounds like talk radio with its invention of matters that don’t exist or recasting issues in language of the zealot that makes slaughter seem righteous. Instead of a system that surrenders some individual rights to civil authorities, engaging dispassionate third parties such as courts separated from those involved in argument, for Rothbard, this is “the State’s control of violence of the police, armed services, and the courts….” The “States taxation is theft…on a grand and colossal scale no acknowledged criminals could hope to match…[where] no private competitors are allowed to invade its self-arrogated monopoly to counterfeit new money…[where] the postal service has long been a convenient method for the State to keep an eye on possibly unruly and subversive opposition to its rule…a vast criminal organization.” Even governmental license of radio and television “stations to use frequencies and channels,” is nefarious to Rothbard. Except those broadcasters want centralized government allocation of bandwidth to avoid unwanted electromagnetic interference that comes with spectral turf battles. While the consequences of a power to tax or its absence are clearly seen as necessary in the American Revolution and Founding of the U.S. in order to pay for the military, courts, and police who guarantee those property rights Rothbard was so fond of.

While some of Rothbard’s claims have been experienced in America, from irresponsible taxation and spending to abuses of power (but the post office?), his assertions read like paranoia. Government operation of the Veterans Administration, student loans turned over to private corporations who rape the system, or deregulation of Wall Street with loss of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act all show how government and the private sector can run amok. There are also cases where they work effectively, like the regulation of Wall Street with the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, defeating the Nazis, Imperial Japan, and USSR, or the Clean Water Act. Such is the real world.

Rothbard could never unravel our wrinkles because his definition of the human is so flawed. Like a postmodern sociologist, he then struggles to make reality fit his model. Rothbard tries to separate ethics (right action) from morality (right and wrong) with its humane social influence because morality is a community matter individuals submit to as “coercion, not guidance” in Rothbard’s view. Rothbard’s human is alone in the universe. Others are simply perturbations to his formulaic individual, a hero of nothing but his adolescent defiance. The State is Rothbard’s Boogie Man to blame, inflated to cartoon dimensions. His political philosophy is, as Leo Strauss would say, “engaged in a project to change the world rather than understand it…from the high end of virtue to the low end of commodious self-preservation. Something genuinely human is in danger of being lost.”

Perhaps I should not be surprised when there are adults who believe in Creationism, post-structuralism, crop circles, stolen elections, and QAnon, but I confess, this text stunned me. To think there are adults like Senator Rand Paul who take this thinking seriously and are granted national powers to employ it is staggering. Beyond the current populist liars Left and Right that crowd our Congress, I hesitate to explore what other pseudo-philosophies haunt the halls of governance with a potent foreboding for the future.


References:

Paragraph 4: "by slavish conformity…"Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, New York University Press, 2002, pg. 17. "as one among a number…" W.R. Newell, "Reflections on Marxism and America," in Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990, pg. 343.

Paragraph 5: "It seems clear then…" Rothbard, pg. 121.

Paragraph 6: "The parent may…" Ibid. pg. 100. "freely-granted consent…" Ibid. pg. 98.
Paragraph 8: "States taxation is theft…" Ibid. pg. 162. "stations to use…" Ibid. pg. 170.

Paragraph 10: "engaged in a project…" Leo Strauss, Straussianism, Mark C. Henrie, First Principles, 2011.

July 4, 2016: A little good news about Western instability

Last time, closing remarks on this blog made note of Michael Polanyi’s lamentation, that Western civilization is inherently unstable. [1] In this post we ponder a particular aspect of instability that Polanyi points out in his final chapter, “The Open Society,” and the form of freedom he believes an open society should have.

First, a bit about Polanyi (1891-1976): He was a remarkable fellow, and part of historic irony. A Hungarian physical chemist, it was claimed he was destined to win the Nobel Prize, when instead of completing his scientific work he turned his attention to social issues. His son went on to win the Nobel for chemistry in 1986 ten years after Michael’s death, and two of Michael’s students also took home the award. Rare company. Michael Polanyi was also mentor to Austrian-born Frederick Hayek (1899-1992), another Nobel winner, in economics, and author of The Road To Serfdom. [2] A book with widespread influence that might be called the Capitalist Manifesto. The irony is that Michael’s brother Karl, in a complete reversal from Michael and Hayek, wrote the Socialist Manifesto, The Great Transformation, also influential, both books frequently referenced today. [3]

Michael Polanyi’s book deals with modern society, without defining what modern means. Of course in this context “modern” means as compared to ancient, which was…what? I can’t resist this opportunity to drop in another remarkable fellow to help answer this perennial question, Marcel Gauchet (1946-). Gauchet’s Disenchantment of the World provides a rip-roaring thrill of how he believes we got to the modernity we have. [4]

Gauchet writes that before invention of the State, humans were “Projected into a world in which the order was irrevocably fixed in an earlier time of foundation. Each of us had an assigned place in this order we could not repudiate. In this world, our defining potential [to innovate] was preemptively abandoned. There was no question of who we were and how we fit in; no question on transforming the order of things.” But with invention of the State comes upheaval through State ambition, and a hierarchy where some are closer to the gods than others. Later, with the Axial Age (ca. 800 BC-300 BC) an attempt was made to unify the order of earlier religions under a transcendent and supreme principle: God (prophetic Judaism), Nirvana (Buddhism), the Tao (Taoism, while Confucianism was a century earlier), or Reason in service of the Good (Greek philosophy). Suddenly “order was no longer self-explanatory,” writes Gauchet, “but depended on a higher reality or principle. Growth toward this reality then became possible through devotion or understanding.” In all cases the individual turned inward (prayer, meditation, analysis) to find the way outward. The holy was, “no longer an irrevocable past, and there were now ways of making contact with it,” says Gauchet. “Now we could change our relation to [this higher reality] by becoming servants to God, seeking spiritual Enlightenment, or through reason grasp the Ideas.” The future was no longer fixed, and it acquired a measure of uncertainty. The old notion of a sacred power in things was attacked, and the world was disenchanted by man, with the holy confined to this higher reality alone (passport to modify the planet). This commenced the era when “religion would bring about an exit from religion,” claims Gauchet, and with that the opening of questions that were once closed, i.e. our role, purpose, meaning.

While the ancients expected tomorrow to be like today, we can never know what tomorrow will be. Herein lays an instability inherent in societies that focus forward rather than back. With the old roles lifted, freedom becomes central. Polanyi notes two forms of freedom: one that tends toward an absence of restraint, the other as liberation through submission to obligation. The first form is an individualistic freedom inherited, according to Polanyi, from the Utilitarians who defined the good society as that which creates the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Rational restrictions dictate that one’s freedom must not interfere with another’s right to the same freedom. Without such limits, absence of restraint leads to anarchy. With priority of the individual this is an anti-communitarian freedom. While rewarding to the individual, this theory of freedom is inspiring at inception, but not in the long run because emancipation from the old chains are forgotten over generations.

Polanyi’s second form of freedom is submission to a “higher ideal.” It fosters community and the inspiration that belonging through submission to the ideal brings. Complete submission is what totalitarian regimes thrive on as witnessed in the first half of the 20th century. In such extremes the old freedom from arbitrary abuse of power is reframed as freedom from circumstance, from want, from fear, or some other universal that the State claims it must enforce. Polanyi proposes a middle road, one that already exists in science and law.

Contrary to modern hostility toward tradition and authority, Polanyi argues that society can be free and open only if it has both. Polanyi notes that during the European Enlightenment, traditional authority had to be rejected because it was opposed to the free pursuit of knowledge. “Once these opponents were defeated,” writes Polanyi, “[this notion] remained, but it came to imply that science required repudiation of all authority and all tradition.” And yet, Enlightenment science requires both.

How? Deeper understandings of reality are not the private conviction of a scientist, but released for open inspection of data, analysis, and conclusions by all others in the field. An iterative exchange eventuates in truth about nature as it is that all can agree on. When that examination arrives at judgments substantiated by a tradition of examination and test, a respect for authority in science results, and real things are built. It is the true nature of nature that science holds as its central concern. Just as justice is the central concern of law. The institutions of law, courts, and enforcement, are composed of traditions and authorities.

But these traditions are not closed or inflexible. “While science imposed an immense range of authoritative pronouncements,” writes Polanyi, “it not merely tolerates descent in some particulars, but grants its highest encouragement to such creative descent. While the machinery of scientific institutions severely suppresses contradictions to accepted views about the nature of things [astrology, Creationism, UFOs], the same authorities pay their highest homage to ideas destined to sharply modify those accepted views [Relativity, quantum mechanics].” Polanyi calls this a “decentralized, free procedure of mutual adjustment.” There’s not only a tradition of practice with a belief this practice is the best one to reveal truth about nature, but there are careers and authority for those who do it well. “All these areas of free interaction operate within a tradition of discipline,” says Polanyi, while still being free to criticize and innovate.

By this analogy Polanyi expands to society at large. “A free society is not simply an open society in which anything goes,” he writes. “It is a society in which people engage in activities considered worthy of respect, with the freedom to pursue those ends…dedicated to various ideals. It cannot be a free society by being open to matters such as these, by being neutral on truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, honesty and fraud.”

A free society exists with traditions that provide a framework within which members make free contributions. “The freedom of mere self-assertion can lead only to disintegration of standards and institutions,” claims Polanyi. “It may lead from time to time in an equalization of interests that mutually tame one another to a point that people can live in a working balance. However, no one who holds the view that freedom is mere self-assertion will be devoted to maintaining such a balance: he will rather be devoted to upsetting it in order to achieve more of his own interests. As Adam Smith foresaw, the chief danger to balance would come from manufacturers, for none of them would have interest in maintaining a free system of competition. Their interests would lie in securing monopolies in order to control their markets.” Hence the need for rational regulations (as Frederick Hayek noted), just as government must be limited because humans are humans no matter where you go.

“Under this system of spontaneous order,” says Polanyi, “individuals are engaged in the competitive pursuit of personal gain. Scientists, judges, scholars, clergymen, et. al. are guided by systems of thought to promote the growth, application, or dissemination of that to which they are dedicated. Their actions are determined by their own professional interests, which do not aim specifically at promoting the general welfare of society.”

Objections to this system are that the public good seems surrendered to the personal motives of individuals, and that society will drift in a direction willed by no one. In a system of spontaneous order the public interest is not controlled by the state, but appears controlled by an irresponsible bourgeois. Polanyi argues that despite all the inheritance, family power, and class differences, oligarchies in societies of spontaneous order do not exercise anything like a controllable plan. With so many moving parts in such complex societies they cannot tell where they are going, nor control the direction of all the players. SONY’s famous 250 Year Plan fell to two boys who invented a company in their garage they later called Apple. “The plain fact is that necessarily man is adrift [in modernity],” claims Polanyi.

If there were a central truth in politics the way there is in science and law, actions in the public interest would be easy. That’s not the case, so persuasion in politics is a matter of one interest striving for as much power as it can get, to survive, and to oppress. Institutions must be built to keep these interests from destroying each other and the whole system. Those intuitions cost money. Hence, why America’s Founders emphasized economic interests, because prosperity pays for national defense and law enforcement to preserve individual rights, as an offset to despotism, not to coddle the rich as some delight in asserting. As Polanyi writes, “A higher level moral sphere exists on the basis of a lower-level sphere of profit, power, and parochialism of interest…crasser interests transformed, in operation, into moral principles like justice.”

“Only if we manage to abandon our deeply ingrained moral perfectionism,” says Polanyi, can we come to accept such a system. But if we let a higher cause, moral as it may sound, take over governance, then “moral inversion” eventually occurs. The State takes charge of morality for a perfected utopia as it did for Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Polanyi’s system is an imperfect moral system that can and sometimes will be immoral, which is paradoxically in service to ideals of truth, justice, and equality that can never be perfectly attained. “The evils which prevent the fullness of moral development,” writes Polanyi, “are precisely the elements which are the source of power that protect moral accomplishments.” Such a system is a bit like the internal combustion engine he writes, “it is noisy, smelly, and occasionally refuses to start, but it is what gets us to wherever we get. We must somehow learn to understand and tolerate, not destroy, the free society.”

Having made a career in pursuit of scientific truths Polanyi writes about, I, and the scientists I know, find politics in practice often unbearable. By Polanyi’s teaching, this is naïve, and it’s some relief to find our views too idealistic. We shouldn’t expect from humans the coherence we find in nature. But there’s just one problem that Polanyi didn’t raise, or likely couldn’t yet see.

Let’s look at that at another time. Maybe the first Monday in September, the 5th, 2016.


[1] Michael Polanyi, Meaning, University of Chicago Press, 1975
[2] Frederick Hayek, The Road To Serfdom, University of Chicago Press, 1994
[3] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time , Beacon Press, 2001
[4] Marcel Gauchet, Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of the World, Princeton University Press, 1997
Revised for clarity 12.5.2018

May 2, 2016: Enlightenment, we owe you, but do those non-believers you made have a future?

When I was a small boy I found myself – not without resistance – in the pews of First Christian Church. For a five year old there was nothing more cruel than to willfully attire a child in his Sunday best. A little boy’s suit to cinch the torso, a colorful noose to restrict blood flow to the brain, and pants that I’d already outgrown. Added to this cotton confinement was the packaging of humans shoulder to shoulder in long wooden pews intended to stifle a child’s need to fidget. Had I known such treatment might be imagined as micro-aggressions, I’d have been well fit for our current campus tantrums.

My imagination cut off from the physical world, I was at times forced to surrender to the sermon. While ours was a church not fond of fire and brimstone, I did pick up bits and pieces of what even to a child seemed like highly contradictory messages: God’s love, God’s slaughter. But I never got much clarity on apparent incongruities. Either adult patience for childish questions was lacking, or adults didn’t have an answer either.

Much later at university, I broke the mental speed barrier of mathematics. Exceeding that boundary hit me like a sonic boom, knocked off my feet by the power of mathematical sciences. Not only to describe the natural world with amazing accuracy, but predict its future actions. Despite hollow assertions by a few postmodernists not yet forgotten in their graves, that mathematical conduit between mind and the physical world reveals Truth about nature. Those planes, trains, and cell phones behave just as scientific prophesy said they would. Science works.

In those far off college years, lingering contradictions about the world expressed by ancient writings of a relatively passive religious upbringing were revived. I’d get to the bottom of those religious riddles the same way I solved physics problems. I decided if God gave man reason, God given reason insisted satisfaction. No equivocations, no excuses, no mysterious ways.

Will and Ariel Durant penned well what I, like others before me, discovered, “Just as the moral development of Hellenes had weakened their belief in the quarrelsome and adulterous deities of Olympus, so too development of the Christian ethic slowly eroded Christian theology. Christ destroyed Jehovah.” [1] Morality evolves. Immoral slaughters in the Bible were not like differences in the comprehension of quantum mechanics between humans and chimps. As though only God could understand his murder of innocents, while mere humans dare not ask. To me, this was mythologized politics, made by people for people. That’s why the gods of every religion I studied, including the Bible, were so suspiciously human in their frailties. Which was not, nor could it be, a denial of higher powers. Rather a denial of human claims about those powers.

Mix this approach with a born iconoclast, socialized in the anti-authority post-Sixties Seventies, and I was primed to embrace goals of European Enlightenment when I finally met it. As Peter Gay (1923-2015) wrote in his National Book Award winning volume, “Enlightenment united on a vastly ambitious program, a program of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom, above all freedom in its many forms…freedom, in a word, of moral man to make his own way in the world.” It was a Greek revival that in Gay’s gesture to Kant said, “Dare to know: take the risk of discovery, accept the loneliness of autonomy.” [2]

So I did. And was rewarded, materially, as are most of us in the West. With skills refined by Enlightenment’s natural philosophers like Bacon and Newton, one can not only predict the future, but combined with Adam Smith’s economic system from the same era, one can buy it. A period we call retirement. No more begging feudal lords for a portion of the food we grew ourselves to keep us in old age.

As with all social movements, Enlightenment was not without conflict. “The philosophe’s perception of a distinction between mythmaking and scientific mentalities was the perception of a fact,” writes Gay, “but since they came to it first through their position as critics and belligerents, they almost invariably converted the historical fact into a moral judgment, praising, indeed identifying themselves with one mentality, and denigrating the other. They translated their insight into an indictment.”

Likewise, when faced with campus preaching of Creationists, I went on the offensive. Disgusted with their intentional misrepresentations of science; their product of doubt, like the tobacco, lead, and global warming denier industries with word games seemingly plausible to a scientifically ignorant public; their indictment of science as a theory as though that meant a hunch, like cell theory, electrical circuit theory, Newton’s theory of mechanics, and their great nemesis the theory of evolution, all used daily to build real things. By that time I already knew Jesus did not say, “Know the lie and it will set you free.” [3]

Above all, Creationists had no models of nature. All they could do was build glass arguments, or put words in the mouth of scientists, then tell how wrong they were. It was clear that until Creationists were able to provide a more successful model of nature, corporate powers like ExxonMobil, Alcoa, and Cargill would use science to expand their empires. It was also apparent that each time Ken Ham, ICR.org, or the Discovery Institute claimed errors in science in their Creationist “museums,” websites, or books, they showed how enslaved they were to it. Creationists proved to be as wrong as those scientists who fail to realize that the deepest facts of human nature are deaf to scientific explanations.

While my hair still sets fire when I’m within earshot of Creationist propaganda, I’ve softened since those years when I’d drive down to San Diego just to argue with ICR.org. I see that I was just as guilty as Creationists for what Joseph Campbell said was missing the message for the symbols. [4] And I understand more about why believers of any stripe feel the way they do, why they seek comfort that modernity doesn’t provide, why they want to save something of tradition vs. fickle adulation of the new. I understand why they believe, but not yet how. I see this not simply because my own mortality is realized, though surely that contributes, but because I’ve recognized two realms of Truth, nature and human nature. When I replaced religious supports in my life with what could be proven, I was trying to reconcile a much elaborated approach to the human condition as we experience it, with an approach to nature as it is. In Marcel Gauchet’s words, our approach to the human condition in religious form provides an “illogical solution to our illogical condition” (being alive and having to die). [5] Bio-chemistry, physiology, physics provide no satisfactory answer to this problem. As the Durants ask, “Has all the progress of philosophy since Descartes been a mistake through its failure to recognize the role of myth in the consolation of man?”

Hence, Enlightenment and I are not as cozy as we once were. How that shakes out will take years to size up, but Enlightenment has been getting some bad press on this blog. It’s not new. “Ever since the fulminations of Burke and denunciations of German romantics,” writes Gay, “the Enlightenment has been held responsible for evils of the modern age.” While there are plenty of dispersions yet to cast, I will remain grateful for what those Europeans did.

But now that our freedoms have been won, and our “loneliness of autonomy” taken to its extreme, is this what we wanted when we jettisoned those illogical solutions to life’s illogical condition? As Chantal Delsol compares our eras, “Ideological man thought his combat for a radiant future symbolically inscribed his acts in capital letters in an immortal future world. Life had meaning; it stood for something, and could therefore quietly disappear behind its points of reference. Death did not mean an absolute end; it was subordinated to something greater and therefore devoid of any sense of catastrophe.” [6] Enlightenment chastened us with a biological expiration date, forgotten after we hit the dirt.

I’m reminded of a remark my niece once made concerning the age of a relative who was 90 at the time. It was an annual family gathering when she said, “That’s so old. I’d never want to live to be ninety.” I replied, “And you’ll be dead for countless trillions of years. Ninety sounds like a long time?” Half the attendees laughed, the other half, stunned. Leading one to respond, “That’s why we believe in everlasting life through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.” And I’ll bet it is. The conception of infinite finality certainly troubles me on those rare occasions I fail to keep myself furiously busy.

I’m not suggesting a return to that good old time religion, but rather a balance of two realities, nature and human. Sadly, societies are like oscillators; they oscillate, forever out of balance. Though idealized harmonic oscillators swing smoothly, real ones, like real civilizations, aren’t so well behaved. They possess nasty nonlinearities, sent on some trajectory by a movement, whipsawed by a counter-movement. It makes me wonder if the arguments of Richard Dawkins, Laurence Krauss, and E.O. Wilson gaining ground in the non-believers direction won’t one day soon be due for a damping theory. A theory of existence that accounts for undeniably rational facts of our natural world, and the irrational human condition as it is, much as some of us wish otherwise.

So what do all these spiritual ponderings have to do with a blog dedicated to political philosophy? Because political philosophy is dependent on a moral base, and morality has been historically dependent on religion or reason. As noted last time, philosophers have never successfully provided a reasoned argument that would bind people to moral rules the way an always watchful God did (a look to history shows this far from perfect). As the Durants wrote, “No reconciliation is possible between religion and philosophy except through the philosopher’s recognition that they have found no substitute for the moral function of the Church.”

As statistics noted in past postings attest, that watchful God is in retreat in the West, which leaves us with questions about the future. As Michael Polanyi has it, “Christian beliefs and Greek doubts are logically incompatible; and if the conflict between the two has kept Western thought alive and creative beyond precedent, it has also made it unstable.” [7]

Personally, internally, maybe so. Externally, in civilization, maybe not. Perhaps the trite nature of our modern disputes is a tolerable outcome compared to what it was when people were so certain of their faith they’d engage in a Thirty Years War. I can see both sides of this coin. But I haven’t given up hope on a synthesis that does what so many have claimed can’t be done. If nothing else, such pursuits keep me furiously busy, concealing that expiration date.

Until next time, the first Monday and 4th day of July, 2016.


[1] Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, Simon and Shuster, 1968
[2] Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Birth of Modern Paganism, Norton, 1966
[3] John 8:32
[4] Joseph Campbell, The Power Of Myth, Doubleday, 1988
[5] Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Princeton University Press, 1999
[6] Chantal Delsol, Icarus Fallen: The Search For Meaning in an Uncertain World, ISI, 2010
[7] Michael Polanyi, Harry Prosch, Meaning, University of Chicago Press, 1975
Revised for word choice and clarity, 11/27/2018.

March 7, 2016: Let’s hear it! Three tears for equality!

There’s a dominant storyline in America today: victims. Who knew there could be so many? Not that there aren’t victims. Last year, sixty million people were displaced by wars advanced by despots, and the vacuum created by America’s conquest of Iraq. When Wall Street got the Glass-Steagall Act removed by the congressmen they bought, gamblers speculated with our money to trash the world economy. Immediately after which they gave themselves $18.4 billion in bonuses. Plus they had several trillion in taxpayer dollars in their pocket, and kept their tools of the trashing—CDOs and derivatives—exempt from regulation, so why not get a bonus? Meanwhile the taxpayers, some of whom can share blame along with governmental programs to prod Freddy Mae and Mac, lost their jobs, homes, families. Since taxpayers can’t afford a politician of their own, America is run by people who serve somebody else. We’re all victims of that. But there are even those—like a man on Staten Island—who get strangled by police after failing to give the state its tax for cigarettes sold on the street. After which a man angry about the incident executed two police officers unrelated to it.

There are plenty of victims, but the victims I’m concerned with are those who seem to be pretending. The radio laments an upstart author who was compared to successful, established authors, constituting an insult to her identity. The TV tells me there’s a lack of racial diversity among LGBT characters on television. And some African American leaders claim that multimillionaire NBA basketball players are slaves on a plantation. Had I known as a boy I could be a victim of such inequality, I’d have paid attention during basketball practice.

But did you hear that the Amazon’s golden toad, Yantze River dolphin, Pyrenean ibex, black-faced honeycreeper, and West African black rhino just went extinct? Driven into extinction, forever, by one globally dominant species. Now those are victims. The rhino’s horn was ground up as a beer additive for—among other false claims—better sex, as though the planet needs more humans. Since rhino horn is made of the protein keratin, drinkers could have trimmed their own toenails as an additive and saved the rhinos.

Instead, if you live in America, while these species and 2000 others blinked out of existence last year, you would have heard the sobs of college students. Coast to coast they marched, screamed, and sobbed, until their administrators resigned over hurtful “micro-aggressions.” One micro-aggression occurred when a white student “commandeered” the Spanish word fútbol instead of the word soccer. Another was a photo of two girls with a mustache and sombrero as part of their Halloween costume. Never mind that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it made Hispanics victims of…something. Incredulous? See the link below and its references. [1]

Video of these events garnered all the requisite outrage and media attention meant to imitate community shame, now that communities are dead. There were apologies, contrition, and tears on camera to dramatize the great conversion that perpetrators of micro-aggressions make in their obedience to conformity. Once done, we could all forget about it in time to feign outrage for the next aggression, a kind of American pastime.

Worldwide ecosystems collapse, America continues its slide unabated with what could be our first Emperor in Chief of Pomposity, and 300,000 were killed in Syria, while we hyperventilate about sombreros. As Chantal Delsol tells it, a people are made by hardship. They are also made by its absence. Hence, she notes, we have become a petty people. [2]

Some might see this striving for victim status as one of the sacraments of political correctness (PC): the oxymoronic notion that a common good of group-preferentiality must be obeyed, while simultaneously rejecting that any common good can exist, much less intrude on individual free choice. Every era has its fashions. But there seems something more fundamental to our tantrums than mere PC. I suggest one component is our concept of equality.

Equality was a central support of Enlightenment individualism. Our Founders gave us a Bill of Rights (not a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities) to ensure equality and freedom of individuals (not communities). What was the foundation of equality? Did it mean something? Or did equality evolve from something of substance to something now trying so hard to be taken seriously?

Enter French philosopher, Phillipe Bénéton. [3] Bénéton’s book elaborates how innovative humans are with social structures, norms, and values—something the ancients saw as reckless. We’re never satisfied. Like the latest gadget, there’s got to be a better way, be it phones or rights, computers or equality. According to Bénéton, Enlightenment innovation in equality lacked a solid foundation. As the demarcation between Medieval and modern thought, arguments abound as to its Christian influence. Is Enlightenment equality a Christian inheritance thanks to Christianity’s idea of the person, each endowed with a unique essence? Or, while a Christian inheritance, does modernity make equality practical by transposing it from the spiritual realm to the temporality of everyday life? Or, lastly, is modern sovereignty of the individual something new, no connection to Christianity? (I chafe at these notions of sovereignty as no one is sovereign. At the very least each has been utterly dependent on a mother, without which they would not exist.)

As Bénéton tells it, Christian perspectives promoted rules of life for spiritual salvation, while modernity promotes rules of society through a legal process for what might be called material salvation of peace and prosperity—Plato vs. Aristotle. The Christian model imitated the Aristotelian with its stress on moral education to make humans more than they are. But modernity now tends to leave humans as they are, elevating our flaws as an expression of identity. Early on, equality was expected to play out within confines of Christian morality with its checks and balances on individual excess. “But,” he writes, “the Founders failed to see they were setting a time bomb.”

Not according to George Washington. In his 1797 farewell address he said, “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.” But religion defined how? By a loving God of the New Testament, or the same God that kills innocent first born, including infants and toddlers? See Exodus 4:21. God denies Pharaoh a choice, despite sending Moses with His demands, as though Pharaoh could choose.

The result of our more recent procedural society is that, “We no longer engage the heart to create indissoluble bonds,” writes Bénéton. Though he does not note that bonds fostered by common belief are unlikely in pluralistic societies with no state sanctioned religious or moral system. (See The Federalist for Madison’s brilliant but portentous solutions. [4]) Instead, we replace these indissoluble bonds with what we hope to be more dependable laws, procedurally administered by dispassionate third parties. Equality then depends not on common sentiments, but formalized rights.

One can see how we replaced sentiment with reasoned process, but as Michael J. Sandel has it, rights put the individual prior to the social. [5] This puts an important edge on the Self, a preconceived posture in opposition to the social before the social is even recognized. What we give ourselves in one way, we take away in another.

For Bénéton, these evolving ideals have denied us the capacity to share the same elevated essence. All are the same but we have nothing in common except our freedom to have nothing in common. With rejection of a common good and its hierarchy of values, rights float in constant clash, without anchor in nature, authority, or religion. “If rights are no longer based on nature, there is no reason to limit them,” writes Bénéton. “Anything one wants becomes a right.” Hence, there’s now a right to carry guns in University of Texas classrooms, a right to “non-sexed” restrooms in Iowa, autonomous cars reveal a right to drive, and from one presidential candidate, anyone claiming sexual assault “has a right to be believed.” In that case, the 2006 Duke Lacrosse team, and 2014 University of Virginia fraternity pilloried by The Rolling Stone should be imprisoned on false accusations. Human rights which substantiated equality have become particular to groups, not to humanity.

The ancient’s respect for vital distinctions of character is rejected by modern equality as the old view places some above others. Character threatens autonomy through inevitable comparisons, with the potential to create another victim. Today the right to be different applies only to certain insignificant surface features. These differences make no difference, not the way character used to make heroes. And if differences make no difference, distinctions between a host of issues are easy to lose, claims Bénéton: genius vs. farce, profound vs. superficial, decency vs. indecency. Under modernity every dogma is outlawed save relativism. “It is an evil to speak of the Good,” writes Bénéton. Because just what would that be, and who’s going to define it? We no longer have a reference. The modern human is liberated, separated from an order that transcends them, pronouncing a death sentence to meaning.

Part of that old order belonged to institutions Bénéton views as now a loose assortment of functions. Institutions like the family, school, civic associations, political organizations, church, and state, all having lost their forms (think Plato). And all, as Robert Putnum shows, descending in America. [6] Somehow, forms that once animated society held substance for people. Sentiments, not laws.

I wonder if this represents modernity's prioritization of creative innovation of these forms, over and above the forms themselves. Forms that once made the man more than a man: the minister in regalia behind his podium, the judge in gown seated above proceedings. And conjure this: the father as patriarch of the household. These are precisely the forms we relish in dismantling. Even a child of post Sixties America in the Seventies (like I was) could see this dismantling as a means to self-indulgence. I was able to hide behind the latest evolution in equality to demand due consideration with adults, as a child, at the expense of community to demolish traditional restraints on me. Bénéton marks this era of the Sixties as “late modernity,” when final condemnation of the forms take place. Individualism’s battle against tradition won.

Given this evolution, deep down, does equality with our fellow human beings now mean nothing more than a statute? The evolution of equality’s reach has rectified many wrongs, from slavery to women’s suffrage. But today, popular violations of equality sound like pretending. To garner victims special rights and privileges under what Bertrand Russell called, “The superior virtue of the oppressed.” One more factor in the disconnected existence we’ve come to accept as normal. Where does this evolution lead?

Until the first Monday in May, the 2nd, 2016.


[1] Lukianoff and Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind , The Atlantic, September 2015
[2] Chantal Delsol, Icarus Fallen: The Search For Meaning In An Uncertain World, ISI, 2003
[3] Philippe Bénéton, Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement, ISI, 2004
[4] Hamilton, Jay, Madison, The Federalist, Modern Library, 1937, (1787)
[5] Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, Belknap Press, 1998
[6] Robert Putnum, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Touchstone, 2001
Revised for grammar and word choice, 11.22.2018

January 4, 2016: Hedonistic hairsplitting and scientific certainty

Despite all my many efforts to combat daftness, it still visits me. And in the least likely of places, such as this blog where I ponder at length something I’ve read. One presumes that both reading and pondering would ward off daftness. But in real life, and as one learns in engineering, no system is perfect.

Days after posting my last entry on this blog I attempted to fix daft notions it contained, but it’s still a mess. That mess seems to come down to some quite subtle hairsplitting over terms and assumptions. As I’ve found, even defining gets dicey. It’s no wonder political philosophy and politics in general generates so much heat in this country. As the cartoon character, Elmer Fudd, once told Bugs Bunny, “It ain’t science!”

Last time I made reference to Gogdignon and Thiriet’s (G&T’s) assessment of the modern individual's willful obsession with work, and our destiny as hedonists, which didn’t happen. I then submitted their hypothesis applied only to white color professionals, not labor and trades, i.e. hedonism did matter to labor and trades because, “Their action tends not to be rewarding beyond remuneration.”

Well…really? While I maintain that most vocations are no longer in and of themselves inspiring (more on that below), does the domination of our workplace argue for a hedonistic life for anybody? If G&T are right, that we in the Western world now work ourselves to the grave by choice, where’s the hedonism in that? So, in this post, I reject the remark I made last time, and suggest that hedonism is not the goal for almost anyone, professional or labor.

But wait! During arguments with myself about this topic, I was confronted with another fine French philosopher from the same text in which I discovered G&T - Gilles Lipovetsky. [2] Lipovetsky convincingly says the opposite: hedonism has been not only a dominant player in modernity, but surreptitious. For him, a cultural transformation can be pinned down to France, May, 1968 (while similar events were afoot in the US). Lipovetsky submits that student movements of ’68 were unprecedented from previous revolts in their combination of unified action, like all such revolts that deny supremacy of the individual for a cause, but for purely individualistic reasons, like no such revolt. In ’68 there was no plan, no future, only challenge to every form of order, organization, and hierarchy as oppressive of immediate gratification. Students of that period, according to Lipovetsky, denounced capitalistic hedonism through a practice of hedonism in which complete permissiveness was demanded without restraints, reinforced by Freud’s (fanciful) notions of repressed desires.

Lipovetsky writes, “In no way did May announce the restructuring of society; indeed, it signaled the very opposite. It was the psychodramatic and parodic end to the [true] revolutionary age [of Enlightenment]. It augured the victory of individualism, and the irreversible privatization of the social sphere. May ’68 was less an antitechnocratic movement struggling for collective self-determination than a wild moment in our relentless descent into the world of modern individualism and personal autonomy.”

Recall that according to Louis Dumont, this individualist movement has a long evolution; from Greek Cynics to Roman Stoics, absorbed by Christians, changed by the Enlightenment, passed forward and amplified to deafening volumes in the 1960s. [3] This evolution exchanged virtue for liberty, duty for rights, responsibility for choice, belonging for autonomy, meaning for purpose. For Lipovetsky, the hedonistic spasm of the ’60s accelerated hedonistic tendencies common to all democracies, and steepened the tumble of what was already in decline. Social bonds weakened with withdrawal into private life, and people further turned in on themselves becoming indifferent to public life with little interest in ties to the collectivity.

While further hairsplitting might be enjoyed between Lipovetsky’s hedonism as cause vs. G&T’s hedonism as outcome, does hedonism really play a role in either context?

America is today a materialistic society, and I doubt I’ll confess to daftness on that. However, materialism - in its social sense as material possessions superior to spiritual values - is not quite hedonism. Materialism seems to have four causes: survival, sexual selection through display, rank in the primate hierarchy, and hedonism. While materialism is not necessarily hedonistic, hedonism is most definitely materialistic. Though Lipovetsky’s impressions of ’68 are inviting - the faddish character of its motivations and its permanent outcomes - hedonism as the outcome of our fall from belonging or its cause, seems less so. To G&T’s point, hedonism should have been the result of radical individualism, but it wasn’t. Instead, our materialism seems to me less about self-indulgent devotions to pleasure, than backfill. As Morgan Whitaker said, “Once on the material track, people strive for more to fill in for less.” [4]

But less what exactly?

Meaning.

I stated in an earlier blog my hypothetical distinction between meaning and purpose. That meaning is delivered to us from external sources – the loving pet, adoring child, trustworthy spouse, belief in God. While purpose, on the other hand, is up to us, internally determined. We’ve always got something to do. Echoing G&T (and Tocqueville [5]) so long as we stay busy, the realization that we have limited or no meaning whatsoever can be hidden. Hence, the effect of lost community, tradition, and religion, exchanged for the satisfaction of self-interest which our economic machine is built for. Of course there are still believers, and people still have families, both of which provide meaning. Both also took serious injury in the 20th century, and according to surveys referenced earlier, that trend is accelerating. The individualist movement powers forward.

Now we’ve arrived at “(more on that below),” and how I came to wrap this business about work, hedonism, and meaning together: “Work hard, play hard” is a mantra in America. From my own youthful experience in labor, the last half of that mantra was an escape. It was a kind of rebellion against making myself return daily to work I loathed, under the whip of my own needs and desires for income. At that age I could not yet separate need from desire. At one factory I worked in (when America had factories), each night on second shift from 4 p.m. to midnight I was confined to a one square meter space, performing the same repetitive action. Over and over, fast as I could perform it, as I dreamed about mealtime, and hoped my daydream didn’t cost me my fingers or a hand. For a 19 year old boy, I was chained to a dungeon. When the midnight whistle blew, I struggled to contain my euphoria until the freeway entrance a half mile away. There, my shouts through an opened car window echoed off the outer planets as I drove up the ramp. I did this to psychologically cut that chain with the power of audio. I bought a motorcycle to ride on trails as hard as I could ride it. I drove my car as fast as I could drive it. I skied as long as I could stand it. I fought factory confinement with outside activity.

My perception of this vocation is telling in a manner beyond personal idiosyncrasies. During the Great Depression, such employment would have been seen as a gift from God. During World War Two, it was seen as a duty to America engaged in the hoped for salvation of civilization. After the war, factory labor was seen as part and parcel of the good life, a mark of the responsible citizen on their way from deprivation to comfort. Things changed. We changed, and the system we made succeeded. My example as a youth, ignorant of the part I represented in that arc of transforming perceptions was merely one instance of that alteration. My actions were about an ordering of life I didn’t want to conform to.

But this sounds like an argument for Lipovetsky, that my actions were little different from students in ’68. I say, no. My actions were not about pleasure seeking, but the fact I saw no meaning to my labor. My purpose at the factory was clear – the dollar. Meaning experienced by these circumstances in previous generations was gone by the time I arrived because the sanctification of individualism moved past any remaining communal roles and their connections. My world was all about me, not some larger picture of the common good so cherished by the ancients, or more recently, by my parents. Be it labor or professional, how many of us today toil in service to a higher cause, or simply to pay the bills? I wanted the meaning my parents had, but didn’t know it. My rebellion wasn’t going to provide that, it could only be a tantrum for reasons unknown at the time.

What I sought was not pleasure, so it wasn’t hedonism, it was relief from whatever I couldn’t define. Those growing numbers of us today without tradition, religion, and true community, have cast off those anchors as an outcome of the individualist movement. We don’t seek a future of material pleasure in hedonism, but try in the only way we know (individual will) to cover for the loss of a past we don’t even know.

But if we don’t even know it, how can we seek to fill in for whatever it was with something else? Because we feel it. Humans are social creatures, starting with birth to mother that determines our meaning from the outside. She is the first valuation of ourselves. We don’t “know” that as infants either, but we feel it. Anyone who’s been around infants can see the importance of that connection, and we know what psychological mutations occur when this is denied. We moderns live in similar denial, but as adults, willfully detached, then wonder why our societies experience such dis-ease. This is why our so called self-realization is impossible on our own, because ironically it can only be found through proper relations with other humans in those true face-to-face communities that no longer exist.

Sadly, political philosophy, which I find so intriguing, is not physics. The precision with which one argues these topics is not a precision engineers would find satisfactory in making real things real. Devices built with the kind of certainty prevalent in political philosophy might work with better than chance randomness, but in engineering, that’s not saying much.

In science and engineering, nature is the unbiased judge. We test our understanding against it and find we are right, close to right, or wrong. Nature has no concern for us, it is what it is. We either understand it, or we don’t. In the human realm, no longer is there a certain test.

Perhaps this is one reason we so often argue past each other now. Who knows what’s true? For we modern products of that Enlightenment reason I so cherish, neither the Greek Cosmos, nor Christian order in God’s divine plan can result in certainty, and thus we have no reference. These views were once considered objective facts, external to us. Now they’re merely subjective opinions.

In America, our Founders intentionally demoted religion from fact to opinion in order to defang passions. Better peace with ambiguity, than war with certainty. Hence, government (not the people) was to be neutral on matters of morality, while the Founders hoped religion and morality would hold their own. That’s not what happened. Today, truth, values, evil, the good, and our individualistic lifestyles are all relative, chosen by the individual. What we have in common now is not a sacred human essence that the ancients held so dear (at least among non-slaves). As Philippe Bénéton writes, “What we have in common is the right to have nothing in common.” [6] We’re free. But deep down is there a growing sense that we are rudderless, and don’t know why? These authors make it appear that way, and my experience seems to agree, but “this ain’t science.”

Oh well. It’s early morning. The stores are open. I’ll feel better – for a while - if I go buy something.

Until the first Monday in March, the 7th, 2016.


[1] Anne Gogignon & Jean-Louis Thiriet, The Rebirth of Voluntary Servitude, in New French Thought: Political Philosophy, Princeton, 1994
[2] Gilles Lipovetsky, May ’68, of the Rise of Transpolitical Individualism, in New French Thought: Political Philosophy, Princeton, 1994
[3] Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism, University Of Chicago Press, Reprint 1992
[4] Brett Williams, The Father, Combustible Books, 2014
[5] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Penguin Classics, 2003
[6] Philippe Bénéton, Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement, ISI, 2004

November 2, 2015: Work ‘til you drop – the fruit of independence

Gogdignon and Thiriet wrote, “As a vehicle for self-fulfillment and personal growth, work has quickly become the focus of individual freedom, as its impure origins in physical subjugation and subsistence needs have been forgotten…transforming [work] from a means to an end in itself.” [1] For Gogdignon and Thiriet (G&T) this aspect of self-determination, elaborated by the Enlightenment to circumvent abuse, has become an abuse all its own, against the individual, by the individual. I’m reminded of that old axiom, that all great ideas commit suicide through excess.

Echoing modernity’s lack of orientation in true community and tradition that we saw from them last time, G&T write, “Since [the self] remains entirely undefined, the self becomes nothing but the act of its own definition. This definition immediately resolves into a new one, and so on, into infinity…Self-affirmation can therefore be achieved through pure action. It must take the form of an endlessly self-renewing project, in which we set ourselves new goals…[where] nonstop work becomes the ultimate measure of [our] being.”

By this point it was clear, this was not so much an essay to the world as a letter to me. I fully embraced (for the most part, still do) what G&T denounce, and what author Philip Bénéton labels “late modernity,” when individualism acquired warp speed from the Sixties. [2] I made full use of the new emancipation: rejections of authority, free choice, self-determination, and a level of work effort that would have made the Puritans blanch. From the standpoint of personal achievement, it eventually served me well, albeit not without pain for my parents in the early years. Later, not without some measure of pain for me, having lost those opportunities for connection that can never be recovered. When I left a career focused on the methods of nature for a quest to understand the human condition, I felt a bit like Linus Pauling when he said he was so engaged in his work that he met his son for the first time at his son’s fortieth birthday party. It’s a common ailment of our times. As G&T note, what was once engagement with the social arena is “exchanged for the exclusive relationship of the self to the self.”

“We can now understand why work has become the individual’s most important, all-consuming activity,” writes G&T. “Its exactions constantly feed the willful appetites that haunt the modern world. If freedom must remain permanently unrealized, work is the perfect place to exercise it…We are witnessing a strange reversal of perspective, in which servitude – be it voluntary or forced – becomes freedom in action…If modern consciousness ever pauses to rest, it only finds a void that serves to fuel its own anxieties. We have no choice except activity or void, work or anxiety.” Tocqueville rings in my ears, having pioneered this perspective with his accurate evaluation of Americans already by 1840. [3] But to take the point only slightly farther, G&T write, “Freedom today takes the form of voluntary servitude to an absent master. Modern man is his own master, yet he has all the characteristics of a slave. Although he is hyperactive, excessively vigilant, and extremely driven, it is entirely by choice. He works frantically because he is free; not because he is held in bondage. This is not a sign of madness; it is the logical outcome of modern freedom.”

For those with a career in the sciences or engineering, there are two sides to this. One side agrees with G&T’s assessment. There were those occasions when a 98 hour week would lead me outside a windowless lab building in the midst of darkness. There I could find refreshment under a smog piercing moon, its rays cast upon asphalt and concrete vistas of another American mega city. Schedules imposed on those efforts were grueling, but my brain needed a break. So I stood there in the dark, wondering what life would be like without equations, computer code, and radio frequency circuits.

The flip side of this experience was the awe one discovers with those deep emersions in nature. In my case, they were pierced by those equations, computer code, and radio frequency circuits. The concepts of things we will never see, only calculate and measure, can be very close to the edge of human capacity. So close that losing one’s mental pattern of understanding spells another struggle to get it back. Being in the presence of that understanding was something like a religious experience. To witness those equations lift off the page with a life of their own was the same feeling as the brush strokes that makes the painting, or the scene that clicks on stage. You didn’t want to leave it. What Alasdair MacIntyre extols as private practice that earns satisfaction by doing it to the best of one’s ability. [4] A private satisfaction with no publicity.

There’s also something to be said for all those individualists gathering to complete some great project. While as transient as G&T would decry, who would not want to have been part of building the Golden Gate Bridge, Empire State Building, Apollo moon mission, or Voyager now beyond our solar system’s heliopause. Most great projects can’t be done alone. But are such triumphs only possible by organized individualists within disconnected societies? The Pyramids, Parthenon, and Lighthouse of Alexandria marking the port to their great library provide arguments against this. (Incidentally, slaves did not build the pyramids as Cecil B. DeMille would have us believe.)

“We were mistaken to think that the emancipation of the individual would lead to the liberation of all desires and passions, to hedonistic self-fulfillment,” writes G&T. “Far from responding to the call of pleasure, modern man is entirely focused on the realization of his power to act, which is the sole indication that he is free.” Though one can barely imagine a laborer pining for another hour on, say, a road crew to dig another ditch. For them, in America, hedonism seems to matter. And why wouldn’t it? Their action tends not to be rewarding beyond remuneration. Often it’s “life eviscerating,” as Joseph Campbell coined our modern work. [5] Having toiled in several factories and on a road crew before my college years, I have some experience in these matters. What counted most on the job was lunch. Of course this is my perspective of labor, and surely – hopefully – there are those brave souls who truly do enjoy it, with a touch of MacIntyre’s private practice.

As witness to others still in the grind of whatever sort, my perspective is from the outside in now, and often I see what G&T meant when they wrote, “[Modern man] is no longer curious about the outside world or capable of aesthetic enjoyment. He has no time to wander freely, no time to waste in wonderment, reflection, or diversion. The self has dispensed with the outside world, and its tireless activity has now forbidden any intrusions…[sounding] the death knell not only of dilettantism but also of art.” And if you don’t believe that, consider modern art. Everything from “excremental works” (for $20,000 per can), to shouting until unable to speak, called “performance art.” With modernity’s disengagement from high culture, the replacement is cash culture or pop culture, while art is anything an artist says it is, and an artist is anyone who says they are. As with moral bearings provided by true communities now gone, we have no reference.

With all this in mind, my engagement with the workplace had a happy ending. Somehow, the utilitarian society I live in didn’t rob me of curiosity and that thrill of discovery. I left the workplace, not without reluctance, to expand my horizons. To write, to paint, to study other fields of science, history and philosophy, to reengage photography, hiking, and visits to what’s left of wilderness or antiquities the world over. Admittedly, I, like most Americans, have no community connection. And while G&T would be disappointed in my general lack of longing for those connections, at least I am enlivened by the wider world they advocate. Western civilization makes its rotation from confinement of the individual by someone else, to confinement of the individual by the self. What else can we do but make the best of it?

Until the first Monday of January the 4th, 2016.


[1] Anne Gogignon & Jean-Louis Thiriet, The Rebirth of Voluntary Servitude, in New French Thought: Political Philosophy, Princeton, 1994
[2] Philippe Bénéton, Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement, ISI, 2004
[3] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Penguin Classics, 2003 (1840)
[4] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, University of Notre Dame Press, 2010
[5] Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, Doubleday, 1987

September 7, 2015: Cerebral Birth Pangs

Godignon and Thiriet wrote, “As the world undergoes what has been called ‘the death of meaning,’ freedom for the [individual] has arrived, since nothing external defines him anymore. He is reduced to timeless, insubstantial, and empty subjectivity. Only two possibilities remain: activity (primarily work), or stagnation (the modern form of hedonism). Any residual ‘self’ resembles any other, and like the world on which it is modeled, this self is [void], insignificant, uncultivated, and without history.” [1] When I read this, I wanted to cry. Not because it was a revelation, but because I was sad to see, yet again, that others felt as I do, or at least as I have begun to feel. This time from the French, who have made epic strides to revive French philosophy since the disgrace of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan.

I wasn’t born with the insights of a Thomas Paine or a Christopher Hitchens. So, while always curious about the world, I was still a product of my civilization. Hence, I have personally experienced both the incessant activity, and stagnation (though only briefly as a youth) that Godignon and Thiriet note. Our American custom is to attach ourselves to the perpetual present – fads, fashion, thrills, this morning’s hottest celebrity, this afternoon’s latest outrage, and of course today’s emergency at the workplace. Our civilization has become one most responsive to primal urge, because we’re so busy, as Tocqueville could already see 175 years ago. [2] Depth – of any sort, really – is not essential to employment. I feel an absence of real and substantial history the more I learn about it. And the more I learn, the better I understand what Godignon and Thiriet wrote.

For years I’ve preferred the Durant perspective: “Our capacity for fretting is endless. No matter how many difficulties we surmount, how many ideals we realize, we shall always find an excuse for being magnificently miserable. There is a stealthy pleasure in rejecting mankind or the universe as unworthy of our approval.” [3] With Durant’s evaluation, I could chalk up my attitude to that “stealthy pleasure.” Until about fifteen years ago when I read Allan Bloom’s, The Closing of the American Mind. It was the sad birth of a new certainty and remains the most impactful book I’ve ever read. Bloom’s book was a commercial blockbuster that raised a continental stink in the US, because, in my opinion, it was the first and most courageous modern text to tell the truth about us as we are now. And, as much as can be done in a single volume, the whole truth, not only that half or less that serves our dogma, Left or Right. We American’s are no longer used to that kind of honesty, especially when delivered with such intense clarity. Closing generated mass editorials, conferences, disciples in and out of academia, a book of responses, a 25th Anniversary edition, blogs with later evolution of the Internet, and is still vilified by those who were stung the hardest.

In close competition with Bloom is Delsol’s, Icarus Fallen [4], and Sandel’s, Democracy’s Discontent. [5] I read a number of books to refute these perceptions including Levine’s Opening of the American Mind [6] which quite unintentionally so reinforced Bloom while struggling to refute him, it only made things worse. At the heart of all these works is the state of humanity in modernity, with reference to the ancients, given the colossal adjustment in human life between then and now.

As a result of these studies, my fear grows; that the world we made is an historic mistake. But fears are often fueled by uncertainty. As the opening paragraph above notes, and the thread on this blog indicates, this “historic mistake” appears strongly associated with the modern conception of the individual. While I embrace the individualist solution of busyness as it serves my purpose, it does not address issues of the soul, i.e. meaning, how we got this way, or if there’s a way out.

It’s easy to dismiss modernity for a rosy image of the ancients as I watch whatever I fancy on NetFlix, seated on a comfy couch from Canada, enjoying my one-gallon-of-water-per-almond (a bag full of them) shipped from drought wracked California across an ocean to my local store. (Sounds like Durant’s stagnation.) But the difference between the ancients may be arranged in two categories, material and spiritual. They were materially poor, spiritually rich. We are the opposite. And that’s the problem. We better stay busy.

Most of our success and advancement over the ancients can be placed in material terms – stuff, technology, biological longevity, comfort, convenience, obesity. However, the technology of access can be uplifting. Consider a jet flight to Delphi, Greece, standing amidst all that magnificent history. Or the Internet, a doorway to information and rubbish. And isn’t there a great deal to be said for the abolition of slavery? (Greece had slaves too.) Once a world industry with people stolen from as far away as Iceland for Arab countries, or Africa for America, now gone but for illegal trafficking that still lingers by comparison.

What the ancients had was belonging to true communities. Ours are long since dead, though the word “community” is used hundreds of times per day in the media. (Just listen for reports of next week’s gun massacre.) As Aristotle notes, and I agree, community is not simply a common location people occupy to ease exchange. But that’s what we have. Community was once about “a people” who belonged to a way of life they sought to perpetuate. But for minuscule subgroups like the Amish, Mennonites, or orthodox Jews, there is no community left in America. Having been raised in an individualistic civilization, I would find such subgroups suffocating. But I’ll never experience the deep connections they have. We are a nation of strangers now, more so with time. Independent islands evermore disconnected from our neighbors, often our own family, nuclear or extended, separated by demands of work that limits our time and expands our distance. For a growing number of us, the ancient soul’s peace is replaced by modernity’s purpose.

Enlightenment - that cherished era of scientific and philosophical discovery from roughly 1650 - 1750 AD - sanctified the individual, but at the expense of true community, and thus began the demise of belonging, faith, and meaning. We have emptied our soul once filled by human connectedness, and the meaning that belonging once provided. We as a society disposed of deeper connections in favor of individual independence, for good reasons, but with unintended consequences. We unwittingly damaged ourselves; we jettisoned all the old certainties; we live with eternal doubt about fundamental things. As Michael J. Sandel wrote with one of my favorite lines, “Liberated and dispossessed.”

Once the accepted moral hierarchy, defined as “the common good,” was replaced by individualism, we woke up in a world of self-contradictory dogmas. As a result, in the private sphere we’re confused as to just what is right, true, good, because nobody knows. This does not stop us from staking our flag in claim of certain terrain. But this is bravado to cover for the truth we hide from ourselves – that we are not in control and we don’t understand why. In the public sphere, liberals claim there is no overarching moral code as this is an infringement on individual choice, as they hyperventilate over the latest violation of an overarching political correctness. Conservatives embrace both the Christian morality of selflessness, and Adam Smith’s capitalism of selfishness. No wonder we’re confused.

And still, after all that, despite the current status of Western civilization, I’m not yet convinced that modernity was a bad trade. It’s true, by comparison to the old ways, we are on our own. But that in itself is not always bad. Long ago, trapped in a hyper-dysfunctional relationship, I learned The Great Secret: “It’s better to be alone than wish you were.” I’ll take free choice, independence, unattached to any sort of external objectivity, rather than suffer unending face-to-face combat, any day. Though it must be said, Bloom and the others are concerned with the nature of Western society, its norms and trajectory, more than calamitous intersections between individual men and women, which the ancients had too. Though Bloom et. al. see this as a symptom and/or contributor to our demise.

I’ve benefited greatly from the social movement those Europeans started in earnest with the Enlightenment. I had a career in the sciences they invented that allowed me to leave it to do as “I” wish. It’s a wonderful thing for me, and a slow motion disaster for society. I am both benefactor and hostage to Enlightenment reason’s dispersion of community. My perspective is expanding to others with acceleration, not, I think, for the better. As a result, the soul craves meaning. But blessings of individualism won’t allow its satisfaction. We’ll have to satisfy ourselves with activity instead. At least we’ve got that.

It seems to me the good news is, we now have the freedom through democratic and capitalistic institutions, virtually without constraint, to choose our own path (unlike the ancients). The bad news is, we now have the freedom through democratic and capitalistic institutions, virtually without constraint, to choose our own path. Consequently, I’ll be doing all I can to stay busy with the dual hope that I can keep that purpose train running, and that I am not too severely haunted by an absence of meaning. There’s something to be said for a sober response to the hand life dealt us. If Oswald Spengler [7] and Brooks Adams [8] are correct, there’s no steering the demise of Western civilization anyway, may as well enjoy the ride down.

Of course, if I believed that I’d never read another book on the subject, often as hard to crack as a stone, nor bother with coalescing those thoughts they generate on this blog.

Until next time, November 2, 2015, when we dig more into Godignon and Thiriet, and their take on the state of the modern individual.


[1] Anne Gogignon & Jean-Louis Thiriet, New French Thought: Political Philosophy, Princeton, 1994
[2] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Penguin Classics, 2003 (1840)
[3] Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, Simon & Schuster, 2010 reprint (1968)
[4] Chantel Delsol, Icarus Fallen, ISI, 2010
[5] Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, Belknap Press, 1998
[6] Lawrence W. Levine, The Opening of the American Mind, Beacon Press, 1997
[7] Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West, Vintage, 2006 (1921)
[8] Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay, Forgotten Books, 2015 (1896)

July 6, 2015: Mount Economics – It Wasn’t Always So Tall

This time we’ll look a bit closer at that catapult of individualism: economics. Not from the standpoint of supply and demand, efficient markets, or Wall Street gamblers, but the development of economics into an independent ideology. Using Louis Dumont as a starting place, we touch briefly on how modern economics was born, evolved, and became paramount to our definition of the world we made. [1]

Modern perspectives on economics are now fundamental to political philosophy. As Dumont puts it, “Modernity has witnessed the emergence of a new mode of consideration – a carving out of a separate domain evoked by the word ‘economics’ or ‘the economy’ – a separate compartment of the human mind, a paramount value of modernity.” The ancients dealt with economic matters too, but these matters were associated with the public good, not an individual’s self-interest as there was no such thing as “individuals” in the ancient world, only members. With the exception of modern individual rights, economics has since become the very expression of the individualist movement, and this evolution has been of keen interest to this blog.

Modern economics is, among other things, the implementation of practical science as technology, made useful through engineering, taken to the masses by markets. I wouldn’t be writing this blog were it not for every link in that chain. I might not even be alive. We now assume economics is a field all its own, a kind of science of production and consumption. But its liberation from politics and morality is historically recent. Before this transition the concept of wealth was immovable property. Rights were granted by land ownership, enmeshed in the social organization, conferring power over others. Once wealth became autonomous as mobile cash, ownership of property as a form of power over people declined. All the old hierarchies were in flux around the same time, lending greater freedom to the individual. As Dumont writes, “When the authority of holistic hierarchy disappears then authority degrades into power and power into influence.” We have seen the positive and negative effects of this.

The transformation from selfless Christian morality to selfish economic morality was mentioned here last time (May 4, 2015) when we considered definitions of the human being. In that entry we considered how different definitions result in different political philosophies that accord with that definition. These different political philosophies then give rise to different societies people live and die in. It was my contention that Enlightenment definitions (ca. 1700) of the human being, with Enlightenment’s emphasis on individualism, were for good reasons: in response to their times, and also wrong in their fundamentals. Wrong because they established the notion that each human is fully autonomous, free of prior connections – an ideal foundation for consumerism. But biology says otherwise, with the connection between mother and child as the fundamental social unit that expresses what we are: social creatures prior to autonomy, dependent and connected. I submit the success of economics born from Enlightenment, with all of its miraculous benefits, has also saved us the trouble of social interaction. The economic promise to make individuals independent was a resounding success. With abatement of social connections goes traditional morality as a characteristic of groups greater than one. This resulting loss of morality, ethics, virtues, traditions, all as victims of our independence serve to exacerbate our growing sense of disconnectedness, isolation, and emptiness. Compared to the past, we are materially rich, socially and spiritually impoverished. We’ve decided without knowing it to trade one domain for the other. As Michael J. Sandal puts it, “Liberated and dispossessed.” [2]

These mostly European philosophers responsible for acceleration of the individualist movement and economics to service it, stressed sovereignty of the individual to break free of arbitrary power of kings and Popes. By the time these philosophers began to ponder new social systems, the king had been demoted, and the Church was about to be. Almost five hundred years earlier the Magna Carta formally started this long process when King John of England (1167-1216) accepted limitations to his power demanded by the barons he was taxing to pay for lost wars. John had already capitulated to the Pope during an era when the Church had turned its pursuit for heaven into a pursuit for the world. As Dumont clarifies and many have noted, this was in violation to the teachings of Jesus: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give to God what is God’s.” [2] An expression of indifference, which in context makes clear which is superior, thus dismissing Caesar. Or, more accurately, dismissing worldly things like possessions and wealth as distractions from matters of the soul.

But bigger things were evolving for the Church than papal-king jousting. Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica in 1687. It extended Johannes Kepler’s Cosmographic Mystery a hundred years earlier (1596), which validated Copernicus and his Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres fifty years before that (1543). What once belonged only to God, man was now in charge of. Some of the shine had been wiped off the mystery and it wouldn’t be the king that posed the greatest threat to Church authority. Even more than the Protestant Reformation itself (1524) that threat would be direct and indirect effects of science. Science is the force behind technology, technology is the power that drives modern economic expansion.

Seventeenth century accentuation of individual autonomy accompanied an often unstated religious and moral sense. Many, though not all (e.g. Voltaire), wanted religion maintained to balance the obvious dangers of individualism: selfishness, greed, hedonism. These men assumed such guidance would always be present. They were wrong, as some did fear and expressed at the time. Individualism and the rights created to sustain it would eventually reach a point where the law would determine one individual able to freely choose to end the life of another incapable of choice. Regardless of one’s political stance on abortion, it serves as a supreme example of modernity when something that has taken place since humans started reproducing, would now become philosophically justified as an individual right. (The reader might recall, this author is agnostic – not atheistic as some are fond of confusing.) Such a right, like all rights, sanction the ascendancy of the individual, while simultaneously distancing them from the belonging, reference, and burden of true community.

With Mandeville [4] and Smith’s [5] dissociation of economics from traditional moral restrictions, individuals would be invited to determine their own morality, able to claim that their pursuits of self-interest were distanced from communal judgement as it served the new morality of private vice as public good. As Ernst Troeltsch noted, “Claims are no more proof of validity than needs are guarantees of satisfaction…” [6] And as Dumont points out, “Something that remains opaque in this transition in mental perspective is that the new morality regulates social relationships whether or not goods are involved.”

Economics is individualism in material practice. Economics is the jet engine under the wings of individualism that make individualism palpably sovereign and clearly visible, not merely philosophically held to be true in a political arena. Economic practice is now so refined we require no human interaction as our transactions can be done electronically with delivery to our door by unseen strangers. We’ve come to prefer this lack of interaction. This economic ideology would quite logically commercialize agriculture into the number one planet-wide selective pressure under which complete species now disappear. Often these species and their habitats are an obstacle to efficiency. Such effects are said not to be the proper purview of economics as they are irrelevant to “maximum utility of efficient markets.” All of this, from our growing isolation without moral tradition, to planet-wide modification by just one species was not created by economic perspectives, but accentuated by it, more even than the original philosophy of individualism itself. Economics is not merely a tool of analysis to tell us what happened or attempt predictions; it sets public policy to structure the very society we live in. [7] Are we the masters of our ideas, or do they master us?

But is this the final status for economics? There may be room for more realistic economic models. By “more realistic,” I mean models that take into consideration community responsibilities a bit closer to that home the ancients realized, one closer to a truer definition of the human, with the recognition that every economic decision has a traditional moral element. University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler’s recent book admits that capitalist economics has been overconfident of unrealistic theories. [8] (Incidentally, the University of Chicago has 29 Noble Prize winners in economics, called the Chicago School, which Thaler opposes.) Thaler shows that humans are not rational agents in economic transactions but frequently quite the opposite. The robotic “free agent” may be in for a common sense replacement by people as they really are. Perhaps not far behind is the realization that all economic transactions have a moral component demanding due consideration, and with that a return to a traditional morality of empathy that rejects greed as good.

Until next time: the first Monday in September, the 7th, 2015.



[1] Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology, University of Chicago Press, 1977
[2] Michael J. Sandal, “Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy,” Belknap Press, 1998
[3] Mathew 22:21
[4] Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 1705
[5] Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776
[6] Ernst Troeltsch, Religion in History, Fortress Press, 1991.
[7] Stephen Marglin, “The Dismal Science: Why Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community”, Harvard, 2010
[8] Richard H. Thaler, “Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics,” Norton, 2015

May 4, 2015: What Defines “Human,” ‘Cuz If You Get that Wrong, Everything’s Screwed Up

Philosophers have spent a great deal of effort attempting to define humanity. It used to be tool use, until chimps were found to use tools. Possessing a moral compass has been another definition, until other animals were found to display morality in their sense of fairness, aid to the sick, and sharing. Language, mathematics, religion, and brain size have all been considered. Though other mammals have a rudimentary language, and even lemurs can count, though so far as we know, they can’t solve differential equations. Elephants appear to revere their dead in “elephant cemeteries.” Dolphins have the largest brain-to-body-mass ratio of any species on earth. Defining just what defines “human” is bound to get a little tricky.

From whatever that definition is, people build societies that strive to be in accord with what they think humans are. Early in a civilization, people seek to base their society on a political philosophy wedded to that definition, even though that definition and its associated philosophy will become forgotten or a little hazy. If, for example, humans are naturally wicked, a strong-arm governance should be employed. So said Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in his favoring of a monarchy. But if humans are naturally good, shouldn’t they be able to govern themselves? So asked John Locke (1632–1704) in his preference for democracy with its stress on individual liberty, rights, and equality before the law. Get the definition wrong, and a mess is made — a society that forces real humans into unreal molds. Like the seven-decade experiment that cost tens of millions of lives, starvation, and wars in Marxist-Leninist Russia.

Until recently, religion, as well as natural law and morality, played such a large role in the human definition, one finds it inseparable in any survey of the past. Historically speaking, the subtraction of religious reference is new. Aside from that colossal shift in the human definition brought on by the Agricultural Revolution, this separation from religion, and for so many, may be our biggest change. (Of course, the city, State, Empire, and Industrial Revolution all rank right up there.) In the practical day-to-day arena of America, religion and traditional morality became disconnected from defining who we are by three parallel routes. First, our Enlightenment-influenced Founders demanded government be morally neutral in order to avoid imposing a specified morality on individuals. (Though we should recognize that moral neutrality is not neutral as it selects for and against competing moral standards: a court-centered system of justice versus “an eye for an eye.”) Gradually, Americans would assume the people themselves were to be morally neutral. This was not intended but bound to happen in an individualist State. Second, and for good historical reasons, America’s Founders expressly parted their government from religion by separating church from a state-sponsored faith, although colonies at that time still funded their favored denomination. Third, the Founders demoted religion from fact to opinion, but an opinion that became an individual right to have. At this same time, the way was being paved for another big change: the separation of morality from economics as elaborated by Louis Dumont (1911–1998) and his From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology.

Prevailing moral standards at the time of America’s Founding came from Christianity. Per Dumont, the emphasis Jesus placed on empathy was seen as a defining aspect of their view. [2] Though incomplete in its application, it set the tone with constitutional allowance for expanded moral inclusion. Central to this Christian view was a striving to be selfless. Jesus placed emphasis on what we might term spiritual morality, degrading the material world of the here-and-now in favor of a world beyond. But seventeen hundred years after Jesus, a big adjustment occurred thanks to Adam Smith’s (1723–1790) Wealth of Nations. [4] Smith submitted that selfishness is central to humanity — a paramount interest in self-preservation, so why not give into it? So long as we create a set of rules to play by, each can pursue their own self-interest by a new type of morality, where “private vice serves public virtue.” Smith reversed the Christian teaching by elevating the material world of here-and-now, seeking physical security and comfort for the greatest number of people. And it worked. Smith’s capitalist economy thrived in an atmosphere of “moral neutrality,” individualism, and limited selfishness. The human definition changed.

It’s clear that traditional morality and “economic morality” are in opposition: selflessness vs. selfishness; empathy vs. “greed is good,” as Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) clarified in his work The Fable of the Bees, which so influenced Smith. [5] Hence, among the most profound self-contradictions in Western civilization: still generally Christian, simultaneously capitalist.

From Smith eventually arrives the notion that material wellbeing is the realization of social justice, not that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. According to Dumont, this change in the human definition changed our ideology and thus our actions. From an ideology once based on “man’s relation to men,” to “man’s relation to things.” It should probably be predictable that at this transition the individual accelerates their separation from others via achievement, control of the natural world, displays of materially defined success, etc. As such, true communities disappear. After Smith, the plodding pace of individualism becomes a sprint, eventually to trample traditional communal life with its many duties and responsibilities that we moderns view as positively stifling.

So, what is the fundamental nature of humans? Nobody knows. Socrates emphasized virtue; Plato, knowledge; Aristotle, our political nature. Kant said morality, and it comes from reason. Though Kant’s is a practical morality applicable to the faceless multitudes of strangers we deal with in societies of mass overpopulation — another adjustment in the human definition in response to circumstances. But biology dictates we are social before we’re born. We don’t choose it. Physically and emotionally, we are connected, utterly dependent on that first elemental society, mother and child. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke both had a mother. They did not arrive on earth fully armed in defense of their individual rights. Individuality is naturally secondary, not primary.

There have been hundreds of experiments based on utterly different definitions. Compare the perfect weirdness of Sparta with hippie communes. Where are those models now? It gets even more complicated when we recognize that late modern humans of the West are a walking contradiction. We want love and independence, belonging and autonomy, someone of extraordinary measure to look up to and equality that guarantees no one is better than anybody else. Even our laws are self-contradictions: the equality of Equal Opportunity Employment versus the race preferences of Affirmative Action. The compensation of these contradictions produces what Chantal Delsol (1947-) terms “black markets.” [6] As Delsol writes in her Icarus Fallen, “The figures of human existence are again [emerging] in spite of their illegitimacy [by late modern norms]. Ban the economy, and the black market will blossom. Decree that religions are obsolete, and you will have sects. Deny that human beings seek the good and the ghost of the good will appear surreptitiously under the guise of correct thinking.” Black markets strive to balance our psyche.

Modernity is filled to the brim with these kinds of contradictions. Why? Is it because our definition of the human being has been distorted by the evolution of ideals born with Enlightenment philosophy of the 1700s? Those ideals were established for good reason, but what Enlightenment defined as liberty, equality, and autonomy have become something radically different. A topic Patrick J. Deneen excavates with petrifying implications that we summarized here from his book, Why Liberalism Failed.

Or could the human definition be so nebulous because ever since the Agricultural Revolution dislodged humanity from 60,000 years as tight-knit hunter-gatherer communities, that every new political philosophy, every new religious dogma, every ideology, all were a patch to fix what we broke without knowing just what it was we broke? Each fix lays over the last one with new problems generated, to be countered, balanced, ameliorated. By now, 400 generations from the agricultural upheaval, and we haven’t an experiential clue what the human condition was like when for 2400 generations it had been that of hunter-gatherers.

It is from nature that the template of humanity is born. We are social, as are other species: flocks of birds, herds of buffalo, schools of fish. Each seeks out others for companionship, safety, society. An expression of social yearning, not social contract, as though we could initiate or dispose of our social nature with an agreement. Compare this to Mandeville, who said the only reason people form society is to satisfy material desires. And—prefiguring Marx—that morality was invented by moralists, philosophers, and politicians to make man social. So, biologically, we can affirm that humans are social beings, who thus require morality (a social characteristic), and echoing Locke, good — potentially at least — and with all that implies for governance. (This definition is necessarily brief, begging questions like, Why is there crime? Why are there wars?)

Morality, born of social bonds, does not exist in a fictional universe of one. In a world occupied by more than ourselves alone, universal moral codes have their place as an obligation on the individual. Aspects of individuality relinquished to the Good, not merely the good of all, but for the Self if that Self expects to flourish. To deny our biologically determined social nature and the morality that comes with it through modern hyper-individualism is to float us on a moral foam, seen so clearly in America, Left and Right, where erratic indignation and sentimentality serve as guidance, not communities and their human reference.

If human social nature is prior to individualism, not just chronologically, but biologically, shouldn’t we rank aspects of individuality in accord with this reality? Not to make the individual disappear, but to rank the individual in a larger picture. Such an idea might have created a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. The individual dare not be dismantled as the individual is forced to do in totalitarian regimes of socialism, communism, or authoritarianism. We can’t remake moderns into ancients and expect to make a better world. Lenin and the French Revolution tried that. We’ve got 30,000 years of human examples to examine, with social systems more, less, or not the least in accord with human nature. Like notes that exist but not yet composed into a great musical composition, somewhere out there is the answer we’ve searched for from the moment humans expressed themselves in those ancient caves of France and Spain. Or are we condemned to civilization’s rise and fall because we can never fix what we broke?

March 2, 2015: Why we are the way we are – some groundwork

This essay prepares the way for an elaboration of powerful nuances in political philosophy that have a deep impact on us. Nuance, philosophy, and politics are on a long list of least concerns to we Americans, but I suggest that with exposure to these ideas, Americans will be as stunned as I was to discover why we are the way we are.

Evolution of these philosophical ideas, born in Europe, have not ceased. Their beginnings are an amazing story. Their development has progressed almost in the dark. We now possess a set of ideas derived from the original that are so different as to be often the inverse of what began. Our views of self and the world were constructed piece-by-piece by these concepts, and we don’t even know it. We built a social system that now builds us. What is it? What should it be? These questions were central to the great political inquires of the West – ancient Greece (ca. 400 BCE), and the Enlightenment (ca. 1700 CE). As we witness the precipitous decline of politics as a worthy endeavor in America; the demise of ethics in every sector; and an acceptance of the hollowness of our principles now paid scarcely lip service, these questions should be asked again.

Political philosophy is at the heart of The Father trilogy. In the first volume of the series, the silent workings of this public perspective results in the Great Upheaval of 2057. In the second volume, with the cheery title “The Worst Of Things,” occasional Socratic debates between John and his followers make the philosophic failings of America and the West more explicit. Hence, the research, and this blog, where every other month I intend to peel back those unrealized matters that make us who we are.

These ideas are not peculiar to America, but they are particular to the West – as in Western Civilization. The Reformation followed by the Enlightenment were the one-two punch that catapulted the West into modernity. Humans left belonging for autonomy; community for individualism; virtue for liberty; hierarchy for equality; permanence for change. Today we take individualism – the basis of all these aspects - so for granted, most of us don’t know there were alternatives. We assume the way we live and see the world to be the way it’s always been, or at least the way it should be. But ideas – like anything humans touch – are never static. Humans are innovators, not just of technology, but of society. What is considered acceptable and taboo; our sense of others and ourselves; beliefs in nationalism and God – all are poked, probed, worn, torn, disposed of and recovered again in new forms. While this implies there are no “societal truths,” I don’t mean to suggest agreement with postmodernist notions of relativity in the root nature of the human being. (See John’s debate on the subject pg. 284-290, of The Father, print version.) In short, there are universal truths common to all humans. What a surprise, given our common biology and brain structure. But it’s not a simple matter. We are also self-contradictory creatures. Our natural yearning for belonging as social beings was emphasized by the ancients through duty and virtue (i.e. self-restraint out of desires for a common good). In opposition to this, our natural longing to be free of restrictions is now elevated by rights of free choice (i.e. satisfaction of desires with no agreement on a common good). That we possess these contradictions is one of those truths that allow us to understand why tensions exist between the system we made and what we are. Of all the Western nations, America - absent of tradition and its limits - now leads the way in this social revolution. What happens here will dictate much of the Western trajectory.

Next in this groundwork, a word about my affiliation to this subject – after all, there is a political element to political philosophy. We’re all affected by where and when we live. I was born, raised, and will likely die in America. I am part of a nation with positive and negative characteristics. A country increasingly dogmatic and polarized, mostly by our ignorance (including my own, thus the quest for coherent understanding). America now appears to be a place where all things are hopelessly politicized by both of our partisan sides, and we have only two. We’re very interested in which political party a person adheres to, such that we can save ourselves the trouble of deciphering whether their arguments have merit or not. Our educational system didn’t teach much, so we’ve got to check with our dogmas before giving a response to anything. We Americans are a people who find it very hard to give a straight answer. I want straight answers.

When education seeks employable people as its sole goal, then the tribal nature of what we created is predictable. Employability is a good first order intention. Saudi Arabia’s politically motivated education of boys in their radical Wahhabi schools, with zero employable skills, attests to the dangers of not satisfying the first purpose in tutoring. But in keeping with Enlightenment philosophy’s emphasis on “self-interest,” our education stops at vocation. We program humans to be mere consumers. The American machine appeals to primal urge with immediate, efficient, low cost satisfaction. An education in higher things, once practiced even here, has been replaced by more materially practical concerns. Deep learning, considered a requirement for understanding ourselves from our past for our future, such as Greek, Latin, and our own Founding Fathers, was discontinued decades ago or warrant barely a mention. We Americans live on a shallow surface. My hope is to dig deeper.

For me, late modern America is a place I neither love nor hate. Representing our opposing views with the words love and hate is not an accident. Ancient Greek support for moderation requires the application of reason, but we are an ever more emotional people. Terms in the extreme are how we announce our affiliations now. Referring to America with, “Love it or leave it,” is a trite expression of our conservative wing. Referring to our Founders as “the dead white males,” is a trite expression of our liberal wing. I adhere to neither, and feel myself as an (almost) outside observer.

All of these aspects of America are rolled up in me and my attitudes in one way or another. All the vital human things I learned – except the secrets of nature and its mathematics - I learned on my own from the Great Books. What I found was that whether it be the miraculous mechanics of the living cell or the brightest shinning quasar, few things compare to the lavish spectrum of marvels that humans produce, joyous and tragic. Political philosophy is among the most vibrant in that spectrum. While there is no such thing as neutral – including government / moral neutrality as these select against something - what I strive for from this study is an honest answer to the truth about us without partisan contaminants; why we are the way we are; ultimately how we might repair it. Now that some groundwork on the subject and my position have been elaborated, those nuances that shape us get underway next time, the first Monday in May: May 4, 2015.