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Sunday, June 28, 2020

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.
      

Sunday, June 7, 2020

"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.
   

Wednesday, June 3, 2020

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.