The Confucian Way (4): Confucian Libertarianism?

For those of us shaped by Western cultural traditions, it's important to study Eastern traditions, because it forces us to consider whether our way of thinking is peculiar to the West, or whether it can account for Eastern experience as well.

So, for example, while libertarian individualism has deep roots in Western history, some people argue that this tradition of thought is so peculiarly Western that it has no application to the East. We can see this in the popular claim that the "Asian values" of communitarian authority are opposed to the "Western values" of individual liberty, and therefore to invoke Western notions of liberty and rights in judging Eastern moral and political practices is an arbitrary imposition of Western culture on the East. Moreover, it is sometimes suggested, Eastern communitarianism might actually be morally superior to Western individualism.

This can be confusing. On the one hand, the critics of the West sometimes seem to be claiming cultural relativism, by which no cultural tradition can be judged by comparison with another. On the other hand, these critics sometimes seem to be claiming the superiority of Eastern traditions, which assumes there is some universal standard for judging some traditions superior to others.

Most libertarians want to argue that the goodness of individual liberty--in economics, politics, and morality--is universally applicable to all human beings everywhere throughout history, and therefore it should be recognizable in all cultural traditions. For that reason, some libertarians have looked for libertarian thinking in ancient Chinese thought. Murray Rothbard and David Boaz have claimed that the first libertarian was the founder of Taoism--Laozi (Lao-tzu), the author of Daodejing (Tao Te Ching. In fact, one can find in Laozi's writing and in the writing of other Taoists the idea that good human order arises best through spontaneous order, free from the evils of governmental coercion and central planning.

But I am persuaded by the reasoning of Roderick Long, a philosophy professor at Auburn University, who shows how the Confucians are better libertarians than the Taoists. Long agrees with Rothbard and Boaz that the key idea is spontaneous order, and he agrees that the Taoists did have some understanding of spontaneous order. But he shows that the Confucians had a better understanding of how spontaneous order could support the moral, economic, political, and intellectual progress of humanity in moving towards what Friedrich Hayek called "the great society of free men."

Spontaneous order refers to an ordered pattern that emerges without being the product of anyone's deliberate design, but only as an unplanned outcome of the mutual adjustment of its parts. For example, language is a spontaneous order, because a language emerges from an evolutionary history of linguistic practice in which every individual speaker or writer can have some influence, but the order of the language at any one point in time is not the product of anyone's deliberate design. Similarly, all enduring social practices--such as law, economics, morality, and religion--arise as evolutionary spontaneous orders. To try to replace such evolved spontaneous orders with deliberately planned orders under the power of a few human planners is both inefficient (because human knowledge is limited) and tyrannical (because human virtue is limited).

The attraction that Lao-tzu has for libertarians is clear. For instance, the following quotation from Lao-tzu is the epigram for the Epilogue of Rasmussen and Den Uyl's Norms of Liberty (p. 340):

"If I keep from meddling with people, they take care of themselves,
"If I keep from commanding people, they behave themselves,
"If I keep from preaching at people, they improve themselves,
"If I keep from imposing on people, they become themselves."

But as Long indicates, Lao-tzu and the Taoists were primitivists who believed that the only way to avoid commanding people or imposing on them was to return to a primitive life without government, commerce, or any of the moral and intellectual development that comes from civilization. Rothbard acknowledges this point when he speaks of the Taoists as teaching "withdrawal from society and the world." Rothbard suggests, however, that Lao-tzu taught this not as a principle, "but as the only strategy that in his despair seemed open to him," because "it was hopeless to try to disentangle society from the oppressive coils of the State." Against this defense of the Taoists as true libertarians, Long rightly argues that the Confucians were able to see the compatibility of liberty and civilization through combining a free society with limited government.

My contribution to Long's argument is to suggest how Darwinian evolutionary science supports this Confucian libertarianism by explaining social order as the evolutionary joint product of natural desires, cultural traditions, and individual judgments.

In doing this, I correct a big mistake in Hayek's explanation of spontaneous order. As I have indicated in Darwinian Conservatism (20-26), Hayek insists that "what has made men good is neither nature nor reason but tradition." I agree with him in rejecting the simple dichotomy between nature and reason as the only two sources of social and moral order, because this ignores the place of custom or habit as that which comes "between instinct and reason." But he is mistaken in so elevating customary tradition over nature and reason that tradition becomes the only source of morality and social order for human beings.

From a Darwinian point of view, human social order arises from both spontaneous order and deliberate order. It arises from the complex interaction of two kinds of spontaneous order--human nature and human tradition--and the deliberate order of human judgment. Human nature is a spontaneous order, because it has arisen through genetic evolution by natural selection, in which complex order emerges without a designer. Human tradition is a spontaneous order, because the customs of social life develop over history through an evolutionary process of random variation and selective retention to create complex traditions of social practice that have not been intentionally designed. Human judgment can be a source of deliberate order, because the human capacity for deliberating about present actions in the light of past experience and future expectations allows human beings to deliberately choose courses of action designed to satisfy their desires. Social biology broadly conceived encompasses all three sources of social order--human nature, human tradition, and human judgment.

The Confucians see the importance of all three. They agree with Hayek in stressing the importance of tradition--the customary, ritualistic norms of behavior--for the spontaneous order of society. Long rightly emphasizes this agreement in making his argument for the Confucians as Hayekian libertarians. But the Confucians also see that cultural traditions presuppose, and are constrained by, the innate propensities of human nature, and they also see that human beings must exercise prudential judgment in deciding what should be done in particular cases, although this judgment is constrained by both nature and tradition.


HUMAN NATURE
Mencius is famous for teaching that human nature is good. What he means by this is not that all human beings are always good, which would be a silly claim, but that the development of the human good is the fulfillment of natural emotional propensities for compassion, indignation, respect, and social approval (3A1, 6A6). So, for example, someone seeing a child about to fall into a well would immediately feel sympathetic concern for the child and would want to protect the child from harm (2A6).

Human nature is not a matter of deterministic necessities that always occur regardless of the circumstances, but of innate propensities that generally occur in suitable circumstances. For Mencius, the "nature" (xing) of something is what it becomes when it matures in a healthy environment (4B26, 6A1-8, 7A21, 7B24). Cultivating moral virtue is like a farmer cultivating the growth of his sprouts. It would be foolish for the farmer to pull on his sprouts to make then grow. But it would be just as foolish for the farmer not to water or weed his sprouts. Nature must be nurtured according to its inborn inclinations (2A2).

I have argued for "Darwinian natural right," based on the claim that the good is the desirable, and that there are at least twenty natural desires rooted in evolved human nature. The Confucians show a similar line of thought when they explain moral norms as providing the orderly satisfaction of natural desires. For example, Xunzi writes:

"From what did ritual arise? I say: Humans are born having desires. When they have desires but do not get the objects of their desires, then they cannot but seek some means of satisfaction. If thee is no measure or limit to their seeking, they they cannot help but struggle with each other. If they struggle with each other, then there will be chaos, and if there is chaos, then they will be impoverished. The former kings hated such chaos, and so they established rituals and the standards of righteousness in order to allot things to people, to nurture their desires, and to satisfy their seeking. They caused desires never to exhaust material goods, and material goods never to be depleted by desires, so that the two support each other and prosper. This is how ritual arose." (chap. 19)

So while "rituals" (li)--formalized behavior of ceremonial performances for funerals, music, dance, and matters of etiquette--are artificial, they arose as a way of expressing and channelling natural desires to show respect for others. The rituals for burying and mourning the dead illustrate this. Mencius observes:

"Now, in past ages, there were those who did not bury their parents. When their parents died, they took them and abandoned them in a gulley. The next day they passed by them, and foxes were eating them, bugs were sucking on them. Sweat broke out on the survivors' foreheads. they turned away and did not look. It was not for the sake of others that they sweated. What was inside their hearts broke through to their countenances. So they went home and, returning with baskets and shovels, covered them. If covering them was really right, then the manner in which filial children and benevolent people cover their parents must also be part of the Way" (3A5.4).

The rituals for children burying their parents are formalized refinements of their natural emotional responses. Similarly, as Confucius argued, the socially prescribed period for mourning the death of parents is a customary expression of natural emotions that arise from the natural bond between parent and child, which is rooted in the biological dependence of children on parental care (Analects, 17.21). As I have indicated in a previous post, this conforms to Darwin's thought that the natural social instincts of human beings are ultimately grounded in parental care and filial affections.

Darwin thought that the extension of social concern beyond one's immediate family came through sympathy--the capacity and inclination to share the feelings of others. Adam Smith saw sympathy as the natural ground of moral sentiments. Darwin adopted this idea and sought to explain its evolutionary roots. He saw the extension of sympathy and moral concern to ever wider circles of human beings as the natural ground for the Golden Rule--do unto others as you would have them do unto you--which he regarded as "the foundation of morality." Recent research in Darwinian moral psychology and neuroscience shows the moral importance of sympathy or empathy and how this seems to be rooted in "mirror neurons" and other neural mechanisms for sharing the experiences of others.

The same kind of thought was expressed by Confucius when he was asked whether there was one word that could be the guide for one's entire life. "Is it not 'understanding' (shu)? Do not impose upon others what you yourself do not desire" (Analects, 15.24). The Chinese term shu refers to a character with components meaning "comparing" (ru) and "heart or mind" (xin). So it can be variously translated as "likening to oneself," "putting oneself in another's place," "sympathetic understanding," or "reciprocity." As Confucius indicates, this naturally supports the principle of the Golden Rule.

Although the Golden Rule was first formulated by the ancient Chinese philosophers, they disagreed about what it required. Some of them understood the Golden Rule as requiring universal love that would be utterly impartial. So Laozi taught:

"I am good to those who are good;
"I also am good to those who are not good;
"This is to be good out of Virtue.
"I trust the trustworthy;
"I also trust the untrustworthy.
"This is to trust out of virtue or kindness (de)" (chap. 49).

"No matter how great or small, many or few,
"Repay injury with virtue or kindness" (chap. 63).

Confucius disagreed. When he was asked what he thought of the saying, "Repay injury with kindness," Confucius answered: "With what, then, would one repay kindness? Repay injury with uprightness, and kindness with kindness" (Analects, 14.34). The Confucian version of the Golden Rule teaches a discriminate reciprocity that rewards kindness and punishes injury. An indiscriminate love that would reward harmful behavior would promote social disorder. It would seem, then, that Confucius would reject the teaching of Jesus about loving one's enemies as contrary to the natural conditions for social order.

Similarly, Confucius and Mencius reject the idea that human beings should love all human beings equally, because they see this as contrary to human nature in denying the natural human disposition to love one's family and those close to one more strongly than strangers.

This natural disposition to discriminate reciprocity--returning good for good and injury for injury--is also expressed in the natural inclination of people to rebel against unjust rulers by refusing to fight for them, by fighting against them, by assassinating them, or by running away to another state. Human beings are naturally inclined to resist exploitation by tyrannical rulers (Analects, 13.15; Mencius, 1B8, 4A2, 5A5, 5B9). As Long indicates, this supports the libertarian principle that governments must compete for popular support by satisfying the natural human desires.

HUMAN TRADITION
Within the broad constraints set by human nature, different societies generate different cultural traditions. The capacity for moral experience is innate in human nature, but this natural moral propensity must be cultivated by moral traditions transmitted through family life and social life generally. The Confucian philosophers stressed the importance of observing the ancient traditional practices inherited from one's ancestors as essential for preserving the moral order of society. Darwin made the same point in arguing that moral progress came mostly from cultural evolution working through habituation, imitation, and the sensitivity of individuals to social approbation and disapprobation.

Some of the defenders of "Asian values" against Western individualism argue that the great fault of individualism is in failing to appreciate the communitarian authority of social traditions. But as Long rightly indicates, this is a false conception of individualism. After all, Hayek defends the "true individualism" that recognizes that a free society is impossible without family life and social groups organized by common conventions and traditions. Without such inherited traditions of moral life to provide rules for social life, we would have to rely on governmental coercion. In a free society that minimizes coercion, most of the social coordination of human activity arises from the spontaneous order of traditional social norms (Hayek, "Individualism: True and False").

Hayek identifies this insight with "the British evolutionary tradition."

"To the empiricist evolutionary tradition, . . . the value of freedom consists mainly in the opportunity it provides for the growth of the undesigned, and the beneficial functioning of a free society rests largely on the existence of such freely grown institutions. There probably never has existed a genuine belief in freedom, and there has certainly been no successful attempt to operate a free society, without a genuine reverence for grown institutions, for customs and habits and 'all those securities of liberty which arise from regulation of long prescription and ancient ways.' Paradoxical as it may appear, it is probably true that a successful free society will always in a large measure be a tradition-bound society" (The Constitution of Liberty, 61).

Although Hayek identified himself as a classical liberal rather than a conservative, and although Long contrasts Hayek's libertarianism to conservatism, one can see here that Hayek's libertarian liberalism was compatible with traditionalist conservatism, because he saw that Burkean evolutionary traditionalism was essential for a free society. (This corresponds to the Aristotelian liberalism of Rasmussen and Den Uyl and the conservative fusionism of Frank Meyer.) Moreover, this Hayekian insight that a "free society will always in a large measure be a tradition-bound society" supports the idea of a Confucian libertarianism.

Hayek and other libertarians believe that part of the evolving traditional order of a free society is the spontaneous economic order of free markets. But one might object here that surely Confucian thought cannot be understood as compatible with libertarian economics, because the Confucians were often scornful of commercial life. But as Long shows, some of the Confucians saw the value of commerce and free markets as necessary for the kind of civilized life that would satisfy human natural desires, and they often argued for low tax rates (around 10%) to foster productive economic activity.

Confucius criticized one of his students, Zigong, for going into business speculation (Analects 11.19). But later, Sima Qian, in his history of the Han dynasty, disagreed with Confucius. Sima wrote a chapter on "The Biographies of the Money-Makers" that defended Zigong and those like him. He pointed out that Zigong's well-earned wealth allowed him to spread Confucius' teaching. And he praised the laissez-faire policies of the Han dynasty as promoting commercial activity in ways that satisfied the human needs of a civilized society. He wrote:

"The region west of the mountains is rich in timber, bamboo, paper mulberry, hemp, oxtails for banner tassels, jade and other precious stones. That east of the mountains abounds in fish, salt, lacquer, silk, singers, and beautiful women. The area south of the Yangtze produces camphor wood, catalpa, ginger, cinnamon, gold, tin, lead ore, cinnabar, rhinoceros horns,tortoise shell, pearls of various shapes, and elephant tusks and hides, while that north of Longmen and Jieshi is rich in horses, cattle, sheep, felt, furs, tendons, and horns. Mountains from which copper and iron can be extracted are found scattered here and there over thousands of miles of the empire, like chessmen on a board. In general, these are the products of the empire. All of them are commodities coveted by the people of China, who according to their various customs use them for their bedding, clothing, food, and drink, fashioning from them the goods needed to supply the living and bury the dead."

"Society obviously must have farmers before it can eat; foresters, fishermen, miners, etc., before it can make use of natural resources; craftsmen before it can have manufactured goods; and merchants before they can be distributed. But once these exist, what need is there for government directives, mobilization of labor, or periodic assemblies? Each man has only to be left to utilize his own abilities and exert his strength to obtain what he wishes. Thus, when a commodity is very cheap, it invites a rise in price, when it is very expensive, it invites a reduction. When each person works only away at his own occupation and delights in his own business, then, like water flowing downward, goods will naturally flow forth ceaselessly day and night without having been summoned, and the people will produce commodities without having been asked. Does this not tally with reason? Is it not a natural result?" (Shi ji, 129).

Thus, the traditional order of a free society allows for a spontaneous order of economic activity emerging through free exchange, prices, and a division of labor.

HUMAN JUDGMENT
Within the constraints of human nature and human tradition, human beings must exercise judgment whenever they decide to reform an existing tradition of rules, or whenever they must decide what to do in particular cases where the existing rules don't properly cover the cases. While the Confucians condemn innovations in customary practices that attempt to reconstruct social practices from the ground up, they recognize the wisdom in exercising prudential judgment that reforms a tradition from within the tradition itself. Moreover, judging what should be done in exceptional circumstances where general rules are inadequate requires "discretion" (quan) (Analects, 9.3; Mencius, 4A17, 6B1, 7A26).

Hayek recognizes the need for discretionary or prudential judgment when he speaks of how we can rightly criticize customary rules. "All valid criticism or improvement of rules of conduct must proceed within a given system of such rules." This is what he calls "immanent criticism." He observes: "It may at first seem puzzling that something that is the product of tradition should be capable of both being the object and the standard of criticism. But we do not maintain that all tradition as such is sacred and exempt from criticism, but merly that the basis of criticism of any one product of tradition must always be other products of tradition which we either cannot or do not want to question; in other words, that particular aspects of a culture can be critically examined only within the context of that culture. . . . we can always only tinker with parts of a given whole but never entirely redesign it" (Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 2, pp. 24-25).

Hayek's idea of the "immanent criticism" of a tradition is obviously very close to C. S. Lewis's idea about how any criticism of the Tao must be from within the Tao itself. While I accept this idea, I would add that our criticism of a tradition can appeal to human nature, so that we can judge a tradition by whether it satisfies or frustrates a natural human desire. So, for example, as the Confucians suggest, we can judge the traditional practices of burial and mourning the dead as to how well they express and channel our natural emotions of bereavement. This appeal to human nature is sometimes ignored in Hayek's writing when he appears to fall into a simple cultural relativism free from any natural standards.

Hayek can't be a simple cultural relativist in so far as he believes that classical liberalism, with its devotion to a free society, is best adapted to human flourishing. Hayek's whole life as a scholar arguing for classical liberalism manifested his conviction that "it is ideas and therefore the men who give currency to new ideas that govern evolution" (The Constitution of Liberty, 112).

Great thinkers exercise their judgment in formulating and promoting ideas that can gradually spread through society in a way that influences the cultural evolution of social tradition. Confucius and his students did this in initiating a Confucian tradition of thought in Asia. Hayek and other classical liberal scholars have done this in advancing a liberal tradition of thought that has influenced cultural evolution around the world.

During most of the twentieth century, it seemed that the ideas of classical liberalism were being defeated by the ideas of socialism and statist liberalism. By the end of the century, it seemed that those classical liberal ideas were gaining influence throughout the world. Now, it seems that the cultural evolution of ideas is moving back again in favor of central planning and statist coercion. But if the classical liberal ideas of the free society really do conform to our natural human desires for liberty and virtue, then those ideas will never lose their appeal to the human mind and heart.

Is Biopolitical Science Predictive?

I have just finished revising an article on "Biopolitical Science" for publication in Politics and the Life Sciences, the journal of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences. When I first began working on this paper a few years ago, it was entitled "Darwinian Political Science."

In this article, I develop a theoretical framework for biopolitical science as a science of political animals. This science moves through three levels of deep political history--the universal political history of the species, the cultural political history of the group, and the individual political history of animals in the group. To illustrate the particular application of biopolitical science, I show how this science would help us to understand Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863.

At the end of the article, I respond to some of the likely objections to my argument. One objection is that the biopolitical science I have sketched lacks the predictive power necessary for a true science. After all, some critics might say, the ultimate aim of a true science of politics is not just to interpret political events in the past (like Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation), but to predict the future course of political events through scientific laws of political behavior.

In answering this objection, I argue that because of the complexity and freedom of human political behavior, any science of politics must be a science of history based on historical narratives. By contrast with non-historical sciences, historical sciences have only limited predictive power. At best, political science can make general predictions about political patterns. But it cannot make specific predictions about political events. Biopolitical science deepens the historical narratives of political science by grounding them in the evolutionary history of political animals, which moves through three kinds of historical narratives: natural history, cultural history, and biographical history. And yet this biopolitical history cannot provide the precise predictions that are possible in the non-historical sciences.

Evolutionary biology and the social sciences are historical sciences of emergent complexity. By contrast, physical sciences such as physics and chemistry are non-historical sciences of reductive simplicity. Except for historical disciplines such as cosmology and geology, physical scientists study physical phenomena without reference to their history.

Many social scientists--particularly, economists--have taken physics as the model for all science, and they have tried to unify the social sciences as founded on a social physics free from historical contingency. But biopolitical science rejects this approach. Biopolitical science recognizes that social phenomena are necessarily historical, and therefore they can only be explained through historical narratives, which cannot have the predictive precision that is achieved through the deterministic laws of the physical sciences. Pursuing social physics sacrifices accuracy for the sake of precision, because it ignores the fuzzy complexity and historical contingency of social reality. Pursuing biopolitical history sacrifices precision for the sake of accuracy, because it recognizes that fuzzy complexity and historical contingency.

Although biopolitical science cannot provide deterministic laws, it can provide probabilistic regularities, which support falsifiable but fuzzy predictions of behavioral patterns. For example, evolutionary game theory has developed formal models of the natural behavioral repertoire that I lay out in this article, and those models can generate falsifiable predictions that can be tested through experimental game playing. This research shows a complex interaction between natural history, cultural history, and individual history. There are some universal behavioral patterns that manifest a natural history of the human species that has shaped human beings to be both self-regarding and other-regarding. But there is great cultural variation in that behavior that manifests a cultural history that has shaped some societies to be quite different from others. And yet there is also great variation across individuals that cannot be precisely predicted from what we know about natural and cultural history.

Consider, for instance, the playing of the "ultimatum game." In this game, there are two players under conditions of anonymity. Both players are told there is a specified sum of money to be divided between the two players. One player is told to propose a division of the money to the other player. The responding player can either accept or reject the proposal. If the responder accepts the proposal, the money will be divided as proposed. If the responder rejects the proposal, then neither player receives any money.

Assuming that human beings are purely self-regarding egoists, rational choice theorists will predict that the responder will accept any proposed division, because any money is better than none, while the proposer will want to take most of the money and give the responder as little as possible. But Darwinian evolutionary theorists, who think human beings have evolved to have other-regarding moral concerns, will predict that responders will indignantly reject unfair offers, and proposers will feel obligated to offer fair divisions of the money, somewhere around an even split. The Darwinians predict that human beings will on average show a sense of fairness in reciprocity by their willingness to punish those who make unfair offers, even when inflicting the punishment is costly to the punisher.

The experimental play of the ultimatum game generally confirms the predictions of the Darwinians--in most cases, responders reject unfair proposals, and proposers feel compelled to offer fair divisions. But while this evidence suggests that a sense of fairness is part of the natural behavioral pattern of most human beings, a substantial portion of the participants in these experiments (about one quarter) behave in a purely selfish manner. And in a few societies around the world--particularly, in small-scale societies where there is no experience with market exchange to cultivate a culture of reciprocal fairness--almost everyone behaves in a purely selfish manner. So, although we can't make specific predictions based on deterministic laws, we can make general predictions based on probabilistic propensities.

Similarly, political scientists could not have precisely predicted Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. But they could have predicted that chattel slavery would provoke resistance from those who saw that it violates the natural desire for justice as reciprocity, and they might have predicted that the cultural history of American constitutionalism would create opportunities for ambitious political actors to satisfy their desire for glory by promoting the ultimate extinction of slavery.

Once Lincoln issued the Proclamation, political scientists could begin a debate over what kind of historical narrative best accounts for that political event. Biopolitical science contributes to that debate by providing a broad theoretical framework for such a historical narrative as moving through the natural history of slavery, the cultural history of slavery in America, and the biographical history of Lincoln as the political actor who won his glory in becoming the Great Emancipator.

Some related posts can be found here here, here, and .here.

The Confucian Way (3): C. S. Lewis and the Tao

A Darwinian science of virtue explains moral order as a joint product of natural propensities, cultural traditions, and individual judgments. It is a mistake to try to reduce morality to one of these three without the others, because each is necessary but not sufficient. Human moral order requires certain natural propensities of the human species as shaped by the history of genetic evolution. But then these natural propensities must be developed through individual habituation and social customs as shaped by the history of cultural evolution. And, finally, we should see that mature adults can deliberately reflect on their individual habits and social customs and exercise their judgment about possibly reforming some of those habits and customs, but without expecting a radical reconstruction that would sweep away all that has gone before. If it is not to be an exercise in utopian fantasy, deliberate choice will always be constrained by human nature and human culture.

One instructive way to think about this tripartite scheme for explaining morality--nature, custom, and judgment--is to see how it runs through the moral reasoning of C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, Darwin's The Descent of Man, and Confucius' Analects. Lewis shows how morality requires moral sentiments that combine emotion and reason as expressed in the universal moral standards of what Lewis calls the Tao, which arises from the complex interaction of human nature, human tradition, and human judgment. Lewis imagines that "a new Natural Philosophy" or "regenerate science" could explain this natural morality scientifically. Darwin's science of the moral sense as rooted in evolved human nature provides the natural science of morality that Lewis seeks. Lewis takes his idea of the Tao from Confucius's Analects. And, in fact, the Confucian tradition of morality illustrates the moral order of nature, custom, and judgment as understood by Lewis and Darwin.

Lewis begins The Abolition of Man as a response to an elementary textbook on English that expresses what Lewis regards as a common but mistaken view of moral language. The authors of the textbook take up the story of Coleridge at a waterfall. When one tourist says the waterfall is "sublime," and another says it is "pretty," Coleridge endorses the first and scorns the second. According to the authors, this illustrates a common confusion in the use of language. These people thought they were making remarks about the waterfall, but in fact they were only making remarks about their feelings. "This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings."

Lewis infers that "the schoolboy who reads this passage . . . will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and, secondly, that all such statements are unimportant" (15). Lewis objects to the implicit separation between the objective world of facts as knowable by reason and the subjective world of values as an expression of emotion. This is a false dichotomy because it ignores the possibility that emotions can be either reasonable or unreasonable, depending on whether the emotions are appropriate responses to reality.

"Until quite modern times," Lewis observes, "all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it--believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt" (25). Lewis believes that this conception was shared by all the great traditions of moral thought--"Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike"--and it is this that he identifies, following Confucius, as "the Tao."

At the root of the Tao--the universal standards of traditional morality--Lewis sees one fundamental thought:

"It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself--just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgment: in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it" (29-30).

Lewis insists that the practical principles of the Tao must be accepted if we are to have any practical principles at all. These principles are both sentimental and rational. They are sentimental, because pure reason by itself cannot move us to action without emotional motivation (33-35, 53). They are rational, not in the sense of theoretical rationality, but in the sense of practical rationality, because they constitute the axioms of "Practical Reason"--the self-evident premises of practical judgment that are "so obviously reasonable that they neither demand nor admit proof" (52-53).

As an indication of their self-evident character, these principles of practical rationality provide the only source for all value judgments. This is not just one system of value, it is the only system of value. Any attempt to totally reject it and create some new system of value becomes self-contradictory, because any supposedly new values turn out to be fragments of the old values. "There never has been and never will be a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. . . . The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in" (56-57).

Lewis sees the Tao as manifested in three levels of social order--human nature, human traditions, and human judgments. At the first level, the Tao is "Natural Law" (56, 95). "Nature" has many senses, and if we define it in opposition to "the Artificial, the Civil, the Human, the Spiritual, and the Supernatural" (81), then the Tao is not natural. But it is natural in the sense that it belongs to "the very nature of man," because it provides "a common human law of action" (31, 84). The Tao is "the Tao of Man," it is the "only known reality of conscience" that distinguishes human nature from the rest of nature (62, 90).

The nature of Lewis's natural law is not cosmic nature as a whole, but human nature in particular. Cosmic nature cannot provide values for human life, Lewis suggests, because "nature as a whole, I understand, is working steadily and irreversibly towards the final extinction of all life in every part of the universe" (50).

Although natural law is often assumed to come from a supernatural lawgiver, Lewis insists that understanding the Tao as natural law does not require any belief in the supernatural. He writes:

"Though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reasoning as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become sceptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more 'realistic' basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not here concerned with" (61).

At the second level of social order, the Tao corresponds to human cultural traditions--"the human tradition of value," "traditional values," "traditional morality," or "traditional humanity" (54-55, 76, 78, 85). In the Appendix to his book, Lewis provides "Illustrations of the Tao" that consist of short quotations from some ancient texts of moral teaching from Egypt, Babylonia, Israel, Greece, Rome, India, China, Scandinavia, and Anglo-Saxon England, and a few texts from early modern England. Lewis's Appendix shows great cultural variability in the moral traditions of human history. But it also shows recurrent themes that reflect how universal human nature constrains these moral traditions--as manifested in Lewis's eight categories of classification: the law of general beneficence, the law of special beneficence, duties to parents, elders, and ancestors, duties to children and posterity, the law of justice, the law of good faith and veracity, the law of mercy, and the law of magnanimity.

At the third level of social order, the Tao allows for individual judgments of value, but only within the broad constraints of human nature and human tradition. Lewis admits that traditional moralities show many contradictions and some absurdities, which invite criticism and improvement. Although the Tao does not permit criticisms and changes coming from outside the Tao--because there are no standards of value outside it--the Tao does permit development from within. So, for example, we can recognize that the Christian version of the Golden Rule--"Do as you would be done by"--is a real improvement over the Confucian version--"Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you"--because we can see that the new positive statement of the rule is an extension of the old negative statement (57-58). Individuals have authority to modify the Tao only insofar as their modifications are within the "spirit of the Tao" (59).

Lewis rejects utopian schemes for radically altering the human condition through biological technology and sociological conditioning, because such utopianism tries to step outside the constraints of human nature and human tradition in a way that can only foster absolute tyranny. In the past, such utopian projects have been frustrated by human resistance. So, for example, proposals for abolishing the natural bonds between parents and children (as in Plato's Republic) have failed to overcome "the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children" (73). But Lewis worries that modern statism with the technology of modern science (such as eugenics) might actually succeed in creating "the world of post-humanity," which would really be the utter dehumanization of humanity, the "abolition of man" carried out by the tyrannical power of some men over others (73, 77, 86).

Although he does not explicitly mention Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Lewis probably has in mind this modern vision of a dehumanized utopia shaped by eugenic engineering and propaganda under the rule of an omnicompetent state. Those like Leon Kass who worry about biotechnology leading to a "posthumanity" of dehumanized degradation have been influenced by Lewis's book as combined with Huxley's novel.

Lewis worries that modern science, with its reductionistic view of human beings and its devotion to the mastery of nature, supports the "abolition of man" that he fears, because while such a science has great power, it lacks the understanding of, or respect for, the traditional morality that alone can provide guidance for the proper use of such power.

And yet, Lewis foresees that "from Science herself the cure might come," if there could be "a new Natural Philosophy" that would not be reductionistic:

"When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying It, it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation. The analogy between the Tao of Man and the instincts of an animal species would mean for it new light cast on the unknown thing, Instinct, by the only known reality of conscience and not a reduction of conscience to the category of Instinct. Its followers would not be free with the words only and merely. In a word, it would conquer Nature without being at the same time conquered by her and buy knowledge at a lower cost than that of life" (89-90).

My argument is that a Darwinian account of morality as grounded in the evolved human nature of the moral sense provides the "new Natural Philosophy" sought by Lewis. (Early in his intellectual career, Leon Kass was trying to develop this new Darwinian natural philosophy, until he turned later in his life to his studies of the Hebrew Bible as a religious basis for morality.) Moreover, we can look to the Confucian tradition of morality as an illustration of how our evolved moral sense expresses itself in our natural propensities, our cultural traditions, and our individual judgments.

I will take up those points in subsequent posts.

For some previous posts on Lewis, go here, here, here, here, and here.

The Confucian Way (2): Filial Piety and the Practical Syllogism

If we consider the large number of people whose way of life in China has been shaped by it for 2,000 years, the Analects must be considered one of the two or three most influential books in all of human history. For that reason, any general view of human nature and human culture must give some account of the Confucian tradition as it arises in the Analects. Consequently, it's important for my defense of Darwinian natural right to show how it can make sense of that Confucian tradition as one expression of our evolved human nature.

Of course, for those of us who are Westerners with little knowledge of Chinese culture and language, reading the Analects is difficult. This book is a collection of short conversations that Confucius has with his students and other people. These conversations assume a knowledge of early Chinese history and of the individuals with whom Confucius speaks. They present Confucius as offering terse comments with almost no elaboration, which often leave the reader confused as to what exactly he's saying. Furthermore, the Chinese language--particularly, classical Chinese--suggests a complex multiplicity of meanings that cannot be fully conveyed in an English translation. The best that the English reader can do is to compare different English translations that have notes on Chinese history and the difficulties of translation. It also helps to learn something about the tradition of commentaries on the text, so that reading the book becomes a conversation with those commentators who have struggled over 2,000 years to think through the puzzles offered by the book.

I have found that Edward Slingerland's translation of the Analects, published by Hackett Publishing in 2003, satisfies most of these needs. Not only does he offer brief comments on the relevant history and on the ambiguity of the language, he also adds to each passage a brief survey of what some of the leading Chinese commentators have said about the passage. And yet I still find it necessary to compare Slingerland's translations with those of others--particularly, the classic translations by James Legge and Arthur Waley and the more recent translations by D.C. Lau and by Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont. In this post, I'll rely primarily on Slingerland's translations.


FILIAL PIETY
From the opening of the book, we are presented with Confucius as a teacher devoted to learning, whose learning is directed to the practical matters of social relationships and social behavior. The primary relationships are those within the family, and so the primary standards of behavior are filial piety and respect for elders. Master You (one of Confucius' students) says:

"A young person who is filial and respectful of his elders rarely becomes the kind of person who is inclined to defy his superiors, and there has never been a case of one who is disinclined to defy his superiors stirring up rebellion.

"The gentleman [junzi] applies himself to the roots. 'Once the roots are firmly established, the Way [dao] will grow.' Might we not say that filial piety and respect for elders constitute the root of Goodness (or authoritative conduct) [ren]" (1.2).

Thus, family life provides a model of social order based on hierarchy, with children being subordinate to their parents and younger family members being subordinate to the older ones.

A few passages later family life is situated within four great human relationships: husband-wife, parent-child, lord-minister, and friend to friend (1.7). The first three are relationships of superior to subordinate. But true friendships are relationships between equals (1.8), which resembles what Aristotle says about friendships of virtue as a relationship of mutual respect based on shared moral character.

Much of the teaching of Confucius concerns the importance of "ritual" (li) in organizing all human relationships and the need to restore the ancient rituals that once secured good social order. Much of that ritual is tied to filial piety and ancestor worship.

For example, Confucius laments that people of his time no longer observe the ancient mourning rituals, which required that sons mourned the death of his parents for three years, during which he ate only the simplest food, wore rough clothing, refrained from the pleasures of music and sex, and lived in a mourning hut. Confucius was criticized by those who thought this was impractical and who doubted that this was done even in ancient times. Zai Wo suggested that one year was long enough, after all this would imitate the one-year cycle of the seasons, and thus conform to the order of Heaven. Here's the response of Confucius:

"The Master asked, 'Would you feel comfortable then eating your sweet rice and wearing your brocade gowns?'

"'I would.'"

"The Master replied, 'Well, if you would feel comfortable doing so, then by all means you should do it. When the gentleman is in mourning, he gets no pleasure from eating sweet foods, finds no joy in listening to music, and feels no comfort in his place of dwelling. This is why he gives up these things. But if you feel comfortable do them, then by all means you should!"

"After Zai Wo left, the Master remarked, 'This shows how lacking in Goodness this Zai Wo is! A child is completely dependent upon the care of his parents for the first three years of his life--this is why the three-year mourning period is the common practice throughout the world. Did Zai Wo not receive three years of care from his parents?" (17.21)

Of course, a three-year mourning period really is not "the common practice throughout the world," unless one assumes, as Confucius does, that the Chinese world is the world. We can see that this is a cultural practice that varies across time and space. The mere fact that Confucius has to debate this shows that many Chinese have decided to change this practice even for themselves. So here's a case of cultural relativism.

But we can also see that some kind of ritual standard of mourning can be justified as rooted in the universal human nature of parental care. One of the most important features of human social life is that human beings are born as children dependent on parental care, and therefore the first and most primordial social relationship is parent to child. Filial piety secures this relationship, and we would expect the emotional tie of children to parents to be expressed as mourning when the parents die. Confucius points to this by suggesting that a three-year period of mourning shows a fitting recompense for the three years of infant dependence on parental care. So while the exact requirements for mourning parents are to a large degree culturally arbitrary and changeable, the practice of such mourning is not completely arbitrary if it reflects the natural emotions of a natural human relationship rooted in human biology.

Scholarly commentators have noted that Confucius never offers anything like a "theory of human nature" such as one might see in the writings of some of the later Confucians such as Mencius. But this overlooks the many ways in which Confucius implicitly appeals to human nature, even without any explicit theorizing. These comments by Confucius on mourning rituals illustrate this, because here he clearly assumes our natural experience of parental care as a natural biological desire.

THE CONFUCIAN PRACTICAL SYLLOGISM
In his Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Arguments in Ancient China (Open Court, 1989), A. C. Graham points to Confucius' discussion of ritual mourning with Zai Wo as illustrating the general pattern in Confucian moral philosophy: "The issue is a matter of taste, but tastes change with knowledge and experience. The proper duration of mourning is how long you want to mourn if you fully appreciate how much your parents have done for you; the Way is what you would want to do if you had the wisdom of the sage" (29). Graham sees here a "quasi-syllogistic formula" that runs through almost all of ancient Chinese thought:

"In awareness of everything relevant to the issue I find myself moved towards X; overlooking something relevant I find myself moved towards Y.

"In which direction shall I let myself be moved?.

"Be aware of everything relevant to the issue.

"Therefore let yourself be moved towards X."

Graham explains "everything relevant to the issue" as "every fact, sensation, emotion, which moves me spontaneously in one direction or another." Whether we are really "aware of everything relevant" can only be judged by experience in seeing whether we regret an action once we become aware of something relevant that we previously overlooked. To be aware of everything relevant means that we must imaginatively work through every viewpoint across space and time that might move us. This includes imaginatively putting ourselves in the viewpoints of others, which is conveyed by Confucius' concept of shu--"likening to oneself" or "sympathetic understanding" by which we put ourselves in the places of others--which supports Confucius' formulation of the Golden Rule (15.24).

Graham's quasi-syllogism looks like Aristotle's practical syllogism in explaining human action (as well as animal movement generally) as combining cognition and desire: if I have a desire, and if I am cognitively aware some action would satisfy that desire without frustrating some stronger desire, then I pursue that action. Thought by itself cannot move me without desire.

A HUMAN WORLD
This Confucian understanding of morality as satisfying our desires in the light of our awareness of how best to make our way in the world would not satisfy many modern moral philosophers in the West. Many philosophers would say that morality must be rooted in some transcendent reality of cosmic order outside the human mind--cosmic God, cosmic nature, or cosmic reason. For example, the Kantian would say that the moral "ought" belongs to an autonomous realm of pure reason--a "noumenal" realm--that is beyond the "phenomenal" realm of nature and human inclinations. So for Confucius to say that the morality of filial duty expresses the natural emotions of parent-child bonding can't be right, because this belongs to the prudential realm of hypothetical imperatives rather than the moral realm of categorical imperatives.

But that only shows that Confucian morality offers an empiricist alternative to the transcendentalist view of morality that dominates much of the history of modern moral philosophy. Graham writes:

"No thinker in this tradition objectivises the spontaneous in man, as morally neutral inclination to be utilized or checked in the service of ends chosen independently, by deducing from rational principles or by an Existentialist leap in the dark. To do so would lead to a quite different problematic, that of post-Kantian philosophy in the West. Is it a limitation of Chinese thought that it overlooked the approach which seems natural to ourselves? It may be more profitable to ask the questions from the opposite direction. How did I as a Westerner get trapped into pretending that I can fully objectivise the spontaneous in myself, shrink myself to a point of rational Ego pursing ends independent of my spontaneous goals, observing unmoved even my own emotions? What have I gained from following a line of thought which first detached supposedly rational ends from the goals of inclination, then failed to discover any rational grounds for them? I may indeed choose duty against present inclination, but am I not even then choosing the course which I spontaneously prefer in the perhaps rare moments when I can bring myself to see clearly from other people's viewpoints?" (387).

One might object, however, that Confucius really is transcendentalist in his view of morality as the "Mandate of Heaven." Doesn't this show that the ultimate authority of morality--the "oughtness" of moral duty--comes from its conformity to the divine or cosmic moral law of "Heaven"?

One problem, however, is that "Heaven" as a translation of tian conveys to Western minds the Biblical idea of a transcendent deity beyond or above the world that he has created, so that the Heavenly City must be separated from the Earthly City. But, even if tian had some transcendent meaning in pre-Confucian China, as providing the normative standard of the universe that human beings should imitate, Confucius himself refuses to talk about the possibility of a separate world of gods or spirits beyond the human world. In his "this-worldly" attitude, Confucius promotes a sense of the sacred as inherent in the ritualised social relationships of human life. It is said in the Analects that Confucius refuses to even discuss the possibility of spirits, divinity, or a life after death (6.22, 7.21, 8.7, 11.12). In trying to turn people to "the Way," Confucius seems to be pointing to what would be the best way for human beings to live their earthly lives if they were perfectly wise. "Human beings can broaden the Way--it is not the Way that broadens human beings" (15.29).

DARWINIAN CONFUCIANISM
A Darwinian view of morality as grounded in human nature, without any necessary support from moral cosmology or divine law, can look to Confucian morality as an illustration of such a natural morality. Of course, there is much in Confucianism that is peculiar to the cultural traditions of ancient China; and there is much there that we might scrutinize as to whether it fully conforms to natural human desires. But we can still see the general patterns of human nature that constitute the universal character of morality.

As I have indicated in some earlier posts, scholars such as Remi Brague argue that the modern turn away from a cosmic or divine ground of morality leads to nihilism. But even Brague eventually concludes that an "autonomous ethics" of "common morality" without religion is indispensable. Religion can support morality, but it adds nothing to morality's content, and even without religion, morality can stand on its own natural ground. This "common morality" sounds a lot like Darwin's natural "moral sense," which does not require religion, although it can benefit from religious beliefs and practices. Confucianism is one major example of a moral tradition that can be understood in Darwinian terms.

Brague says that what he calls "common morality" contains "the elementary rules that permit the coexistence of individuals and the permanence of the species, what C. S. Lewis called 'the Tao.'" The reference is to Lewis's The Abolition of Man, where Lewis claims that in all human cultures through history, there is evidence for a shared morality that can be known without any particular religious beliefs. Lewis calls this universal morality "the Tao," and thus uses Confucius' term for the "Way" of human social life. Lewis concludes his book with "Illustrations of the Tao"--short quotations of moral standards from ancient texts from around the world that illustrate universal moral norms. The Analects is quoted repeatedly, including the passage I discussed above on filial piety and respect for elders as the root of goodness.

Like Confucius, Darwin saw that all of human social life is rooted in the parent-child relationship. "The feeling of pleasure from society is probably an extension of the parental or filial affections, since the social instinct seems to be developed by the young remaining for a long time with their parents, and this extension may be attributed in part to habit, but chiefly to natural selection."

Modern biological research has reinforced this conclusion by showing how the evolution of human childhood--the long period of childhood dependence on adult care--has been crucial to the evolution of human morality and culture generally. Research in genetics, neuroscience, and endocrinology show how the intellectual and emotional bonds between parents and children are biologically supported. That's why I have included "parental care" and "familial bonding" on my list of 20 natural desires.

Moreover, Darwinian science also supports the practical syllogism that Graham sees implicit in the teaching of Confucius. In the Darwinian account of morality, moral judgment requires a combination of reason and desire, awareness of the world and emotional motivation. In contrast to the extreme rationalism of much modern moral philosophy, Darwinian moral psychology stresses that reason alone does not move us, and that Hume was right about the primacy of moral emotions or desires in providing the natural inclinations that sustain our moral sense.

Darwinian science can help us to understand Confucianism as an empiricist view of morality that does not require transcendent grounds, because Confucian morality rests not on the eternal norms of a cosmic God, cosmic Nature, or cosmic Reason, but on the earthly norms of human nature, human culture, and human individuals.

Of the many posts on related themes, four can be found here, here, here, and here.

The Confucian Way

In October, I will be travelling to China for a week-long conference on "Evolution and Ethics" at Peking University in Beijing. The conference is sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, and it's a continuation of the seminar at the University of Oxford that I helped to conduct in January.

As I indicated in my posts on the Oxford seminar, I see the debate over evolutionary ethics as showing the contrast between two opposing views of ethics--Platonic/Kantian transcendentalism and Aristotelian/Humean empiricism. The transcendentalists believe that moral order must conform to some cosmic order as dictated by God, by the nature of the universe, or by universal rational structures. Just as we discover mathematical principles as somehow woven into the constitution of the world, we should be able to discover moral principles as part of the "wisdom of the world" (in Remi Brague's phrase). On the other side, the empiricists look to the human sources of moral order: human nature, human culture, and human individuals. Human nature gives us the generic goods of life as rooted in the natural desires of the human species as shaped by evolutionary history, which would include the 20 natural desires that I have sketched. But within the constraints of human nature, human culture specifies the moral traditions of human morality as shaped by cultural history. Within the constraints of both human nature and human culture, human individuals make choices that reflect the uniqueness of their individual temperaments, abilities, and circumstances as shaped by their individual history.

A Darwinian moral psychology supports the empiricist view of morality, because it rejects the idea that morality must somehow conform to some eternal order of the cosmos--cosmic God, cosmic nature, or cosmic reason. Darwinian empiricism accepts the historical contingency of morality as shaped by the genetic history of human nature, the social history of human culture, and the personal history of human individuality.

I have argued in defense of this Darwinian empiricism. I have also argued that this Darwinian empiricism supports an Aristotelian liberalism that reconciles virtue and freedom. The moral and intellectual virtues can be rightly understood as those states of character that fulfill the natural desires of our evolved human nature, which constitute the universal goods of human life. But the ranking and specification of those natural generic goods must vary according to the variable circumstances of human individuals in particular cultural situations. Government can rightly secure the conditions for individuals to freely choose how best to develop the moral and intellectual virtues in voluntary association with other individuals in social life. But government cannot rightly impose some one substantive conception of the best life on society, because this would deny the self-directedness necessary for moral freedom. A liberal government secures individual freedom as the condition for individuals to pursue virtue in civil society.

In my paper for the China conference, I will show how my arguments for Darwinian empiricism and Aristotelian liberalism apply to the Confucian traditions of China and East Asia.

The debate between Platonic transcendentalism and Aristotelian empiricism runs through Western cultural history from Greek antiquity to the present. A similar debate runs through Asian cultural history. On the one hand, much of the philosophic and religious thought of the East suggests that moral and political order must conform to some transcendent cosmic order, and therefore the authority of government comes from its enforcement of that cosmic order on the human community. On the other hand, one can also see intimations in some Asian thought of an empiricist or naturalist view of moral and political order as rooted in natural human experience, which would be supported by Darwinian science.

To lay out this line of thinking, this will be the first in a series of posts on the evolution of Confucian moral and political thought and the implications of Darwinian biology for the Confucian tradition. My general point is to show that my conception of Darwinian natural right can be extended beyond Western culture to include Eastern traditions of thought.

The traditional dates for Confucius are 551-479 B.C. Kongzi ("Master Kong") is the Chinese name rendered into latinized English by Jesuit missionaries as "Confucius."

Confucius lived under the Zhou dynasty. By the time of Confucius' birth, the power of the Zhou kings had been in decline for centuries. Confucius looked back to the Golden Age of the Zhou Dynasty (1122-770 B.C.), when the power of the Dynasty was at its peak, as setting the highest moral and religious standards of virtue as exemplified in the life of the gentleman. Confucius devoted himself to restoring those ancient standards that had been lost in his day. Such moral and political reform would require a recovery of what Confucius called "the Way" (dao), the ancient "way" that all human beings must follow to achieve excellence.

The Zhou Dynasty began when King Wu militarily defeated King Zhow, an evil tyrant, who was the last king of the Shang Dynasty (1751-1122 B.C.), the earliest Chinese civilization for which we have archaeological and written records. The first written records are "oracle bones"--pieces of ox scapula or tortoise shells used in divination. Rulers would write questions or requests directed to the spirits of the Shang ancestors. When the oracle bones were heated, they would crack, and the patterns in the cracks would be read by the diviner as a message from the ancestral spirits. Rulers needed to maintain good relations with these spirits, especially the "Lord on High," the first human ancestor of the Shang. A ruler who had the approval of the ancestral spirits was endowed with "virtue" (de), a charismatic power that attracted supporters and allowed harmonious order in the state.

The Zhou developed a religious tradition that incorporated some of the elements of the Shang religion. The Zhou fused the Shang "Lord on High" with the Zhou tribal god tian, which can be translated as "Heaven," because tian was a supreme anthropomorphic deity associated with the sky. "Heaven" supervised and judged human affairs. Rulers who performed the ritual sacrifices to the ancestors correctly could be granted the "Mandate of Heaven," which conferred on the human ruler the Virtue to rule over the political order, just as "Heaven" ruled over the universe. But rulers who did not act correctly, and particularly those who did not perform their ritual duties correctly with sincere devotion, could lose the "Mandate of Heaven."

This conception of a "Mandate of Heaven" suggests a transcendentalist view of moral and political order as grounded in conformity to the cosmic order of spirits and gods. Confucius seemed to continue that transcendentalist view in so far as he claimed that he himself was acting with a "Mandate from Heaven" to persuade people in his corrupt age to restore the "Way" of proper gentlemanly conduct and political rule.

And yet Confucius refused to speak about or inquire into the spiritual world. He was primarily concerned about good conduct in the earthly life of human beings as mortal creatures who die with no prospects for an afterlife. His silence about spiritual and divine matters suggested that his teaching was hardly religious at all. In a few places in the Confucian texts, Confucius interpreted the ritual traditions of virtue--particularly, filial piety--as grounded in the biological nature of human life, which manifested an empiricist view of morality as conforming to natural human experience with no need for cosmic support.

The teaching of Confucius is hard to determine, however, because he left no writings of his own. Like Socrates, his thinking was passed on only through his students who reported his conversations. The Confucian texts consist of collections of short conversational exchanges based on writings that were edited long after his death. These texts eventually became the basis for the Chinese civil service examination, so that for many centuries every Chinese person in the educated classes had to memorize the Confucian teachings. Similar examinations were administered in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. The most famous of those writings is the Analects, and one might argue that no other book has had more influence on more people over a longer period of time.

The Analects will be the subject of my next post.

Some of the posts on the Oxford seminar can be found here, here, and here.

A Darwinian Left?--A Reply to Jiro Tanaka

Politics and Culture is an online journal that has just published a special issue on "Bioculture: Evolutionary Cultural Studies," edited by Joseph Carroll. One of the essays for this issue is Jiro Tanaka's "Notes Toward a Darwinian Left." Tanaka's article includes some strange comments on my argument for Darwinian natural right.

As the epigram for his essay, Tanaka quotes from Stephen Jay Gould: "Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our noble traits as well?" I would agree with this idea that even our noblest traits show some evolutionary continuity with other animals, and in fact this is a fundamental part of my argument for Darwinian natural right. But how exactly does this support a "Darwinian left"? Tanaka never gives a clear answer.

Tanaka indicates his agreement with Peter Singer's A Darwinian Left. But Tanaka never explains how he would respond to the many criticisms of Singer coming from me and from others.

As I have argued in Darwinian Conservatism, Darwin's biological science of human nature challenged the utopian vision of the left by denying human perfectibility and suggesting that social reform would always be constrained by the limitations of human nature. Unless they chose to totally reject Darwinian science, leftists were forced to look for some way of accommodating Darwinism while preserving their utopian vision. There were three strategies for doing this. One strategy was to embrace Francis Galton's eugenics, because this assumed that biological nature could be brought under human control and thus directed to utopian reform. But Galton's utopian eugenics was both scientifically false and morally repugnant.

Another strategy for the left was to follow Alfred Russel Wallace in asserting a dualism of nature and culture, so that human social life could be seen as a product of culture unconstrained by nature and thus subject to utopian improvement. Although Wallace formulated his own theory of evolution by natural selection at the same time that Darwin developed his, Wallace broke with Darwin in arguing that the moral and intellectual powers of human beings transcended natural selection. Natural selection shaped the "animal nature" of human beings but not their "spiritual nature," which must arise from "the unseen universe of Spirit." This led Wallace to attend seances where he could talk to dead people who lived as disembodied spirits in the spiritual afterlife. Although many leftists found it hard to accept Wallace's spiritualism, they did accept a dichotomy between animal nature and human culture, which implied that human culture belonged to some kind of transcendental or supernatural realm of experience, which denied Darwin's claim that human cultural history was part of the natural history of the human species. So it seemed that the leftist belief in human perfectibility must deny a Darwinian science of human nature that constrains the human freedom for utopian transformation.

Another strategy for a Darwinian left is to reject any radical dichotomy between animal nature and human history and to adopt a Darwinian view of human beings as embedded fully within the natural world. This is evident in the work of Peter Kropotkin, a socialist anarchist who saw human beings as shaped completely by Darwinian natural selection. In contrast to those Darwinians who stressed the competitive character of the struggle for existence, Kropotkin argued that Darwin himself saw that natural selection often favored the cooperation of animals within their species. Kropotkin emphasized the importance of sociality, mutual aid, and the moral sense in Darwin's account of human nature in The Descent of Man. For Kropotkin, this suggested that human beings could organize their societies as a socialist anarchy based on spontaneous cooperation without government.

But while a Darwinian view of human nature does show how social cooperation is rooted in biological nature, such cooperation is not totally selfless, because it depends on norms of kinship, mutuality, and reciprocity, so that individuals cooperate with those people whom they trust but not with those whom they distrust. This will not sustain pure anarchy without government. Moreover, by embracing Darwinian naturalism, Kropotkin rejects the leftist tradition of utopian reform unconstrained by human nature, and in doing so, he rejects the fundamental ground of leftist thought.

Kropotkin's strategy for a Darwinian left has been adopted by Peter Singer. But like Kropotkin, Singer in caught in a dilemma: his Darwinian view of human nature forces him to deny leftist utopianism, but in doing that, he denies the core of leftist thought. Singer concedes that a Darwinian left would have to realize that natural tendencies (such as social ranking, male dominance, sex roles, and attachment to one's kin) cannot be abolished. He is forced to conclude: "In some ways, this is a sharply deflated vision of the left, its utopian ideas replaced by a cooly realistic view of what can be achieved. That is, I think, the best we can do today." In fact, much of his "deflated" leftism would be acceptable to conservatives, who have long assumed that conformity to human nature is a fundamental standard for good social policy. For example, Singer agrees with Adam Smith about the benefits of a market economy in channeling the selfish motivations of human nature in ways that serve the common good. While Tanaka embraces Singer's Darwinian left, he never explains how he escapes Singer's dilemma.

As one might expect, Tanaka has to reject my arguments for Darwinian conservatism, but his reasoning is hard to understand. He writes: "Darwin himself was for the most part a progressive and liberal thinker, kind in his personal relations and hostile to all forms of social cruelty and exploitation. He hated slavery, which he had witnessed firsthand in Brazil." He doesn't indicate, however, that Darwin's liberalism was the classical liberalism of the Liberal Party of Great Britain. And he doesn't respond to my claim that the modern exponents of classical liberalism are people like Friedrich Hayek who belong to the modern tradition of libertarian conservatism.

Tanaka's analysis of my position is hard to follow. Here it is:

"It is not enough simply to invoke the naturalistic fallacy. The conservative scholar Larry Arnhart forces us to confront this inadequacy when he derives several 'oughts' from 'ises.' In direct opposition to the fact-value distinction, Arnhart argues for the ultimate compatibility of Darwinian evolution and Aristotelian natural right. The context of this endeavor is clear: Darwin has few advocates on the political right these days, due in large part to the coalition, forged in the Reagan era, between fiscal and social conservatives on the one hand, and Christian conservatives on the other. Arnhart therefore finds himself in a minority when he claims that 'conservatives need Charles Darwin.' To make this claim, he must argue that our evolved human nature is a source of moral--and specifically conservative--values.

"Like almost all modern evolutionists, Arnhart posits a panhuman, species-typical nature. On the basis of this human nature, he takes a moral stand on the issues of slavery and female circumcision. Both practices, he argues, violate the basic, evolved needs of human nature. Theoretically, this move puts us in the same place as Hauser puts us: it takes evolutionary biology as the source of factual knowledge, and then leaves us to decide about how to deploy that knowledge. But unlike most evolutionists, Arnhart goes on to invest 'human nature' with a kind of sacral authority that he feels is self-evidently wicked to contravene. But therein lies the false step: by choosing loaded examples, Arnhart makes the derivation seemingly self-evident. But one could also point to other historical examples in which what comes naturally is not self-evidently 'good.' Puritanism (and other belief systems that value chasteness) exhorts its followers to contravene our nature, and then identifies that contravention--that abstention or forbearance--as the Good.

"'Human nature' itself cannot stand in as a proxy for God. We're back to feeling, but not without having made some progress. Yes, it is possible for some to feel pleasure at the suffering of children, and for others to find our highest good in frustrating the natural impulses of human nature. Nonetheless, if we recognize the limits and potential in our common humanity, we shall at least know where we stand. We can put the norms implicit in the feelings of psychopaths and the ethos of Puritans--and the norms implicit in our judgment of them--into their appropriate biological context. It is probable that the brains of psychopaths exhibit irregularities in regions of the frontal lobe that mediate pro-social emotions like empathy and compassion. Belief systems that place a premium on chasteness, by contrast, may represent social constructs that tap into and amplify an evolved, but highly variable, instinct for 'purity.'"

Later, he observes: "Nothing prevents us from advancing a progressive version of Arnhart's argument, so long as we do not invest human nature with sacral authority!"

Unfortunately, Tanaka never explains specifically what he means by "a progressive version of Arnhart's argument."

Nor does he explain how he reaches the conclusion that I "invest human nature with sacral authority." Sacral authority? He even puts this phrase in italics, which suggests that I use this exact phrase in application to human nature. In fact, as far as I know, I have never used this phrase, and I have never identified human nature as having sacral authority. I am not even sure what this would mean. I do understand that some religious believers might believe that God as Creator has used the evolutionary process to create human beings in His image. But I have never said that a scientific understanding of evolved human nature requires believing that human nature is sacred or has sacred authority. Since Tanaka never provides any citation of my writings to support his claim that I invest human nature with sacral authority, I am left perplexed as to what he has in mind.

Maybe what he means by this is that I believe that human beings are naturally good, that every natural disposition is good. But it's hard for me to figure out how he pulls this out of my writing, especially since I stress human imperfection and the tragic situations that arise from conflicting natural desires. For example, I explain the tragic character of slavery as showing the conflict between the slavemaster's natural desire for exploitation and the slave's natural desire to be free from exploitation. I also explain female circumcision as showing the conflict between the natural desire of parents to make their daughters marriageable and the natural desire to avoid the pain and suffering from the customs of clitoridectomy and infibulation. As Tanaka indicates, the natural feelings of psychopaths deviate from the moral feelings typical for most human beings. But he doesn't indicate that I have a whole chapter on psychopaths as people with natural temperaments that render them "moral strangers" who cannot respond normally to moral persuasion.

How Tanaka infers from this that I regard human nature as having "sacral authority" is beyond my comprehension.

Some of my posts on why the "naturalistic fallacy" is not a fallacy can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The Evolution of Heaven and Hell (6): The Modern Heaven & the Decline of Hell

In 1743, the Reverend Robert Blair published a poem The Grave that became so popular that it was published in many editions. In 1808, it was illustrated by William Blake.

One of Blake's illustrations was "The Meeting of a Family in Heaven." The children embrace one another. A son runs towards his father. The husband clasps his wife, with his right arm around her left shoulder, and his left hand planted firmly on her butt. This is not Dante's Heaven where pure contemplation of God is the highest human good. This is a Heaven that reproduces the joys of the world, including sexual desire and familial love. This is the Modern Heaven.

Jesus had said that "in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in Heaven" (Matthew 22:29-30). The traditional interpretation--the obvious interpretation--was that in Heaven there are no marital or family relationships. This was part of the traditional view that in Heaven, the ordinary activities of earthly life would be gone, because everyone in Heaven would be continuously engaged in the beatific vision of God.

But over the past few centuries, many people have found this unacceptable. If we are deprived of all the pleasures of earthly life, then how are we going to spend our time. Staring at God for all eternity? Boring!

Today, if people talk about Heaven at all, the prospect of being reunited with loved ones is one of the primary hopes. In the case of the Mormons, the whole life of Heaven is organized around families. Mormons who have a "celestial marriage" are assured that their marriage will be preserved for billions of years. Another important point for Mormons is to pray by name for all their dead ancestors so that they can be brought into Heaven, which is why genealogical records are so important for Mormons.

As John Casey indicates in his book, this Modern Heaven was first fully described by Emanuel Swedenborg in the 18th century. He described the pleasures of Heaven as including eating the best food, playing games, and beautiful wedding ceremonies. He elaborates the idea of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation that the active life of ordinary people is superior to the contemplative life of a theoretical few, and therefore one should expect Heaven to manifest all the practical activities of daily life on earth elevated to heavenly perfection. So that grave monument I saw that looked forward to "golfing for eternity" was in this tradition of Swedenborg's Modern Heaven.

This Modern Heaven might seem vapid to some of us--particularly, those intellectual snobs among us who like to think that we would be happy to have the beatific vision in which we might see "ingathered, bound by love into one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe."

But there is a serious point here. We have no other way to judge our symbolic images of Heaven and Hell except to think about our natural experience of virtue and vice, excellence and degradation, the human good and the human bad. So, if the good is the desirable, and if we have a wide range of natural desires, then why not say that Heaven would allow us to pursue all those natural desires to perfection, and so it would be unreasonable to expect us to continuously engage in only one activity like contemplation?

As Aristotle suggested, it's unreasonable to think that the only truly happy life is a life of solitary, continuous contemplation. The truly happy life requires that we live as the social and political animals that we are--animals with natural desires for love, honor, and beauty as well as for intellectual and religious understanding. So why shouldn't we welcome the Modern Heaven as an image of the human good understood as the fullest satisfaction of all our natural desires over a complete life?

The Evolution of Heaven and Hell (5): Dante

The evolution of Heaven and Hell illustrates that one dimension of evolution that is uniquely human--symbolic evolution.

As I have indicated in a previous post, I agree with Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb that the genetic system of inheritance is only one of four dimensions of evolutionary inheritance. All organisms have two systems of inheritance--the genetic system and the epigenetic system. Many animals have a third system--the behavioral system--by which learned traditions of behavior are passed from one generation to another. Human beings are unique in that they have not only these three forms of evolutionary inheritance, but also symbolic inheritance.

Symbolism is distinctively human because it shows the qualitative leap that defines our humanity as based on our capacity for symbolic thought and communication. Other animals can communicate through signs. But only human beings can communicate through symbols. The evolution of human language was crucial for the evolution of symbolism. Symbolic systems allow us to think about abstractions far beyond our concrete, immediate experiences. Symbolic systems allow human beings to construct a shared imagined reality. Art, religion, science, and philosophy are all manifestations of human symbolic evolution.

Dante's Divine Comedy is the supreme literary moment in the symbolic evolution of Heaven and Hell--and of Purgatory, by the way! He inherited 2,000 years of oral, visual, and written symbolism of the afterlife. He appropriated and transformed that inheritance by passing it through his individual experience and judgment and then passed it on to future generations. He thus introduced variations into the imagery of the afterlife that would compete in the evolutionary battle of symbols that constitute the spiritual history of humanity. His success depended upon his astute artistic judgment as to what kind of symbolism could survive and reproduce itself in the mental space of human intellectual and emotional responses, as constrained by the capacities and propensities of the human brain and nervous system as modulated by the behavioral and symbolic history of human culture over the past 50,000 years.

An evolutionary explanation of The Divine Comedy must move through at least three levels of evolutionary history--the natural history of the human species, the cultural history of Dante's world, and the individual history of Dante's life. His writing would be unintelligible and uninteresting if it were not responsive to our universal human nature--our natural desires and inclinations. And because of that appeal to human nature, a book like The Divine Comedy will resonate with human readers for as long as human beings have natural desires that are satisfied by the symbolism of an afterlife. But within the broad constraints of human nature, Dante's work was also constrained by the cultural history of Christendom and of Dante's Italy. And yet, natural history and cultural history constrained but did not determine exactly what would emerge from the individual history of Dante's unique mind.

NATURAL HISTORY
From the beginning of Dante's Inferno, we see what he calls the principle of contrapasso--"counter-penalty" or "retaliation" (28.142). The punishment fits the crime as appropriate retribution. Dante learned this principle from Thomas Aquinas who defined contrapassum as "equal passion repaid for a previous action; and the expression applied most properly to injurious passions and actions, whereby a man harms the person of his neighbor; for instance, if a man strike, that he be struck back" (ST, II-II, q. 61, a. 4). He also learned this from Aristotle who identified antipeponthos--"reciprocity"--as a fundamental principle of justice (NE, 1132b21-23). He also learned this from the Bible's teaching "an eye for an eye" and "whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed" (Gen. 9:6

Of course, Dante didn't need to learn this principle from reading Aquinas or Aristotle or the Bible, because he could have learned it from his own natural experience. Indeed, all human beings--even those who have never read Dante, Aquinas, Aristotle, or the Bible--understand the principle of reciprocity, because there is a natural human desire to respond in kind--returning benefit for benefit and injury for injury. That's why I have identified the desire for justice as reciprocity as one of the twenty natural desires that belong to our evolved human nature.

The symbolic world of an afterlife might seem so far beyond our natural human experience that a skillful artist like Dante would have a completely free hand in designing that world in any way he pleases. That's not true, because the evolutionary success of an artist in constructing a symbolic world depends on his satisfying the natural desires of his human audience. We naturally want people to be rewarded appropriately for their virtues and punished appropriately for their vices. The ideas of Heaven and Hell have evolved in response to those natural human expectations, and so we will judge the plausibility of those ideas by how well they fit our expectations for fair reciprocity of rewards and punishments.

Much of the power of Dante's art in describing the afterlife comes from his skill in depicting appropriate punishments and rewards. For example, he presents the second circle of Hell as reserved for those being punished for the sin of lust. Although lust is one of the seven deadly sins, Dante ranks it as one of the least of the mortal sins. The more serious sins--violence, fraud, and treachery--are punished in the deeper circles of Hell.

In the second circle, the punishment of the sin of lust conveys the passionate power that drives the lustful by having the lovers blown about incessantly by a hurricane:

"I reached a place where every light is muted,
which bellows like the sea beneath a tempest,
when it is battered by opposing winds.
"The hellish hurricane, which never rests,
drives on the spirits with its violence:
wheeling and pounding, it harasses them.
"When they come up against the ruined slope,
then there are cries and wailing and lament,
and there they curse the force of the divine.
"I learned that those who undergo this torment
are damned because they sinned within the flesh,
subjecting reason to the rule of lust.
"And as, in the cold season, starlings' wings
bear them along in broad and crowded ranks,
so does that blast bear on the guilty spirits:
now here, now there, now down, now up, it drives them.
"There is no hope that ever comforts them--
no hope for rest and none for lesser pain" (V.28-45).

Here the punishment fits the crime, because the lustful reenact the restless obsessiveness of their lust eternally. The natural punishment for a vice is to be driven forever by one's vicious activity.

Nevertheless, Dante feels compassion for these lovers, particularly, Francesca and Paolo. Francesca had been unhappily married to Giancotto, and she had fallen in love with his handsome brother, Paolo. When Giancotto discovered their adulterous love, he murdered both of them. Francesco tells Dante how she fell into sin. She and Paolo were reading a romantic story about how Lancelot fell into an illicit love for Guinevere. When they read how Lancelot and Guinevere kissed for the first time, Francesca relates, "this one, who never shall be parted from me, while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth," and "that day we read no more." As Francesca finishes telling her story, Paolo weeps, and then Dante faints with pity.

We the readers are made by Dante to feel the sweet power of romantic lust, and so we also feel Dante's pity for these lovers, which persuades us to agree with Dante's judgment that their sin is lighter than the sins punished deeper in Hell. But we also know that adultery is so disruptive to social life that it deserves some punishment.

Some scholars have argued that romantic love is not a universal natural desire but a cultural invention of the medieval courtly love tradition. If so, then those readers who have not been shaped by that cultural tradition might not share Dante's sympathy for these doomed lovers. But if romantic love is a natural desire of our evolved human nature--as I believe it is--then Dante's depiction of the temptations of this passion should evoke some agreement from most readers universally.

Even readers who don't believe in the reality of an afterlife with Heaven and Hell can be moved by, and learn from, Dante's Divine Comedy because its poetic symbolism illuminates natural human experience.

CULTURAL HISTORY
But within the limits set by our universal human nature, there is room for cultural variation. And so conceptions of the afterlife will express both the natural universality and the cultural variability of our experience. Although our 20 natural desires are universal, different cultural traditions will rank and organize those natural desires in different ways, and this will be manifested in views of the afterlife.

For example, the cultural history of medieval Christendom had shaped a view of the afterlife in which the supreme good of religious understanding was to be recognized by being placed at the peak of heavenly rewards. All other goods were to be ranked as inferior to this dominant good. The goods of the body were inferior to the goods of the mind. The goods of the political life were inferior to the goods of the contemplative life. And of the goods of the mind, philosophic or scientific understanding was inferior to the religious understanding that would come from the eternal contemplation of the Christian God.

Moreover, the traditional Christian doctrines of original sin and predestination dictated that all human beings were condemned to eternal punishment, and that those few who attained eternal salvation did so only by the unmerited grace of God through the atonement of Christ. Therefore, all those outside the tradition of Christian revelation were to be condemned forever.

Dante's Divine Comedy is constrained by this Christian cultural history, which provides him the symbolic material for his poetic art. But even so, if he is crafty enough, he can exercise his individual judgment in altering and even criticizing that cultural tradition. And, certainly, the individual readers of his poetry, including many who might be skeptical of Christian culture, can engage in a critical assessment of the Christian afterlife and Dante's representation of that afterlife, which contributes to the continuing symbolic evolution of Heaven and Hell.

For instance, one might question the assumption of eternal punishments in Hell. Why do they have to be eternal? Even if Francesca and Paolo deserve punishment for their adulterous lust, do they deserve it for eternity? Doesn't it seem unfair and unreasonable that God would never give them a chance to repent of their momentary yielding to the seductive sweetness of romantic love? If so, then why not agree with Origen that the punishment of Hell is to have a purging effect, so that eventually all those in Hell can feel the pangs of conscience and then ask for, and receive, forgiveness? After all, doesn't the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory concede Origen's arguments for sinners being able to undergo purgation and thus open themselves to the love and forgiveness of God?

Dante's answer seems to be drawn from Aristotle's account of how habituation shapes character. If we choose often to engage in vicious behavior, then eventually we become habituated to it, it becomes our enduring character, and then it's hard, maybe impossible, to turn away from our vicious path. In much of the Divine Comedy, Dante seems to endorse the traditional Christian view that sin is so obsessive that at death the sinful will is unchangeable.

But how is this consistent with the idea of depravity as original sin? If we are so depraved that we have no choice but to sin, how is it just to punish us eternally? Aristotle thinks we have some choice in the matter, and therefore we can be held responsible for our choices. But if we are responsible for our conduct, why can't we choose to change, to reform, to turn back?

Is the idea of total depravity even intelligible? If we were totally depraved, how would we be able to recognize depravity as depravity? If we were totally depraved, how could be make the judgments of better and worse ways of acting that are reflected in the gradations of vicious and virtuous conduct in the Divine Comedy?

Such questions illustrate the freedom we have to criticize the cultural history of the afterlife.

INDIVIDUAL HISTORY
Within the limits set by his Christian culture, Dante had some freedom to exercise his individual judgment about how to depict the afterlife. He was able to use the Divine Comedy to criticize the Catholic Church in ways that prepared the way for the Protestant Reformation. He also implicitly endorsed a pre-Christian or pagan conception of politics and philosophy that some readers have seen as suggesting a secret teaching at odds with Christian culture (see Inferno, 9.61-63; Purgatorio, 8.19-21; Paradiso, 2.1-9, 13.121-23, 23.64-69).

Dante identifies himself with the "honorable men" and "great-hearted souls" in Limbo--pagan poets, politicians, scientists, and philosophers. At the center of the list of people in Limbo are Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato. He even includes three Muslims--Saladin, Avicenna, and Averroes. These people "did not sin," but since they "lived before Christianity" or "did not worship God in fitting ways," they cannot enter Heaven, but neither are they in the depths of Hell (Inferno, V).

As Dante finally ascends to the tenth heaven, the Empyrean, which is the highest realm of spiritual reality, the seat of imperial sovereignty is reserved for Henry VII, the Emperor, whom Dante had hoped would restore the Roman Empire. And it is prophesied that Henry's opponent--Pope Clement V--will be eternally condemned for simony (Paradiso, XXX).

As John Casey correctly notes, Dante depicts at the end of the Paradiso the supreme happiness of the eternal contemplation of God, which is the beatific vision. Dante sees the eternal light of God. "Within its depths, I saw ingathered, bound by love into one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe" (XXXIII.85-87). Here then is the traditional idea of Christian culture that what human beings really want, what they most deeply desire, is to see God and thus to contemplate the whole order of things forever, which shows that a purely contemplative life is the only true good for human beings.

But what Casey does not notice is that even as Dante appears to endorse this, his placement of the Emperor Henry on a seat in the highest heaven suggests that political life is part of the supreme good, perhaps also suggesting that the contemplative life (whether religious or philosophic) cannot be separated from the political life, because human beings are political animals as well as rational animals.

Some posts on related themes can be found here, here, and here.

The Evolution of Heaven and Hell (4): The Bible

A few years ago, I taught a series of three courses on Biblical politics, with separate courses on the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran.

My undergraduate students were often surprised by what they read. Many were religious believers in the Abrahamic tradition--Jews, Christians, or Muslims. But most of them had never read the Bible carefully. They were surprised to see that the Hebrew Bible says almost nothing about Heaven and Hell, and while the New Testament says more about this, what is said is vague and confusing. The Koran is more explicit and descriptive in its few accounts of Heaven and Hell, but it's still unclear.

Many of my students were perplexed by this. If the whole point of being a Biblical believer is to enter Heaven and escape Hell, why do the texts of the Bible and the Koran provide so little explanation of Heaven and Hell?

This question is most acute in the case of the Old Testament. Through most of the text, there is no clear reference to the afterlife except for a few references to Sheol or "the pit," a dark underworld where the dead go. Job foresees that when he dies, he will go "to the place of no return, to the land of darkness and shadow dark as death, where dimness and disorder hold sway, and light itself is like dead of night" (10:21-22). It's nothing to write home about.

When Moses gives God's Law to the Israelites, his argument for obeying it is that it provides the conditions for living on earth and securing a life for one's progeny (Deuteronomy 4:29-40, 32:22). What matters is protecting the nation of Israel in competition with their enemies. There's no interest in individual immortality in an afterlife. There are a few passages about resurrecting faithful Israelites, but only for the sake of establishing an earthly kingdom of the Jews ruled by David eternally (Ezekiel 37).

The only place in the Hebrew Bible indicating a general resurrection and a final judgment with eternal rewards and punishments is two verses in the book of Daniel, which was probably written late in the history of ancient Israel (perhaps 167-164 B.C.): "Of those who are sleeping in the Land of Dust, many will awaken, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting disgrace. Those who are wise will shine as brightly as the expanse of the heavens, and those who have instructed many in uprightness, as bright as stars for all eternity" (12:2-3).

This idea of resurrection and final judgment could have come to the Jews from contact with the Persian religion founded by Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), who had taught that there would be a general resurrection at the end of time with a final judgment of the good and the evil. As a result of military defeat, many Jews had been deported to Babylon, beginning in 597 B.C. In 539 B.C., the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon, and later allowed the Jews in Babylon to return to Jerusalem. For this reason, Isaiah identified Cyrus as the Messiah or the "anointed one" of God (Isaiah 44-45). This possible contact of the Jews with the Persian religion of Zarathustra is part of the reason why Nietzsche thought Zarathustra was the original source for the otherworldliness of Biblical religion, and why he adopted Zarathustra as the name for his prophet in Thus Spake Zarathustra

Certainly, by the time of Jesus, belief in the resurrection of the dead was debated among the Jews--the Pharisees affirming it, and the Sadducees denying it. Saint Paul was a Pharisee (Acts 23:6-10).

Sometimes Jesus clearly teaches that in the afterlife, the saved will enjoy eternal bliss in Heaven, while the damned will suffer eternal punishment in Hell, as if Heaven and Hell were literally located somewhere in another world beyond the world we know now (Matthew 25:31-46; Mark 9:43-48).

But in other cases, Jesus speaks as if Heaven and Hell could be states of mind in our present life. "The kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21). Many of his parables suggest that the kingdom of Heaven corresponds to some inward state of character that is fruitful and receptive (Matthew 13:1-52).

Jesus implies that the saved will have the same rewards and the damned the same punishments, so there's nothing like Dante's Divine Comedy, where there are different kinds of punishments and rewards appropriate to each category of the damned and the saved.

By comparison with Jesus, Paul's references to the afterlife are even more vague. He offers no clear conception of hell, and he doesn't teach eternal damnation. He does provide an influential statement on the resurrection of the body as a transformation of a "psychic body" (soma psychikon) into a "spiritual body" (soma pneumatikon (First Corinthians 15).

The Bible concludes with the prophecies of John's Revelation, depicting the final apocalyptic battle against the forces of Satan, the reign of Christ on earth for a thousand years, and then the Last Judgment, where the dead are judged by the record of their deeds, and those whose names are written in the book of life enter "a new heaven and a new earth." The "new Jerusalem" comes down from Heaven. This new holy city is described in exquisite detail as built of gold, pearls, and precious stones (Revelation 19-22).

The Bible left the early Christians with unresolved issues about the character of Heaven and Hell that provoked debates that continue to the present.

Some Christians interpreted Paul as teaching a doctrine of original sin--that as a result of Adam's sin, all human beings are born so totally depraved that there's nothing they can do to save themselves, and that salvation comes unearned only by the grace of God through the atonement of Christ's crucifixion. This leads to the doctrine of predestination--that from the beginning, God has freely chosen who is to be saved and who is to be damned.

The doctrine of original sin was rejected by Pelagius, a British monk who taught at Rome in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. He argued that since Jesus asked for repentance, he surely thought that human beings had the freedom to choose between salvation and damnation. To teach that human beings are born so totally depraved that they cannot avoid sinning seemed to Pelagius to deny that human beings can be held responsible for their lives, and thus God would be unjust in condemning them. If God is just in his rewards and punishments, then surely human beings must have the freedom to choose salvation.

The Pelagians were condemned by the early church authorities as heretics. But today most Christians are Pelagians, because they assume that God rewards people for their good deeds and their repentance of sin. When evangelical Christians insist that God will certainly save all those who sincerely repent of their sins and ask for forgiveness, they show their adherence to the Pelagian heresy.

Should God's punishment of the damned be eternal? Jesus suggests that. But Paul suggests that Christ's atonement might save everyone. "For as in Adam all die, even in Christ shall all be made alive" (First Corinthians 15:22). 

Origen (185-253), a Coptic Christian born late in the second century, became a theologian who taught that the fires of hell should be interpreted as symbolic of a burning conscience, so that those in Hell would eventually be purged of their sins, and all would be saved. That God would condemn sinners to an eternal Hell with no chance to repent seemed unjust to Origen. But Origen's teaching was declared a heresy by the early Church. When Darwin condemned the doctrine of eternal punishment in Hell as a "damnable doctrine," he was in the tradition of Origen's heresy.

Originally, the idea of an afterlife with a final judgment, as developed by the ancient Egyptians and Plato, seemed to be a way to enforce good conduct in life by providing eternal rewards for the good and eternal punishments for the bad. But the Christian doctrines of original sin and predestination would seem to deny this by denying that one's choices in life have any influence over one's eternal destiny.

For some related posts on Darwinian readings of the Bible, go here, here, here, here, here, and here.