Note on the Pathologically Pious

I mentioned Malcolm Muggeridge’s post-mortem of a decade he had just lived through, The Thirties, in an earlier post.  There are any number of thought provoking nuggets in the book, but one of the best has to do with the people I sometimes refer to as the pathologically pious.  These are the self-appointed saviors of one category of the oppressed and downtrodden or other whose “selfless” crusades are always an irritant to the rest of us, and occasionally become downright dangerous.  Typically one finds them eternally locked in a noble struggle to right some egregious wrong, yet, in spite of all their self-attributed heroism, they never actually seem to reach the goal.  There’s good reason for that.  The “struggle” is the end in itself.  As Muggeridge put it,

In all movements which undertake the championship of the oppressed, and demand rectification of injustices and inequalities, there is, as in Don Quixote, a strong admixture of egotism.  Their leaders are usually heroic; but when their heroism is no longer required, they are left disconsolate, and sometimes embittered.  It seems cruel that they should be deprived of the limelight, or at best deserve as veterans only occasional acclamation, for no other reason than that what they agitated for has been wholly, or largely, obtained.  In their case, nothing fails like success.

The doom of all who invest imaginative hopes in earthly enterprises and mortal men, is for these enterprises to triumph.

In other words, as Skinner might have put it, the positive “reinforcement” for this sort of behavior lies not in actually achieving some hypothetical goal, but in the process of, or, perhaps more accurately, in the appearance of “struggling” to achieve that goal.  To put it more pithily, the pose is everything, and the reality nothing.

There’s nothing surprising or unexpected about this particular aspect of human behavior.  It’s perfectly “normal” manifestation of the human traits associated with morality.  As is usually the case, it requires the Don Quixote in question to perceive the Good as an object, existing independently, outside of the subjective mind.  We are all programmed to perceive the Good in that way, even though no such object actually exists.  Evolution doesn’t arrive at solutions that respect abstract truth.  It arrives at solutions that promote genetic survival.

It is not difficult to understand why we should be programmed to perceive the Good in this way.  Assuming moral behavior promoted our ancestors’ survival in the first place, it is more plausible that it would do so in the form of emotional imperatives rather than as a mix of subjective alternatives for cave dwelling philosophers to chew the fat over around the campfire at night.  This sort of programming apparently worked well enough in our prehistoric past.  After all, we’re still here.  In those days, the Good was associated almost exclusively with ones own tribe or group, and the Evil with ones neighbors.  The problem is, human societies have changed rather significantly since then.  We can now perceive the Evil in ways that Mother Nature never imagined during the long millennia in which we existed as small groups of hunter-gatherers.  Victor Davis Hanson provided just a few of the almost countless possibilities from a point of view on the political right in a recent article:

…there are new monsters in America, and I am starting to wonder whether I am to be considered among them: those of the uninvolved and uninformed lives, the bar-raisers, the downright mean ones, the never deserving of respect ones, the Vegas junketeers, the Super Bowl jet setters, the tuition stealers, the faux-Christians who do not pay higher taxes, the too much income makers, the tormenters of autistic children, the polluters, the enemies deserving of punishment, the targets to bring a gun against, the faces to get in front of, the limb-loppers, the tonsil pullers, the fat cats, the corporate jet owners, the one-percenters, the stupidly acting, the not paying their fair sharers, the discriminators on the “way you look”, the alligator raisers and moat builders, the vote deniers, the clingers, the typical something persons, the hunters of kids at ice cream parlors, the stereotypers and profilers, the cowards, the lazy and soft, the non-spreaders of money, the not my people people, the Tea party racists, the not been perfect and mistake makers, the disengaged and the dictating, the not the time to profiteers, the ones who did not know when to quit making money, and on and on.

Those on the left could compose a similar list, and it would be just as accurate.  One finds saviors of mankind occupying all points on the political spectrum, and they all perceive Good and Evil in a bewildering array of real and imagined entities that didn’t exist when the tendency to conceptualize Good and Evil as real, independent objects evolved.  As a result, human moral behavior is becoming increasingly dysfunctional.  If the preceding ages weren’t sufficient, the 20th century provided us with ample experimental confirmation of the fact.  Never before had so many people been slaughtered in the name of defending the Good in its Communist, Nazi, and assorted other ideological manifestations.

As one who cherishes the whim that our species should survive, I suggest that it’s high time that we a) realize we have a problem, and b) do something about it.  We have at least taken the first baby step towards this goal by finally realizing, after a bitter struggle, that there is such a thing as human nature, and that it exists because it evolved.  It seems to me that, once we have accepted these elementary facts and done a little thinking about their implications, we may be able to start breaking ourselves of the very satisfying but increasingly dangerous habit of inventing ever more imaginary Goods and the imaginary Evils of the sort noted by Mr. Hanson that invariably come along with them.

The advantages would be many.  For starters, we could finally dismiss all the pretentions of the pathologically pious, the obnoxiously self-righteous, and the permanently outraged among us to an exclusive knowledge of the ingredients of Virtue.  Instead of taking them seriously, would it not be better to smile in their faces, explain to them that the particular Good object that seems so real to them doesn’t actually exist, and, if they persist, house them in comfortable asylums?  The alternative is to wait and hope they go away, as we did so often in the past.  Sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn’t and, as history has so copiously demonstrated, eventually they can accumulate enough power to start murdering those of us who are unfortunate enough to fit their description of Evil.  From a purely utilitarian point of view, it seems better not to take the risk.

On the Morality of Terraforming Mars

Ron Bailey just posted an interesting article on the ethics of extraterrestrial terraforming at Reason.com.   It illustrates, once again, that before entering into deep philosophical debates about morality, it’s useful to know what you’re talking about.

Before taking up the article in question, let me lay my own cards on the table.  I consider human morality to be the expression of behavioral traits that exist because they evolved in a species with a large brain.  Thus, good and evil are subjective categories that depend for their existence on emotional responses in the minds of individuals.  As such, it is impossible for them to have any independent objective existence as things in themselves.  As subjective emotional responses elicited in individual minds, there is no way in which they can acquire objective legitimacy.  Elaborations on this theme may be found here and here.

Of course, one can dispute my take on morality, but, in that case, it will be necessary to somehow explain away the increasing flood of findings relative to what some call hardwired morality now appearing in academic and scientific journals and the popular media, not to mention the increasingly compelling evidence of analogs of the behavioral traits we associate with morality in other animals.

What does all this have to do with the ethics of terraforming?  Simply this – arguments about whether terraforming is morally good or evil are absurd, and efforts in futility.  They amount to attempts to apply behavioral predispositions that have evolved over millions of years in circumstances utterly unlike the present, and that exist for the sole reason that they promoted the genetic survival of the creatures who carried them, to a situation completely unrelated to the conditions and causes under which they evolved in the first place.  Such arguments are completely senseless failing the assumption, long cultivated by philosophers, but nevertheless delusional, that good and evil can somehow acquire an objective legitimacy and objective existence of their own.  In view of what we now know about the evolved roots of morality, belief in the existence of good and evil as things in themselves is no longer rationally supportable.

The article in question, entitled Does Mars have Rights, argues that terraforming is good, contradicting an earlier essay by Australian philosopher Robert Sparrow entitled The Ethics of Terraforming that claims that, at least for the present, it is evil.  Let’s take up Prof. Sparrow’s essay first.  He uses what he calls an agent-based virtue ethics to support his claim that advocacy of terraforming reveals “a shocking moral bankruptcy at the heart of our attitude toward the environment.”  An agent-based ethics is motivated by the observation that “It is much easier to point out those who are cruel or benevolent in a community than it is to provide a description of what counts as a cruel or benevolent act.”  It is based on the assertion that it is ”the virtuous (or vicious) character of the actor which makes the act virtuous (or vicious).”  As such it is easier to apply in practice that an alternative system of virtue ethics, namely, agent-focused ethics, which Sparrow describes in his essay.  Basing his conclusions on such an agent-based ethics, Sparrow argues that “terraforming reveals two serious defects of character.  First, it demonstrates that we are suffering from an ethically significant aesthetic insensitivity,” and, “Second, it involves us in the sin of hubris.”

Sparrow goes into a great deal of detail in describing these two “sins,” but their legitimacy as “real” sins is based on their validation as “vicious” according to whether some subset of a population of animals with large brains “feels” that persons committing such acts are vicious.  I say subset because it has been demonstrated that even infants, presumably without the benefit of having read the ancient philosophers, judge “agents” according to their actions.  Prof. Sparrow does not go into a great deal of detail as to how that subset would be chosen.  Clearly, this “feeling” test does not actually call the sins in question into existence.  Rather, it is merely a means of detecting them once they have been committed.  In other words, in order to accept the validity of the system, it is necessary for us to assume, a priori, that the sins in question exist as things in themselves, independent of the actors and agents that allow us to detect them.  If, however, as I have maintained, morality is really the expression of a subset of evolved behavioral traits in a particular type of animal, this assumption is absurd, and the system collapses.  Regardless of my opinions about morality, it is irrational to simply assume the objective existence and legitimacy of good and evil as entities in themselves, as Sparrow has done, without making the slightest attempt to explain the rationale on which their existence and legitimacy are based.

And what of Bailey’s post at Reason taking issue with Prof. Sparrow?  He either doesn’t seem to have understood Sparrow’s definition of agent-based ethics, or has simply decided to ignore it.  Instead, he explains to us why terraforming would be “really good” in terms of his own system of morality, which comes with rather less philosophical ballast courtesy of Aristotle and company.  Addressing Sparrow’s two evidences of moral deficit, he writes,

Sparrow acknowledged that he did not offer an objective account of beauty, so the notion still resides in the eye of the beholder, as does desolate ugliness.  And as awesome as the view down Valles Marineris might be right now, it would arguably be even more so if it were teeming with life.  With regard to the hubris of terraforming, one initial response whould be a hearty “so what?”  Terraforming offers the promise of helping humanity toward practical moral improvement by increasing our understanding of just how precious terrestrial life is, aiding us in managing it toward greater integrity, stability, and beauty.

To this, Sparrow’s virtuous agent would presumably reply, “Yes, and your point is?”  In fact, there is no point, because Bailey missed it.  His reply simply ignores the role of the virtuous agent in Sparrow’s ethics, a role which the philosopher explained clearly enough.  He could simply observe that Bailey has self-identified as an “unvirtuous agent,” and his remarks about beauty and hubris are, therefore, neither here nor there.  Bailey’s implication that terraforming would be morally good because it, “offers the promise of helping humanity toward practical moral improvement,” is simply a statement of the circular argument that terraforming is moral because it is moral.

Again, while both author’s arguments depend on the existence of objective good, they simply assume it a priori, without troubling themselves to explain to us how they have deduced the existence of that holy grail.  Presumably it floats somewhere out there in the luminiferous ether, independent of any crude animal intelligence, and we are to take it on trust that, while it remains invisible to vulgar eyes, they have beheld it in all its glory.  If all life in the universe ceased to exist, it would still remain, one gathers, as some kind of potential energy, ready to hop into the brain of any sentient beings that happened to evolve, guiding them towards the light.

Our consciousness certainly leads us to perceive the Good as an objective thing.  In spite of that it was clear enough to Hume, Mill, and any number of other pre-Darwinian thinkers that no such object existed.  Still, the illusion is so strong that even now, after the recent “discovery” by our social scientists that such a thing as human nature exists, and morality is a manifestation of that nature, objective Good is still taken for granted in deep, philosophical debates by people who should know better.

And what does all this have to do with terraforming?  Simply this; morality is completely irrelevant to the question of whether we should do it or not.  My personal opinion is that we should, as soon as we are able, because it will enhance the chances that both terrestrial life in general and our species in particular will survive and continue to evolve.  Is our survival objectively good?  Certainly not!  Call it a mere whim of mine, if you will, but I submit that it’s at least a natural whim.  Virtually everything about me exists because it happened to promote the survival of the genes responsible for putting me together at some point or other in the past.  Furthermore, subjective though they may be, such whims make life not only endurable, but exciting and enjoyable.  I hope that others will share this whim, this preference for survival over oblivion.  If enough do, then terraforming will some day become a reality.

Space Colonization and Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking is in the news again as an advocate for space colonization.  He raised the issue in a recent interview with the Canadian Press, and will apparently include it as a theme of his new TV series, Brave New World with Stephen Hawking, which debuts on Discovery World HD on Saturday.  There are a number of interesting aspects to the story this time around.  One that most people won’t even notice is Hawking’s reference to human nature.  Here’s what he had to say.

Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million.

The fact that Hawking can matter-of-factly assert something like that about innate behavior in humans as if it were a matter of common knowledge speaks volumes about the amazing transformation in public consciousness that’s taken place in just the last 10 or 15 years.  If he’d said something like that about “selfish and aggressive instincts” 50 years ago, the entire community of experts in the behavioral sciences would have dismissed him as an ignoramus at best, and a fascist and right wing nut case at worst.  It’s astounding, really.  I’ve watched this whole story unfold in my lifetime.  It’s just as stunning as the paradigm shift from an earth-centric to a heliocentric solar system, only this time around, Copernicus and Galileo are unpersons, swept under the rug by an academic and professional community too ashamed of their own past collective imbecility to mention their names.  Look in any textbook on Sociology, Anthropology, or Evolutionary Psychology, and you’ll see what the sounds of silence look like in black and white.  Aside from a few obscure references, the whole thing is treated as if it never happened.  Be grateful, dear reader.  At last we can say the obvious without being shouted down by the “experts.”  There is such a thing as human nature.

Now look at the comments after the story in the Winnipeg Free Press I linked above.  Here are some of them.

“Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.”  If that is the case, perhaps we don’t deserve to survive. If we bring destruction to our planet, would it not be in the greater interest to destroy the virus, or simply let it expire, instead of spreading its virulence throughout the galaxy?

And who would decide who gets to go? Also, “Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.” What a stupid thing to say: if we can’t survive ‘lurking’ on planet Earth then who’s to say humans wouldn’t ruin things off of planet Earth?

I will not go through any of this as I will be dead by then and gone to a better place as all those who remain and go through whatever happenings in the Future,will also do!

I’ve written a lot about morality on this blog.  These comments speak to the reasons why getting it right about morality, why understanding its real nature, and why it exists, are important.  All of them are morally loaded.  As is the case with virtually all morally loaded comments, their authors couldn’t give you a coherent explanation of why they have those opinions.  They just feel that way.  I don’t doubt that they’re entirely sincere about what they say.  The genetic programming that manifests itself as human moral behavior evolved many millennia ago in creatures who couldn’t conceive of themselves as members of a worldwide species, or imagine travel into space.  What these comments demonstrate is something that’s really been obvious for a long time.  In the environment that now exists, vastly different as it is from the one in which our moral predispositions evolved, they can manifest themselves in ways that are, by any reasonable definition of the word, pathological.  In other words, they can manifest themselves in ways that no longer promote our survival, but rather the opposite.

As can be seen from the first comment, for example, thanks to our expanded consciousness of the world we live in, we can conceive of such an entity as “all mankind.”  Our moral programming predisposes us to categorize our fellow creatures into ingroups and outgroups.  In this case, “all mankind” has become an outgroup or, as the commenter puts it, a “virus.”  The demise, not only of the individual commenter, but of all mankind, has become a positive Good.  More or less the same thing can be said about the second comment.  This commenter apparently believes that it would be better for humans to become extinct than to “mess things up.”  For whom?

As for the third commenter, survival in this world is unimportant to him because he believes in eternal survival in a future imaginary world under the proprietership of an imaginary supernatural being.  It is unlikely that this attitude is more conducive to our real genetic survival than those of the first two commenters.  I submit that if these commenters had an accurate knowledge of the real nature of human morality in the first place, and were free of delusions about supernatural beings in the second, the tone of their comments would be rather different.

And what of my opinion on the matter?  In my opinion, morality is the manifestation of genetically programmed traits that evolved because they happened to promote our survival.  No doubt because I understand morality in this way, I have a subjective emotional tendency to perceive the Good as my own genetic survival, the survival of my species, and the survival of life as it has evolved on earth, not necessarily in that order.  Objectively, my version of the Good is no more legitimate or objectively valid that those of the three commenters.  In some sense, you might say it’s just a whim.  I do, however, think that my subjective feelings on the matter are reasonable.  I want to pursue as a “purpose” that which the evolution of morality happened to promote; survival.  It seems to me that an evolved, conscious biological entity that doesn’t want to survive is dysfunctional – it is sick.  I would find the realization that I am sick and dysfunctional distasteful.  Therefore, I choose to survive.  In fact, I am quite passionate about it.  I believe that, if others finally grasp the truth about what morality really is, they are likely to share my point of view.  If we agree, then we can help each other.  That is why I write about it.

By all means, then, let us colonize space, and not just our solar system, but the stars.  We can start now.  We lack sources of energy capable of carrying humans to even the nearest stars, but we can send life, even if only single-celled life.  Let us begin.

The Forgettable Philosophy of Konrad Lorenz

Konrad Lorenz was a great man.  A careful observer of animal behavior, he noted the many similarities between the innate traits of some of the species he studied and the behavior of human beings.  In view of the fact that we are the products of a similar process of evolution, and the improbability of the supposition that our ancestors had suddenly shed all these innate traits in the relatively short time it took them to evolve large brains, he came to the seemingly obvious conclusion that the ultimate cause of these analogous characteristics was to be found in the genetic programming of the brain.  It was not, however, obvious to a great number of sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and other professional ”experts” in human behavior, including the vast majority of them in the United States, over a period of many decades.  They persisted stubbornly in the belief that no such innate traits existed, that all human behavior worth mentioning was a result of culture and education, and that the human mind at birth was actually a “blank slate.”

The absurdities of blank slate orthodoxy are sufficiently obvious that the ease of debunking them is akin to that of shooting fish in a barrel.  In fact, there were numerous debunkers during the decade of the 60′s and early 70′s when the theory was still in vogue.  Of these, Lorenz was the second most effective.  The most effective was Robert Ardrey.  As proof of this assertion, we have the testimony of the blank slaters themselves, conveniently assembled in an invaluable little book published in 1968 and edited by Ashley Montagu entitled, Man and Aggression.

In the fullness of time, blank slate orthodoxy collapsed under its own weight and the pressure of advances in the relevant sciences.  It is one of the more remarkable oddities of this field of study that has always had such an abundance of oddities that its demise was accompanied by the emergence of a whole new orthodoxy in the form of a fantastically imaginary account of its downfall.  The whole, fanciful tale can be found in The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, purportedly a “history” of the blank slate in which he manages to get through 528 pages in paperback with hardly a mention of its two most effective opponents.  Lorenz is dismissed because of his “hydraulic theory,” an hypothesis that made only a minor appearance in his work and was utterly insignificant as far as his fundamental thought on human behavior is concerned.  Ardrey, a brilliant man and the greatest debunker of them all, is waved out of existence with a single mention because, according to Richard Dawkins, no less, he was “completely and utterly wrong.”  This concoction was apparently produced to cover the shame of the academic and professional experts in human behavior who had been so wrong for so long, in part by trotting out E.O. Wilson as the “real” father of opposition to the blank slate.  His book, On Human Nature, was merely a repetition of the fundamental conclusions that had appeared in the work of Lorenz and Ardrey more than a decade earlier.  No matter.  He could plausibly be claimed by the experts as one of their own.  Now, instead of being shamed by a mere playwright, they had actually cleaned their own house.  To add oddity to oddity, it turns out that the reason that Dawkins claimed that Ardrey was “totally and utterly wrong,” was his support for the theory of group selection in his book, The Social Contract.  The theory, still highly controversial, was subsequently embraced by none other than E.O. Wilson!  And what of Lorenz?  He may have been right about innate behavior, but, regrettably, he had linked it with some of the less savory human traits in On Aggression.  For example, from that book,

To the humble seeker of biological truth there cannot be the slightest doubt that human militant enthusiasm evolved out of a communal defense response of our prehuman ancestors.  The unthinking single-mindedness of the response must have been of high survival value even in a tribe of fully evolved human beings.  It was necessary for the individual male to forget all his otgher allegiances in order to be able to dedicate himself, body and soul, to the cause of the communal battle.

and,

Humanity is not enthusiastically combative because it is split into political parties, but it is divided into opposing camps because this is the adequate stimulus situation to arouse militant enthusiasm in a satisfying manner.  “If ever a doctrine of universal salvation should gain ascendancy over the whole earth to the exclusion of all others,” writes Erich von Holst, “it would at once divide into two strongly opposing factions (one’s own true one and the other heretical one) and hostility and war would thrive as before, mankind being – unfortunately – what it is!”

This was a bit much for the orthodox “experts.”  After all, they had been assuring each other for years that the pervasiveness of warfare in virtually all human societies since the beginning of recorded time was merely a regrettable coincidence.  Take away war toys, adjust the “culture” here and there, and fine tune the educational system a bit and, viola!, it would be banished to mankind’s dark past, never to return again.  If something in our genes actually did contribute to this remarkable “coincidence” of warfare, such dreams vanished like the morning fog, and with them all the Brave New Worlds of “human flourishing” that were being planned for a recalcitrant humanity.  Having strained on the gnat of innate behavior, they found this added lump of “aggression” just too much to swallow.  Lorenz had to go.

No matter, in the end, Pinker’s fairy tale doesn’t wash in any case.  The truth will out.  We have Ashley Montagu and his fellow blank slaters to thank for that.  Pinker may have relegated Ardrey and Lorenz to the ranks of unpersons, but they were not quite so delusional.  They knew who their most effective opponents were, and they set it all down in black and white in no uncertain terms in Man and Aggression.  For anyone who cares to fact check Pinker’s “official history,” that invaluable little book is still available in paperback at Amazon for the bargain basement price of one cent.

In a word then, Lorenz deserves a lot more respect than he gets in Pinker’s yarn, or in the sanitized “histories” that are fed to unwitting undergraduates in the current crop of Evolutionary Psychology textbooks, and he deserved the Nobel Prize he was awarded for his work in 1973, two years before Wilson published On Human Nature.  Why, then, do I find his philosophy “forgettable.”  It seems to me that, just as Einstein should have stayed out of politics, a field in which he was easily manipulated by the unscrupulous ideologues of his day, Lorenz should have left the philosophizing to Kant and Hegel.  Alas, he had drunk too deeply in those waters.  Like Don Quixote, who, Cervantes tells us, read stirring tales of knight-errantry until he became a bold knight himself in his imagination, Lorenz thought to save the world with his philosophy.  He could sling epistomologies, ontologies, and teleologies with as much panache as the best of them, and so he did in a number of his lesser known works.

It happens I have just waded through one of them, entitled The Waning of Humaneness, a somewhat rough approximation of the German title, Der Abbau des Menschlichen, which conveys more of the flavor of Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), a work which Lorenz often cites.  Written in 1983 when Lorenz was 79 years old, the book is a mish-mash of stuff taken, sometimes word for word, from his earlier books, dubious claims about the origin of values, even more dubious prescriptions for restoring them so that humaneness stops waning, all in a melange of simplistic pontification about preserving the environment inspired, we are informed, by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

To enlist the help of others in restoring “humaneness,” it is first necessary to explain to them what it is.  It turns out that humaneness is as similar to all the other noble causes that have disturbed the tranquility of mankind since time immemorial as one pea to all the others in a pod.  In short, Humaneness is what Lorenz thinks is Good.  It’s not very original as Goods go.  In the Foreword we are informed that it consists of restoring the environment and reversing the cultural “decadence” with which its degradation goes hand in hand.  This is to be done by restoring “true” morality and values.  Of course, the rub, as with all such systems, lies in establishing the legitimacy of the Good.  Why is the Good really good?

In the case of Lorenz, the task of establishing this legitimacy would seem particularly daunting.  After all, he was a pioneer in establishing the innate, genetically programmed component of human morality.  By no means does he renounce his earlier work.  In fact, he actually cites it.  For example, reiterating his earlier claims about the ancient wellsprings of the emotions that influence human behavior he writes,

Based on genetic programming are not only the apparatuses for sensory perception and for logical thinking that outline and fill in with color the picture we have of our world; also based on these programs are the complicated feelings that determine our interhuman behavior.  Our social behavior especially is dominated by an immensely old heritage of species-specific action and reaction patterns; these are undoubtedly much, much older than the specific capacities of intelligence associated with our neocortex, that is, with the evolutionarily youngest part of our brain.

and,

It is beyond doubt that a great number of qualitative emotions, recognizable and unmistakable, are common to all mankind, that is, are anchored in the genes of humans.

So far so good.  However, these innate traits, as well as the various culturally transmitted modes of behavior to which they give rise haven’t kept up with the pace of technological and cultural change.

…many of the innate as well as traditional norms of humans that were still well-adapted programs of social and economic behavior just a short while ago today contribute to the waning of what is humane.

Again, if we can drop the “waning of humaneness” jargon and simply say that these behavioral traits have become maladaptive, Lorenz is merely reiterating truths that have, in the meantime, become obvious to all but the most diehard and ancient of blank slaters.  But it is just here that Lorenz, along with so many others who have more or less accepted the facts as set forth above, run off the tracks.

It seems clear to me that, if the ultimate cause of human behavior (and moral behavior, however defined, is merely a subset thereof), lies in the evolved features of our brains, then there can be no possible legitimate basis for one human being to claim that what his subjective emotions portray to him as the Good must also be the Good for everyone else.  This pervasive illusion, cause of so much human misery, should finally be recognized as such and jettisoned once and for all.  But in spite of the demise of the Blank Slate, in spite of a tidal wave of papers in scholarly journals on innate behavior, and in spite of a continuing flood of books on themes such as hard-wired morality and the moral behavior of animals, that isn’t about to happen.  The emotional high of feeling morally superior to lesser mortals is just too sweet and savory to dispense with.  Orgasms of self-righteousness and virtuous indignation are almost as satisfying as the sexual kind, and they last a lot longer.  But to experience them in all their glory, the Good must be justified.

Lorenz goes about the task without much virtuosity, but with a few idiosyncratic twists.  In short, he admits that values are subjective, but claims that they are, nevertheless, real.  As he puts it:

What must be made clear, and convincingly, is that our subjective experiential processes possess the same degree of reality as everything that can be expressed in the terminologies of the exact natural sciences. …Since all of the moral responsibilities of humans are determined by their perceptions of values, the epidemic delusion that only numerical and measurable reality has validity must be confronted and contradicted.

Certainly our subjective impressions are real and do actually exist in the sense that they result from observable and measurable physical phenomena in our brains. The non sequitur here is that, simply by virtue of the fact that they do actually exist in that fashion, they thereby acquire some sort of objective legitimacy.  Some more or less similar leap of faith is always necessary to establish a moral system.  Somehow, a subjective impression must be promoted to the Good, an objective thing in itself.  Only in that form can it acquire the power of serving as an imperative for all mankind.  It seems to have occurred to Lorenz that his claim of objective validity by virtue of subjective reality is a rather threadbare variant of this essential sleight of hand.  To prop it up, he drags in Beauty.

For all the value perceptions of humans that have been discussed up to now, the assumption is justified that these sensibilities assist the individual in advantageous achievements and, therewith, the assumption is also justified that their programs as well, through selection of these achievements, have evolved in typical ways.  But there is the beautiful, the genesis of which in a similar manner must be doubted, for which, in fact, an explication of origin by means of selection seems conspicuously contrived.

If Lorenz’ argument for the special status of Beauty gives you a faint sense of a televangelist arguing for the special status of divine creation, you’re not alone.  Cutting to the chase, in the final chapter the author reveals himself as a theist.  We finally detect the supernatural stiffening behind all this flimsy stuff about Beauty and Values.  Nature is “really beautiful” and “true values” are really legitimate because God wants it that way.

Lorenz’ suggestions for turning the humaneness curve back in the right direction are paltry enough.  Even in 1983 he was still feeling the afterglow of the 60′s youth fetish.  (As a baby boomer myself, I cannot but feel a distinct relief that my generation, the object of all that obsession with “youth,” has finally reached retirement age).   As usual, we were to redeem mankind from its horrible fate:

The predicament of young people today is especially critical.  Forestalling the threatening apocalypse will devolve on their perceptions of value; their sensibilities of the beautiful and worthwhile must be aroused and renewed.

And how was this arousal and renewal to be brought about?

It must still, in some way, be possible to provide even those children born and reared in large cities with some kind of opportunity for developing their capacities to perceive the harmony and disharmony of living systems – if only by means of an aquarium.  Those children who are given a chance to tend to aquarium and to care for its inhabitants come to learn, through necessity, to comprehend a functioning entirety in its harmony and disharmony, an entirety bringing together and combining very many systems consisting of animals, plants, bacteria and an entire range of inorganic givens, systems that complement one another and systems that are antagonistic to one another.  Children would learn how delicate the equilibrium of such an artificial ecological system is.

It may seem uncharitable to dismiss the aquarium idea.  After all, we’ve tried pretty much everything else.  However, I can assure the reader that, as a child, my teachers had me tend to both an aquarium and a beehive for good measure, and look how I turned out.

The Waning of Humaneness contains a good deal more of puerile stuff about corporate war profiteers, the evils of nuclear energy, canned homilies about saving the environment, the stupidity of Americans who live in suburban subdivisions, tiresomely repetitious warnings about the impending suicide of mankind, etc., but that can rest.  Konrad Lorenz was, after all, a great man.  Working in his own specialty, he struck a telling blow at the Blank Slate, one of the most pernicious pseudo-religions that ever claimed the name of science.  Let us remember and honor him for that.

The Great Heisenberg Uncertainty

Few of the great scientific principles have been more abused than that of the famous German physicist, Werner Heisenberg.  Known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, it states that no pair of certain physical quantities, such as position and momentum, can both be known at the same time with a precision greater than a certain very small number.  It was one of the great discoveries in quantum mechanics in the 1920′s, a decade studded with such discoveries that resulted in the development of modern quantum theory.  Among other things, the modern theory states in mathematical terms the implications of the wave nature of both matter and energy.  That mathematics can be used to derive Heisenberg’s famous principle. 

Unfortunately, because many things in life are uncertain, the principle has been abundantly misapplied to a whole range of uncertainties to which it has no relevance whatsoever, just as the Theory of Relativity has been misapplied to a whole host of things that happen to be relative to each other in one way or another.  Some of the misapplications and misconceptions are more subtle than others.  I recently ran across an interesting one in a book entitled Swarm Intelligence, by James Kennedy and Russell Eberhart, the former a social psychologist and the latter an expert in evolutionary computation.  The book argues that “intelligent human cognition derives from the interactions of individuals in a social world and that the sociocognitive view can be effectively applied to computationally intelligent systems.”  I actually bought it to try programming a few of the computational examples contained therein, but found that it was a much a statement of ideology as of computational theory, larded with all the usual illusions to all the usual suspects among the philosophers who are currently fashionable in works of that genre.   Among other things there is a discussion on page 11 of whether such a thing as “true randomness” exists, or whether, on the contrary, in the words of the authors, “The basis of observed randomness is our incomplete knowledge of the world.  A seemingly random set of events may have a perfectly good explanation; that is, it may be perfectly compressible.” 

As you may have gathered, all this eventually relates to the question of free will, and whether the universe is truly random or “stochastic” at some level, or, on the contrary, purely deterministic.  I will not presume to answer that fascinating question here.  However, the authors appear to be of the opinion that the latter is the case.  What caught my eye was one of the arguments they used to support that point of view.  Allow me to quote them at length:

For most of the 20th century it was thought that “true” randomness existed at the subatomic level. Results from double-slit experiments and numerous thought experiments had convinced quantum physicists that subatomic entities such as photons should be conceptualized both as particles and waves. In their wave form, such objects were thought to occupy a state that was truly stochastic, a probability distribution, and their position and momentum were not fixed until they were observed. In one of the classic scientific debates of 20th-century physics, Niels Bohr argued that a particles’s state was truly, unkowably random, while Einstein argued vigorously that this must be impossible: “God does not play dice.” Until very recently, Bohr was considered the winner of the dispute, and quantum events were considered to be perhaps the only example of true stochasticity in the universe. But in 1998, physicists Duerr, Nonn, and Rempe disproved Bohr’s theorizing, which had been based on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The real source of quantum “randomness” is now believed to be the interactions or “entanglements” of particles, whose behavior is in fact deterministic.”

In fact, the paper referred to, entitled “Origin of quantum-mechanical complementarity probed by a ‘which-way’ experiment in an atom interferometer,” is an elegant piece of work, but in no way, shape or form does it demonstrate that the “real source of quantum randomness is the interactions of “entanglements” of particles, whose behavior is in fact deterministic.”  It can be found in its entirety here. The math and scientific notation are a little dense, but if you simply trust the authors of the paper on those matters, and just look at the discussion and conclusions at the end, you should be able to see without too much difficulty that it in no way has the significance that Kennedy and Eberhart assign to it.  They seem to think that it somehow represents a refutation of the Heisenberg principle.  In fact, the authors of the paper explicitly state the contrary. 

Their paper is one of the many that have sought to shed light on the famous experiment in which interference patterns are formed by particles passing through a double slit, even when single particles are passed through one at a time, defeating any attempt to explain the phenomenon based on classical (non-quantum) physics.  The question they attempt to answer is not whether the Heisenberg principle is itself valid or not, but merely whether the principle must be invoked to explain the fact that “measuring” which one of the slits each particle passes through causes the loss of the interference pattern, or, on the contrary, some other mechanism can enforce the change.  It turns out that, in fact, the Heisenberg principle is not necessary.  Which of the ”slits” (in this case the experiment is done with standing light waves rather than physical slits) each particle passes through can be measured by much more subtle means that have orders of magnitude less effect on particle momentum than would be necessary to justify invoking it.  In other words, what the authors are really saying is, not that the Heisenberg principle is wrong, or has been superceded by some new “deterministic” theory, but merely that it is not true that it must be invoked to explain “complementarity,” or the ability of quantum mechanical entities to behave as either particles or waves.

All this is very intriguing.  One wonders to what extent this meme that the experiment in question “proves” that we live in a deterministic universe is making the rounds among people who don’t actually understand its implications one way or the other.  It would hardly be the first time that authors have been cited as authorities for ideas that never appeared in their work.  To what extent do the authors of the paper realize they’ve become “famous” in this way?

And what of the great questions of free will, and whether we live in a deterministic or stochastic universe?  The world is full of people who are cocksure they know the answer.  They just don’t agree on what it is.  Alas, I fear we are not at the point at which we can really say one way or the other.  Before that can happen, it will be necessary for us to figure out the fundamental nature of all this stuff around us, and why it all exists to begin with.  We are yet far from having that knowledge, a fact that makes life that much more exciting.  There are still great new worlds for us to discover out there.

Werner Heisenberg

Of Evolutionary Psychology and Historical Myopia

The journal Evolutionary Psychology hosts a blog written by Robert Kurzban, an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Its content is mostly commentary about ongoing research in the field, with a strong academic flavor. Now and again, however, Robert will react with a measure of chagrin, and seeming surprise, to the occasional potshot directed at EP by some unrepentant cultural determinist (for example, here, here and here). These latter typically seize on some supposed flaw in one obscure scientific paper or another as a pretext to condemn the entire field of EP as pseudo-science.  What surprises me most about this is Robert’s surprise.  His replies always have the air of someone who can’t comprehend why his field has been singled out for carte blanche condemnation, like the victim of schoolyard bullies who can’t fathom the reason that they constantly steal his glasses and tromp on them. 

In fact, nothing could be more predictable than these attacks.  After all, a basic premise of the field of Evolutionary Psychology is that there is such a thing as innate human nature.  That premise, obvious as it may seem, contradicts the quasi-religious, ideologically driven denial of human nature that has been the prevailing orthodoxy in the behavioral sciences ever since the days of Franz Boas, an orthodoxy that was very much alive and kicking well into the late 90′s.  Should one really be surprised at the bitter mutterings of the many partisans of that now-shattered orthodoxy who are presumably still alive and kicking as well?  EP, after all, does not exist in a vacuum.  It is not just another scientific sandbox for specialists to play in, isolated, not only from all the other scientific sandboxes, but from the real world outside as well.  It is inextricably entangled with any number of weighty issues relevant to politics, ideology, philosophy, and religion.  The idea that one can arrive at independent scientific judgments in the field without taking the significance and influence of these connections into account is, at the very least, “bad science.”  It assumes an almost complete lack of awareness of the intellectual history relevant to the field ever science the days of Darwin.

Perhaps I’m the one who should be surprised that I’m surprised.   To see why, one need look no further than the works that pass as textbooks in the field.  For example, Evolutionary Psychology, by David Buss, is accepted by many as the standard.  The first chapter, entitled “The Scientific Movements Leading to Evolutionary Psychology,” is a remarkable example of “history” encapsulated in the form of a disarmingly simple-minded fairy tale.  For example, there is a section entitled “The Ethology Movement.”  To begin, as anyone who was actually alive at the time of the “ethology movement” and has some passing familiarity with both the relevant scientific and popular science literature that appeared at the time must be aware, by far the most significant player in this “movement” was Robert Ardrey, acknowledged at the time as such by scientific friend and foe alike.  To confirm that fact, one need look no further than Man and Aggression, published in 1968 and edited by Ashley Montagu, a collection of essays directed at Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz by several experts in the behavioral sciences.  By all means, check the source material.  As I write this, the hardcover version is available at Amazon for $1.88, and the paperback for only a penny.  Nowhere in Buss’ account of the Ethology Movement does one so much as encounter Ardrey’s name. 

It is not so easy to studiously ignore Konrad Lorenz.  He was, after all, a Nobel Prize winner.  He appears in Buss’ book as a nice old man followed by a line of ducklings.  It would seem, you see that that was his primary contribution to the field.  According to the book, “Lorenz (1965) started a new branch of evolutionary biology called ethology, and imprinting in birds was a vivid phenomenon used to launch this new field,” and ”Indeed, the glimmerings of evolutionary psychology itself may be seen in the early writings of Lorenz, who wrote, “our cognitive and perceptual categories, given to us prior to individual experience, are adapted to the environment for the same reasons that the horse’s hoof is suited for the plains before the horse is born, and the fin of a fish is adapted for water before the fish hatches from its egg.”  One cannot but laugh out loud when reading such stuff.  Imprinting, professor?  Really?  Have you never heard of such other works by Lorenz as King Solomon’s Ring, On Aggression, and Behind the Mirror, all of which contained a great deal more than a “glimmering” of what later was rechristened “Evolutionary Psychology,” and all of which had a great deal more to say about the significance of the field to the human condition than his papers about imprinting in ducks?

Professor Buss next helpfully informs us that,

Ethology ran into three problems, however. First, many descriptions acted more as “labels” for behavior patterns and did not really go very far in explaining them. Second, ethologists tended to focus on observable behavior – much like their behaviorist counterparts – and so did not look “inside the heads” of animals to the underlying mechanisms responsible for generating that behavior. And third, although ethology was concerned with adaptation (one of the four critical issues listed by Tinbergen), it did not develop rigorous criteria for discovering adaptations.

Yes, professor, and in the same sense, Aristotle “ran into the problem” of not inventing magnetic resonance imaging.  Such abject trivializations of the work of a whole generation of brilliant thinkers is apparently what today passes for the official “history” of the field. 

Which brings us to the anomalous situation we are in today.  The whole essence of the “Ethology Movement” and the whole essence of what is now called Evolutionary Psychology, is encapsulated in that one statement of Lorenz’, “our cognitive and perceptual categories, given to us prior to individual experience, are adapted to the environment for the same reasons that the horse’s hoof is suited for the plains before the horse is born, and the fin of a fish is adapted for water before the fish hatches from its egg.” The work of Ardrey, Lorenz, Tinbergen, and the lesser lights of the “Movement,” all focused on that one theme, has been triumphantly vindicated.  And yet, in the weird Twilight Zone of what today passes for “history,” they have either been forgotten entirely, or, failing that, the essential relevance they always stressed of their ideas to the human condition writ large ignored and students who will never understand the significance of their field unless they are aware of the significance of these connections fobbed off with some incoherent mumblings about “imprinting theory.” 

One can but shake one’s head.  Would you know something about the real history of what is today called Evolutionary Psychology.  You had better come armed with a fondness for seeking sources, the spirit of a detective, and a lot of patience.

On God as a “No Thing”

According to a favorite argument of religious believers, God must exist because otherwise the physical universe with all its wonders would be inexplicable. I have always considered it a very powerful argument against His existence that such arguments leave you with an even bigger problem. If you can’t accept the existence of the universe without a Creator, why do you accept the existence of a Creator to begin with? He must necessarily be even more complex and inexplicable than that which he created. In other words, you don’t gain anything by positing the existence of something more complex to explain something less complex. Jean Meslier used the argument in his Testament, and Richard Dawkins and others have included it in more recent works.

Moslems and some Christians use divine inspiration, or faith, to get around the argument. In the more extreme, Muslim version, God decided in advance who would have faith and who not. He created unbelievers in such a way that their minds would be hardened against faith in Him, and for the “sin” of being created that way, he intends to burn them forever. It’s all set forth very explicitly in the Koran.

However, Christians who imagine themselves more sophisticated than the rest, apparently never having read the bit in Matthew 18:3 about the impossibility of entering the kingdom of heaven except as a little child, have more “complex” arguments. One such is Paul Wallace, who set forth a version thereof at the website of Religion Dispatches.

Wallace begins with the well-worn argument that, if you don’t believe in God, you’re really just a religious horse of a different color. In his words,

The atheisms of most committed, principled atheists are often not more than mirror images—inversions—of the theisms they negate.

By that logic, if you don’t believe in fairies, you belong to the “anti-fairy cult,” and if you’ve never read Virginia’s letter, and lost faith in Santa, you’re a zealot in the “anti-Santa” religion. Winston in Orwell’s “1984,” was presumably a fundamentalist religious fanatic because he insisted he only counted four fingers instead of five when his torturer held up his hand.

Wallace is just warming up, though. Citing Yale theology professor Denys Turner, he explains that, if you don’t see the fifth finger, you’re just not trying hard enough:

Turner also writes that, very often, the theisms attacked by atheists are not very interesting; therefore, the atheisms of most committed, principled atheists are not very interesting. Why this is so is not clear; perhaps it is because in many cases theism was abandoned before it was allowed time to develop into something of substance.

He then focuses on the version of the argument presented in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion -

In The God Delusion, Dawkins presents his central argument against the existence of God in the fourth chapter. His thinking goes something like this: The universe is a complex thing. Therefore the God of the Christians, who, Christians say, made the universe, must be at least as complex as the universe God made. Therefore we are left with an even bigger problem than before: Who made this ultra-complex God? A hyper-complex megaGod? It makes plain sense, according to Occam’s razor, to stop before we get to the first God. The complex universe is enough. Ergo, in all likelihood, God does not exist.

This argument, which boils down to Well, who made God, then?, assumes that God is a thing like any other thing. It assumes that God must exist in the same way the moon exists, in the same way Dawkins himself exists. As Terry Eagleton wrote in his now-infamous review of The God Delusion, Dawkins seems to think that God is “a celestial super-object or divine UFO,” a creature like other creatures, only bigger and smarter: a kind of überthing, but a thing nonetheless.

But nowhere does Dawkins get outside of himself and ask, Is my assumption that God is a thing like any other thing really necessary? On what is this assumption grounded? Where did it come from?

I’m no fan of Dawkins. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I was not enthralled by his quasi-racist anti-American ranting about the “U.S. Taliban” and overt bigotry against Christian fundamentalists in The God Delusion. Be that as it may, his argument doesn’t depend on God being a thing like other things. It only requires that God is a thing, as opposed to nothing. Nowhere does Dawkins suggest that God is a thing like other things, but merely that, whatever sort of thing he is imagined to be, if He is the creator, he must necessarily be more complex than that which he created. As a result, whatever kind of a thing believers of whatever stripe might imagine Him to be, the argument that He must exist because otherwise the remarkable physical world we see around us could not exist becomes absurd. It is assuming something more complicated to explain something less complicated. It doesn’t solve anything. Wallace, however, demures:

What is at issue here is, Dawkins refuses to examine the ground on which he stands: science itself. That is, Dawkins may change his mind about evolution, but nothing will change his mind about science. He will never question—in a serious way—the sufficiency of science as a guide to truth.

Here we see the familiar portrayal of “science” as a religious belief. In fact, it is nothing of the sort, but merely a systematic way of discovering and acquiring knowledge. There is nothing mystical about the word “science” at all. It is simply one way of reasoning about what is true. Continuing with Wallace:

He will never question—in a serious way—the sufficiency of science as a guide to truth. Perhaps he thinks the success of science makes it a self-evident choice when it comes to grounding his worldview; what he does not and will not consider is the very real possibility that science is so successful precisely because it is so limited. To reject this possibility out-of-hand is nothing but intellectual laziness. Dawkins is dogmatically rigid and fixed in place. He is a fundamentalist.

Fine. Science is limited. However, Christian fundamentalism, an “easy target,” is also limited. Dawkins just wasn’t aiming high enough. Forget the Christians as “little children” meme. If you want to “see through” his argument, it’s going to take some serious mental gymnastics. Wallace describes the process in terms of four levels of “God-talk,” with the third being the most important. Let’s let him explain:

The third level is the most difficult but the most important. This is second-order negation, or the inversion of the inversion. Here we would say, “God is not a fire, but God is not a not-fire either,” and “God is not love, but neither is God not-love.” God transcends the (human-based) distinction between love and not-love.

Also on this third level is found the insistence, made for centuries by theologians throughout Christendom, that God transcends the distinction of being and not-being. Therefore, if we use the conventional definition of existence, God does not exist. Our category of existence does not apply to God. Put another way, the word “exist” cannot be used univocally of things and God. These are artificial categories imagined and used by human beings; they are manifestly not divine attributes. In the end, to speak correctly, there are no divine attributes. Which means that God is not distinct from creation, nor is God not-distinct from creation. That is, in God there is no distinction at all, nor is there non-distinction. No affirmation or denial properly applies to God.

Or, in other words, God is neither a thing or nothing. This very convenient for believers, because it puts their God out of reach of logic. By the same token, I can say that fairies, Santa, or the Great Green Grasshopper God are neither thing or nothing, and no one can prove they don’t exist.

But atheists say that Christianity is false, that God does not exist. Asking them to defend their position in light of mature theology is doing nothing but taking them for their word and respecting their intelligence.

So atheists are wrong because, like Winston and his four fingers, they can’t imagine an entity that is neither a thing nor nothing. Wallace assigns them the task of disproving the existence of that entity, but without using language, because that would be too deceptive, and without reasoning, because that which is outside the union of “thing” and “nothing” is also outside the realm of rational argument. If they fail then, voila, the existence of God is proved! Of course, the author realizes he’s walking on thin ice. He admits as much:

Also, one may say that negative theology is content-free and useless because it nullifies the use of rational thought. In a sense this is a valid argument. But one can go beyond negative theology while bearing in mind its lessons. In fact, negative theology constitutes the central nervous system, if you will, of the entire Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas that Dawkins so happily and ignorantly mocks. In this work, Thomas employs analogical language in order to speak freely of God’s attributes without the possibility of confusing them with the attributes of, say, fire or kingship or love or being.

Since it’s obviously impossible to believe in an un-thing, the author, after assuring us that God is neither thing nor nothing, is suddenly speaking of Him as an object with attributes. I, and I daresay anyone else who speaks English fluently, would call an object with attributes a thing.

This is one of the most powerful aspects of negative theology: It cleanses the mind not only of assumptions about God, but of idols (like science, say) that can so easily replace God.

Again assigning some mystical quality to “Science.”  As noted above, science is just systematic reasoning.  What the above amounts to is the claim that anyone who dares to use their brain as something other than inert stuffing for their skull is an “idolater.”

We are required to have faith in no thing at all; only then will our faith have any chance of finding its true home in God.

There are, of course, different flavors of this “no thing.” The author should take care that he has faith in the right “no thing.” If it turns out that the Moslem “no thing” is the real one, he’ll be spending quadrillions and quintillions of years sizzling in hell, and that’s just for starters. I will leave that to the competing “no things” to sort out among themselves. Poor, deluded atheist that I am, I am left by all these arguments in direr straights than before. I will certainly end up frying in the afterlife regardless unless, without relying on logic or language, I somehow manage to figure out what “no thing” is, and that with alacrity, I being no longer the youngest. I gather from what the author is telling me that this will only be possible by virtue of reading Thomas Aquinas and a voluminous stack of other religious tomes. I suspect that such fare may not really be the path to divine enlightenment. Rather, it seems more likely that the author has been left in more or less the same condition by reading his own pile of books about religion as Don Quixote was left by reading a pile of books about knight errantry. Miguel de Cervantes provides a detailed psychological description in the first chapter of his famous account of that gentleman.

While I strongly suspect that Wallace is as deluded in matters of religion as Don Quixote was touching knights in shining armor, I am content to let him believe whatever he chooses as long as he accords the same right to me, and does not conclude, as so many others have done in the past, that his “no thing” requires him to burn people, or launch wars against those who believe in other “no things,” or fly airplanes into buildings on behalf of the “no thing”, or that the state should serve as an interpreter of the will of the “no thing.” As long as we’re clear about those things we should be able to coexist.

John Locke and the Blank Slate

I’ve always been dubious of attempts to trace the origins of ideas back through generations of philosophers. They were, after all, individuals, and to understand them, one must take that into account. In creating such philosophical genealogies, one should consider the fact that, while thinkers separated in time by centuries may have had superficially similar ideas, it is far from certain that they understood the ideas in quite the same way, or endorsed them for the same reasons.

Take, for example, the case of John Locke. He is often cited as the father of the modern incarnation of the Blank Slate. In our own day, the “Blank Slate” refers to the notion that, for all practical purposes, there is no such thing as innate human nature, and our behavior is almost entirely determined by what we learn and experience. The idea was in vogue among behavioral scientists who should have known better through much of the 20th century before finally falling into the well-deserved disrepute it enjoys today. Locke seems a perfect candidate for the “father” of the idea. It’s all there in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The very title of Book I of the essay is, “Neither Principles nor Ideas are Innate.” The problem is that what Locke meant by “principles and ideas” was not quite the same thing as what later day anthropologists and psychologists understood under the rubric of “human nature,” nor is it likely that more than a handful of them would have agreed with his reasoning if they had actually taken the trouble to read his book. The idea that they were somehow “inspired” by him is the type of stuff that makes good filler in philosophy textbooks, but is highly questionable in fact.

For starters, Locke didn’t have the luxury of sitting on the shoulders of Darwin. An Englishman of the religion-drenched 17th century, nothing was more certain to him than the existence of God. He related his belief in God to his rejection of innate ideas in a way that one would look in vain to see repeated in 20th century journals of the behavioral sciences;

If the idea of God be not innate, not other can be supposed innate.

and he assumed that, if we had innate ideas, they must have been written on our minds by the hand of God. For example,

Hence naturally flows the great variety of opinions concerning moral rules which are to be found among men, according to the different sorts of happiness they have a prospect of, or propose to themselves; which could not be if practical principles were innate, and imprinted in our minds immediately by the hand of God.

and, referring to five supposed “innate ideas” set forth in a contemporary book by Lord Herbert,

First, that these five propositions are either not all, or more than all, those common notions written on our minds by the finger of God.

Locke also believed in a spiritual as surely as he believed in a physical world. Hence, if innate ideas existed, they would not have been written in the physical makeup of an organ like the brain, but on our souls. In his words,

It might very well be expected that these (innate) principles should be perfectly known to naturals; which being stamped immediately on the soul, (as these men suppose,) can have no dependence on the constitution or organs of the body, the only confessed difference between them and others.

When he spoke of “ideas and principles,” Locke had something very different in mind than the innate predispositions that we share with many animals, against the existence of which the Blank Slate orthodoxy of the 20th century thundered down its anathemas for so long in vain. Rather, Locke referred to principles that could be clearly set down in words and reasoned about in a way that excluded all other animals but ourselves. He referred to them as “speculative maxims,” and, since they were inscribed by the hand of God himself, they must necessarily be universal:

…this argument of universal consent, which is made use of to prove innate principles, seems to me a demonstration that there are none such: because there are none to which all mankind give an universal assent.

and, referring to moral principles,

But, since it is certain that most men’s practices, and some men’s open professions, have either questioned or denied these principles, it is impossible to establish an universal consent, (though we should look for it only amongst grown men,) without which it is impossible to conclude them innate.

Innate morality was inconceivable to Locke because he could not conceptualize morality as other than a set of clear rules that could be spelled out in words, and the resulting moral “maxims” then reasoned about and proved:

Another reason that makes me doubt of any innate practical principles is, that I think there cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand and reason: which would be perfectly ridiculous and absurd if they were innate.

Furthermore, innate moral rules were impossible, because, if they existed, they must have been inscribed in our minds by God himself, and we could not be unaware that he had put them there, and would certainly punish their breach:

From what has been said, I think we may safely conclude, that whatever practical rule is in any place generally and with allowance broken, cannot be supposed innate; it being impossible that men should, without shame or fear, confidently and serenely, break a rule which they could not but evidently know that God had set up, and would certainly punish the breach of, (which they must, if it were innate,) to a degree to make it a very ill bargain to be the transgressor.

and,

If, therefore, anything be imprinted on the minds of all men as a law, all men must have a certain and unavoidable knowledge that certain and unavoidable punishment will attend the breach of it.

It would seem, then, that when we attempt to lump Locke’s Blank Slate with that of a 20th century anthropologist, we are comparing apples and oranges. It’s hard to imagine that knowledge of a source of innate morality as different from the hand of God as evolution by natural selection would have had no impact on his thought. He was far from rejecting any notion of “human nature” carte blanche. For example,

Nature, I confess, has put into man a desire of happiness and an aversion to misery: these indeed are innate practical principles which (as practical principles ought) do continue constantly to operate and influence all our actions without ceasing.

and,

Principles of actions indeed there are lodged in men’s appetites.

In a word, then, it’s not really fair to tar Locke, or, for that matter, Rousseau and his “noble savage” with the same brush as the experts of a later day because they didn’t take the trouble to be born before the publication of The Origin of Species. The same excuse cannot be made for the obscurantist “behavioral scientists” of the 20th century.

“Stoner” by John Williams

John Edward Williams

What’s great about Stoner?  The same thing that’s great about any great novel.  It gives you an intimate glimpse into the mind of another human being, telling you what they experienced, and how they reacted to it.  In the process, you always recognize yourself; your own thoughts and feelings.

Works like this are written with a simple clarity that’s often missing from the works of philosophy and psychology with which they have much in common.  There’s nothing obscure about them, because the author is unconcerned about impressing you with how smart he is.  Rather, he has an intense desire to make you understand.  Stoner is not only clear, but beautiful.  Many passages in the book read like poetry. 

Look and spread the word.

John Stuart Mill and the “Blank Slate”

Categorization enables us to simplify the world sufficiently for us to think and reason about it.  However, like the rest of our mental equipment, it isn’t perfect, and can occasionally lead us astray, as when we try to categorize things that are, by their nature, highly individual or original.   Our most brilliant thinkers are an example thereof.  There are certainly similarities among them, but it can be very misleading to try to label them and fit them into philosophical pigeon holes.  To the extent that they are worth reading, they tend to be unique.  One cannot understand them or learn anything from them by virtue of the fact that someone includes them in this or that school of thought.  It is necessary to read their work. 

I ran across a particularly egregious example of the pitfalls of this form of categorization in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. The “blank slate” is the theory that prevailed among psychologists, anthropologists, and other experts in human behavior for much of the 20th century, according to which, for all practical purposes, human behavior and morality are learned, and there is no human nature other than what is acquired via experience and culture.  In its modern incarnation the theory was always an absurdity, and belonged more in the realm of ideological narratives such as “scientific” Marxism-Leninism than of science.  The “expert” defenders of blank slate orthodoxy in the 60′s and 70′s are better understood as the high priests of a secular religion than as proponents of a scientific hypothesis that turned out to be incorrect.  In general, Pinker has done a brilliant job of debunking them and explaining the reasons for their fanatical defense of an idea that had long been palpably ridiculous.  His book is well worth reading, although not without its flaws.  One of them is the manner in which he lumps some of mankind’s greatest thinkers together with the hidebound ideologues of the “blank slate.” 

Pinker shares a vice of the pedants who run philosophy departments in academia, in that he imagines direct chains of thought linking the ideas of highly original and individual thinkers who lived in times utterly different from each other informed by vastly different levels of scientific and general knowledge into neatly arranged systems.  Thus, as he tells it, the modern version of the blank slate was invented by John Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers.  Then Locke begat John Stuart Mill, John Stuart Mill begat John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism, and Watson begat latter day ideologues like Ashley Montagu and Richard Lewontin.  These are strange bedfellows indeed.  Let’s consider the case of Mill.  Pinker quotes him at length, citing his notion of intuitional philosophy.  According to Pinker,

By “intuitional philosophy” Mill was referring to Continental intellectuals who maintained (among other things) that the categories of reason were innate. Mill wanted to attack their theory of psychology at the root to combat what he thought were its conservative social implications. He refined a theory of learning called associationism (previously formulated by Locke) that tried to explain human intelligence without granting it any innate organization. According to this theory, the blank slate is inscribed with sensations, which Locke called “ideas” and modern psychologists call “features.” Ideas that repreatedly appear in succession (such as the redness, roundness, and sweetness of an apple) become associated, so that any one of them can call to mind the others. And similar objects in the world activate overlapping sets of ideas in the mind. For example, after many dogs present themselves to the senses, the features that they share (fur, barking, four legs, and so on) hang together to stand for the category “dog.”

The associationism of Locke and Mill has been recognizable in psychology ever since. It became the core of most models of learning, especially in the approach called behaviorism, which dominated psychology from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Voila!  With this trivialization of the ideas of a brilliant thinker, Pinker mashes him into a soup with the likes of Montagu and Lewontin.  There’s just one problem.  Mill is poles apart from the 60s blank slaters intellectually.  Where his mind was open, their minds were nailed down tightly in ideological boxes.  Where he was original, they were dogmatists.  Where they demonized anyone who disagreed with them, he always admitted the possibility that he could be wrong.  Where they were fanatical defenders of the blank slate in its most extreme forms, he freely admitted the possibility of innate predispositions. 

How do we know Mill was a brilliant thinker?  For one thing, unlike 999 out of 1000 of the “experts” in morality, he, in the words of E. O. Wilson, “laid his cards on the table” when he was discussing it.  Unlike so many others who pontificate wisely about morality, he did not consider it beneath his dignity to explain to the rest of us on exactly what basis he presumed to base his claims for the legitimacy of his conclusions regarding why we should do some things but not others.  He knew the difference between the subjective nature of morality as it actually exists and morality as a “good-in-itself,” for which he admitted he saw no rational basis.  As he put it in Utilitarianism:

The ultimate sanction, therefore, of all morality (external motives apart) being a subjective feeling in our own minds, I see nothing embarrassing to those whose standard is utility, in the question, what is the sanction of that particular standard? We may answer, the same as of all other moral standards – the conscientious feelings of mankind.

Note that by invoking the “conscientious feelings of mankind,” Mill has already distanced himself from the blank slate purists.  In the following sentences, he explicitly embraces a theory of human nature of which these moral feelings are a part:

…the feelings exist, a fact in human nature, the reality of which, and the great power with which they are capable of acting on those in whom they have been duly cultivated, are proved by experience. No reason has ever been shown why they may not be cultivated to as great intensity in connection with the utilitarian, as with any other rule of morals.

In other words, Mill’s error was not in rejecting human nature per se, but in assuming that it was more malleable than subsequent research has revealed it to be in reality.  Unlike our current “experts” in human behavior, including Pinker, who, having finally rejected the blank slate, remain mesmerized by the chimera of the “good-in-itself,” Mill suffered from no such delusions.  In his words,

There is, I am aware, a disposition to believe that a person who sees in moral obligation a transcendental fact, an objective reality belonging to the province of “Things in themselves”, is likely to be more obedient to it than one who believes it to be entirely subjective, having its seat in human consciousness only.

Mill, rejecting transcendental morality himself, notes the obvious fallacy in its claim to superior moral authority:

Does the belief that moral obligation has its seat outside the mind make the feeling of it too strong to be got rid of? The fact is so far otherwise, that all moralists admit and lament the ease wwith which, in the generality of minds, conscience can be silenced or stifled.

As we have already seen in the above, far from embracing the blank slate, Mill states his explicit belief in the existence of human nature.  How, then, do Pinker and the rest come up with the idea that he was the great progenitor and godfather of the blank slate.  Perhaps from statements like the following:

On the other hand, if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason the less natural.

Note that what Mill is referring to here is not human nature, but “moral feelings,” by which he means emotions, themselves grounded in human nature, in association with an explicit code of moral behavior.  Let us allow him to elaborate on this for himself:

…the moral faculty, if not a part of our nature, is a natural outgrowth from it.

But there is this basis of powerful natural sentiment; and this it is which, when once the general happiness is recognized as the ethical standard, will constitute the strength of the utilitarian morality. This firm foundation is that of the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures, which is already a powerful principle in human nature.

The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that, except in some unusual circumstances or by an effort of voluntary abstraction, he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body.

The powerful sentiment, and apparently clear perception, which that word (Justice) recalls with a rapidity and certainty resumbling an instinct, have seemed to the majority of thinkers to point to an inherent quality in things; to show that the Just must have an existence in Nature as something absolute – generally distinct from every variety of the Expedient, and, in idea, opposed to it, though (as is commonly acknowledged) never, in the long run, disjoined from it in fact. In the case of this, as of our other moral sentiments, there is no necessary connection between the question of its origin, and that of its binding force. That a feeling is bestowed on us by Nature, does not necessarily legitimate all its promptings. The feeling of justice might be a peculiar instinct, and might yet require, like our other instincts, to be controlled and enlightened by a higher reason.

In other words, far from rejecting innate behavior associated with morality, Mill embraced it.  He neither doubted nor rejected the notions of human nature and innate predisposition.  It was his misfortune to live just a bit too soon for the full import of Darwin’s great theory to sink in.  As a result, he could not imagine the true nature of the moral instincts whose existence he explicitly recognized, nor appreciate the fact that it would be a great deal more difficult than he expected to get them to attach themselves seemlessly to his Utilitarian prescriptions.  I firmly believe that, had he been born 20 years later, the truth would have dawned on him.

As for Pinker’s notion that Mill’s ideas were somehow primarily intended to “combat conservative social implications” of the thought of continental intellectuals is similarly far from the truth, and a further bowdlerization of his ideas.  He was certainly engaged politically, but with the rather substantial difference from the high priests of the blank slate that his mind was always open to new ideas and new arguments, and he didn’t automatically assume someone was evil and guilty of some terrible political crime simply by virtue of the fact that the person in question disagreed with him.

The best antidote to Pinker’s wooden portrayal of Mill is to read him.  As a writer he is clear and easy to understand, the very opposite of the likes of Kant and Hegel.  His work is of lasting value today.  If he’d known what we now know about morality, he probably would have realized that attempting to link his utilitarian prescriptions to a new moral code wouldn’t work, and would likely be dangerous.  On the other hand, the ideas set forth in works like On Liberty and Utilitarianism, divorced of their moralistic trappings, are worth serious consideration as possible means of promoting the happiness and welfare of human beings as individuals in the societies of the future.  I vote in favor of giving them a try.