"Not ALL White Americans ...!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm sorry.
   

Liberty for me, too bad about you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's who we are.

Violent self-assertion.

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

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

Just don't cross us.

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

Morals from Nature: What about homosexuality?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That would be our 3%.

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

Morals from Nature: What about sex?

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

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

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

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

What then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.         

             

Is religious conversion possible?

This is a piece that I wrote 25 years ago -- the date of the file on my home computer was October 23, 1995 -- but I still think the basic point is not wrong. I have made some minor adaptations (by dropping out proper names, for example).

Is it possible to convert someone from one religion to another?

In a trivial sense, of course it is. Anyone with a big enough army can force the people around him to enter certain buildings on certain days and do certain things. After enough repetition, belief will follow. A religion that offers social advantages can attract converts for purely secular reasons. And there are always people who want to be like their friends and therefore join their friends' religion for that reason.

But all these are uninteresting cases, because they have no real reference to anything beyond this world. The more interesting case is this: Is it possible for one person to convert another, when the latter is pondering the issue for himself, in the absence of any secular motivation?  I suspect that the answer here is "No," but this requires explanation. For I do not deny that such conversions take place. C.S. Lewis was such a man, and became famous for his conversion in adulthood. What I deny, to be precise, is not conversion but converting. I deny that in the most serious case, the verb convert can be transitive: Lewis certainly converted to Christianity, but J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson did not convert him.

The point is that religion is rooted in experience and not ratiocination. Therefore, absent secular motivations or the like, persuasion is impossible without that personal experience, in the same way no one can be persuaded to like Mozart until he has heard Mozart. Consider a couple of examples.

I have twice been asked to help someone decide whether a religion is true. When I was at university, a friend once prayed intently for something improbable that she didn't really want; and when she got it she was rather scared. (She was depressed over something involving her current boyfriend, and prayed for a painless way to die that wouldn't make anyone feel guilty. She woke the next morning to find a gas leak in her room.) So she came to me to ask whether this was proof that prayer works. She said she chose me because she knew if she asked her ostentatiously Christian friends they would say Yes, while her ostentatiously atheist friends would say No, in each case categorically and by rote. But she thought I would give the matter serious thought, and she didn't know in advance what I would say.

Some years later my father was attending a Bible study circle lead by a buddy of his, and asked me what I made of the proofs of Christianity that this fellow urged on him. I asked, "Why do you ask me? Why not ask someone else who could give you a more certain answer?" He said that anyone else he asked would give him an answer that he could already predict, so he wasn't interested.

Think about that for a minute.  In my father's eyes, testimony was worthless from someone whose answer he could already guess. Now supposing I gave him an answer, Yes or No. Would he accept it? On the contrary, once I'd answered with any certainty, I would become someone whose answer he could thenceforth guess, and so my testimony would become worthless. I would not have answered any questions for him about the truth or falsity of Christianity; I would only have given him information about me -- namely, that I was now predictable as far as that question goes.
 
In a real sense, then, nothing I could have said would have convinced him either way. If he were predisposed to believe, and I disagreed, I would become in his eyes an Atheist and therefore wrong. If he were predisposed to disbelieve, and I disagreed, I would become in his eyes a Believer and therefore wrong.  Once you are prepared to discount the testimony of people who are (as you think) required to say what they say by blind adherence to some kind of dogma, then you can only convert yourself. And that in turn can take place only when you have had something happen inside you to prepare the way, to make you predisposed to convert. Anyone who tries to convince you of something which you have not experienced in some way -- for which the soil of your mind has not been somehow already prepared -- becomes in your view a lunatic or an idiot, whose testimony cannot be taken seriously. So you will only take seriously the testimony of someone preaching to you a faith which you want to hear, where the hard work of re-setting your emotional disposition (the crucial part of conversion) has already been done by you. In this sense, you can convert to a different religion, but no one else, in the most serious sense, can convert you.