Modern science, modern liberalism, and even the whole of modern culture began in January of 1417. That's when Poggio Bracciolini was looking for old books in a monastic library in southern Germany, and he discovered a copy of Lucretius' ancient poem On the Nature of Things.
Written near the middle of the first century B.C., Lucretius' book was a poetic exposition of the philosophical atomism of Epicurus. Although Epicurus and Lucretius professed to believe in the existence of gods, they argued that the gods were immortal but natural beings who had no care for human beings, and who never interfered with the natural order of the cosmos. That natural cosmic order was explained as the product of atomic particles combining and dissolving by chance and material necessity. As part of that natural motion of atoms, human beings were purely material beings--in their bodies and their minds--and as such they were mortal. Religious beliefs in the immortality of the soul and an afterlife in which those immortal souls were to be eternally rewarded or punished should be recognized as delusions. Indeed, those delusions based on religious fears were the primary source of human anxiety. To be happy, to be able to enjoy the pleasures of mortal life, human beings needed to overcome their fear of death and of divine judgement. They could do that, Epicurus and Lucretius believed, by understanding the way things really are as a product of the evolutionary history of the world as atoms in motion.
This materialist cosmology of Epicureanism was a radical alternative to the other views of cosmic order in the ancient Greek and Roman world--including Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism. And while many of the early Christian theologians could accommodate modified forms of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism as compatible with Christianity, they had to reject Epicurean materialism as utterly contrary to Christianity. The Christian fear of the Satanic temptation of Epicureanism was so deep that the writings of Epicurus and Lucretius were hidden away and largely disappeared from medieval Christendom.
But then with the passionate revival of ancient learning in the European Renaissance, there was a curiosity, even among some devout Christians, about the long forgotten writings of Epicureanism. As one of the greatest hunters of ancient books in the Renaissance, Poggio was elated to finally discover a copy of Lucretius' text in 1417. But he had no idea that his discovery would lead to a renewal of Epicurean thought that would transform the culture of the Western world. In fact, we can make a good argument that what makes the world modern is the materialist cosmology presented in Lucretius' On the Nature of Things. We are all Epicureans now.
This story has recently been told in a most engaging way by Stephen Greenblatt in his book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Norton, 2011), which has received the National Book Award for nonfiction for 2011. The book is wonderfully well-written, perhaps reflecting the fact that Greenblatt is a professor of English literature at Harvard.
It's surprising that Greenblatt never mentions another book published 10 years ago that covers much of the same ground as his book--Benjamin Wiker's Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists (InterVarsity Press, 2002).
Greenblatt and Wiker agree in their historical narrative of the modern world as a product of the turn away from the Christian cosmology of intelligent design to the Lucretian cosmology of evolutionary atomism. They disagree, however, in their assessment of this historical turn: Greenblatt celebrates it as moral progress, while Wiker laments it as moral degeneration. Comparing the two books illuminates this fundamental cosmological debate, a debate that runs through much of my writing for this blog.
Wiker is a Fellow of the Discovery Institute, and he wrote his book with the financial support of the Discovery Institute as part of their "wedge strategy" for overturning the modern culture of Darwinian materialism and replacing it with a Christian culture of intelligent design. The back cover of Wiker's book bears endorsements from many of the luminaries of the intelligent design movement, and the Foreword is written by William Dembski.
Dembski indicates the fundamental issue in declaring that Wiker's book poses the primary question between intelligent design and Darwinism: "Is reality fundamentally mindful and purposive or mind-less and material?" (13).
Christians must see the world as intelligently designed by the divine Creator, who exercises providential care over human beings and who judges them in the afterlife as deserving heavenly rewards or hellish punishments for eternity. Christians can interpret many of the ancient philosophers--Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics--as teaching that the world is "fundamentally mindful and purposive" and thus supporting a Christian cosmology. But they can't do this with the atomistic cosmology of Epicurus and Lucretius, which must be seen as the fundamental rival to Christianity.
Moreover, Wiker argues, one must defend Christian cosmology if one wants to defend Christian morality. As a comprehensive account of the universe, every cosmology implies a morality, because every account of nature as a whole implies an account of human nature--the moral and intellectual life of human beings--as part of cosmic nature.
With this in mind, Wiker argues that "the culture wars are cosmological wars" (314). The current debates over the morality of abortion, gay marriage, sexual conduct generally, biotechnology, and the teaching of evolution in public schools are all ultimately rooted in an irreconcilable choice between intelligent-design cosmology and materialist cosmology. The cosmology of intelligent-design provides cosmic support for Christian morality. The cosmology of materialist atomism promotes an individualistic hedonism free from any absolute standards of right and wrong.
Wiker would seem to agree with Greenblatt's summary of the 20 fundamental propositions of Lucretius' account of "the way things are" (182-202):
1. Everything is made of invisible particles.
2. The elementary particles of matter--"the seeds of the things"--are eternal.
3. The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size.
4. All particles are in motion in an infinite void.
5. The universe has no creator or designer.
6. Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve.
7. The swerve is the source of free will.
8. Nature ceaselessly experiments.
9. The universe was not created for or about humans.
10. Humans are not unique.
11. Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquillity and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival.
12. The soul dies.
13. There is no afterlife.
14. Death is nothing to us.
15. All organized religions are superstitious delusions.
16. Religions are invariably cruel.
17. There are no angels, demons, or ghosts.
18. The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.
19. The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
20. Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder.
Greenblatt and Wiker show how these Lucretian ideas shaped the leading modern thinkers in philosophy and science--including Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Hume, Spinoza, and Darwin.
The one person overlooked here, I think, is Nietzsche. Particularly, in his middle writings--Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of The Gay Science--Nietzsche develops one of the most elaborate modern statements of Epicurean and Darwinian Enlightenment. In his earlier and later writings, however, Nietzsche essentially agrees with Wiker that human beings cannot live well as Darwinian Epicureans without a redemptive cosmology, and we see Nietzsche striving for a cosmology of atheistic religiosity. The agreement between Wiker and Nietzsche is most evident in their scorn for David Friedrich Strauss in his failing to see the nihilistic consequences of Darwinian science. Some of my posts on this point can be found here, here, and here.
Although there is no evidence that Darwin read Epicurus or Lucretius, one can clearly see the fundamental ideas of Darwinian evolution in Book 5 (see lines 837-877) of De rerum natura, although one does not see a clear account of the gradual transmutation of one species into another. Moreover, one sees the fundamental agreement between Lucretius and Darwin in their general cosmology of a world in which complex order arises through a natural evolutionary process that does not require miraculous interventions by an intelligent designer.
Although I find Wiker's intellectual history illuminating, we fundamentally disagree in that I don't share his apocalyptic fear of what he sees as the moral nihilism of the Lucretian/Darwinian cosmology. The disagreement was evident some years ago when Wiker and I had an exchange in the pages of First Things. In the November 2000 issue of First Things, I wrote an article defending "Darwinian Conservatism," which was followed by critical responses from Michael Behe and Bill Dembski, and then my response to them. A year later, Wiker wrote an article in First Things attacking me, and much of his argument was incorporated into his book (see pp. 245-46). There was then a brief exchange between us in a later issue of First Things.
Our disagreement comes at two levels. At the first level, Wiker refuses to see--as I do--that a purposeful human nature can arise within a purposeless cosmic nature. I believe that we can judge the moral and intellectual virtues as contributing to the flourishing of evolved human nature, even when we think those virtues have no correspondence to any cosmic order of intelligent design. Thus we can recognize that there is a natural law for human beings rooted in their evolved natural inclinations without any need to see this natural human order as the fulfilment of some intentionally designed cosmic order.
At the second level of our disagreement, I find Wiker sophistical in his writing. By that, I mean that he intentionally suppresses evidence and arguments that counter his case for Epicurean Darwinism as morally degrading. For example, in trying to cite evidence in Darwin's Descent of Man that he promoted the eugenics that would lead to Hitler's eugenics, Wiker carefully omits any passages that would contradict his interpretation. One illustration of this is how he selectively quotes from a paragraph near the end of Descent (1871, 2:402-403). In his book (252-53), Wiker quotes the following: "Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes such care. . . . Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if in any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian and will never be even partially realised until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known. All do good service who aid towards this end." Wiker says this last sentence is a "most damning remark" showing his endorsement of eugenics.
But Wiker is quoting here from one paragraph that concludes with this one sentence that he fails to quote: "When the principles of breeding and of inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan of ascertaining by an easy method whether or not consanguineous marriages are injurious to man." This makes it clear that Darwin's concern here was to study the possibly injurious effects of incest. In particular, he had proposed that the British Parliament should sponsor a study of the effects of first-cousin marriages to see if they had a high rate of physical and mental birth defects in their children. Darwin had a personal interest in this, since his wife Emma was his first cousin, and he worried about whether the ill health of some of his children might be a consequence of inbreeding. Eventually, Darwin's son George carried out the research Darwin sought, and George concluded that the danger of inherited defects from first-cousin marriages was very low.
Here then is an example of what I have called "good eugenics," the kind of eugenics that almost all of us would support. For instance, many Ashkenazi Jews have voluntarily organized genetic testing of their children, so that when they want to marry, they can investigate the probability of birth defects in their children (such as Tay Sachs disease), and then decide whether they want to marry and have children. This is eugenics. Indeed, all the laws that prohibit incestuous marriages are based on eugenics--trying to promote "good births." But this is good eugenics. Wiker hides this from his reader because it would weaken his moral denunciation of Darwin.
Similarly, Wiker strengthens his case for the moral superiority of Christian cosmology by carefully refusing to mention any Christian teachings or practices that his readers might find troublesome. For instance, in presenting the moral teachings of the Bible, Wiker never mentions the fact that the Bible endorses slavery and genocide. He speaks of infanticide as a moral abomination. But he never mentions the troublesome story of Abraham being commanded by God to kill Isaac. Nor does he mention Jeptha's murdering of his daughter as a sacrifice to God. As I have noted in some recent posts, even Pope John II and Pope Benedict XVI have asked foregiveness for Christian traditions of violence. Wiker is silent about all of this.
Moreover, Wiker is also silent about the Epicurean books of the Bible--Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs--both of which teach the goodness of pleasure. The Song of Songs celebrating erotic love without reference to marriage or reproduction contradicts Wiker's claim that sexual pleasure must always to directed to producing children. The Epicureanism of Ecclesiastes was noted by Thomas Aquinas (Summa Contra Gentiles, III.27.11).
Wiker accuses Darwin of racism, but never mentions that much of the argument for the unity of the human species in the Descent of Man was part of Darwin's argument against slavery.
Another troubling part of Wiker's writing is how he warns against the "secularization" of the modern world as the source of our moral degradation, and thus implies that what we need is a "sacralization" of the world, but he never explains what this would mean. Would he have us revert to the world of medieval Christendom based on its intelligent-design cosmology? He mentions those Epicurean Christians--like Giordano Bruno--who were burned at the stake for their Epicureanism. He doesn't condemn this. So would he want to bring back such executions?
Similarly, Wiker condemns homosexuality as evil because it goes against Christian cosmology and Biblical teaching. He doesn't mention that the Bible commands the killing of homosexuals. For centuries, homosexuality was a capital crime. Would he endorse this? If not, would that mean that he doesn't really want to enforce Christian cosmology and abolish Epicurean cosmology?
Furthermore, Wiker assumes that intelligent design reasoning is not only morally but also scientifically superior to evolutionary reasoning, because the evolutionists cannot explain exactly the step-by-step pathway by which all complex forms have evolved. But then he never offers any account of how the intelligent design proponents would explain exactly when, where, and how the Intelligent Designer did this.
And while Wiker criticizes Darwinism as based on faith rather than demonstration, he never demonstrates the truth of the anthropomorphic analogy behind all intelligent design reasoning--the idea that we can infer divine intelligent agency from what we know about human intelligent agency. As I have argued in some previous posts, this is dubious assumption that needs to be proven.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Sunday, January 08, 2012
Rick Santorum's Support for the Intelligent Design Movement
As I have indicated in my previous post, I think Rick Santorum should be questioned about his support for the intelligent design movement. What's at issue here is not just a matter of the science curriculum in public schools, because the deeper question is whether Santorum believes that modern evolutionary science is responsible for the decline of Western culture, and whether he thinks the salvation of Western culture requires replacing evolutionary science with a "true science" of intelligent-design creationism.
This is suggested by what Santorum wrote in 2006 in his Foreword to a collection of essays honoring Phillip Johnson, the founder of the intelligent design movement. The book is Darwin's Nemesis: Phillip Johnson and the Intelligent Design Movement, edited by William A. Dembski (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006). One of the essays in this book is an attack on me by J. Budziszewski, who argues that my defense of Darwinian natural right is a dangerous denial of the Christian morality required for a healthy culture. Santorum's Foreword suggests that he agrees with this. I have responded to Budziszewski in two posts that can be found here and here.
Phillip Johnson is the person who first proposed the "wedge strategy"--the idea that a carefully crafted attack on Darwinian evolutionary science could become the "wedge" for ultimately destroying all of modern scientific naturalism and then leading to a "renewal of culture" based on intelligent-design creationism.
Here's the full text of Santorum's Foreword:
Santorum's support for the intelligent design movement, while serving as Senator from Pennyslvania, included supporting the school board of the Dover Area Public Schools, in Dover, Pennsylvania, when they tried to introduce intelligent design creationism into the schools. This was overturned by a federal judge as unconstitutional in 2005. Some of my blog posts on this case can be found here.
It would be good for someone to ask Santorum if as President, he would be carrying out the plan in the Discovery Institute's Wedge Document for overturning scientific naturalism and replacing it with intelligent-design creationism.
This question could have been asked this morning on the "Meet the Press" Republican presidential debate, particularly when Santorum said that President Obama's failure to support traditional marriage and family life showed Obama's "secular" view of American culture.
This is suggested by what Santorum wrote in 2006 in his Foreword to a collection of essays honoring Phillip Johnson, the founder of the intelligent design movement. The book is Darwin's Nemesis: Phillip Johnson and the Intelligent Design Movement, edited by William A. Dembski (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006). One of the essays in this book is an attack on me by J. Budziszewski, who argues that my defense of Darwinian natural right is a dangerous denial of the Christian morality required for a healthy culture. Santorum's Foreword suggests that he agrees with this. I have responded to Budziszewski in two posts that can be found here and here.
Phillip Johnson is the person who first proposed the "wedge strategy"--the idea that a carefully crafted attack on Darwinian evolutionary science could become the "wedge" for ultimately destroying all of modern scientific naturalism and then leading to a "renewal of culture" based on intelligent-design creationism.
Here's the full text of Santorum's Foreword:
This volume celebrates Phillip Johnson's leadership in the intelligent design (ID) movement. Scholars who have known Phil best and worked with him most closely assembled in April 2004 at Biola University to present him with a collection of papers in his honor. I wish I could have been there to offer my congratulations and thanks in person. Instead, I have the privilege of writing this brief foreword from Washington.
Since the publication of Darwin on Trial more than ten years ago, Phillip Johnson has provided extraordinary leadership for an extraordinary cause, namely, to rid science of false philosophy. The importance of the cause is clear: what could be more important than showing that only a shallow, partisan understanding of science supports the false philosophy of materialist reductionism, with its thoroughly unscientific denial of formal and final causes in nature and its repudiation of the first cause of all being? As the decline of true science has been a major factor in the decline of Western culture, so too the renewal of science will play a big part in cultural renewal.
Johnson's extraordinary leadership also is clear: rather than fall into the trap of building a cult of personality around himself and his own considerable talents, he has instead helped raise up and promote a whole group of intellectual leaders in the course of scientific renewal. This kind of selfless Christian leadership is a shining example to us all, young and old.
Speaking of the young, I personally wish to commend Phil for the great help he has given me in my efforts to inject a renewed and unbiased understanding of science and its practice into the curricula of our public schools. There is much more for us to do, but working with Phil's colleagues at Seattle's Discovery Institute, we have begun the difficult fight for removing the stranglehold of philosophical materialism on textbook science.
Phil, I congratulate and praise you for your tireless work to return science to a sure philosophical grounding in the nature of things as they really are. Please know that during your Biola celebration, I was with you and your colleagues in spirit. As much as I was delighted when I first heard about this celebration in your honor, I am again delighted now that the proceedings from that celebration have appeared in book form.
Senator Rick SantorumIt is remarkable to have a United States Senator joining the intelligent design movement led by the Discovery Institute. As Santorum's language here indicates, he sees himself as serving the plan of the Discovery Institute for overturning modern scientific materialism--particularly, as expressed in Darwinian evolutionary science--and replacing it with the "true science" of intelligent-design creationism. This plan was first laid out in a secret memorandum--the "Wedge Document"--for establishing the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. That document can now be found here.
Santorum's support for the intelligent design movement, while serving as Senator from Pennyslvania, included supporting the school board of the Dover Area Public Schools, in Dover, Pennsylvania, when they tried to introduce intelligent design creationism into the schools. This was overturned by a federal judge as unconstitutional in 2005. Some of my blog posts on this case can be found here.
It would be good for someone to ask Santorum if as President, he would be carrying out the plan in the Discovery Institute's Wedge Document for overturning scientific naturalism and replacing it with intelligent-design creationism.
This question could have been asked this morning on the "Meet the Press" Republican presidential debate, particularly when Santorum said that President Obama's failure to support traditional marriage and family life showed Obama's "secular" view of American culture.
Wednesday, January 04, 2012
Romney, Santorum, and the Debate Over Evolution
Now that Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have finished in a tie in the Republican presidential primary vote in Iowa, we might expect to see some debate between them over evolution.
As I have indicated in some previous posts, Romney is a theistic evolutionist who sees no conflict between evolutionary science and religious belief. He is also a thoughtful proponent of religious liberty. These two positions are related, because he can defend the teaching of evolution in public schools as compatible with religious liberty.
By contrast, Santorum is a proponent of "intelligent design theory," who has acted as an agent of the Discovery Institute in Seattle in attacking Darwinian evolution. In 2001, he attempted to attach the "Santorum Amendment" to the "No Child Left Behind Act," an amendment that would have promoted the teaching of "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolutionary science.
In his recent campaigning, Santorum has continued to criticize evolution as an atheistic teaching.
Santorum stresses the religious foundations of the American political tradition, and he sees evolutionary science as a threat to those traditional religious beliefs. Romney, however, has defended the tradition of religious liberty and toleration that stretches from Roger Williams and John Locke to the "no religious test" clause of the American Constitution. Like Abraham Lincoln, who adopted the idea of evolution from his reading of Robert Chambers Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Romney sees no conflict between evolutionary science and religious liberty. Like William Jennings Bryan, Santorum thinks that evolutionary science subverts the religious foundations of American political life.
So it's possible that we might see a split among the Republican presidential candidates over evolution similar to what we saw five years ago.
As I have indicated in some previous posts, Romney is a theistic evolutionist who sees no conflict between evolutionary science and religious belief. He is also a thoughtful proponent of religious liberty. These two positions are related, because he can defend the teaching of evolution in public schools as compatible with religious liberty.
By contrast, Santorum is a proponent of "intelligent design theory," who has acted as an agent of the Discovery Institute in Seattle in attacking Darwinian evolution. In 2001, he attempted to attach the "Santorum Amendment" to the "No Child Left Behind Act," an amendment that would have promoted the teaching of "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolutionary science.
In his recent campaigning, Santorum has continued to criticize evolution as an atheistic teaching.
Santorum stresses the religious foundations of the American political tradition, and he sees evolutionary science as a threat to those traditional religious beliefs. Romney, however, has defended the tradition of religious liberty and toleration that stretches from Roger Williams and John Locke to the "no religious test" clause of the American Constitution. Like Abraham Lincoln, who adopted the idea of evolution from his reading of Robert Chambers Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Romney sees no conflict between evolutionary science and religious liberty. Like William Jennings Bryan, Santorum thinks that evolutionary science subverts the religious foundations of American political life.
So it's possible that we might see a split among the Republican presidential candidates over evolution similar to what we saw five years ago.
Sunday, January 01, 2012
Is There Any Manly Revolutionary Resentment in Pinker's World?
It is remarkable that while Steven Pinker says a lot in Better Angels about the "Humanitarian Revolution" and the "Rights Revolution," he never supports the right to revolution or the moral resentment against oppression that often motivates revolution. This reflects his conviction that the decline in violence depends on the soft sentiments of a feminized culture rather than the hard sentiments of a male culture of honor. But I am not convinced that the moral progress of liberal humanism can be sustained without the spirited sentiments of manly resentment against injustice.
Pinker recognizes the importance of the Declaration of Independence as a statement of the "Humanitarian Revolution" (134, 183, 185). But he never acknowledges its affirmation of the right to revolution. Nor does he reflect on the fact that this was a declaration of war signed by men pledging to one another "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."
He also recognizes the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) as a statement of the "Rights Revolution" (134, 257-58). But he never mentions the statements in the Preamble of the Universal Declaration about "barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind" and the justice of "rebellion against tyranny and oppression."
Pinker is troubled by the moral psychology of outrage, rebellion, and honor as rooted in the "inner demon" of revenge (529-47), which drives human beings into moralistic violence. But while Pinker endorses Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and Smith's idea of how the moral sentiments are expressed by the "impartial spectator" (669-70), he does not recognize Smith's distinction between revenge and resentment. Revenge is the "excess of resentment," Smith explains, and as such it "appears to be the most detestable of all the passions, and is the object of the horror and indignation of every body." But a proper resentment against inhuman oppression is rightly endorsed "when properly humbled and entirely brought down to the level of the sympathetic indignation of the spectator" (TMS, 76-77).
Contrary to Pinker's reliance on the soft, feminine sentiments of nonviolence, I don't see how we can enforce respect for human rights and individual liberty if we don't feel a manly "sympathetic indignation" in response to oppression, and if we don't allow that moral indignation to justify revolutionary violence against tyrannical rule.
Pinker acknowledges the influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) in promoting the abolition of slavery by eliciting sympathy for the suffering of slaves (155, 177). But he says nothing about how some black abolitionists criticized Stowe for presenting Uncle Tom as a purely submissive character who cooperated with his slave masters, who thus implicitly confirmed the proslavery claim that blacks were naturally inclined to slavish obedience and lacking in the spiritedness of free men.
Nor does Pinker say anything about Stowe's other antislavery novel--Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856)--in which she presents some slaves as moved by moral indignation to revolutionary resistance to their enslavement. Here she depicts slaves who manifest Smith's moral psychology of proper resentment. She writes: "This sentiment of justice, this agony in view of cruelty and crime, is in men a strong attribute of the highest natures; for he who is destitute of the element of moral indignation is effeminate and tame" (Dred, Penguin Classics, 497). (This point has been made clear to me by my reading of Chris Thuot's dissertation on the political theory of Stowe's novels.)
Beginning with John Locke and other early modern liberal theorists, liberal political theory has rested upon an ultimate appeal to revolutionary violence to vindicate the natural human right to liberty. But in Chapter 8 ("Whatever Happened to Revolution?) of James Payne's History of Force, Payne argues that "owing to the evolution against force, the tendency toward revolution has been decreasing" (102). The same thought is perhaps implied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law." The suggestion seems to be that if human rights are protected by the rule of law, there is no need for revolutionary violence. And apparently, Pinker believes that the historical trend toward protecting human rights has become so strong that there is no need for revolution and thus nonviolence can be the rule.
But even if the level of revolutionary violence has dropped in recent history, I cannot see how human rights and liberty can be enforced if there is not at least some threat of revolution to check the power of tyrants. In fact, as Arnold Ludwig has shown in his book King of the Mountain, the 20th century shows a clear pattern in which despotic rulers are likely to be deposed by assassination or rebellion. We should regret that some of the most brutal tyrants of the 20th century--such as Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot--did not arouse enough manly resentment in their subjects to provoke revolutionary resistance.
Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, and here.
Pinker recognizes the importance of the Declaration of Independence as a statement of the "Humanitarian Revolution" (134, 183, 185). But he never acknowledges its affirmation of the right to revolution. Nor does he reflect on the fact that this was a declaration of war signed by men pledging to one another "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."
He also recognizes the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) as a statement of the "Rights Revolution" (134, 257-58). But he never mentions the statements in the Preamble of the Universal Declaration about "barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind" and the justice of "rebellion against tyranny and oppression."
Pinker is troubled by the moral psychology of outrage, rebellion, and honor as rooted in the "inner demon" of revenge (529-47), which drives human beings into moralistic violence. But while Pinker endorses Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and Smith's idea of how the moral sentiments are expressed by the "impartial spectator" (669-70), he does not recognize Smith's distinction between revenge and resentment. Revenge is the "excess of resentment," Smith explains, and as such it "appears to be the most detestable of all the passions, and is the object of the horror and indignation of every body." But a proper resentment against inhuman oppression is rightly endorsed "when properly humbled and entirely brought down to the level of the sympathetic indignation of the spectator" (TMS, 76-77).
Contrary to Pinker's reliance on the soft, feminine sentiments of nonviolence, I don't see how we can enforce respect for human rights and individual liberty if we don't feel a manly "sympathetic indignation" in response to oppression, and if we don't allow that moral indignation to justify revolutionary violence against tyrannical rule.
Pinker acknowledges the influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) in promoting the abolition of slavery by eliciting sympathy for the suffering of slaves (155, 177). But he says nothing about how some black abolitionists criticized Stowe for presenting Uncle Tom as a purely submissive character who cooperated with his slave masters, who thus implicitly confirmed the proslavery claim that blacks were naturally inclined to slavish obedience and lacking in the spiritedness of free men.
Nor does Pinker say anything about Stowe's other antislavery novel--Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856)--in which she presents some slaves as moved by moral indignation to revolutionary resistance to their enslavement. Here she depicts slaves who manifest Smith's moral psychology of proper resentment. She writes: "This sentiment of justice, this agony in view of cruelty and crime, is in men a strong attribute of the highest natures; for he who is destitute of the element of moral indignation is effeminate and tame" (Dred, Penguin Classics, 497). (This point has been made clear to me by my reading of Chris Thuot's dissertation on the political theory of Stowe's novels.)
Beginning with John Locke and other early modern liberal theorists, liberal political theory has rested upon an ultimate appeal to revolutionary violence to vindicate the natural human right to liberty. But in Chapter 8 ("Whatever Happened to Revolution?) of James Payne's History of Force, Payne argues that "owing to the evolution against force, the tendency toward revolution has been decreasing" (102). The same thought is perhaps implied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law." The suggestion seems to be that if human rights are protected by the rule of law, there is no need for revolutionary violence. And apparently, Pinker believes that the historical trend toward protecting human rights has become so strong that there is no need for revolution and thus nonviolence can be the rule.
But even if the level of revolutionary violence has dropped in recent history, I cannot see how human rights and liberty can be enforced if there is not at least some threat of revolution to check the power of tyrants. In fact, as Arnold Ludwig has shown in his book King of the Mountain, the 20th century shows a clear pattern in which despotic rulers are likely to be deposed by assassination or rebellion. We should regret that some of the most brutal tyrants of the 20th century--such as Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot--did not arouse enough manly resentment in their subjects to provoke revolutionary resistance.
Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, and here.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Termite Morality and Pinker's Platonic Longings
Like Peter Singer, Steve Pinker struggles with his Platonic longings for a moral cosmology.
Pinker shows this in the final pages of Better Angels (694-96). The evidence for declining violence throughout history suggests that history has some cosmic purpose. James Payne wonders whether this indicates "a higher power at work." Robert Wright wonders whether history is a story with a "cosmic author." Although Pinker resists the temptation to see a divine purpose at work in history, he does see some vindication for "moral realism--that moral truths are out there somewhere for us to discover, just as we discover the truths of science and mathematics."
But like Singer, Pinker is ambivalent about whether his belief in moral truths that are "out there somewhere for us to discover" can be justified by a moral cosmology. He writes:
Would "any fellow thinker" include a rational termite? Edward O. Wilson has quoted the following excerpt from a commencement address by the dean of the faculty at the International Termite University (In Search of Nature, 1996, pp. 97-99):
Contrary to what is suggested by Pinker and Singer, there are no moral truths written into the order of the cosmos that are justifiable to any thinking being. "Human beings possess a species-specific nature and morality." And, similarly, any nonhuman animal with cognitive capacities for moral reasoning would arrive at whatever moral imperatives were suited for its species-specific nature. So, for example, rational termites would reject "the evil of personal rights."
In imagining how termite morality would differ from human morality, Wilson is following the lead of Darwin, who indicated in The Descent of Man that, if bees were capable of moral reasoning, they would develop a moral sense very different from that of human beings. In her review of Darwin's book, Frances Cobbe was deeply disturbed by this thought, because it denied her belief that moral imperatives were universal and axiomatic truths of the universe that could be discovered by pure reason alone just as we discover the truths of mathematics.
Pinker and Singer often seem to be on the side of Cobbe against Darwin. And yet they are ambivalent about this, because they recognize that an evolutionary morality must be adapted for the natural inclinations of the species, and thus it has no cosmic truth. The human good is a discoverable truth about the human species only as long as the human species exists in its present form. Many contemporary moral philosophers worry that such a species-specific morality that has no foundation in moral cosmology must be purely "fictional."
Some of my blog posts on the Darwin-Cobbe debate can be found here.
Pinker shows this in the final pages of Better Angels (694-96). The evidence for declining violence throughout history suggests that history has some cosmic purpose. James Payne wonders whether this indicates "a higher power at work." Robert Wright wonders whether history is a story with a "cosmic author." Although Pinker resists the temptation to see a divine purpose at work in history, he does see some vindication for "moral realism--that moral truths are out there somewhere for us to discover, just as we discover the truths of science and mathematics."
But like Singer, Pinker is ambivalent about whether his belief in moral truths that are "out there somewhere for us to discover" can be justified by a moral cosmology. He writes:
Only an inflated sense of our own importance could turn our desire to escape the Pacifist's Dilemma into a grand purpose of the cosmos. But the desire does seem to tap into contingencies of the world that are not exactly physical, and so it is different from the desires that were the mothers of other inventions such as refined sugar or central heating. The maddening structure of a Pacifist's Dilemma is an abstract feature of reality. So is its most comprehensive solution, the interchangeability of perspectives, which is the principle behind the Golden Rule and its equivalents that have been rediscovered in so many moral traditions. Our cognitive processes have been struggling with these aspects of reality over the course of our history, just as they have struggled with the laws of logic and geometry.
Though our escape from destructive contests is not a cosmic purpose, it is a human purpose. Defenders of religion have long claimed that in the absence of divine edicts, morality can never be grounded outside ourselves. People can pursue only selfish interests, perhaps tweaked by taste or fashion, and are sentenced to lives of relativism and nihilism. We can now appreciate why this line of argument is mistaken. Discovering earthly ways in which human beings can flourish, including stratagems to overcome the tragedy of the inherent appeal of aggression, should be purpose enough for anyone. It is a goal that is nobler than joining a celestial choir, melting into a cosmic spirit, or being reincarnated into a higher life-form, because the goal can be justified to any fellow thinker rather than being inculcated to arbitrary factions by charisma, tradition, or force.So, on the one hand, the human good of reducing violence is not a cosmic purpose, but only a human purpose. And yet, on the other hand, this goal reflects "an abstract feature of reality," and it can be "justified to any fellow thinker." What does Pinker mean by "any fellow thinker"? His reference to the laws of logic and geometry suggests that he means that any rational being would have to agree on the morality of reducing violence, which suggests a Kantian moral imperative of pure reason that does not depend on the natural inclinations of the human animal. That's what I see as Pinker's Platonic longing.
Would "any fellow thinker" include a rational termite? Edward O. Wilson has quoted the following excerpt from a commencement address by the dean of the faculty at the International Termite University (In Search of Nature, 1996, pp. 97-99):
On one thing we can surely agree! We are the pinnacle of 3 billion years of evolution, unique by virtue of our high intelligence, employment of symbolic language, and diversity of cultures evolved over hundreds of generations. Our species alone has sufficient self-awareness to perceive history and the meaning of personal mortality. Having largely escaped the sovereignty of our genes, we now base social organization mostly or entirely upon culture. Our universities disseminate knowledge from the three great branches of learning: the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the termitities. Since our ancestors, the macrotermitine termites, achieved 10-kilogram weight and larger brains during their rapid evolution through the later Tertiary period and learned to write with pheromone script, termitistic scholarship has refined ethical philosophy. It is now possible to express the deontological imperatives of moral behavior with precision. These imperatives are mostly self-evident and universal. They are the very essence of termitity. They include the love of darkness and of the deep, saprophytic, basidiomycetic penetralia of the soil; the centrality of colony life amidst a richness of war and trade among colonies; the sanctity of the physiological caste system; the evil of personal reproduction by worker castes; the mystery of deep love for reproductive siblings, which turns to hatred the instant they mate; rejection of the evil of personal rights; the infinite aesthetic pleasures of pheromonal song; the aesthetic pleasure eating from nestmates' anuses after the shedding of the skin; the joy of cannibalism and surrender of the body for consumption when sick or injured (it is more blessed to be eaten than to eat); and much more . . .
Some termitistically inclined scientists, particularly the ethologists and sociobiologists, argue that our social organization is shaped by our genes and that our ethical precepts simply reflect the peculiarities of termite evolution. They assert that ethical philosophy must take into account the structure of the termite brain and the evolutionary history of the species. Socialization is genetically channelled, and some forms of it all but inevitable.
This proposal has created a major academic controversy. Many scholars in the social sciences and termitities, refusing to believe that termite nature can be better understood by a study of fishes and baboons, have withdrawn behind the moat of philosophical dualism and reinforced the crenellated parapets of the formal refutation of the naturalistic fallacy. They consider the mind to be beyond the reach of materialistic biological research. A few take the extreme view that conditioning can alter termite culture and ethics in almost any direction desired. But the biologists respond that termite behavior can never be altered so far as to resemble that of, say, human beings. There is such a thing as a biologically based termite nature . . .Wilson explains: "I have concocted this termitocentric fantasy to illustrate a generalization strangely difficult to explain by conventional means: that human beings possess a species-specific nature and morality, which occupy only a tiny section in the space of all possible social and moral conditions."
Contrary to what is suggested by Pinker and Singer, there are no moral truths written into the order of the cosmos that are justifiable to any thinking being. "Human beings possess a species-specific nature and morality." And, similarly, any nonhuman animal with cognitive capacities for moral reasoning would arrive at whatever moral imperatives were suited for its species-specific nature. So, for example, rational termites would reject "the evil of personal rights."
In imagining how termite morality would differ from human morality, Wilson is following the lead of Darwin, who indicated in The Descent of Man that, if bees were capable of moral reasoning, they would develop a moral sense very different from that of human beings. In her review of Darwin's book, Frances Cobbe was deeply disturbed by this thought, because it denied her belief that moral imperatives were universal and axiomatic truths of the universe that could be discovered by pure reason alone just as we discover the truths of mathematics.
Pinker and Singer often seem to be on the side of Cobbe against Darwin. And yet they are ambivalent about this, because they recognize that an evolutionary morality must be adapted for the natural inclinations of the species, and thus it has no cosmic truth. The human good is a discoverable truth about the human species only as long as the human species exists in its present form. Many contemporary moral philosophers worry that such a species-specific morality that has no foundation in moral cosmology must be purely "fictional."
Some of my blog posts on the Darwin-Cobbe debate can be found here.
Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, and the Perils of Paleolibertarianism
Some polls are predicting that Ron Paul might win the Iowa caucases next week. As a result of this, Paul is under intense media scrutiny, and the primary center of attention is some newsletters sent out under Paul's name in the 1990s, which suggest racist bigotry.
This is not a new story. The journalistic reports--including that from the New York Times--are restating what has already been reported years ago in the libertarian media world. In the 1990s, Paul was captivated by the influence of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell, who were trying to promote a "paleolibertarian" movement that would bring together libertarians with American Southern traditionalists tracing their roots back to John C. Calhoun and the defenders of American slavery.
American libertarians have recognized the strange and incoherent character of this movement, as indicated by this recent blog by Matt Welch and an earlier blog on Reason.com.
The evidence suggests that the bigoted newsletters were written by Lew Rockwell. Ron Paul did not write them. But because of his long friendship with Rockwell, he cannot bring himself to publicly identify Rockwell as the author and repudiate what Rockwell wrote.
Behind all of this is the strange career of Rothbard who fostered the paleolibertarian movement. Rothbard and I had some common interests in the defense of libertarianism as rooted in a natural law/natural right/Darwinian conception of human liberty. I met him on one occasion, and we corresponded over the years. But he was too easily seduced by some strange positions that did not fit well with his libertarian thought.
Just as Barack Obama was forced to repudiate the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Ron Paul will be forced (I hope) to repudiate Lew Rockwell.
This is not a new story. The journalistic reports--including that from the New York Times--are restating what has already been reported years ago in the libertarian media world. In the 1990s, Paul was captivated by the influence of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell, who were trying to promote a "paleolibertarian" movement that would bring together libertarians with American Southern traditionalists tracing their roots back to John C. Calhoun and the defenders of American slavery.
American libertarians have recognized the strange and incoherent character of this movement, as indicated by this recent blog by Matt Welch and an earlier blog on Reason.com.
The evidence suggests that the bigoted newsletters were written by Lew Rockwell. Ron Paul did not write them. But because of his long friendship with Rockwell, he cannot bring himself to publicly identify Rockwell as the author and repudiate what Rockwell wrote.
Behind all of this is the strange career of Rothbard who fostered the paleolibertarian movement. Rothbard and I had some common interests in the defense of libertarianism as rooted in a natural law/natural right/Darwinian conception of human liberty. I met him on one occasion, and we corresponded over the years. But he was too easily seduced by some strange positions that did not fit well with his libertarian thought.
Just as Barack Obama was forced to repudiate the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Ron Paul will be forced (I hope) to repudiate Lew Rockwell.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
A Darwinian Cure for Peter Singer's Platonic Longings
It is strange that so many contemporary moral philosophers show a Platonic longing for a cosmic morality of eternal moral truths. One can see this in their response to evolutionary accounts of morality. They either totally reject an evolutionary science of morality for failing to grasp the transcendental truth of morality. Or they accept it as true, but then they worry that this makes morality purely fictional, because an evolutionary morality is not founded in any eternal truth about the universe.
This Platonic longing is evident in the writing of Peter Singer. I was reminded of this in looking at the new edition, published this year, of Singer's The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress. When this was first published in 1981, this was the first book-length response to the revival of Darwinian ethics initiated by Edward O. Wilson. It anticipated the agonizing struggle of philosophers over the past 30 years to come to terms with the new biological and evolutionary studies of morality.
One can see the influence of this book in Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, where Singer's idea of the "expanding circle" guided by the "escalator of reason" is a fundamental theme. But while Pinker emphasizes the role of reason in moral progress, just as Singer does, Pinker does not fully embrace Singer's Platonic/Kantian rationalism, because Pinker recognizes that pure reason by itself cannot move us to act without emotion or desire, and because he recognizes that whatever moral truths we discover are contingent truths about our evolved human nature, not eternal truths about the universe (see Better Angels, 642-50, 694-96).
The new edition of Expanding Circle has an "Afterword" in which Singer reluctantly admits that he has lost confidence in his earlier Platonism, although he still can't bring himself to give it up.
In the original book, Singer insists: "there is something in ethics which is eternal and universal, not dependent on the existence of human beings or other creatures with preferences. The process of reasoning we have been discussing is eternal and universal. That one's interests are one among many sets of interests, no more important than the similar interests of others, is a conclusion that, in principle, any rational being can come to see" (105-106).
But then he immediately adds some comments that show his ambivalence about this. He notes that it was easy to believe in "moral laws which exist independently of us" when those laws were believed to have been handed down by God. But now--for people like Singer--this religious belief is impossible. "And the more we think about what it could mean--outside of a religious framework--for there to be eternal moral truths existing independently of living creatures, the more mysterious it becomes" (106-107).
This is "mysterious," because, as John Mackie argued, this implies some very queer metaphysical entities in the universe, something like Plato's Idea of the Good. "How can there be something in the universe, existing entirely independently of us and of our aims, desires, and interests, which provides us with reasons for acting in certain ways?" (107).
So, in the original book, Singer left his reader wondering whether he really believed in cosmic moral truths that were "eternal and universal," or whether he regarded such a cosmic morality as too "mysterious" to be credible.
In his new "Afterword," Singer points to this part of his book as showing "how ambivalent I was about the idea of ethics being objectively true and rationally based" (198). Now, he admits:
One can see this longing for a moral cosmology of eternal and universal truths in Plato's dialogues. But a careful reading of the dialogues also suggests that while Plato and Plato's Socrates thought such a moral cosmology might be necessary for the good morals of most people, it was not really plausible, because the universe appears to be morally indifferent. The universe does not care for or about us. But we care for ourselves. And that care for ourselves as an expression of our human nature constitutes the natural ground for the human good as perfected in the moral and intellectual virtues.
Darwinian science provides an evolutionary account of life, including human life, that supports such a naturalistic ethics of human care. The denial of moral cosmology does not drive us into nihilism, because the evolved nature of human beings as caring for themselves constitutes a natural ground for the human good, even though the human species is not eternal or invariant.
These points have been more fully elaborated in some previous posts, which can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
This Platonic longing is evident in the writing of Peter Singer. I was reminded of this in looking at the new edition, published this year, of Singer's The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress. When this was first published in 1981, this was the first book-length response to the revival of Darwinian ethics initiated by Edward O. Wilson. It anticipated the agonizing struggle of philosophers over the past 30 years to come to terms with the new biological and evolutionary studies of morality.
One can see the influence of this book in Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, where Singer's idea of the "expanding circle" guided by the "escalator of reason" is a fundamental theme. But while Pinker emphasizes the role of reason in moral progress, just as Singer does, Pinker does not fully embrace Singer's Platonic/Kantian rationalism, because Pinker recognizes that pure reason by itself cannot move us to act without emotion or desire, and because he recognizes that whatever moral truths we discover are contingent truths about our evolved human nature, not eternal truths about the universe (see Better Angels, 642-50, 694-96).
The new edition of Expanding Circle has an "Afterword" in which Singer reluctantly admits that he has lost confidence in his earlier Platonism, although he still can't bring himself to give it up.
In the original book, Singer insists: "there is something in ethics which is eternal and universal, not dependent on the existence of human beings or other creatures with preferences. The process of reasoning we have been discussing is eternal and universal. That one's interests are one among many sets of interests, no more important than the similar interests of others, is a conclusion that, in principle, any rational being can come to see" (105-106).
But then he immediately adds some comments that show his ambivalence about this. He notes that it was easy to believe in "moral laws which exist independently of us" when those laws were believed to have been handed down by God. But now--for people like Singer--this religious belief is impossible. "And the more we think about what it could mean--outside of a religious framework--for there to be eternal moral truths existing independently of living creatures, the more mysterious it becomes" (106-107).
This is "mysterious," because, as John Mackie argued, this implies some very queer metaphysical entities in the universe, something like Plato's Idea of the Good. "How can there be something in the universe, existing entirely independently of us and of our aims, desires, and interests, which provides us with reasons for acting in certain ways?" (107).
So, in the original book, Singer left his reader wondering whether he really believed in cosmic moral truths that were "eternal and universal," or whether he regarded such a cosmic morality as too "mysterious" to be credible.
In his new "Afterword," Singer points to this part of his book as showing "how ambivalent I was about the idea of ethics being objectively true and rationally based" (198). Now, he admits:
I no longer believe that this argument succeeds. The judgment that "one's own interests are one among many sets of interests" can be accepted as a descriptive claim about our situation in the world, but to add that one's own interests are "no more important than the similar interests of others" is to make a normative claim. If I deny that normative claims can be true or false, then I cannot assert that this claim is true. It too could be treated as just one preference among others--except that now there is no basis for saying that we ought to maximize the satisfaction of preferences. . . . The denial of objective truth in ethics thus leads not, as I had tried to argue, to preference utilitarianism as a kind of metaphysically unproblematic default position, but to skepticism about the possibility of reaching any meaningful conclusions at all about what we ought to do. The only conclusions we could reach would be subjective ones, based on our desires or preferences, and therefore not ones that others with different desires or preferences would have any reason to accept. I was reluctant to embrace such skeptical or subjectivist views in 1981, and that reluctance has not abated over the intervening years. (199-200)But then, after making this admission, he concludes in the last sentence of the "Afterword" with an appeal to "the existence of objective moral truths" (204).
One can see this longing for a moral cosmology of eternal and universal truths in Plato's dialogues. But a careful reading of the dialogues also suggests that while Plato and Plato's Socrates thought such a moral cosmology might be necessary for the good morals of most people, it was not really plausible, because the universe appears to be morally indifferent. The universe does not care for or about us. But we care for ourselves. And that care for ourselves as an expression of our human nature constitutes the natural ground for the human good as perfected in the moral and intellectual virtues.
Darwinian science provides an evolutionary account of life, including human life, that supports such a naturalistic ethics of human care. The denial of moral cosmology does not drive us into nihilism, because the evolved nature of human beings as caring for themselves constitutes a natural ground for the human good, even though the human species is not eternal or invariant.
These points have been more fully elaborated in some previous posts, which can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Is Pinker Right that the Smarter People are Classical Liberals?
The argument of Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature that history shows a general trend towards declining violence has provoked a lot of discussion. But I am surprised that there has been no discussion of the most provocative facet of his argument--his claim that we're becoming more peaceful as we become smarter, and that the smartest people are classical liberals who best understand the reasoning for minimizing violence. Once one sees this point, one sees that Pinker's book is actually a work of political theory presenting the history of declining violence as confirmation for a Darwinian classical liberalism.
Pinker's understanding of how intelligence is linked to peace owes a lot to Peter Singer's theory of how the "escalator of reason" leads to an "expanding circle" of moral concern that eventually embraces all sentient beings. It's not surprising, therefore, that Singer's review of Pinker's book in the New York Times Book Review endorses Pinker's argument. But Singer fails to see that his support for the "Darwinian left" is subverted by Pinker's argument for Darwinian classical liberalism.
As I have indicated in a previous post, Pinker is not as emphatic as is James Payne (The History of Force) in linking declining violence to classical liberalism. Even so, Pinker indicates repeatedly in his book that classical liberalism is the only moral and political theory that recognizes the links between declining violence, individual liberty, and scientific rationalism as promoting human progress.
For example, Pinker recognizes that the classical liberals see that "the world has far too much morality," because the most destructive forms of violence often arise from using violence to enforce some dominant group's conception of morality (622-23). Adopting the moral psychology of Jonathan Haidt and Alan Fiske, Pinker sees an evolution in human history through four models of morality--communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing/rational-legal. The dramatic declines in violence over the last few centuries have depended on the move towards market pricing/rational-legal models of morality, and this is the move made by classical liberals. Pinker writes:
And, indeed, over the last few centuries there has been a remarkable decline in such moralistic violence. Blasphemy, heresy, and homosexuality were once capital crimes. But now, in many parts of the world, most people abhor the idea of executing blasphemers, heretics, and homosexuals. For example, in recent years, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have officially apologized and asked foregiveness for the sins of the Catholic Church in sanctioning religious violence. There is no precedent for this in the entire history of the Church. We see here a fundamental change in human cultural history.
How do we explain this change? Pinker's answer is that we are becoming smarter, and a smarter world is a less violent world. Or to be more precise, the smarter we become, the more inclined we are to a classical liberalism that teaches that violence is never justified except to prevent greater violence.
Pinker explains this as a "moral Flynn effect." The "Flynn effect" is named after political scientist James Flynn who is famous for pointing out that average IQ scores have been increasing dramatically over the past century. By today's standard, a typical person of 1910 would have an IQ score that would today be at the border of mental retardation! These increases in IQ scores have come primarily in the subtests that measure abstract thinking, as in the testing of reasoning about similarities, analogies, and visual matrices.
Flynn has argued that this increase in intelligence comes from the influence of modern science, so that now more and more people have been educated to think about the world through the abstract categories and formulas of science. Consequently, we see increases in "the ability to detach oneself from parochial knowledge of one's own little world and explore the implications of postulates in purely hypothetical worlds" (654).
Here is where Pinker sees the emergence of a moral Flynn effect: "enhanced powers of reason--specifically, the ability to set aside immediate experience, detach oneself from a parochial vantage point, and frame one's ideas in abstract, universal terms--would lead to better moral commitments, including an avoidance of violence" (656). "The cognitive skill that is most enhanced in the Flynn Effect, abstraction from the concrete particulars of immediate experience, is precisely the skill that must be exercised to take the perspectives of others and expand the circle of moral consideration."
The importance that Pinker attaches to this point is indicated by the prominence he gave it in his short article for Nature in October, which consisted of a few excerpts from his book
If Pinker is right about this, I suggest, then we should expect that this is the cognitive skill that one sees in the proponents of classical liberalism--those like John Locke, Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, Auberon Herbert, and Friedrich Hayek. I will elaborate this point in a future post.
Pinker's bold conclusion is that smarter people are more classically liberal. "The escalator of reason predicts only that intelligence should be correlated with classical liberalism, which values the autonomy and well-being of individuals over the constraints of tribe, authority, and tradition. Intelligence is expected to correlate with classical liberalism because classical liberalism is itself a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives that is inherent to reason itself" (662). Moreover, Pinker explains that this kind of moral intelligence is more closely linked to classical liberalism, which promotes individual liberty in all spheres of life, than to "left-liberalism," which favors using governmental violence to restrain economic liberty.
Pinker presents various kinds of empirical evidence for this link in historical evolution between intelligence and classical liberalism. The psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has shown that high IQ is correlated with political liberalism, and Pinker sees some evidence here that intelligence is more strongly linked to classical liberalism than to left-liberalism. Kanazawa found that among a sample of young American adolescents and adults, those with high IQ were more likely to identify themselves as liberal. He also found that the high IQ people were less likely to agree with the statement that government has the responsibility to redistribute income from the rich to the poor, perhaps by raising the taxes of the rich or giving income assistance to the poor. Pinker interprets this to mean that these high-IQ liberals were actually classical liberals or libertarians rather than left liberals.
Pinker does not tell his reader, however, that Kanazawa defines liberalism for himself as left liberalism. Nor does Pinker tell his reader that Kanazawa's data analysis was somewhat confusing on this issue. Although the high-IQ people did indeed tend to reject the idea of government using taxation to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, these same high-IQ people tended to agree that their federal income tax was too low, which Kanazawa interprets to mean that they were willing to be taxed to support welfare programs (Kanazawa 2010, 38, 49, 51-52).
Pinker also cites the work of Ian Deary and his colleagues who have shown that British children who showed high IQ in 1970 at age 10 were likely to show socially liberal attitudes in 1990 at age 30. In the article reporting this research, the authors concluded:
Deary and his colleagues also found a strong correlation between IQ and voting for the Liberal Democrats in the UK (Deary et al. 2008b). Pinker sees this as "a suggestion that intelligence leads to classical rather than left-liberalism" (663). This is a dubious claim, however, because many, if not most, of the Liberal Democrats are social liberals but not economic liberals, because they support the British welfare state.
It is true, however, that many of the leaders of the British Liberal Democrats have argued for moving to a classical liberal position that combines social liberalism and economic liberalism, which would be a move back to the classical liberalism of the Liberal Party as founded in 1859, before the Liberal Party moved at the beginning of the 20th century to welfare state liberalism. This argument for reviving classical liberalism within the Liberal Democratic Party was made by the contributors to The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism (2004), which include Nick Clegg, the current leader of the party and Deputy Prime Minister. It is not clear, however, as to how many of those voting for the Liberal Democrats think they are voting for classical liberalism.
Pinker also cites the research of economist Bryan Caplan who has shown that brighter people tend to think like classical liberal economists. For example, more intelligent Americans are likely to support free markets and free trade as more advantageous for the country than governmental wage and price controls and protectionism.
Finally, Pinker cites the research of psychologist Heiner Rindermann showing that a country's level of education and cognitive ability in 1960-1972 predicted its level of democracy, rule of law, and political liberty in 1991-2003. This effect of greater intelligence brings declining violence because democratic governments that secure the rule of law and political liberty lower the level of governmental violence.
REFERENCES
Caplan, Bryan, and Stephen Miller, "Intelligence Makes People Think Like Economists: Evidence from the General Social Survey," Intelligence 38 (2010): 636-47. Available online.
Deary, Ian J., G. David Batty, and Catharine R. Gale, "Bright Children Become Enlightened Adults," Psychological Science 19 (2008): 1-6. Available online.
Deary, Ian J., G. David Batty, and Catharine R. Gale, "Childhood Intelligence Predicts Voter Turnout, Voting Preferences, and Political Involvement in Adulthood: The 1970 British Cohort Study," Intelligence 36 (2008): 548-55. Available online.
Kanazawa, Satoshi, "Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent," Social Psychology Quarterly 73 (2010): 33-53. Available online.
Paul Marshall and David Laws, editors, The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism (Profile Books, 2004).
Pinker, Steven, "Taming the Devil within Us," Nature 478 (20 Octobr 2011): 309-11.
Rindermann, Heiner, "Relevance of Education and Intelligence for the Political Development of Nations: Democracy, Rule of Law, and Political Liberty," Intelligence 36 (2008): 306-22. Available online.
Pinker's understanding of how intelligence is linked to peace owes a lot to Peter Singer's theory of how the "escalator of reason" leads to an "expanding circle" of moral concern that eventually embraces all sentient beings. It's not surprising, therefore, that Singer's review of Pinker's book in the New York Times Book Review endorses Pinker's argument. But Singer fails to see that his support for the "Darwinian left" is subverted by Pinker's argument for Darwinian classical liberalism.
As I have indicated in a previous post, Pinker is not as emphatic as is James Payne (The History of Force) in linking declining violence to classical liberalism. Even so, Pinker indicates repeatedly in his book that classical liberalism is the only moral and political theory that recognizes the links between declining violence, individual liberty, and scientific rationalism as promoting human progress.
For example, Pinker recognizes that the classical liberals see that "the world has far too much morality," because the most destructive forms of violence often arise from using violence to enforce some dominant group's conception of morality (622-23). Adopting the moral psychology of Jonathan Haidt and Alan Fiske, Pinker sees an evolution in human history through four models of morality--communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing/rational-legal. The dramatic declines in violence over the last few centuries have depended on the move towards market pricing/rational-legal models of morality, and this is the move made by classical liberals. Pinker writes:
"Why might a disinvestment of moral resources from community, sanctity, and authority militate against violence? One reason is that communality can legitimize tribalism and jingoism, and authority can legitimize government repression. But a more general reason is that retrenchment of the moral sense to smaller territories leaves fewer transgressions for which people may legitimately be punished. There is a bedrock of morality based on autonomy and fairness on which everyone, traditional and modern, liberal and conservative, agrees. No one objects to the use of government violence to put assailants, rapists, and murderers behind bars. But defenders of traditional morality wish to heap many nonviolent infractions on top of this consensual layer, such as homosexuality, licentiousness, blasphemy, heresy, indecency, and desecration of sacred symbols. For their moral disapproval to have teeth, traditionalists must get the Leviathan to punish those offenders as well. Expunging these offenses from the law books gives the authorities fewer grounds for clubbing, cuffing, paddling, jailing, or executing people."
"The momentum of social norms in the direction of Market Pricing gives many people the willies, but it would, for better or worse, extrapolate the trend toward nonviolence. Radical libertarians, who love the Market Pricing model, would decriminalize prostitution, drug possession, and gambling, and thereby empty the world's prisons of millions of people currently kept there by force (to say nothing of sending pimps and drug lords the way of Prohibition gangsters). The progression toward personal freedom raises the question of whether it is morally desirable to trade a measure of socially sanctioned violence for a measure of behavior that many people deem intrinsically wrong, such as blasphemy, homosexuality, drug use, and prostitution. But that's just the point: right or wrong, retracting the moral sense from its traditional spheres of community, authority, and purity entails a reduction of violence. And that retraction is precisely the agenda of classical liberalism: a freedom of individuals from tribal and authoritarian force, and a tolerance of personal choices as long as they do not infringe on the autonomy and well-being of others." (636-37)I do have one objection to this. The way Pinker expresses his point here about the "retrenchment of the moral sense" in classical liberalism might be interpreted to suggest that classical liberals must deny the moral longings for "community, authority, and purity." But, in fact, classical liberals allow the expression of these moral longings, as long as they are channelled into the voluntary associations of civil society without any enforcement by violent coercion. So, for example, some believers in biblical religion might want to condemn blasphemers, heretics, and homosexuals as immoral, and classical liberals would allow them to express that condemnation within their religious groups, as long as they do not enforce that condemnation through violence.
And, indeed, over the last few centuries there has been a remarkable decline in such moralistic violence. Blasphemy, heresy, and homosexuality were once capital crimes. But now, in many parts of the world, most people abhor the idea of executing blasphemers, heretics, and homosexuals. For example, in recent years, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have officially apologized and asked foregiveness for the sins of the Catholic Church in sanctioning religious violence. There is no precedent for this in the entire history of the Church. We see here a fundamental change in human cultural history.
How do we explain this change? Pinker's answer is that we are becoming smarter, and a smarter world is a less violent world. Or to be more precise, the smarter we become, the more inclined we are to a classical liberalism that teaches that violence is never justified except to prevent greater violence.
Pinker explains this as a "moral Flynn effect." The "Flynn effect" is named after political scientist James Flynn who is famous for pointing out that average IQ scores have been increasing dramatically over the past century. By today's standard, a typical person of 1910 would have an IQ score that would today be at the border of mental retardation! These increases in IQ scores have come primarily in the subtests that measure abstract thinking, as in the testing of reasoning about similarities, analogies, and visual matrices.
Flynn has argued that this increase in intelligence comes from the influence of modern science, so that now more and more people have been educated to think about the world through the abstract categories and formulas of science. Consequently, we see increases in "the ability to detach oneself from parochial knowledge of one's own little world and explore the implications of postulates in purely hypothetical worlds" (654).
Here is where Pinker sees the emergence of a moral Flynn effect: "enhanced powers of reason--specifically, the ability to set aside immediate experience, detach oneself from a parochial vantage point, and frame one's ideas in abstract, universal terms--would lead to better moral commitments, including an avoidance of violence" (656). "The cognitive skill that is most enhanced in the Flynn Effect, abstraction from the concrete particulars of immediate experience, is precisely the skill that must be exercised to take the perspectives of others and expand the circle of moral consideration."
The importance that Pinker attaches to this point is indicated by the prominence he gave it in his short article for Nature in October, which consisted of a few excerpts from his book
If Pinker is right about this, I suggest, then we should expect that this is the cognitive skill that one sees in the proponents of classical liberalism--those like John Locke, Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, Auberon Herbert, and Friedrich Hayek. I will elaborate this point in a future post.
Pinker's bold conclusion is that smarter people are more classically liberal. "The escalator of reason predicts only that intelligence should be correlated with classical liberalism, which values the autonomy and well-being of individuals over the constraints of tribe, authority, and tradition. Intelligence is expected to correlate with classical liberalism because classical liberalism is itself a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives that is inherent to reason itself" (662). Moreover, Pinker explains that this kind of moral intelligence is more closely linked to classical liberalism, which promotes individual liberty in all spheres of life, than to "left-liberalism," which favors using governmental violence to restrain economic liberty.
Pinker presents various kinds of empirical evidence for this link in historical evolution between intelligence and classical liberalism. The psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has shown that high IQ is correlated with political liberalism, and Pinker sees some evidence here that intelligence is more strongly linked to classical liberalism than to left-liberalism. Kanazawa found that among a sample of young American adolescents and adults, those with high IQ were more likely to identify themselves as liberal. He also found that the high IQ people were less likely to agree with the statement that government has the responsibility to redistribute income from the rich to the poor, perhaps by raising the taxes of the rich or giving income assistance to the poor. Pinker interprets this to mean that these high-IQ liberals were actually classical liberals or libertarians rather than left liberals.
Pinker does not tell his reader, however, that Kanazawa defines liberalism for himself as left liberalism. Nor does Pinker tell his reader that Kanazawa's data analysis was somewhat confusing on this issue. Although the high-IQ people did indeed tend to reject the idea of government using taxation to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, these same high-IQ people tended to agree that their federal income tax was too low, which Kanazawa interprets to mean that they were willing to be taxed to support welfare programs (Kanazawa 2010, 38, 49, 51-52).
Pinker also cites the work of Ian Deary and his colleagues who have shown that British children who showed high IQ in 1970 at age 10 were likely to show socially liberal attitudes in 1990 at age 30. In the article reporting this research, the authors concluded:
"In this large, longitudinal study, intelligent children became, on average, broad-minded adults. The state of mind common to the attitude scales used in this analysis is one of objective fairness to other individuals, an overturning of past prejudice that militated against fairness. Brighter 10-year-olds are, at age 30, more likely to hold to a 'philosophy emphasising reason and individualism rather than tradition,' which is how The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines enlightenment." (5)
Deary and his colleagues also found a strong correlation between IQ and voting for the Liberal Democrats in the UK (Deary et al. 2008b). Pinker sees this as "a suggestion that intelligence leads to classical rather than left-liberalism" (663). This is a dubious claim, however, because many, if not most, of the Liberal Democrats are social liberals but not economic liberals, because they support the British welfare state.
It is true, however, that many of the leaders of the British Liberal Democrats have argued for moving to a classical liberal position that combines social liberalism and economic liberalism, which would be a move back to the classical liberalism of the Liberal Party as founded in 1859, before the Liberal Party moved at the beginning of the 20th century to welfare state liberalism. This argument for reviving classical liberalism within the Liberal Democratic Party was made by the contributors to The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism (2004), which include Nick Clegg, the current leader of the party and Deputy Prime Minister. It is not clear, however, as to how many of those voting for the Liberal Democrats think they are voting for classical liberalism.
Pinker also cites the research of economist Bryan Caplan who has shown that brighter people tend to think like classical liberal economists. For example, more intelligent Americans are likely to support free markets and free trade as more advantageous for the country than governmental wage and price controls and protectionism.
Finally, Pinker cites the research of psychologist Heiner Rindermann showing that a country's level of education and cognitive ability in 1960-1972 predicted its level of democracy, rule of law, and political liberty in 1991-2003. This effect of greater intelligence brings declining violence because democratic governments that secure the rule of law and political liberty lower the level of governmental violence.
REFERENCES
Caplan, Bryan, and Stephen Miller, "Intelligence Makes People Think Like Economists: Evidence from the General Social Survey," Intelligence 38 (2010): 636-47. Available online.
Deary, Ian J., G. David Batty, and Catharine R. Gale, "Bright Children Become Enlightened Adults," Psychological Science 19 (2008): 1-6. Available online.
Deary, Ian J., G. David Batty, and Catharine R. Gale, "Childhood Intelligence Predicts Voter Turnout, Voting Preferences, and Political Involvement in Adulthood: The 1970 British Cohort Study," Intelligence 36 (2008): 548-55. Available online.
Kanazawa, Satoshi, "Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent," Social Psychology Quarterly 73 (2010): 33-53. Available online.
Paul Marshall and David Laws, editors, The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism (Profile Books, 2004).
Pinker, Steven, "Taming the Devil within Us," Nature 478 (20 Octobr 2011): 309-11.
Rindermann, Heiner, "Relevance of Education and Intelligence for the Political Development of Nations: Democracy, Rule of Law, and Political Liberty," Intelligence 36 (2008): 306-22. Available online.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Plantinga on Theism and Science
The New York Times (December 14, 2011) has a good article on Alvin Plantinga's new book, in which he argues that the true enemy of modern science is not theistic religion but metaphysical naturalism.
Plantinga's scholarship is a remarkable achievement in making a philosophical case for biblical religion, which goes against the grain of modern analytic philosophy's tendency to take atheism for granted.
As I have indicated in a previous post, Plantinga's argument depends on taking a theistic evolutionist position that assumes the truth of Darwinian evolutionary science, while arguing that biblical theism provides support for that science.
I have indicated why I find his argumentation unpersuasive. But what is most interesting about his reasoning is how biblical believers need to accept evolutionary science in arguing that science and religion are compatible.
Thus, Plantinga belongs to a long tradition of theistic evolutionists that includes people like C. S. Lewis, Pope John Paul II, Francis Collins, and Michael Behe.
Plantinga's scholarship is a remarkable achievement in making a philosophical case for biblical religion, which goes against the grain of modern analytic philosophy's tendency to take atheism for granted.
As I have indicated in a previous post, Plantinga's argument depends on taking a theistic evolutionist position that assumes the truth of Darwinian evolutionary science, while arguing that biblical theism provides support for that science.
I have indicated why I find his argumentation unpersuasive. But what is most interesting about his reasoning is how biblical believers need to accept evolutionary science in arguing that science and religion are compatible.
Thus, Plantinga belongs to a long tradition of theistic evolutionists that includes people like C. S. Lewis, Pope John Paul II, Francis Collins, and Michael Behe.
Friday, December 09, 2011
Empathy in Rat Choice
Science has just published an article reporting experiments showing empathy in rats. This supports some of my previous writing on the mammalian basis for empathy as an evolutionary ground for Darwinian natural right.
Here's the abstract for the article:
The authors also argue that this shows that the rats were engaging in deliberate action to free their cagemates.
This supports the claims of Aristotle and Darwin that some nonhuman animals--and particularly mammals--are capable of intentional action in caring for individuals for whom they feel some attachment. Moreover, as indicated by Jaak Panksepp's commentary on this article, research in "affective neuroscience" is uncovering the neural basis for social emotions, which allows us to see how the evolution of morality and politics could emerge from the evolution of the mammalian brain. Human morality and politics are unique insofar as they show the uniqueness of the human capacities for high-level mental processing in the neocortex, and yet even this can be explained by the natural evolution of the neocortical structures of the primate brain.
Many years ago, I was interviewed for a job in the Department of Political Science at the University of Rochester. At that time, the Department was famous for promoting "rational choice theory" in political science--explaining politics through economic models of human beings as rational maximizers of their self-interest. I gave a job talk that was entitled "Emotional Choice Theory," in which I criticized rational choice thinking for failing to see the importance of social emotions in human behavior, which are best explained through evolutionary psychology. As you might expect, my talk was not well received.
If I were giving that job talk today, I might be more persuasive by pointing out how research in evolutionary psychology--as, for example, in studies of empathy in mammalian psychology--has challenged rational choice theory by showing how the economic model of Homo economicus needs to be combined with a Darwinian model of Homo moralis
REFERENCES
Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, Jean Decety, and Peggy Mason, "Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats," Science, 334 (9 December, 2011): 1427-30.
Jaak Panksepp, "Empathy and the Laws of Affect," Science, 334 (9 December, 2011): 1358-59.
Jaak Panksepp, "The Basic Emotional Circuits of Mammalian Brains: Do Animals Have Affective Lives?" Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 35 (2011): 1791-1804.
Some related posts can be found here, here, here, and here.
Here's the abstract for the article:
Whereas human pro-social behavior is often driven by empathic concern for another, it is unclear whether nonprimate mammals experience a similar motivational state. To test for empathically motivated pro-social behavior in rodents, we placed a free rat in an arena with a cagemate trapped in a restrainer. After several sessions, the free rat learned to intentionally and quickly open the restrainer and free the cagemate. Rats did not open empty or abject-containing restrainers. They freed cagemates even when social contract was prevented. When liberating a cagemate was pitted against chocholate contained with a second restrainer, rats opened both restrainers and typically shared the chocolate. Thus, rats behave pro-socially in response to a conspecific's distress, providing strong evidence for biological roots of empathically motivated helping behavior.The authors report that the female rats were more empathic than the male rats. They also report that the levels of empathic behavior were associated with individual differences in boldness, so that those individual rats with personal propensities to bold behavior were more inclined to empathic behavior.
The authors also argue that this shows that the rats were engaging in deliberate action to free their cagemates.
This supports the claims of Aristotle and Darwin that some nonhuman animals--and particularly mammals--are capable of intentional action in caring for individuals for whom they feel some attachment. Moreover, as indicated by Jaak Panksepp's commentary on this article, research in "affective neuroscience" is uncovering the neural basis for social emotions, which allows us to see how the evolution of morality and politics could emerge from the evolution of the mammalian brain. Human morality and politics are unique insofar as they show the uniqueness of the human capacities for high-level mental processing in the neocortex, and yet even this can be explained by the natural evolution of the neocortical structures of the primate brain.
Many years ago, I was interviewed for a job in the Department of Political Science at the University of Rochester. At that time, the Department was famous for promoting "rational choice theory" in political science--explaining politics through economic models of human beings as rational maximizers of their self-interest. I gave a job talk that was entitled "Emotional Choice Theory," in which I criticized rational choice thinking for failing to see the importance of social emotions in human behavior, which are best explained through evolutionary psychology. As you might expect, my talk was not well received.
If I were giving that job talk today, I might be more persuasive by pointing out how research in evolutionary psychology--as, for example, in studies of empathy in mammalian psychology--has challenged rational choice theory by showing how the economic model of Homo economicus needs to be combined with a Darwinian model of Homo moralis
REFERENCES
Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, Jean Decety, and Peggy Mason, "Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats," Science, 334 (9 December, 2011): 1427-30.
Jaak Panksepp, "Empathy and the Laws of Affect," Science, 334 (9 December, 2011): 1358-59.
Jaak Panksepp, "The Basic Emotional Circuits of Mammalian Brains: Do Animals Have Affective Lives?" Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 35 (2011): 1791-1804.
Some related posts can be found here, here, here, and here.
Sunday, December 04, 2011
The End of Manliness?
Steven Pinker's history of declining violence in The Better Angels of Our Nature seems to be a history of declining manliness. A pervasive theme of his book is that violence comes from men fighting over matters of honor, and therefore the historical trend towards declining violence requires a turn away from the culture of manly honor.
In the past, wars were fought as contests of honor. But now we know that Falstaff was right about honor--it's only a word, or a social construction, as we would say today (247). War is not glorious and exciting. It is stupid and cruel. We need to puncture the swollen egos of men who fight over who's most important. After all, it's only the silly games of little boys. If we get rid of that macho striving for honor and glory, then we can see that moral progress is measured, as Pinker declares on the last page of his book, by our success in allowing "a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes" (696).
But can we be satisfied by a world of peace without honor, a world of feminine values without masculine virtues, a world of bourgeois comfort without manly courage? In Pinker's long book, he raises this question in one paragraph, only to quickly dismiss it. He is speaking about the historical trend towards a feminized culture favoring peace over violence.
A few years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts on Mansfield's case for manliness in the modern world as an expression of a counter-Enlightenment tradition evident in the work of Straussians like Mansfield. Mansfield is correct, I think, in seeing that the biology of Plato and Aristotle recognises the complementarity of male and female virtues in human biological nature, while also recognising that manliness can be either bad or good, so that we need a virtuous mean between too little and too much masculinity. But I also think that Mansfield is wrong in failing to see how a Darwinian biology supports this ancient insight. If Mansfield were to embrace a Darwinian understanding of the sexual complementarity of evolved human nature, he would not be seduced by the "manly nihilism" of Friedrich Nietzsche and Teddy Roosevelt, which leads him to argue for "one-man rule" by the American President serving a policy of "imperial ambition."
Pinker fails to elaborate a Darwinian response to this Mansfieldian manliness. But there are some hints in his writing as to how the evolutionary psychology of human nature recognises the comprehensive complementarity of male and female virtues, which can promote a decline in violence without a decline in true manliness.
Pinker observes that the greatest human suffering from violence has been caused by the narcissistic personality of tyrants, who show the grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy characteristic of people inflated by unearned self-esteem (519-21). But Pinker fails to point out that such narcissism is different from what traditionally has been recognised as "greatness of soul"--the magnanimity of those men who have earned their self-esteem and who are contemptuous of those who derive sadistic pleasure from the suffering of innocent people.
Pinker describes a new martial arts program of the United States Marine Corps, which teaches "a new code of honor, the Ethical Marine Warrior." The chant for this new code is "The Ethical Warrior is a protector of life. Whose life? Self and others. Which others? All others." A former Marine captain who helped to implement this program wrote to Pinker: "When I first joined the Marines in the 1970s it was 'Kill, kill, kill.' The probability that there would have been an honor code that trained marines to be 'protectors of all others--including the enemy, if possible' would have been 0 percent" (264-66).
Pinker doesn't reflect on the deeper implications of this--that the liberal humanism of declining violence might be best promoted, not by denigrating manly honor, but by "a new code of honor" in which men can take pride in their courageous self-discipline in defending human life. After all, if Pinker is right in declaring that "violence is always a bad thing except when it prevents greater violence," doesn't that require manly courage from those trained to use violence to prevent greater violence?
Pinker devotes a lot of attention to the argument that the atrocious killing of World War II was caused ultimately by the maniacal narcissism of one man--Adolf Hitler. But he gives no attention to the fact that England's refusal to surrender to Hitler's assault depended crucially on the glorious resoluteness of one man--Winston Churchill. Although there are some dubious facets to Churchill's character and policies, one can see him as manifesting a manly magnanimity that is compatible with, and even necessary for, modern liberalism.
Some of my blog posts on Mansfield can be found here, here, here, here, and here.
Martha Nussbaum has written a manly attack on Mansfield.
In the past, wars were fought as contests of honor. But now we know that Falstaff was right about honor--it's only a word, or a social construction, as we would say today (247). War is not glorious and exciting. It is stupid and cruel. We need to puncture the swollen egos of men who fight over who's most important. After all, it's only the silly games of little boys. If we get rid of that macho striving for honor and glory, then we can see that moral progress is measured, as Pinker declares on the last page of his book, by our success in allowing "a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes" (696).
But can we be satisfied by a world of peace without honor, a world of feminine values without masculine virtues, a world of bourgeois comfort without manly courage? In Pinker's long book, he raises this question in one paragraph, only to quickly dismiss it. He is speaking about the historical trend towards a feminized culture favoring peace over violence.
Feminization need not consist of women literally wielding more power in decisions on whether to go to war. It can also consist in a society moving away from a culture of manly honor, with its approval of violent retaliation for insults, toughening of boys through physical punishment, and veneration of martial glory (chapter 8). This has been the trend in the democracies of Europe and the developed world and in the bluer states of America (chapters 3 and 7). Several conservative scholars have ruefully suggested to me that the modern West has been diminished by the loss of virtues like bravery and valor and the ascendancy of materialism, frivolity, decadence, and effeminacy. Now, I have been assuming that violence is always a bad thing except when it prevents greater violence, but these men are correct that this is a value judgment, and that no logical argument inherently favors peace over honor and glory. But I would think that the potential victims of all this manliness deserve a say in this discussion, and they may not agree that their lives and limbs are a price worth paying for the glorification of masculine virtues. (686-87)Although Pinker does not identify these "conservative scholars" who worry about the decline of manly spiritedness as a flattening of the human soul, I suspect that Harvey Mansfield--one of Pinker's colleagues at Harvard--must be one of these people. After all, he's the one who's written the book Manliness, in which he worries that the sort of liberal humanism defended by Pinker fails to satisfy the human need for manly self-assertion.
A few years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts on Mansfield's case for manliness in the modern world as an expression of a counter-Enlightenment tradition evident in the work of Straussians like Mansfield. Mansfield is correct, I think, in seeing that the biology of Plato and Aristotle recognises the complementarity of male and female virtues in human biological nature, while also recognising that manliness can be either bad or good, so that we need a virtuous mean between too little and too much masculinity. But I also think that Mansfield is wrong in failing to see how a Darwinian biology supports this ancient insight. If Mansfield were to embrace a Darwinian understanding of the sexual complementarity of evolved human nature, he would not be seduced by the "manly nihilism" of Friedrich Nietzsche and Teddy Roosevelt, which leads him to argue for "one-man rule" by the American President serving a policy of "imperial ambition."
Pinker fails to elaborate a Darwinian response to this Mansfieldian manliness. But there are some hints in his writing as to how the evolutionary psychology of human nature recognises the comprehensive complementarity of male and female virtues, which can promote a decline in violence without a decline in true manliness.
Pinker observes that the greatest human suffering from violence has been caused by the narcissistic personality of tyrants, who show the grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy characteristic of people inflated by unearned self-esteem (519-21). But Pinker fails to point out that such narcissism is different from what traditionally has been recognised as "greatness of soul"--the magnanimity of those men who have earned their self-esteem and who are contemptuous of those who derive sadistic pleasure from the suffering of innocent people.
Pinker describes a new martial arts program of the United States Marine Corps, which teaches "a new code of honor, the Ethical Marine Warrior." The chant for this new code is "The Ethical Warrior is a protector of life. Whose life? Self and others. Which others? All others." A former Marine captain who helped to implement this program wrote to Pinker: "When I first joined the Marines in the 1970s it was 'Kill, kill, kill.' The probability that there would have been an honor code that trained marines to be 'protectors of all others--including the enemy, if possible' would have been 0 percent" (264-66).
Pinker doesn't reflect on the deeper implications of this--that the liberal humanism of declining violence might be best promoted, not by denigrating manly honor, but by "a new code of honor" in which men can take pride in their courageous self-discipline in defending human life. After all, if Pinker is right in declaring that "violence is always a bad thing except when it prevents greater violence," doesn't that require manly courage from those trained to use violence to prevent greater violence?
Pinker devotes a lot of attention to the argument that the atrocious killing of World War II was caused ultimately by the maniacal narcissism of one man--Adolf Hitler. But he gives no attention to the fact that England's refusal to surrender to Hitler's assault depended crucially on the glorious resoluteness of one man--Winston Churchill. Although there are some dubious facets to Churchill's character and policies, one can see him as manifesting a manly magnanimity that is compatible with, and even necessary for, modern liberalism.
Some of my blog posts on Mansfield can be found here, here, here, here, and here.
You should also see Mansfield's manly interview with Stephen Colbert.
Martha Nussbaum has written a manly attack on Mansfield.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
John Gray's Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Steven Pinker
Perhaps the most vehement attack on Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature is John Gray's review in Prospect magazine. Gray is just as vehement in his attack on Frank Fukuyama's Origins of Political Order in The New Republic (November 9, 2011). Both reviews show Gray's angry scorn for liberal capitalist republicanism and his nihilistic disdain for the Enlightenment idea of moral progress.
Gray's commitment to the intellectual tradition of the counter-Enlightenment is evident in his books Straw Dogs and Black Mass, and in an interview with Laurie Taylor. A. C. Grayling has written a good rebuttal. (See Peter Lassman, "Pluralism and its Discontents: John Gray's Counter-Enlightenment," in John Horton and Glen Newey, eds., The Political Theory of John Gray [Routledge, 2007].)
Gray dismisses the idea of moral progress in history as showing a utopian blindness to the harsh reality of the human condition, a utopianism that can only be explained as a secularization in the Enlightenment of the Christian faith in salvational history as leading to a final age of redemptive bliss.
Grayling points to the fundamental idea that Gray ignores: "trying to make things better is not the same as believing that they can be made perfect. . . . meliorism is not perfectibilism." Contrary to what Gray implies, Pinker never claims that human history is headed towards the perfection of perpetual peace--a world without any war or violence. But Pinker does claim that history shows a general pattern of declining war and violence, although the pattern can be broken by random contingencies that lead to irruptions of horrific killing.
Another way of saying this is that Gray fails to see the differences between the French Enlightenment, on the one hand, and the British and American Enlightenments, on the other. Pinker embraces the "tragic vision" of the British and American Enlightenments, in which human progress was constrained by the imperfections of human nature, in contrast to the utopian perfectionism in some strands of the French Enlightenment that explains the excesses of the French Revolution. Pinker writes: "An acknowledgement of human nature may have been the chief difference between the American revolutionaries and their French confreres, who had the romantic conviction that they were rendering human limitations obsolete. In 1794, Maximilien Robespierre, architect of the Terror, wrote, 'The French people seem to have outstripped the rest of humanity by two thousand years; one might be tempted to regard them, living amongst them, as a different species'" (185-86).
A crucial part of Pinker's argument is numerous statistical analyses of historical data showing a decline in violence. How does Gray respond to this? He repeatedly speaks about Pinker's "impressive-looking graphs and statistics," his "not always very illuminating statistics," and his "panoply of statistics and graphs and the resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts." That's it. He breezily dismisses the statistics as "impressive-looking" without ever explaining what's wrong with the statistical arguments. In fact, he never even mentions any of the details of these arguments, and thus he refuses to specify exactly what he thinks is wrong with Pinker's statistical reasoning. We can see here the style of writing that Gray prefers--confident assertion unsupported by factual or argumentative reasoning.
Gray might respond to this by insisting that he has demonstrated Pinker's "resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts" by citing the many wars of the past 65 years that are ignored by Pinker. Against Pinker's claim that the world has enjoyed a "Long Peace" since World War II, during which the Great Powers have not fought one another, Gray writes:
Furthermore, Gray is silent about how Pinker sets the "Long Peace" of the past 65 years at the end of a history of declining violence stretching back to the Stone Age. It's the expansiveness of this deep historical pattern that makes Pinker's argument so powerful. Gray does not even acknowledge this, much less refute it.
Oddly enough, Gray does acknowledge--in one sentence--that "no doubt we have become less violent in some ways." This seems to be an admission that Pinker's argument is at least partially true. But Gray says nothing more about this.
Actually, I suspect that Gray has not bothered to read all of Pinker's book. There is lots of evidence for this in Gray's review. For example, Gray suggests that Pinker has ignored the scientific evidence showing that "human thought and perception are riddled with bias, inconsistency, and self-deception." And yet Pinker actually stresses this point as part of his argument, because he explains that one reason why it's hard for us to see the decline in violence over human history is the "availability bias"--the illusion of calculating probabilities based on examples that are most easily recalled. So we easily remember the dramatic atrocities of the recent past, but we are unaware of the great atrocities of the distant past, so we infer that violence is increasing rather than decreasing, and thus it has become a cliche to say that "the twentieth century was the bloodiest in history," although a statistical analysis of history denies this (189-99). This is one of the main ideas of Pinker's book. Gray says nothing about it.
Gray asserts that The Better Angels of Our Nature contradicts Pinker's earlier book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002). In Blank Slate, Gray says, Pinker's "emphasis on the constancy of human nature limited the scope of future human advance." By contrast, "the decline of violence posited in The Better Angels of Our Nature is a progressive transformation of precisely the kind his earlier book seemed to preclude." But as I have pointed out in an earlier post, Pinker's argument in Better Angels is largely an elaboration of what he said in Chapter 17 ("Violence") of The Blank Slate. There's no contradiction in saying that both violent conflict and peaceful cooperation are rooted in human nature, and so, while violence can never be completely eliminated, we can see moral progress towards declining violence as conditions cultivate the "better angels of our nature."
Another bizarre feature of Gray's review is that he accuses Pinker of not understanding Darwin's evolutionary science. According to Gray, Darwin teaches us that moral progress is impossible, and thus "if Darwin's theory is even approximately right, there can be no rational basis for expecting any revolution in human behaviour." Gray does not cite any particular passages in Darwin's writing to support this conclusion. His only support is a vague assertion that Darwin taught that human beings are just brute animals, and therefore they can never rise above the violence of the animal world. This ignores Darwin's insistence in the Descent of Man that the cultural evolution of reciprocal cooperation supports moral progress. So, for instance, he declares in the last chapter: "The moral nature of man has reached its present standard, partly through the advancement of his reasoning powers and consequently of a just public opinion, but especially from his sympathies having been rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of habit, example, instruction, and reflection."
Gray's assertions about Darwin are as ungrounded as those about Pinker.
Gray's commitment to the intellectual tradition of the counter-Enlightenment is evident in his books Straw Dogs and Black Mass, and in an interview with Laurie Taylor. A. C. Grayling has written a good rebuttal. (See Peter Lassman, "Pluralism and its Discontents: John Gray's Counter-Enlightenment," in John Horton and Glen Newey, eds., The Political Theory of John Gray [Routledge, 2007].)
Gray dismisses the idea of moral progress in history as showing a utopian blindness to the harsh reality of the human condition, a utopianism that can only be explained as a secularization in the Enlightenment of the Christian faith in salvational history as leading to a final age of redemptive bliss.
Grayling points to the fundamental idea that Gray ignores: "trying to make things better is not the same as believing that they can be made perfect. . . . meliorism is not perfectibilism." Contrary to what Gray implies, Pinker never claims that human history is headed towards the perfection of perpetual peace--a world without any war or violence. But Pinker does claim that history shows a general pattern of declining war and violence, although the pattern can be broken by random contingencies that lead to irruptions of horrific killing.
Another way of saying this is that Gray fails to see the differences between the French Enlightenment, on the one hand, and the British and American Enlightenments, on the other. Pinker embraces the "tragic vision" of the British and American Enlightenments, in which human progress was constrained by the imperfections of human nature, in contrast to the utopian perfectionism in some strands of the French Enlightenment that explains the excesses of the French Revolution. Pinker writes: "An acknowledgement of human nature may have been the chief difference between the American revolutionaries and their French confreres, who had the romantic conviction that they were rendering human limitations obsolete. In 1794, Maximilien Robespierre, architect of the Terror, wrote, 'The French people seem to have outstripped the rest of humanity by two thousand years; one might be tempted to regard them, living amongst them, as a different species'" (185-86).
A crucial part of Pinker's argument is numerous statistical analyses of historical data showing a decline in violence. How does Gray respond to this? He repeatedly speaks about Pinker's "impressive-looking graphs and statistics," his "not always very illuminating statistics," and his "panoply of statistics and graphs and the resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts." That's it. He breezily dismisses the statistics as "impressive-looking" without ever explaining what's wrong with the statistical arguments. In fact, he never even mentions any of the details of these arguments, and thus he refuses to specify exactly what he thinks is wrong with Pinker's statistical reasoning. We can see here the style of writing that Gray prefers--confident assertion unsupported by factual or argumentative reasoning.
Gray might respond to this by insisting that he has demonstrated Pinker's "resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts" by citing the many wars of the past 65 years that are ignored by Pinker. Against Pinker's claim that the world has enjoyed a "Long Peace" since World War II, during which the Great Powers have not fought one another, Gray writes:
The Korean war, the Chinese invasion of Tibet, British counter-insurgency warfare in Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez, the Angolan civil war, decades of civil war in the Congo and Guatemala, the Six Day War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Iran-Iraq war and the Soviet-Afghan war--these are only some of the armed conflicts through which the great powers pursued their rivalries while avoiding direct war with each other. When the end of the Cold War removed the Soviet Union from the scene, war did not end. It continued in the first Gulf war, the Balkan wars, Chechnya, the Iraq war and in Afghanistan and Kashmir, among other conflicts. Taken together these conflicts add up to a formidable sum of violence. For Pinker they are minor, peripheral and hardly worth mentioning.
Gray's readers are left with the impression that Pinker says nothing about these 19 wars listed by Gray because for Pinker, they are "hardly worth mentioning." But any reader who actually looks at Pinker's book will notice that not only does he mention most of these wars, he offers evidence that they conform to the pattern of declining violence. Consider, for example, the following passage:
To be sure, the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first decade of the 21st century show that the country is far from reluctant to go to war. But even they are nothing like the wars of the past. In both conflicts the interstate war phase was quick and (by historical standards) low in battle deaths. Most of the deaths in Iraq were caused by intercommunal violence in the anarchy that followed, and by 2008 the toll of 4,000 American deaths (compare Vietnam's 58,000) helped elect a president who within two years brought the country's combat mission to an end. In Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force followed a set of humanitarian protocols during the height of the anti-Taliban bombing campaign in 2008 that Human Rights Watch praised for its "very good record of minimizing harm to civilians." (266)Pinker's point is that even as the U.S. continues to fight wars, we can see the pattern of declining violence in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, because they show "an extraordinarily low number of civilian deaths for a major military operation" (267). If there is a flaw in Pinker's reasoning, Gray has not identified it.
Furthermore, Gray is silent about how Pinker sets the "Long Peace" of the past 65 years at the end of a history of declining violence stretching back to the Stone Age. It's the expansiveness of this deep historical pattern that makes Pinker's argument so powerful. Gray does not even acknowledge this, much less refute it.
Oddly enough, Gray does acknowledge--in one sentence--that "no doubt we have become less violent in some ways." This seems to be an admission that Pinker's argument is at least partially true. But Gray says nothing more about this.
Actually, I suspect that Gray has not bothered to read all of Pinker's book. There is lots of evidence for this in Gray's review. For example, Gray suggests that Pinker has ignored the scientific evidence showing that "human thought and perception are riddled with bias, inconsistency, and self-deception." And yet Pinker actually stresses this point as part of his argument, because he explains that one reason why it's hard for us to see the decline in violence over human history is the "availability bias"--the illusion of calculating probabilities based on examples that are most easily recalled. So we easily remember the dramatic atrocities of the recent past, but we are unaware of the great atrocities of the distant past, so we infer that violence is increasing rather than decreasing, and thus it has become a cliche to say that "the twentieth century was the bloodiest in history," although a statistical analysis of history denies this (189-99). This is one of the main ideas of Pinker's book. Gray says nothing about it.
Gray asserts that The Better Angels of Our Nature contradicts Pinker's earlier book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002). In Blank Slate, Gray says, Pinker's "emphasis on the constancy of human nature limited the scope of future human advance." By contrast, "the decline of violence posited in The Better Angels of Our Nature is a progressive transformation of precisely the kind his earlier book seemed to preclude." But as I have pointed out in an earlier post, Pinker's argument in Better Angels is largely an elaboration of what he said in Chapter 17 ("Violence") of The Blank Slate. There's no contradiction in saying that both violent conflict and peaceful cooperation are rooted in human nature, and so, while violence can never be completely eliminated, we can see moral progress towards declining violence as conditions cultivate the "better angels of our nature."
Another bizarre feature of Gray's review is that he accuses Pinker of not understanding Darwin's evolutionary science. According to Gray, Darwin teaches us that moral progress is impossible, and thus "if Darwin's theory is even approximately right, there can be no rational basis for expecting any revolution in human behaviour." Gray does not cite any particular passages in Darwin's writing to support this conclusion. His only support is a vague assertion that Darwin taught that human beings are just brute animals, and therefore they can never rise above the violence of the animal world. This ignores Darwin's insistence in the Descent of Man that the cultural evolution of reciprocal cooperation supports moral progress. So, for instance, he declares in the last chapter: "The moral nature of man has reached its present standard, partly through the advancement of his reasoning powers and consequently of a just public opinion, but especially from his sympathies having been rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of habit, example, instruction, and reflection."
Gray's assertions about Darwin are as ungrounded as those about Pinker.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Is the Decline in Violence the Road to Voluntaria?
Ron Bailey has interviewed Steve Pinker in a video for Reason magazine. One can see here that libertarians like Bailey are attracted to the argument of Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, because they would like to see the evolutionary decline in violence as a historical trend towards a libertarian future in which societies would be organized through voluntary cooperation rather than physical force.
In fact, there are many parts of Pinker's book where he points to the moral and political philosophy of classical liberalism or libertarianism as a prime factor favoring the decline in violence (xxi, 180, 237, 284-88, 636-37, 662-63, 690-92). As I have suggested in my previous post, the libertarian implications of Pinker's argument become even more evident when one looks at James Payne's book A History of Force and notices how much of Payne's thinking has shaped Pinker's writing.
But while Payne is explicit--in the last chapter of his book--in indicating how the historical decline in violence provides "lessons for voluntarists," Pinker refrains from any open endorsement of libertarianism. Payne has adopted the "voluntaryism" of Auberon Herbert, a British libertarian individualist. Although Herbert was sometimes identified as an anarchist, he refused to accept that label, because he thought there was a proper role for government in using force defensively against aggressors who have initiated force, but he denied that government could initiate force to advance seemingly good ends. He regarded the use or threat of physical violence as the greatest evil in human life, because it denied the liberty that was the condition for human happiness. He accepted the purely defensive use of violence against violent aggressors--murderers, thieves, invaders, and so on--as a necessary evil dictated by human imperfection. Herbert's thought has been summarized by Eric Mack and Gary Galles. In recent decades, the "voluntaryist" position has been revived by Carl Watner and others.
Having adopted this libertarian voluntarism, Payne goes further in rejecting violence than does Pinker. Like Pinker, Payne recognizes and celebrates all of the historical trends towards reducing violence. But unlike Pinker, Payne laments that we still rely too much on coercive force. He observes: "Judging from some of our practices, we do indeed appear to believe that force is a sound and proper basis for human institutions. The modern welfare state with all its taxation and regulation utterly depends on it" (249).
In Payne's book on the history of force, there is a chapter on taxation as a form of legalized violence, in which government agents use force or the threat of force to compel people to give up their money. Although this is widely accepted today, Payne looks forward to the future evolutionary decline in violence as bringing about the abolition of taxation. By contrast, Pinker says nothing about taxation as violence. Nor does he look forward to its elimination as part of the historical trend towards declining violence.
That we could abolish taxation sounds ridiculously utopian to many of us, because we agree with Oliver Wendell Holmes that the coercion of taxation is "the price we pay for civilization." But Payne responds by observing that this is what people in the past thought about torturing prisoners, burning heretics, and other forms of cruelty that were thought to be absolutely necessary for maintaining social order. Through a gradual process of evolution, we have learned that such violent practices are unnecessary and undesirable. Similarly, Payne argues, we will eventually discover that without coercive taxation, we can fund our public projects through voluntary means such as lotteries, user fees, and philanthropic generosity.
Payne has defended his libertarian voluntarism in a series of fictional works written in the style of children's books. In the last book in the series--Princess Narnia Visits Voluntaria--he presents the land of Voluntaria, where people organize their social order through voluntary cooperation.
The people of Voluntaria have no conception of government, and it seems that they have no need for government, and therefore that they are living in pure anarchy. But it turns out that they do have something that looks like government, although it's very limited. In each community, there is a voluntary association to punish criminals--murderers, thieves, and others who initiate aggressive force. If government is defined as an agency for using force, then this is government. But this government uses force only negatively or reactively to restrain aggressive force. If government is defined positively as an agency that initiates public force to solve social problems or to punish nonviolent behavior that is regarded as offensive, then Voluntaria has no government.
If the entire course of human history shows a progressive decline in violence, as Pinker and Payne argue, can we anticipate, as Payne argues, that we are on the evolutionary road to Voluntaria?
In fact, there are many parts of Pinker's book where he points to the moral and political philosophy of classical liberalism or libertarianism as a prime factor favoring the decline in violence (xxi, 180, 237, 284-88, 636-37, 662-63, 690-92). As I have suggested in my previous post, the libertarian implications of Pinker's argument become even more evident when one looks at James Payne's book A History of Force and notices how much of Payne's thinking has shaped Pinker's writing.
But while Payne is explicit--in the last chapter of his book--in indicating how the historical decline in violence provides "lessons for voluntarists," Pinker refrains from any open endorsement of libertarianism. Payne has adopted the "voluntaryism" of Auberon Herbert, a British libertarian individualist. Although Herbert was sometimes identified as an anarchist, he refused to accept that label, because he thought there was a proper role for government in using force defensively against aggressors who have initiated force, but he denied that government could initiate force to advance seemingly good ends. He regarded the use or threat of physical violence as the greatest evil in human life, because it denied the liberty that was the condition for human happiness. He accepted the purely defensive use of violence against violent aggressors--murderers, thieves, invaders, and so on--as a necessary evil dictated by human imperfection. Herbert's thought has been summarized by Eric Mack and Gary Galles. In recent decades, the "voluntaryist" position has been revived by Carl Watner and others.
Having adopted this libertarian voluntarism, Payne goes further in rejecting violence than does Pinker. Like Pinker, Payne recognizes and celebrates all of the historical trends towards reducing violence. But unlike Pinker, Payne laments that we still rely too much on coercive force. He observes: "Judging from some of our practices, we do indeed appear to believe that force is a sound and proper basis for human institutions. The modern welfare state with all its taxation and regulation utterly depends on it" (249).
In Payne's book on the history of force, there is a chapter on taxation as a form of legalized violence, in which government agents use force or the threat of force to compel people to give up their money. Although this is widely accepted today, Payne looks forward to the future evolutionary decline in violence as bringing about the abolition of taxation. By contrast, Pinker says nothing about taxation as violence. Nor does he look forward to its elimination as part of the historical trend towards declining violence.
That we could abolish taxation sounds ridiculously utopian to many of us, because we agree with Oliver Wendell Holmes that the coercion of taxation is "the price we pay for civilization." But Payne responds by observing that this is what people in the past thought about torturing prisoners, burning heretics, and other forms of cruelty that were thought to be absolutely necessary for maintaining social order. Through a gradual process of evolution, we have learned that such violent practices are unnecessary and undesirable. Similarly, Payne argues, we will eventually discover that without coercive taxation, we can fund our public projects through voluntary means such as lotteries, user fees, and philanthropic generosity.
Payne has defended his libertarian voluntarism in a series of fictional works written in the style of children's books. In the last book in the series--Princess Narnia Visits Voluntaria--he presents the land of Voluntaria, where people organize their social order through voluntary cooperation.
The people of Voluntaria have no conception of government, and it seems that they have no need for government, and therefore that they are living in pure anarchy. But it turns out that they do have something that looks like government, although it's very limited. In each community, there is a voluntary association to punish criminals--murderers, thieves, and others who initiate aggressive force. If government is defined as an agency for using force, then this is government. But this government uses force only negatively or reactively to restrain aggressive force. If government is defined positively as an agency that initiates public force to solve social problems or to punish nonviolent behavior that is regarded as offensive, then Voluntaria has no government.
If the entire course of human history shows a progressive decline in violence, as Pinker and Payne argue, can we anticipate, as Payne argues, that we are on the evolutionary road to Voluntaria?
Friday, November 11, 2011
Pinker and Payne: Does Declining Violence Mean Increasing Liberty?
That human history shows a general decline in violence has emerged in recent years as one of the greatest discoveries of social scientific research. It has taken me many years to realize that. And it has only slowly dawned on me that this has deep implications for political theory, because it provides dramatic support for Darwinian liberalism.
I first began to think about this when I read Michael Doyle's article "Liberalism and World Politics" in 1986 (in The American Political Science Review). He convinced me that the empirical data of wars and violence over the last 200 years strongly supported some of Immanuel Kant's arguments for a liberal peace. Liberal commercial republics are less inclined to go to war than other kinds of regimes, and as the cultural values of liberal commercial republicanism have spread around the world, there has been a decline in war and violence.
In 2000, Robert Wright's Nonzero persuaded me that the entire evolutionary history of life might be rightly understood as a history of expanding cooperation producing ever increasing gains through the logic of nonzero-sum games.
More recently, Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization and Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature have surveyed the research showing that this decline in violence is a trend over all of human history from the Stone Age to the present, and this seems powerfully persuasive to me.
This seems to confirm the evolutionary liberalism of the 19th century--particularly, as formulated by Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin--because we seem to see here that Darwin was right in his vision of the future: "As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races." According to Darwin, the most recent advance of sympathy extends it even beyond humanity to include the lower animals, so that now we can see "the most noble attribute of man" in the "disinterested love for all living creatures."
In Darwinian Natural Right (pp. 143-49), I rejected this as Darwin's "moral utopianism," while I defended Darwin's "moral realism." Darwin's moral utopianism is clearest in the section of the Descent of Man (2004: 147-50) where he cites "our great philosopher Herbert Spencer." In some of my blog posts, I have criticized Spencer's evolutionary utopianism.
But I now think that I was wrong, because recognizing the evolutionary trend away from violent conflict and towards peaceful cooperation arises not from a naive utopianism but from an optimistic realism that vindicates evolutionary liberalism.
This has become clear to me from reading Pinker's Better Angels along with a book that Pinker often cites--James Payne's History of Force. What is implicit in Pinker's book becomes explicit in Payne's book--that the evolutionary history of declining violence confirms Spencerian/Darwinian liberalism, because it shows how human beings through a long history of trial-and-error learning have discovered the benefits of peaceful cooperation and the costs of violent aggression. Moreover, this also confirms the classical liberal insight that declining violence coincides with increasing liberty.
Payne brings this out more clearly than does Pinker, because Payne is explicit in his commitment to classical liberalism or libertarianism. If one accepts the classical liberal or libertarian definition of liberty as arising from the absence of coercive violence, then a decline in violence means an increase in liberty, as people enjoy the benefits of voluntary cooperation while minimizing the costs of violent conflict. (This conception of liberty corresponds to what Isaiah Berlin called "negative liberty.")
As Payne indicates, the classical liberal thinkers of the 19th century were the first political theorists to adopt the reduction in the use of force as their fundamental political principle. Although previously some political theorists had condemned some uses of force, they also wanted to use force to promote what they regarded as good ends for social and political life. The classical liberals were the first political theorists to see how the reduction in the use of force was the fundamental condition for human progress. In particular, Payne has adopted the position of Auberon Herbert's "voluntaryism."
Payne's "voluntarism" holds that "all uses of force, even those that seem most necessary and unavoidable today, are slated for eventual displacement" (250). Although this might seem utopian, it's realistic insofar as Payne recognizes that even as we renounce "the assertive use of force," we must accept "the reactive use of force," in using force against aggressors. Pure pacifism or nonviolence does not work as long as there are individuals and groups who will aggressively use force for predatory purposes. "The goal of reducing the use of force cannot be achieved by applying the principle of never using force!" (253)
This evolutionary liberalism allows us to avoid the utopianism of absolute pacifism while allowing for a continuing evolutionary trend away from violence.
Some related posts can be found here, here, here, and here.
I first began to think about this when I read Michael Doyle's article "Liberalism and World Politics" in 1986 (in The American Political Science Review). He convinced me that the empirical data of wars and violence over the last 200 years strongly supported some of Immanuel Kant's arguments for a liberal peace. Liberal commercial republics are less inclined to go to war than other kinds of regimes, and as the cultural values of liberal commercial republicanism have spread around the world, there has been a decline in war and violence.
In 2000, Robert Wright's Nonzero persuaded me that the entire evolutionary history of life might be rightly understood as a history of expanding cooperation producing ever increasing gains through the logic of nonzero-sum games.
More recently, Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization and Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature have surveyed the research showing that this decline in violence is a trend over all of human history from the Stone Age to the present, and this seems powerfully persuasive to me.
This seems to confirm the evolutionary liberalism of the 19th century--particularly, as formulated by Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin--because we seem to see here that Darwin was right in his vision of the future: "As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races." According to Darwin, the most recent advance of sympathy extends it even beyond humanity to include the lower animals, so that now we can see "the most noble attribute of man" in the "disinterested love for all living creatures."
In Darwinian Natural Right (pp. 143-49), I rejected this as Darwin's "moral utopianism," while I defended Darwin's "moral realism." Darwin's moral utopianism is clearest in the section of the Descent of Man (2004: 147-50) where he cites "our great philosopher Herbert Spencer." In some of my blog posts, I have criticized Spencer's evolutionary utopianism.
But I now think that I was wrong, because recognizing the evolutionary trend away from violent conflict and towards peaceful cooperation arises not from a naive utopianism but from an optimistic realism that vindicates evolutionary liberalism.
This has become clear to me from reading Pinker's Better Angels along with a book that Pinker often cites--James Payne's History of Force. What is implicit in Pinker's book becomes explicit in Payne's book--that the evolutionary history of declining violence confirms Spencerian/Darwinian liberalism, because it shows how human beings through a long history of trial-and-error learning have discovered the benefits of peaceful cooperation and the costs of violent aggression. Moreover, this also confirms the classical liberal insight that declining violence coincides with increasing liberty.
Payne brings this out more clearly than does Pinker, because Payne is explicit in his commitment to classical liberalism or libertarianism. If one accepts the classical liberal or libertarian definition of liberty as arising from the absence of coercive violence, then a decline in violence means an increase in liberty, as people enjoy the benefits of voluntary cooperation while minimizing the costs of violent conflict. (This conception of liberty corresponds to what Isaiah Berlin called "negative liberty.")
As Payne indicates, the classical liberal thinkers of the 19th century were the first political theorists to adopt the reduction in the use of force as their fundamental political principle. Although previously some political theorists had condemned some uses of force, they also wanted to use force to promote what they regarded as good ends for social and political life. The classical liberals were the first political theorists to see how the reduction in the use of force was the fundamental condition for human progress. In particular, Payne has adopted the position of Auberon Herbert's "voluntaryism."
Payne's "voluntarism" holds that "all uses of force, even those that seem most necessary and unavoidable today, are slated for eventual displacement" (250). Although this might seem utopian, it's realistic insofar as Payne recognizes that even as we renounce "the assertive use of force," we must accept "the reactive use of force," in using force against aggressors. Pure pacifism or nonviolence does not work as long as there are individuals and groups who will aggressively use force for predatory purposes. "The goal of reducing the use of force cannot be achieved by applying the principle of never using force!" (253)
This evolutionary liberalism allows us to avoid the utopianism of absolute pacifism while allowing for a continuing evolutionary trend away from violence.
Some related posts can be found here, here, here, and here.
Saturday, November 05, 2011
The Optimistic Realism of Pinker's Darwinian Liberalism
When I was writing Darwinian Conservatism, Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate was a big influence on my thinking, because he showed how Darwinian science supported a tragic vision of human nature that is fundamental for traditionalist conservatism or classical liberalism. But some readers of Pinker's new book--The Better Angels of Our Nature--might conclude that Pinker has turned against my thinking, because now he seems to argue that the cultural trends favoring peace have overcome the violent propensities of human nature, and thus he seems to have embraced the utopian vision of the Left that I rejected in Darwinian Conservatism. From my reading of Pinker, however, I think that while he occasionally comes close in the new book to adopting a rationalist utopianism, he generally adheres to an optimistic realism that is compatible with The Blank Slate.
In Chapter 16 ("Politics") of The Blank Slate, Pinker adopts Thomas Sowell's dualistic analysis of the political spectrum that has dominated the last two centuries of political debate. In A Conflict of Visions, Sowell sees a contrast between a Constrained Vision and an Unconstrained Vision. Pinker prefers the terms Tragic Vision and Utopian Vision. In the Tragic Vision, human nature is limited in virtue and knowledge, and these limits constrain what we can do in our social arrangements, so that we should respect those traditional practices that have been tested by experience although they were not rationally designed. In the Utopian Vision, by contrast, human nature changes through changes in our social circumstances, and consequently we can experiment with rationally designed social reforms that change human nature to achieve social improvement, and thus we should not accept any limits coming from traditional institutions that are not products of rational planning. Although there is some fuzziness in this bifurcation, those on the Right are generally on the side of the Tragic Vision, while those on the Left are generally on the side of the Utopian Vision.
In The Blank Slate, Pinker argues that the new biological sciences of human nature support the Tragic Vision of the political right and deny the Utopian Vision of the political left, because the life sciences show the moral and intellectual limitations of human nature that are recognized in the social theory of traditionalist conservatives like Michael Oakeshott and classical liberals like Friedrich Hayek (284-94). He also suggests, however, that as some leftists embrace Darwinian science and give up their utopianism--for example, Peter Singer's "Darwinian left"--there might be new ideological alignments. The non-Utopian left might align itself with the secular right against the religious right (299, 305).
But even as he stressed the constraints on social planning coming from evolved human nature, Pinker also argued that that evolved human nature provided the resources for social progress (159-185). Moreover, he suggested that this natural human capacity for progress was most evident in the history of violence. In Chapter 17 ("Violence"), he showed how the sciences of human nature refuted the belief that human violence was purely cultural and thus easily eliminated by cultural reform. And yet he also showed how the evolutionary logic of violence could explain the situations in which violence can be controlled and reduced.
In Better Angels, Pinker's sustained defense of Enlightenment rationalism sometimes looks like a defense of the Utopian Vision against the Realist Vision, particularly when he defends Enlightenment humanism against its critics and identifies Edmund Burke--a proponent of the tragic vision of human nature--as one of its leading critics (184-86). But even here, he concedes that Burke's criticism of the French Revolution for its attack on the spontaneous orders of civilized traditions was justified. Pinker praises the American Revolution as superior to the French Revolution, because the Americans worked within the "English Civilizing Process," which supported the exercise of prudence in pursuing social reforms.
Although Pinker never mentions Gertrude Himmelfarb's book The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (2004), Pinker implicitly accepts Himmelfarb's insight that the Enlightenment took multiple forms, and that while the French Enlightenment embraced a rationalistic utopianism that was disastrous, the British and American Enlightenments embraced a prudent realism that fostered a prudent road to modern progress.
Although Enlightenment reason plays a large role in Pinker's account of the decline of violence, he recognizes that pure reason by itself cannot motivate human beings unless it is joined to the moral emotions, and thus he is on the side of British Enlightenment thinkers like Burke and Hume who were skeptical of abstract rationalism.
And although he is remarkably optimistic about the strength of the historical trends favoring the decline in violence, he is still realistic in recognizing that the complete elimination of all violence and war is impossible. He sees that "a perfect fusion of the interests of every living human is an unattainable nirvana" (689). "Only preachers and pop singers profess that violence will someday vanish off the face of the earth. A measured degree of violence, even if only held in reserve, will always be necessary in the form of police forces and armies to deter predation or to incapacitate those who cannot be deterred" (646).
I am not sure, however, whether Pinker would agree with me that war is one of the 20 natural desires of human beings. I believe that human beings desire war when fear, interest, or honor move them to fight for their community against opposing communities. I agree with Pinker that these motives for violence--fear, interest, and honor--can be moderated in ways that promote peace and reduce violence. But I also think that the tragic structure of human social nature makes it impossible to totally eliminate these motives.
I will have to say more in some future posts.
In Chapter 16 ("Politics") of The Blank Slate, Pinker adopts Thomas Sowell's dualistic analysis of the political spectrum that has dominated the last two centuries of political debate. In A Conflict of Visions, Sowell sees a contrast between a Constrained Vision and an Unconstrained Vision. Pinker prefers the terms Tragic Vision and Utopian Vision. In the Tragic Vision, human nature is limited in virtue and knowledge, and these limits constrain what we can do in our social arrangements, so that we should respect those traditional practices that have been tested by experience although they were not rationally designed. In the Utopian Vision, by contrast, human nature changes through changes in our social circumstances, and consequently we can experiment with rationally designed social reforms that change human nature to achieve social improvement, and thus we should not accept any limits coming from traditional institutions that are not products of rational planning. Although there is some fuzziness in this bifurcation, those on the Right are generally on the side of the Tragic Vision, while those on the Left are generally on the side of the Utopian Vision.
In The Blank Slate, Pinker argues that the new biological sciences of human nature support the Tragic Vision of the political right and deny the Utopian Vision of the political left, because the life sciences show the moral and intellectual limitations of human nature that are recognized in the social theory of traditionalist conservatives like Michael Oakeshott and classical liberals like Friedrich Hayek (284-94). He also suggests, however, that as some leftists embrace Darwinian science and give up their utopianism--for example, Peter Singer's "Darwinian left"--there might be new ideological alignments. The non-Utopian left might align itself with the secular right against the religious right (299, 305).
But even as he stressed the constraints on social planning coming from evolved human nature, Pinker also argued that that evolved human nature provided the resources for social progress (159-185). Moreover, he suggested that this natural human capacity for progress was most evident in the history of violence. In Chapter 17 ("Violence"), he showed how the sciences of human nature refuted the belief that human violence was purely cultural and thus easily eliminated by cultural reform. And yet he also showed how the evolutionary logic of violence could explain the situations in which violence can be controlled and reduced.
He then lays out that logic of violence and its decline over history in 18 pages (318-336). Better Angels is a very long (800 pages!) elaboration of this section of The Blank Slate.This is necessary to disentangle the knot of biological and cultural causes that make violence so puzzling. It can help explain why people are prepared for violence but act on those inclinations only in particular circumstances; when violence is, at least in some sense, rational and when it is blatantly self-defeating; why violence is more prevalent in some times and places than in others, despite a lack of any genetic difference among the actors; and, ultimately, how we might reduce and prevent violence. (317)
In Better Angels, Pinker's sustained defense of Enlightenment rationalism sometimes looks like a defense of the Utopian Vision against the Realist Vision, particularly when he defends Enlightenment humanism against its critics and identifies Edmund Burke--a proponent of the tragic vision of human nature--as one of its leading critics (184-86). But even here, he concedes that Burke's criticism of the French Revolution for its attack on the spontaneous orders of civilized traditions was justified. Pinker praises the American Revolution as superior to the French Revolution, because the Americans worked within the "English Civilizing Process," which supported the exercise of prudence in pursuing social reforms.
Although Pinker never mentions Gertrude Himmelfarb's book The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (2004), Pinker implicitly accepts Himmelfarb's insight that the Enlightenment took multiple forms, and that while the French Enlightenment embraced a rationalistic utopianism that was disastrous, the British and American Enlightenments embraced a prudent realism that fostered a prudent road to modern progress.
Although Enlightenment reason plays a large role in Pinker's account of the decline of violence, he recognizes that pure reason by itself cannot motivate human beings unless it is joined to the moral emotions, and thus he is on the side of British Enlightenment thinkers like Burke and Hume who were skeptical of abstract rationalism.
And although he is remarkably optimistic about the strength of the historical trends favoring the decline in violence, he is still realistic in recognizing that the complete elimination of all violence and war is impossible. He sees that "a perfect fusion of the interests of every living human is an unattainable nirvana" (689). "Only preachers and pop singers profess that violence will someday vanish off the face of the earth. A measured degree of violence, even if only held in reserve, will always be necessary in the form of police forces and armies to deter predation or to incapacitate those who cannot be deterred" (646).
I am not sure, however, whether Pinker would agree with me that war is one of the 20 natural desires of human beings. I believe that human beings desire war when fear, interest, or honor move them to fight for their community against opposing communities. I agree with Pinker that these motives for violence--fear, interest, and honor--can be moderated in ways that promote peace and reduce violence. But I also think that the tragic structure of human social nature makes it impossible to totally eliminate these motives.
I will have to say more in some future posts.
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