Return to the One (sections 1-2)

I've started reading Brian Hines's Return to the One. Here are a few short notes on his first two sections, "God is the Goal," and "One is Overall."

He starts by making the point that Plotinus is an ascetic, but not because he wanted to be a joyless curmudgeon. He says that Plotinus is an ascetic because he wants to get at what is truly good, and not be distracted by lesser goods which are unsatisfying. That remark sounds a little like my thoughts about asceticism here. Then he says that we all desire the One, that we should therefore channel all our desires towards it, and that when we finally achieve the One (if we ever do) all our desires will cease. 

How does it make any sense to say that we all desire the One? Don't we desire a lot of different things? Food, shelter, love and companionship, money and nice things, admiration and respect, … and on and on? Well yes, of course. But Plotinus says that these are only distractions from the One, or at best they are reflections of it; whereas if we had the One Itself, we wouldn't need all the other things.

At first hearing, this sounds bizarre. It comes from Plato defining the Good as that which we all seek, and that definition comes in turn from saying, "I want food because it is good; I want shelter because it is good; I want companionship because it is good," and so on. But to jump from saying all these things separately to saying that there is one single thing called "the Good" that we can somehow acquire and that will satisfy all our desires at once … that sounds like a joke. It sounds like Plato (or Plotinus) is playing with words to charm us or mystify us or confuse us, and in any event to get us to follow along. Of course Plato and Plotinus would deny that the Good (or the One) is a "thing" that we can "acquire." Also, they are both very smart; so if I can see that the jump from adjective to noun looks like a stretch, odds are that they see it too. Maybe there is more to it than meets the eye. Keep this question in mind as we go on.

Notice by the way that Robert Pirsig does something similar in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when he introduces the term Quality but refuses to define it beyond saying "Quality is what you like." [p. 232] There are some words in there about Quality as an immediate felt experience, but nothing very exact. If the comparison helps, I think it is fair to use it. 

When Plotinus says that all desires will cease he sounds for a minute like a Buddhist (I've remarked before that the Buddha dharma and the Πλατωνικός λόγος sound awfully similar) but his path doesn't sound especially Buddhist. Hines writes that, "Plotinus does not espouse the extinction of desire, but the channeling of desire. Within us is a spiritual engine, longing, that is always running strong.... [But] In truth, that hunger can only be satisfied by the One." [p. 40]

Is the difference real, or only apparent? I'm not sure yet. This is another question to keep in mind as we go, to see if it is answered later. I admit that when I hear that the way to the One involves using all our power of longing and desire but simply channeling it, the first thing I think of is William Blake's remark in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that "at the end of six thousand years …. the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment." [plate 14] But I'm probably wrong: at any rate I make no claims here that Blake and Plotinus are saying anything like the same thing. 

So if we all want the One, where do we find it? Plotinus says that the One is everywhere, that it is the source (but not the creator) of all existence, and that the only way to see it is to look back on ourselves in contemplation, screening out all the other distractions that occupy our attention. Here again, the advice sounds quasi-Buddhist: meditate quietly in order to understand the true nature of reality. Right now my working hypothesis is that the methods and experience which Plotinus is teaching may turn out to be very similar to the methods and experience taught by the Buddha, but that the language and conceptual structure in which he describes them are rather different. Let's see if this hypothesis holds up.       

What's wrong with following your passion?

There is a kind of fashionable advice on careers that says to find work you are passionate about. The argument behind it is that your passion will fuel your hard work, and the hard work will bring success. And usually there is an example given, of this or that person who never finished school or labored under some other handicap, and who nonetheless succeeded because of single-minded dedication fueled by passion. 

This argument is wrong in two ways, not just one. One well-understood flaw is that it is an example of survivorship bias. (See especially this section of the article, as well as this cartoon.) 

But the second error is that it assumes passions are immutable. On the one hand, if you find yourself becoming successful at something you are likely to start feeling passionate about it. But also, if you regularly fail at something you are likely to lose your passion. Think of a young boy who loves role-playing as a superhero. He hears the advice about following your passion, and so he makes it his life's goal to achieve fame and fortune in a career where he can role-play as a superhero. Of course such careers exist — there are actors who star in superhero movies, after all — but they are few and far between. So the numerical odds are stacked way against him, and the overwhelming probability is that he will fail.

What then? Will he be as passionate about playing superheroes at 45 as he was at 10? Probably not. His tastes will likely have changed over time, and his repeated failures to make even a bare living this way will likely have dampened his ardor. But if he then complains to the propagandist who sold him on the "Follow your passion" dogma years ago, how is that fellow going to reply? "Don't complain to me, Sonny. Just look at yourself: you're no longer passionate about superhero role-playing, and so of course your flabby commitment is dragging down your performance. Of course you failed. It's your own fault for losing that passion you had when you were younger, because if you had only kept the flame alive you would surely have succeeded one day."

In other words, "follow your passion to achieve success" really means "your failure is your own fault." 

But sometimes it ain't.

See also a similar point made by Scott Galloway on Twitter, here. 

This clip is excerpted from a much longer speech which you can find here:

         

Return to the One (Introduction)

 Some months ago, I bought a book that has been sitting around waiting for me to read it. (To be clear, this happens a lot.) In the meantime, though, I've picked it up and browsed at random through it any number of times. (This, too, is pretty common.) And I've thought, "What if I actually read the thing from start to finish? You know, the way it's meant to be read."

The book is called Return to the One: Plotinus's Guide to God-Realization, and it's by Brian Hines. In the Introduction, he says that the right approach to Plotinus's teaching is to probe it, criticize it, and ask questions. Plotinus taught a very distilled form of Platonism; so as the conceit of this blog is that ancient philosophy is still meaningful today, looking into Plotinus's thought would seem to be a natural thing to do. And isn't the medium of a blog post just tailor-made for criticizing or asking questions? For thinking through topics when you're not sure how they will turn out? Maybe if I plan to post something here once a week or so it will keep me on track. We'll see.

I explained back in the inaugural post of this blog that at the time I saw great value in classical thought as well as some areas that I simply disagreed with. That's still true today. To make it clear where I am starting from, let me quote one summary paragraph (and just a bit more) from Hines's introduction:

During the third century, in Plotinus's lifetime, Neoplatonism and Christianity competed for the hearts and minds of those in the Mediterranean world.... Indeed, the spiritual message of one of these combatants can be summarized in this fashion: There is only one God, who is all love; every human being has an immortal soul, whose highest destiny is to be united with God; if we live virtuous lives, we will join our heavenly Father after death, but if we do not, justice will be done; we must humbly yield to the divine will, accepting with equanimity whatever life brings us; to be attracted to the sensual pleasures of this world is to be distanced from God, the Good we seek but never find in material pursuits. And then there is the Christian conception of spirituality, which I won't bother to summarize, as it should already be familiar to the reader. [Hines, p. xvi]

Fine, let me take this radically abbreviated summary of Neoplatonism and suggest where I stand today with respect to each of its points. Naturally by the time I get to the end of the book I might have changed my mind on some of these opinions.

• There is only one God, who is all love. Of course it depends on how you define the word "god." Under one definition this claim is perfectly reasonable. But the word has also been used to describe other phenomena as well, that don't fit so neatly into this view. It will probably take me at least one whole post on its own to explain what I have in mind.
• Every human being has an immortal soul, whose highest destiny is to be united with God. If I look at this through the metaphysical lenses that I normally use, it's hard to agree. What is this soul made out of? Matter or energy? How do we detect it? Also, anything made out of either matter or energy cannot be immortal, based on what we understand of physics. On the other hand the anecdotal sources attesting to ghosts or other communications with the dead are many and they come from all over the globe. So this point deserves some thought before I dismiss it.
• If we live virtuous lives, we will join our heavenly Father after death. This belief relies on what came before, about the immortal soul. If that fails, this does too.
• But if we do not [live virtuous lives], justice will be done. This, on the other hand, looks perfectly obvious to me. If I lead a corrupt and vicious life, my punishment is to be the kind of person that my actions make me. And living a life as that kind of person is unpleasant. Such a life is not worth living. So the justice is immediate and, I would argue, inescapable: cause and effect, no more.
• We must humbly yield to the divine will, accepting with equanimity whatever life brings us. Yes, equanimity is a good thing. And kicking against Reality -- refusing to accept that what is, is -- that's just a waste of time and effort. And it makes you needlessly miserable. I'm completely onboard with this point.
• To be attracted to the sensual pleasures of this world is to be distanced from God, the Good we seek but never find in material pursuits. Not so sure about this one. Are we really supposed to think that wine and music and love are worthless distractions? That's a hard argument to make, and I will be interested to see how Plotinus makes it. I have already started to discuss this point before, for example here and here.

So it's a mixed bag. And again, my positions may change after I read the book. Let's see.

             

Philodemy

I started wondering today about a phenomenon that I'm pretty sure is a real thing but I don't know if it has a name. My questions to you are therefore first, Is this a real thing? and second, Does it have a name?

The phenomenon I have in mind is the envy of -- or perhaps even the fetishization of --  the common man or the simple man or the uneducated man on the part of the urbane, the sophisticated, and the intellectual or cultural elite. (Compare, for example, this post where I talk about the flattery of the poor by the rich.)

When I say "envy or fetishization" I am thinking of the idea (sometimes not consciously articulated) that this simple, common man is somehow more in touch with Real Life than the person making the judgement or any of his friends. And I think, for example, of Lady Chatterley's Lover, where it is the lower-class gamekeeper who brings Lady Chatterley's sexuality alive, … because, I don't know, maybe upper-class people don't have sex? (Don Juan would like a word.)

By Margaret Brundage - Scanned cover of pulp magazine, Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8091452

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples that I'm just too lazy to think of right now. And I think the phenomenon is also related (a little more distantly) to the way that Europeans, for example, fetishized their colonial subjects; or the way that Americans in the 20th century were sold an image of Mexico as (in the words of Tom Lehrer, who was of course satirizing this very attitude) "that Magic and Romantic Land South of the Border."

Anyway, this is why I think it is a real thing. Now, what's it called? 

I've been playing with names like Philodemy or Philoplethy (which looks harder to say), because ὁ δῆμος and τό πλῆθος both mean "the common people." But I have this nagging fear that there is some more obvious word that I am blanking on, and that I will feel like an idiot for not thinking of. Still, if you can think what it is, I'd like to know. (Grin)

I started thinking about this because I saw a play-reading this morning over Zoom. The play was called "Human Error," and it's basically a comedy. The set-up is that an infertility clinic goofs, and accidentally implants the fertilized ovum from Couple A into the wife of Couple B. This brings the two couples into each other's lives. But of course (since this is set in more-or-less-modern America only without COVID-19), Couple A are liberals and Couple B are conservatives. And the playwright goes out of his way to make them solid representatives of their type. Couple A is an interracial couple: he works at a research institute and she's a yoga instructor. Couple B are both white: he owns a small business and a big truck and goes hunting, while she is a stay-at-home mom who is active in her church. But what I began to notice was that -- to my eyes, at least -- the liberal couple didn't seem as likeable as the conservative couple. I say this even though I'm morally certain that the playwright himself has more in common with the liberal couple than with the conservative couple. So what's the deal? Why would he write His Own Team to be less nice than the Other Guys?

To be clear, the differences are subtle. None of the people are saints, and none of them are terrible. If this is a case of philodemy, I don't consider it blatant or overt. I would call it a very subtle shading. But I do think it's there. 

Anyway, I've been mulling over this today. As usual if I'm full of it please feel free to say so.

The New Yorker agrees we are violent

More confirmation of my basic thesis that we Americans are a fundamentally violent people. This time it's an article in the New Yorker.

The Violent Style

I'm not really glad that everyone seems to agree with me. I mean, … this is the kind of topic where it would be nice to be wrong. (Sigh.)

        

Donald Trump agrees we are violent

Three months ago I posted an essay arguing that the signature characteristic of Americans is violent self-assertion.

This evening, President Trump is holding a campaign rally in Henderson, Nevada, during which he remarked casually that he agrees. Oh, not with my essay in particular: he's never heard of me. But with the basic thesis.

With the thesis that there is something fundamentally violent in the American character.

You can see it here.

Trump Twitter Video

The developed world? Where's that?

In the last few days I've heard several times the claim that the United States has 4% of the world's population and close to 25% of the confirmed deaths from COVID-19. It's an alarming statistic, partly because of the cognitive dissonance that it generates. Aren't we the richest country in the world? Aren't we scientifically the most advanced? How can we be fucking up so badly?

But wait. Why do we say that the United States is the richest country in the world? We have the world's highest GDP, of course. But we are also a big country, so by itself that doesn't make us rich. Do we have the highest GDP per capita? No, it turns out that's Luxembourg, or perhaps Monaco or Liechtenstein (depending on who does the calculation). Fine, but those are all small countries, so the qualification "per capita" means dividing by a very small denominator. What about comparing to countries that most Americans can find on a map? Without digressing too far into the question of how geographically literate Americans might be, our GDP per capita still falls below that of Norway, though we run a bit ahead of Australia.

But surely these numbers are meaningless. The United States is a huge country, and nobody pretends that the wealth is evenly distributed. Any number that relies on calculating a median income is going to distort the reality in important ways.

So yesterday I decided to see whether there are any available results that describe the level of economic development inside the United States at a county-by-county level. I decided to use the Human Development Index (HDI) as a metric (see the link for an explanation of the formula), and started googling for economic and demographic data. I didn't find exactly what I wanted, so I made some estimations (in respect to some of the inputs) that may skew the final numbers by a bit. But the results were still interesting.

The Human Development Index ranges (in principle) between 0 and 1. Based on global data in 2018, countries with ah HDI < 0.400 include Somalia, Niger, and the Central African Republic. Scores between 0.500 and 0.549 include countries like Sudan, New Guinea, and Syria. Scores between 0.700 and 0.749 include Bolivia, Venezuela, Libya, and Mongolia. All American counties scored higher than these. But not all of them were a lot higher: the lowest-scoring American county came in with an HDI (by my calculation) of 0.7803. And the overall breakdown was something like this:

• HDI between 0.750 and 0.799: 11 counties. Comparable nations include Sri Lanka, Albania, and Serbia.
• HDI between 0.800 and 0.849: 597 counties. Comparable nations include Malaysia, Oman, and Qatar.
• HDI between 0.850 and 0.899: 1811 counties (more than half!). Comparable nations include Portugal, Cyprus, and Spain.
• HDI of 0.900 or above: 659 counties. Comparable nations include Slovenia, USA (!), and Norway.

So I found that interesting, for a couple of reasons. One is that you really can see how taking an arithmetical mean distorts the results: taken as a whole, the USA falls into the top category, but only a little over a fifth of our counties make it there on their own. Clearly the numbers in those counties are high enough to pull up the rest of the country. On average.

On the other hand, that top category is the second-largest. If you cluster the bottom two categories together you get a group that is almost the same size as the top group, and you can consider those the two tails of a normal bell distribution. It makes sense.

Most important, though -- at least from my perspective -- is that over half of our counties are in the second-highest category. So maybe we should stop thinking of ourselves as sitting at the top of the development heap. Maybe it helps to think of ourselves, instead, as a large and dynamic developing nation, with political institutions that are a couple of centuries old and that date from a smaller, more rural, and more agricultural time. Maybe if we saw ourselves that way it wouldn't be so amazing that we failed to react to the coronavirus as decisively and (seemingly) successfully as countries that truly occupy the top rank of the Developed World: places like Germany, South Korea, and Hong Kong. 

And maybe their example can give us something to aspire to.

      

Formalizing the argument about Strauss's Paradox

Three months ago I posted an argument that an observation of the facts of biology, together with something like the Darwinian theory of evolution, requires the existence of innate purposes at the level of the individual organism and also at the level where that organism interacts with its environment. The argument was discursive and chatty and not terribly formal, because I meant it to be an essay.

Well over time I continued to discuss the topic with friends, and a few weeks ago I rewrote the argument. I am trying to say the exact same thing I said before, but my goal is to say it in a more formal and exact way. Let me know what you think. What follows is lightly adapted from an email I sent my friends at the beginning of this month.
__________

My claim, which I shall undertake to prove, is that the normal Darwinian picture of blind evolution logically entails the existence of natural purposes at the level of the individual organism and at the level of the species. More precisely, I propose to show that it is possible to define the word "purpose" and the phrase "natural way of life" in ways that are (1) consistent with Darwinian theory and also (2) intuitively plausible.

 

Please note that throughout this argument I will use the language of Darwinian theory as it has trickled down to the ordinary, university-educated non-biologist, on the assumption that it is all just a fact. Partly this is because my layman's understanding is that neo-Darwinian theory is pretty well established by analysis of the available data. But in addition, in this case the whole point is to show that Darwinian theory itself logically requires the results I have described. So it only makes sense to start out by assuming it. At the same time, I am neither a specialist in neo-Darwinian theory nor even a biologist. So it is certain that there are specialized features of the theory that I do not know. I am operating with only a layman's knowledge.

 

Now, to restate formally what I intend to show:

Theorem: Assuming that there are no purposes in the heavens and that life evolved in a Darwinian way by random chance, it is nonetheless possible to define the word "purpose" in three ways (corresponding to three different levels of analysis) such that in each case the word describes something which (1) must exist by Darwinian theory and (2) plausibly corresponds to our normal use of the word. These three different uses shall be distinguished as purpose1 (when discussing ontogenesis), purpose2 (when discussing the life of the individual organism), and purpose3 (when discussing the evolution of particular organs or features). Moreover it is possible to define the phrase "natural way of life" such that it describes something which (1) must exist by Darwinian theory and (2) plausibly corresponds to our normal use of the phrase.

 

Part 1: Ontogenesis is the growth of any organism from a fertilized egg into an adult. In this context, the purpose1 of any preliminary structure in the embryo is defined to be the organ that it will grow into by the time of maturity. So the purpose1 of these cells here is to grow into the lungs, while the purpose of those cells there is to grow into the stomach. Philosophically, this is not a very interesting usage. But please note that any normal understanding of Darwinian biology guarantees the existence of purpose1 for any species.

 

Part 2: The individual organism is a self-maintaining and self-replicating system that transforms inputs (light, air, water, food) into outputs (energy, new cells, and other things). Complex organisms are systems which themselves contain subsystems such as the respiratory, circulatory, and digestive systems, all of which interact in a manner that preserves the existence of the main organism and also (at least from time to time) generates new instances of the same species (i.e., children). Each subsystem also transforms inputs into outputs, and the outputs of one subsystem are generally inputs into another.

Example: One of the outputs of the respiratory system is oxygen transferred as an input to the circulatory system which then outputs the same oxygen to individual cells which use it in combustion whose output is energy. One of the outputs of the digestive system is glucose transferred in the same way as an input into the circulatory system for use as a fuel in the previously-mentioned combustion at the cellular level. Then the energy produced by the combustion at the cellular level is used to run all the other activities of the body, and so on.

Characterizing an organism as a system composed of subsystems is one way to describe it. But an organism can also be described in terms of its characteristics or features. These features are consequences of the many subsystems that comprise the organism, but often in a holistic way -- that is, a feature like height or strength or speed is generally not the output of a single subsystem but the result of the cooperation of many subsystems.

 

That said, however, it is a basic principle of Darwinian theory that all or most of the features or characteristics of an organism are somehow derived from an evolutionary advantage or survival benefit which they conferred at one time or still confer. (The qualifier "or most" is there because sometimes a feature is a random mutation. The qualifier "at one time" is there because in some cases there appear to be features which have outlived their usefulness, like the vestigial leg bones in whales or like the coccyx in humans.) Therefore, some features of an organism can be described as contributing to the organism's survival in an evolutionary sense. An example is the swiftness of the gazelle, which allows it to outrun predators. There might of course be -- and in some cases there certainly are -- other features of the same organism which do not contribute to its survival.

 

In this context, the purpose2 of any feature or subsystem of any organism is defined to be the function that it plays in maintaining and reproducing the organism as a whole (for subsystems), or in ensuring its survival and reproduction (for features). Since the whole point of Darwinian theory is that the development of species can be characterized in terms of evolutionary advantage, it should be clear that Darwinian biology guarantees the existence of purpose2 for any species.

 

Part 3: In some organisms, some features can be used in a variety of different ways. For example I can use my fingers to bring food up to my mouth, but I can also use them to type on the keyboard of my computer. Now it should be clear that while I do derive some personal advantage from being able to type on a keyboard, there is no possible way that the ability to type on a keyboard is a usage which provided enough survival benefit to lead to the development of fingers in the human species. Personal computers came into existence only in my lifetime, and even typewriters did not exist when my grandparents' grandparents were born. But people had fingers long before that. So when an organism uses one of its features in a way that clearly played no part in that feature's evolutionary development, I call that an "adventitious" usage.

 

The opposite of an adventitious usage is a usage that was driven by evolution. I call this kind of usage an "evolutionary" usage. (For all I know there might be middle cases which are neither evolutionary nor adventitious under the current definitions, but that is not a problem for the argument.)

Example: When a gazelle uses its high speed to escape from a leopard, that is an "evolutionary" usage of the feature of high speed. On the other hand if two gazelles were simply playing "Tag" with no predators in sight, that would be an adventitious use of the feature of high speed. (I have no idea whether gazelles play "Tag" in real life.)

I now define the word purpose3 as a shorthand, such that the sentence "Behavior B is an evolutionary usage of feature F in this species" is synonymous with the sentence, "This species has F for the purpose3 of B." For the sake of variety I will also introduce the phrase "in order to" which I will define so that the same sentence can also be phrased as, "This species has F in order to B."

Example: Gazelles are fast in order to escape from predators. Cats have curved claws and strong pouncing muscles in order to catch mice.

Again, it should be clear that any organism which can be described as having any kind of behavior must (according to Darwinian biology) have some behaviors which meet the description of purpose3. In other words, there might be room for disagreement over whether you can discuss the "behavior" of algae. But in all contexts where the term is meaningful, Darwinian biology logically entails the existence of purpose3.

 

Part 4: To recapitulate where we are so far, any species S can be described as having a variety of features or characteristics. And in general we can suppose that any feature F can be used in a variety of ways, some evolutionary and some adventitious. When I talk about any individual of S using F in a certain way, I am talking about different kinds of behavior. A usage is a kind of behavior. So if I talk about a set of behaviors, I can also talk about the subset of those behaviors which constitute a usage of some feature of the species.

 

Therefore, for some species S, consider the set L of all behaviors available to S which are also evolutionary usages of some feature F of S. I now define the phrase "natural way of life" so that L is the natural way of life for S. Basic Darwinian theory ensures that L is never an empty set, because every kind of organism has some behavior which has been determined by evolution. Therefore Darwinian theory guarantees that every species has a natural way of life.

QED.

The next step is to start inquiring about what exactly constitutes the natural way of life for Man, but this has taken me long enough that I want to stop here and rest for a bit. Subsequent installments will recapitulate the argument of this post and this one ... and perhaps will move forward from there a little as well.

   

Will we see lasting change?

We live in a time of riots, protests, and demonstrations. We live in a time when people demand change -- lasting change. And there is an election coming up. Surely the time is ripe for something different to surface in our political world. Will it?

Probably not.

Of course I have no idea for sure, and it's always possible. After the catastrophe of the Great Depression, the New Deal laid the groundwork for a period of middle-class prosperity that wasn't dismantled for another fifty years. In political terms, that's significant change. Not that Franklin Roosevelt did it all by himself. The tooling up of our industrial plant for the Second World War, and Eisenhower's building of the interstate highway system all helped. The fact that ours was the only major industrial plant in the world that had not been bombed into rubble helped as well, because it meant for a while that the whole world was a market for our goods. So yes, events helped. But so did strong unionization and a government regulatory apparatus that was suspicious of economic centralization. So did a 90% marginal income tax rate. It all helped, and yes, that counts as lasting change.

Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation also ushered in a kind of lasting change -- at least for a while. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act did make a difference in how we played the game of citizenship.

Lasting change of another kind was ushered in by the "movement conservatives," who initiated a long-term rightward shift in the American political spectrum: starting with men like Barry Goldwater, achieving national power with Ronald Reagan, and proceeding straight through Newt Gingrich to our own time. This rightward shift has been so pronounced that from a modern perspective, even a dogged anti-Communist like Richard Nixon -- who founded the Environmental Protection Agency, integrated public schools across the country, and imposed centralized wage-price controls to combat inflation -- comes across looking like a flamboyant socialist.

So what about the unrest in the country today? Why do I say that I don't expect to see lasting change come from it?

Because we've seen it before. The city of Los Angeles burned when the police who brutalized Rodney King were acquitted by a majority-white jury. There have been demonstrations and protests after many other instances of apparent police brutality, especially when there seems to have been a racial motivation. There have been demonstrations and protests after mass shootings. In 2011 the Occupy Wall Street movement took over Zuccotti Park as well as banks, churches, and other local buildings. And all of these movements have accomplished exactly nothing.

Zero. Nada. Bupkes.

There is a reason they accomplished nothing, and it was first identified by Publius (James Madison) in Federalist No.10. He wrote about "faction" which had sooner or later killed every classical democracy or led it to be subverted by tyranny. And his argument was that "faction" would never be a serious problem in America because the country is too damned big! No matter what dramatic events happen here, they will be outweighed by the undramatic inertia of commonplace life everywhere else. Demonstrate and protest all you like: barricade the streets, set fire to cars or buildings, march, sing, wave signs. Knock yourself out. In the grand scheme of things it will barely ripple across the surface, and life will go on.

It is worth noting that, to date, he hasn't been far wrong. Factions ripped us apart during the Civil War, but they were factions that spanned whole regions, so that (nearly) everyone who lived in, say, Georgia or South Carolina belonged to one faction; while (nearly) everyone who lived in Michigan or New York belonged to the other. Splits like that are rare, and the uniqueness of that war in our history proves as much. (Factionalism sure looks strong today too, but all it seems able to do is to prevent Congress from legislating. I think we are unlikely to see anyone fire on another Fort Sumter.) 

What about the "lasting changes" that I list above? The New Deal became possible only because so much of the nation's economic infrastructure had collapsed. The War came to us through events outside our control. And all those other changes I list happened through the ordinary course of politicking ... a route that seems largely unavailable these days, since Congress can agree on so little.

The one way that I might be wrong is if the dramatic events of the last couple months drive changes at the state and local levels, and if those changes finally grow heavy enough to shift the center of balance in the country as a whole. It could happen. James Fallows has argued as much, over the last few years.

Maybe I'm prejudging events too rapidly. But it sure looks like we've all seen this movie before and know how it ends.
      

"Not ALL White Americans ...!"

When I wrote my last post, I suppose I should have included the obligatory "Not all ...!" disclaimer. Are all white Americans armed to the teeth? Do all white Americans react to even minor slights with violence?

I don't, and neither do my friends or family. So there's that. There must be millions of us -- tens of millions -- who are just as decent and civilized as I am ... or, if you prefer other adjectives, as polite and weak and timid and passive. When I talk about our national character, it doesn't literally refer to every single person in the exact same way.

But that also doesn't mean it's false. For my money, the best brief discussion of the concept of national character is found in a couple of chapters at the beginning of Part Two of Milton Mayer's classic, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945. He makes the argument that there is such a thing as national character, even though millions of any nationality won't exhibit it and even though the people who talk most about such things are generally racists or national supremacists of one kind or another. But even if you leave such deplorable people out of consideration, and even when you make allowances for all the exceptions ... there's something. And that something is worth talking about.

So no, not all Americans are violent. Not all men are rapists. Not all whites are racists. And so on. Of course all of those qualifications are always true. We get it. But whites still need to be extra sensitive to racism. Men still need to be extra careful about sexual consent.

And Americans ...? I have no lessons to teach. No curriculum to offer. No 12-step plan that will make us all better human beings. So I don't ask my fellow Americans for anything except awareness and self-knowledge.

My only other advice, I guess, is  ... just don't cross us.

I'm sorry.
   

Liberty for me, too bad about you

On May 25 of this year, a man named George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Since that day, there have been protests and riots across major American cities. At this point there are conflicting stories spreading: voices from the political right say that the protestors are also rioting and looting, while voices from the political left say that the protests have been peaceful until agents provocateurs working for the authorities initiate violence and thereby give those authorities an excuse for a violent response. As a mere philosopher I am far too lazy to sift truth from falsehood while the mix is still so inchoate. But whatever else might be true it certainly appears -- even on the most generous reading of the data -- that the forces of "law and order" have been guilty of wild overreach if not manifest malpractice in many of our cities over the last few days.

And so people are starting to grasp at historical analogies, to try to understand where we are, how we got here, and what is coming next. Are we once again in 1968? Or is this 1860? Could it be 1933, with the murder of Mr. Floyd our Reichstag Fire? All of the examples seem outlandish and dangerous; but it also seems like we are living in an outlandish and dangerous time.

Or is it? More precisely, there does appear to be danger aplenty, but is it outlandish? Are we really seeing the unraveling of the social fabric, or is this how it has always been? Certainly in the last few days there have been voices explaining with some exasperation that the only people who find these times outlandish are White Americans, because those who are Black or who otherwise fall outside the White mainstream have lived with the threat of random terror all their lives, whether from state actors or from their fellow citizens.

[As a terminological note: one current way to refer to those outside the White mainstream is BIPOC, which stands for Blacks, Indigenous, and People Of Color. I will use that word in what follows.]

Unsurprisingly, this is not a story that White Americans want to hear, particularly not liberal White Americans who believe themselves always to have had the kindest of motives and who (again, unsurprisingly) don't like being told that they live blind and insulated lives. So the alternative story that one hears fairly often from White liberals is that it is all the fault of Donald Trump. If only Hillary Clinton had won the Electoral College in the same way that she won the popular vote in the election of 2016, life would be roses. But this story is false in at least two important ways.

First, much of today's agitation is around race, and it is simply not credible to assert that Mr. Trump personally turned tens of millions of people into racists. If anything, this story has the causality exactly backwards. It is impossible to argue that Mr. Trump has used his Presidency to cause ordinary Americans to adopt this or that set of opinions. Rather, it should be obvious that the whole reason he is President in the first place is that large swathes of the electorate already had whatever opinions they had, and as a result of their opinions they decided they liked him better than his opponent.

Second, there remains the pernicious half-truth that Mr. Trump is a minority President. I call this a "half-truth" because the numbers are there to support it if you look no closer; but the impression they give is misleading. More exactly, it is true that the total number of votes cast for Mr. Trump was about three million fewer than were cast for Mrs. Clinton. But consider for a moment an alternative map of the United States which contains every inch that it contains today with only two places dropped out: the City of New York and the County of Los Angeles. In that alternative country, Mr. Trump won a popular majority. Add up all the other great Democratic strongholds you like: San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Chicago. They are not enough. Mr. Trump's support across the country was wide enough and deep enough to outvote them all. So when you stop to ask yourself what the election of 2016 tells us about ourselves as a people, there are really only two alternatives. Either the "average American" is a New Yorker or an Angeleno and none of the rest of the wide, full country counts for anything; or Mr. Trump is ours. We elected him, we earned him, and we deserve him. My money is on the second alternative.

So who are we as a people? I'm inclined to think the radical BIPOC voices have it right, or almost. They make the discussion about race and I'm going to make it about ideals (in the next few paragraphs, at any rate) but we end up in much the same place. The history of America is a history of violent self-assertion. Taken together as a nation, we are one of the most violent -- and hands-down the most self-assertive -- on the planet.

I have hinted at this argument before, but let me approach the question a couple of different ways. Here's a personal story. A couple of years ago I was working on a project with a colleague from Germany. She travelled all over the world for work, and had been to the United States many times before. Anyway, in the course of the conversation one evening over dinner I used the term "American exceptionalism," and she asked me "What does that mean?" And I was kind of stumped. How do you explain American exceptionalism? I mean ... I know what it is. I assume every American more or less knows what it is. It is the assumption ... no, not an assumption, the knowledge deep in your bones that America is different from the rest of the world. Different and better. And the rules that apply to the rest of the world don't apply to us. We all know what this attitude means. And I will wager that at some level most Americans believe it too, even if they would never admit it in public. (Most? Let's say more than half.) Only ... how was I supposed to explain this to my colleague, an intelligent professional woman who has visited and worked in more countries than I can even name? How was I supposed to explain it and not sound like a five-year-old? I don't remember what I said. But you all know what I am talking about.

Or let's look at first principles. What is the most important American ideal, the one we consider our gift to the world? I pull a quarter out of my pocket, and right there underneath George Washington's chin it says "LIBERTY." But what is liberty? Liberty means I get to do what I want. Oh sure, there are scholars who will tell you it means more than that. John Stuart Mill wrote what may be his most famous work (On Liberty) to argue that it means granting equal liberty to all, subject only to the restriction that none of us impinge on the liberty of anyone else. It sounds great. But only scholars would actually believe such a thing.

Because stop and think: as long as I get to do what I want, what incentive do I have to think about you? Why should I really care? And let's say that in the course of things it becomes necessary for someone to stop me from doing something I want for the very good reason that my actions interfere with you. Am I going to stop, evaluate the whole thing dispassionately, and realize that of course you are right? Am I going to apologize for my thoughtlessness? Or will I see only that I was trying to do something and somebody stopped me, and therefore that horrible person is interfering with my liberty? Won't I just insist that the American ideal of liberty means I should be allowed to go ahead with whatever god-awful plans I have in mind, regardless of the cost to you? Once in a while, of course, you may be able to get through to me. Once in a while I might not be completely self-centered about the whole encounter. But over the long haul, which way do you want to wager your money?

This forgetting-about-other-people is fundamental and all too easy. How else could the American Founders so easily accept slavery? Not all of them did, of course. But four of the first five Presidents, and nine of the first twelve, were slaveholders. Samuel Johnson commented on this obvious incongruence (not to say hypocrisy) between the ideals of the Revolution and the daily lives of the primary revolutionaries when he wrote, in 1775, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" And of course Washington, Jefferson, Madison and the rest were smart men. Intellectually they knew it was a problem. But pragmatically, on a day-to-day level, it was much easier not to think about it. To forget about others so they could get on with what they were doing.

Or look at the Revolution itself. We all know that it was sparked by a rebellion against taxes, and there was something about tea. But that was in Boston. Out on the frontier (which at that point ran through the Appalachian Mountains) the big problem was land. The British Crown had signed treaties with various Indian nations, promising to stay out of all the lands across the frontier. The Indian nations were there first, it was their land, and the British recognized as much. But this put the Crown in direct conflict with her own subjects, the colonists who lived on the frontier and saw all that beautiful land just waiting for them. They wanted to take the land for themselves and cultivate it. So when the British Crown tried to stop them, that just meant that the King's government was ... wait for it ... interfering with their liberty. And in that case the King had to go. So they raised the banner of revolution in order to stop the government from interfering as they stole somebody else's land in defiance of a written treaty. Liberty for me -- too bad about you. (You can find a summary of this history in this book review here or in the book itself, Alan Taylor's American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804.)

Do I have to go on? In 1812 and 1813, Joel Roberts Poinsett was meddling in the relations between Chile and Peru; having been sent by President James Madison to look after American commercial interests, he accepted a commission in the Chilean army and captured the Bay of Conception from Peru. What difference did it make if he was fighting and commanding troops under the flag of a foreign power, so long as the end result was more favorable to American commercial interests? So long as we got what we wanted?

A decade later, in 1823, President James Monroe first articulated what was later known as the Monroe Doctrine, a principle which stated -- at a time when we had a tiny army and almost no navy -- that the entire Western Hemisphere (half the globe, in principle) was now our sphere of influence and other Great Powers (meaning Europe) should stay out of it. Breathtaking arrogance, comical in fact. And that's how the European powers took it for several years. In 1861, the French installed an emperor in Mexico, which shows how seriously they took the whole thing. (Also in 1861 we were rather preoccupied with our own troubles.) But the point is that we took it seriously. And when our army and navy began to grow in strength and reach, towards the end of the nineteenth century, we took it as our natural right to settle border disputes between other powers in this hemisphere, or even to make and unmake governments as we chose. After all, we had already explained this to everyone beforehand.

And after all, this is why the rest of the world thinks we are so insufferably arrogant: because it never occurs to us not to tell other countries what to do. Because we "bestride the narrow world like a Colossus" and send our troops where we will to make or break other nations. Because it is totally natural for us to do this, and to lecture other countries about their internal affairs even when we seem to have a pretty poor grip on our own. When George Floyd was murdered and our most recent riots started, don't think the rest of the world failed to notice. (See, for example, here or here.)

Well, but that's all about foreign policy. Every country does things abroad because they have to, in the interests of political realism. But how about at home? Aren't we Americans basically Nice Guys?

Sure. Everybody abroad understands that we can be tremendously nice (Florence King once called us the Labrador puppies of the world) ... as long as you don't cross us. But get us mad -- I'm still talking about private life here -- and suddenly you find out how many guns we own. Other people have written about this topic, more extensively and more eloquently than I can. So I won't try to improve on what anyone else has said. But let me reference two articles by James Fallows, written five years apart, each time after a mass-shooting captured all the country's headlines. He wrote the first one in 2012 and the second one in 2017. In both articles he makes a simple point: we choose to be a country where mass shootings are possible. We know this about ourselves, and we know that we will never do anything to change it. What's more, everybody in the world knows it about us too. This, more than anything else, is what the rest of the world cannot understand about us.

It's who we are.

Violent self-assertion.

This essay of mine that you have just been reading -- is it un-American? That's impossible. I'm an American, so this essay represents by definition an American opinion. The accusation of un-Americanism comes from a fear that after I write all these things about us, I'm going to wind up by saying that by contrast life is all roses somewhere else: in Cloud-Cuckoo Land, or on the Moon. But I'm not going to say that. I assume there are troubles everywhere. I assume that everyone has faults, and that every nationality has elements of their national character that make them shake their heads in dismay when they think about it.

It just so happens that this one is ours. Violent self-assertion is our special badge among the nations of the world. And of course if we can succeed in asserting ourselves without violence, that's just swell. We don't insist on the violence, as long as we get our way. That's where the praise of American individualism comes from, the praise of Emersonian self-reliance and Yankee ingenuity. They are all great things, and they allow us to make names for ourselves in all kinds of ways. Cue the lights, cue the flags, cue the stirring music and balloons.

Just don't cross us.

So yes, the radical BIPOC voices more or less have it right. This is who we are.
  

Morals from Nature: What about homosexuality?

When I started writing about how morality can be founded on Nature, it was in the context of a discussion with a couple of friends, one of whom kept raising the example of homosexual behavior as something that he thought obviously "contrary to Nature" and that he expected any teleologically-based ethics to condemn. Since then that conversation has wandered off in other directions, But I thought maybe I should address his question here.

I think the objections of this first friend, at least at a philosophical level, relied on some kind of argument that homosexual acts are intrinsically non-procreative and therefore somehow "wrong by nature." (I emphasize the words "at a philosophical level" because he also tended to wander of the subject and start growling about new laws around bathroom usage. But I didn't find anything of philosophical substance in that part.) But then the other friend broke in asking, "Why don't you think of homosexuality as something like a cleft palate, where Nature clearly intended one outcome but Her hand slipped when She made this one individual so he turned out not to match the design? Then you could say it's too bad and all, but there's no moral problem."

I think my second friend was trying to be a liberalizing influence here, but still I cringed a little at the image. To be clear, I don't have a horse in this race -- not personally -- but I do think it's valuable to understand the truth, and I don't think either of my friends has gotten there yet.

As far as non-procreative sex is concerned, I dealt with that in my previous post here. In the terms of that discussion, any sex that sparks love or brings people together is fulfilling at least one of its natural ends, whatever else we might say. But I can imagine that my second friend might answer back something like this:

"You know, Hosea, I have no problem with the fact that a homosexual couple won't beget new children. But my comparison of homosexuality with a cleft palate gets at another question entirely. I'm asking, 'Why does anybody want to do this in the first place?' It's clear to me why we (or most of us) are born with an attraction for the other sex: without it the species would never survive. But why do 3% of the population have an attraction for the same sex? At a biological or chemical level, how does that even happen? That's what I meant by saying that Nature was trying to reproduce the same pattern She uses for everyone else and somehow slipped."

Suppose he were to ask that. (In real life we haven't had this particular conversation.) What's the answer?

The first part of the answer is that it is misleading to use the words "at a biological or chemical level." As I argued way back in 2012, homosexuality is not a thing. There is no genetic marker for it. The only ways to find out whether someone is gay is to ask or watch; a blood test won't tell you.

The immediate objection to that position is that it makes homosexuality sound like a mere preference, like between chocolate and vanilla, or between pistachio and mint chocolate chip. And in that case, why is the incidence so small? Wouldn't we expect to see more of a bell curve, where a few die-hards are found out at each end who love chocolate and loathe vanilla (or the reverse) while most people are somewhere in the middle?

Indeed we would. And if we conducted our survey in -- oh, let's say Athens in the 4th century BCE -- that's more or less what we would find. Look at the discussion in the Symposium, which covers attraction to both girls and boys and in which the highest teaching comes from a woman (Diotima) ... but where some (not all) of the participants are frank about preferring boys. But in our own society there have historically been such a strong opposition to homosexual behavior and such a pervasive assumption of heterosexuality that you would expect anyone in the middle to settle for living a conventional heterosexual life without ever thinking about it. You would expect that the only ones ever to make an issue of it would be the die-hards out at one end who love pistachio and loathe mint chocolate chip.

That would be our 3%.

So much for the statistical distribution. As for the moral side, I really think it is all covered, in principle at least, in the earlier post.
  

Morals from Nature: What about sex?

If Nature, by providing a teleology for Man, is the source of our morality, then what is the morality of sex?

There have been a number of answers to this question over the years. The Catholic Church has articulated a theology of sexuality which is probably familiar in outline to most people: sex is good inside marriage when it is for the sake of begetting children; but sex outside of marriage, or sex acts where children are impossible (think of contraception, masturbation, or many other examples), are "intrinsically disordered" and wrong. What is interesting is that a number of authors who believe they are writing science find themselves in a similar boat for a similar reason: these are the authors who look at sex through the lens of sociobiology or "evolutionary psychology". They seem to have a lot to say about sexual jealousy, differential investments in childrearing, and so on, but to have some trouble accounting for non-procreative sexual activity. And of course the argument would be that non-procreative sexual activity doesn't leave children behind (obviously!) and therefore can hardly be selected-for in any normal Darwinian sense.

What interests me about both these positions is that on the surface they look so logical, but in their consequences they look totally at odds with the way human beings really live -- around the globe and over the ages. What's more, it is easy to think you have found the flaw in the argument and then go astray in another direction.

Both the Catholic and the "evolutionary psychological" positions rest on the premise that the purpose of sex is reproduction. From that, all the rest follows. If you want to reject those conclusions, the easiest way is to reject teleology and say "There are no purposes! Go do what you want!" But you know by now that I consider teleology to be a basic fact about living beings, so that too is an error.

What then?

If an argument leads to results which look absurd, but all the steps of the argument are logical, the error is probably in its premises. As noted, the premise behind both the Catholic and the "evolutionary psychological" teachings is this: Reproduction is the purpose of sex. But where is the error? If we concede that there are purposes in Nature, how can this premise possibly be false? Isn't that how we get children, through sex? Isn't it the only possible way to create new children?

Of course it is. And while I do affirm there is an error in that sentence, it's subtle. Only one word is wrong, and that word is not "reproduction." Its "the."

The point is that this premise ("Reproduction is the purpose of sex") itself relies on an earlier, hidden premise which states, "A thing can have only one purpose." But where is the evidence for that? How would you ever go about proving it? Can you prove it?

Presumably the argument would start by conceding that a thing can be used in lots of different ways, but would insist that only one of them is the true natural end or goal or purpose. A car can be used to get money (by selling it) or to impress your neighbor (by polishing it ostentatiously and parking it where he has to see it); but its natural purpose is to drive. And as far as it goes, the analogy sounds plausible. Does it work the same way in Nature? You could argue that I can use the hair on top of my head to make a political or fashion statement depending on how I wear it, but its natural purpose is to keep my head warm. Maybe the rest of Nature is like that too.

Only it's not. I can formally disprove the allegation that everything has only one purpose, as follows:

Lemma: It is possible for a thing to have more than one natural purpose.  

Proof: For the sake of an example, consider the penis. What is its natural function: elimination of waste, or reproduction of the species? Both are essential to survival. Neither one can possibly be considered an incidental, side use. Neither one can be considered an abuse. Both purposes are absolutely fundamental. But they are different. Therefore it is possible for a thing to have more than one natural purpose. QED.

And with this proof, both the Catholic and the "evolutionary psychological" teachings collapse. Because while it is obvious that reproduction is a purpose of sex, there is no evidence whatever that it is the only one.

What else then? What other purpose can we reasonably suppose sex to have? Recall that I recently argued that the highest end for Man is friendship. And recall the argument I made ... gosh, almost three years ago, by now ... that the purpose of the orgasm is to make love -- to create or generate love even where it did not exist before (and therefore a fortiori to strengthen it where it does). Based on these two arguments, I think it is inescapable that one essential, natural purpose for sex is to bind us together, to help us love each other, to unite us as friends and lovers.

Naturally there are other ways to make friends too. Don't misunderstand me to say sex is the only path to friendship! But it can be one of them.

But if the purpose -- oops, excuse me, one of the purposes -- of sex is friendship and human bonding, then what should the morality of sex look like? Suddenly there is nothing wrong with all the different varieties of non-procreative sex (including contraception, masturbation, and all the others), as long as they are serving the purposes of love and bringing people together. On the other hand, rape is pretty obviously still bad because it takes something that should be a means towards unity and makes it a violent weapon instead.

I don't have a complete teaching to offer about the other consequences of this new understanding. This is new ground, and I am still thinking it through. But I expect the changes to be real, and -- what is more important -- closer in line with our lived human experience than the earlier teachings were.