Common Sense Realism and Modern Philosophy

Common Sense Realism 

I call "common sense realism" any philosophy that takes ordinary experience as generally reliable. I consider myself a common sense realist, and I will use CSR as a shorthand for "common sense realism."

The designation "common sense realism" has some use in the history of philosophy, particularly with respect to Scottish philosophers including Thomas Reid, but I'm using the term for my own purposes independent of that history.

We all follow CSR in everyday life. Everyone goes through life taking for granted, most of the time, that what is presented to his senses is the way things are. They see the sun and don't doubt it is the sun they are seeing, they hit a baseball and don't doubt that the bat caused the baseball to fly, and they greet their wife not doubting that she is the same woman they greeted yesterday. This holds true for modern philosophers of the skeptical, analytical or Kantian variety as much as it did for Aristotle. 

The greatest advantage of CSR, an advantage I find nearly decisive, is that when reflecting philosophically on experience, CSR doesn't demand that the philosopher toss everyday certainties out the window. The philosophy he develops is the same philosophy by which he lives everyday.  He avoids the fracturing between life and thought that inspired the title of this blog. 

That fracturing was puzzling when I noticed it in college philosophy classes. We discussed what might be believed or doubted with respect to our experience and our morality, but those philosophical beliefs and doubts seemed to have little to do with how any of us, students or professors, actually conducted ourselves outside of class. This impression of philosophy proved enduring, and I developed the "private book" vs "public book" distinction to describe it. 

Organized crime keeps two sets of accounting books, the public book it presents to the courts and investigators, and the private book it keeps hidden that is the true account of the organization's finances.  Similarly, philosophers seemed to have a "public book" that reflected their "official" philosophy they presented in class and in journals, and a "private book" of beliefs by which they actually ran their lives. It was only many years later and after reading certain philosophers - especially Kierkegaard - that I began to understand that this fracturing was not accidental.

Prior to the modern era - which I will define with usual starting point of Descartes - the mainstream of the philosophical tradition followed CSR.  But there were exceptions. The Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, noticing the constantly changing nature of the material world, concluded that flux was metaphysically basic and that CSR was mistaken. CSR says the river behind my house today is the same river it was yesterday, but Heraclitus would insist this is an illusion: You can't step into the same river twice. On the other hand, the philosopher Parmenides, seeing that nothing comes from nothing, and that being is and non-being is not, concluded that change is an illusion and that reality is static, since any change from non-being to being would be an instance of something coming from nothing. These philosophers did something that would become recurrent throughout history: They saw part of the truth but became so captured by it that they ignored the rest of the truth. 

What distinguishes Heraclitus and Parmenides from CSR philosophers is that the former ended up insisting that ordinary experience is at bottom an illusion. We might think things endure through time, that the tree in my yard yesterday is the same tree that is there today, but Heraclitus would tell us that I'm naive to think so. I might think that tree grew from a sapling over the years, but Parmenides would deny that it had ever really changed at all. 

The most famous and enduring CSR philosopher is Aristotle. Against Heraclitus, Aristotle noted that if everything was in flux, then there would be no possibility of knowing the truth. And since we manifestly do know some truth, that position cannot be correct. Against Parmenides, Aristotle pointed out that change is a manifest aspect of reality, which his position denies. His developed response to these philosophers resulted in the hylomorphic theory of being, the distinction between matter and form.

But what makes Aristotle a CSR philosopher is not his hylomorphism, however.  Hylomorphism is just one way to develop a CSR philosophy.  Aristotle was a CSR philosopher because he defended ordinary experience against radical skepticism. He gives an expression of CSR in his Metaphysics:

There are, both among those who have these convictions and among those who merely profess these views, some who raise a difficulty by asking, who is to be the judge of the healthy man, and in general who is likely to judge rightly on each class of questions. But such inquiries are like puzzling over the question whether we are now asleep or awake. And all such questions have the same meaning. These people demand that a reason shall be given for everything; for they seek a starting-point, and they seek to get this by demonstration, while it is obvious from their actions that they have no conviction. But their mistake is what we have stated it to be; they seek a reason for things for which no reason can be given; for the starting-point of demonstration is not demonstration. (Metaphysics, Book IV, Ch. 6)

Aristotle criticizes his opponents by saying that "it is obvious from their actions that they have no conviction."  How do we interpret this? Notice that he compares his opponents to those who wonder whether they are asleep or awake. Such people typically behave as though they know very well that they are awake. If they thought they truly might be in a dream then they would struggle to wake up. But they don't struggle. In fact, they behave as though they had no doubt they are awake. Their doubt has no conviction and need not be taken seriously.

For the CSR philosopher, the lack of conviction in such objections is enough to dismiss them. Philosophy for him is not a game, a hobby, or merely something to teach in the classroom, a way to make money. It is the penetration of life with reason, this life, the one I am actually living. He is always on guard to prevent the fracturing of his life with his thought.  No one can get through life with the conviction that everything is in flux, or that change is impossible. The only way to hold such positions is to fracture life and thought, to live by one philosophy and think by another. 

The Modern Philosophical Era

I noted earlier that prior to the modern era the mainstream of philosophers were CSR.  What distinguishes the modern era is that philosophers are typically not CSR. In fact, very often a modern philosopher develops his philosophy specifically as a rejection of CSR. If for the CSR philosopher the greatest sin is to lack conviction (i.e. to allow a fracture between life and thought), for the modern philosopher the greatest sin is to be "naive", and CSR philosophers are at the top of the list of naive philosophers as far as modern philosophers are concerned. 

Over the years the modern philosophical view has percolated through the culture, down to the level of the ordinary man. At that level it manifests itself in an impression that the business of the philosopher is to doubt everything, or to hold eccentric views that challenge the common sense of the ordinary man. The philosopher is the man who has "seen through" the naive dogmas and prejudices of the ordinary man to the truth beyond it.

Descartes established the pattern for modern philosophers and can be taken as the starting point for philosophy in its distinctively modern sense.  Although subsequent philosophers rejected many of his specific conclusions, the general form Descartes gave to modern philosophy has persisted. 

As a young man surveying the education he had received, the impression Descartes had was that the centuries of classical philosophy had produced nothing of any certainty. The philosophers were still arguing the same points they always had:

Concerning philosophy I shall say only that, seeing that it has been cultivated for many centuries by the most excellent minds that have ever lived and that, nevertheless, there still is nothing in it about which there is not some dispute, and consequently nothing that is not doubtful... I deemed everything that was merely probable to be well-nigh false. (Discourse on Method, Part One)

 He conceived a way out of this (alleged) futility: He would embark on a campaign of radical doubt, not accepting anything unless it could be demonstrated with absolute certainty:

,,, I thought it necessary that I do exactly the opposite, and that I reject as absolutely false everything in which I could imagine the least doubt, in order to see whether, after this process, something in my beliefs remained that was entirely indubitable. Thus, because our senses sometimes deceive us, I wanted to suppose that nothing was exactly as they led us to imagine... (Discourse on Method, Part 4)

We may note that the campaign of doubt on which Descartes began may not be as straightforward as he imagined.  Remember that Descartes was led to his radical doubt because he concluded from the history of classical philosophy that it was futile. Well, if he's going to doubt everything that might be doubted, should not his conclusions with respect to classical philosophy be doubted? Maybe classical philosophy wasn't as futile as he supposed. Perhaps his own understanding of it was worthy of doubt.  We may recall the following passage from Plato's Phaedo, where Socrates addresses the frustration his friends felt at their inability to arrive at a conclusive argument with respect to the nature of the soul:

Well, then, Phaedo, he [Socrates] said, supposing that there is an argument which is true and valid and capable of being discovered, if anyone nevertheless, through his experience of these arguments which seen to the same people to be sometimes true and sometimes false, attached no responsibility to himself and his lack of technical ability, but was finally content, in exasperation, to shift the blame from himself to the arguments, and spent the rest of his life loathing and decrying them, and so missed the chance of knowing the truth about reality - would it not be a deplorable thing? 

But Descartes chose to doubt the whole of the philosophical tradition rather than himself. We might also note that Descartes's assertion that "our senses sometimes deceive us" is not an expression of doubt but rather of knowledge, for an instance of deception that is known as such really isn't an instance of deception, and anyways witnesses to the more general case of the reliability of the senses. For instance, a straw seen in a glass of water appears bent to us due to the refraction of light at the boundary between air and the water. We take the straw out of of the water and we see that it is straight. We might classify the former case as an instance of our eyes "deceiving" us, but that conclusion only stands on a conviction that in the latter case our eyes are not deceiving us. 

That all notwithstanding, Descartes's method of doubt eventually led him to the one proposition that he thought could withstand doubt: An assertion of his own existence. He must exist in order to be deceived, and so I think therefore I am,  the famous Cogito Ergo Sum.

The Cogito is sometimes interpreted as the first proposition that Descartes "could not doubt." That is not quite correct. It is the first proposition that Descartes found could withstand doubt. For Descartes definitely doubted it. He just overcame that doubt with an argument: If he is deceived, he must exist to be deceived, therefore he exists. 

Descartes congratulated himself on making a novel discovery with the Cogito, but in fact all he had done was rediscover a metaphysical principle well known to CSR philosophers: Being is prior to act. The assertion of an act implies the existence of the being for whom it is an act. Flute playing implies a flute player, thinking implies a thinker, dancing implies a dancer, and deception implies one who is deceived.  

Where the CSR philosopher differs from Descartes is in recognizing that this metaphysical principle is something immediately known through experience, not something that is known only after surviving trial by doubt. As soon as someone sees and hears a flute player, he knows that the flute playing depends on the flute player and would not exist without him. He knows it so immediately that his mind ordinarily does not stop to reflect on the fact but moves on to other things. All the CSR philosopher does is slow the mind down to conscious reflection on the elements known through experience, elements that the mind normally glosses over in favor of more pressing things requiring attention.  The fact that the mind normally glosses over basic metaphysical principles immediately known to it in no way makes them doubtful; Thinking it does is a mistake at the heart of modern philosophy.

Philosophy and Method

While subsequent philosophers rejected many of Descartes's specific conclusions, they embraced his basic approach. Specifically, that philosophy must begin with method. Thinkers at the time, in the 17th and 18th centuries, were understandably impressed with the successes of the new scientific approach that was unlocking the secrets of nature.  The new science exploded many things thought to be true based on an Aristotelian approach and brought the Aristotelian tradition as a whole into question. Aristotle, for instance, taught that objects like stones fall toward the center of the Earth because that is their natural place to be as heavy objects, as opposed to light objects like fire that travel away from the center towards the periphery. The developing science of Newton, however, not only explained the motion of objects much more fruitfully and accurately than an Aristotelian approach, but did so in a way that seemed to dispense with Aristotelian notions, like final and formal causes, entirely.

Philosophers noticed the emphasis on method in the new science and, hoping to mimic science's success, made again the mistake that recurs in the history of philosophy: The mistake of absolutizing an aspect of the truth into the whole of the truth. In this case, they took the newly discovered truth concerning the methods of modern science, which does in fact provide a new and reliable way of interpreting empirical nature,  to imply that all thought must start with method to be reliable.

This is where they agreed with Descartes. Where they disagreed is just what the appropriate method for philosophy should be. Descartes thought it was his method of "universal doubt."  Locke proposed instead his "plain, historical method", which was highly influential and colored much of the discussion of method in philosophy after him, including the philosophy of David Hume. Ultimately there came the method of "critical philosophy" of Immanuel Kant, a monumental attempt to get at what might be described as a "method of methods" in thought.

It's understandable why there was such disagreement over what constituted the proper method of philosophy.  For if we can only trust our thought when it is disciplined by method, then the thought that determines method is unreliable, since it is necessarily prior to method and therefore undisciplined. In one of the many ironies generated by modern philosophy, the method by which modern philosophy would transcend the alleged uncertainty of CSR could itself only be determined by thought in a gray zone that was, if anything, even more uncertain than CSR. Descartes, naturally, was the first to operate in the gray zone when he justified his adoption of the method of universal doubt by a biographical account of his subjective impression of classical philosophy. 

The lesson subsequent philosophers took from Descartes was not to mimic his universal doubt, but  that they were as free as Descartes to operate in the gray zone and establish philosophy on a method of their own invention. The most notable of these was  John Locke and his empiricist "plain, historical method."  Locke's selection of method became very influential, perhaps because it was explicitly developed to support the new science that had so impressed the 17th and 18th centuries.

Science and Philosophy

In their haste to learn lessons from the newly developing science, philosophers overlooked a few important features of science. The most important of these is that scientists themselves, in conducting science, operated in the common sense world of CSR.  When Galileo looked through his telescope at the moons of Jupiter, he took for granted that his telescope was what his common sense thought it was, that the dots of light he observed in the sky represented celestial objects that were the same objects he had observed the night before, and that various other common sense notions of cause and effect were reliable. He did not think that his vision of Jupiter was actually a blob of color organized by his mind into something resembling a planet, and having only a dubious relationship to external reality,

To doubt CSR is to doubt the basis on which science is actually conducted. The skeptical arguments of David Hume were most devastating in this regard. Hume argued that from a strictly empirical perspective, we see through our eyes colors and shapes, but we do not see causes that link one thing to another, nor do we see the substance that is claimed to be the basis of enduring identity.  I see a tree in my yard today and remember seeing a tree there yesterday, but what I do not see is the principle that this is the same tree as yesterday. I see the brick thrown at the window and the window shatter, but I do not see the brick caused the window to shatter.  The enduring identity of the tree on the one hand, and the causal link between the thrown brick and the shattered glass on the other were, Hume claimed, but "habits of the mind" developed through repetition rather than empirical principles read off sense data.

The response of CSR to Hume is that while empirical data comes through the senses, it doesn't follow that everything in that data is grasped by the senses, any more than your mailman knows the contents of all (or any) of your packages. The senses themselves grasp being in its material particularity; the intellect grasps the universal nature of being encountered through the senses. It is the intellect that knows that the same tree I see today is the same as yesterday, not the senses. 

Hume's skeptical empiricism pulls the rug out from empirical science, as was recognized by perhaps the greatest of Enlightenment philosophers, Immanuel Kant. Kant wanted to preserve the certainty of science, as well as establish philosophy on a permanently firm foundation. Rather than propose yet another philosophical method developed more or less arbitrarily, the variety of which proved that philosophers had yet to penetrate to the depths of the problem, Kant took the analysis to another level with what he called the a priori in his "critical philosophy." The a priori seeks to get behind experience to explore the conditions that make experience itself possible in the first place. The endurance of identity over time, for instance, which we might give the name substance,  isn't a concept our minds draw from experience already given to us, whether legitimately (as CSR holds) or illegitimately (as Hume held.)  Kant argues that it is a condition we must presuppose for there to be any experience at all. In that sense it is far more certain than Hume imagined. 

Thought and Being

What is fascinating about Kant is that in developing his critical philosophy, he reconstructs much of the Aristotelian infrastructure, only instead of basing it in being, he bases it in presuppositions of thought. In other words, instead of being out there in the world, it is only inside our heads as something we must assume. This is the result of denying the reality of the human intellect's relationship to being.

We might ask why we should go through the arduous journey of critical philosophy (Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is no easy read) only to arrive back at Aristotle, and an Aristotle that is imprisoned in our own minds. Kant's answer was that the limits of reason had now been firmly established and philosophers were no longer in danger of making the metaphysical mistakes of the classical philosophers. Philosophers were no longer "naive."

Looking at philosophical history post-Kant however, that basis wasn't established nearly as solidly as Kant thought. From an even loftier "meta" level, Kant's efforts look like just another attempt to find an absolute starting point to philosophy, not essentially different from Descartes's. 

This brings full circle the philosophical project begun by Descartes. The basic mistake Descartes made, putting thought prior to being, became the fundamental move of modern philosophy. It remains to ask why such a mistake is so tempting. Since being is in truth prior to thought, the answer should be an answer in terms of being, and being's implications for thought.

Man's being is that of a rational animal. He is animal insofar as he is a material being existing in time and space. He is rational insofar as he has an intellect capable of knowing universal being. Your dog encounters this tree and that tree in its life, but does not know each tree as expressing the universal nature of tree that your intellect grasps.

The incarnate aspect of man's rationality has significant consequences. Through his senses his intellect grasps being, but it is only this or that being of the contingent objects encountered in experience. The mind grasps the being of this tree as one tree among many, true, and as the same tree as yesterday.  But it also sees that the being of the tree does not account for itself. There are mysteries at the heart of contingent being: Why do this tree and that tree share the mutual nature of tree? Just what is the universal nature of tree?  The tree yesterday and today persists in its being, but there is nothing in the nature of tree as such that seems to make it so.

The classical philosopher does not see these questions as reasons to doubt the intuition of being itself, i.e. common sense is not overthrown simply because it is not perfectly transparent. Instead he uses these intuitions of being to demonstrate the reality of Absolute Being (i.e. God) that underwrites the contingent beings of our experience.  The proofs in this regard are relatively straightforward and pretty much unassailable given CSR.  That is why atheist philosophies since the early modern era find that in attacking the existence of God, they must first attack the existence of common sense.

Be that as it may, the temptation to which modern philosophies succumb when faced with the opacity in contingent being is to fall back on the clarity the mind has in its own ideas. It may be mysterious why the tree yesterday continues to be the same tree today, but it is no longer mysterious if I assume that my mind generated the persistent identity; there is nothing more in the idea than what my mind put there. Problem solved.

Only it isn't solved, only denied, and at the cost of destroying common sense and fracturing life and thought. 

Thus, even those who appreciate the metaphysical depths of Thomism in other matters have expressed surprise that he does not deal at all with what many now think the main metaphysical question; whether we can prove that the primary act of recognition of any reality is real. The answer is that St. Thomas recognized instantly, what so many modern skeptics have begun to suspect rather laboriously; that a man must either answer that question in the affirmative, or else never answer any question, never ask any question, never even exist intellectually, to answer or to ask. - G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

Commentary on Jay Dyer / Trent Horn Debate

Jay Dyer's opening is a "kitchen sink" approach. There seemed to be no overarching argument, but a mass of references to history and philosophers cited as skeptics of natural theology. Trent Horn's seemed more tightly organized and structured.

The one thing Dyer did put a lot of stock in was that the word "God" is not a "rigid designator", which means that not everyone uses the word God to refer to exactly the same thing. He uses this to dismiss Horn's numerous references to saints and theologians throughout history who apparently argued from natural facts to God. But it doesn't matter if the theologians throughout history didn't agree on the precise meaning of "God."  What they did agree on is that knowledge of a transcendent, "first principle of all things" could in some measure be obtained by reflection on the natural world.  In other words, they thought it possible to go from natural facts about the world to facts transcending the world. Disagreement with regard to the precise conclusions of that investigation doesn't invalidate the process any more than disagreement about the facts with respect to the Battle of Hastings invalidates history as a legitimate project of research. 

48:00: Horn refers to the statement "I exist" as a self-evident truth. 

49:31: Dyer references Horn's submission of  "I exist" as self-evident and interprets Horn in a Cartesian manner. He then subjects the Cartesian Cogito to all the skeptical arguments from modern philosophers. Horn should have objected to this and pointed out that medievals like Thomas Aquinas meant something quite different than moderns do about self-evident propositions, and that Horn meant it Thomistically and not in the manner of Descartes. 

Descartes did not think his own existence was self-evident in the manner of Thomas Aquinas. He doubted it like everything else in his method of "universal doubt."  It was only after arguing through his doubts that Descartes was able to affirm his own existence. This is what Dyer jumps on. He thinks that Descartes was unsuccessful in dispelling all doubts concerning the proposition "I exist", and since Descartes failed, Horn must fail as well.

But for classical philosophers like Aquinas, a self-evident truth is a truth that is immediately known and stands as its own witness, not one that can only be affirmed after surviving skeptical scrutiny.  The classical philosophers were aware that it was possible, in an artificial way,  to doubt propositions like "I exist."  Where they differ from modern philosophers is that even if such a proposition could be doubted, they didn't think it should be doubted. In other words, they did not think doubt self-justifying (which is a modern conceit.)  Doubt can be doubted like anything else.  The classical philosophers did not doubt their own existence because no one in his right mind does so.

Consider the Dyer/Horn debate itself. Trent Horn and Jay Dyer go online, engage a moderater, and argue with each other for almost two hours. Now suppose after two hours of debate one of them criticizes the other's position on the grounds that he hasn't justified his belief that either one of them exists. The modern philosopher furrows his brow at this devastating rejoinder, and starts flipping through his Descartes and Kant to find an answer.  Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, bursts out laughing. For what greater comedy could there be than two philosophers debating whether they exist to hold the debate?

For the uninitiated, these are the lengths needed to avoid Natural Theological conclusions.  The unwary clicks on a debate concerning Natural Theology and thinks it will involve doubting the existence of God. That seems like something that might be doubted. I can't see God, after all, like I can see tables and chairs or myself in a mirror, and it can't be proven like the law of gravity. But he discovers that necessary to the case against natural theology is not just doubt of God's existence, but his own existence as well, something he never considered doubtful or in need of justification. If he persists, he might also discover that the tables and chairs he thinks are self-evidently there are no longer solid. They may just be constructions his mind puts on sense data, which itself bears only a dubious relationship to external reality. They might only be presuppositions he needs to get on with life.  

After all this, it might seem to the individual that the pummeling of the world of common sense is an awfully high price to pay to avoid Natural Theology. It was a price, however, that the early modern philosophers were willing to pay. People with no education in philosophy have a general impression that the modern world "disproved" the arguments of the classical philosophers. That never happened. The early modern philosophers did not engage the classical philosophers and refute them, but instead dismissed them for their own varied reasons. Descartes, for example, in Part One of his Discourse on Method, dismisses classical philosophy in these words:

Concerning philosophy I shall say only that, seeing that it has been cultivated for many centuries by the most excellent minds that haver ever lived and that, nevertheless, there still is nothing in it about which there is not some dispute, and consequently nothing that is not doubtful... I deemed everything that was merely probable to be well-nigh false.

This "argument from dispute" is an obvious non-sequitur, for arguments stand on their own merits and do not become more or less reasonable for being disputed. But it does relieve Descartes from the long and laborious task of actually reading and understanding the philosophers before dismissing them.

Whatever their motives, the early modern philosophers were united in restarting philosophy on a basis that would exclude the classical "dialog of opinion" they were convinced was fruitless. Their philosophy was designed to preclude the Natural Theology that Horn is advocating.  So Jay Dyer is correct to point out that, under modern philosophical assumptions, Natural Theology is a non-starter. It couldn't be otherwise. Trent Horn should not allow Dyer to recast his arguments into modernist terms. 

52 minutes: "I exist" presupposes that language has meaning, presupposes time determination". "The business of philosophy is to question assumptions." Is that one of the assumptions we can question? Classically, philosophy is the "love of wisdom", and part of wisdom is knowing when to doubt and when not to doubt.

1:00. Sense data. properly basic beliefs. Horn allows Dyer to recast his position into modernist terms. 

1:01:56 Dyer: "that rests on the assumption that the external world is properly caused to impress on your sense organs"

Here we have the basic modernist position on human nature. Compare it with the classical understanding. The ordinary individual, looking out his window, sees a tree. Thomas Aquinas analyzes this occurrence philosophically. He doesn't doubt that the person actually saw a tree. He asks, what is implied about reality in the fact of his seeing a tree? He notes that this isn't the only tree the person has seen, there are other beings encountered that are also trees. What about reality answers to the fact that we can call both these things trees? The analysis of being into form and matter follows. 

The modern philosopher thinks this is all terribly naive because Aquinas didn't start by doubting whether the man was actually seeing a tree at all.  The modern thinks that the only thing we can safely say is that the man is seeing "sense data", i.e. blobs of color that his mind organizes into shapes and then he names. This opens a gap between the mind and reality that the modern philosopher uses to reject classical Natural Theology, but then hopes to cross himself for other purposes. The attempt is futile since he burned the bridge in his first step, and so is only left with presupposing rather than knowing that one thing or another has any basis in reality.

The difference with Thomas Aquinas is that Aquinas refused to burn the bridge in the first place. When the man looks out his window he sees a tree, not a blob of colors his mind turns into a tree. This is the philosophical truth of what is going on regardless of the biomechanics underlying the process. This is why the man can know metaphysical first principles, because he knows things through his senses.

Now someone may dispute with Aquinas on this. But Dyer seems to take modern skepticism as self-justifying. Simply because Hume doubted the relationship of cause to effect we must ourselves doubt the relationship of cause to effect. We do not. The classical philosopher is perfectly justified in rejecting such skepticism until the modernist makes a positive case for it. This is what Dyer needs to do if he is to provide an argument against Natural Theology, rather than simply assuming modernist philosophical assumptions that were designed to undermine it.

Aquinas's Second Way

 Aquinas's Second Way to prove the existence of God (from newadvent.org):

The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.

A common way to interpret this passage is to claim that Aquinas is talking about per se causal series in this argument, not per accidens causal series. A per se causal series is one in which the later causes depend on the prior causes essentially; that is, the later causes stop causing when the prior causes stop causing. The standard example is an arm pushing a stick pushing a rock. When the arm stops pushing, the stick stops pushing the rock. 

This is contrasted with the per accidens causal series, in which the later causes can continue causing even when the prior causes cease. The example here is Abraham begetting Isaac. Isaac himself can beget even if Abraham dies. He doesn't cease being causal when his own cause ceases.

The reason Aquinas is generally interpreted as speaking of per se causal series in this argument is that he also famously held that per accidens efficient causal series could in fact be infinite. He thought the world in principle could be eternal, although he thought it in fact had a beginning because of Scripture. 

But I'm not sure we have to interpret Aquinas this way. Consider a series of dominos knocking themselves down. We can ask of any particular domino: What caused it to fall? And we answer: The domino prior to it in the series. And we can ask of that domino what caused it to fall, and again we get the answer: The domino prior to it in the series.

Suppose the row of dominos only consists of one domino. What is the answer to the question What caused the domino to fall? Since there is only one domino, the answer is: Something external to the row of dominos itself. Suppose the row of dominos consists of two dominos. The second domino falls as a consequence of the first domino falling, and with that first domino, we are left in exactly the same place as we were with the row consisting of a single domino. Something outside of the row of dominos itself must have caused it to fall. The only thing the additional domino did in the row of two dominos vs the single domino is simply to displace the question to another domino. It did nothing to answer the essential question.

Now consider a row of dominos of arbitrary length. What do all those extra dominos do as far as answering the essential causal question? They do nothing other than displace the question from one domino to the next. Even were the row of dominos infinite, all that would do is displace the question an infinite distance. It wouldn't get us one inch closer to answering the question of what caused the dominos to fall than we were with the one or two domino series. So the fact that a per accidens causal series might be infinite in length is irrelevant to the causal question asked in Aquinas's Second Way.

Suppose God created a world with an infinite series of dominos in it, that is in the process of falling. In the act of creation, he would have to pick one or more dominos somewhere in the series to get the falling process rolling. Call that domino D1. God creates D1 in the state of falling. Now God could create all dominos prior to D1 in the fallen state, and all dominos after D1 in the standing state. Were he to create all the dominos in a standing state, then the row of dominos would remain in the standing state eternally, whatever its length. Looking at the series after the fact of creation, we see an infinite series of fallen dominos disappearing in the distance in one direction, and an infinite series of standing dominos in the other direction, with the dominos in front of us in the process of falling. This might give us the illusion that the dominos were falling forever and therefore had no need of an exterior cause to get the process of falling going. But that is a distraction. Whether they were falling forever or not, something external to the row of dominos itself was the ultimate origin of the state of falling.

I think it is important to note that the "first efficient cause" in the series can't be just another efficient cause. If it were, then it would need the same prior causal explanation that all the other efficient causes did. The "first efficient cause" must be something over and beyond the causes in the series in question. The point of Aquinas's proofs, after all, is to show that nature points beyond itself to a supernatural origin. In this case, the series of efficient causes in nature points beyond itself to a "first efficient cause" that jumpstarts the efficient causal series that we experience in nature.

Doubting doubt

The thing about doubt is that it never stands alone. Doubt of one thing inevitably involves affirmation of something else. Often the doubter doesn't acknowledge the implied affirmation or is simply unaware of it.

Take solipsism for example. I can doubt that there is an external world and that I am the only thing in existence. No one can prove that I'm wrong because any evidence submitted might simply be a creation of my own mind. 

Instead of trying to prove the solipsist wrong, let's see what is implied in his view if taken seriously. I now know calculus, but there was a time when I didn't. I remember being a freshman in high school and looking through my elder brother's calculus book. It contained a lot of funny symbols and complicated math I didn't understand. A few years later, I took calculus myself and the symbols and math became clear.

If solipsism is true, then everything in this history is a creation of my own mind. The book with the symbols I didn't understand as a freshman was a creation of my mind. So were my later calculus teacher, my calculus homework, and my calculus tests. Indeed, calculus itself is a creation of my own mind. 

So at one point my mind created a book with funny symbols that I didn't understand, which I only later understood through calculus class. Yet the symbols only make sense in light of calculus, which I didn't understand at the time my mind (supposedly) created the calculus book. Was calculus then a creation of my subconscious mind, and calculus class but a devious way my mind tricks itself into thinking it learned something which it really knew all along? We have to believe something like this if we are to take solipsism seriously. 

Beyond the bizarre stories implied concerning personal history, there is the simple fact that solipsism implies that I was the creator of calculus. Calculus is among the greatest mathematical achievements in history and is generally credited to the geniuses Newton and Leibniz. But on the solipsistic hypothesis these gentlemen are fictions of my mind, and in fact I am the inventor of calculus.  

And it's not just his calculus that I'm claiming from Newton. I've got his physics as well. Also the electrodynamics of Maxwell, the relativity of Einstein, and the quantum mechanics of Heisenberg - even though I barely made it through QM in college.  They are all creations of my mind.

We don't need to stop with science, either. I also wrote the plays of Shakespeare, the symphonies of Bach and Beethoven, and painted the Sistine Chapel. Not really, of course, only in my mind, but it seems all the more impressive to execute a classical painting purely in the imagination. 

So what are we left with? Solipsism implies doubt of the external world, which means the external world is a creation of my mind, which means my mind is greater than the sum of all the geniuses in history.

Is that possible? Perhaps. Is it something we can doubt? I would hope so; in fact, any sane person should doubt it.  

Solipsism is doubt of the external world coupled with a titanic affirmation of the self.

All doubt operates like this. So when we consider doubting something, we should bring into consideration the affirmations implied in the doubt.

An Interpretation of John 8:1-11

This is the famous story of the woman caught in adultery.

Of enduring interest in the interpretation of this passage is what Jesus wrote on the ground in John 8:6 and 8:8. The verses only tell us that he wrote; they don't indicate what was written.

So then what was written? Ultimately we can only speculate. There are two popular suggestions (at least these are the most common I have heard).  The first is that Jesus wasn't writing anything in particular. He was doodling, an indication of his disinterest, even boredom, in the Pharisees' zeal to condemn the woman. The second is that Jesus was writing down the sins of the individual Pharisees present. With his challenge in John 8:7 ("He that is without sin among you, let him cast a stone at her"), and on seeing their sins manifest in the writing, they departed.

It occurs to me that there is another interpretation. I haven't read this interpretation anywhere, but I don't claim originality for it, as I'm sure some saint somewhere has already thought of it.

The Pharisees mention the Mosaic Law in John 8:5: "Now Moses in the law commanded us to stone such a one. But what sayest thou?" The Pharisees are referring to the written law of the Old Testament. It is immediately after this in John 8:6 that Jesus begins writing on the ground. We are not told what he is writing. The fact that we are not told what is written is a clue that what is important is the act of writing and not the physical product of the writing. In the act of writing, Jesus is indicating that He is writing the New Law that transcends the Old Law quoted by the Pharisees.

This New Law is not written in the manner of the Old Law. It is written in the Life and Acts of Jesus Christ Himself. This is why we are not told what Jesus wrote on the ground; it doesn't matter. What matters is what Jesus does, for that is the content of the New Law.  The New Law consists in conforming ourselves to the Person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus challenges the Pharisees in John 8:7 (and implicitly the Old Law) and in John 8:8 continues to write on the ground. This is an indication that His Act, His writing of the New Law, continues uninterrupted. In John 8:9, the Pharisees depart, leaving Jesus alone with the woman. John 8:10 then tells us that Jesus lifts Himself up. He is done writing as His Act in writing the New Law is finished and he has demonstrated the superiority of the New over the Old by the departure of the Pharisees. He then applies the New Law to the woman in John 8:11 in an act of mercy.

What we have here is a revolutionary approach to the Law. The Law is not a list of commands and proscriptions; at least, it is not primarily that. The Law is a Person; it is in uniting and conforming ourselves to that Person that we truly fulfill the Law. It is because we didn't know that Person that we needed the list of commands; in knowing Him, the list becomes unnecessary. If we conform ourselves to Jesus Christ, we will follow the Law more faithfully than any zealous adherence to a list of commandments could achieve. 

The Big Historical Cycle George Friedman Misses

A big problem with The Storm Before the Calm is that it ignores the most significant historical cycle driving the current crisis: The monetary cycle.

The monetary cycle consists of the transition from sound to unsound money, eventually resulting in a monetary crisis and a reset of the system. The transition is sometimes driven by external events like a war, other times by the seemingly irresistable temptation of governments to fund themselves through the printing press.

The current monetary cycle is unprecedented insofar as every currency in the world has been a pure fiat currency since 1971. Historically, monetary cycles end and begin when the market displaces a debased currency with a sound one. The two World Wars, for example, put a severe strain on the British Pound, which had been the world's reserve currency for more than one hundred years. The debt accumulated, and the fact that Britain had sent all its gold to the United States in payment for food and arms, made the Pound an unsound currency by the end of WW2. At the Bretton Woods Conference held in 1944, based on the fact that the United States at that point owned 70% of the world's gold, it was agreed that the U.S. Dollar would replace the Pound as the world's reserve currency. Furthermore, all other currencies would peg themselves to the dollar rather than be backed by gold. The Dollar remained the sole currency redeemable for gold.

This system persisted into the 1960s, by which time the U.S. could not resist printing more money than it could back with gold to fund the Vietnam War and the Great Society programs. Foreigners were trading in their dollars for gold, at the rate that the 20,000 tons of gold owned by the U.S. at the end of WW2 had been reduced to 8,000 tons. To prevent the rest of U.S. gold reserves from fleeing the country, Nixon "temporarily" suspended the redemption of dollars for gold on August 15, 1971, a suspension that persists to this day. 

This has resulted in the unprecedented fiat monetary system noted above. The dollar continues to be the world's reserve currency, if for no other reason than that there is no suitable alternative. Furthermore, since 1980 we have been in a debt bull market of falling interest rates. See below.

Federal Funds Rate since 1950

The falling interest rate regime is not an accident or a result of the free market, but has been a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. This isn't a conspiracy theory; it is part of the Fed's charter to manage interest rates. Falling interest rates support the dollar (and the accumulation of dollar debt) because it makes the purchase of debt more attractive. If I anticipate that the interest rate on the U.S. 10 year treasury bond will drop, then if I buy a 10 year treasury carrying a 5% interest, I will be able to sell it at a profit when the interest rate on new 10 year treasuries drops to 4%, since the higher interest rate on my bond represents greater value.

So the increased printing of dollars did not cause a crisis in the dollar as long as interest rates have had room to drop. The accumulation of debt in response to lowering interest rates happened accordingly.

U.S. Debt to GDP ratio

But notice that since 2008 interest rates have been close to 0. What happens when there is no more room for interest rates to drop? Then the debt cycle would naturally reverse, interest rates rise, and there is a major financial crisis, likely much worse than 2008 and on a global basis (since most other countries are running up debt and printing currency as fast as we are).

But that hasn't happened. Debt is still being bought despite tiny interest rates. Who is buying debt now that interest rates aren't going lower? The answer is the Federal Reserve:

Federal Reserve Balance Sheet in Millions

This has gone into hyperdrive since the COVID crisis hit. Since we were already running a deficit before the COVID pandemic, all the trillion dollar "stimulus packages" since then are financed purely through Federal Reserve money printing - that is the spike at the far right. Just in the last couple of months the Federal Reserve has bought up $3 trillion in government debt. This signals the end phase of the monetary cycle, which will result in the demise of the dollar and its replacement as the worlds reserve currency.

Friedman misses all this. He interprets the drop in interest rates over the last 30 years as an indication of capital accumulation. It would be in a regime of free market interest rates. But we don't have that: Interest rates are manipulated through Fed policy. As debt increased over the years, interest rates should have risen as well, incentivizing savings as a balance to debt accumulation. By forcing interest rates lower, the Fed has short-circuited these market forces and put us in a situation where a catastrophic financial crisis can only be put off by ever more furious money printing.

Comments on "The Storm Before the Calm" by George Friedman

In this book George Friedman argues that we are experiencing the convergence of two historical cycles: A socioeconomic cycle and an institutional cycle. The present time is unusual insofar as the two cycles are coming into crisis at the same time, and will result in an unusual period of upheaval, disorder and, in Friedman's optimistic view, the reinvention of the American experiment in an as yet unidentified form that will nonetheless be a positive development and represent civilizational advancement.

I broadly agree with Friedman's thesis on the cyclical nature of history, and that the present moment represents an unusual convergence of cycles. I don't agree with him completely on the nature of the cycles, and think that he doesn't appreciate a historical cycle that is more significant that the ones he identifies. I will say more about that in another post.

Here I would like to make a skeptical argument concerning Friedman's optimistic view of the future, and argue why the present crisis is different than prior American crises. I am not necessarily pessimistic, but I imagine the future very differently than Friedman does.

The basis of my skepticism is the role natural resources, and in particular energy, play in American history. It is only recently that the United States has come to fully exploit the natural resources of the continent it claimed in Manifest Destiny. The North American continent and the exploitation of its resources shaped the history of the United States.

Consider the Civil War. At the time of the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution was just getting underway. The Industrial Revolution embodied a transition from a civilization founded on wood based energy to a civilization founded on coal based energy. Coal is a more dense form of energy than wood; it is essentially wood energy compacted over thousands of years into a much smaller space. This makes the use of coal more cost effective to gather as energy and more efficient as an energy source: A coal-fired train can travel farther than a wood-fired train before it has to restock its coal car, and coal burns hotter. It also costs less energy to harvest energy, in terms of the "energy return on investment." The consequence is that a wood-based energy civilization can never achieve the complexity or technological sophistication of a coal-based civilization. Its low efficiency energy limits its development. This is precisely the reason why major civilizational transformations are accompanied by a change in the energy foundation of the civilization.

Also at the time of the Civil War, large-scale Western migration was just beginning. In fact it was stalled prior to the war as the North and the South squabbled about the legal status of slavery in the new territories.

With the secession of the Southern states, the political roadblocks to full-scale Western migration disappeared and the migration West accelerated even during the war. The demands of the war accelerated the already nascent industrial revolution, fueled by the new energy, cheap and abundant coal, to transform the nation into a continental and industrial power very different from the nation that existed just a few years before. By 1870 the United States was a major industrial world power and had steam locomotives running from coast to coast.

Now consider the Second World War. Like the Civil War, this crisis occurred as the world was transitioning from a less dense to a more dense source of energy: From coal to oil. The United States was just beginning to exploit its oil resources in the 1930s. Those were the days when a Jed Clampett, in Beverly Hillbillies style, could shoot his gun and up from the ground came a bubbling crude. The war accelerated this change, especially as the U.S. industrial base and energy sources were not subject to attack like the rest of the world's were. As the war went on, it became clear that access to oil was the crucial factor. We sank Japan's merchant fleet denying them oil, and destroyed Germany's oil refineries through bombing, grounding the Luftwaffe.

The crucial factor about the current crisis is that it does not occur during an ongoing transition from a less dense to a more dense energy source. So-called "green energy" may or not be feasible, and perhaps is even necessary, but one thing it definitely is not is a more dense source of energy than oil. If it were, the transition would occur on its own rather than being subsidized by governments and forced through regulation. Towards the end of the book, Friedman speculates about space-based solar power. If possible, such power will require a massive infrastructure development and it is hard to believe it would be a more dense source of energy than oil. Coal and oil fueled their respective civilization transformations because they were sitting there, ready to hand, waiting to be exploited. There is no such new energy source available.

This is a misunderstanding people sometimes have concerning technology and energy. They believe our technology will solve the energy crisis. This gets the causality backwards. It is the energy that fuels the technological revolution, not technology that drives the energy revolution. It's true that civilization must be advanced to a certain point before it can exploit coal and then oil usefully. We didn't jump directly from wood-based energy to oil-based energy; it took a period of coal-based energy to develop the technology to exploit oil usefully. The key point is that the technology necessary is the technology to exploit the energy, not to harvest the energy. Civilization was capable of mining coal for thousands of years; it just had no special use for it until industrial civilization advanced enough. Similarly, early oil exploitation involved no special technological breakthroughs as the oil was near the surface. Doing not much more than poking a hole in the ground was good enough.

The difference today is people are imagining technological breakthroughs to harvest the energy, not exploit it. The energy harvested - electricity in the case of space-based solar power - we already exploit. The energy it takes to develop and use additional technology to harvest energy is an energy cost, not a gain. This is the Achilles heel of shale oil; exploiting technology to harvest these heretofore unreachable reserves is an energy cost that makes shale oil more expensive than conventional oil.

In any case, shale oil is rapidly depleting, and conventional oil has also peaked. What's going to happen in the next crisis is something that hasn't happened before: The transition to a civilization based on a less dense form of energy than the last. Whether it is "green" or not, this energy will not have the density of oil.

The United States is fortunate that we still have unexploited natural resources, in particular massive coal reserves that can fuel our nation for many decades. I suspect that as things start to get truly difficult, all the "climate change" rhetoric and "green energy" initiatives will be rapidly forgotten as people see their civilization crumbling around them (as might even be starting now). We will be happy to turn back to coal.

But the result must be a simpler civilization than the one now, not a more complex civilization as after the Civil War and WW2. We will still have our iPhones and Netflix, but you won't be able to get fresh vegetables in the supermarket year round. The oil-based civilization that can grow vegetables in California's Central Valley, then truck them all over the country at any time, will be gone. Instead, food will be more locally grown. People will not take as many or as exotic vacations as they once did, maybe going camping instead of Disney World. People will get used to living in some heat rather than blasting air conditioning anytime it gets warm. We will miss some of the things that are gone, like always available air conditioning, but appreciate some things that are rediscovered, like playing board games with the family or playing outside if you are a kid. They hyper-scheduled childhood of the recent past of carting kids from soccer to piano lessons to boy scouts will be gone. Childhood will be simpler and, as far as that goes, more healthy.