Return to the One (Introduction)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

             

Philodemy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Yorker agrees we are violent

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

The Violent Style

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

        

Donald Trump agrees we are violent

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

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

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

You can see it here.

Trump Twitter Video

The developed world? Where's that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      

Formalizing the argument about Strauss's Paradox

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

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

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

 

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

 

Now, to restate formally what I intend to show:

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

QED.

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

   

Will we see lasting change?

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

Probably not.

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

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

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

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

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

Zero. Nada. Bupkes.

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

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

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

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

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