Kierkegaard on regret

How have I NOT posted this delightfully melancholy quotation before now? It comes from Søren Kierkegaard, and you can find it all over the Internet. I'm sure you've seen it before.

The thing is, I remember figuring this out on my own many years ago ... possibly even before I'd heard of Kierkegaard, and certainly before I ever encountered the quote. I knew people who regretted major decisions in their lives, turning points where they were sure (in retrospect) that they had taken the wrong path. And I remember thinking, after I'd known them for a while, ...

All this regret is silly. In the first place, if you could go back in time to The Day you made that Big Decision, you would once again be the person you were back then. You'd think the way you thought back then. You'd have the same priorities you had back then. And so you'd end up deciding the same way all over again.

What's more, even if you did happen to pick the other choice, you'd always second-guess yourself just like you do today. No choice is ever perfectly blissful. No road is ever perfectly smooth. So you'd run into problems and difficulties (just like you do today), and I guarantee you'd start telling yourself, "If only I had made The Other Choice back on That Day (meaning the one you really did make in reality), then everything would be fine now!" 😀 In the long run you'd just be trading one batch of troubles for another, and it wouldn't be any better.

Then one day I read the quote by Kierkegaard, who said the whole thing so much more elgantly.

 

    

Rousseau, rats, and the cuckoo-clock

A month ago I posted an interesting observation. In his famous work The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposes a simple criterion to establish the best governments in the world. "What is the purpose of any political association?" he asks. "The preservation and prosperity of its members.… [Therefore] other things being equal, the … best government is the one under which the population increases most…. The government under which the population shrinks is the worst. Over to you, Statisticians—count, measure, compare!" 

A simple lookup of countries ranked by rate of natural increase then shows us that—according to Rousseau—the best-governed countries in the world today are Niger, Uganda, Angola, and Benin. All have a rate of natural increase over 33‰.* If you want to pick one of these countries to move to—because they are so well-governed, I mean—you might make your choice based on what languages are available. (Looking only at European languages, you could choose from French, English, Portuguese, or French, respectively.)

But what are we to learn from this fact? Those of us who live today in the modern, advanced West are likely to view with alarm any suggestion that we move to one of these countries. Economically they are poor and struggling; politically they are far from free; even in the best country of the four, 17% of the population do not have access to an improved water supply.** Would Rousseau really have stuck to his guns, if he had known these facts, or would he have changed his mind about what criterion indicates the best government? Put more simply, was Rousseau merely ignorant, or was he crazy?

Or is there something more to these results than we see at first?

Between 1958 and 1962, the American ethologist John B. Calhoun conducted a series of studies on rats. Specifically, he created "rat utopias"—artificial environments with unlimited amounts of food and water (but finite living space), and with no risk from predators. After a couple of generations, the rats went crazy. They stopped reproducing: many female rats could no longer carry babies to term, and many male rats lost interest in sex. There were other dysfunctions too. Rats stopped grooming; heart attack and cancer rates soared; some turned to cannibalism or "frenetic overactivity," while others fell into "pathological withdrawal." These results seemed to correlate with overcrowding, but in fact the rats voluntarily increased their own overcrowding by choosing to eat all at once rather than waiting till others were not around. All kinds of discipline broke down; normal social behaviors vanished. The "rat utopias" became nightmares.***

No analogy is exact. But how hard is it to see the modern, advanced West as a human version of the "rat utopias"? Of course there are still pockets of poverty and deprivation in our societies, but many of us have all the food and water we need, even while we live in confined spaces. Many of us have minimal experience of violent crime, and none at all of warfare (the two most obvious forms of "predation" to which humans are subject in modern societies). And sure enough, our numbers are dropping—just like Calhoun's rat populations did. If Rousseau were evaluating Calhoun's experiments, he would have had no trouble at all concluding that the rats were miserable. He would have had no trouble at all identifying this misery as the source of the declining numbers.

Why shouldn't the very same argument apply to us? Because we like having enough to eat? Because we like being free from predators? 

I mean, … sure, of course we like those things. I like them! But if our objective behavior looks pathological, isn't it at least possible that we are confused or mistaken about what is good for us? Isn't it at least possible that we like peace and plenty the way a drunk likes his whiskey even while it is poisoning him? (For a further consideration of the ways in which modern Western society creates profoundly anti-natural stresses, see the extended discussion in this post here of the thought experiment from Frederica Mathewes-Green.) 

I don't want to argue in favor of hunger and repression, scarcity and warfare, as ideals necessary for human thriving. Really, truly, I don't. Show me where the argument is wrong.

Of course it is possible to spin this result in an idealistic direction, or in a coldly cynical one. As an example of the first, John Eldredge argues in his book Wild at Heart that we are built for combat and conflict because God created us in the middle of a world at war; and so long as Satan continues his war against God, so long will our lives require us to fight hard to win and guard everything good in them. Eldredge uses this idea to construct a spirituality that is at once modern, martial, and Christian. And yes, idealistic.

There's another way to interpret the insight that we somehow need deprivation and conflict to rise to our human potential. It's an interpretation put into the mouth of Harry Lime, in The Third Man. I think you know how it goes:

Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Show me where the argument is wrong. 

__________

* That's 33 per thousand. 

** The respective percentages (of people without access to an improved water supply) are: Niger, 31.43%; Uganda, the best of them at 16.86%; Angola, a whopping 33.54%; and Benin, 25.27%.   

*** For a more detailed account of the results of Calhoun's experiments, along with some of the lessons for human populations, consider for example this article here.    

               

What would it take to eliminate abortion?

In my last post, I wrote about the political aspects of the Supreme Court's 1973 decision Roe v. Wade, particularly in light of the possibility that the current Court might end up overturning it when they decide Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization later this year. But there's another aspect of the abortion debate that I would like to consider. There are strong political forces in this country that say it is their goal to eliminate abortion. But what would it take to do that? Is it even possible?

Naturally it's possible to pass laws against abortion, and to define penalties for those who break the laws. That's the easy part. But surely everybody knows that merely passing laws won't actually eliminate abortions—they'll just happen illegally. In the same way that illegalizing drugs just drove the drug trade underground, so illegalizing abortions will—in the absence of any other changes—just drive the abortion trade underground. Anyone who considers the subject honestly knows this.

But wait. "In the absence of any other changes"? Is it possible that there are indirect ways to reduce or eliminate the number of abortions in the country, by eliminating the causes that create the demand for them? What would such an approach even look like?

What would it take to eliminate abortion?

According to nature

My thinking about this topic was inspired by Frederica Mathewes-Green, who wrote in a 2016 essay as follows:

If you were in charge of a nature preserve and you noticed that the pregnant female mammals were trying to miscarry their pregnancies, eating poisonous plants or injuring themselves, what would you do? Would you think of it as a battle between the pregnant female and her unborn and find ways to help those pregnant animals miscarry? No, of course not. You would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.” Something is creating intolerable stress, so much so that animals would rather destroy their own offspring than bring them into the world. You would strive to identify and correct whatever factors were causing this stress in the animals.

The same thing goes for the human animal. Abortion gets presented to us as if it’s something women want; both pro-choice and pro-life rhetoric can reinforce that idea. But women do this only if all their other options look worse. It’s supposed to be “her choice,” yet so many women say, “I really didn’t have a choice.”

Of course she's right. In a trivial sense, the only reason anyone chooses anything is that it looks better than the other options. As for her charge that many women feel trapped into having an abortion, I have no idea whether that's true or not. All I can say is that Frederica* has talked to a lot more women pre- and post-abortion than I have. So maybe provisionally I can take her word for it.

But I want to go back to one sentence that represents, for me, the key insight in this passage: You would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.” This is important. If we take Frederica's insight seriously, we have to conclude that something is badly wrong with the way we live.

You remember that the original point of this blog was to try to see the world "with classical eyes," and that this phrase implies in part a willingness "to accept that things have a nature, and that at least some things have a purpose." By these lights, there must be such a thing as "how we are meant to live by nature"; and abortion is so manifestly artificial an arrangement that it is very unlikely that abortion itself is by nature. (I mean medically-induced abortion here. There is a kind of abortion which is indeed by nature, but we call it miscarriage.) So if we find that there is currently a demand for medical abortions, there must be a reason. To put it broadly, we must be doing something wrong for such a demand to have arisen in the first place. In Frederica's terms, something must be really wrong in our environment.   

So when I ask whether abortion can be eliminated, I am really asking: What factors are causing this kind of stress in us, in the human animals? What's wrong with our environment that is pushing women to want access to abortions which presumably (in the absence of such stresses or other factors) they would not seek out in the same kinds of numbers? What would we have to change in our environment to eliminate that demand?

Why do women seek out abortions?

The first step is to inquire why women seek out abortions? Fortunately, it turns out there are studies on exactly this question. A quick Google search turns up three studies from different years, but their results are largely consistent. The studies are these:

• Biggs, M.A., Gould, H. & Foster, D.G. Understanding why women seek abortions in the US. BMC Women's Health 13, 29 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6874-13-29   
• L.B. Finer, L.F. Frohwirth, L.A. Dauphinee, S. Singh and A.M. Moore, Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2005, 37(3):110–118. https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/article_files/3711005.pdf
• Dawn Stacey, Why Do People Have Abortions?, December 19, 2021. https://www.verywellhealth.com/reasons-for-abortion-906589

Collating the results from these three studies, the primary reasons that women have abortions are, in order from most to least common, as follows:

1. They can't afford a baby financially.
2. They can't afford the disruption a baby will cause to their lives at this time.
3. They don't have the support they need (unmarried, partner does not want baby, partner is abusive, etc.).
4. They need to focus on other children.
5. A baby will ruin their future opportunities (education, employment).
6. They don't want people to know they had sex or got pregnant.
7. They are not mentally or emotionally ready to be mothers.
8. Health-related reasons (baby will be damaged, baby will endanger their health).
9. They cannot provide a good life for the baby.
10. They don't want to give the baby up for adoption.
11. They were victims of rape or incest.

There were minor differences among the three lists, but no significant ones. And these eleven reasons pretty much sum up all the reasons that were listed. So now the question that I posed above can be reframed as: What is wrong with our social environment today that makes these reasons possible? 

Or, to put it another way: If we were living the way we were meant to live, would these reasons all go away? What are the changes or gaps between how we were meant to live and how we actually live that make these reasons happen? 

Also, Can we go back? Can these reasons be eliminated? What would it take?

What do we have to change?

If we look at each of the eleven reasons in the list, our first question should be: What is the fundamental assumption behind each of these in turn that makes it a reason to abort one's child? Let me explain what I mean by giving an example. The first reason listed is, "They [the mothers] can't afford a baby financially." One assumption which makes that into a reason to abort is, "The mother has to bear the financial costs of the baby." Do you see what I mean? If that assumption were false—in other words, if mothers never had to bear the costs of their babies—then limited financial resources would no longer be a reason to abort a child. 

Note that when I say this, I'm not making any argument for or against a particular way of doing things. I'm not making an argument about who should bear the costs of babies. I'm just trying to explain what I mean by "finding the assumption behind a reason that makes it a reason." And the example I give doesn't have to be the only one. Maybe you can find another assumption too, that works the same way. This is just an example.

In fact, the list of fundamental assumptions behind these reasons is a lot shorter than the list of reasons itself. I think it's possible to write a minimal list of fundamental assumptions as follows:

• Nuclear families: We assume that mothers (and their partners, if any) are solely responsible for the care, nurturing, and expenses of their children OR ELSE they have to give up those children completely to someone else, in another nuclear family, who will accept that responsibility. (This covers reasons #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10.) 
• Sexual propriety: We assume certain kinds of rules around what constitutes decent or proper sexual behavior, with the result that women (or at least some women) will be shamed or punished if other people find out that they had sex or got pregnant. (This covers reason #6.)
• Health: We assume that it is bad to bear a child whose health will be fundamentally damaged from birth OR to continue a pregnancy which might kill the mother. (This covers reason #8.)
• Rape and incest: We assume that it is bad to bear a child that you will always hate and resent because you hate how he or she was conceived. (This covers reason #11.)

That's just four basic assumptions. What would it take to reverse them?

1. Nuclear families

This is the big one. Mothers are solely responsible for their children, OR ELSE they have to give up the children completely to somebody else. What would it take to undo this assumption, or to make it false?

Note, by the way, that the assumption has two parts to it. The first part says we assume that mothers are responsible for their children.** At this point it is easy to object, "But what about all those wonderful families waiting to adopt? If a mother can't take care of her own child, why can't she give him or her to a family who can provide a better life?" But that is just the second half of the same assumption. Underlying it all is the clear assumption that somebody—some one, identifiable, nameable person!—has to be responsible for the child, and also that people are naturally organized into households which contain either solitary adults or else nuclear families. Therefore, if a mother cannot take on the heavy and expensive responsibility to be that unique caregiver, she has to let someone else do it; and "letting someone else do it" means she will never see her baby again.

This is a lot to ask. Even mothers who know that they can't undertake the responsibility for their children don't want to give their babies up. In fact, the 2005 study identified above specifically discusses attitudes towards adoption (p. 117) and remarks: "While fewer than 1% of women in the quantitative survey volunteered that they would not consider or did not favor having a baby and giving it up for adoption, more than one-third of interview respondents said they had considered adoption and concluded that it was a morally unconscionable option because giving one’s child away is wrong." [Emphasis added.] In other words, more than a third of the women interviewed concluded that giving their child away for adoption was morally worse than aborting him or her.

This is the time that someone should object, "But what are the other alternatives? Surely either you look after your child or someone else does—right? Are there really any other choices?"

Of course there are other choices. Just not here and now.

• In an earlier day, the extended family offered an alternative. Especially if many members of the family lived all together (or at any rate very close by), there would have been any number of sisters and aunts and cousins to help raise one's child. Other people could share the work, other people could share the expense, and one wouldn't have to give up him or her completely.
  
  
• More fundamentally, if (as I have suggested earlier) "we were meant to live [tribally] in immediate-return foraging communities," children would have been raised by the whole tribe. Mothers would never have to give them up completely, but at the same time they would not have had to shoulder the awesome burden of sole responsibility that faces them today.

In other words, the first unnatural stress that makes the environment in our "nature preserve" so toxic is the nuclear family.

2. Sexual propriety

What's next? Because of our social rules of sexual propriety, women (or at least some women) will be shamed or punished if other people find out that they had sex or got pregnant. What would it take to undo this assumption, or to make it false?

To undo this assumption means eliminating the situation where any women are shamed or punished for having sex: to cover all the bases, let me clarify that this means for having sex at all, and for having sex at the wrong time, and for having sex with the wrong person. I insist on all those variants, because any one of them might result in a pregnancy that a woman would want to hide or make go away. 

Now clearly there are at least two ways to avoid that any woman ever fears shame or punishment for one of these things. One way is if she never has the wrong kind of sex. The other way is if she won't get punished for any kind of sex, regardless. In principle either approach would achieve the goal. But I consider that it is impossible to guarantee the first one. Therefore if we want to adjust society in order to eliminate this cause for abortions, we have to go after the second.

That is, the second thing that makes our environment so toxic are all our ideals of sexual propriety, including in particular: virginity, chastity, and monogamy. In saying this, I am not saying that everyone should live in a riotous carouse at all times. Do not misunderstand me. There are a lot of good things to be said in favor of monogamy and the rest. But to make them ideals or principles, whereby people who fail to live up to them are shamed or punished—well, the data show that doing so causes (a certain number of) abortions. 

In other words, holding up those ideals is the second unnatural stress that makes the environment in our "nature preserve" so toxic.

3. Health

Our third fundamental assumption is this one: It is bad to bear a child whose health will be fundamentally damaged from birth OR to continue a pregnancy which might kill the mother.

This one is more difficult. In the case where a pregnancy might actually kill the mother, I think I have to agree with Florence King: the mother was there first, so if it really is a strict choice between them, then she takes priority. In other cases of severe health risk, it is possible that better availability of health care might help sometimes. It is also true that some children born with severe health problems might well die young. Of the four fundamental assumptions supporting abortion, I think this is the hardest one to eliminate completely.*** So even if we eliminate all other causes, I think there would likely still be a small number of abortions resulting from health-related problems.

4. Rape and incest

The last fundamental assumption is this one: It is bad to bear a child that you will always hate and resent because you hate how he or she was conceived.

I admit I don't know what to say about this case. I have not known anyone personally who has had to face this situation, and in the absence of such personal acquaintance I would feel presumptuous laying down the law about a situation so intimate and so painful. It is possible that some of the pain could be alleviated if the child were able to fade back into the rest of the community or the tribe—not given away, exactly, but allowed to spend more and more time with other people, and therefore not posing the same kind of lifelong reminder to the mother. But I might be wrong. I am willing to listen to suggestions from someone else. For what it is worth, all three studies that I reference above list this as the cause of only a very small percentage of abortions.

My conclusion is that yes, if we pursue Frederica's thought-experiment, we can identify toxic stressors in our environment that push women to abort their unborn children. What is more, nine of the eleven regularly identified causes—accounting, cumulatively, for over 85% of all abortions****—can be traced to just two assumptions in our society. These two fundamental assumptions, these two "toxic stressors," are: 

• the nuclear family
• the ideals of virginity, chastity, and monogamy

Maybe these won't be so easy to eliminate. But that means maybe it won't be so easy to eliminate abortion. 

I have speculated before that we were meant to live in the way described by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá—and also, be it noted, by the divine Plato. It is worth observing that such a life would indeed avoid all these toxins. So perhaps it is fair to say that the fundamental reason so many women seek out abortions is that our lives are out of joint. We are not living as we should live, or as we were made to live, and the resulting stress is making us do crazy things.

The sad part is that, as I discuss in the earlier article, we may not be able to get back there from here. Still, it's nice to understand, at least. 

__________

* I will refer to Ms. Mathewes-Green consistently by her first name, because that's the name of her blog and how she refers to herself. This does not mean that I know her personally, more's the pity.   

** Naturally if the mother has a husband or other partner who is supportive and willing to share the burden and the expense, that's great. But all too often she doesn't (reason #3), or even if she does they just don't have the money (reason #1) or something like that. To keep the discussion simpler, I will say "mothers are solely responsible for their children" even though I recognize that these other cases exist.   

*** Not that any of them is easy. Eliminating the nuclear family, or all our ideals about sexual propriety? Good luck with that. 

**** Nearly all the rest are health-related. The number of abortions resulting from rape or incest add to less than 1.5% of the total. 

         

The other meaning of karma

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post about reincarnation, where I discussed the doctrine of karma. In that post, I argued that there is no clear way to tell whether the doctrine of karma is true in a metaphysical sense, but that it is nonetheless wholesome in an ethical sense because it impels us to care about strangers, and therefore to act better towards them.

But there is another way in which the doctrine can be interpreted, one that is undeniably true. Reflect, for a minute, that our actions, good or bad, shape the kind of person that we become in this life. If you make a habit of behaving kindly, that habit shapes you over time into a kinder person. If you make a habit of behaving callously, that habit shapes you over time into a more callous person. We all know this is true. Aristotle talks about the importance of habit in training for virtue. Plato spends most of Books 8 and 9 of the Republic talking about the very same effects. And we can see it in our own lives, and the lives of the people we know.

What does this have to do with karma? The word karma literally means "action, work, or deed." The doctrine of karma is, in essence, no more than a doctrine that the laws of cause and effect apply in the ethical sphere just as much as they do in the material world: the actual details of how these laws operate can be left vague or can change around depending on the author. But the effect that our actions have in shaping our character, as I described in the previous paragraph, is precisely a kind of causality in the ethical sphere. This means that it fits the basic requirements of the doctrine of karma; and because it is a phenomenon that we can all observe in this life, it requires no belief in any further lives beyond this one. 

What's more, the action of these laws is pretty relentless. If you are a thief, you are punished by having to live your life as a thief: this means among other things that you start seeing other people inescapably as either predators or prey, which reduces or eliminates your ability to form solid friendships with them. And living a life without friendship is a heavy burden for anyone. For more horrible crimes, it's like I wrote in a post two years ago about the moral side of natural law:

As long as you are a human being, your inner nature will reject with disgust any attempt to violate the Good for Man. You can talk yourself out of it ... and if you do that then you probably won't listen to any of my arguments to the contrary. But some night, at 3:00 in the morning, you will find yourself huddled in a ball under your blankets keening softly to yourself, "Dear God what have I done?"

For what it is worth, when I started to look up the references for this post I stumbled across some early Hindu verses concerning karma that make exactly the point I've made here about the nature of karmic causality. Since karma is, after all, a Sanskrit word, maybe it is appropriate if I let these verses stand at the end.

Now as a man is like this or like that,
according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be;
a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad;
he becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds;

And here they say that a person consists of desires,
and as is his desire, so is his will;
and as is his will, so is his deed;
and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.

— from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 7th century BCE, as quoted in the Wikipedia article "Karma"

      

Is life fair?

Is life fair or unfair? 

I mean really, which is it? It's got to be one or the other, right? Law of the Excluded Middle, and all that?

-----

I love this question, because I can argue equally sincerely either Yes or No. It's not that my opinions are inconsistent. It's not even that the word fair has two different meanings, though I guess the shadings of meaning are not quite the same in the two cases. No, it's a choice based on pure pragmatics. What am I trying to do with the answer? What is the questioner going to do with what I tell him? What is he really asking?

-----

On the one hand, we are all told that life isn't fair. Everybody knows this. It's hardly news. Bad things happen to good people; virtue suffers while vice triumphs. People have known this for a long time. Well over two thousand years ago, Kohelet, a son of King David, wrote:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. (Ecclesiastes 9:11)

-----

On the other hand, we are also told that you get out of life what you put into it — which is another way of saying that life is fair, after all. Yes, accidents happen. Yes, there is horrible injustice. Since we know that in advance, we can prepare for it. And if you know that there's a chance of something bad happening but you take no steps to protect yourself, ... how exactly is it unfair when the disaster finally comes?

Of course there has to be a little leeway in this position. If a whole population is oppressed or held in servitude, it's a little harsh to say that it's their own fault for not taking the steps to free themselves.* For various reasons they might be literally unable to do so. And it's equally callous to suggest a man is at fault for not buying an expensive insurance policy when he has but two cents to his name. You can't reasonably ask someone to do everything for himself in all possible circumstances, because for any individual you care to name — be he never so heroic — it is possible to construct circumstances that are stacked so far against him that he cannot prevail. Even Superman is undone by kryptonite.

-----

But in normal, workaday circumstances, you can oscillate between the two positions almost frivolously, without any sense of inconsistency. Let's say your friend is looking for a job, and has two different interviews lined up today. After the first one, he says that by bad luck it just so happened that the Perfect Applicant walked in an hour earlier, so the company hired him on the spot and turned your friend away without even interviewing him. Right away you say, "Wow, that really is bad luck. Life is so unfair." 

Then after the second interview he tells you that it turns out the company absolutely requires applicants to have a certain certification that your friend doesn't have. They said so explicitly in the advertisement, but your friend admits he didn't read it all. And so they threw him out with some harsh words about his wasting their time. This time you say, "I'm really sorry it didn't work out for you, but what were you thinking? You applied for the job without even reading the complete advertisement? No wonder they were annoyed. It's only fair. If you don't look where you're going, you'll bump into things. Life's like that." In the space of five minutes you have told your friend both that life is unfair, and that life is fair. And you meant it both times.

It's just a really funny question to ask.  

__________

* To be sure, the sheer pointlessness of such an accusation didn't stop Ezra Pound from making it. Till now I have not traced the quote to its source, but he is said to have written, "A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him."       

Life after life?

Do we reincarnate after death?

Plato seemed to think so, or at least he describes the cycle of rebirth with a lot of detail in "The Myth of Er" (the thrilling conclusion of Book 10 of the Republic). Buddhism and Hinduism both teach reincarnation. But is it true?

I'm inclined to think that there can be no such thing as empirical proof — maybe I should say "empirical proof while in this life." 😀 What I mean is that when I look at the people who believe in reincarnation (on the one hand) and people who disbelieve (on the other), I don't think they even agree on what "empirical proof" would look like. Whatever happens in the world, whatever possible observations anyone might make, I think the partisans of each side would reply, "You see? That goes to show I was right all along." So I don't think it is a question that can be solved in an empirical way.

What I find absolutely fascinating, though, is to reflect how the doctrine of reincarnation functions pragmatically as a source of ethical advice. For example: one time or another we have probably all heard someone say, "You should act ethically because, if you hurt other people, you'll incur a lot of bad karma." If you ask what that means, the answer is very often something like this: If you steal from people in this life, you will be stolen from in your next life. If you cheat on your spouse in this life, you will be cheated on in your next life. If you murder someone in this life, you will be murdered in your next life. And so on. Since nobody wants those bad things to happen to them in the future, the advice is not to incur that implacable and inevitable karmic penalty by doing them to others right now.

But wait a minute. If I tell a child, "Stop poking your little brother or you'll have to go into time-out," the child knows what "time-out" is like and knows it's no fun. If society tells us, "Don't break the law or you'll have to go to prison," we know what that means. We can imagine what it's like to be sent to prison, and we know that it means we will suffer as a direct result of our earlier actions. If you tell me, "Don't steal from others or you will be stolen from in your next lifetime," it sounds like the same kind of advice as the other two. But is it? Think for a minute.

Who exactly is this person, the Future Me that risks being stolen from? Is this person male or female? (Let me pick one at random — I'll assume she's female — so that I can use pronouns and not have to keep repeating the phrase "this person" until I'm blue in the face.) What's her name? Where does she live? What language does she speak? And when someone steals from her, ... is she going to have any idea that it's merely an inevitable karmic retribution for my having stolen something in this life?

A few people claim they can remember past lives, but most of us don't. I don't remember having any past lives. That doesn't mean the doctrine is untrue, of course. But it does mean that when something bad happens to me, I don't immediately see the cosmic justice in it. And as for this woman we were just discussing, the Future Me, she really is somebody else according to how the world measures these things. She won't have my name, she might not live in my country, and she's sure not going to remember having been Hosea Tanatu in one of her earlier lives. In fact, there is absolutely nothing tangible connecting the two of us — nothing at all that the world can see and measure. She is a stranger to me. She is Somebody Else, pure and simple.

And yet I care about her, and I don't want her to suffer. In my mind, I see her as me ... well, sort of. "Me" as I will be in a few years, ... after I've gone through death and rebirth. But still basically me. And because I don't want bad things to happen to me, I will try to avoid doing bad things to others — at any rate, if I believe in reincarnation, or if (as is probably a lot more common) I'm not quite sure but want to hedge my bets.

In other words, the doctrine of reincarnation has the pragmatic effect of making me see the world through the eyes of others. What is it that parents and playground supervisors always tell little kids, to teach them that they have to play nicely with others? "How would you like it if somebody did that to you?" That's what we learn from the doctrine of reincarnation. We learn to see the world through the eyes of a complete stranger — someone that we are literally guaranteed never to meet in the flesh — and think, "That thing I'm about to do to someone else, ... how would I like it if somebody did that to me?"

The doctrine of reincarnation is, in effect, a playground supervisor for adults.

I have no idea whether reincarnation is actually true at a metaphysical level, or whether it is just one more of the thousand-and-one crazy things that people believe. But so long as it encourages us to see our actions reflected in the eyes of those others who are affected by them, ... so long as it does that, I'm all in favor. Sure, hell, sign me up.         

    

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.

   

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.
      

Morals from Nature: What about divorce?

Way back in 2012 I posted this article about the ethics of divorce. It makes a couple of points. First, marriage is a "school for character"; in that sense precipitate divorce can look like dropping a class before the first exam when you realize you haven't studied. Second, marriage is an environment for raising children. This means that if you can't raise them safely because there is a risk of physical abuse, divorce should be mandatory. But it also means that if you can't agree on how to raise them -- in particular, if you can't agree on fundamental ethical norms -- divorce should again be mandatory before any children are even conceived. On the other hand, I added, once the children are there you owe it to them to provide a safe and stable environment in which to grow; and this may mean making the best of a bad situation until they are older.

Now that I have argued for founding morality on Nature, do I have to change any of what I wrote earlier about divorce? 

Not really. Everything about our duty to nurture and protect growing children stands as-is, absolutely without amendment: I even reference our duty to children when I discuss the Leopold and Loeb case in Part Two of this post here. Most of the other points in the earlier essay are based on things we know empirically about how children respond to different kinds of situations in the home. We know that they need physical safety. And we know that in order to develop a kind of emotional security inside themselves, they need stability in the home environment -- the same people, more or less, over long years.

How would this argument have looked from the perspective of the Old Stone Age? Much the same, but perhaps in one respect a bit easier.

The thing is, divorce is particularly destructive in the context of a nuclear family where there are only two adults to begin with. If one leaves, that's a 50% reduction. If the other parent dates for a while before finding a new spouse, that can mean a cycle of suitors trooping through the house, each one trying out for the role of Step-parent. This is anything but stable.

But so far as I understand it, the isolated nuclear family is a by-product of the enormous material wealth of the modern day -- enormous by comparison with earlier ages, who were more likely to live together because it was too expensive to do otherwise. A couple of centuries ago this would have meant multiple generations of the same family under one roof. If we push back as far as the Stone Age, I assume that the basic living unit was probably the clan or the tribe.

On the one hand, this might have made the job of parenthood easier, because there would be more adults to share the work with. Infants and small children are a lot of work to look after. There are times during the day or during the week when even one child is too much work for two adults. But many hands make light work. While two parents can only with difficulty meet the needs of one child, ten adults can do a pretty good job of taking care of forty children. If we lived together in small bands instead of nuclear families, we would have had those uncles and aunts and cousins and friends around to help out when we needed the help, because of course we would also do the same for them.

On the other hand, I think such an arrangement might have made divorce easier too, except it might not have been called "divorce." But if father and mother began to hate each other, and if the whole tribe were already involved in raising the tribe's children collectively, then presumably there shouldn't have been much obstacle to the mother and father simply choosing to have less and less to do with each other. The children would be raised much the same as before, by the same collection of tribal adults. They would have the same adults in their lives, setting boundaries and teaching them to stay away from cave bears and saber-toothed tigers. So the stability of the children's experience could be ensured without the mother and father having to grin at each other through clenched teeth every morning. 

No doubt this picture is somewhat romanticized. And in any event I don't recommend it for the modern day. I don't see any pragmatic way to bring back genuinely tribal living in an age of cell phones and streaming personal media. The point of the thought experiment was just to check whether my recent arguments contradict my earlier ones. I don't think they do.       
    

What are we made for? Natural virtue and the highest life

A few weeks ago I was writing about the foundations of morality, and I argued that they can be found in Nature. Specifically I argued that (at least in the classical understanding) it is possible to derive human morality from a teleology of Man; and I argued moreover that Man's nature as a biological organism guarantees us a teleology. The conclusion is that there is a human morality derived from our Nature that is not merely a matter of convention or an assertion of arbitrary will.

The next question, clearly, is: What does this natural morality tell us to do? What ends are we made for? How shall we live? And what kind of man is the highest, noblest, or best kind of man?

Aristotle answered this question by saying that the highest virtue is the virtue of our highest and most distinctive human part, viz., our reason. Since the best activity is that which is for its own sake and not for the sake of something else, the best reasoning is the pure contemplation of the philosopher. And the philosopher himself is the best and highest man.

I approach the question a little differently, although I certainly don't quarrel with all of Aristotle's results. I am just fine with recognizing courage, temperance, prudence, and justice as virtues. But I am not persuaded that human reason is so uniquely and distinctively human, that it is qualitatively (not just quantitatively) different from the kinds of cognition available to the other higher animals, such as dolphins or the other primates. It is true that human technology has allowed us to penetrate far out of the ecosystem where we arose and into most parts of the world, but after all ants seem to have achieved the same victory.

Remember, though, what I said in identifying the natural foundation of human teleology: with respect to our internal biological functioning, the " system of regular processes which interact to perpetuate themselves constitutes a teleology at a cellular level, or at the level of the single organism"; and at the level of the organism's life inside an ecosystem, the "system of acquired traits which function in a self-maintaining way can be described as a system of interlocking purposes that are an innate feature of this organism's life in this environment."

In other words, if we have evolved in such a way that we interact with our environment in a stable, sustainable way, where our way of life is both caused by and maintains both the environment and our evolutionarily-acquired features -- in that case, that way of life is what we are made for.

By that criterion, the life we were made for was the life of the Old Stone Age, which represents 99% of human history, and which therefore has a better claim to adjectives like stable and sustainable than any way of life we have seen ever since. What can we say about this way of life? Things that we know for sure include:

• We lived in communities, not large ones by modern standards but larger than a single family.
• We spoke language.
• We cooked our food.
• We made art.
• We cooperated on common goals, like hunting.  

It has also been recently argued that human bands in the Old Stone Age had neither property nor marriage, keeping all their tools and raising all their children in common. This thesis is certainly not universally accepted (or at least not yet), but the similarities to Plato's ideal republic are unmistakable. 

What are the ends of Man? I think it is the whole package, to be implemented so far as practically possible. We are made to live with others, to work together, to play together, to make music and art, and to raise children. To be clear, almost nobody in the modern day has any idea how to survive like we lived in the Old Stone Age, without medicine or metal or even bread or rice. And surely it is obvious that there is no way to support eight billion people on this planet using only Stone Age technology and no agriculture. So the qualifier "so far as practically possible" is an important one. But we can still live together and work together and all the rest of it. And those are good things for us to do.

What is the highest end of Man? I don't really want to limit the list to only one. Or to put it another way, I think it is a failure of our language that we don't have a single noun which means life-as-a-human-being. If there were such a noun, that would be my choice -- because that is what we have evolved to do, and therefore according to the principles I explained above that is what we are made for. Aristotle said our highest end was reason, and I agree that life-as-a-human-being includes reason as one component; but for the most part I think it is the practical reason of the man-at-work organizing a task with his fellows, and not the theoretical reason of the metaphysician (which by comparison looks a little hypertrophic or even pathological). Freud said that someone in good mental health should be able to "lieben und arbeiten" -- love and work -- and these too are part of the package but not the whole thing by themselves. Still, like reason, they are inestimably precious.

If I had to pick one single phenomenon or behavior as the highest end for Man, I think I would look at our eusociality, which comes as close as anything to a truly defining characteristic for us as a species, and I would nominate friendship. Friendship meets Aristotle's criterion insofar as (in at least the best and noblest cases) we it enjoy for its own sake and not purely in an instrumental way as a tool for getting something else. And from it we can derive all the other behaviors that I identified above as distinctively human. Community, language, and cooperation are surely related to friendship; for the rest, an artist might live alone and even cook for himself, but it is hard to imagine how he could have learned his art (or learned how to cook) without the initial help and support of friends.

Who, then, is the highest man? Aristotle proposed the philosopher; and if he meant a philosopher like Sokrates, who was always talking with his friends in the gymnasium or the marketplace, the suggestion at any rate doesn't look crazy. But the history of philosophy has also known great minds with awkward social skills, thinkers who had trouble connecting with anyone around them. And as I suggested above, it is hard not to see such cases as at least a little pathological. If I can say that the highest end of Man is life-as-a-human-being, then the highest man is someone who can do all those things surpassingly well, someone like Odysseus. H. D. F. Kitto writes in The Greeks (p. 172):

The hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing arete.

In fact the only question-mark that I have to set against Odysseus is that he seems to be a dangerous man to know ... look at the fate of all his shipmates on the voyage home, or of even innocent bystanders during his slaughter of the suitors. So I am actually not completely certain how well he stands with respect to the virtue of friendship. But perhaps the example is valuable anyway. 

Nor is this ideal the special preserve of Antiquity. The very same perspective was captured in the late twentieth century by Robert Heinlein, in Time Enough for Love:

A human being should be able to fix a flat, con a ship, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, deliver a baby, heal the sick, comfort the dying, lie convincingly, take orders, give orders, write a sonnet, fight nobly, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.