Correcting the Bible on Slavery

Pointing to the Bible, Marco Rubio has said: "You'll find all the answers in that book."  That's his way of appealing to evangelical Christian voters who believe that a literal reading of the Bible as God's inerrant revelation does indeed give us all the answers.

This has been a powerful tradition in American political life--the belief of many American Christians that we can find the answers to all of our moral, political, scientific, and religious questions through a careful reading of the Bible.  In response to my arguments for "Darwinian natural right," for natural standards of right rooted in our evolved human nature, one of the most common objections has been that morality is impossible without the revelation of a divine moral law in the Bible.  Even some evolutionary theorists have provided some support for this by arguing that the cultural evolution of moral gods--such as the God of the Bible--beginning about 5,000 years ago made it possible for human beings to live in huge communities of people who cooperated with one another because they thought they were being watched by a moral God enforcing His moral law.

But sometimes the Bible does not give clear and indisputable answers to our great moral questions, and thus some moral debates cannot be resolved by the Bible.  The most dramatic example of that in American political history was the debate over slavery leading to the Civil War.  As Mark Noll indicates in his book, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, some Christians saw the Bible as proslavery, and others saw it as antislavery.  The text of the Bible was not clearly on one side or the other.  This became a great "theological crisis," because it meant that while Americans had always looked to the Bible as the inerrant moral authority, it failed to resolve the deepest moral and political controversy in American history, and thus the only way to answer the question of what the Bible taught about slavery was to go to war.  And in that war, as Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural, "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."

50 years ago, as a young man growing up in Texas, I struggled with this problem.  Like Rubio, I had been taught by my Southern Baptist ministers that all the answers were to be found in the Bible, and therefore that Baptists should carefully read the Bible.  It was recommended that by reading a few chapters of the Bible every day, starting with Genesis and ending with Revelation, one could read the entire Bible over a year.  I did that for five years.  But I was bothered by some of what I read, particularly the passages that seemed to accept slavery without any condemnation.  When I learned that the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, was founded in 1845 to defend slavery as sanctioned by the Bible against the antislavery arguments of the Northern Baptists, I was deeply troubled by this and by the refusal of American Baptists to confess that this had been a mistake.  Later, in 1995, at the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Convention finally passed a resolution apologizing for its mistake in interpreting the Bible in supporting slavery and racism.  But that resolution says nothing about the many verses in the Bible that speak about slavery as though it is acceptable.

In later years, I studied the American debate over the Bible's handling of slavery, which became part of my wider study of the Darwinian evolution of a moral sense condemning slavery.  Much of my thinking on this went into Chapter 7 of Darwinian Natural Right.  Now I am finally ready to draw some conclusions about the Biblical teaching on slavery.

I have come to two conclusions.  First, if one looks at the verses in the Bible that specifically mention slavery, one can see that slavery is accepted and never condemned as wrong.  Second, if one wants to correct this Biblical endorsement of slavery by finding a way to read the Bible as antislavery, then one must appeal to some general moral principles of Biblical teaching--such as the Golden Rule, for example--that conform to our natural moral sense for condemning slavery.

In the antebellum writing on the Bible and slavery, people recognized this point.  For example, James De Bow, writing on "Slavery and the Bible" for the September 1850 issue of De Bow's Review, explained:

"The anti-slavery party maintain, that the Bible teaches nothing directly upon the subject, but, that, in holding slaves, we are guilty of a moral wrong.  This mode of reasoning would be perfectly fair, if the Bible really taught nothing directly upon the subject of slavery: but when that book applies the principles it lays down to the particular subject in controversy, we must take the application to be correct.  We think we can show, that the Bible teaches clearly and conclusively that the holding of slaves is right; and if so, no deduction from general principles can make it wrong, if that book is true."

If one is looking for the verses that specifically mention slavery, the King James translation (favored by American Evangelicals) is confusing because the word "slave" appears only twice.  In Jeremiah 2:14, the word "slave" appears in the translation, although there is no Hebrew word for it in this verse.  In Revelation 18:13, "slave" translates the Greek word doulos, which really is the most common Greek word for "slave."  In all of the other Biblical verses that seem to refer to slaves, the King James translation most often uses the word "servant," and sometimes other words such as "manservant," "maidservant," "bondman," or "bondmaid." 

So some interpreters who wanted to deny that the Bible was endorsing slavery could argue that "servants" were not really "slaves," but rather hired servants.  But this is not a credible interpretation.  In the King James translation, the word "servant" appears in the Old Testament most often as a translation of the Hebrew word ebed, which denotes "bondage"; and in the New Testament, "servant" most often translates the Greek word doulos.  Moreover, the Bible distinguishes between "hired servants" and "bond servants," and the "bond servants" were those who had been bought with money and held as the property of the master (see, for example, Genesis 17:12, Leviticus 25:44-46, Exodus 21:20-21, 26-32).

There are places in the Bible where God or His angels have clear opportunities to condemn slavery as wrong, but instead of that, they sanction slavery as right.  One example is when Abraham allows Sarah to beat her bondwoman Hagar, and Hagar runs away.  Hagar meets an angel of the Lord.  Instead of helping her to escape, the angel tells her: "Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands" (Genesis 16:9).

Christians might think that even if the Old Testament supports slavery, then surely the New Testament condemns it as a violation of Christian love.  But it is startling that while Jesus overruled many of the regulations of the Old Testament--such as those allowing for polygamy and divorce--he never said anything against slavery.  Furthermore, Paul and Peter often tell slaves to obey their masters and not to run away.  Even when slaves are converted to Christianity, this gives Christian masters no reason to emancipate their Christian slaves. (See 1 Corinthians 7:21; Ephesians 6:5; Colossians 3:22, 4:1; 1 Timothy 6:1-2; 1 Peter 2:18).

Some abolitionists thought they have found a specific condemnation of slavery in the Old Testament's punishment of "man-stealing": "And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death" (Exodus 21:16).  Doesn't this mean that slave traders should be punished with death?  But a few lines later in this same passage, it is said: "And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished.  Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money" (Exodus 21:20-21).  So it seems that holding a slave as property does not violate the rule against "man-stealing."  This must be so, because the Hebrews were permitted to hold slaves.

Although a reading of the Bible as antislavery cannot be based on specific Biblical condemnations of slavery as wrong, such a reading can, and has been, justified by appealing to some of the general moral principles of the Bible that are not specifically applied to slavery in the Bible.  The two most common principles employed here are the creation of Adam and Eve in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), which can be read as an affirmation of human equality, and the Golden Rule as stated by Jesus (Matthew 7:12), which can be read as suggesting that enslaving a human being is not treating that human being as one would wish to be treated.  People who say that slavery is good don't honestly believe that, because they never choose the good of it for themselves.  Lincoln and many others have cited this as a Biblical basis for recognizing slavery as wrong.

But as Fred Ross (in Slavery Ordained of God, 1857) and others have pointed out, it's not clear that these general moral principles must be interpreted as condemning slavery.  First, it's not clear that God's creation of human beings in His image means that they are all equal.  Here's the verse: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:27).  Far from creating all men equal, Ross observed, God here created humanity as "male and female," so that they are not equal in body and mind.  God made the woman "out of the man" (Genesis 2:23); and He made "the man the image and glory of God, but the woman for the glory of the man.  For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man" (1 Corinthians 11:7-9); and he made the woman to be the weaker vessel (1 Peter 3:7).   Moreover, just as wives are to obey their husbands, and children to obey their parents, slaves are to obey their masters (Ephesians 5:22-24, 6:1-5).  Insofar as slaves are inferior in body and mind to their masters, the slaves are naturally better off being ruled by their masters.

Similarly, Ross argued, it's not clear that the Golden Rule requires equality in human social relationships.  If the Golden Rule means that we ought to do unto others as we would have them do unto us if we were in similar circumstances, then we can see that different circumstances justify differences in treatment.  We do not rightly treat children the way we treat adults, because we know that children depend on the care of adults.  Similarly, we do not rightly treat slaves the way we treat masters if slaves are naturally weaker in body and mind in ways that make them dependent on the care of their masters.

And yet both of these arguments fail if one denies Ross's assumption that some human beings are by nature so inferior in body and mind that they are like perpetual children dependent on the care of those superior to them.  Except for those few human beings who might be born so mentally disabled that they are better off being under the lifetime care of others, it's hard to imagine that any group of human beings would be naturally adapted for enslavement.  As members of the same evolved human species, we can recognize the equality of all human beings as possessing a common human nature.  Although human beings are naturally unequal in many respects, they are equal in those minimal emotional and intellectual capacities that sustain a moral sense and thus identify them as members of the human species.  All normal human beings will resist exploitation and demand social cooperation based on reciprocal exchange.  They will be enslaved only when they are held down by brute force.

If this is true, then we can apply the Bible's Golden Rule to condemn slavery as wrong, and thus correct those passages of the Bible that seem to support slavery.  Indeed, that is exactly what most Christians have done: they overlook those Biblical passages that specifically recognize slavery, and they stress the general principles of Biblical morality that show slavery to be unjust exploitation.  Those general principles appeal to our naturally evolved moral sense.  Charles Darwin saw this, in The Descent of Man, when explained how the evolution of the moral sense could lead to Jesus's statement of the Golden Rule as what "lies at the foundation of morality."

Before and during the Civil War, however, American Christians could not agree on this corrected interpretation of the Bible's teaching on slavery.  Answering the question of how to interpret the Bible required recourse to arms.  Or, as Noll said, "it was left to those consummate theologians, the Reverend Doctors Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to decide what in fact the Bible actually meant" (50).

When I first read this remark by Noll about Grant and Sherman deciding what the Bible meant, it bothered me a lot.  But as I thought more about it, I began to see that there is a sense in which might really does make right.  Justice is enforced by the natural propensity of human beings to retaliate against oppression and meet force with force.  Slaves had many ways to resist their slavery, including violent resistance and running away.  Southerners were deeply fearful of slave insurrections.  One primary reason for Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was to recruit slaves into fighting in the Union army.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, seemed to teach through the example of Uncle Tom that Christian slaves should love their enemies and not fight back; but even she, especially in her novel Dred, seemed to concede that manly honor required violent resistance to oppression.

Some previous posts on this can be found here, here, here, here, here., here., here, here., here, and here.

The Human Nature of Genetic Engineering: A Realistic Assessment of CRISPR

For over fifty years, some people have been predicting that someday genetic engineering will radically transform, perhaps even abolish, human nature, and thus lead us to what Francis Fukuyama has called "our posthuman future."  The transhumanist optimists (people like Ray Kurzweil, Gregory Stock, and Nick Bostrom) have welcomed this prospect for transcending the limits of human nature.  The bioconservative pessimists (people like Fukuyama, Leon Kass, and Bill McKibben) have warned against this as biotechnological suicide.

Until recently, the existing technology for manipulating the human genome has not been powerful enough or precise enough to do this.  But now, a new technique seems to offer the prospect that parents might be able for the first time to modify the genetic nature of their offspring to create “designer babies,” and then these genetic changes could be passed on by biological inheritance so that the nature of the human species itself might be fundamentally altered, if not abolished.

And yet, a realistic assessment of the potential for genetic engineering should show us that both the transhumanist optimists and the bioconservative pessimists are mistaken, because they fail to see how genetic engineering will always be so limited in both its technical means and its moral ends, that it cannot change human nature.

The new technology for editing DNA that has stirred excitement and controversy over the past three years is called CRISPR, the acronym for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.”  Some years ago, scientists discovered that the DNA of some microbes had some identical segments of DNA composed of repeated sequences of the same bases, the building blocks of DNA.  These repeated segments were separated by blocks of DNA, called spacers, which had a unique sequence.  Scientists also noticed that these CRISPR sequences were always accompanied by nearby genes called Cas genes (“CRISPR-associated genes”).  Once they saw that the CRISPR spacers looked like the DNA of viruses, scientists could infer that CRISPR was part of the microbe’s adaptive immune system for destroying viruses. 

When viruses invade microbes, many of the microbes die, but those that survive will grab some of the virus’s DNA and insert it into a CRISPR spacer.  The microbe can then use this viral DNA to identify future viral invaders and target them for destruction.  Cas enzymes are guided to viral DNA and then chop it up, so that the virus cannot replicate.  Scientists discovered that they could use this CRISPR-Cas system to enter a cell, snip out any segment of DNA that they targeted, and then have the cell stitch a new gene into the open space.  Moreover, they could do this not only for somatic cells, but also for germ cells (eggs and sperm).  Doing it for germ cells would mean that the genetic changes would be passed down by the biological inheritance of offspring.  Recent research has shown that this can be done with human embryos.  This suggests the possibility that parents could use this technique to genetically enhance their children with genetic propensities for better bodies and better minds, and that this redesign of the human genome could be passed down by inheritance to the next generation.

Properly understood, this should teach us at least three lessons about human evolution—lessons about the Lamarckian character of biological evolution, about the natural sources of technological evolution, and about how evolved human nature limits the power of genetic technology.

First, notice that CRISPR is an adaptive immune system that learns from its experience with the viral enemies of microbes and passes on what it has learned to the descendants of the microbes.  It has been generally assumed that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of the evolutionary inheritance of acquired traits has been refuted by Darwinian biology.  Actually, Charles Darwin himself accepted Lamarckian evolution as one of the mechanisms of evolutionary change.  And CRISPR shows that Lamarckian inheritance really does occur in nature.  Using CRISPR for the genetic engineering of children could become a form of intentional evolution in which parents use scientific knowledge and technology to direct the evolutionary inheritance of acquired traits for the improvement of human life.

The second lesson here is about the natural sources of the technological evolution of genetic engineering.  We might see genetic engineering as manifesting the modern scientific project, first proposed by Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century, for the human mastery of nature for the relief of the human estate.  We might think that such a conquest of nature requires the human invention of artificial tools.  But notice that CRISPR is not a human invention but something that scientists discovered in nature.  Microbes have been using CRISPR to edit their DNA for millions of years.  Once we understand how this works in nature, we can then use it for genetic engineering.  This confirms Bacon’s observation that “nature to be commanded must be obeyed,” because “all that man can do is to put together or put asunder natural bodies,” and then “the rest is done by nature working within.”  And thus we should see how the power of biotechnology is limited by the potentialities inherent in nature.

That leads us to the third lesson—how evolved human nature limits the power of genetic technology.  A realistic assessment of genetic engineering avoids both the exaggerated hopes of the optimists and the exaggerated fears of the pessimists, because we should see that genetic engineering will always be limited in its technical means and its moral ends.

It will be limited in its technical means, because an individual's traits of personality and intelligence arise in unpredictable ways from a complex interaction of genes, brains, life history, and social environment that is not determined by one or a few genes.  Genetic engineering can possibly eliminate some genetic disorders that are strongly influenced by a few genes.  But the complex traits of the human mind are not genetically determined in any simple way.

For example, proponents of human genetic engineering often say that it will allow parents to increase the innate intelligence of their children by selecting those genes that enhance intelligence.  But while there surely is some genetic contribution to human intelligence, research in behavioral genetics suggests that intelligence arises as much from environmental factors as from genetic propensities.  Moreover, the genetic basis of intelligence depends on so many genes interacting in such complex ways that it will be impossible to control this through changes in one or a few genes. 

Even if we could explain exactly the multiple genetic causes of intelligence, we would still have to explain how these genes influence neural activity and how genetic propensities and neural activity interact with environmental contingencies in the unique life histories of particular human beings.  And all of this would presuppose that we could agree on how to define and measure “intelligence,” even though both scientific research and common-sense experience suggest that there are different kinds of intelligence—for example, analytic intelligence, verbal intelligence, practical intelligence, musical intelligence, and kinesthetic intelligence.  For all of these reasons, we are unlikely to ever succeed in the genetic engineering of intelligence.

Genetic engineering will also be limited in its moral ends, because parents will want to use this technology to improve the chances that their children will be healthy and happy, and thus the parents will be guided by the same natural desires of our evolved human nature that have always motivated parents in the care of their children.

For these reasons, we should welcome genetic engineering as helping us to treat some genetic disorders, but we should not expect that it will ever fundamentally transform human nature.  We should give up both the utopian hopes of the transhumanists and the apocalyptic fears of the bioconservatives.

Some of my previous posts criticizing genetic determinism can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln

Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on February 12, 1809.  Beyond the coincidence of their being born on the same day, there were many points of connection in their lives and thought.

I have written a series of posts on this, some of which can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Is Big History Science or Myth? Or Both?

In 1978, Edward O. Wilson, in On Human Nature, warned that the naturalistic explanation of human nature as a product of natural evolution rather than divine creation created a spiritual dilemma: as products of a purposeless evolutionary process, we have no transcendent purpose or goal around which we can organize our societies, and yet the religious longing for transcendent meaning is part of our evolved human nature.  Wilson thought Friedrich Nietzsche was right in warning that evolutionary science was a deadly truth in denying human life any transcendent meaning, and that human beings would not accept this, because they would rather have the void as purpose than be void of purpose (171).  The dilemma is that human beings cannot live nobly without some religious belief in mythic stories that convey the cosmic purposefulness of human life, and yet modern scientific materialism must deny any such belief.

Wilson's proposal for resolving that dilemma was to appeal to the "mythopoeic drive" of the human mind by turning scientific materialism into a mythology of the "evolutionary epic" as "the best myth we will ever have" (201).  This evolutionary epic will begin with the origin of the Universe in the Big Bang of fourteen billion years ago, as deduced by astronomers and physicists, which is "far more awesome than the first chapter of Genesis or the Ninevite epic of Gilgamesh" (202).  This epic will move forward through the evolution of everything from stars and planets to plants and animals, and finally to the hero of the epic--the human brain as the most complex device we know.

Wilson claimed that although the evolutionary epic's "most sweeping assertions cannot be proved with finality," the scientific method of empirically testing hypotheses and discarding those hypotheses that are falsified can improve our understanding of the evolutionary epic so that it approaches ever closer to some approximation of reality (201).

Is this reasonable?  Or is the very idea of a scientific mythology based on an evolutionary epic incoherent?  Must any myth or story be a human fiction that cannot be fully grounded in empirical science?  Or is it possible to construct a scientific narrative of the evolution of everything that can be supported by empirical scientific research?  Can such a scientific narrative satisfy our religious longings for cosmic meaning?  Or must scientific knowledge and religious belief always be in conflict?

These are the questions that must be raised about the Big History promoted by David Christian, Fred Spier, and others, which is the elaboration of Wilson's proposal for an evolutionary epic.  An engaging presentation of Big History is Christian's TED talk, which is entitled "The History of Our World in 18 Minutes."  Over the past five years, this talk has been viewed almost 6 million times!  The influence of Christian's vision is indicated by the fact that Bill Gates is supporting Christian's "Big History Project," which is promoting the teaching of Big History courses in high schools.

The debate over Big History can be seen in an article by Ian Hesketh--"The Story of Big History" -- and an article by Eric Chaisson--"The Natural Science Underlying Big History" . 

Christian's TED talk is organized around the question of how the Universe creates ordered complexity without violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that randomness or disorder (entropy) increases everywhere.  His answer is that ordered, complex systems can arise when there is a flow of energy into them from the environment outside the system.  The order of the system does not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, because the net disorder of the system and its environment always increases.  So, for example, the complex order of life on Earth arises from photosynthesis, by which some of the energy radiated onto the Earth from the Sun is captured by plants to power the processes of life.  He can then narrate the history of the Universe from the Big Bang to humankind as an evolutionary history of increasing complexity powered by the flow of energy into ordered systems.  The complexity of human systems of order depends not just on the flow of energy but also on the uniqueness of human language and networks of communication that allow for collective learning, culminating in the modern global community that constitutes a global brain.

Christian ends his lecture with a vision of the future prompted by pictures of him visiting his grandson Daniel.  Christian explains that he worries about the current threats to human civilization--particularly, nuclear war and global warming--that could disrupt the "Goldilocks conditions" for human life on Earth.  He wants his grandson's generation to study Big History in high school so that they can understand how to meet these challenges to human life on "this beautiful Earth."

Hesketh sees Christian's lecture as a good illustration of the rhetorical trick in all of Big History, in which historians claim to have found an empirical science of history that embraces the entire history of the Universe, but actually what they have done is to use the literary techniques of story-telling to tell "an anthropocentric story of cosmic origins" that has no grounding in empirical science (193).  "Indeed," Hesketh asserts, "like any myth, big history's deep meanings are not inherently derived from empirical observations but from its anthropomorphic projections of an idealized cosmic world" (196).  In fact, Hesketh notes, Christian and the other proponents of Big History have often explicitly identified this cosmic history as "a modern creation myth," and they admit that they are engaging in the sort of mythology dressed up as science that was recommended by Wilson (174, 180-81, 183-86).

The anthropocentric and anthropomorphic character of this myth is evident in the way Christian ends his story of cosmic history with pictures of himself with his grandson: he thus ends with human beings on Earth occupying the center of the Universe as they face the moral challenges of securing the ecological conditions of human life on Earth against the threats coming from nuclear weapons and global climate change. 

Hesketh points out (192-93) that this corresponds to what Christian at the end of Maps of Time predicted for the "near future" of the next hundred years, but then Christian went on in his book to predict the "remote future" of the Universe--the end of life on Earth, the burning out of the Sun, and the Universe becoming "a dark, cold place filled only with black holes and stray subatomic particles that wander light-years apart from each other" (Maps, 486-89).  In his TED lecture, Christian is silent about this dark, cold future of the Universe, because that would have taken away the heroic ending of his story with human beings at the center of the universe on "this beautiful Earth."

Hesketh's fundamental criticism of Big History is conveyed in the two quotations at the head of his article.  Hesketh identifies Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry's The Universe Story as one of the first of the recent Big History texts.  He quotes them as saying: "The goal is not to read a book; the goal is to read the story taking place all around us."  He then follows that with a quotation from Hayden White's Tropics of Discourse: "No one and nothing lives a story."  Swimme and Berry present themselves not as authors of the "universe story" they tell but as discoverers of the story that can be found in Nature (186).  Against this, Hesketh points to White's "insight" that every story is a human fictional creation that has no factual grounding in Nature (196).

If you read Hesketh's article, you should notice that he simply asserts White's "insight" without offering any evidence or argumentation to demonstrate its correctness.  In contrast to this, Chaisson presents his natural science of Big History as cosmic evolution as a "grand scientifically based story" (36).  So Chaisson thinks a story about cosmic history really can be grounded in empirical science, and he backs up that claim with scientific evidence that energy is "a common currency for all complex, ordered systems," and that one can find a quantitative measure of complexity in "energy rate density," which is the amount of energy passing through a system per unit time and per unit mass (4-5).  He surveys the evidence supporting a cosmic evolution of increasing complexity as measured by energy rate density that moves from physical systems to biological systems to cultural systems.  In some of his earlier writings, Chaisson had spoken of this as a "cultural myth."  But now he speaks of this as a "scientific narrative."  He avoids the term "myth," because that often carries the connotation of "fiction." 

But Hesketh would insist that any kind of story or narrative is fictional--that's White's "insight"--and therefore it's impossible for it to have any grounding in empirical scientific evidence.  Oddly, Hesketh recognizes the importance of Chaisson's science of cosmic evolution for Big History, but he is completely silent about Chaisson's presentation of the empirical evidence for this science, because Herseth is confident that an empirically-based science of history is impossible.

It's noteworthy that Chaisson agrees with Hesketh in criticizing the Big History of Christian and others as being too "anthropocentric" or "anthropomorphic" (see Chaisson, 1-3, 14, 35).  Chaisson criticizes Big History scholars for restricting their view mostly to our Milky Way Galaxy, our Sun, our Earth, and our history on Earth.  They do this because "big historians like all historians, basically strive to know themselves, nobly and ideally, yet sometimes dubiously rendering humanity as central or special while deciphering our sense of place in the grand scheme of things" (2).

Chaisson agrees that the empirical evidence of the cosmic evolution of complexity as measured by energy rate density shows that human brains and human cultures are some of the most complex systems in the Universe (23-30).  And yet he sees no empirical evidence that cosmic evolution follows some grand design leading up to human life as having some privileged position in the cosmos.  And while we can hope that the human species will endure into the near future, the empirical evidence of how ordered systems evolve and of the rare conditions required for human life make it clear that human life is unlikely to last for long, and that the eventual death of the Sun will bring earthly life to an end.

Chaisson observes: "As a confirmed empirical materialist, my vocation is to critically observe Nature and to experimentally test theories about it" (36).  And thus, in contrast to Hesketh, Chaisson believes that stories about cosmic history can be tested empirically by scientific research.

Still, as we saw in the previous post, Chaisson concedes that our grandest models of the cosmos depend on speculative thinking that cannot be tested through observation and experimentation, and consequently our scientific knowledge of the cosmos must always be severely limited.  Why was there a Big Bang?  What was there before the Big Bang?  Such questions cannot be answered according to the traditional standards of scientific method.  Wilson admitted that such questions leave a big opening for religious belief in God as the First Cause (On Human Nature, 1, 171-72, 191-92, 205).

But even if empirical science cannot give us absolute knowledge of the whole--a theory of everything--it can give us empirically grounded stories about the cosmos that approximate reality.  If so, then, contrary to Hesketh's confidence in White's "insight" that all stories must be fictional, we can use science to help us read (even if only dimly) the story taking place all around us.

The first attempt at telling a scientifically based story of Big History or cosmic evolution was Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which Lucretius wrote as a didactic epic poem.  The poetic artistry of Lucretius's writing in presenting Epicurean atomistic science is evident.  But those like Hesketh would raise the question of whether this poetic story-telling is the fictional imposition of a literary order onto a natural order that does not speak for itself.


REFERENCES

Chaisson, Eric J., "The Natural Science Underlying Big History," The Scientific World Journal, volume 2014, 41 pages.

Christian, David, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

Hesketh, Ian, "The Story of Big History," History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History, 4 (Fall 2014): 171-202.

Wilson, Edward O., On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).

Some other posts on topics related to Big History can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here., here., and here.

Cosmic Evolution: The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable in Eric Chaisson's "Epic of Evolution"

In many of my posts over the years, I have defended an evolutionary classical liberalism, which I see as a tradition of thought that stretches from David Hume and Adam Smith to Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin and to Friedrich Hayek and Matt Ridley. This evolutionary classical liberalism can be rooted in a universal history of cosmic evolution like that presented by Eric Chaisson and David Christian.

Chaisson is an astrophysicist who sees the entire history of the Universe from the Big Bang 14 billion years ago to the present as showing an evolution from simplicity to complexity that passes through eight epochs: the Particle Epoch, the Galactic Epoch, the Stellar Epoch, the Planetary Epoch, the Chemical Epoch, the Biological Epoch, the Cultural Epoch, and the Future Epoch.  Chaisson has a website that sketches his account of this cosmic evolution, which is elaborated in his Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos (Columbia University Press, 2006) and in his Astronomy Today (8th edition, Pearson, 2014).

Ever since the emergence of human self-conscious awareness, human beings have wondered about how the world came to be, how humans came to be, and how the human place in the world illuminates the meaning of human life.  To answer their questions, human beings have told themselves myths about cosmic history, and generally these myths have appealed to religious beliefs about the powers of supernatural beings. 

Chaisson says that his story of cosmic evolution is also a "cultural myth" (Epic, 426).  But it's a scientific myth that does not rely on beliefs about supernatural beings or philosophical speculation, because modern science as it began in the Renaissance can achieve true knowledge through the scientific method of gathering relevant data, formulating theories, and then testing those theories through rigorous observation and experimental testing and rejecting those theories that fail to be empirically confirmed.  Without mentioning Karl Popper, Chaisson assumes Popper's standard of falsifiability for science: a theory is not truly scientific if it is not in principle empirically testable, and a theory is falsified when it's empirical predictions fail.

I wonder whether this is true, or whether any science of cosmic evolution must confront the ultimate limits to science in facing fundamental mysteries of nature that are not open to observational or experimental study.  Herbert Spencer set forth a scientific account of cosmic evolution that is very similar to Chaisson's.  Like Chaisson, Spencer saw a cosmic evolution from simplicity to complexity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity, which could be explained through natural laws.  But unlike Chaisson, Spencer thought that increasing scientific knowledge reveals "the ultimate mystery of things," and thus provides "a firmer basis to all true Religion" ("Progress: Its Law and Cause," 484).  Modern science shows the power of the human intellect in explaining everything that comes within the range of human experience.  But it also shows the weakness of the human intellect in dealing with all that transcends human experience. 

In studying the origin of the external world, Spencer observed, we can hypothesize that all matter originally existed in a diffused form, but we cannot prove this, and we cannot conceive how this came to be, because we can have no experience of the distant origin of all things.  Likewise in studying the internal world of our human mind, we cannot conceive of how consciousness is possible, of how mind emerges from matter.  And thus we see that "absolute knowledge is impossible," because "under all things there lies an impenetrable mystery" (485).  If science is limited to thinking about nature that is empirically testable and falsifiable, Spencer would seem to say, then there can be no scientific understanding of those realms of nature that are beyond human observation.

That this might be true has recently become a hotly contested issue among some scientists and philosophers of science.  About a year ago, two physicists--George Ellis and Joe Silk--wrote an article for Nature complaining that some physicists were threatening the intellectual integrity of science by asserting that if speculative theories of the Universe were sufficiently elegant and explanatory, they should be accepted as true, even if they could never be empirically tested.  This would deny the traditional understanding of science as empirical knowledge based on observational evidence and experimental testing, which might make it impossible to distinguish scientific knowledge from philosophical speculation or religious belief (Ellis and Silk, "Defend the Integrity of Physics," Nature 516 [2014]: 321-23).

According to Ellis and Silk, string theory and the theory of the multiverse are prime examples of theories accepted by many physicists that are not testable.  According to string theory, elementary particles should be understood as infinitesimally thin vibrating one-dimensional strings in multidimensional space that are too small to be seen through microscopes or detected through collisions in any particle collider.  According to the idea of the multiverse, our universe is just one of many universes with different cosmic and physical properties.  Scanning over all possible universes, everything that can physically happen does happen an infinite number of times.  But it's impossible for us in our universe to observe these other universes.  Since these theories cannot be tested by observational or experimental evidence, Ellis and Silk argue that they are not scientific theories at all, because science should be limited to theories that are testable.

In December, a meeting of scientists and philosophers of science was convened in Munich to debate the issues raised by Ellis and Silk.  A report on the meeting can be found at the website for Quanta Magazine.

David Gross, a proponent of string theory, opened the meeting by arguing that the problem identified by Ellis and Silk is simply a "fact of nature"--the fundamental constituents of nature are either too small, too far away, or too far in the past to be observed directly by us or indirectly through our instruments, and thus nature's secrets are buried so deep or so far away that we have no way to test our theoretical speculations about them.

Here is a sketch of what Gross sees as the limits on the scale of human observational experience of nature.  At the small scale, microscopes have extended our experience beyond our visual reach, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has extended our reach even deeper.  We have gone from scales of centimeters to millionths of a millionth of a millionth of a centimeter.  But we have reasons to believe that the fundamental constituents of nature that string theory attempts to describe lie at a distance scale 10 million billion times smaller than the resolving power of the LHC.  At the cosmic scale, telescopes have extended our experience of the astronomical universe; but no telescope will ever look beyond our universe's cosmic horizon and see the other universes assumed by the multiverse hypothesis.  The white area is the range of scales within human experience.  The grey area is outside that range.  You can click on the image to enlarge it.

Philosophers of science like David Dawid (String Theory and the Scientific Method) have argued that this shows the need for Popperian falsificationism to be replaced with Bayesian confirmation theory, which allows for a non-empirical science in which we rate the confidence we have in a theory from zero to 100 percent.  We can be confident in a theory even when it makes claims about phenomena that we cannot directly observe.  No one has ever directly seen an atom or subatomic particles, but we can be confident in atomic theory based on indirect inferences using instruments.  We might even have good reasons for accepting string theory, even though we might never have either direct or indirect empirical evidence for it.

At the Munich conference, some defenders of Popperian falsificationism pointed out that Popper recognized the importance of speculative theories that lack testable predictions.  He identified such theories as "metaphysics," and he saw that such metaphysical thinking could be taken seriously, with the thought that eventually it might become possible to devise empirical tests for a metaphysical theory.

Chaisson adopts the Popperian position when he describes the scientific method that was first formulated by scientists in the Renaissance:

"They realized that thinking about Nature was no longer sufficient.  Looking at it was also necessary.  Experiments became a central part of the process of inquiry.  To be effective, ideas had to be tested experimentally, either to refine them if data favored them or to reject them if they did not.  The 'scientific method' was born--probably the most powerful technique ever conceived for the advancement of factual information.  Modern science had arrived" (Epic, x).

With this standard in mind, Chaisson rejects string theory and the multiverse as unscientific theories: "I see no evidence for cosmic strings, eleven dimensions, or multiple universes" (xvi).  Such thinking "borders on science fiction (or even religion)" (75).  Such ideas cannot be truly scientific, because they depend on thinking without looking, speculative thought without empirical observation. 

An alternative position would be to say that while our knowledge of the world is most reliable when it is based on both thinking and looking, we must ultimately come up against the limits of human observational experience, and then we must settle for thinking without looking, even as we hope to someday push the boundaries of our experience deeper into nature, so that we can empirically test our theories.  Here we must fall back onto what Chaisson calls "informed speculation" (67).

Consider, for example, what might be the most difficult metaphysical question of all:  Why is there something rather than nothing, and why are things as they are an not different?  The modern theory of the Big Bang as the beginning of the Universe forces us to ask this question.  What was there before the Big Bang?  Why did it occur?  What or who caused it?

In a previous post, I have argued that Why is there something rather than nothing? is a meaningless question, because it rests on two false assumptions.  First, it falsely assumes the possibility of absolute nothingness.  Since human beings have no experience of absolute nothingness, whereas all of our experience confirms the being of things, there is no empirical evidence for absolute nothingness.  Even the very idea of nothingness as a product of the theological imagination pondering the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is dubious, because in the absence of any empirical evidence, I doubt that people even understand what they are saying when they ask why the world arose out of nothingness.

Chaisson comes close to agreeing with me when he says that questions about the origins of the Big Bang cannot be addressed by modern science, because there are no ways to experimentally test our thinking about such questions (Epic, 33).  Asking what came before the Big Bang might be a "meaningless puzzle" (57). And yet he thinks it is reasonable for scientists to speculate about such questions by formulating various models of the Universe. 

One is the steady-state model that stipulates that the average density of the Universe is eternally constant.  Although the Universe is expanding, the average density of matter remains the same.  For this to be true, however, new matter must be constantly created out of nothing, and thus the steady-state theorists still face the problem of explaining how something arises from nothing, which seems to contradict the scientific principle of the conservation of mass and energy.

A second model of the Universe is that of the "open Universe," in which the Universe expands eternally from the Big Bang.  A third model is that of the "closed Universe," in which the Universe expands from the Big Bang until the gravitational pull of matter pulls everything back, and matter collapses back onto itself in a "big crunch."  Both of these models face the problem of explaining the initial Big Bang.

A fourth model is that of the "cyclic Universe," in which the Universe expands from a big bang, collapses back onto itself, and then expands again from another big bang; so that the Universe oscillates eternally.  In this view, there is no single, unique beginning that has to be explained, because the oscillation of the Universe is eternal.  For that reason, Chaisson observes, "subjectively, in our guts, many researchers prefer it," because this model avoids the philosophical problem of what preceded the Big Bang (32).  But notice that Chaisson appeals here to some subjective "gut feeling" for which there is no objective empirical test.  Isn't this thinking without looking?

Repeatedly, Chaisson first affirms the truth of some mysterious idea in science and then admits that it might be purely imaginary.  So, for example, he says that black holes "apparently really do exist" (95), but then says that they might be "a whim of human fantasy," because there can be no evidence, either direct or indirect, for their existence (106).  There are no experimental tests for explaining what happens deep inside black holes, and so this might be "the ultimate in the unknowable" (101).

Sometimes, Chaisson insists that scientific cosmology can supplant religious myth (418).  At other times, however, he says that we might need "a merger of science and religion" (76).

Was Spencer right in seeing "the ultimate mystery of things" as providing "a firmer basis to all true Religion"?

Other posts on cosmic evolution can be found here, here, here, here, here., here, here, here, and here.

A Prehistoric Massacre in Africa Suggests that the State of Nature was a State of War

 

 

Skeletal Remains of Early Holocene Hunter-Gatherers Killed in a Massacre at the Site of Nataruk, West of Lake Turkana, Kenya


One of the fundamental debates in the history of political philosophy is over whether the state of nature was a state of peace or a state of war.  Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all agree that the first human beings lived as foraging hunter-gatherers, but they disagree about whether this original human condition was generally violent or generally peaceful.  Hobbes claimed that without any government to enforce peace, life among these first human beings must have been an utterly lawless war of all against all.  Locke inferred from reports about hunter-gatherer bands in America that life in a state of nature could be a state of peace, but it could easily become a state of war.  Rousseau thought that the evidence refuted both Hobbes and Locke in suggesting that the first human ancestors were peaceful, and that war did not arise until the invention of agriculture led to a less nomadic and more settled social life.

As I have indicated in my many posts on this issue, this has continued to be one of the most contentious debates in the social sciences, with some social scientists (such as Richard Wrangham) arguing for the Hobbesian position that the evolution of our foraging human ancestors was shaped by warfare, and others (such as Douglas Fry) arguing for the Rousseauan position that nomadic foragers were generally peaceful, and that war was a cultural invention of the agricultural societies that emerged 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. 

Now that we have more archaeological and anthropological evidence than was available to Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, we are reaching the point where we might settle this debate.  I have argued that the evidence suggests that Hobbes was partly right, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right.  Locke was right in seeing that foraging human bands can enforce customary laws of cooperation that secure a peaceful life, but that in the absence of formal governmental rule, feuding often leads to war.

And yet while the evidence pertinent to this debate has been growing, the evidence is still limited in ways that make it difficult to reach any demonstrative proof.  Inferences about warfare among prehistoric foragers from ethnographic reports about foraging societies are open to dispute, because modern hunter-gatherers might be quite different from prehistoric hunter-gatherers, and because we can argue about whether acts of violence against individuals or small groups of individuals should be described as warfare.  The archaeological evidence for prehistoric warfare among foragers has been severely limited, because when prehistoric skeletons show signs of homicidal violence, it's hard to know whether this should be interpreted as showing warfare rather than inter-personal violence within a society.

But now in this week's issue of Nature, we have a report of the first prehistoric skeletal evidence for a massacre in a foraging society: Marta Mirazon Lahr, et al., "Inter-Group Violence among Early Holocene Hunter-Gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya," Nature 529 (21 January 2016): 394-398.  The New York Times has an article about this.

A team of scientists reports the discovery of the first clear evidence of the intentional killing of a small band of foragers in prehistory.  In 2012, they found the skeletal remains of 27 individuals at the site of Nataruk, west of Lake Turkana in Kenya.  The skeletal remains are dated at around 10,000 years ago.  12 of the individuals were preserved as articulated skeletons.  10 of these 12 show evidence of major traumatic lesions that would have been lethal.  There are fractures from violence in heads, necks, hands, and ribs.  For example, the skull pictured above shows multiple traumatic lesions to the cranium, involving blunt force to the frontal and left temporal bones.  In one case, a projectile was found embedded in a cranium.  In another case, projectiles were found within a body cavity.  There is no evidence of burial for any of these skeletal remains.

The Hobbesians like Richard Wrangham will see this as one of the best archaeological discoveries for confirming that warfare was part of human evolution in prehistoric foraging societies before the invention of agriculture.

But the Rousseauans like Douglas Fry will say that skeletal evidence like this from one site is not enough to be conclusive.  As quoted in the New York Times article, Fry has also said that these foragers might have been moving away from a purely nomadic life to a more settled life, and thus this would not be evidence for warfare among nomadic foragers. 

I see evidence that the co-authors of the article in Nature disagree with one another over whether their discovery supports the Hobbesian view or the Rousseauan view.  Here's the last paragraph of their article:

"As one of the clearest cases of inter-group violence among prehistoric hunter-gatherers, the event recorded at Nataruk offers information on the socio-economic conditions that marked the presence of warfare. However, there are two interpretations of how this fact impinges on our understanding of war among foraging societies.  West Turkana 10,000 years ago was a fertile lakeshore landscape sustaining a substantial population of hunter-gatherers; the presence of pottery may be indicative of some storage and so reduced mobility.  Thus, the massacre at Nataruk could be seen as resulting from a raid for resources--territory, women, children, food stored in pots--whose value was similar to those of later food-producing societies among whom violent attacks on settlements and organized defence strategies became part of life.  In this light, the importance of what happened at Nataruk would be in terms of extending the chronology and degree of the same underlying socio-economic conditions that characterize early warfare in more recent periods.  Alternatively, Nataruk may offer evidence not of changing conditions towards a settled, materially richer, and demographically denser way of life, but of a standard antagonistic response to an encounter between two social groups. As such, Nataruk would be important for the particular circumstances that preserved an ephemeral, but perhaps not unusual, event in the life of prehistoric foraging societies.  In either case, the deaths at Nataruk are testimony to the antiquity of inter-group violence and war" (397).

The first of these two conflicting interpretations supports a modified version of the Rousseauan view.  The second interpretation supports the Hobbesian view.  The news reports about this article (here, here, and here) suggest to me that Marta Mirazon Lahr, the lead author of the article, is taking the Hobbesian view, while Robert Foley, a co-author, is taking a modified Rousseauan view. 

In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau claimed that warfare began with the invention of agriculture, which he called the "great revolution," because it brought the territorial settlements, the accumulation of property and the status hierarchies that provided the conditions for war.  But Rousseau also recognized that before agricultural societies, the "first revolution" in human history was the establishment of family life in settled societies that produced some forms of property. 

Some anthropologists today might see this as the pre-agricultural revolution in which nomadic foragers moved towards becoming complex foragers living a somewhat settled existence.  If there were some abundant source of food, such as fish along a shoreline or in a river, foragers could camp there, either seasonally or year-round.  They could then store some of their food.  And their population could grow.  But once they took control of this territory and its abundant resources, they became targets for other foraging bands who might want to take their property, and thus began warfare.  There are many examples of this in the ethnographic and archaeological record.  The most famous example of this is the complex foraging societies that formed on the Northwest Coast of North America.  Once formerly nomadic foragers became dependent on the intense harvesting of aquatic resources, they settled into permanent villages, in which there was increasing population and inequality in property and status, and which produced competition over valuable resources (stored food, territory, and women) that led to warfare.  These complex foraging settlements have appeared thousands of years before agricultural settlements.  By contrast, fully nomadic foragers show inter-personal violence within their bands, but not inter-group warfare.

As quoted in the Washington Post, Robert Foley seems to adopt this interpretation of the foragers who were killed at Nataruk:

"According to Foley, the skeletons appear to have belonged to a group of hunter-gatherers living at the time on the lush, marshy edge of a lagoon where they used bone harpoons to fish and hunt.  They were probably more sedentary than most foraging communities, as there are indications that the environment was quite rich.

"Although any guesses as to why they were killed are speculations, Foley said it is possible that another group found the area attractive and competed for it."

Similar quotations from Foley appear in the story at LiveScience:

"The number of casualties rules out the notion of an interfamily feud, Foley said.  More people from the group may have been killed, and still others may have escaped, which suggests the group was larger than the average hunter-gatherer group. (Most hunter-gatherer groups tend to hover around 25 to 30 people per encampment, Foley said.) And given the simple tools used to deal death, the attacking group was probably larger still, he added.

"This idea suggests that the two warring groups were likely more settled than the average hunter-gatherer population, Foley said.  That's not surprising, as hunter-gatherers who tend to stay in one place for longer periods often live near lakes, where food is plentiful and unlikely to be depleted by long stays, he added.

"'That fits into the idea of a slightly more densely packed population where intergroup conflict is likely to arise,' Foley said. 'It's quite difficult to have a war with a highly mobile group that's very dispersed.'"

Douglas Fry agrees with Foley in seeing this prehistoric warfare in Nataruk as showing the intergroup violence that arises among complex foragers, but not among fully nomadic foragers.  Thus, Fry can argue that this discovery support his Rousseauan view that throughout most of human evolutionary history, when human beings lived as nomadic foragers, there was no warfare; and consequently war must be seen as a cultural invention of recent history.

Lahr, however, seems to disagree with Foley and Fry.  As quoted by Deborah Netburn of the Los Angeles Times, Lahr says that while there is lots of evidence of warfare "among settled, sedentary communities," the discovery in Nataruk is the first "archaeological record of armed conflict between early nomadic hunter-gatherer groups."  She suggests that the foragers who were massacred had not established a settlement on the lake, but rather they were a "small traveling band of hunter-gatherers who stopped by a lagoon to hunt or fish."  And so, she seems to be adopting the Hobbesian interpretation of this archaeological discovery as confirming that warfare was prevalent among our earliest foraging ancestors, and thus deeply rooted in our evolved human nature.

Some of my posts on this debate over the evolution of war can be found here, here, here, here, and here, which include links to many other posts on this.

The Evolutionary Origins of the Word "Liberalism"

The term "liberalism" has had a confusing history.  When this English word was first coined in the 1820s in Great Britain, it referred to the political and economic ideas of those who stressed individual liberty in both politics and economics, so that government should be limited to protecting individual liberty, and should therefore not intervene in the social and economic life of the community except to protect life, liberty, and property.  But then by the end of the century, some of those who called themselves liberals were supporting social welfare policies in which government intervened in social and economic life in ways that denied individual liberty.  Now, in the United States, those who favor interventionist government--those like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama--are known as liberals, while those who favor protecting individual liberty from governmental intervention are called conservatives or libertarians.  Sometimes the original meaning of liberalism is identified as "classical liberalism" as distinguished from "modern liberalism" or "left liberalism."

Daniel Klein of George Mason University has been leading an intellectual campaign for restoring the original meaning of "liberalism" as devoted to individual liberty and limited government.  As part of that campaign, he has presented evidence that the use of the word "liberal" in its political sense originated with Adam Smith and other Scottish thinkers as a term denoting what Smith called "the system of natural liberty."  He has presented his research as an essay on the website of The Atlantic, which includes a video of a lecture that elaborates his reasoning.

Daniel Klein on the Emergence of "Liberal" as a Political Term

Scholars who have traced the history of the English word "liberalism" have often claimed that "liberal" as a political term originated on the European Continent at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which was then imported into Great Britain in the 1820s, when a suffix was added to coin the word "liberalism."  In The Constitution of Liberty, Friedrich Hayek noted that it was often suggested that the word "liberal" derived from the early nineteenth-century Spanish party of the liberales (first edition, 530; definitive edition, 529). But Hayek indicated that he believed that this political sense of "liberal" derived from Adam Smith's language in The Wealth of Nations, where Smith identified "the liberal system of free exportation and free importation" (Liberty Fund, 538), and where he spoke of "allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice" (Liberty Fund, 664).

Klein argues for the Hayek thesis as opposed to the importation thesis.  Google has scanned millions of books, and Googles Ngram Viewer allows researchers to study this digital data to see how words have been used over the centuries.  Klein has used this to study the meaning of the adjective "liberal."  Prior to 1769, "liberal" had only non-political meanings, such as being generous, noble, or having superior status (as in "liberal arts" and "liberal education").  Beginning in 1769, there was a sudden jump in the number of times that writers used political terms such as "liberal policy," "liberal plan," "liberal system," "liberal views," "liberal ideas," and "liberal principles."  In 1769, William Robertson was the first writer to use such terms in his book The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V. 

Robertson was a friend of Adam Smith, who began to use "liberal" in this way in 1776, in his Wealth of Nations.  He argues in favor of "the liberal system of free exportation and free importation," which would turn all of Europe into a single great empire bound together by free trade (538).  In explaining this "liberal system," he thinks it applies as much to free trade in religion as to free trade in corn.  "The people feel themselves so much interested in what relates either to their subsistence in this life, or to their happiness in life to come, that government must yield to their prejudices, and, in order to preserve the public tranquility, establish that system which they approve of" (539).  As long as the laws secure "to every man that he can enjoy the fruits of his own labor," the "natural effort of every individual to better his condition" will carry a society to wealth and prosperity (540).  Smith also speaks of this liberal system of freedom to trade as "allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon that liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice" (664).

Smith's description of the "liberal system" suggests that it coincides with what he calls the "system of natural liberty," because in both cases, he speaks of a man's freedom "to pursue his own interest his own way":

"All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord.  Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.  The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of society.  According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society" (687-88).

Thus, the "liberal system" or the "system of natural liberty" does require government, but the duties of government are limited.  The first two governmental duties are clear--protecting the individuals of a society from foreign attack and from the unjust attacks of other members of the society.  But the third duty--providing public works or public institutions--is more open to debate.  What Smith says about this in Book 5 of Wealth of Nations has been interpreted by some readers as suggesting that Smith might today be a left liberal or even a Marxist in favoring an interventionist government with a welfare state and redistribution of income.  If you look at the video of Klein's lecture, you will see that the commentator on the lecture raises this point, and Klein acknowledges that this is a possible reading of Smith, although Klein favors the reading that sees Smith as a classical liberal who would not have supported left liberalism.

In any case, Klein has, I think, proven that Hayek was right in seeing the political sense of "liberal" as originating with Smith, so that the "liberal system" is to be equated with Smith's "system of natural liberty."  Later, in Great Britain, the English noun "liberalism" was coined to refer to this Smithian understanding of "liberal" thought.  The earliest use of "liberalism" that I have noticed is by Alexander von Humboldt in a letter to Thomas Jefferson on May 24, 1804, in which Humboldt writes: "Your writings, your actions, and the liberalism of your ideas have inspired me from my earliest youth."  Later, Jefferson himself, in a letter to John Adams (January 22, 1821), spoke of "the advance of liberalism" that was shown in the 1820 revision of the Massachusetts Constitution favoring religious liberty.

Although Smith does not use the word "evolution," his account of the "liberal system" does have an evolutionary character to it.  Hayek noticed this and developed it in his account of the liberal idea of "spontaneous evolution" or "spontaneous order."  Smith's system of natural liberty is a spontaneous order that evolves from the bottom-up rather than being designed from the top-down.  It is a natural evolutionary order in that it arises from the natural desire of all individuals to better their condition, which leads to wealth and prosperity whenever the laws secure to individuals the liberty to enjoy the fruits of their own labor.

In the nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer elaborated the principle of equal liberty as fundamental for liberalism, and he presented it as part of a cosmic evolution of order in which the whole history of the Universe could be seen as an evolution from simplicity to complexity.

In 1859, the Liberal Party of Great Britain was established under the leadership of William Gladstone; and Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was published.  Darwin became an enthusiastic supporter of the Liberal Party, and one can see his liberalism in his Descent of Man, particularly in his criticism of slavery.

I will be writing more about the cosmic evolution of Darwinian liberalism.

ADDENDUM: 2024

Klein has published a new article on the data from Google Ngram showing the evolution of "liberal" as a political adjective and "liberalism" and "liberals" as political nouns: "'Liberal' as a Political Adjective (in English), 1769-1824," Journal of Contextual Economics (2024).

He shows that "liberal" as a political adjective does indeed appear first sometime around 1769.  In British parliamentary debate, its usage spikes around 1778 after the appearance of Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1776.  The nouns "liberalism" and "liberals" appear first around 1820.

He also shows that the political sense of "liberal" shows up first in English in Great Britain and only later in the French, German, Italian, and Spanish languages.

This demonstrates that Friedrich Hayek was right about this.

Good Inequality

In recent years, it has become common for many political leaders to say that economic inequality--the growing gap between the few who are very rich and the many who are very poor--is the greatest political problem for the United States and many European countries.  Two years ago, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a best-selling book warning about the growing economic oligarchy in the leading capitalist countries and recommending that the only solution was a redistribution of wealth through confiscatory tax rates of 80% to 90% for the wealthiest.

There has been little attention, however, given to one important point raised in Piketty's book: "Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself: the key question is to decide whether it is justified, whether there are reasons for it" (19).  As one can see in Piketty's book, he thinks the inequality that he sees in the advanced capitalist countries is not justified, because the very wealthy haven't really earned their wealth, and those in the lower classes have no opportunity to improve their condition.

But is that really true?  Is it true that economic inequality shows a rigid class structure, in which those at the top stay at the top, and those at the bottom have no chance to rise?  Or is there a lot of mobility, with people moving up and down the class structure?  If there is such mobility, wouldn't that be a good form of inequality?

In fact, there is a lot of evidence for such mobility.  Economists who study this have shown that over 50 percent of Americans will be in the top 10 percent of income-earners for at least one year in their lives.  Over 11 percent of Americans will be among the top 1 percent of income-earners (people making a minimum of $332,000 per year) for at least one year in their lives.  94 percent of the Americans who join the top 1 percent group will keep that status for only one year.

Moreover, the factors that explain higher household incomes among Americans are not fixed over a lifetime, and they are to some degree a matter of personal decisions, which means that people are not forced to remain in one income bracket for their whole lives.  American households with higher than average incomes tend to be households where the members are well-educated, in their prime earning years (between the ages of 35 and 64), working full-time, and are in stable marriages.  Households with lower than average incomes tend to be households where the members are less-educated, outside their prime earning years, unemployed or working only part-time, and they are likely to be unmarried.

A large part of the growth in economic inequality among Americans over the past 40 years has been a result of assortative mating:  college students marry people they have met in college, and then form two-income households with the higher income levels correlated with higher education.  These "power couples" are then in a position to help their children become successful, because their children will inherit the good genes of their parents as well as the good environments of rearing the parents provide.  Since high educational achievement is correlated with high IQ, and since the higher paying jobs in a highly technological and mentally challenging economy require higher intelligence, what we see here is the emergence of what Charles Murray has called a "cognitive elite."  So if we really wanted to reduce economic inequality, we would have to prohibit intelligent and well-educated people from marrying other intelligent and well-educated people.

Consequently, people can raise their chances of becoming wealthy by getting a good education, by getting married to other well-educated people, by getting lots of professional work experience, and by forming two-income households.  When people do this, they create economic inequality.  But this is good inequality.

Some of my posts on Piketty, Murray, and economic inequality can be found here, here, here, here, here, here., here, here., here., here, here., and here.

The Rhetoric of Aristotle's Praise of the Philosophic Life as the Only Happy Life

In some previous posts here, here, here, here, here. and here.  I have argued that Aristotle's arguments for the supremacy of the contemplative life in book 10 (chapters 7 and 8) of the Nicomachean Ethics are dubious in ways that suggest that Aristotle is not endorsing these arguments, and that the true peak of the Ethics is in the books on friendship where Aristotle presents an inclusive conception of the human good as a range of moral and intellectual goods.  In this way, I am challenging the Straussian reading of the Ethics as moving towards the transmoral and transpolitical life of philosophy in book 10 as the peak of the human good.

If this is correct, then Aristotle's arguments for the philosophic life as the only truly good life, set apart from and above the moral life, might be seen as an exercise in rhetoric for those of his readers who are Platonic philosophers.  Aristotle indicates in the Politics (1267a1-13) that for those who desire a life of pure pleasure unmixed with pain that can be enjoyed without dependence on other people, philosophy is the best remedy.  For such people, describing philosophic contemplation as a godlike, self-contained activity might be the best rhetorical strategy.

In Aristotle's Rhetoric, he emphasizes that the successful rhetorician must respect the opinions of his audience.  Particularly, in epideictic rhetoric of praise and blame, he explains:

"It is necessary to consider in whose presence we praise; for, as Socrates said, it is not difficult to praise Athenians among Athenians.  We must also speak of what is honored by the particular audience as actually existing there, such as among Scythians, Lacedaemonians, or philosophers.  And generally what is honored is to be referred to the noble, since they seem to border upon one another" (1367b7-12).

This remark occurs in the context of Aristotle's claim that the rhetorician must praise what appears noble to the audience, and the audience tends to assume that what they honor is truly noble.  The problem is that different audiences honor different things and therefore have different conceptions of the noble.  The rhetorician must respect those differences.  Furthermore, Aristotle indicates that philosophers constitute a distinct audience in that they have their own standards of honor and nobility.  It seems likely, therefore, that when Aristotle, in the Ethics, praises the activity of solitary philosophic contemplation as the most honorable and noblest activity (1141a20, 1141b3, 1177a16, 1178a2), he is making a rhetorical appeal to the Platonic philosophers among his readers.  It is not difficult to praise philosophers among philosophers.

The common opinion of philosophers, Aristotle indicates, is that the philosophic life is godlike because it consists in the contemplation of objects that are unchangeable and eternal.  For Plato, the unchangeable and eternal objects of philosophy are the Ideas.  Aristotle rejects the doctrine of the Ideas, particularly as applied to the study of the human good.  The Idea of the Good, Aristotle argues in the Ethics, "is no more good by being eternal, just as a white thing that exists for a long time is not whiter than a white thing that exists for a day" (1096b3-4).

More common than Plato's doctrine of the Ideas, Aristotle suggests in the Ethics, is the belief that the unchangeable and eternal objects of philosophic contemplation are the heavenly bodies--the Sun, the Moon, and the stars.  It is commonly thought that the life of wisdom is completely lacking in prudence, because while the prudent man studies the changeable and contingent affairs of human life, the wise man studies the unchangeable and eternal bodies of the cosmos (1141a30-41b2).

Although Aristotle speculates in some of his writings on the nature of the heavenly bodies, he concedes that such speculations are largely matters of "faith" (pistis) that depend on traditional myths handed down from the earliest times, and therefore such matters cannot be settled by demonstrative reasoning (Topics, 104b1-18; On the Heavens, 270b1-26, 279b4-12, 283a30-84b5, 291b24-92a10; Metaphysics, 1074b1-14).  Consequently, Moses Maimonides could claim that Aristotle's arguments for the eternity of the cosmos were rhetorical rather than demonstrative (The Guide of the Perplexed, II, 13-15).

In contrast to the common view that the highest activity of philosophy is the cosmological study of the unchanging and immortal bodies of the heavens, a large part of Aristotle's philosophical writings is devoted to the biological study of the contingent and mortal bodies of living organisms.  At the beginning of his Parts of Animals, Aristotle defends the philosophical dignity of his biological studies:

"Of substances that are composed by nature, some are ungenerable and indestructible throughout eternity, while others partake of generation and destruction.  The former are honorable and divine but less subject to investigation by man (for there is little evidence from sensation that we can use to make inquiries about those things that we aspire to understand); but concerning plants and animals, which are destructible, there is much more information to use for knowledge, because they are all around us. . . . The knowledge of terrestrial things exceeds that of divine substances because of its greater accuracy and scope, and our knowledge of terrestrial things has the advantage that they are nearer to us and more akin to our nature. . . . Even in the case of those animals that do not delight our senses, nevertheless the nature that designed them gives inconceivable pleasures to those of us who are by nature philosophers and are able to gain theoretical knowledge of causes" (644b22-45a11).

Aristotle's defense of biology as a philosophical science is important for our reading of his Ethics and Politics, because this should lead us to consider the possibility that for Aristotle ethics and politics are biological sciences.  Aristotle's biological study of human beings affirms the psychophysical unity of their nature, in which mind and body are separable in speech but inseparable in reality.  And so for the philosophic life to be a human life, it must be a rational life of embodied intellect, a social life of friends who live together by talking and thinking together, and thus a moral life based on mutuality and reciprocity.

Furthermore, recognizing the biological character of Aristotle's philosophizing should make us wonder whether modern Darwinian biology can sustain Aristotle's biological naturalism.