Sam Harris Free Will Thought Experiment

Tooling around youtube I came along this video of a an exercise Sam Harris offered as a practical refutation of free will.

The exercise Harris advocates is essentially this: He asks you to think of a city, any city, in the world, without any constraints. Once you have done so, Harris claims that this choice, if anything, would be an example of the exercise of free will. He then proceeds to debunk the choice as free by arguing that it wasn't really free. I won't rehearse all the reasons he provides (the video is only about 6 minutes), but his arguments all boil down to showing that the choice must have had a cause, even if we are unaware of the cause. For instance, you may have chosen Paris as your city because it happened to bubble up out of your subconscious, and that bubbling was a function of the fact that you once travelled to Paris and have fond memories. The point is that we mistakenly think the choice was "free" because we think we chose it arbitrarily, when in actuality the cause was driven by psychological factors of which we were simply unaware.

Harris's exercise involves a typical misunderstanding of what is meant by "free will", or rather, what the classical philosophers meant by calling man free. They did not mean that human will is an uncaused caused, which is what Harris seems to think it must mean. That would simply be to mistake man for God, Who is the only possible uncaused cause.

Man's will is classically understood to be free not because it is uncaused, but because it can have rational causes rather than irrational ones. Specifically, man can rationally judge means and the relationship of means to ends, and choose a course of action based on that judgement. (This is what Plato meant by saying "the truth shall make you free.") It is in the exercise of rationally considered action that man's freedom is manifest, not in the allegedly arbitrary choice of a meaningless selection as in Harris's exercise. A classical philosopher would not dispute that the choice made by a person in Harris's exercise is not free - in that sense, Harris is not showing anything new. But they would point out that they never thought such a choice was free in a significant sense in any case.

To flesh these points out, consider the difference between a beaver building a dam and a man building a dam. The beaver builds a dam by instinct. When it hears the sound of running water, it attempts to stop the sound by piling sticks and mud on it - even in cases where it makes no sense to do so. (For example, playing the sound of running water beneath a concrete floor will cause beavers to pile mud and sticks over the sound on the dry concrete). The beaver builds the dam the same way every time, by piling up sticks and mud, and will keep building them the same way.

The beaver is not free in its dam building. It's not free when it builds the dam (the end), because it simply starts building a dam at the sound of running water, nor is it free in how it builds (the means), for it does it the same way every time by piling up mud and sticks.

Now consider man building a dam, for example Hoover Dam. Man did not build this dam because he happened to hear the sound of running water once and automatically started piling sticks on it. The dam was built after a long, rational consideration of ends that might be achieved with the dam - hydroelectricity and the recreational possibilities of Lake Mead among others. Once the end was selected, the means were then considered. The dam could be build out of a variety of materials and in a variety of places. Concrete for the material was selected and a particular spot on the Colorado river was chosen - and not because an engineer picked the location "freely" by just letting a location pop into his head, but as the result of a detailed investigation of hydrology and the anticipated consequences of various locations.

Eventually the construction began and the Hoover Dam was built and it stands as a monument to the freedom of man, which means the freedom to know the truth and to act according to it. It doesn't mean to act in some purely arbitrary manner. That is the degenerate freedom that has unfortunately become the vision of freedom of that has captured the imagination of modern man.

Know the truth and it shall make you free.

Sam Harris and Free Will

I just finished reading Sam Harris's Free Will, a brief defense of Harris's view that free will is an illusion. Harris is worth reading because he is an excellent writer, with a clear and succinct style. He doesn't hedge or avoid the more disturbing logical implications of his position, but addresses them head on and with confidence.

Free Will is also worth reading because Harris, unintentionally, reveals the weaknesses of the modern understanding of free will while leaving the classical understanding entirely unscathed. In fact the classical understanding becomes all the more attractive in comparison to Harris's conception. (By "classical" I mean mainstream philosophy up to roughly St. Thomas Aquinas, with Aquinas representing the pinnacle of the classical tradition).

The key to understanding the classical conception is that it is inextricably linked with the intellect. The intellect and will in classical philosophy are almost two sides of the same coin, and it is difficult to make sense of one without the other. Freedom is found in the interplay between the two.

Harris writes at the start of his chapter "Changing the Subject:"

It is safe to say that no one was ever moved to entertain the existence of free will because it holds great promise as an abstract idea. The endurance of this notion is attributable to the fact that most of us feel that we freely author our own thoughts and actions (however difficult it may be to make sense of this in logical or scientific terms). Thus the idea of free will emerges from a felt experience. (p 15)

The fact that Harris is likely true about this says more about the poor state of contemporary popular philosophical reflection than any failure of the promise of free will as an abstract idea. The old notion of free will did not arise out of any felt experience, but simple empirical observation, and it issued in an idea (aren't ideas by nature abstract?) straightforwardly intelligible. Men observed that inanimate objects  like stones are acted on but have no interior principle of action. In that sense they are entirely unfree. They also noticed that plants, unlike rocks, can initiate their own actions like sinking roots into the soil or growing toward the sun, and so are in that sense freer than rocks. Animals, beyond plants, have the ability to perceive their environment and pursue their desires as well as flee from their fears. An oak tree can't move itself to better soil or run away from a forest fire, but a wolf is free to find better hunting grown or flee a conflagration. In that sense, the wolf is yet more free than the oak tree.

Man, alone in physical nature and by the power of his intellect, can know the truth about himself and the universe, and so perceive his own good through that truth and pursue it as such. The wolf will devour raw meat because it perceives it as desirable and it reacts on that basis. Man also perceives meat as desirable, but he also knows the truth that meat is good for him because of its nutritional value, and the end of nutrition is health, and so he may not devour meat even if his animal nature desires it if he decides it is not healthy for him (e.g. he is cutting down on red meat to lower his cholesterol). Man, then, is free in a way that no other earthly creature is because freedom for him means the power to act in light of the truth and in pursuit of the good as such.

It's easy to see why the classicals stressed the relationship between intellect and will. Free will in the classical sense means a will enlightened by the intellect with truth; absent the intellect's knowledge, the will has no object and becomes impotent. It becomes reduced to an animal or plant will that merely responds immediately to perceived desire or fear.

We can also see that the classical conception of freedom is dynamic. It depends on knowledge, and as our lives move between the poles of ignorance and knowledge, so our will moves between the poles of slavishness and freedom: A philosophically primitive barbarian is in a very real sense not as free as Socrates, but may become so to the extent that he is educated. Thus the classical aphorism that "the truth shall make you free."

The classical conception also recognizes that our behavior is derived from both rational and non-rational sources. I may conclude that it is good for me to lose weight and so begin a diet (a rational cause). But I may have difficulty staying on it because my desire for cheesesteak subs (a non-rational cause) overwhelms my rational determination to diet. The moral life consists, in part, in training the non-rational side of our nature to follow the rational side.

Finally, it is important to see that the classical conception of freedom does not involve rescuing free will from a chain of causation. The free will is caused just like everything else is caused. The difference is that the will becomes free when it is moved in the chain of rational causes rather than the chain of non-rational causes. Why did I write "4" to the answer "What is 2+2?" Because it is true, and mathematically provable, that two added to two is four. This is an explanation in terms of rational causes. There is a parallel explanation in terms of non-rational causes as to how that "4" got written: My brain sent an electrical signal to my hand which moved a pencil to write a symbol of the shape "4." But no matter how detailed this account, it has no bearing on the truth of the account in terms of rational causes that is the basis of freedom: I wrote "4" because 2+2=4.

The modern version of free will differs from the classical insofar as it separates the will from the intellect. This had its origin in the early modern's dazzlement by the advances of science. Science seemed to provide an account of the world entirely in terms of dumb matter and irrational causes - Newton's clockwork universe. Rational causes - Aristotle's formal and final causes, and which are at the heart of the classical understanding of free will and intellect - were not so much refuted as simply left out of the account, having lost respectability in the non-rational account of nature provided by science. The classical intellect and will simply disappeared from view as invisible to modern science.

The result was that free will, which was not particularly mysterious for classical philosophers, became an impenetrable mystery for modern philosophers, for what could freedom mean in a clockwork universe devoid of rational causation? The issue of causation becomes the central focus of modern thinking about the will because the only way moderns can conceive of freedom is as some sort of escape from the chain of non-rational causation (which is why free will can only be felt rather than demonstrated, because demonstration necessarily involves an account in terms of causes, and for moderns free will is a mysterious uncaused cause).

Sam Harris puts great stock in experiments like the Libet experiments that detect neural evidence of our decisions before we are actually conscious of making the decision:

The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain's motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab extended this work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI): Subjects were asked to press one of two buttons while watching a "clock" composed of a random sequence of letters appearing on a screen. They reported which letter was visible at the moment they decided to press one button or the other. The experimenters found two brain regions that contained information about which button subjects would press a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made. More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80 percent accuracy a person's decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it. 

These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. (p. 8-9)

They are certainly difficult to reconcile with modern attempts to find some space for freedom within the clockwork universe thought to be heralded with the advent of modern science. Those attempts, e.g. those of Descartes or Kant, attempted to save freedom by removing it to a realm beyond the reach of science, either in an immaterial soul mysteriously attached to the body (Descartes), or another realm beyond the reach not only of science but of rational inquiry altogether (Kant). They are all, in the end, attempts to rescue free will as some sort of spontaneous uncaused cause. It is not surprising that this conception of freedom would fall apart as soon as human choice was shown to be susceptible to physical causes (something, incidentally, the classical philosophers never denied because they had no need to.)

But experiments of this type say nothing about the classical understanding of free will. I am free to the extent that I act in light of the truth. Suppose I take a math test, and write down the answer "0" to the question "What is the limit of 1/x as x goes to infinity?" I am free because the answer to the question "Why did I write down 0" is "Because it is true." It is entirely irrelevant that Benjamin Libet could detect my impulse to write the answer down a few milliseconds before I actually decided to move the pencil. And it means nothing that someone could predict with 100% accuracy what my answers will be to a simple math test before I take it. They can safely predict that I will get nearly all the answers right because I am educated enough to know the answers to simple math questions.

It is fascinating, and revealing, that all the examples Harris cites in his book to refute free will involve non-rational decision making, i.e. they do not involve the engagement of the intellect with the will that is the foundation of the classical conception of freedom. In the above cited case, subjects were asked simply to press a button based on a visual cue; in other words, a test suitable for a monkey. That the resulting decision is something that might be explained in terms of purely physical causation is nothing that would surprise Aquinas or Aristotle, for it is only when we consciously act in light of rational causes that we are free in the sense of human freedom.

Here is another example of free will in terns of non-rational causes that does not survive Harris's deconstruction:

I generally start each day with a cup of coffee or tea - sometimes two. This morning, it was coffee (two). Why not tea? I am in no position to know. I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I was free to have what I wanted. Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence. Could I have 'changed my mind' and switched  to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes. (p. 8)

But as we have seen, the really relevant distinction crucial to free will isn't between conscious and unconscious causes, but between rational and non-rational causes. From the classical perspective, the decision to choose tea over coffee (unless it involved a rational deliberation about the good) was never really an instance of free will in the first place. It was on the level of a dog choosing which bowl of food from which to eat; something entirely explainable in terms of the physical chain of causes involving non-rational desires and stimuli.

Here are some of the other putative examples of free will Harris examines:

"For instance, I just drank a glass of water and feel absolutely at peace with the decision to do so. I was thirsty, and drinking water is fully congruent with my vision of who I want to be when in need of a drink.  Had I reached for a beer this early in the day, I might have felt guilty; but drinking a glass of water at any hours is blameless, and I am quite satisfied with myself. Where is the freedom in this? [Nowhere, because there is no freedom in water buffalos going to the watering hole, which this essentially is. DT] It may be true that if I had wanted to do otherwise, I would have, but I am nevertheless compelled to do what I effectively want. And I cannot determine my wants, or decide which will be effective, in advance. My mental life is simply given to me by the cosmos. Why didn't I decide to drink a glass of juice? The thought never occurred to m. Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do? [italics in original] Of course not. (p 19)

Harris has essentially described the life of a bear or a fish. Animals are driven by their desires, not rational consideration of the good, and so are not free. What's interesting about this example are the words in italics at the end, which present the possibility of recovering something of the classical understanding of freedom. The will cannot choose that which is not presented to it as an object; the will cannot choose that which we do not know. So the more we know, the more freedom we may have as the range of our options increases. This, again, is why knowing the truth can make you free - and why the best way to keep someone a slave is to keep him ignorant.

Again:

Thoughts like 'What should I get my daughter for her birthday? I know - I'll take her to a pet store and have her pick out some tropical fish' convey the apparent reality of choices, freely made. (p. 32)

and:

For instance, in my teens and early twenties I was a devoted student of the martial arts. I practiced incessantly and taught classes in college. Recently, I began training again, after a hiatus of more than 20 years. Both the cessation and the renewal of my interest in martial arts seem to be pure expressions of the freedom that Nahmias attributes to me. I have been under no 'unreasonable external or internal pressure.' I have done exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to stop training, and I stopped. I wanted to start again, and now I train several times a week. All this has been associated with conscious thought and acts of apparent self- control. 

However, when I look for the psychological cause of my behavior, I find it utterly mysterious. Why did I stop training 20 years ago? Well, certain things just became more important to me. But why did they become more important to me...?" (p. 43)

and the final and clearest example of an attempt at non-rational free will:

In fact, I will now perform an experiment in free will for all to see: I will write anything I want for the rest of this book. Whatever I write will, of course, be something I choose to write.  No one is compelling me to do this. No one has assigned me a topic or demanded that I use certain words. I can be ungrammatical if I pleased. And if I want to put a rabbit in this sentence, I am free to do so. 

But paying attention to my stream of consciousness reveals that this notion of freedom does not reach very deep. Where did this rabbit come from? Why didn't I put an elephant in that sentence? I do not know. I am free to change 'rabbit' to 'elephant,' of course. But if I did this, how could I explain it? It is impossible for me to know the cause of either choice. (p. 65)

This is a perfect example of the muddle into which modern thinking about free will has gotten itself. The search for a truly free act is seen as the search for an act immune to any intelligibility; somehow an act can only be free if we can't find any reason for it, rational or otherwise. This is freedom as the Uncaused Caused, i.e. a freedom only God could possibly have.

Thomas Aquinas would be baffled at this understanding of human freedom. Surely the best evidence of Harris's free will would not be the random insertion of words into the text - again, something a well-trained monkey could do - but rather the intelligible content of the book as a whole. Harris's freedom is expressed in his attempt to grasp the truth about free will and communicate it to the rest of us, something monkeys, trees and rocks are not free to do.

Free Will is a relatively short book (82 pages), but then the case against freedom in the scientistic worldview of Harris is straightforward and brief:

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them. (p 5)

This is surely true if you only recognize as causes non-rational efficient causes. But if the reality of rational causes (Aristotle's formal and final causes) is acknowledged, then we can be responsible for our actions, and our actions be free, even if they occur within a chain of rational causation. Socrates made the distinction a long time ago in the Phaedo:

I felt very much as I should feel if someone said, 'Socrates does by mind all he does'; and then, trying to tell the causes of each thing I do, if he should say first that the reason why I sit here now is, that my body consists of bones and sinews, and the bones are hard and have joints between them, and the sinews can be tightened and slackened, surrounding the bones along with flesh and the skin which holds them together; so when the bones are uplifted in their sockets, the sinews slackening and tightening make me able to bend my limbs now, and for this cause I have bent together and sit here; and if next he should give you other causes of my conversing with you, alleging as causes voices and airs and hearings and a thousand others like that, and neglecting to give the real causes. These are that since the Athenians thought it was better to condemn me, for this very reason I have thought it better to sit here, and more just to remain and submit to any sentence they may give. For, by the Dog! these bones and sinews, I think, would have been somewhere near Megara or Boeotia long ago, carried by an opinion of what is best...

Coyne and the nature of philosophy

I've been trying to get around to commenting on the this Jerry Coyne article on free will from USA Today. Rather than one large blogpost - which I don't seem to be able to get the time to do - maybe I can attack it with a series of smaller ones. For this one, I'll comment on Coyne's passing remark about the significance of the question of free will:

"The issue of whether we have of[sic] free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons."

What's interesting about this passage is what it says about Coyne's view of the nature of philosophy, which is a view of it that started in the Enlightenment and is still common. Philosophy, for Coyne, includes "arcane academic debates" that aren't about anything that "affects" us. When we do begin talking about things that affect us, like how we assign moral responsibility or how we punish criminals, we've moved beyond philosophy or, at least, the arcane debates that comprise academic philosophy.

Now the classical philosopher would say that Coyne has it exactly backwards. To the extent that philosophy discusses anything that won't "affect" us, it isn't really philosophy at all. The philosopher is a lover of wisdom, which means living an "examined life." Everything the philosopher discusses, from the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas to the ethics of Aristotle, must be in service to the primary goal of living an examined life - or the philosopher isn't really a philosopher at all. To use my favorite example, Socrates in the Crito is offered the chance to escape from his death sentence in Athens so he may continue pursuing philosophy in a different city. Socrates refuses the opportunity because he does not, after philosophical reflection, think there would be justice in an attempt to escape his sentence. To escape his sentence would then be to betray his philosophical vocation, which isn't about merely discussing "philosophy", but leading a life examined by reason and faithful to it. Such a life is what philosophy is; it is not a series of academic debates, arcane or otherwise.

The degeneration of philosophy from the Socratic ideal to a series of academic debates about nothing that "affects" us started in the Enlightenment. We can point to Descartes idea in his Discourse on Method that he would accept nothing until it had survived the most critical form of doubt. What then of his ongoing daily life and the myriad decisions life requires, including mundane ethical decisions? Daily life demands regular decisions from us whether we have prepared those decisions through a Method or not. Descartes solved this problem by living according to a "provisional morality", pending the development of a truly rational,  real morality that would be worked out in due course through the Method. While under development this true morality, of course, had nothing to do with how Descartes was actually living (which was the province of the provisional morality); it wasn't about anything that "affected" him. In truth, whatever ethics might be developed through the Method isn't really an ethics at all, since the subject of ethics is precisely the existing man facing the problems of life as they come, problems for which he can't take a "timeout" pending the development of a truly rational ethics. Socrates facing the problem of escaping from Athens is a subject of ethics; man considered in timeless abstraction through something like the Method is not.

What is interesting about the "provisional morality" is that it isn't open to rational criticism. True reason is only available through the method; since the provisional morality is just that which we live by while the method works out the true morality, the provisional morality is by definition not open to reason. And, in truth, the true morality never does get worked out. This was Kierkegaard's point in emphasizing that abstract reason cannot put an end to itself; in other words, abstract reason cannot of itself issue in a decision, because decisions are demanded by the concrete circumstances of life that are just what reason abstracts from. Socrates did not refrain from escaping from the Athenian prison because he had worked out a logical ethics to completion; he refrained because, as his philosophical reflection told him at the moment, there was no justice in an attempt at escape.

The thing about allegedly arcane philosophical debates, like the one over Descartes and his method, is that they eventually trickle down and spread through the common culture. Descartes' "provisional morality" is, it seems to me, the de facto ethical view of the average American. The average person may believe that you can think about ethical questions, but he doesn't think such thought counts as "real thought" in the sense of abstract methods like math or physics. It's all kind of "iffy." And it certainly doesn't apply to what he himself will do in the moment. That is a matter of "personal choice"; and by that we mean not only that it is up to us as individuals to make a decision, but that the process by which we come to that concrete decision isn't finally open to rational scrutiny. Descartes "provisional morality" has become our permanent morality.

When we do bring what we think is "true reason" to bear on subjects like ethics, then it means approaching them through science in the manner of Coyne. But Coyne's approach isn't, in the end, any more sound that Descartes'. Any system of thought, philosophical or otherwise, that doesn't start with man in his subjective, concrete existence, and stay there, can't have ethics in the true sense as its subject; it can't ever be about the things that "affect" us. Thus the "free will" discussed by Coyne isn't the subjectively experienced free will you are aware of every moment you make a decision. It is "free will" as a scientific abstraction, which isn't really free will at all and is, in fact, incoherent in terms of scientific abstraction.

Is Free Will a Contingent Possibility

With respect to this post at the Secular Right, Kierkegaard cannot be bettered:

Freedom is never possible. It is either actual or it is not at all.

Put another way... anyone who wonders if he is free (or even could possibly wonder if he is free) is already free.

Natural Slavery II

The issue of natural slavery came to mind while I was reading The End of Faith by Sam Harris. In Ch. 1, Harris proposes a thought experiment in which we imagine that we are suddenly totally ignorant:

What if all our knowledge about the world were suddenly to disappear? Imagine that six billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in a state of utter ignorance and confusion. Our books and computers are still here, but we can't make heads or tails of their contents. We have even forgotten how to driver our cars and brush our teeth. What knowledge would we want to reclaim first? Well, there's that business about growing food and building shelter that we would want to get reacquainted with. We would want to relearn how to use and repair many of our machines. Learning to understand spoken and written language would also be a top priority, given that these skills are necessary for acquiring most others. When in this process of reclaiming our humanity will it be important to know that Jesus was born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected?

The last two questions are rhetorical, of course, because Harris takes the answers to be obvious: Never in this process will it seem important to us to know that Jesus was born of a virgin or resurrected. Harris is right - but not for the reasons he thinks, and the implications of the negative answer are not what he thinks they are. Harris takes it for granted that a negative answer means that the Gospel is unnecessary and may be safely forgotten. To the contrary, the negative answer implies that the Gospel is absolutely necessary and is only forgotten at our peril.

Harris has not thought deeply enough about the meaning of thorough-going ignorance. We learn from Socrates that ignorance, in its deepest aspect, is ignorant of itself. When we are ignorant, we not only don't know something, we also don't know that we don't know it. Harris asks the question "What knowledge would we want to reclaim first," but his question implies that we already are knowledgeable. It implies that his state of "utter ignorance" isn't really utterly ignorant, for in it we are not only aware that we are ignorant, but we are aware of precisely in what our ignorance consists. He imagines us reacquiring knowledge as though we were browsing a supermarket, picking and choosing the items we wish to know. But on what basis does the ignorant man decide what is important to know and what is not important to know?

Necessity will certainly teach him the importance of knowing certain things, like acquiring food and shelter. Man naturally knows the objects of certain desires, like hunger, thirst and the desire for shelter. He doesn't have to be taught to eat or drink. But what about those machines, like automobiles and computers, which are not the direct objects of natural desire and are utterly baffling to the ignorant man? Harris simply says that "We would want to relearn how to use and repair many of our machines", but this only follows on the assumption that we not only know what the machines are for, but that we know that the ends for which they can be used are valuable. But the ignorant man doesn't know such things. Even something as simple as a toothbrush; how will we know what it is for and that it is important to brush our teeth? We will be as ignorant of dental hygiene as anything else.

Necessity drives the quest for knowledge only so far. The necessities of life can be met without knowing most of what modern man knows, as demonstrated by civilizations throughout history. Most civilizations reach a certain level of knowledge and then stay there indefinitely, as Chinese civilization had not significantly changed for thousands of years prior to its encounter with the Western world in early modernity. The civilizations of Polynesia and Africa similarly puttered along serenely for thousands of years at the same level of knowledge and technology, and probably would have continued doing so had they not met Western man and his startling technology.

No, Harris does not have it quite right. In the utterly ignorant state he supposes, we would see no need to learn that Jesus was born of a virgin or was resurrected. But neither would we see a need to learn how to use computers, or to learn the scientific method, or to learn much more than is necessary to maintain a basic level of civilization that allows us to survive. That is the general lesson of history. Even the civilization of Socrates and Aristotle that became aware of its own ignorance (but not exactly what it was ignorant of), never really took off. Philosophers felt the hunger for knowledge, but their hunger was always viewed as eccentric and never qualified the civilization as a whole.

In only one civilization, at one moment in history, was this pattern broken and man came to know things far beyond the necessities of survival. That civilization, as it happens, is also the civilization that was founded on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is not unreasonable for us to suspect that there is a connection between these two facts. Perhaps it is only because we knew that Jesus was born of a virgin and was resurrected that we later came to know things like automobiles and dental hygiene.

The Church was commanded by Jesus Christ to teach the Gospel throughout the world, that the "repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name to all the nations..." Now you can preach the Gospel to all nations only if you, in fact, know all nations and are able to get to them. The Christian Gospel in its origin involves a divine summons to know and explore the world. Tradition holds that many of the Apostles died in foreign lands (e.g. St. Thomas in India, I believe). It isn't long after his conversion that Paul, the first great missionary, sets out from the Palestine he had known his whole life to tramp to the ends of the Roman Empire. The Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles are basically a travelogue of Paul's journeys around the Empire.

The outward-looking and exploratory character of Western civilization owes its origin to Jesus Christ. Western man did not develop the science and technology necessary to understand the world simply as an end in itself; he developed it as a means to achieving the religious mission to which he had been set by God. You can preach to the ends of the Earth only if you have the ships and navigational technique to get there.

But there is something more than this. Jesus Christ is the Word made Flesh. He is Knowledge Itself made flesh. So to know Jesus Christ, we must know the Flesh of which He is made. It follows that knowing the world is also a way of knowing God. More than this, we can't know God unless we truly know the world. Throughout Christian history, there has always been this dual aspect to the quest for knowledge: Knowing the world is not only good for its own sake, but we know and glorify God in coming to know the world He has made. Christian man cannot rest in knowing enough to know how to survive; he has been given a divine summons to explore the world and know it so that he not only can preach the Gospel, but also that he may know God more fully.

What about the natural slavery I mentioned at the beginning of this essay? Sam Harris mentions some things to which "we could never return with a clear conscience." Among them he mentions the caste system and slavery. As I remarked in that earlier post, it is only Christian-inspired Western civilization that has actively abolished slavery. All other civilizations, illuminated only by the light of natural knowledge, never saw anything wrong with slavery per se. So in Harris's hypothesized state of utter ignorance, we would be utterly ignorant of the immorality of slavery. And given that non-Christian civilizations never arrive at the conclusion that slavery in and of itself is wrong, we can safely suppose that neither in Harris's hypothesis would we ever conclude that slavery is wrong, no matter how much science and technology we relearned. We might return to slavery but we would do it with a clear conscience, for our conscience would be ignorant.

Natural slavery

We are all familiar with the fact that Aristotle thought that some people are natural slaves. But I don’t think we always think through the full implications of what Aristotle was saying.

For Aristotle, nature is the active, vital principle in something that makes it what it is. It is the fundamental driving force that directs an organism’s development in one direction rather than another. To say that someone is a natural slave, then, means that his nature tends toward slavery. In a real but perhaps unconscious manner, he desires to be a slave. Just as a ball will naturally roll down a hill unless something prevents it from doing so, so the natural slave will gravitate toward slavery unless something prevents him from doing so.

Now it was self-evident for Aristotle that nature should be fulfilled rather than thwarted. If some people are natural slaves, then it is right and good that their natures should be fulfilled in slavery. Before we leap up in outrage, we should understand that Aristotle means by “slavery” something a bit different than what we normally understand by it. When we think of “slavery”, we think of the modern institution of pure exploitation. We think of the Spanish capturing Africans and dragging them to the New World to work on plantations until they dropped. The Spanish, as well as the later English, Dutch and American slave traders, were not motivated by an Aristotelian understanding of slavery. They were motivated by the lure of pure profit and the slaves were entirely expendable in pursuit of that profit.

Aristotle’s understanding of slavery is not that of an institution of simple exploitation. It is something that should work for the benefit of both master and slave. It is an example of the “ruler/ruled” relationship that Aristotle finds everywhere in life; he sees the master/slave relationship as analogous with the father/son relationship. If we must find a modern image of Aristotelian slavery, then probably the best is the “noble obligation” that British colonialists felt in their rule over India. The British thought that their superiority of culture gave them the right to conquer and rule over India, but also that it carried with it the obligation to rule for the benefit of the Indians as well as themselves; a very Aristotelian view of things.

My point in the present essay is not to argue whether the Aristotelian institution of slavery is just, or whether the British rule of India was ultimately good or bad for that subcontinent. It is to ask the question: Was Aristotle right that some people are natural slaves?

I have argued in an earlier post that most people want to be told what to do. That is an admission, I suppose, that I believe Aristotle was right that there are such things as natural slaves; even that most people are by nature slaves. But that doesn’t mean that I am any less dedicated to the proposition that all men should be free. It does mean that I think that making men free, and keeping them that way, is a lot harder than we suppose it to be. We are running against the grain of their natures.

If some men are by nature slaves, and nature should be fulfilled rather than thwarted, then how do we avoid Aristotle’s conclusion that slavery is just or, at least, that it is inevitable? There is one possibility: Men must be given a new nature, a nature that is naturally free rather than inclined to slavery. This is the nature that Jesus Christ offers us through being re-born in Him. It is in this way that the Gospel is the true foundation of every kind of freedom in the world, including political freedom. It is also the reason that, as Christianity declines in the Western world, political freedom declines with it. Western man is returning to his old nature of a natural slave. In his depths he no longer desires to be free, but only that someone will tell him what to do and relieve him of the burdens of freedom.

It is often remarked that nowhere in the New Testament is there an explicit condemnation of the institutions of slavery. This is because Jesus Christ was after a much deeper target; he was after the natural slavery that is in the heart of every man. An attack on the public institutions of slavery is meaningless without a change in the natural inclination man has toward slavery; a new institution of slavery would soon be built on the rubble of the last. Once man’s original slave-nature is re-born in the free-nature found in Jesus Christ, conventional slavery will eventually disappear as a matter of course; for it will no longer be based on nature. Western history bears this out. The Western world once took slavery for granted, as every civilization has, but the Western world is the only one that eventually actively abolished it; and that for the reason that it had become unnatural.

We see the beginnings of true freedom in the Book of Exodus. Moses leads the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt, but it is by way of summons and command. Many times they demand that Moses turn back; they want to go back to slavery in Egypt. They are still natural slaves. But God forces them out of slavery and into freedom; a feat of such irony that only God could pull it off. God’s Law is a law of freedom but it is not perceived as such. One day in seven must be set aside from the demands of the world and be a day of rest. It is, in fact, a day of true freedom, a day of freedom for slaves as well as masters.

The Old Testament is a preparation for the true freedom that is found in Jesus Christ, the true freedom that can only be found by being re-born in a new nature. The nature of this new freedom is wonderfully expressed in St. Paul’s letter to Philemon. Paul does not demand that Philemon free Onesimus. He does not attack the institution of slavery directly. But he asks Philemon to reconsider the meaning of slavery in light of the new life into which he, Paul and Onesimus have been born.

For perhaps he was therefore parted from thee for a season, that thou shouldest have him for ever; no longer as a servant, but more than a servant, a brother beloved, specially to me, but how much rather to thee, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

Onesimus was once just “a servant”, a natural slave. Now he is “more than a servant”, a man born into a new freedom in Jesus Christ, and Paul asks Philemon to respect that freedom. What meaning can conventional slavery have when its foundation in natural slavery has been overthrown by Christ? Paul is not asking Philemon to go against the grain of nature. He is asking Philemon to fulfill what has now become natural for Paul, Philemon and Onesimus: To be free.