"We Are Creatures of Matter Who Long to Matter": Goldstein's Mattering Map

                                                                    The Mattering Map

"The Areas of the Continents and Regions Are Determined by Estimations of the Comparative Percentage of Inhabitants" (Goldstein 2026:xiii).  SBNR on the Transcenders continent stands for "spiritual but not religious."  You can click on the image to enlarge it. 

In her new book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein thinks through the central paradox of the human condition, which she expresses by saying: "We are creatures of matter who long to matter."  

We are material beings governed by physical laws of nature that are indifferent to our existence--impersonal natural laws that do not care about or for us.  And yet we are obsessed with the significance or meaning of our lives as something more than mere matter that is destined by the laws of nature to disappear in death.  We want to matter in the sense that we are deserving of attention and truly deserving of all the attention that we must give to ourselves to pursue our lives.  We long to prove that we subjectively feel that we matter because we objectively do.

We have to feel that we matter if we are to feel our lives worth living.  Goldstein observes:

We don't want to live if we become convinced that we don't, can't, will never truly matter.  The paradigmatic words of the suicidally depressed are "I don't matter."  It's no accident that the URL for the US Hotline for Suicide Prevention is https://youmatter.suicidepreventionlifeline.org (2).

I have not been able to find this website.  But I have found a suicide prevention organization named "You Matter" at https://www.youmatterawareness.org. 

Previously, I have written about Goldstein's book, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.  In that book, she suggests that the deepest emotional attitude supporting religion is the feeling that my life has no meaning or purpose if I am not a creature of God who loves me and cares for me and will give me eternal life. I cannot bear the thought that my appearance in this universe was an accident, the product of cosmic causes that have no special purpose in mind, and that when I die, the world will go on without me. How can my life matter--really matter--if it's not all about ME? This is the thought that moves existentialist Christians who say that Darwinian science cannot explain everything if it cannot give cosmic meaning to the life of human beings as unique persons who don't want to die.

But as Goldstein indicates, this shows the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Wishing for something doesn't make it so, even when the wish expresses an anguished human longing. If there's no good reason to believe that it's all about ME, then my wish that it should be so is unwarranted narcissism. If I undergo an existential crisis as I seek the cosmic reason for my personal existence--why am I here? what am I here for?--there may be no reason, because it might be that my personal existence is ultimately just a contingency of the universe.

And yet, even as Goldstein reaches this conclusion, she gives her reader a novel that suggests that most human beings will never accept this, and so they will turn from reason to religion. Even those few who understand most fully the fallaciousness of the transcendent longings of human beings might feel compelled to yield to those longings by an emotional necessity that overpowers rational necessity.

FOUR CONTINENTS ON THE MATTERING MAP

In her new book, Goldstein identifies these people who rely on religious belief to demonstrate that their lives really matter as "transcenders."  But if you look at Goldstein's Mattering Map, you'll see that transcenders are one of four continents that represent the four kinds of "mattering projects."  These are four ways of answering the question--Do I matter?  The transcenders say, I matter because I matter to the spiritual presence that is the transcendent ground of the universe.  The socializers say, I matter because I matter to others.  The heroic strivers say, I matter because I can achieve a standard of excellence in my chosen area of striving.  The competitors say, I matter because I matter more than others.

Each of those four continents is divided into regions that represent subgroups within each category.  The different kinds of transcenders correspond to different religious movements, such as Christians, Muslims, and Hindus.  The socializers differ in the people they identify as the others to whom they matter: so, for example, some socializers want to matter to their friends and lovers, while others want to be famous and thus matter to many people who are not known to them.  Heroic strivers differ in their chosen areas of achievement--intellectual, artistic, athletic, and ethical.  Finally, competitors differ as to whether they compete as individuals against other individuals or as members of a social group against other groups. 

Notice that most of the transcenders continent is covered by the "Axial Age" religions identified by Karl Jaspers--the major religious traditions that originated in roughly the same period, from 800 to 200 BCE (202-206).  The "folk/traditional" category would include shamanism, the original evolutionary seed of all religious experience.

Goldstein claims that since the Axial Age, for "much of our history," almost all human beings have been transcenders.  The ancient Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) introduced a "secular approach" to mattering, which was lost during the Middle Ages, but then renewed by modern secular philosophers such as Spinoza and Locke (204-205).

Notice that the dimensions of the four continents suggest that about one-third of human beings today are transcenders, while two-thirds are not.  And of those that are not transcenders, about half are socializers, who think they matter because they matter to others.

FOUR PEOPLE WHO MATTER

Goldstein fills in her Mattering Map with narratives of the lives of people who represent the different kinds of mattering projects.  So, for instance, the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal is an example of a transcender.  For a long time, he worried about the insignificance of his life in the cosmos: "When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space that I occupy, and even that which I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I am terrified."  But then, in one night, he had a mystical experience of being in the presence of God and Jesus Christ.  He wrote down some notes about his experience on a scrap of paper, in which he concluded: "Let me never be separated from Him.  He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel: Renunciation, total and sweet.  Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.  Eternally in joy for a day's exercise on earth.  May I not forget your words.  Amen" (200-201).  From that moment, he knew that his life mattered because he mattered to God--the divine creator of the infinite immensity of spaces that had previously terrified him.

Angela Rubino is an example of a socializer who found the purpose of her life when she became a cult follower in Trump's Make America Great Again movement in 2020.  She lives in Rome, Georgia, in the congressional district represented by Majorie Taylor Greene.  Before 2020, she had never felt that she mattered as a citizen.  But then she became captivated by Donald Trump because he seemed to be speaking for her.  She became one of the leading political activists for the MAGA movement in Georgia.  She was determined to find evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump through fraudulent vote counting.  She was sure that the county election board in Rome had destroyed many of the ballots cast for Trump.  So one night, she jumped into the dumpster outside the election board office.  She found two plastic bags crammed with paper shavings.  She took the bags back to her home where she tried to put the strips of paper together like a jigsaw puzzle that would show voting ballots for Trump that had been shredded.

She said that her being part of the MAGA movement made her feel "recognized and even important" for the first time in her life.  She had found her purpose.  She said that her wondering about the purpose of her life began when she was eight years old, sitting in the back seat of her mother's car on the way to a religion class.

The thought just came into my head.  I was thinking, "What are we doing this for?  What are we doing any of this for if we're just going to die?  You die, and it's over.  So, what's the point?"  I felt afraid.  Afraid to the point of not wanting to think about that anymore.

Speaking to a journalist with the Washington Post, she confessed:

Sometimes I'm like, what if I'm wrong?  It crosses my mind.  Then I ask God: If I'm doing something wrong, please give me the strength to figure it out.  Because I really want to understand what the point is.  This can't be what life is, that you get up and go to work and come home.  That as humans, we're nothing (19-20).

Goldstein quotes this as showing the most melancholic thing about the longing to matter--we can never be sure that we have chosen the right way to make our lives matter.  But even if we can't conclusively know that we matter, we must somehow appease the longing to matter--perhaps by becoming a political cult follower--if we are to get on with our lives. 

William James is an example of a heroic striver whose striving was for intellectual achievement in philosophy and psychology.  But for many years as a young man, James could not identify the project that would make his life worth living, and consequently, he fell into long periods of persistent depression.  He suffered such a disgust for life that he would lie in bed for days contemplating suicide.  In 1860, at the age of 18, he became interested in art, and he spent a year studying with the prominent artist William Morris Hunt.  But he decided art was not his calling, declaring, "Nothing is more contemptible than a mediocre artist."  In 1861, at age 19, he entered Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard.  But after three years there, without getting a degree, he switched over to the Harvard Medical School in 1864, at age 22.  He received his medical degree in 1869, at the age of 27.  But he never practiced medicine.  And shortly after leaving the Medical School, he fell back into a severe depression, in which he felt a "horrible fear of existence" (127-132).

Finally, in 1872, at age 30, he began to teach at Harvard, first teaching comparative anatomy and physiology, and later teaching psychology and philosophy.  At that point, it seemed that he had found his life's calling, although he continued to endure occasional bouts of depression.  The publication of his book, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890 made James the founder of American psychology.  The publication of his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, in 1902 made him the first evolutionary psychologist of religion.  The publication of his book, Pragmatism, in 1907 made him one of the founders (along with Charles Sanders Peirce) of the pragmatist tradition of philosophy.  

These intellectual achievements arose from his conviction that he could decide what matters in life, and in that decision he could make his own life matter.  As he once said, he could "believe in my individual reality and creative power."  Or, as he said in his lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?": "Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."

                                   Frank Meeink Tells His Story--From Neo-Nazi to Faithful Jew

Frank Meeink is an example of a group competitor who thought that his life mattered because he belonged to a neo-Nazi group of white supremacists who mattered more than the targeted groups--particularly, Blacks and Jews--whom he hated.  He grew up in the brutal neighborhoods of South Philadelphia, where he faced daily violence not only on the streets but in his home, where his stepfather regularly beat him and called him a retard.

Then, at age 14, spending a summer with relatives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he came under the influence of a cousin who was a neo-Nazi skinhead, who persuaded him to join a white supremacist group.  Later, he explained:

They knew what to do and say to snag the interest of a fourteen-year-old half-Irish, half-Italian kid from Philly whose real dad was an addict, whose stepdad was an asshole, whose mom was indifferent, whose school was a war zone, and whose only real desire was never to feel like a fucking victim again: they gave a shist about me.  The Lancaster County white sup0remacists talked to me like they cared about what I thought and what I could become.  Then they told me I had a destiny.  They told me I could become a warrior.  They told me all I had to do was look in the mirror and see the truth: I was white and that was all that mattered. . . . For the first time in my life, I felt like I mattered (261).

By the end of the summer, he had earned the red shoelaces in his combat boots by having shed blood.  When he returned to Philadelphia, he organized his own neo-Nazi group, and he became a charismatic leader.  But at one point, he had so many warrants out on him that he was sure he would be soon arrested.  So he left Philadelphia, and eventually ended up in Springfield, Illinois, where he organized a skinhead group.  

But then, at age 17, when he was convicted of kidnapping and torturing another teenager, he was incarcerated for three years.  In jail, he became friends with two Black inmates.  When he was released, he found that he could no longer hate Blacks.

Out of prison, he was looking for jobs, but someone with his record had dismal prospects for employment.  He was so desperate that he took a job with a Jewish antique dealer in New Jersey who needed someone to move his heavy merchandise.  But when it came time to be paid, the boss was not around.  Frank assumed that the Jew was going to jew him out of his pay--because he had heard people talking about jewing as what you should expect from a Jew.  But instead, his boss paid him a little extra for his good work and offered him a full-time job.  Now Frank could no longer believe the stereotypes about Jews.

One day, Frank accidently broke a piece of valuable furniture.  He apologized for being so "stupid."  But his boss became angry that he so often called himself stupid.  He told Frank: "Listen hard to what I'm saying.  Smart people can fake being dumb, but dumb people can't fake being smart.  You are just smart.  Get used to it."

Those words had a powerful effect.  When Frank quotes these words today, he tears up.  That was the beginning of his transformation.  He explains: "When people started to talk to me like I was a fellow human, it changed everything.  We have to start talking.  It's human beings being human beings among human beings."

He became a cofounder of "Love After Hate," an organization that helps to rehabilitate people who have been members of hate groups.  An avid hockey fan and player, he organized "Harmony Through Hockey," associated with the Philadelphia Flyers, to teach kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, from different racial groups, to play together on a team.  He has also lectured widely about his life.  And he has testified before the U.S. Congress about the threats coming from white supremacist groups--particularly, the police brutality that comes from neo-Nazis who have joined police departments.  

So at that point, Frank's self-mattering came from his moral activism against racist hate groups.  He had changed his location on Goldstein's Mattering Map--moving from being a group competitor to being an ethical heroic striver.

But then another change in his sense of how his life matters came when he discovered that he was Jewish!  He talked with a rabbi who told him that Meeink was clearly an Ashkenazi Jewish name, and that Frank also looked Jewish.  Frank then discovered that his mother's maternal gread-grandmother had been Jewish.  Since Jewish identity is matrilineal by Jewish law, this lineage makes Frank Jewish.

Now, after years of studying Judaism under the instruction of rabbis, Frank has become an observant Jew.  He frequently invokes Ha-Shem, which is a Hebrew word which means the Name.  This is the way observant Jews refer to God to avoid violating the divine commandment against taking God's name in vain.

Now, as Frank goes through his day, he reminds himself to STAY--"stop thinking about yourself"--and instead think about serving Ha-Shem and praying to him at least an hour and a half every day to ask for his guidance.

He has changed his position on the Mattering Map again--he is not just an ethical heroic striver but also a Jewish transcender.

DONALD TRUMP AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN ON THE MATTERING MAP 

Donald Trump is an example of an individualist competitor who thinks that his life matters only if he matters more than anyone else.  That's why he becomes so angry when someone disagrees with him, challenges him, or just doesn't profess to love him as much as he loves himself.  That's why he must hate every person who stands up to him or who does not bow down to him.  That's why he can never have any friends because friends respect one another as equals.

When Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic interviewed Trump a year ago, they asked him if his second term felt different from his first.  He said it did.  "The first time, I had two things to do--run the country and survive--I had all these crooked guys.  And the second time, I run the country and the world."  A few days ago, Parker and Scherer reported that a Trump confidant had told them: "He's been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live."

Previously, I have written about Trump's grandiose narcissism and the belief of his followers that he has been chosen by God.

For Trump, his life matters because he thinks he's the most powerful person to ever live--because he thinks he runs the country and the world--and therefore he matters more than any other human being who has ever lived.

Trump often compares himself with Abraham Lincoln.  But while Lincoln was politically ambitious, his ambition was different from Trump's.  Although Goldstein never mentions Lincoln, he is a good example of a political fame-seeking socializer whose noble ambition makes Trump's juvenile craving for attention look petty by contrast. 

I have written about Lincoln's ambition and his suicidal depression when he thought that his ambitious strivings might never be fulfilled.  For example, at age 32, Lincoln was plunged into one of his deepest bouts of melancholic misery while serving as an Illinois state legislator.  He withdrew into his room in Springfield and stopped attending sessions of the Legislature.  He considered committing suicide, and his friends removed all sharp instruments from his room.  He spoke with his best friend--Joshua Speed--who later reported the conversation to William Herndon:

In the deepest of his depression, he said one day he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived; and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation, and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow-men, was what he desired to live for.

22 years later, shortly after Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he reminded Speed of this earlier conversation about his ambition for doing something great so that he would be remembered forever, and he told Speed: "I believe that in this measure, my fondest hopes will be realized."

Lincoln thought his life would matter if he could link his name to the vindication of the American principle of equal liberty by the emancipation of slaves.  Trump thinks his life matters if he can exercise such absolute power over the world that everyone will be forced to pay attention to him.

THE MATTERING OF TRANSCENDERS IS SPECIAL

Goldstein does not rank any of the different kinds of mattering projects as better than the others.  And she warns against the mistake of universalizing one's own mattering project by moving from "this is what most matters to me, if I'm to matter" to "this is what ought to matter to everyone, if they're to matter."  

She does say, however, that the transcenders are special in that "there is no greater sense of mattering than that experienced by transcenders" (193).  She explains:

To be a transcender is to believe that your personal existence has a role to play in the narrative of eternity.  You would not be at all unless you had a role to play in the drama of all of existence.  There is no greater mattering that you can conceive for yourself, short of imagining that you are yourself a transcendent being existing on an exalted plane beyond other mortals--in other words, short of lunacy.  Compared to transcendent mattering, any other sense of mattering limps far behind, which again explains why psychologists keep producing data showing that the religious and spiritual report comparatively higher levels of life satisfaction (197).

What I see here is a suggestion of Goldstein's envy of the transcenders for having a greater sense of mattering than she does.  Or perhaps it's a regret that she lost the transcenders' sense of mattering when she lost her ultra-Orthodox Jewish faith at age fourteen.  As she reports in her book on Spinoza, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, she attended an ultra-Orthodox all-girls high school, where her favorite teacher--Mrs. Schoenfeld--warned the girls that they must never read Spinoza because he was a Jew who became an atheist.  But then as Mrs. Schoenfeld described his atheistic philosophizing and how the Jewish community in Amsterdam had excommunicated him as a heretic, Goldstein felt an attraction to him: "The thought occurred to me that he must have been a lovable man.  I sat in Mrs. Schoenfeld's class, and I felt that I loved him" (47).

Goldstein became a professional philosopher whose sense of mattering comes from her being an intellectual heroic striver who finds her life's purpose in achieving intellectual excellence.  But she still feels some faint longing for that most intense sense of mattering that she once had as an ultra-Orthodox high school girl.

She hinted this in one of her conversations with Frank Meeink:

Frank asked me once about my own Jewish faith and observance.  We were in an Uber returning from the quirky marina where his waterlogged boat is still docked.

When I come clean to him about my lack of religious belief and observance, he give me his lopsided grin and tells me that it's all okay, but he hopes I know I'm going to hell.  (A joke.  Frank doesn't believe in hell.)

Wait a minute, I say, grinning back.  You of all people have got to believe in redemption.

"Yeah, you're right," he says.  "Me of all people.  I gotta believe in redemption even if it ends up killing me." 

In my next post, I will argue that Darwinian Lockean liberalism supports Goldstein's theory of the Mattering Instinct.

The Lockean Liberalism of King Charles III's Rebuttal of Trump in His Address to Congress

 

King Charles III addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress yesterday.  This is only the second time that a British monarch has spoken to the Congress.  The first was in 1991 when Queen Elizabeth II spoke to Congress during President George H. W. Bush's administration.

The occasion for this speech was to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  Remarkably, even though the Declaration was a declaration of war with Great Britain, Charles asserted that the Lockean liberal principles of the Declaration were grounds of agreement between the American and British peoples.  Moreover, he implicitly invoked those principles in attacking Trump's authoritarian rule.

Here's the main theme of his speech:

Ours is a partnership born of dispute, but no less strong for it, so perhaps, in this example, we can discern that our nations are in fact instinctively like-minded--a product of the common democratic, legal, and social traditions in which our governance is rooted to this day.  Drawing on these values and traditions, time and again, our two countries have always found ways to come together.

He then suggested that those "common democratic, legal, and social traditions" justified checking Trump's power.

Our Declaration of Rights of 1689 was not only the foundation of our constitutional monarchy, but also provided the source of so many of the principles reiterated, often verbatim, in the American Bill of Rights of 1791.

And those roots go even further back in our history: the U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.

I heard this as a tacit reference to Trump's attempts to suspend the right to due process of law that have been challenged in the courts.  We could also hear this as an appeal to the Congress to check Trump's executive power.  

Notice also that in accepting the Declaration of Rights of 1689, Charles III acknowledges the mistake made by Charles I and Charles II in claiming that Rex is Lex--the same mistake made by Trump when he claims "as President, I can do anything I want to do."

Actually, Charles was explicit in reminding Congress that they should have the supreme power in protecting liberty from authoritarian one-man rule.

Distinguished members of the 119th Congress, it is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America's founders is present in every session and every vote cast.  Not by the will of one, but by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States.

Not by the will of one!

Charles also invoked Christianity as one of the social traditions shared by the British and American peoples.

And, Mr. Speaker, for many here--and for myself--the Christian faith is a firm anchor and daily inspiration that guides us not only personally, but together as members of our community.

At this point, House Speaker Mike Johnson, sitting behind the King, smiled and shook his head in agreement, which was to be expected considering that he has been so adamant in affirming America to be a Christian nation guided by God's providence.  But while Johnson has denied the Lockean principles of religious toleration and separation of church and state, the King has affirmed those principles--particularly in his coronation three years ago.  He reaffirmed that in his speech by speaking of the need "to value all people, of all faiths, and of none."

The second half of the King's speech was devoted entirely to defending the military alliance of America and Great Britain and the NATO alliance as essential for protecting the principles of liberty and equality and also for securing the freedom of trade and cultural exchange necessary for economic growth.  As part of that argument, the King insisted that "unyielding resolve is needed for the defense of Ukraine and her most courageous people."

The King's speech to Congress was thus a powerful argument against Trump's attempts to break up the military, economic, and cultural alliance of the U.S. with Great Britain and the rest of Europe that has advanced the Lockean principles of the Declaration of Independence.

A Chimpanzee Civil War: The Inner Demons and Better Angels of Primate Nature

               Ngogo Chimpanzees from the Western Group Attacking the Central Group

As I have indicated in previous posts, evolutionary anthropologists studying the evolution of war and peace have been divided into Hobbesians who believe that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were naturally violent and warlike and Rousseauans who believe that hunter-gatherers were naturally peaceful.  But in setting up this debate as Hobbes versus Rousseau, they have overlooked the position of Locke.  This is a serious mistake, because the weight of the evidence and argumentation on this issue today is on the side of Locke's account of the state of nature as a state of peace that tended to become a state of war.  It seems now that while Hobbes was partly right and partly wrong about the state of nature, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right.

THE GOMBE CHIMPANZEES

I have also indicated, how this debate extends to chimpanzees.  The Hobbesians see chimpanzees as showing an evolved propensity to war, and the clearest evidence for this is the chimpanzee civil war that Jane Goodall observed in Gombe in the 1970s.  At the beginning of 1973, she and her colleagues noticed that the chimps had formed two separate communities--the northern or Kasakela community, based on the valleys of the Kakombe and Kasakela rivers, and the southern or Kahama community, based on the valley of the Kahama river.  By early 1974, they saw the first of a series of attacks by the Kasakela community on the Kahama community, which led over four years to the complete annihilation of the Kahama community, which allowed the Kasakela chimps to expand their territory over the area once claimed by the Kahama chimps.  Since human beings are closely related to chimps phylogenetically--chimps and humans evolved from a shared common ancestor some 5-6 million years ago--chimpanzee war could show the evolutionary roots of the human propensity to war.

But the Rousseauans insist that in normal circumstances, chimpanzees are naturally peaceful, and they explain the Four-Year War in Gombe as provoked by the abnormal circumstances created by human impacts on the chimps--particularly, their being fed bananas at Goodall's camp.  During her first two years at Gombe, Goodall was frustrated by her failure to closely observe the chimps because if she attempted to follow them, they ran away from her.  She spent a lot of her time sitting on a hill trying to see the chimps through binoculars.  But then in the summer of 1962, she discovered that if she set out bananas every day, the chimps would crowd into her camp.  Soon they were eating 30, 40, or even 60 bananas per day.

Fighting over the bananas caused increased aggression among the chimps.  They even threw rocks at humans who got too close.  Goodall was shocked by the violence that came from competition for bananas.  Eventually, she tried to lower the violence by restricting the supply of bananas.  This did reduce the violence.  But it also drastically reduced the nutritional benefits that the chimps had gained from the bananas.  Some of Goodall's Rousseauan critics--particularly, R. Brian Ferguson (2023)--have argued that the restriction of the banana feeding created the frustration that prompted the violence of the Four Year War.  When Kasakela males sought food in the southern areas of their range, Kahama males chased them away.  But when Kahama chimps came into Goodall's camp, they were always fed bananas.  So it's not surprising that the Kasakela chimps developed a deep animosity toward the Kahama chimps, although they had once belonged to the same community.

THE NGOGO CHIMPANZEES

Now we have a new report--in the journal Science--of a long-running chimpanzee civil war that has divided the Ngogo chimpanzees in the Kibale National Park in Uganda (Sandel et al. 2026).  The scientists who have studied this group since 1995 have never fed them bananas or any other food.  So artificial provisioning cannot be a factor in explaining their violence.

The Ngogo group is the largest group of chimpanzees ever studied by scientists.  The size has increased from 118 individuals in 1998 to 201 in 2016.  The number of mature males (over 12 years old) has fluctuated around 40 individuals.

The Ngogo chimpanzees range over a large territory, which they have expanded through war with their neighbors.  From 1999 to 2008, they ranged over a territory of about 29 square kilometers (18 square miles).  During this time, they engaged in intensive border patrols, particularly along their northeastern border.  In 2009, they engaged in numerous lethal attacks on their neighbors to the northeast, which allowed them to expand their territory, adding about 6 square kilometers (3.7 square miles) to their territory.  This seemed to confirm the "resource acquisition hypothesis" for explaining chimpanzee warfare as adaptive for territorial expansion (Mitani, Watts, and Amsler 2010).

Prior to 2015, the Ngogo chimpanzees belonged to a single group, although there was a social substructure of two to four "clusters" that could be identified each year.  They were generally divided into a Western cluster and a Central cluster, but this cluster membership was fluid, because individuals could move freely between these clusters.  But then on June 24, 2015, when members of the Western and Central clusters approached each other near the center of their territory, the Western chimpanzees ran away, and the Central chimpanzees chased them.  For at least six weeks, the two groups avoided one another, which had never previously been observed.

In 2016, the Western males started territorial patrols directed toward the Central chimpanzees.  In 2017, what was once the center of a shared territory became a border.  In 2018, the Western group initiated lethal attacks on the Central group.  These aggressive attacks by the Western group have continued up to the present.  Remarkably, the Western group is smaller than the Central group.  In 2018, the Western group had a population of 83 (including 10 adult males and 22 adult females), while the Central group had a population of 107 (including 30 adult males and 39 adult females).  The death toll from the war drove the population of the Central group down to 80 in 2024.

This Ngogo civil war differs from the Gombe civil war in one striking way.  At Gombe, the larger group (the Kasakela chimps) attacked and defeated the smaller group (the Kahama chimps).  This led some primatologists like Richard Wrangham to develop the "imbalance-of-power hypothesis"--that larger groups (particularly, in the number of adult males) will attack smaller groups.  The Ngogo civil war is evidence against that hypothesis.

Actually, the scientists who have studied the Ngogo civil war have not been able to agree on any alternative hypothesis for explaining the war.  Some of them have wondered, however, whether shifting social bonds could explain the rupture that led to the war.  In 2014, five adult males died, perhaps because of disease.  Dr. Aaron Sandel, one of the leaders of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, has suggested that these five individuals might have been social bridges that held the Ngogo groups together into one community.  So that the contingency of their deaths in one year created the conditions for the polarization of the community that then led to the war.

Similarly, if Abraham Lincoln had died before or shortly after the beginning of the American Civil War, the history of that war would probably have been radically altered.  Or if Thomas Crooks had assassinated Donald Trump on July 13, 2024, American politics might be very different from what it is today.  America might be less polarized.  And perhaps there would have been no war with Iran.  Such unpredictable contingencies often determine the history of war and politics.

INNER DEMONS, BETTER ANGELS, AND LOCKEAN LIBERAL NICHE CONSTRUCTION

So what, if anything, does the history of chimpanzee wars teach us about the evolutionary history of human war and peace?  How we answer that question may depend a lot on whether we think humans are more closely related to chimpanzees or to bonobos.

Chimpanzees seem to be far more aggressive and violent than are bonobos.  Male chimps attack females and other males.  Sometimes these attacks are lethal.  Male chimps also form coalitions with other males to assert a male dominance hierarchy over females and other males.  These male coalitions also patrol the borders of their community, and they can launch attacks against other communities--even to the point of annihilating the whole community in war.

By contrast, bonobos have never been observed to engage in lethal attacks on other bonobos. Female bonobos seem to be dominant over males.  And the females form coalitions with one another to attack males and mediate their conflicts.  In contrast to chimps, bonobo communities have never been observed to go to war with one another.  Bonobos from different communities can interact with one another peacefully.  All of this peacemaking depends on mutually pleasurable bisexual lovemaking--rubbing their genitals together--females with other females and with males.  This is why the bonobos have been dubbed the "hippie apes" who "make love not war."

Comparing human beings with these two ape species in working out the evolutionary links between the three species has provoked a debate among evolutionary biologists and social scientists.  The Hobbesian scientists argue that human beings are closer to chimps, which shows that the human state of nature was a state of war.  The Rousseauean scientists argue that human beings are closer to bonobos, which shows that the human state of nature was a state of peace.

In my posts on bonobos and the human state of nature, I have argued that Locke's account of the state of nature is closer to the truth than either Hobbes' or Rousseau's, and that evolved human nature combines the natural propensities of both chimps and bonobos.  As Steven Pinker would say, our human nature has both Inner Demons and Better Angels.  Lockean liberalism constructs a cultural niche of social institutions, mental attitudes, and moral traditions that tame the Inner Demons while eliciting the Better Angels to motivate voluntary cooperation and nonviolent relationships.

But in contrasting bonobos and chimpanzees, we should not assume that bonobos are utterly peaceful.  That bonobos are often aggressive in their attacks on one another is made clear in new research by Maud Mouginot and her colleagues (Mouginot et al. 2024).

The message from this study as reported in the press--as in Carl Zimmer's report for the New York Times--is that "male bonobos commit acts of aggression nearly three times as often as male chimpanzees do."  That would seem to deny the common view that chimps are far more aggressive than bonobos.  But if you read the article carefully, you will see that the story is much more complicated than that.

Mouginot and her colleagues employed what scientists studying animal behavior call the "focal-animal sampling" method (Altman 1974).  All occurrences of specified actions of an individual, or specified group of individuals, are recorded for a pre-determined period of time.  

For their study, they had all-day focal follow data for 14 chimpanzee adult males from two communities in the Gombe National Park in Tanzania and 12 bonobo adult males from three communities in the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  They had recorded hundreds of aggressive dyadic interactions, including contact aggression (physical contact such as hit, pull, bite, kick, or jump-on) and non-contact aggression (such as charge and chase).  They had also recorded whether the focal-male was the aggressor or the victim and whether he was interacting with another male or with a female. 

They wanted to use this data to test the "self-domestication hypothesis" of Brian Hare and Richard Wrangham, who have suggested that bonobos evolved to be less aggressive than chimpanzees just as dogs evolved to be less aggressive than wolves.  Humans selected less aggressive (or friendlier) wolves to become their companions, and over time, wolves evolved into dogs through domestication by human selection.  Similarly, if female bonobos formed coalitions to punish aggressive males, and if females preferred to mate with less aggressive males, which would tend to produce less aggressive offspring, bonobos could have been self-domesticated for being less aggressive or friendlier to one another (Hare, Wobber, and Wrangham 2012).

Moreover, Hare and Wrangham have also suggested that humans could have undergone a similar process of evolution by self-domestication to be less aggressive or friendlier towards individuals within their community (Hare 2017; Hare and Woods 2020; Wrangham 2019).  I have extended this idea of human self-domestication to explain the evolution of Lockean liberalism and the bourgeois virtues as symbolic niche-construction.

What Mouginot and her colleagues have found does not deny the self-domestication hypothesis of Hare and Wrangham, although it might require some refinement in the theory.  They found that there was a higher rate of male-male contact aggression among bonobos than chimpanzees.  And in both species, the more aggressive males had higher mating success.  But they found no evidence to contradict the observation that bonobos never kill other bonobos, while chimpanzees do kill other chimpanzees in fighting both within and between communities.

One possible explanation for why bonobo males engage in more non-lethal aggression with other males than do chimpanzee males is that since bonobo females prevent males from forming coalitions, bonobo males can attack other males without suffering reprisals from male coalitions.

As Hare told Carl Zimmer, the one dramatic difference in aggressiveness between the two species remains:  "Chimpanzees murder, and bonobos don't."

Frances White, one of the leading scientists studying bonobos in the wild, has explained that in the wild bonobo females serve a policing function, in that they intervene in fights to moderate conflicts through impartial mediation, because they benefit from living in a stable social order that is not disrupted by violence.

She has also observed that bonobos--like all primates--show a range of personality types, so that some individuals have more violent temperaments than others, and consequently the occurrence of violence can depend on the contingency of whether there are such violent individuals in the group.  She said that many of the deaths of the males comes from "testosterone poisoning"--young males vigorously displaying their virility in the forest canopy can kill themselves by slamming into a tree.

She has also said that if dominant males are grouped together in zoos without females who can moderate their male conflicts, then nasty fighting is likely to break out.  She has explained then that what the females are doing in the wild groups in pacifying conflicts is "niche construction"--behavior that creates a social environment in which stable and peaceful cooperation is adaptive.

In most of evolutionary theory, we think of organisms as carrying genes, and the inheritance of these genes by the next generation depends on organisms surviving and reproducing according to chance and natural selection in their environments.  But there is another process of evolution that arises from organisms changing their environments, which modifies the natural selection pressures in their environments.  This is evolutionary niche construction (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003).  Among many animals, evolutionary niche construction includes the transmission of culturally learned traditions.  And among human beings, it includes the transmission of culturally learned symbolic systems such as art, science, religion, and philosophy.

I have suggested that the history of classical liberalism is evolutionary niche construction, and that this is a big part of Pinker's argument: the history of classical liberal philosophy has created a cultural moral environment of liberalism in which peaceful cooperation and declining violence are adaptive.  (This is what Deirdre McCloskey would identify as the work of rhetorical entrepreneurs in the marketplace of ideas who have used moral persuasion to create a liberal culture that honors the bourgeois virtues.)

As Pinker argues, human nature is a mixture of Inner Demons and Better Angels.  Human beings are innately predisposed to violence by their Inner Demons, but the expression of those predispositions is not "hydraulic"--that is, a drive that must necessarily be satisfied--but "strategic"--that is, a propensity that is responsive to environmental triggers.  Classical liberalism constructs a cultural niche of social institutions, mental attitudes, and moral traditions that tend to elicit the Better Angels to motivate voluntary cooperation and nonviolent relationships.

In this way, human nature constrains and enables but does not determine human culture and individual judgment.  Within the constraints of human nature as a mixture of Inner Demons and Better Angels, classical liberalism can foster those cultural traditions and individual judgments that limit the Inner Demons and channel the Better Angels towards a system of liberty and voluntarism.

REFERENCES

Altman, Jeanne. 1974. "Observational Study of Behavior: Sampling Methods." Behaviour 48: 227-65.

Ferguson, R. Brian. 2023. Chimpanzees, War, and History: Are Men Born to Kill? Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Goodall, Jane. 1986. The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Hare, Brian. 2017. "Survival of the Friendliest: Homo sapiens Evolved via Selection for Prosociality." Annual Review of Psychology 68: 155-86.

Hare, Brian, and Vanessa Woods.  2020.  Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity. New York: Random House.

Hare, Brian, V. Wobber, and Richard Wrangham.  2012.  "The Self-Domestication Hypothesis: Evolution of Bonobo Psychology Is Due to Selection Against Aggression."  Animal Behaviour 83: 573-85.

Mitani, John C., David P. Watts, and Sylvia J. Amsler. 2010. "Lethal Intergroup Aggression Leads to Territorial Expansion in Wild Chimpanzees." Current Biology 20:R507-R508.

Odling-Smee, F., Kevin Laland, and Marcus Feldman. 2003. Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton University Press.

Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Penguin Books.

Sandel, Aaron A. et al. 2026. "Lethal Conflict After Group Fission in Wild Chimpanzees." Science 392(9 April):216-220.

Wrangham, Richard.  2019.  The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution.  New York: Pantheon Books.

Zimmer, Carl.  2024.  "No 'Hippie Ape':  Bonobos Are Often Aggressive, Study Finds." The New York Times, April 12.

The Defeat of Orban's "Illiberal Democracy"? The Dilemma for Magyar's "Liberal Democracy"?

Peter Magyar, Leader of the Tisza Party, on the Danube River, with the Hungarian Parliament Building Behind Him

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post on "The Fall of Orban's 'Illiberal Democracy.'"  I argued that the decline of freedom in Hungary under Victor Orban's rule has brought declining Christianity, declining families, declining population, and a declining economy.  I predicted that the Hungarian voters would give Peter Magyar and his Tisza party a victory over Orban and his Fidesz party.  

You might expect, therefore, that I would now be cheering for that electoral victory that occurred yesterday.  But I have decided that I can give it one or two cheers but not three cheers.  I can give it one or two cheers because the voters have voted against the corruption and economic decline in Hungary produced by Orban's "illiberal democracy" over the past 16 years.  But I cannot give it three cheers until I see that this will bring about a restoration of liberal democracy in Hungary.

Over 77 percent of the registered voters cast ballots in this election, which is the highest turnout in a Hungarian election since the collapse of communism in 1989.  Magyar's opposition party is projected to win more than a two-thirds majority in Parliament.  Ironically, this is a result of Orban's Fidesz party's alteration of the Constitution to ensure that the one party with the highest vote total gets a huge majority of Parliamentary seats even though they've won less than a majority of the votes.  Fidesz party leaders had always assumed that the opposition parties would split the opposition votes so that Fidesz would have the most votes.

This illustrates how precarious the power is in a "competitive authoritarian" system: even when the ruling party has manipulated the electoral system in its favor, it can still be defeated if the opposition is united behind a popular coalition, which is what happened yesterday.

The popularity of that coalition led by Magyar came from the widespread public resentment against the corruption and economic decline produced by the Fidesz government.  An article in the New York Times explains this by focusing on one provincial town in Hungary--Keszthely, which is located on Lake Balaton, a popular vacation spot.  For generations of Hungarians, it was popular because of its free public beaches and cheap camp sites.  But during the rule of Orban and Fidesz, the family, friends, and cronies of Orban have taken over the shoreline of Lake Balaton to build luxury hotels and apartment buildings.  Rich oligarchs have also siphoned off the money for public projects in Keszthely funded by the European Union.  As Magyar and his supporters have said: "They have stolen everything."

This has made Hungary the most corrupt government in the European Union.  And to use the terms suggested by Stephen Balch, "corruption" here corresponds to the rule of takers who steal the wealth created by the makers.  For almost 5,000 years, most governments were dominated by takers (kings, princes, nobles, and priests) who expropriated the property of the great mass of people.  Modern liberal constitutionalism created the first regimes that were "Made Safe for Making" by enforcing a rule of law that protected private property from the depredations of the takers.  An "illiberal state" like that favored by Orban returns state power to the takers--to Orban's family, friends, and cronies who can amass wealth and power at the expense of the people.

But we can't be sure that Orban's loss of power will necessarily mean a full return to liberal democracy.  There are three reasons for that.  First, we should remember that Magyar was a Fidesz loyalist for over 20 years.  So we have to worry that to satisfy his own ambition for power, that he might continue Orban's legacy of illiberal democracy.  After all, if he did that, he would be following the pattern of Orban himself, who began his political career as a liberal anti-communist before turning towards right-wing authoritarianism as the best way to achieve power.

A second reason for worry is that Orban conceded his defeat just a few hours after the polls closed, which suggests the possibility that he has decided that allowing Magyar to come to power in a time of economic crisis might prepare the way for Orban to regain power in a few years if Magyar fails to quickly turn the country around.

A third reason for worry is that Orban has filled the government, the courts, the media, and other institutions with Fidesz loyalists, who will resist any attempt to restore liberal democracy.  To overcome that resistance, Magyar might be tempted to set aside the rule of law in firing those Orban loyalists and replacing them with his own loyalists.  In other words, he might face a dilemma in deciding whether he has to use illiberal means to restore liberal institutions.

That points to the fundamental problem here that applies not only to Hungary but also to the United States.  Once a liberal democracy has passed through a period of illiberal abuses of power, it becomes hard to cleanse the regime of those illiberal practices.  Once Trump is gone, how realistic is it to expect the next president to give up the authoritarian power that Trump has exercised?

That's the most troubling question for those of us who hope for a renewal of liberal democracy after an era of illiberal executive power.

Love, Death, and Redemption: The Atheistic Religiosity of Roger Scruton and Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde"

 

On December 3, 2019, Viktor Orban presented the Hungarian Order of Merit to Roger Scruton in London.  Scruton would die five weeks later from lung cancer.

In his speech honoring Scruton, Orban praised him for his work in the 1980s aiding the anti-communist underground in Central and Eastern Europe, which included Hungary.  Orban concluded the speech by saying: "He was and is a loyal friend of the freedom-loving Hungarians, who knows that this freedom relies on nation states and Christian civilization."

To identify Scruton as a supporter of "Christian civilization" is disturbing to those of us who have argued that Scruton belonged to a Kantian conservative tradition of atheistic religiosity.  Atheistic religiosity is for those who want the "magic of religious feeling" as an expression of the human mind's "religious instinct," but without having to believe in the real existence of God independent of the human mind.  They don't believe in the literal truth of Christianity or any other religion.  And yet they want to have a sense of the sacred that comes from religious emotions, but without the need to believe any religious doctrines.  They believe that God is dead, but they also believe that human beings need to satisfy their religious longings for transcendence and redemption if they are to escape the nihilism that comes from the death of God.

I suspect that many, if not most, of the conservatives who promote "Christian civilization"--including Orban--are really Christian atheists who believe a Christian culture supports the moral and political order of a nation, but without believing in the truth of Christian doctrines.  The flimsiness of this fake Christianity explains why Orban's promotion of Hungary as a Christian nation has failed to stop the decline of Christianity in Hungary.

I have been prompted to think more about this while reading Scruton's interpretation of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in Death Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (Oxford University Press, 2004).  I have been doing this in preparation for attending a concert performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra that includes the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde along with Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs.

REDEMPTION IN TRISTAN AND ISOLDE

Let's start with a brief synopsis of the story as Wagner tells it.

Set in the Celtic Middle Ages, the opera begins with Tristan, a knight of Cornwall, escorting Isolde, the daughter of the King of Ireland, to Cornwall where she is to marry King Marke, Tristan's uncle.  During the journey, Isolde is filled with rage and resentment towards Tristan for killing her fiancé, Morold, in battle.  Despite her anger, when Tristan stares into her eyes--which is marked musically by Wagner's "Look" motive--she is drawn to him, and their complex relationship unfolds throughout the opera.

Act 1.  Isolde, furious at her fate, wishes for revenge against Tristan.  She recalls how she had speared his life when he was wounded and disguised as Tantris.  As they approach Cornwall, she demands that Tristan drink a cup of atonement with her.  However, Brangane, Isolde's maid, secretly substitutes the poison with a love potion, causing both Tristan and Isolde to fall deeply in love with one another.

Act 2.  The love between Tristan and Isolde deepens, but they are caught in a web of duty and betrayal.  Tristan is torn between his loyalty to King Marke and his love for Isolde.  Their secret affair is discovered, leading to a confrontation that highlights the tragic nature of their love.  The act culminates in a passionate duet where they express their longing and despair.

Act 3.  The final act sees Tristan wounded in battle and longing for Isolde.  He dies in her arms, and Isolde, overwhelmed by grief, follows him into death.  The opera concludes with Isolde's poignant Liebestod (love-death) where she transcends the physical world, symbolizing the idea that true love can only be fully realized in death.

I will pass over the details of Scruton's meticulous interpretation of this opera and jump to his conclusions. 

Scruton argued that Wagner's agenda as an artist was "nothing less than the redemption of humankind," which he accomplished in Tristan and Isolde.  According to Scruton, Wagner saw that the yearning for redemption was a religious yearning, an expression of the religious instinct that is universal to human beings, and that it could be fulfilled only in "otherworldly renunciation."  But Wagner "set out to discover a redemption that needs no god to accomplish it," because he would "make man his own redeemer" (3).  He would show "what redemption could mean, when detached from every promise of a life after death" (14).

Wagner himself once described Tristan and Isolde as a story of "endless yearning, longing, the bliss and wretchedness of love; world, power, fame, honor, chivalry, loyalty, and friendship all blown away like an insubstantial dream; one thing alone left living--longing, longing unquenchable, a yearning, a hunger, a languishing forever renewing itself; one sole redemption--death, surcease, a sleep without awakening" (29).

Thus could Wagner's opera stir religious feelings of redemption in his audience without requiring any belief in religious doctrines (like the existence of God and the eternal afterlife).  In this way, Scruton insisted, Wagner proved "that religion could live again in art and did not need God for its survival," and "that man can become holy to himself with no help from the gods" (190, 196).

But I would say that at best what Wagner proved is that his operatic art could induce a fake emotion of religious redemption that could not really redeem human beings.  After all, how can human beings be redeemed through "otherworldly renunciation" if they believe that there is no "otherworld" beyond this world?

THREE POSITIONS ON REDEMPTION

The fake redemption of atheistic religiosity is only one of at least three possible positions that musical artists can take on redemption.  

A second position is the real redemption that can come through a musical composition like Bach's Saint Matthew's Passion or Handel's Messiah, which induce religious emotions of redemption but also teach religious doctrines of redemption by eternal salvation.  The members of the audience who are not Christian believers can feel the power of those religious emotions.  But the Christian believers in the audience can also understand the promise of their redemption because they know that their Redeemer really exists, and He will raise them from the dead to eternal life in Heaven.

A third position that a musical artist can take on redemption is that there is no need for redemption from life because life--even with its suffering, vulnerability, and mortality--is inherently good.  And for that reason, we can calmly accept the end of life in death as the completion of our life's journey.  That position is artistically conveyed in Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs.

In 1948, Strauss was 84 and composing his last music before his death the next year.  His Four Last Songs were for soprano and orchestra.  He wrote to Kirsten Flagstad to express his wish that she would be the soprano for the world premiere of these songs.  And indeed the premiere occurred in London in 1950, after his death, sung by Flagstad with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler.  (Remarkably, Flagstad had sang as Isolde at Covenant Garden, London, in 1936.)

As he composed this music for a soprano, Strauss probably heard the voice of his wife Pauline de Anha, who had sung as a professional soprano.

The lyrics for the four songs are poems.  The first three by Herman Hesse, the fourth by Joseph Eichendorff.

In the first, Fruhling ("Spring"), the soprano's voice rises up as she dreams of trees and sky, and the flute evokes birdsong.

In the second, "September," there is an allegorical passage from life to death.  The first stanza reads:

The garden is mourning,

the rain sinks coolly into the flowers.

Summer shudders

as it meets its end.

It ends with Summer closing "its large eyes grown weary."

In the third song, Beim Schlafengehen ("While going to sleep"), the soprano yearns to forget all thoughts in sleep.  The first stanza reads:

Now that the day has made me so tired,

my dearest longings shall 

be accepted kindly by the starry night

like a weary child.

In the final song, Im Abendrot ("In the twilight"), we hear about an old couple at the end of life.  It begins with an orchestral depiction of sunset, with two trilling flutes representing a pair of larks ascending into the sky (the souls of the old couple).  We can imagine that here Strauss was thinking of his long and happy marriage with Pauline de Anha, who would die in 1950 only eight months after his death.  Here in this song, they are contemplating the end of life together.

The light fades as the song unfolds, and then the soprano asks, in the last line, Ist dies etwa Tod? ("Is this perhaps death?") 

The orchestra then whispers the "transfiguration" theme from Strauss's Death and Transfiguration, which he had written 60 years before.  Strauss is saying goodbye by wistfully suggesting that he has come full circle from his early life to his end.

Although "transfiguration" might suggest the need for redemption, the tone and meaning of Strauss's Four Last Songs are very different from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.  Strauss's songs convey not an unquenchable longing for redemption from life (like that of Tristan and Isolde) but a serene completion of life in the old couple's calm acceptance of their inevitable ending of their lives together: "Is this perhaps death?"

Human Freedom Makes "A World Safe for 'Making'"

For the distinction between making and taking, see the previous post.

PERSONAL FREEDOM AS THE NATURAL GROUND OF ECONOMIC FREEDOM

Stephen Balch has identified the “anti-taking” ideologies as “classical liberal or libertarian” (2014, 16n.16).  He has also spoken of “pro-maker rights theories, such as those of John Locke” (315).  In passages like the following, he certainly seems to be endorsing classical liberalism or libertarianism as the moral argument of his book:

At the great anomaly’s heart lies the diminution of the part force plays in the distribution of status and goods.  That signal "achievement"—if it can be called such, a lot turned on luck—gave birth to a ‘World-Safe-for-Making (the underlying meaning of bourgeois constitutionalism, wherein, through a variety of normative and institutional practices, coercive power was contained in scope, increased in predictability, policed against private abuse, and when publicly employed, generally to serve, not subvert, industrious behavior.  Spared senseless exactions and arbitrary demands, science, invention, manufacture, commerce and banking gradually became career paths of choice for society’s best and brightest.  Because of this, when further powered by science, the World-Safe-for-Making (WSM) sparked a tremendous explosion of productive behavior and consumable wealth, the second ‘Cambrian’ (after agriculture) of human history.  Unquestionably a major metaevolutionary turn due to a new keystone (311).

When he speaks about “the diminution of the part force plays in the distribution of status and goods,” I’m reminded of James Payne’s History of Force, which makes the Lockean libertarian argument that declining violence means increasing liberty, and that the only justified use of force is as the reactive forcible punishment of those who initiate force.

When he speaks of the Western bourgeoisie as the makers, this evokes Deirdre McCloskey’s argument for liberalism as the celebration of the “bourgeois virtues.”

But then I wonder why Balch is not more vigorous in affirming the classical liberalism or libertarianism of WSM.  The answer seems to be that while he can give WSM one or two cheers, he can’t give it three cheers because of its “critical weakness” in failing to separate “property rights” from “personal rights.”  He explains this failure as arising from John Locke’s assertion of “property rights as an outgrowth of personal rights” (320).  He cites paragraph 6 of the Second Treatise, where Locke explains the law of nature as a no-harm principle rooted in the equal liberty of human beings: “that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.”  He also could have cited paragraph 27, where Locke grounds property ownership in self-ownership: “Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person.  This no Body has any Right to but himself.  The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.”  A man makes something his property by mixing his labor with it.  Elsewhere Locke identifies “labor” as “human industry,” which suggests that what he calls “labor” is what we today would call “human capital.”  

I have argued that Locke’s rooting of ownership in self-ownership is confirmed by the evolutionary neuroscience of interoception—the neural self-ownership of the body.

The “critical weakness” here, Balch says, is the failure “to separate the liberties of commerce from the emancipation of individuals in their intellectual, electoral, behavioral, and moral capacities" (320).  The WSM would be better off, he suggests, if it protected economic liberty but repressed personal liberty (the “intellectual, electoral, behavioral, and moral capacities”).  But I don’t see how that would work.  For example, if intellectual liberty were suppressed, that would have made the Scientific Revolution impossible, and yet Balch insists that the WSM would have been impossible without modern science.

Balch identifies four ways in which WSM has been weakened by its promotion of personal liberty (178-180, 317-320; 2014, 16-18).  (1) The disarming of the makers—particularly, the waning of the tradition of trained middle-class militia—makes it unlikely that people would ever again rise up in arms to defend their liberties from tyranny.  (2) Modern mass democracy has favored the expansion of the modern welfare state, which has become a new taker regime, although the “take” is not just for a few takers but widely distributed among many.  (3) The personal freedom of thought and speech has given too much power to intellectual elites who attack the liberal social and political order by elevating taking over making.  (4) The personal freedom to choose hedonistic lifestyles--such as pursuing sexual pleasure without producing or caring for children--weakens our moral character and lowers our genetic fitness.

Although I see some truth in all four of these points, I see no reason here to conclude that the WSM has been, or will soon be, destroyed by its promotion of personal liberty.   Ultimately, this comes down to a question of empirical evidence.  Is there any evidence for a trade-off between economic freedom and personal freedom, as you argue, so that as personal freedom goes up, economic freedom goes down?  On the contrary, it seems to me, that in most countries, higher personal freedom is correlated with higher economic freedom.  I see evidence for that in the Human Freedom Index.

In the Human Freedom Index, for each of 87 indicators of freedom, countries are scored on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 represents the highest level of freedom.  The scores for each of 12 subcategories are averaged.  These are then averaged for personal freedom and economic freedom.  The final score for freedom in general is the average of these two, so that personal freedom and economic freedom are weighed equally.  The Human Freedom Index 2025 ranks countries based on data for 2023.

Here is a sampling of the rankings, with the scores for Personal Freedom (PF), Economic Freedom (EF), and Human Freedom (HF).

1.     Switzerland (PF: 9.77, EF: 8.28, HF: 9.15)

2.     Denmark (PF: 9.75, EF: 8.02, HF: 9.15)

3.     New Zealand (PF: 9.51, EF: 8.33, HF: 9.02)

4.     Ireland (PF: 9.54, EF: 8.05, HF: 8.92)

15. USA (PF: 9.15, EF: 8.10, HF: 8.71)

19. UK (PF: 9.12, EF: 7.88, HF: 8.60)

162. Sudan (PF: 3.97, EF: 4.00, HF: 3.98)

162. Yemen (PF: 3.19, EF: 5.08, HF: 3.98)

164. Iran (PF: 3.36, EF: 4.37, HF: 3.78)

165. Syria (PF: 2.31, EF: 4.62, HF: 3.27)

The United States ranks at 15^th in Human Freedom, 22^nd in Personal Freedom, and 5^th in Economic Freedom.

I don’t see any confirmation here of Balch's prediction that increasing personal freedom is correlated with decreasing economic freedom.  On the contrary, economic freedom and personal freedom seem to go up or down together.

There are a few exceptions, however.  For 2023, Singapore ranks #2 in economic freedom out of 165 countries (score: 8.50), but only #84 in personal freedom (score: 7.19), which gives Singapore an overall human freedom rank of #51 (score: 7.73).  Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) shows the same pattern of high economic freedom but low personal freedom: #1 out of 165 in economic freedom (score: 8.55), but #88 in personal freedom (score: 7.05), with an overall human freedom ranking of #53 (score: 7.68).

Having been a British colony, Hong Kong was returned to Chinese authority in 1997, and beginning around 2012, China imposed severe restrictions on personal freedom in Hong Kong.  For the year 2012, the Human Freedom Index ranked Hong Kong as #1 in human freedom, #1 in economic freedom, and #18 in personal freedom.  So there was a big drop in personal freedom from 2012 to 2023.

Would Balch have to say that Singapore and Hong Kong today have achieved the most desirable form of the "World Safe for Making," because they have high economic freedom but low personal freedom, and so they are free from the social weaknesses that arise from too much personal freedom?

The problem, however, is that both Singapore and Hong Kong show what Balch regards as the greatest social weakness of modern liberal societies--a low fertility rate. Singapore's total fertility rate is 1.26.  Hong Kong's is 1.44.  This is well below the replacement level of 2.1.  By comparison, the fertility rate for the U.S. is 1.79.

I don’t understand why Balch thinks the “demographic transition" is a threat to "human species survival" (183, 188).  Obviously, with over 8.3 billion people alive today, the world is not underpopulated.  Even those free societies with low birth rates can have growing populations as long as their freedom attracts immigrants.   That was Locke's argument for open borders and evolutionary group selection.

Parents investing in a small number of children is a prudent reproductive strategy in certain ecological conditions.  It can be explained by an "embodied capital theory of life history evolution" (Kim Hill and Hillard Kaplan).  There are many trade-offs in parental investment.  One of them is the tradeoff between the quantity of offspring (investing in a large number of offspring but with each receiving little investment) and the quality of children (investing in a lesser number of offspring but with each receiving a lot of investment).  In a bourgeois liberal society, many parents will choose quality over quantity.

I see no evidence of any weakening in the natural desire for parental care in America or elsewhere.  The Pew Research Center has reported that the percentage of American women ages 40-44 who are mothers rose to 86% in 2016 from a low of 80% in 2006 and close to the high of 90% in 1976.

Presumably, Balch would support governmental programs for raising fertility rates.  But there's no reason to believe that such programs work.  Strangely, he claims that Italian Fascism and German National Socialism were “genocratic utopias” in supporting ethnic genetic interests, as argued by Pierre Van Den Bergh and Frank Salter (57, 102, 133, 186)?  But Salter has complained that the drop in the total fertility rate for native Germans continued under the Nazis, and that none of the “ethnic states” has ever raised the fertility of their ethnic group.  As I noted in a previous post, despite Victor Orban's vigorous "pro-family" policies, Hungary still has one of the lowest fertility rates for any country.

IS THE WELFARE STATE A NEW TAKING REGIME?

Another way in which personal freedom subverts economic freedom, according to Balch, is through the expansion of the modern welfare state into a new kind of taking regime.  He worries about the "'taking-favoring' redistributive creeds like social democracy" that promote the modern welfare state.  He muses:

The heightened power . . . that the "world-made-safe-making" gave the propertyless led to a conceptual inversion, a means of preventing state redistribution become one for advancing and legitimating it.  The triumph of personhood over property secured slavery's demise, full equality of women and other historic achievements, but it also transformed property from the cynosure of freedom into a political parceled entitlement.

. . .

It's true, that unlike yesteryear, today's "take" is not just for the mighty but widely distributed among (as well as taken from) all-and-sundry.  With votes to bestow on politicos, some of the masses have become net "taking" winners, a plus perhaps in the scales of justice, if not necessarily for social productivity and individual autonomy (2014, 18).

Against this, I have argued that a capitalist welfare state can be compatible with individual liberty in securing both personal freedom and economic freedom.  Here what I argue is similar to what Friedrich Hayek recommended in Part 3 of The Constitution of Liberty, which was entitled "Freedom in the Welfare State."

The most extensive welfare states in Europe are in the Nordic social democracies--Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland.  Although they are sometimes identified as democratic socialist systems, they are not really socialist in any strict sense. Rather, these are all capitalist welfare states in that they combine social welfare programs with largely free-market capitalism.

This is indicated by their Human Freedom Index rankings for Human Freedom (HF), Personal Freedom (PF), and Economic Freedom.

                       HF    PF    EF

Denmark         #2     #2    #9

Finland           #7     #9    #15

Iceland           #11   #11  #23

Sweden          #12   #6    #35

Norway         #16   #4    #48

This compares favorably with the U.S.--#15 (HF), #22 (PF), and #5 (EF).

With the possible exception of Norway, there does not seem to be any correlation between a high ranking for personal freedom and a low ranking for economic freedom.

To me, this indicates that the capitalist welfare state belongs to the "World Safe for Making."  It is not a new taking regime.