Who dares to be better than Aristotle?

A week ago I posted about something I called "Strauss's Paradox" on the strength of an extensive quote from Leo Strauss. I have more to say on the subject of applying natural reason to questions of ethics, but first I want to step aside to look at a question Strauss asks in that long quote.

His topic is whether there is a teleology for Man, because any natural ethics would have to be based on some kind of natural teleology. And what he says, in his normally indirect way, is this:

"From the point of view of Aristotle -- and who could dare to claim to be a better judge in this matter than Aristotle? -- the issue between the mechanical and the teleological conception of the universe is decided by the manner in which the problem of the heavens, the heavenly bodies, and their motion is solved."

Now, Strauss never states whether he agrees with this opinion, or not. He asks rhetorically who dares to claim to be a better judge than Aristotle, but we can't see his face as he asks it -- so we don't know if he is smirking at a private joke, or in dead earnest. But what he does give us -- and this is vintage Strauss -- is a footnote to the exact references in Aristotle on which he bases his remarks. That footnote reads in full as follows:

Physics 196a25 ff., 199a3-5

OK, what does Aristotle say in those places? I don't own a copy of the Physics and it took me a little while to find a copy online that included Bekker numbering. But I finally found a PDF of the Revised Oxford Translation. Here, therefore, are the two paragraphs which include the passages that Strauss indicates.

196a25-196b4 There are some who actually ascribe this heavenly sphere and all the worlds to spontaneity. They say that the vortex arose spontaneously, i.e. the motion that separated and arranged the universe in its present order. This statement might well cause surprise. For they are asserting that chance is not responsible for the existence or generation of animals and plants, nature or mind or something of the kind being the cause of them (for it is not any chance thing that comes from a given seed but an olive from one kind and a man from another); and yet at the same time they assert that the heavenly sphere and the divinest of visible things arose spontaneously, having no such cause as is assigned to animals and plants. Yet if this is so, it is a fact which deserves to be dwelt upon, and something might well have been said about it. For besides the other absurdities of the statement, it is the more absurd that people should make it when they see nothing coming to be spontaneously in the heavens, but much happening by chance among the things which as they say are not due to chance; whereas we should have expected exactly the opposite.

198b34-199a8 Such are the arguments (and others of the kind) which may cause difficulty on this point. Yet it is impossible that this should be the true view. For teeth and all other natural things either invariably or for the most part come about in a given way; but of not one of the results of chance or spontaneity is this true. We do not ascribe to chance or mere coincidence the frequency of rain in winter, but frequent rain in summer we do; nor heat in summer but only if we have it in winter. If then, it is agreed that things are either the result of coincidence or for the sake of something, and these cannot be the result of coincidence or spontaneity, it follows that they must be for the sake of something; and that such things are all due to nature even the champions of the theory which is before us would agree. Therefore action for an end is present in things which come to be and are by nature.

To summarize. The first selection says that we are more likely to find design in the heavens than we do on earth, because there is never anything new in the heavens. The second selection says that we can see regular patterns in nature, so therefore natural events cannot have come about by accident.

Leaving Strauss aside for a minute, is there any way that we could accept these arguments today?

• The first one fails because we now know that things do change in the heavens: stars are born and die, and rocks fall from interplanetary space to land on the Earth.
• The second one confuses the assertion (a) that the world originally arose in an unplanned way long ago in the depths of time (but follows definite laws so that after a while regular patterns have showed up) with the assertion (b) that all events in nature happen stochastically all the time. Since (b) is plainly false, Aristotle infers (mistakenly, I think) that (a) must also be false. 

In other words, neither argument would fly today. It is true that the second paragraph could be reworked or adapted into something stronger, by making the argument that the regularities of natural physical law are so remarkable that the odds are against them having happened by accident. But the first paragraph is -- in light of what we know today -- clearly a joke.

The only remaining question is the biographical one whether Strauss understood that those arguments could not stand on their own today. If yes, then his footnote is intended as a subtle wink and nod to his reader, allowing him to pay public deference to the pre-modern view of teleology while not really believing it. If no, then it is a remarkable coincidence that he just happened to find two such weak arguments to support a position he really believed.

Of course the man is dead now, so I suppose we shall never know for sure. But my guess is for Yes. As far as the biographical question about Strauss's personal opinions is concerned, I find the argument from design (i.e., that he chose those passages on purpose) stronger than the argument from random accident.   

    

"McFarland USA" or Revisiting "Ancient politics vs modern"

Last year I wrote a post in which I argued that modern political entities are by nature stronger than ancient ones: "Set up a modern state and an ancient one side by side, and the first will conquer the second as soon as it wants to." But now I'm not so sure. Does the rich power always vanquish the poor one?

Last month Walt Disney Pictures released "McFarland USA" in which a school teacher with nowhere else to go starts a cross-country team at one of the poorest high schools in California, and they sweep the CIF championships. It's a good movie: if you haven't seen it, stop reading philosophy blogs and go rent it. But it calls into question the seemingly natural victory of rich over poor. Before one race (on a course with a lot of hills) the coach tells his runners,

Just remember: when you start to feel pain going up those hills, so does the guy next to you and the guy in front of you. This race is going to come down to who can handle more pain. My bet is on you guys. [The quote is inexact.]

The rest is history.

Does this attitude translate to the battlefield? James Fallows recently wrote about why the American military -- the richest and most powerful army in the world by a very large margin -- keeps losing. In particular, we lose to poorer forces that are willing to engage in non-stop non-traditional warfare, particularly guerilla warfare. The North Vietnamese were very good at this; more recently, so were the Afghans. Armies like that nibble away at us until we just don't care any more, and call it a day. As Ho Chi Minh famously said, "You will kill ten of our men, and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it."

This suggests that maybe there is a breathing space, after all, in which ancient political forms could flourish. The city would have to be one like Sparta, oriented entirely around making war. It would help if it were located somewhere remote and inaccessible: Afghanistan and northern Pakistan are actually perfect in that regard, but they are already taken. But it's not impossible.

Even so, the margins in which such a city could prosper are narrow. When I summarized McFarland's victories by saying "The rest is history," it is instructive to look at all the history. McFarland's winning streak came to an end when the California Interscholastic Federation reclassified the small school into Division I, so that they had to compete against the largest schools in the state. No matter how good they were, they couldn't dominate against that deep a field and they began losing. Likewise, an ancient city transplanted to the modern day could probably hold out for some time against a larger power if they dedicated themselves heart and soul to guerilla combat. (I leave for another time the question whether such dedication would be consistent with the spirit of ancient cities in other ways.) But ancient cities were small. The city in Plato's Laws had 5040 families. If the larger power is sufficiently determined, sooner or later it can kill every last family and extinguish the city. And in the meanwhile, the city would have lived every minute as an armed camp. It's hard to think of this as the Good Life.

It may not be impossible to achieve ancient political ideals today, but there is no question that the attempt would be difficult on many levels.   
    

Ancient politics vs modern

A couple of months ago I posted an essay about Plato's Republic, and specifically about whether its prescriptions are as laughably impossible as we often say.  But it is worth noting that this is just one thread in a larger argument about the applicability of ancient thought at all.  Of course in principle I have already staked out a position on that question at the very beginning of this blog, although I am painfully aware that I have written so little here that anyone would be excused for thinking I haven't proven a damned thing.  What is especially interesting is that sometimes it is possible to use arguments or modes of thought that would have appeared perfectly clear to classical thinkers, while coming to conclusions quite different from theirs.  And politics is one of the places where this happens.

In my post about sex in the Republic, I argued that we shouldn't expect to be able to implement the kind of sexual regime Plato describes [an arrangement that was already long obsolete by classical times!] so long as we still own property.  But what about the rest of classical political thought -- the parts that the ancients themselves agreed with?  While no doubt the ideas may be useful as a framework or a reference point, could we plausibly try to build a society -- a regime -- on classical ideals?  And if not, why not?

A famous argument that it is no longer possible to frame a regime along classical lines is given in Stephen Holmes's 1979 article "Aristippus In and Out of Athens."  Holmes argues that the classical model of political life is no longer possible because times have changed. Specifically, Holmes does not deny the point from which classical thinkers started -- viz., that human nature requires sociability, ... social contact with others, ... friends.  But he makes the point that in classical times, the only way to get this social contact was as a member of the civic network in a polis, as an engaged citizen.  The only path to gratifying one's social needs was politics.  In modern society, by contrast, most of us find ourselves to be part of many different social networks, networks that overlap and interlock but do not simply coincide.  We are members of our families, but we are also employees at our jobs, worshippers at our churches, coaches at Little League, volunteers for local charities and in community theater, and so on.  Some of the people we know from one network might also show up in another one, but many won't.  And this complexity of interlocking but independent networks gives us a kind of freedom that was unimaginable to ancient thinkers who had never experienced anything like it.  Any attempt to implement classical political ideals would mean merging all these networks into the political network, or in other words politicizing all of life the way totalitarian states do.  But this is horrible -- nobody wants to live like that!  Therefore the modern application of classical political ideals is impossible.

It's an ingenious argument, and it was a career-maker.  (Full disclosure: I took one class from Holmes many years later, and it was halfway through the term before I visited his office hours to ask, "Are you the same Stephen Holmes who wrote ...?" He rolled his eyes and then chuckled, admitting that yes he was and adding that whenever he met a total stranger that was usually the first question asked.)  But notice that strictly speaking Holmes doesn't prove that it is impossible to apply classical forms to modern polities ... just that it would be very unpleasant or unattractive.  Anyone committed to dragging out the argument could easily reply, "That's just because we've been conditioned by growing up in the modern world to prefer the kinds of pleasures we find here. If we had been trained from birth to value other things instead, we might prefer the classical regime after all."  So the question naturally becomes, Is there any argument that can settle the contest between ancient and modern political forms other than an argument that proceeds from an acceptance of modern values?  Or does it all just depend on whatever you like?  
 
To get a grip on this question we need a little better idea of what exactly is entailed by classical political ideals.  Happily we can find a crisp list of four essential points articulated by Bertrand de Jouvenel in chapter 8 of his Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good.  (You can also find the book here.  For a good overview of Jouvenel's life and thought generally, see also this article here.)  Jouvenel makes it clear that the following criteria were absolutely essential to any good state, in the classical perspective:

1. It must be small.  In the Laws, Plato proposed a maximum size for his ideal city of 5040 families.
2. It must be completely homogeneous: racially, culturally, linguistically ... the works.
3. It must prohibit the importation of any beliefs or customs or ideas from outside. That more or less prohibits immigration of any kind, or even much in the way of newspapers.  (Television or the Internet would be straight out.)
4. It must not change. Innovation is death. 

Brian Anderson's article that I linked above summarized these criteria by saying, "You begin to get the picture. It looks like Albania under Enver Hoxa."  Not a place I'd want to live, nor probably you.  But does that matter?  Remember, the question now is not whether you or I would like to live here, but whether it is actually impossible.  Even if we found 5000 families of people who valued this sort of thing, could they make a go of it or not?

In the short run, and in total isolation, probably Yes.  But in the long run No.  And the real reason has nothing to do with "values".  The simple fact is that modern societies -- large, diverse, innovative societies -- are stronger than ancient ones.  In any contest, a big army has the advantage over a small army (other things being equal).  To be sure, other things aren't always equal.  David had the advantage over Goliath because he had superior technology.  But then, the innovative army will have better technology than the non-innovative one.  The diverse army can pick up new recruits anywhere -- this is one of the features of empires throughout history -- while the homogeneous army (like that of the Spartans) is limited to one population and one alone.  And a culture that is open to immigrants is also open to planting itself everywhere: you can buy a Big Mac on Red Square, and only two countries in the world officially do not import Coca Cola.  (Those two countries are Cuba and North Korea, and there are rumors suggesting we not be too sure about North Korea.)  There is no power in classical civilization that can stand up to this.

This says nothing about the respective levels of cultivation, to be sure.  I don't mean to compare the art of Praxiteles to the Cartoon Network.  But in terms of sheer strength -- in the first instance, military strength; and in the second, cultural dominance -- modern societies are vastly more powerful than ancient ones.  Set up a modern state and an ancient one side by side, and the first will conquer the second as soon as it wants to.  In that sense -- if in no other -- ancient political ideals are no longer realizable.  
 

Sex at Dawn, and the Republic

Name anything written by Plato. I bet the first thing you thought of -- maybe the only one -- was the Republic.

Tell me something about the Republic. Once we skip past "It's long," "It's boring," and "I think we had to read it in college but I just blew it off" the next thing to trip off the tongue -- the first remark that has anything to do with the content -- is probably "It's idealistic and impractical."

Plato gets that a lot. In the central books of the Republic, Socrates describes a made-up city, and commentators ever since (starting with Aristotle) have fallen all over themselves criticizing how silly his ideas are. It got so bad for so many centuries that in the late 1940's Leo Strauss proposed (and his students have later extended) the theory that Plato was just kidding. Strauss's student Allan Bloom, responsible for one of the most widely-used translations of the Republic, amplified this suggestion by saying that the Republic is really meant to expose the true nature of political life, and the true demands of political justice, so that we can all see just how problematic politics and justice are once we realize that the true demands of political community are impossible.



Impossible? How so? Well, there are plenty of fish to shoot in this barrel, but Bloom focusses on three specific proposals, which Socrates himself acknowledges are huge, saying they will provoke "three waves" of ridicule from his listeners: that the Guardians of the City should hold all their possessions in common, that they should hold their women and children in common, and that the whole show should be ruled by philosophers. Bloom says that every listener will naturally reject these proposals, because they leave us no fragment of private life, ... because everybody will naturally want to hold on tight to his own personal property, nobody will want to share his bed-partner with another (because of jealousy), everybody will be attached to his own children at the expense of all the others, and besides philosophers are ridiculous. Who would ever accept being ruled by them? The point, Bloom goes on to explain, is that real community -- if the word means anything -- is like that. Political groups, social groups, kinship groups ... they require everything from us, they ask for our total devotion. Holding anything back is invariably perceived as disloyal, as unjust, even (potentially) treacherous or treasonous. But since (Bloom concludes) we can't help but hold things back -- since it's a simple fact of nature that we won't give up our stuff, that we won't let our neighbors fuck our spouses, and that we'll always cheer for our own kids at Little League -- perfect justice and perfect community are impossible. There is and will always be a permanent tension between the demands of justice, of community, of the group, and the immutable requirements of human nature.



And ... well, that's fine, I guess. It's actually an impressive argument when he spells out all the details. Only, ... pause with me for just a minute to remember the argument of Christopher Ryan's and Cacilda Jethá's delightful book Sex at Dawn. Ryan and Jethá argue a number of things, but foremost on the list is their claim that the way we organize sex and child-rearing -- all our presuppositions about chastity and fidelity, about infidelity and immorality, about legitimacy and bastardy and parental affection -- that all this is a product of the agricultural revolution, or at any rate of the introduction of food surplusses that can be saved. They argue further that among "immediate-return foraging societies" these concepts are unknown. And they wind up by pointing out that for most of human history, we grouped together into bands that lived by immediate-return hunting and foraging. Durable property was unknown, food storage was unknown, ... and so were most of the concepts we use today to think about sex.

In fact, the more you think about it, the more you see that the first two of those three huge proposals actually describe the very same societies Ryan and Jethá write about. Holding all property in common? If "property" means rocks used for pounding, why not hold them in common? There are plenty lying around on the ground. Sticks sharpened to spears? There are always more sticks. Cars, computers, refrigerators, houses, money, jewelry, swords, metal of any kind? Nope, hadn't been invented yet. Look at the description of the Bushman community in the first few minutes of "The Gods Must Be Crazy" -- before the Coke bottle -- and you'll see what I mean.


What about "women and children"? Socrates says (at Stephanus 457 D), "All these women are to belong to all these men in common, and no woman is to live privately with any man. And the children, in their turn, will be in common, and neither will a parent know his own offspring, nor a child his parent." And right away his interlocutor (I think it is Glaucon at that point, though it is a little hard to keep track.) objects that this arrangement sounds both impractical and undesirable. But isn't this exactly the scenario that Sex at Dawn describes? That in paleolithic communities, men and women fucked whom they wanted when they wanted, and then the whole tribe raised children together, loving them all without caring who was whose? The whole discussion of "partible paternity" and of "intersecting webs" of mothers and fathers in Chapters Six and Seven are about exactly that. Again, so far from being impossible or impractical, this measure looks like something that may well have been the norm for most of human history.

The third proposal, rule by philosophers, we can probably write off as a piece of special pleading. But Bloom points out that in principle we would all like the wise to rule, more or less. We may disagree that philosophers are especially wise, but that is another point. Even here, though, I think there is not a total disconnect. Ryan and Jethá write that in the societies they study there is very little social hierarchy and a broad sense of social equality. Similarly, there is a reluctance to do what somebody else tells you, unless there is a better reason than that they said so. In a society like that, the most influential people are likely to be the ones who are most persuasive. And since these tribes are small and everybody has known everybody else forever, that doesn't mean someone who can run a slick propaganda campaign. Most often it will mean someone whose ideas have proven right before. Philosophers? Maybe not. But the wise? Maybe closer.

This way of looking at the subject casts a whole new light on Bloom's claim that Socrates here shows the nature of community and justice. If this is how we lived for most of human history, if this is (as far as anything can be) the way we evolved to live, then an immediate-return foraging community may indeed be the very kind of community we are built to live in. So far as we can infer purpose from long-term evolutionary development -- and I am bracketing a huge philosophical discussion here, about which let me say right now only that whatever you think of the idea of innate human purposes, it is pretty clear that cats have long claws and strong pouncing muscles in order to catch mice* -- I say, so far as we can infer purpose from this kind of evidence it seems plausible that we were meant to live in immediate-return foraging communities. But these are indeed exactly communities where all individual interest is subordinated to the communal interest, where there is no private property to speak of, where sexuality is not channeled to monogamous forms of expression, and where children are raised by the whole tribe as a huge pool of fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts. In other words, the true nature of human community, the true nature of political organization, the true nature of justice ... at heart it really is this kind of communal life. Bloom is right about that. The only place he goes wrong is to say that it is impossible, when that's how we lived for most of our life as a species.

So is the tragic Straussian prognosis wrong as well? ... the gloomy story that says there is a permanent conflict (or "tension") between what is best for the individual and what is best for society? If a just society is possible because we lived that way in the Stone Age and they live that way now in the Kalahari, does that mean we truly can achieve justice and community in our lifetimes?

Sure. Move to the Kalahari.**

But short of that, ... no, I don't think so. Ryan and Jethá are really clear about saying that times have changed. With the introduction of agriculture and property, it becomes impossible to lead a life of the kind of sexual freedom they describe. And as sex goes, so goes justice. As long as we live around agriculture and property -- hell, as long as we can hoard resources for tomorrow, which may not take much more than salt and fire -- for so long we will live in an "ownership society."*** And for so long will the joy of true community in the deepest sense -- including (but not limited to) a social acceptance of promiscuity -- be unavailable to us. We can't get there from here. Sadly, Strauss and Bloom are right about that too.



* Six years after writing this post, I finally spelled out the beginnings of the argument I allude to here -- viz., the argument that there are innate purposes, and that what you evolved for is that purpose. You can find it here.
** Or Mars. This kind of society also looks exactly like the Nest that Valentine Michael Smith sets up at the heart of the Church of All Worlds in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. In fact, for some years I have toyed with the idea that Stranger is really an extended gloss on the Republic. If you're on your way to Mars, call me when you get there.

*** Stephen Snyder's review of Sex at Dawn is really good on this point, so I am glad that Ryan and Jethá posted it on their website.