The "Inner Logic" of Equal Liberty in Evolved Human Nature: A Response to Darrin McMahon

THE "INNER LOGIC" OF EQUALITY

I have written about Lynn Hunt's book Inventing Human Rights as an illustration of the Darwinian neurohistory of human rights, in which the understanding of human rights arises from the human brain's evolved capacity for feeling empathy for the victims of injustice.  

Part of her argument is that human rights have a kind of "inner logic" or a "kind of conceivability or thinkability scale" (150). She illustrates this by showing how the French revolutionaries of 1789 were driven by the logic of human rights to extend the circle of humanitarian concern. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen had declared: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights."  The abstract universalism of this declaration inevitably inclined them to extend that equal protection to new groups of human beings, and thus expand the circle of human empathy.  So, for example, once the French revolutionary leaders had granted religious liberty not only to Catholics but also to Protestant Christians, this made it easier to see the need for granting liberty to Jews.

Another example of the "inner logic" of equal liberty being extended to ever more groups of people is how the right to vote in America has been broadened so far that eventually almost all adult citizens have the right to vote.  Hunt illustrates this with a letter from John Adams to James Sullivan on May 26, 1776.  

Since the Americans had begun their revolutionary overthrow of British rule, the Second Continental Congress had called upon the American states to begin writing their first constitutions.  Part of the debates over those constitutions was the question of voting rights.  In England, electors had to own a 40-shilling freehold (land that produced an annual rent of at least 40 shillings).  In the American colonies, because of the cheapness and availability of land, this property requirement allowed between 50 percent and 80 percent of all while males to vote, which was a much wider franchise than was the case in England, where no more than 20 percent of adult males could vote.  But even so, when the Revolution began, some Americans questioned these property requirements for voting.  If republican government was based on the consent of the people, and if all the people had an equal right to consent to the laws, then it would seem to follow logically that all the citizens should have an equal right to vote.  That was the argument of James Sullivan for universal suffrage in Massachusetts, which he presented to John Adams.

Although Adams agreed that this was a logical application of the principle that all human beings have an equal natural right to consent to government, he warned Sullivan that making such a proposal was risky:

"Depend upon it, sir, it is dangerous to open So fruitful a Source of Controversy and altercation, as would be opened by attempting to alter the Qualifications of Voters.  There will be no End of it.  New Claims will arise.  Women will demand a Vote.  Lads from 12 to 21 will think their Rights not enough attended to, and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State.  It tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions, and prostrate all Ranks, to one common Levell."

Adams admitted to Sullivan that women "have as good Judgment, and as independent Minds as those Men who are wholly destitute of Property."  And so, once the property qualification for men is abolished, there will be no grounds for denying the right to vote to women.  "There will be no end of it."

Thus, Adams foresaw that declaring the equal human right to consent to government would logically require the constant expansion of the right to vote so that finally all citizens would have an equal right to vote.

Similarly, Abraham Lincoln saw the Declaration of Independence as setting a standard of human equality of rights that would be constantly approximated as its influence spread and deepened over American history.  The authors of the Declaration declared that "all men are created equal" in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

"This they said, and this they meant.  They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them.  In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon.  They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.  They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere" (Lincoln 1989, 1:398).

Thus it was, Lincoln claimed, that the Declaration of Independence "gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance" (1989, 2:213). 

Lincoln's contribution to fulfilling this "promise" of equal rights was to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and to lead the Union in defeating the Confederacy in the Civil War so that the emancipation of slaves could be fully enforced in the South.  After his death, during the Reconstruction era, the North forced the Southern states to respect the equal rights of the freed slaves.  But with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, white supremacist leaders were able to establish Jim Crow laws that enforced a system of racial segregation that denied the equal rights of black citizens. 

In 1963, standing before the Lincoln Memorial and speaking to 250,000 people at the March on Washington, Martin Luther King invoked Lincoln's rhetoric of equal liberty and particularly his interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as providing the "standard maxim of free society."  King began his "I Have a Dream" speech by pointing to Lincoln.  (I have written about this speech as showing the superiority of King's rhetoric of equality over George Wallace's rhetoric of freedom as separation.)

"Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.  . . . But one hundred years later, the Negro is still not free."

He then turned to the promise of equal liberty in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

"In a sense, we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.  When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.  This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the 'unalienable Rights' of 'Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.'  It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note."

He explained his Dream, repeating "I have a dream" eight times.  He began:

"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:  'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

In this way, King advanced the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s as the fulfillment of the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence.

McMAHON'S CRITIQUE

And yet, Darrin McMahon (in his book Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea) has argued that Hunt,  Lincoln, and King were all wrong about the Declaration of Independence as supporting the "inner logic" of equality as a progressively unfolding tendency in history.

Lincoln was wrong, McMahon claims, for two reasons.  First, far from promising equality for all men, the Declaration of Independence was really only a promise of "white freedom," so that black slavery would be preserved (166).  Second, "the Declaration was less a promissory note for the future, or a charter of individual rights, than an intervention in international law that justified secession from the British Empire" (163).

Although McMahon does not mention Stephen Douglas's debates with Lincoln, McMahon's two points here repeat the two claims made by Douglas about the Declaration of Independence.  In defending the Dred Scott decision that blacks could not be citizens, Douglas insisted that the signers of the Declaration "referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they declared all men to have been created equal," and that the only purpose of the Declaration was "justifying the colonists in the eyes of the civilized world in withdrawing their allegiance from the British crown" (Lincoln 1989, 1:399).

Because he agrees with Douglas, McMahon can say that King was wrong in describing the Declaration's proposition that all men are created equal as a "declaration of intent" and a "promissory note" that would be fulfilled in time.  Actually, McMahon observes, "it is doubtful . . . that the Declaration intended any such thing, and still less that Jefferson's well-worn proposition was meant to portend the coming equality of all" (371-72).

Similarly, McMahon insists that Hunt was wrong about the proposition that all men are created equal having an inherent tendency that would drive revolutionaries to extend equal rights to all human beings.  In Hunt's "inner logic story," "equality is presented in strikingly idealist and teleological terms, as if it were gradually, yet inexorably, spreading across the globe according to some powerful necessity, overcoming barriers one by one" (219).  Clearly, McMahon thinks such a teleological conception of history patently absurd.

But McMahon's arguments for these conclusions are weak.  First of all, his assertion that the Declaration of Independence promises only "white freedom" is not grounded in the text of the Declaration.  The Declaration says that "all men" are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights.  It does not say that only "all white men" are created equal.

In some previous posts, I have shown that Jefferson and the other founders always condemned slavery as an unjust violation of natural human liberty, and that slavery must eventually be abolished, although they disagreed about how and when slavery could be abolished without disastrous consequences.  Actually, Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a clause condemning the King for supporting the British slave trade:

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another" (Jefferson 1984, 22).

Jefferson reports that this clause was struck out because some of the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia wanted to continue the foreign importation of slaves, and because some people in the northern colonies had engaged in the commercial shipping of slaves.

Notice that slaves are identified as "men," and thus entitled to the "rights of life and liberty" that belong to "all men."  Notice also the reference to the "market where MEN should be bought & sold."  Since female as well as male slaves were sold on the market, this must imply that "men" is being used in a generic sense to include women as well as men.  If so, then the affirmation in the Declaration that "all men are created equal" must include slaves and women.

Enslaving human beings is said to be a "cruel war against human nature itself."  This appeal to human nature as the moral standard for natural rights appears often in Jefferson's writings, where one repeatedly finds language about "the rights of human nature" and the abolition of slavery as "a complete emancipation of human nature" (1972, 87; 1984, 116).

Some of the most important Black Americans of the founding era recognized that the Declaration's principle of human equality of rights meant that slavery was an unjust violation of natural right.  In one sentence, McMahon identifies the African American preacher Lemuel Haynes as saying this (162).  But there were many other Black Americans who said the same thing (Basker 2023: 132, 152-54, 190-93, 251, 367, 510-511). 

Now, it is true that the purpose of Jefferson's Declaration was to declare the independence of the United States as "Free and Independent States" under international law and "Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown."  But this does not mean that the Declaration's affirmation of the natural equality of men as endowed with unalienable rights was not critically important.

McMahon relies on David Armitage's The Declaration of Independence: A Global History for his claim that the Declaration was not "a charter of individual rights" but rather "an intervention in international law that justified secession from the British Empire" (163, 451n.12).  But I have shown that Armitage's denigration of the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration is unjustified.

Armitage observes that the Declaration was a "document of state-making" declaring that these previously dependent colonies in the British Empire were now free and independent states in the international system of states.  "The rest of the Declaration," he explains, "provided only a statement of the abstract principles upon which the assertion of such standing within the international order rested, and an accounting of the grievances that had compelled the United States to assume their independent station among 'the Powers of the Earth'" (17, 66).  Therefore, the abstract principles in the second paragraph (about the rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness") were "strictly subordinate to these claims regarding the rights of states, and were taken to be so by contemporaries, when they deigned to notice the assertions of individual rights at all" (17). 

But notice that in the first sentence of the Declaration, it's "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" that "entitle" this "one people" to claim a "separate and equal station" among "the Powers of the Earth."  And so, the immediately following paragraph ("We hold these truths . . .") explains exactly how the Laws of Nature and Nature's God "entitle" them to become free and independent states.  Even Armitage says that their claims to independent statehood "rest upon" these principles, which provide the foundation for their claims.  This denies his attempt to denigrate the second paragraph as unimportant or dispensable, because this paragraph constitutes the indispensable ground for entitling them to independence as states. 

It was that second paragraph of the Declaration that King saw as the "declaration of intent" or "promissory note" that would be fulfilled by achieving the equality of rights for both white and black Americans.  But McMahon objects that the Declaration did not in fact intend this, and "King likely knew that too."  McMahon explains: "To assume that the underlying logic of the country would eventually work itself out--that the founding principle of equality would somehow force Americans into line by dint of its inherent justice and right--was to risk 'complacency' and 'comforting myth.'  King was anything but complacent" (372).

McMahon here is referring to a paragraph in King's essay "A Testament of Hope":

"It is time that we stopped our blithe lip service to the guarantees of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.  These fine sentiments are embodied in the Declaration of Independence, but that document was always a declaration of intent rather than of reality.  There were slaves when it was written; there were still slaves when it was adopted; and to this day, black Americans have not life, liberty nor the privilege of pursuing happiness, and millions of poor white Americans are in economic bondage that is scarcely less oppressive.  Americans who genuinely treasure our national ideals, who know they are still elusive dreams for all too many, should welcome the stirring of Negro demands.  They are shattering the complacency that allowed a multitude of social evils to accumulate, Negro agitation is requiring American to reexamine its comforting myths and may yet catalyze the drastic reforms that will save us from social catastrophe" (King 1986: 315).

Contrary to what McMahon suggests, King is not denying that the Declaration was a "declaration of intent" to eventually guarantee equal liberty for all American citizens.  Rather, King's argument is that to fulfill that "declaration of intent," we must give up the "comforting myths" in "our blithe lip service to the guarantees of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness," and then we must satisfy the "Negro demands" for "the drastic reforms" required to finally guarantee equal liberty for all.

THE EVOLUTIONARY "END OF HISTORY" IN LOCKEAN EQUAL LIBERTY

But then, we must ask, what explains those "Negro demands" for the "drastic reforms" that would secure the equal liberty promised by the Declaration of Independence?  

One answer, suggested by Christopher Boehm's evolutionary theory of "reverse dominance hierarchy," is that these "Negro demands" express the natural desire of our evolved human nature to be free from exploitative dominance and to exercise the equal liberty to which all human beings are naturally inclined.  That's what John Locke saw in the evolutionary state of nature.

In the first chapter of his book, McMahon adopts Boehm's theory as the best explanation of the original foraging society in which the evolved human nature of egalitarian hierarchy was shaped:

". . . the theory balances nicely the bipolarities of our nature.  For at work in the construction of reverse dominance hierarchies is both something like a will to power and a will to parity, a drive for dominance and a drive for fairness, a desire to rise up the ranks and a resentment of those who do so by bullying others.  The reverse dominance hierarchy accommodates both hierarchical and anti-hierarchical feelings at once.  As one anthropologist's East African informant summed up the logic, 'All men seek to rule, but if they cannot rule, they prefer to remain equal'" (38).

This evolutionary theory of egalitarian hierarchy and the "bipolarities of our nature" runs throughout McMahon's history of equality, either explicitly or implicitly.   In the last paragraph of his book, he reaffirms the primacy of this evolutionary psychology of dominance, deference, and counter-dominance:

"Resisting hierarchy is part of who we are as a species.  But we are also better than any other at building it back up, using the vaunted wisdom of Homo sapiens to construct regimes of hierarchy and domination of a scale and intensity unknown in the animal kingdom.  We will never make them go away entirely, and we must be mindful of how our views of equality can serve to reinforce them.  But we hold it in our power to make them less severe, and more fair, by recalling the vigilance of our ancestors who have fiercely resisted upstarts and fought against the force of things, imagining equality in different figures and forms" (419). 

At the beginning of McMahon's history, we see the equal liberty of our foraging ancestors: "equality, and its early concomitant, freedom, . . . were arguably among the greatest blessings our foraging ancestors knew, even if they didn't know it.  The two went together.  Equality among members of the group prevented the domination of all save the would-be upstarts, forestalling severe constraints on the liberty of others.  Equality served as liberty's foundation and guarantee" (59).

Then, beginning in the Neolithic era, we see the transition into agricultural settlements and urban states in which rulers become despotically dominant and most human beings live as peasants or slaves.  Once this despotic inequality reaches a breaking point, moral and religious reformers begin to denounce the injustice of the elites; and resistance to domination is expressed as peasant revolts.  These are signs of what McMahon calls a "legitimation crisis" (78-79,  82-83, 146-47).

McMahon does not recognize how this idea of "legitimation crisis" points to the Lockean idea that all government depends on the consent of the people, and that even the most powerful tyranny needs at least the acquiescence of the people to dominance.  Sometimes McMahon exaggerates the power of the first "god kings" in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, and he ignores the evidence that these states were weakened by resistance and rebellion (60-62).

The most recent stage in this history of egalitarian hierarchy is the emergence of modern liberal democracies over the past three hundred years.  McMahon recognizes these evolutionary stages of history in Peter Turchin's "Z-Curve of Human Egalitarianism" (84-85).   First, human foraging bands moved away from the extreme inequality of ancestral primate groups to the egalitarianism of the foraging order.  Second, human beings moved away from foraging egalitarianism to the extreme inequality of archaic states.  Finally, in recent centuries, human beings have moved to constitutional democracies that approximate the egalitarianism of the foraging order.

McMahon does not notice that this confirms Boehm's claim that modern liberal democracies fulfill the natural human desires for equal liberty as they were shaped in the foraging state of nature (Boehm 1999: 225-258).

Previously, I have written about the similar three-stage evolutionary history of Douglass North and his colleagues: the foraging order, the limited access order, and the open access order.

McMahon does not recognize how this evolutionary history of egalitarian hierarchy culminating in the equal liberty of modern liberal democracy confirms Francis Fukuyama's argument for the "end of history".  History as the human search for the fully satisfying social order might have come to an end, he suggested, because with the defeat of fascism and Nazism in World War Two and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, liberal democracy remains with no serious challenger; and most of the people in the world today agree in principle that liberal democracy is the only fully satisfying social order.  In practice, of course, the ideals of liberal democracy--equal liberty for all--have not been completely attained.  Nevertheless, even if we disagree about how best to achieve these ideals, most of us agree on the ideals themselves.  Never before has this happened, because in all previous history there were fundamental disagreements about what the ideal society would be like.

In one sentence, McMahon speaks about Fukuyama's claim "the 'the end of history' was on the horizon and that it was the 'march of equality' that was taking us there, to a time when political evolution would end in liberal democracy for all" (400).  McMahon argues that this idea has been refuted by the evidence that over the past fifty years there has been a global turn to massive inequality, even in the modern liberal democracies.  He thinks the proof for this is clear in Thomas Piketty's collection and analysis of the data for economic inequality (404-405).

But McMahon makes no attempt to answer the many criticisms of Piketty's handling of his data--criticisms that I have surveyed in some previous posts.

McMahon also says nothing about the fact that countries ranking high on the Human Freedom Index tend to have the lowest Gini coefficient scores.  Liberal social orders have low levels of inequality and high levels of freedom.

Moreover, McMahon ignores the fact that Lockean liberal social orders tend to have Gini coefficients comparable to those for foraging societies.   This suggests that modern Lockean liberal social orders approximate the equal liberty of human beings in the evolutionary state of nature.

I take all of that as evidence that Fukuyama was right about the "end of history": the "inner logic" of equal liberty in evolved human nature has reached its consummation in liberal democracy.

REFERENCES

Basker, James G., ed.  2023.  Black Writers of the Founding Era.  New York: The Library of America.

Boehm, Christopher.  1999.  Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Hunt, Lynn.  2007.  Inventing Human Rights: A History.  New York: Norton.

Jefferson, Thomas.  1972.  Notes on the State of Virginia.  Ed. William Peden.  New York: Norton.

Jefferson, Thomas.  1984.  Writings.  Ed. Merrill D. Peterson.  New York: The Library of America.

King, Martin Luther.  1986.  A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches.  Ed. James M. Washington.  New York: HarperCollins.

Lincoln, Abraham.  1989.  Speeches and Writings.  2 volumes.  Ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher.  New York: The Library of America.

McMahon, Darrin M.  2023.  Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea.  New York: Basic Books.    

The Evolution of Equal Liberty Through Capital Punishment: Boehm's Egalitarian Hierarchy in Locke's State of Nature

This is a tracing of a rock drawing from a cave at the stone age site of Remigia, Castellon, Spain, dated to sometime before 6500 BCE.  Christopher Boehm used this rock drawing at Remigia in an essay arguing for the importance of capital punishment in the evolution of morality and egalitarian hierarchy (Boehm 2017).  He observed that on the right we see ten men jubilantly holding their bows over their heads.  On the left, we see a man lying on the ground with exactly ten arrows sticking in his body or on the ground.

It's hard to know for sure what has happened.  The victim could have been a prisoner of war who has been executed.  In fact, other drawings at Remigia show scenes of warfare.  But Boehm suggests that given what we know about hunter-gatherer foragers in the ethnographic record, it's more likely that the victim here was a deviant member of the band who had violated the moral rules of the band--perhaps by murdering someone--and he was becoming a bully who was trying to assert his dominance over the group.   

One study of the rock drawings in the inland regions of the Iberian Mediterranean basin identified 49 scenes of violent content (battles, ambushes, fights, and so on), which included 8 scenes of "execution squads" like the drawing above (Lopez-Montalvo 2015).

This also illustrated Boehm's "ambivalence model" of human nature in politics.  Human politics arises from the complex tension between three levels of our evolved political psychology: dominance, deference, and counter-dominance (Boehm 1999).  Some human beings want to have dominance over others.  Most human beings are inclined to defer to the rule of the dominant ones.  But when that dominance becomes despotic and exploitative, people will resist that dominance and punish the bullies by shunning them, ostracizing them, or--in the most dangerous cases--killing them.  (I have written a series of posts on the evolutionary theory of reverse dominance hierarchy.)

We can infer that this universal human nature was shaped in the environment of evolutionary adaptation of human foraging ancestors in the Late Pleistocene epoch.  We can make that inference through what Boehm calls the "ethnographic analogy".  Boehm has created a hunter-gatherer database of sixty-five foraging societies for which we have ethnographies, selected because they are most likely to resemble foragers in the Late Pleistocene.  If we find a practice like capital punishment for bullies in all six of the world regions where foragers have lived--North and South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Arctic--then we can infer that this has been widespread throughout hunter-gatherer history since the Late Pleistocene (Boehm 2012).

These ethnographies of foraging bands show that they form moral communities through agreement on moral rules and then enforce those rules through the forcible and reputational punishment of deviants.  Through gossip, ridicule, and shunning, those who violate the rules are punished with bad reputations, and people will refuse to cooperate with them.  Today, we might call this "nonviolent resistance"--people withdraw their consent to a bully's dominance.

If reputational punishment is not enough to enforce obedience to the rules, then the community can use coercive force, such as expelling deviants from the group, or, in the worst cases, killing them.  Nevertheless, foragers resort to capital punishment only rarely, and usually it's to punish a murderer.

Forcible punishment creates two possible problems.  The group can be torn apart by conflict.  Or an angry relative of a person killed can take vengeance on the executioner.  To avoid these problems, the group must reach a consensus on the punishment and even persuade the close relatives of the victim to cooperate.  In rare cases, the entire community might participate in the execution (as seems to have been the case in the Remigia drawing).  Or, more commonly, the group will delegate a close relative of the victim to do the killing.

Executing a bully is often dangerous for the executioner, however, because bullies are often formidable and aggressive enough to fight back and harm the executioner.  The solution to this problem, as I have indicated in previous posts, is killing at a distance.  There is plenty of evidence that human beings are evolved for throwing and shooting projectiles--rocks, spears, arrows, and bullets--that can kill even the strongest opponent from a safe distance.  In the Remigia drawing, we can see that it is easy for ten men armed with bow and arrow to bring down a bully without having to fight with him hand to hand. 

In this way, hunter-gatherers enforce the moral norm that Boehm calls "egalitarian hierarchy."  As that term suggests, they see that human beings are not naturally equal in all respects, because no two human beings are the same in all respects.  By virtue of being separate individuals, human beings are naturally different, naturally unequal, in any number of respects.  But they are naturally equal in their natural desire for equal liberty--their natural freedom from being ruled by others without one's consent.

The Bushmen (or San) people of Southern Africa are regarded by many evolutionary anthropologists as the descendants of the earliest human ancestors who lived as hunter-gatherers.  Polly Wiessner, an anthropologist who has studied them, reports that "all adult members of the society are autonomous equals who cannot command, bully, coerce, or indebt others.  There is a "strong egalitarian norm that no adult can tell another what to do."  "All people as autonomous individuals are expected to stand up for their rights," and so everyone has the right to enforce the social norms of the group by punishing those who violate them (Wiessner 2005).

John Locke recognized this natural desire for equal liberty as emerging in the ancient hunter-gatherer state of nature in which human nature was originally shaped.  He inferred this from his own "ethnographic analogy," because he studied hundreds of books by Europeans who had observed foraging and tribal societies around the world, particularly in the New World.  In particular, he looked to the indigenous people of America as providing "a pattern of the first ages in Asia and Europe" (Second Treatise, 108).  "In the beginning, all the world was America" (ST, 49).

Locke saw that in this state of nature, societies enforced moral norms through the "executive power of the law of nature"--the natural right of all human beings to use forcible and reputational punishment to punish those who violated the law of nature, which included capital punishment.  Even after they entered civil society and formed a government to rule over them by their consent, human beings retained the natural right of self-defense, including defense against a despotic government that would deprive them of their freedom from exploitative dominance.  The people can resist a despotic government through an "appeal to Heaven"--that is, an appeal to the God of battles to settle their dispute through war.

All of this manifested the principle that "all men by nature are equal in their liberty."  Locke explained:

"I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of Equality: Age or Virtue may give Men a just Precedency: Excellency of Parts and Merit may place others above the Common Level: Birth may subject some, and Alliance or Benefits others, to pay an Observance to those to whom Nature, Gratitude or other Respects may have made it due: and yet all this consists with the Equality, which all Men are in, respect of Jurisdiction or Dominion one over another, which was the Equality I there spoke of, as proper to the Business at hand, being that equal Right that every Man hath, to his Natural Freedom, without being subjected to the Will or Authority of any other Man" (ST, 54).

Thus, Locke saw in the state of nature the same egalitarian hierarchy that Boehm identified in the evolutionary state of nature that shaped the human nature of our foraging ancestors.  But Boehm does not recognize that his account of the evolved human nature of egalitarian hierarchy confirms Locke's view of the natural equality of liberty in the state of nature, because Boehm mistakenly identified Locke as a "blank slate" theorist who denied the reality of human nature (Boehm 1999, 128, 227).

Darrin McMahon makes the same mistake in his recent book Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea in seeing Locke as "famously conceiving of the mind as a tabula rasa at birth, shaped by education and experience, not hardwired by iniquity or innate ideas" (168).  McMahon also fails to see how Boehm's egalitarian hierarchy manifested in the execution scene at Remigia and in the ethnography of hunter-gatherers confirms Locke's conception of natural equal liberty in the state of nature (21-51).

McMahon does see that our foraging ancestors found a way to combine equality and liberty.  "The two went together.  Equality among members of the group prevented the domination of all save the would-be upstarts, forestalling severe constraints on the liberty of others.  Equality served as liberty's foundation and guarantee" (59).  

And yet McMahon does not see how Lockean liberalism achieves this by affirming the natural right to equal liberty.  McMahon passes over Locke's account of natural equality in a few pages without taking seriously Locke's concept of equality as equal liberty as the most intellectually defensible ground for justifying classical liberalism (163-166).

Nevertheless, since McMahon's book is the best history of the idea of equality, I will be writing a series of posts on the book, in which I will argue in defense of Lockean liberalism as showing the best understanding of human equality.

REFERENCES

Boehm, Christopher. 1999.  Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Boehm, Christopher.  2012.  Moral Origins: The Evolution of Altruism, Shame, and Virtue.  New York: Basic Books.

Boehm, Christopher.  2017.  "Prehistoric Capital Punishment and Parallel Evolutionary Effects."  Center for Humans and Nature, June 12.

Locke, John.  1988.  Two Treatises of Government.  Edited by Peter Laslett.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lopez-Montalvo, Esther.  2015.  "Violence in Neolithic Iberia: New Readings of Levantine Rock Art." Antiquity 89: 309-327.

McMahon, Darrin.  2023.  Equality: The History of An Elusive Idea.  New York: Basic Books.

Weissner, Polly.  2005.  "Norm Enforcement among the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen: A Case of Strong Reciprocity?"  Human Nature 16: 117-135.

The Obscurity of the Holy Spirit in the Traditional Revelation of Hell

 

Even if the scriptural revelation of Hell is obscure, Christians can respond by arguing that Jesus Christ promised to send the Holy Spirit to believers as a divine guide to His truth, and so the Holy Spirit can direct the church's tradition of interpreting scripture so that the truly revealed meaning of scripture becomes clear (for Christ's promise to send the Holy Spirit, see John 14:15-27, 15:26-16:15).  For example, many Christians believe the Holy Spirit inspired the Church Fathers in their reading of the Bible.

This idea is beautifully conveyed in the pictures above from St. Peter's Basilica.  These images are from the apse at the end of the central nave.  There is an online virtual reality tour of the apse.

In the center of the apse is the Altar of the Chair of St. Peter.  Peter is the "rock" of the Church through whom has passed the apostolic succession linking the popes to Christ.  Beneath the Chair are four huge statues (over 16 feet tall).  The two outer statues are figures of the Latin Church: St. Ambrose and St. Augustine (in the bottom picture above).  The two inner statues are of two Doctors of the Greek Church:  St. Athanasius and St. John Chrysostom.  Thus, it is suggested that these theologians from both the Latin and Greek churches have a consistent teaching that is descended from the Apostles through Peter.

Above the Chair of Peter is a brilliant dove that is a symbol of the Holy Spirit, who guides the Church through Peter and the theologians to the truth of revelation.

But this suggests a question:  Has the Holy Spirit succeeded in conveying the revealed truth of Christian doctrines such as Heaven and Hell, so that all Christians can agree on one orthodoxy?

On the issue of Hell as eternal torment, the answer seems to be No.  But even if all Christians cannot agree on this, perhaps most of them can agree.  Would this be enough to show the success of revelation through the Holy Spirit?

Actually, it is not clear that the majority of Christians throughout the two-thousand year history of the Christian tradition have believed that the torment of Hell is eternal.  There is some evidence that in the first five centuries of Christianity, the universalist Christians--who believed that those condemned to Hell would eventually be saved--were a large faction, and perhaps even the majority, of the Christians, particularly in the Greek Eastern Christian world.  Christian theologians like Origen (c. 185-c. 253) and Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-c. 394) advocated Christian universalism.  But then by the fifth century, theologians like Augustine (c. 354-c. 430) tried to refute the universalists and argued for eternal torment in Hell.  And as indicated by the prominence of Augustine's statue in St. Peter's Basilica, the Catholic Church has assumed that the Holy Spirit spoke through Augustine as representing the orthodox tradition of the Church.  And yet, how can we know that this is true?

Hart begins his book That All Shall Be Saved by stating: "The great fourth-century church father Basil of Caesarea (c. 329-379) once observed that, in his time, a large majority of his fellow Christians (at least, in the Greek-speaking Eastern Christian world that he knew) believed that hell was not everlasting, and that all in the end would attain salvation" (1-2).  

Writing for First Things, Michael Pakaluk argued that Hart was committing "theological fraud" in this assertion about what Basil had said.  But Hart replied to Pakaluk by showing that this is exactly what Basil had said.  Basil was not endorsing universalism because he was trying to show that it contradicted a clear scriptural teaching of eternal torment, but he was observing that "the great multitude of men" (hoi polloi ton anthropon)  among his fellow Christians had made the mistake of being universalists.  When polloi is given with the definite article, it means not just "many" but "the many" as opposed to "the few," and thus the majority as opposed to the minority.

Once the Catholic Church and other Christian churches adopted Augustine's position favoring eternal torment in Hell, that became the dominant majority tradition for most Christians for the next 1500 years.  But Hart's argument is that this was a mistake because of Gregory of Nyssa's defense of universalism is far more cogent--a more coherent and morally logical interpretation of scripture--than Augustine's position.

In The City of God, Augustine entered a "friendly-spirited" with those "merciful-hearted" (misericordes) Christians who deny the human beings condemned to Hell will suffer eternal punishment and never be saved (book 21, ch. 17).  Hart observes that "the merciful-hearted" is "an epithet that for him apparently had something of a censorious ring to it (one, I confess, that is quite inaudible to me)."

Augustine's main argument against these Christians who suffer from excessive mercy is that they fail to see how scripture--particularly, Matthew 25:41 and Revelation 20:10--teaches that the torment of Hell must be eternal.  This must be so, he asserts, because Jesus clearly indicates the parallelism of "eternal life" in Heaven and "eternal punishment" in Hell.  To say that eternal life shall be without end, while eternal punishment will have an end, is "utterly absurd" (book 21, ch. 24).

Hart has pointed out, however, that Augustine could not read Greek, and so he had to rely on the Latin translation of the New Testament.  Augustine did not know, therefore, that the Latin word aeterna is a translation of the Greek word aionios, which can mean "eternal" or "everlasting," but can also mean an "age" or "extended period of time."  He did not study how the Greek New Testament uses this Greek world aionios, and so he did not notice that Jude 7 speaks of the puros aioniou ("eternal fire") that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, although this fire lasted for only one day!

Did the Holy Spirit fail to explain to Augustine the lexicography of New Testament Greek words like aionios?  

Why didn't that Dove of the Holy Spirit flying over the head of Augustine do a better job of guiding his reading of the New Testament?

The Obscurity of the Biblical Revelation of Hell, And the End of Esotericism

 Scriptural revelation does not give us a clear teaching about Heaven and Hell.  The Hebrew Bible says almost nothing about Heaven and Hell.  The New Testament says more about this, but what is said is vague and confusing, if not incoherent.  The Quran is more explicit and descriptive in its few accounts of Heaven and Hell, but it's still remarkably unclear.

In the controversy over the Bible's account of Hell, there have been two major questions.  Does the Bible support the predominant view of orthodox Christians that most human beings will suffer eternal torment in Hell?  If it does, does the Bible teach that the torment will be the same for everyone, or will there be different kinds of torment for different kinds of sin?

I won't say much about the second question except to note that the Bible says almost nothing about precise gradations of punishment in Hell (such as what Dante describes in his Inferno).  When Jesus condemned the hypocrisy of the "teachers of the law," he said: "They devour widow's houses and for a show make lengthy prayers.  These men will be punished most severely" (Mark 12:40).  But Jesus didn't explain exactly how such variations in the severity of punishment would appear in Hell.  Jesus also spoke in a parable about slaves receiving different levels of punishment for their disobeying their masters:  "The slave who knows the master's will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows.  But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows.  From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked" (Luke 12:47-48).  But Jesus didn't explain exactly whether or how this parable is meant to apply to different kinds of punishment in Hell.

There are many more scriptural passages that can be read as answering the question about eternal torment in Hell.  And yet these passages are so confusing and contradictory that almost every position in the debate over this question seems to have some scriptural support.

A good survey of the positions in this debate is Four Views of Hell, edited by Preston Sprinkle (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016).  In this book, Denny Burk speaks for "eternal conscious torment," which is the traditional interpretation of Hell as the place where most human beings will be condemned to eternal punishment, and they will never be saved.  John Stackhouse speaks for "terminal punishment," which is the idea that most human beings will suffer a period of punishment in Hell, but then they will be extinguished forever.  Robin Parry speaks for "universalism," for the thought that all those punished in Hell will all eventually learn from their punishment that they need to repent of their sins and accept the redemptive mercy offered by Christ, and thus in the end all human beings will be saved and enjoy eternal happiness in Heaven.  Finally, Jerry Walls for "Purgatory," for the idea that sinful people who die in a state of grace, but are less than fully perfected, need to go to a place where they can be purified before they enter Heaven.  

It is questionable whether Walls' argument for Purgatory belongs in a book on "views of Hell," because since all the people in Purgatory are saved and on their way to Heaven, Purgatory is not a mitigation of Hell but a modification of Heaven.  By contrast, Limbo is a real mitigation of Hell, because the unbaptized infants in Limbo are damned by original sin, but they suffer only the deprivation of the beatific vision in Heaven and not the sensible torment of Hell.  In Dante's Divine Comedy, Limbo is the highest level of Hell, just before Purgatory.

To my mind, the best defense of universalism is David Bentley Hart's That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale University Press, 2019).  The best comprehensive history and critique of Christian universalism is Michael McClymond's two-volume The Devil's Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018).

All of the authors in these books are Christians who look to the Bible as the authoritative vehicle for divine revelation, and therefore they agree that any resolution of the debate over Hell must come from scripture.  The problem, however, is that there are many scriptural texts that seem to support opposing positions in the debate.  So, for example, Burk identifies 10 biblical texts supporting his view of Hell as eternal torment.  While Hart identifies 23 texts supporting his view that while some human beings will endure a period of punishment in Hell, ultimately all human beings will be saved and enter Heaven.

One of the clearest texts for eternal torment in Hell is what Jesus said about separating the sheep from the goats in Matthew 25:31-46.  "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne.  All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.  He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left."  The sheep on his right will enter the Kingdom of God and enjoy "eternal life."  The goats on his left will be condemned to "eternal punishment" and "the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."

Another seemingly clear text for Hell as eternal torment is Revelation 20.  John foresees that Christ will return to earth to rule over all the earth for a thousand years.  At the end of that thousand-year reign, there will be a judgment of Satan, who will be thrown into a lake of fire and "tormented day and night for ever and ever."  Then, there will be a judgment of the dead, and "each person was judged according to what they had done."  "Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire."

Hart has his own interpretations of passages like this.  He notes that in the English translations of Matthew's references to "eternal punishment" and "eternal fire," the word "eternal" is a translation of the Greek word aionios, which is an ambiguous word in Greek.  It can mean a period of endless or indeterminate duration, but it can also mean an "age" or extended interval.  So Jesus might have meant that punishment in Hell will be over an extended period but not "eternal."

There is a problem with this interpretation, however.  When Jesus speaks of "eternal life" for the saved, it's the same Greek word aionios that is translated as "eternal."  The parallelism here between "eternal life" and "eternal punishment" suggests that in both terms aionios really means "eternal."  Hart's response to this is to argue that since many verses in the New Testament say that God intends to save all human beings, Matthew's reference to punishment being aionios cannot be read as "eternal punishment" without contradicting what is said elsewhere in the New Testament.

Moreover, we can't be sure that Jesus meant to indicate a parallel in his use of aionios between the punishment of the age to come and the life of the age to come.  For that, we must look elsewhere in the New Testament as to how the word aionios is used.  In Jude 7, the phrase puros aioniou ("eternal fire") is used to describe the punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah.  But Sodom's fire only lasted for one day!  So this suggests that for Jesus, eschatological life and punishment are parallel in belonging to the age to come, but are not parallel in needing to last forever:  life in Heaven must be forever, but punishment in Hell might be for a limited period of time.

And as to all the strange imagery in Revelation about Satan and the damned being thrown into the lake of fire, Hart dismisses the whole book of Revelation as "an impenetrable puzzle, one whose key vanished long ago along with the particular local community of Christians who produced it."

". . . True, the book does contain a few especially piquant pictures of final perdition, if that is what one chooses to cling to as something apparently solid and buoyant amid the whelming floods of all that hallucinatory imagery; but, even then, the damnation those passages describe chiefly falls upon patently allegorical figures like 'Hades' (Death personified) or 'the Beast' (Rome 'brutified'), which hardly seems to allow for much in the way doctrinal exactitude.  As it happens, the text also contains a lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, horses with lions' heads and tails like serpents, giant angels, locusts with iron thoraxes, a dragon with seven heads and ten horns and wearing seven diadems, a great whore seated on the beast and bearing a chalice full of abominations, a gigantic city with streets of transparent gold . . . (and so on and so forth).  One would have to be something of a lunatic to mistake any of it for a straightforward statement of dogma" (107).

Indeed, throughout the New Testament, Hart observes, the language about the afterlife in Hell or Heaven should be seen as "an intentionally heterogenous phantasmagory, meant as much to disorient as to instruct" that provides no precise and literal description of life after death (119).  Moreover, the confusing language about Hell is somewhat hidden by the custom of using the single Anglo-Saxon word "Hell" as a collective translation for three Greek words--Gehenna, Hades, and Tartarus.  Hades is the pagan conception of the world under the earth where all of the dead go.  Gehenna is the Greek form of Ge-Hinnom, "Valley of Hinnom," which is located southwest of Jerusalem, which was associated with child-sacrifice for worshippers of evil gods.  Tartarus was a pagan conception of a place where demonic spirits were imprisoned (112).  None of this can be considered a clear description of any Christian doctrine about the afterlife.

By contrast, Hart insists, there are some clear doctrinal statements in the New Testament of God's intention to save all human beings.  "So, then, just as through one transgression came condemnation for all human beings, so also through one act of righteousness came a rectification of life for all human beings" (Romans 5:18).  "For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be given life" (1 Corinthians 15:22).  "Our savior God . . . intends all human beings to be saved and come to a full knowledge of truth" (1 Timothy 2:3).

But isn't there a contradiction between these scriptural statements that all people will be saved and the other statements that some people ("the goats") will go to Hell?  No, Robin Perry argues, there is no contradiction:  "it is arguable that we can legitimately infer that those in hell will be saved out of hell.  If postmortem salvation can be legitimately inferred from teachings that have good claims to being biblical, then the doctrine itself can claim to be biblical, at least in a secondary sense" (117).

But notice that he has to infer this as biblical "in a secondary sense," because there is no explicit statement about "postmortem salvation" anywhere in the Bible.  If this really is a biblical teaching, why did the biblical authors refuse to state this openly and explicitly?

One answer suggested by the proponents of universal salvation, beginning with the early Church fathers such as Origen, has been that universal salvation should be a "secret teaching" known only to the Christian intellectual elite because the common people need to fear eternal torment in Hell as the only way to scare them into good behavior.  Universal salvation must an esoteric truth known only to the intellectual few, while eternal damnation is the exoteric truth believed by the ignorant many.  Eternal punishment in the afterlife is a lie, but it's a noble lie because it deters bad behavior in this life.

One indication of this esotericism in the universalist teaching about Hell is that it has often been hidden in private manuscripts or in posthumous and anonymous publications (see Hart, 200-201; McClymond, 2-14, 20, 46-49, 158-59, 631-40, 696; and D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment [University of Chicago Press, 1964], 5-8, 48, 76-83, 158-62).  From Plato to Locke, philosophers have argued that the public teaching of atheism must be prohibited because atheists deny the eternal punishment of bad people in the afterlife that provides the only deterrence to immoral conduct for most people.

It is remarkable, therefore, that Christian universalism and the denial of eternal torment are now being publicly advocated and debated rather than being hidden as a secret teaching.  It is even being promoted in popular best-selling books--like Rob Bell's Love Wins.

This confirms my argument that modern liberalism's success over the last two centuries has shown that esoteric writing is neither desirable nor necessary in a liberal open society.  We no longer see any need to persecute heretics or atheists.

Heaven and Hell in the Reason/Revelation Debate: In Defense of Zetetic Scientific Philosophizing

Over the years, I have written a lot about the reason/revelation debate, particularly as manifest in the thought of Leo Strauss and Charles Darwin.   I have made five claims. 

First, I have agreed with Catherine and Michael Zuckert in identifying Strauss as a zetetic philosopher--as someone devoted to Socratic inquiry into the nature of the whole without expecting to achieve full knowledge of the whole, who makes a rational choice for philosophy over revelation but without ever refuting revelation.  

Second, I have identified Charles Darwin as a zetetic scientific philosopher in choosing evolutionary science over Biblical creationism, while recognizing that he could not refute the revelation of God as the First Cause of natural evolutionary history, which would support theistic evolution.  

Third, I have argued that the Darwinian liberalism that emerged during Darwin's lifetime promoted the public debate over reason and revelation that was revived by Strauss, which shows how the liberal social order secures the freedom of thought that allows people to freely choose between the philosophic life, as satisfying the natural desire for intellectual understanding, and the religious life, as satisfying the natural desire for religious transcendence.

Fourth, I have said that the success of Darwinian liberalism over the past two hundred years has made esoteric writing undesirable and unnecessary, so that now the choice between reason and revelation can be an open and public debate, because in a liberal or open society, there is no natural conflict between the philosophic life of the few and the practical life of the many.

Fifth, although the zetetic scientific philosophers cannot refute revelation, they can show that revelation suffers from such obscurity that religious believers cannot agree on what is religious orthodoxy, and consequently, as Locke said, "everyone is orthodox to himself," which supports the need for religious toleration and liberty.

As one illustration of the last point, I have pointed out that neither biblical revelation nor natural revelation provides a clear teaching to resolve the debate among Christians over creation and evolution. 

Another illustration of the obscurity of revelation is in the disagreement among Christians about the afterlife in Heaven and Hell.  In some ways, this is the crucial teaching of Christianity because it's the question of the eternal destiny or final end of human beings in the cosmos:  Will we achieve eternal happiness in Heaven or eternal misery in Hell?

In my next three posts, I will take up the question of Hell.  And I will argue that neither biblical revelation, nor traditional revelation, nor natural revelation provide Christians with a clear teaching about Hell on which they can agree.

The zetetic scientific philosopher will infer from this that either God has not revealed the truth about Hell, or He has, but He has failed to reveal it clearly enough to be understood by all (or at least most) believers.

Then, in subsequent posts, I will take up the question of Heaven, and argue that the revelation of Heaven has been just as obscure as the revelation of Hell.

Darwinian Thinking About Life After Death

Darwinian science can explain the evolved natural desire for religious experience as a manifestation of the uniquely human evolved capacity for symbolism--for imagining symbolic worlds that can include life after death, perhaps with eternal happiness in Heaven for the saved or eternal torment in Hell for the damned.  We have an instinctive desire for preserving our lives, and our powerful imaginations can project our lives into an endless future after death.  

We create the symbolic reality of the afterlife by collective consent--by agreeing with one another that this symbolic world exists.  That is to say that we must persuade one another that it's real.  That also means that we can persuade ourselves that it is not real.  For example, as I have argued, the four possible ways of achieving immortality--staying alive forever, being resurrected after death, living forever as a disembodied soul, or living forever though one's legacy (fame or progeny)--can all be shown to be incoherent illusions, because a deathless existence could never preserve the personal identity of any human being.

But then if we were persuaded that the symbolic world of the afterlife is not real, we would have to learn to live with the inevitability of death without that knowledge ruining our lives.  We could do that if we could see that living forever is not as good for us, and death is not as bad for us, as we might think.  We would need to see that living forever cannot be really desirable because a deathless human life could not be a truly human life, a point beautifully conveyed in Wallace Stevens' poem "Sunday Morning," which teaches us that "death is the mother of beauty."  We also need to see that fearing death makes no sense because the dead know nothing, and no living human being can ever be dead, an argument that has been advanced by Epicurus and by Epicureans like Lucretius and Montaigne.

We might worry, however, that morality requires the cosmic justice of Heaven and Hell.  Do good people need to hope for eternal happiness in Heaven, while bad people need to fear eternal damnation in Hell?  Or does our moral conduct depend on the rewards and punishments that come to us while we are alive?  How we answer such questions might decide whether we can agree on the symbolic reality of Heaven and Hell.

Charles Darwin thought that there was a natural moral sense that could move people to moral conduct without any belief in heavenly rewards or hellish punishments.  He claimed that "a man who has no asssured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward" could still derive moral guidance from social praise and blame and from his own rational judgment or conscience.  And yet he also thought that "the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advance of morality." 

Darwin agreed with the Epicurean denial of life after death, even though he rarely spoke about this in his public writing.  He was led to this both by his evolutionary science of life and death and by his personal experience with death, particularly the death of his ten-year-old daughter Annie in 1851.  She died of tuberculosis (known at the time as "consumption").  Darwin's way of understanding and dealing with the death of his child was to keep a careful record of her childhood and her sickness and to preserve his memories of her--particularly, the "joyousness" of her character--in a written memorial essay.

Darwin looked forward to the day that scientists would understand the natural causes of her sickness and perhaps the remedies for it.  He was excited, therefore, when in 1877 he saw an article by Dr. Robert Koch with the first photographs of bacteria, along with Koch's argument that such microorganisms could cause diseases.  Darwin said that it would be the "greatest triumph of Science" to discover the origin of infectious diseases such as the one that killed Annie.

In March 24, 1882, Koch announced that he had identified the cause of tuberculosis as a bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis.  This was only a few weeks before Darwin's death on April 19.  Over the next forty years, scientists developed antibiotics for treating tuberculosis and a vaccine for preventing it.  In 19th century Europe, 25% of all deaths had come from tuberculosis.  So this medical advance contributed to the remarkable lengthening of the average human lifespan.

Of course, this prolonging of human life by natural science cannot secure life after death.  Unlike his wife Emma, who was a Universalist Unitarian who believed in the universal salvation of all human beings in Heaven after death, who could therefore seek consolation in the thought that she could someday see Annie in Heaven, Darwin saw no reason to believe in the orthodox Christian doctrine of Heaven.

But Darwin and Emma did agree in their rejection of the orthodox Christian doctrine that most human beings would suffer eternal torment in Hell, which Darwin called a "damnable doctrine."

In fact, many Christians like Emma had been persuaded to deny the symbolic reality of Hell as eternal torment as a morally incoherent idea contrary to the scriptural texts of the New Testament.

Over the past fifty years, a growing number of Christians have been led to this conclusion, particularly by people like David Bentley Hart.  In my next post, I will reflect on this as a dramatic example of the cultural evolution of human symbolic thinking about the afterlife.

Kamala Harris Will Win--At Least in the Popular Vote

Allan Lichtman has predicted (in a video produced by the New York Times) that Kamala Harris will win the presidential election.  As I said in a previous post in 2020, Lichtman (a historian at American University) has persuaded me that he has the best model for predicting presidential elections based on his study of all the presidential elections since 1860.  But there is one flaw in his model: although it almost perfectly predicts the popular vote winner, it cannot predict those cases where the loser in the popular vote wins in the Electoral College.

In 2000, he predicted that Al Gore would win, and indeed he did win the popular election by about 544,000 votes.  But Gore lost the Electoral College by a narrow margin (271 for Bush, 266 for Gore).  The Electoral College vote was decided when Florida's 25 electoral votes went to Bush.  The U.S. Supreme Court halted the recount of votes in Florida with Bush leading Gore by 537 votes out of almost 6 million votes cast.

Lichtman tried to argue that his prediction was not a failure because he had correctly predicted Gore's popular vote victory.  So, he seemed to concede that his model predicts the popular vote but not the Electoral College vote.

But then, in 2016, Lichtman became famous for predicting Trump's win, even though most people had predicted a Clinton win.  Of course, Trump actually lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes.  So, in claiming that he had correctly predicted the election in 2016, Lichtman was contradicting what he had said in 2000--that his model only predicted the popular vote winner.  Lichtman should have admitted that in 2016 his model failed to predict Clinton's popular vote win.

In 2020, Lichtman correctly predicted Biden's win, who won both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

In 2020, I argued that Lichtman needed to add a 14th Key to his "13 Keys to the White House" that would say "The likely voters for the incumbent party are evenly distributed across the states so as to minimize wasted votes in the Electoral College system."  Answering yes to this statement would favor the incumbent party.

But now I see that this doesn't work as a modification of his model.  Instead of that, I would suggest that he needs to add a qualifying statement to the model:  This model predicts the popular vote winner in almost every case (except for elections like 2016), but it cannot predict when the popular vote winner is the loser in the Electoral College.

Lichtman is wrong, therefore, when he says: "Kamala Harris will be the next President of the United States."  What he should say is: I predict that Kamala Harris will win the popular vote for President, but it is possible that Trump could still win the Electoral College.

The reason for this weakness in his model is that the Electoral College allows presidential elections to be decided by a few votes in a few key states in ways that are not predictable by any model of presidential elections.  For example, in 2016, Trump won all 16 of the electoral votes for Michigan, even though he won by only 10,704 popular votes out of a total of 4,548, 382 votes.  In 2020, Biden won all 16 of the electoral votes for Georgia, even though he won by only 11,779 votes out of a total of 4,935, 487 votes.  The problem here is that the "winner-take-all" system of the Electoral College in most states (except for Nebraska and Maine) gives all of a state's electoral votes to the popular vote winner in the state, even when only a few thousand votes have made the difference, and thus the votes cast on the losing side have been wasted.

This obvious unfairness could be eliminated by either abolishing the Electoral College or by having state legislatures abolish the "winner-take-all" process for allocating electoral votes.

Let's turn now to Lichtman's model as applied to the 2024 presidential race.

Lichtman's fundamental insight--based on his study of presidential elections--is that voters in a presidential election are mostly judging the past performance of the incumbent party, and that what happens in the presidential campaign--campaign tactics, fluctuating polling, presidential debates, campaign fundraising, campaign advertising, and so on--don't really matter all that much, because all that matters for the voters--the past performance of the incumbent party--has been determined long before the campaign began.  Of course, this contradicts what most political commentators assume, which is that the outcome depends upon the day-to-day events of the presidential campaign.

From his study of the history, as laid out in his book Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020 edition), Lichtman decided that there were 13 conditions that favor reelection of the incumbent party.  These 13 conditions could be framed as 13 statements, so that when six or more of these statements are false, the incumbent party loses.  Here I will state each of the keys followed by Lichtman's answer for 2024.

KEY 1  Incumbent party mandate:  After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections.

False.  Although the Democrats did better than expected in the 2022 midterms, they experienced a net loss in House seats.

KEY 2  Nomination contest:  There is no serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination.

True.  Harris won her nomination without any contest for the nomination.

KEY 3  Incumbency:  The incumbent-party candidate is the sitting president.

False.  The Democrats lost this key when Biden withdrew his candidacy for a second term.

KEY 4  Third party:  There is no significant third-party or independent campaign.

True.  With RFK Jr.'s withdrawal from third-party candidacy, this key goes to the Democrats.

KEY 5  Short-term economy:  The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.

True.  Despite the fact that some people have complained about the economy, there is no clear evidence of a recession.

KEY 6  Long-term economy:  Real annual per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the two previous terms.

True.  Growth during Biden's term has exceeded the growth over the two previous terms.

KEY 7  Policy change:  The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.

True.  Biden has made some major changes in policy--such as rejoining the Paris Accords on Climate Change, the CHIPS Bill, the Inflation Reduction and Climate Change Bill, and the Infrastructure Bill.

KEY 8  Social unrest:  There is no sustained social unrest during the term.

True.  Although there has been some social unrest associated with the pro-Palestine student protests, this has not been sustained over a long period.

KEY 9  Scandal:  The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.

True.  The attempts of the Republicans to find Biden guilty of some great scandal have failed.  Hunter Biden's legal problems have not created a personal scandal for the President.

KEY 10  Foreign or military failure:  The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.

Undecided.  It's not clear right now whether the Biden Administration's policy for a cease-fire in Gaza will fail.

KEY 11  Foreign or military success:  The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.

Undecided.  For the reason just indicated for foreign or military success.

KEY 12  Incumbent charisma:  The incumbent-party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.

False.  Kamala Harris does not have a broadly bipartisan charismatic appeal (comparable to someone like Ronald Reagan).

KEY 13  Challenger charisma:  The challenging-party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

True.  Although the cult of Trump treat him like a God, this is a narrow base in the electorate.  Most voters find Trump repulsive rather than charismatic.  This makes an interesting point about Trump's "populism"--contrary to his claim to speak for all or at least most of the people (the "true Americans"), he speaks only for a minority.  That's the fundamental weakness in most populist movements.

This gives Harris and the Democrats eight true keys, and that's enough to win.  Even if the two foreign policy keys were to flip to false, that would constitute only five false keys, not enough for the Republicans to win.

                             Lichtman Applies His 13 Keys to Harris, 1 Hour and 14 Minutes