Random Notes on Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now

I'm reading Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now. Herewith are some random notes:

p. 234 - Pinker is discussing knowledge and sociology:

Do better-educated countries get richer, or can richer countries afford more education? One way to cut the knot is to take advantage of the fact that a cause must precede its effect. (emphasis mine)

It's clear from earlier in the book that Pinker has no brief for metaphysics as classically conceived.  The thing about classical metaphysics is that it is necessary whether you like it or not. The consequence is that metaphysics-haters cannot avoid metaphysics no matter how much they try, and must eventually let metaphysical concepts slip in, consciously or not. A cause must precede its effect is a 100 proof metaphysical concept. And as Pinker's example inadvertently admits, it is more surely known than any scientific conclusions because it is part of the intellectual framework that makes science possible in the first place.

A metaphysical analysis might reflect on a cause must precede its effect and note that it is not precisely articulated. Causes and effects are actually simultaneous. The effect of education is an educated person and it happens at the moment of education. Later on, an educated person may be the cause of riches, so we may loosely talk about education causing riches.

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p. 235 - "Better educated girls grow up to have fewer babies, and so are less likely to beget youth bulges with their surfeit of troublemaking young men."

The thrust of Pinker's book is that Enlightenment values and methods have contributed to unprecedented progress over the last few hundred years. And that is certainly true. But, as Chesterton has pointed out, the only way to measure "progress" is to have a stable measure of progress over time. In Chesterton's example, if we decided the world would be better if it was painted green, and we all began to splash green paint everywhere, what would happen if we then decided the world would be better if it were blue? Then all our work painting it green was wasted and we had really made no progress at all.

Up to the time of the Enlightenment (and actually, until very recently) , there was universal agreement that children were a blessing, and  indeed among the greatest of blessings. God promised Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous of the stars, and Abraham didn't think it a burden. One of the great achievements of the modern era (one that Pinker emphasizes) is the massive reduction in child mortality over the past 200 years.

And yet, if you had told an Enlightenment philosopher in the year 1770 that one of the great achievements of Western society in the year 2018 would be that many people desired few or no descendants, he'd be puzzled. How is that progress? And if you further told him that mothers would regularly kill their unborn children in order to avoid having a child, he'd be even further puzzled. And he would be positively flabbergasted if you told him the replacement rate of France, Spain and Italy was such that in a few generations Frenchmen, Spaniards and Italians would disappear altogether.

The thing is, the notion of progress is a philosophical one, and those who refuse to reason philosophically end up in places they never dreamed of.

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Sam Harris and the Moral Landscape

Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values is several years old at this point but is still generating controversy. Ross Douthat's recent take on it is here. For my part,  Harris is worth reading because of the straightforward, transparent manner in which he argues his case; Harris is an honest atheist and sincerely wishes to rationally persuade his audience. He also has a certain philosophical naivete, such that he does not always perceive the philosophical consequences of his positions, consequences that atheists have long struggled to avoid. I think this latter aspect of Harris's writing accounts for the not quite friendly response he has gotten from some secular reviewers. But more on this later.

Harris has issued a challenge to critics, offering a cash award for the best criticism of his book and an even larger cash award if that criticism persuades him. (Given that Harris is by definition the judge of the latter, it's not too much of a leap to suppose that prize is in no danger of being won.) I might submit an essay to this challenge just to see what happens. If I do, the essay will run along ideas like the following.

Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape acknowledges a fundamental challenge to his attempt to determine human values through science: If it is through science that human values are to be determined, how is the value of science itself to be determined? Harris recognizes the only possible answer: Science cannot  determine its own value, so that value must be recognized pre-scientifically:

Science is defined with reference to the goal of understanding the processes at work in the universe. Can we justify this goal scientifically? Of course not. Does this make science itself unscientific? If so, we appear to have pulled ourselves down by our bootstraps. (p. 17 - all references to paperback edition)

In the chapter "The Future of Happiness", he argues in this way:

It seems to me, however, that in order to fulfill our deepest interests in this life, both personally and collectively, we must first admit that some interests are more defensible than others. Indeed, some interests are so compelling that they need no defense at all. (p. 191)

The interest of finding truth through science is, of course, the principal interest Harris has in mind. In the Afterword to the paperback edition, Harris puts the matter in a way that makes the philosophical implications clear:

The fatal flaw that Blackford claims to have found in my view of morality could be ascribed to any branch of science - or to reason generally. Certain "oughts" are built right into the foundations of human thought. We need not apologize for pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps in this way. It is better than pulling ourselves down by them. (p.201-202, emphasis mine)

The italicized sentence is the one that will cause heartache in Harris's secular critics, for although Harris appears not to know it,  it is a foundational principle of traditional natural law philosophy, something modern philosophers have been hoping to discredit since the Enlightenment. Indeed, the typical modern philosopher thinks natural law philosophy was discredited at the dawn of the Enlightenment with the "discovery" of the fact-value distinction. This is why Harris's secular critics sometimes, like Colin McGinn, simply repeat the fact-value distinction and think they are done - for the fact-value distinction is a foundational principle of modern philosophy and functions as something of a litmus test. Denying it serves to identify oneself as one of those naive pre-modern philosophers who still believes in things like the natural law, and therefore may be justifiably and summarily dismissed (which is what McGinn does).

As I say, one of the attractive features of Harris is his relative philosophical innocence with respect to the larger philosophical battles waging around him. He simply calls things as he sees them, and does not hedge his views or couch them in obscurity for the sake of broader philosophical consequences. In this case, Harris acknowledges what is obviously true, that there are certain values (certain "oughts") that are self-evident to human reason and need no other justification. He does this because he sees the self-evident value of scientific inquiry. What he doesn't see (which his secular critics recognize with horror) is how much of modern philosophy is undermined, and classical philosophy affirmed, with that simple acknowledgement.

For starters, the Kantian project is shown to be misguided. For Kant's premise is that nothing can be truly known without a prior evaluation of the range of human reason - a "critique" of reason that defines its powers and limits. But if the value of something (in this case science) can be immediately known absent a prior critique, then the Kantian project is shown to be unnecessary and even counter-productive, since it may result in the obscuring of truth that can be immediately known yet might not survive a critique.

Harris doesn't see that the consequentialism he favors - and is popular amongst modern philosophers - is put in danger by acknowledgement of fundamental natural law principle:

Here is my (consequentialist) starting point: all questions of value (right and wrong, good and evil, etc.) depend upon the possibility of experiencing such value. Without potential consequences at the level of experience - happiness, suffering, joy, despair, etc. - all talk of value is empty. Therefore, to say that an act is morally necessary, or evil, or blameless, is to make (tacit) claims about its consequences in the lives of conscious creatures (whether actual or potential). (p. 62)

But Harris has already given us an instance of where the talk of value without respect to potential consequences is not empty: Talk about the value of science itself, which is based on an "ought" built into the foundations of human thought, not demonstrated via its consequences. Given that Harris acknowledges the existence of at least one pre-consequentialist "ought", he must acknowledge the possibility that there might be others (maybe there isn't, but the possibility can't simply be dismissed without investigation). And if there are other pre-consequentialist "oughts", they must be discovered and understood and consequentialist conclusions evaluated in light of them rather than vice-versa.

Another way of saying the point is this: Harris recognizes that "certain oughts are built right into the foundations of human thought." He has in mind the value of science. We "ought" to prefer truth to falsehood and science is the best way of distinguishing between the two. His project is to recognize the value of science pre-scientifically, then use science to bootstrap a comprehensive theory of good and evil. All well and good.

But he fails to see certain consequences of this view. The first is that it is clear that the most important values are the ones known pre-scientifically, for it is on the pre-scientific value of science itself that Harris's whole project is based. All other values stand or fall on it. The second consequence is that there may be other pre-scientific values other than the value of science itself, other "oughts" built right into the foundations of human thought. Simply because Harris only recognizes the value of science and simply ignores any other possible pre-scientific values does not mean that they are not there (and, incidentally, violates Harris's oft-stated distinction between "no answers in practice" and "no answers in principle" p.  3)

It is no good to critique other possible pre-scientific values based on the results of Harris's scientific inquiry into morality: For those other potential pre-scientific values compete with science at the level of science's own value. To take the value of science for granted, then evaluate other potential pre-scientific values in light of science's conclusions, is simply to beg the question against other pre-scientific values that might compete with the value of science. Those other candidate's for value must be evaluated the same way the value of science was: Pre-scientifically.

What I have been just discussing exposes a typical misunderstanding of natural law philosophy found in writers like, well, Sam Harris. Traditional opposition to things like abortion, homosexuality, gay marriage and contraception comes in for rough treatment by Harris in The Moral Landscape, where he writes as though his scientific morality case against traditional views is conclusive almost before he states it. What he doesn't understand is that his case for his scientific morality on those questions begs the question against traditional natural law opposition to them: For that natural law opposition operates at the level of pre-scientific value, "oughts" built right into the foundation of human thought itself, and is susceptible to criticism of the "scientific morality" sort only to the extent that the question is begged.
The natural law opposition may be opposed, but it must be done in the same way that the pre-scientific value of science was defended - not through science, but a philosophical case.

The irony of Harris's project, an irony that I think his modernist critics recognize and want to distance themselves from, is that to the extent Harris is right he must leave off the scientific criticism of the things he most wants to attack (traditional moral views on matters sexual and life-related) and fight them on the traditionalists own turf in the arena of natural law. For the game is all about those pre-scientific values - by Harris's own account the most important ones - that he acknowledges exist but modern philosophers have been struggling to banish to the realm of mythology since the sixteenth century.

The Moral Landscape is, I think, a case of needing to be careful what you wish for.

I will have more to say about Harris's book and its relation to traditional thinking on morality in subsequent posts.

The Legacy of the Enlightenment

I'm just finishing reading The Enlightenment And Why It Still Matters by Anthony Pagden, an excellent history of the enlightenment as well as Pagden's interpretation of its significance. His last chapter - The Enlightenment and Its Enemies - is a robust defense of the Enlightenment legacy against its critics.  While Pagden is certainly right that the Enlightenment has bequethed us some genuine treasures, in particular the modern theory of rights and constitutional government, he gives the Enlightenment far too much credit. Why, for instance did the Enlightenment happen at all?

What so many of these opponents of Enlightenment have failed even to ask is why the world of virtue and moral authority that had apparently served our ancestors so well should have been overturned in the first place. Why, in other words, did the Enlightenment happen at all? It cannot simply be explained away, as the De Maistres and the Burkes had hoped, as the murderous revenge of disinherited minorities suddenly - and inexplicably - grown powerful. I have tried to offer an answer, not in terms of a conflict between "reason" and belief, between science and religion, but rather in terms of the historical failure of Christianity to continue to provide the kind of intellectual, and consequently moral, certainty that it had once done. By the mid-seventeenth century the entire structure on which all monotheistic beliefs rest, that the universe had been the creation of a divinity who continues to dictate every aspect of its being, had come to seem to many Europeans as threadbare as paganism had once seemed to Plato and Aristotle. In origin, all except the strictly theological aspects of Christianity - all that it could salvage from its Judaic origins - everything that relates to the human, and to life on earth - derived exclusively from ancient pagan sources manipulated by a powerful and often brilliantly imaginative clerical elite. Hence the description of it as "Hellenized Judaism." What the Enlightenment did was to replace this Christianized vision of the human condition with a more appealing, less dogmatic account, derived initially from the same attempt to reshape the most powerful of the ancient philosophical schools.

It is appropriate that Pagden gives a characteristically Enlightenment-style argument in defense of the Enlightenment. What makes it peculiarly Enlightenment is its use of history as a category that stands in judgement of all other modes of thought. By the mid-seventeeth century, Pagden tells us, the ancient view of God as Creator and Sustainer of the Universe had "come to seem to many Europeans as threadbare as paganism..." (that's my emphasis.) What is significant, and what justifies the Enlightenment, is the historical fact that the ancient view came to seem threadbare; whether it actually was threadbare, whether that perception was in accord with the truth of the matter, is irrelevant. History has spoken and the "age of theology" was over and the "age of reason" had begun.

The difference between Plato and Aristotle on the one hand, and the Enlightenment thinkers on the other, is that paganism (and by that I assume Pagden means the sophists and pre-Socratics) was more than merely apparently threadbare to Plato and Aristotle. They provided extensive arguments to show that the older pagan philosophy actually was threadbare and inadequate. Enlightenment thinkers by and large could not be bothered with such details. Descartes, for instance, merely informs us that he found the scholastic philosophy he was taught in school unbelievable and decided to chuck it overboard and start afresh. The great polemicists of the Enlightenment like Voltaire, and like their contemporary counterparts Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, didn't and don't actually refute their medieval nemeses. Instead, they heap scorn on traditional philosophy and theology, flattering their readers that they are too smart to believe such nonsense, and hope no one sees the bluff.

It is understandable why they took this approach. The sense of the Enlightenment thinkers was that the ancient ways of thinking had played themselves out and a new approach was needed. Whether this was true or not, coming to terms with  someone like Thomas Aquinas to the point of genuinely demonstrating the bankruptcy of his thought is potentially the task of a lifetime. But that very task, through the length and difficulty of its execution, would thwart its purpose - which was not to spend a lifetime in scholastic thought, but to move beyond scholasticism to something new.  The whole point of the Enlightenment was to get out of the (so they thought) suffocating thicket of medieval thought.

But "moving beyond" St. Thomas is not the same as refuting him. Ironically, instead of trying to sidestep the scholastics, St. Thomas might have served as a model for a genuine movement of Enlightenment rather the icon of medieval obscurity he became. For St. Thomas actually performed the task mentioned in the last paragraph - the task of moving beyond an older school of thought via a thorough refutation of it. And this brings me to Pagden's counterfactual account of history.

Pagden imagines what might have happened had the Protestant Reformation never taken place:

Luther, who was burned as a heretic in 1521, has gone down in history as nothing more than yet another troublesome friar hankering after the purity of the early Church. Christianity, although rarely ever at peace, remains united. The discovery of America has led to some flutters of uncertainty within the universities, but any thought that it might present a challenge to the traditional view of the laws of nature or God have been successfully repressed. There have been no French Wars of Religion, no English Civil Wars. The Revolt of the Netherlands, lacking ideological cohesion and foreign aid, has been swiftly suppressed. There has been no Thirty Years' War. Spain continues to be the richest, most powerful nation in Europe and remains locked in an unending struggle with France. Copernicus and Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and Mersenne succeed in creating a new kind of Renaissance, which flourishes for a while under moderately tolerant regimes. Thomas Hobbes, however, although he enjoys some small success as a mathematician, eventually follows his father into the Church and dies, like him, an embittered alcoholic. John Locke is an obscure doctor at Christ Church, Oxford, renowned only for the silver tap he succeeded in inserting into the Earl of Shaftesbury's lower intestine without killing him in the process. Newton achieves recognition as a gifted astrologer and competent administrator and some notoriety as a somewhat heterodox theologian. By the end of the century the "Scientific Renaissance," as it later came to be called, as been silenced, the heliocentric theory and Descartes's atomism between them having proved too much for the Church to tolerate. The next generation has nothing to build on. The "mighty Light which spreads itself over the world," which Shaftesbury had seen in 1706 and which he believed must ensure that "it ... is impossible but Letters and Knowledge must advance in greater Proportion than ever," is instead a steadily darkening cloud. Western Christendom drops behind its centuries-old antagonist to the east, the Ottoman Empire. In 1683 Vienna falls to the armies of Sultan Mehmed IV. Russia, or "Muscovy," as it still calls itself, backward and divided, is easily defeated and overrun in January 1699. Spain and France still control the western Mediterranean and dominate most of northern Europe. But threatened by the seemingly irresistible Ottoman armies, they become increasingly theocratic and resistant to any innovation, from mechanical clocks to vaccination, which, they fear, might offend their ever-unpredictable God... Lacking any capacity for scientific or social innovation, the European powers not already under Ottoman control steadily decline until finally, in May 1789, Sultan Selim III marches into Paris. Within a few years what the English ecclesiastical historian Edward Gibbon had predicted in 1776 has come true, and "the interpretation of the Koran is now taught in the schools of Oxford and her pupils demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the Revelation of Mahomet." United in one massive religious and political community, which reaches from the Himalayas to the coasts of Scotland, the Ottoman Empire survives into the twentieth century... 

An utterly implausible flight of fancy? An illusion? Perhaps, but something not wholly dissimilar did, in fact, befall the Islamic world. During the reigns of the Caliphs al Mansur (712-75) and his successors Harun-al Rashid (786-809) and al-Ma'mun (813-33), an entire school of Hellenizing philosophers, jurists and doctors greup: men like the surgeon Abul Qasim Al-Zahravi, known as "Albucasis"; the mathematician and astronomer Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khawarizmi, after whom a crater on the far side of the moon is now named; Abu or Ibn Sina, called "Avicenna" in the West, the author of a vast treatise that brought together all the medical knowledge of the ancient Greek world then available, from Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen; Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, physician, astronomer, mathematician, physicist, chemist, geographer, and historian, who in 1018 made calculations, using instruments he had created himself, of the radius and circumference of the Earth that vary by as 15 and 200 kilometers from today's estimates. The best known in the West, however, was Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd, or "Averroes" as he was called by his Latin readers, who was so highly regarded in the Christian world that he became known simply as "The Commentator" (just as Aristotle was known as "The Philosopher)... But Averroes was not only the greatest of the Arab Muslim scholars and perhaps the most influential of all Muslim philosophers, he was also the last. In the late twelfth century the Muslim clergy began a concerted onslaught on translation from the Greek and against all forms of learning that did not derive from either the Qur'an itself or from the sayings of the Prophet...

Pagden mentions Averroes "Latin readers", among whom were Thomas Aquinas, but doesn't seem to see the implication for his counterfactual history. At the time St. Thomas was reading Averroes, Platonism was the reigning philosophical school in Christendom and set the terms within which the Christian Revelation was interpreted. Aristotle was, in the twelfth century, a recent, revolutionary discovery. His major works had been lost in the West and only became known when translations from the Arabic (which themselves were translations from the Greek) became available. Not only because he was a pagan philosopher, and not only because he contradicted Plato in fundamental ways, but also because he came via the Arabs - complete with Muslim gloss by Averroes and Avicenna - Aristotle was greeted with a great deal of ecclesiastical skepticism. So much skepticism that the teaching of Aristotle was banned by the Church for decades, with his advocates like Aquinas also coming under a cloud of suspicion.

But Thomas Aquinas was not Descartes or Voltaire. He criticized the reigning philosophical regime from the inside, showing that he was its master and knew it better than did its defenders. He also demonstrated that, for those who love the truth, there was nothing to fear from Aristotle. For the truth cannot contradict itself. If the Gospel is true, whatever is true in Aristotle cannot contradict it, despite superficial appearances. Far from his faith being in conflict with reason, Aquinas's faith was a spur to an intellectual revolution in Christendom: His faith that Christianity was true meant that Christianity could have nothing to fear from the truth wherever it is encountered, even if it comes through pagan philosophers and Muslim translations.

Something similar could have happened with the revolution of thought that occurred in the Enlightenment. Like Aristotle and before him, Plato - who was also initially resisted as a pagan interloper ("what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?") - Enlightenment style thinking would have gone through some bumps and bruises but what was good in it would have eventually been accepted by the Church. This, in fact, was what was happening with Galileo. He initially had the support of the Pope, but through a series of unfortunate circumstances and scheming by the established bureaucracy, found himself on the wrong side of an ecclesiastical ban - just as had happened to Aristotle. But, unfortunately, Galileo was not St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was not merely brilliant, but also humble, pious, charitable and selfless - a saint. Galileo, in contrast, was vain and egotistical, and it is interesting to wonder how things might have turned out if the Galilean personality was more Thomistic. Nonetheless, the Church would have come around to Galilean physics eventually, as it had come around to Plato and then Aristotle.

In Pagden's counterfactual history "by the end of the century the 'Scientific Renaissance,' as it later came to be called, has been silenced, the heliocentric theory and Descartes's atomism between them having proved too much for the Church to tolerate." But there is no precedence for this in the (even by then) long history of the Church. The Church successfully absorbed Plato and other Greek thinkers, the pagan Latin intellectuals like Cicero and Virgil had been taught for centuries (and even figured as heroic figures in works like The Inferno), and only relatively recently Aristotle had been absorbed through his Islamic commentators. Pagden's alternative, anti-intellectual history, a history where the truth is "too much for the Church to tolerate", is without precedent in Christian history.

A crucial difference between the Church's approach to truth and the Enlightenment's is that the Church was not willing to absorb new truth at the expense of old. It is certainly true that scholastic-type thinking was in many ways proving a hindrance rather than a help at the dawn of the modern age, and the temptation to clear the thickets by slashing away wholesale at traditional thought is understandable. But it is surely an unwise thing to destroy that which you don't really understand,  for you may very well destroy a cultural inheritance that was gained by centuries of effort, and that could be gained no other way. And that is what happened with the Enlightenment, which in its efforts to get on with the scientific revolution, destroyed the ancient philosophical inheritance of the Greeks. The result is the modern world: Scientifically unsurpassed but philosophically bankrupt. The Church, in its efforts to avoid losing the accumulated wisdom of centuries in the hurry to get on with novel investigations, surely slowed the pace of scientific progress, and did so consciously; but it is a mistake to confuse a commitment to a measured pace of scientific progress with an opposition to scientific progress altogether, which is Pagden's mistake.

Pagden's counterfactual military history has a contradiction in it. He uses the history of the Ottoman Empire as an example of what might have happened had the Enlightenment not occurred in the West, but then has the Ottomans defeating the West because of the subsequent lack of innovation in the West.  But if the Ottomans are the actual historical exemplar of a culture that lacks Enlightenment and stagnates for lack of innovation, wouldn't the lack of Enlightenment in the West simply have resulted in a stalemate between East and West, rather than the Western triumph that actually occurred?

In fact, the Western superiority in innovation long predated the Enlightenment. This is ably documented in the works of Victor Davis Hanson (e.g. The Western Way of War, Carnage and Culture, The Soul of Battle) among others. All the way back to the ancient Greeks, the West showed a unique openness to innovation, particularly in military matters, that provided a sometimes subtle but persistent military superiority with respect to the East. The only way the medieval Crusades were possible was that Western technological superiority - both in arms and in logistical support - allowed far smaller Christian armies to compete on level terms with Islamic hordes.

The Enlightenment did not happen out of the blue, but was made possible by the medieval innovations that pre-dated it. Innovations in agriculture like the plow and the harness, which made medieval farms far more productive than their ancient (or Eastern) counterparts, contributed to population growth; medieval navigational innovations like the compass and the sextant made possible the voyages that discovered new worlds, and medieval inventions like modern banking made possible their financing.

The truly interesting counterfactual history would be one in which the Enlightenment acknowledges its debts to the past and remains within the innovative tradition going back to the Greeks, rather than constructing a mythology of the past that justifies its own revolutionary, and philosophy destroying, origin.

Man at the Center of the Universe

I’m looking forward to reading Jonah Goldberg’s latest book, The Tyranny of Cliches. From reviews, one of the myths he takes down is the notion that the Galilean revolution destroyed the classical view of man as the most important thing in the universe. More specifically, in the classical view of the world, the universe consists of a series of concentric spheres with Earth at the center and the sun, moon and stars situated like studs on various shells rotating about the Earth. This cosmology reflected (so the myth goes) the innocent but arrogant classical belief that man is the most important thing in the world. In the process of destroying the geocentric view of the universe that flowed from arrogant anthropocentrism, Galileo taught man a lesson in humility.

The problem with the myth, as many before Goldberg have pointed out, is that the center of the universe in classical cosmology is not a place of honor. Earth is at the center of the universe in the sense that a drain pipe is at the center of a toilet. It’s where everything repulsive ends up that that isn’t welcome at more august stations in the universe. Even the matter here on Earth is, for Aristotle, of a lesser kind than the matter of the moon and stars. In fact, one of the key discoveries of Galileo that destroyed the old Aristotelian cosmology was the existence of craters on the moon. Celestial matter wasn’t supposed to be “corruptible” the way it is on Earth; but if the moon can get knocked around and beat up just like a something here on Earth, then there is nothing special about it with respect to Earthly objects. In a sense, it could be said that Galileo didn’t knock down man and Earth, but he knocked down everything else.

So Galileo did not destroy the classical view of man as the most important thing in the universe, because the classical view did not think of man as the most important thing; there were plenty of things more important, including God and angels. But there is a counter-myth that arises from this understanding; the counter-myth that since the Galileo-proved-man-isn’t-the-most-important-thing myth is false, that Galileo and the Copernican revolution in general did not have a revolutionary cultural/philosophical impact.

In fact, it did have a revolutionary cultural/philosophical effect, one that is even more profound than if the effect had been merely to demote man in the natural hierarchy. For even a demoted man is part of a hierarchy, and hierarchy and order are the essence of the classical view of the world. The Aristotelian view of the world is one of profound unity and order; the hierarchy of the Earth at the center/bottom, with the celestial objects on various spheres, is not only a physical hierarchy but a moral one. The stars are better things than the things on Earth, and the meaning of the universe is wrapped up in its physical structure. Dante profoundly mediated on this in his Divine Comedy. Hell is at the center of Earth, Purgatory is a mountain reaching from the Earth up to the Heavens, and Heaven itself is located among the celestial objects. To travel from Hell to Heaven is to travel a road that is physical and moral, every piece of which bears meaningful relationship to the whole.

The Copernican revolution did something far more serious than merely demoting man in the hierarchy. It destroyed the hierarchy altogether. When the geocentric understanding of the world was undermined, the philosophical, cultural and even social order entwined with it was challenged as well. This is why the Church took such a serious view of Galileo’s publications. They had truly revolutionary implications in a way we have difficulty understanding today. Our view of the world, post-Enlightenment, tends to be fractured and piecemeal. We have political theories, physical theories, social theories, etc. Two men can share identical views of physics but hold opposite political ideas, as we can have both Marxist and Liberal-Democratic physicists. A revolution in physics holds no political implications, and vice-versa. But for classical man, physical revolutions certainly could have political implications, as well as religious and philosophical implications. Galileo did far more than move man down the prison cell-block. He destroyed an entire world.

Or, if we adopt the self-interpretation of the Enlightenment, he destroyed the prison. The elegantly integrated and complete classical view of the world may have been beautiful, but it was also a prison. It imprisoned man philosophically, religiously, scientifically and socially. It is hard not to be swept along with the passion of Enlightenment pioneers like d’Holbach, Bacon and Kant. Man, finally, was coming into his maturity, finally throwing off comforting illusions and taking charge of himself and his destiny in the cold light of things as they are. He has, after millenia, knocked the lock off his cell door and pushed open the creaking door. But what he finds is not what he expected. He encounters no prison guard to usher him back to his cell, or a warden to announce his release and direct him to his home. He finds no one and nothing to indicate what he should do with his newfound freedom. He sees that his prison was merely a cave in which he happened to fall at some forgotten moment in the distant past, and finds no indication of where his home might be or how to build one.

So we should reject the myth that Galileo knocked man off from his privileged place in the universe. But we should not fall into the mistake of thinking that he didn’t do something even more disturbing.

On the superficiality of the New Atheists

Edward Feser often complains that the New Atheists have a superficial and inaccurate understanding of the traditional arguments for God (for example, see the posts here, here and here).  There is considerable merit to Feser's complaint, as an inspection of Ch. 3 of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion will readily confirm. What interests me here, however, is not showing the inadequacy of Dawkins's treatment of Aquinas's Five Ways (Feser does a better job of that than I ever could), but the relationship of New Atheist thought to its original inspiration in the Enlightenment. Specifically, Dawkins et. al. seem unaware of the movement of thought that gave birth to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment never "refuted" the reasoning of the classical philosophers; instead, in a bold move, it simply put the classical tradition aside and started philosophy afresh.

Perhaps the most succinct statement of the Enlightenment attitude toward the philosophical tradition is expressed by Immanuel Kant in the Preface to the Second Edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (from Cambridge Edition of the CPR):

Whether or not the treatment of the cognitions belonging to the concern of reason travels the secure course of a science is something which can soon be judged by its success. If after many preliminaries and preparations are made, a science gets stuck as soon as it approaches its end, or if in order to reach this end it must often go back and set out on a new path; or likewise if if proves impossible for the different co-workers to achieve unanimity as to the way in which they should pursue their common aim; then we may be sure that such a study is merely groping about, that it is still far from having entered upon the secure course of a science; and it is already a service to reason if we can possibly find that path for it, even if we have to give up as futile much of what was included in the end previously formed without deliberation.

Kant's paragraph simultaneously reveals what the Enlightenment sees as the problem with classical philosophy, and provides the Enlightenment solution to it. The problem (as the Enlightenment sees it), is this: Philosophy, as traditionally practiced, is futile. Rather than continue along the traditional lines, Enlightenment philosophers prefer to jettison the philosophical tradition altogether and make a fresh start, a start that promises to support the new science then emerging and perhaps make progress in its own right. But how does one reasonably dismiss the philosophical tradition as futile? Something is futile if it fails to do what it proposes to do. It seems like the Enlightenment philosopher must therefore be a master of the philosophical tradition, at least enough to understand what it proposes to do and to show that it fails to achieve it, and will continue to fail.

Understanding the philosophical tradition, however, is a task for a lifetime, and it is just this task that the Enlightenment philosopher is desperate to avoid; at all costs he must avoid engaging the classical philosopher in a never-ending roundabout concerning the meaning and "end" of classical philosophy. What the Enlightenment philosopher requires is a means to summarily dismiss the philosophical tradition, a means that relieves him of the task of engaging the classical philosopher on the latter's preferred ground and allows him to get on with the modern project of reconstructing philosophy.

In the Preface, Kant both proposes such a means and applies it. He writes that a "treatment" can "soon be judged by its success." We immediately hit a snag. Mustn't we understand the philosophical tradition so that we can know what "success" means with respect to it? We are right back to engaging the classical philosopher in his favorite game of never-ending debate. Kant first deals with this problem rhetorically, by hurrying the reader past it with that "soon." He then sidesteps it by proposing, or rather asserting, several measures by which a project of thought may judged. First, does it "get stuck" when it approaches its end (i.e. goal)? Second, does it repeatedly start over again in frustration? Third, does it result in unanimity of opinion as to its conduct?  Kant applies his criteria to logic, mathematics and the new science of physics in turn, not surprisingly concluding that they all pass the test. He then turns to metaphysics (i.e. classical philosophy):

Metaphysics - a wholly isolated speculative cognition of reason that elevates itself entirely above all instructions from experience, and that through mere concepts (not, like mathematics, through the application of concepts to intuition), where reason thus is supposed to be its own pupil - has up to now not been so favored by fate as to have been able to enter upon the secure course of a science, even thought it is older than all other sciences, and would remain even if all the others were swallowed up by an all-consuming barbarism. For in it reason continuously gets stuck, even when it claims a priori insight (as it pretends) into those laws confirmed by the commonest experience. In metaphysics we have to retrace our path countless times, because we find that it does not lead where we want it to go, and it is so far from reaching unanimity in the assertions of its adherents that it is rather a battlefield, and indeed one that appears to be especially determined for testing one's powers in mock combat; on this battlefield no combatant has ever gained the least bit of ground, nor has any been able to base any lasting possession on his victory. Hence there is no doubt that up to now the procedure of metaphysics has been a mere groping, and what is the worst, a groping among mere concepts. (again from the Cambridge Edition of the CPR).

Metaphysics, according to Kant, fails all his tests for a successful "treatment of cognitions." It repeatedly "gets stuck", it must repeatedly start over, and their is no unanimity of opinion in its adherents. The question of the "success" of classical philosophy still lurks in the background, since a philosophy "gets stuck" to the extent that it no longer makes progress toward its end (goal); but it would seem one must know the end of something to know if progress is being made towards it, so Kant's conviction of metaphysics on the charge of "getting stuck" implies that Kant knows the end of classical philosophy. As noted, however, Kant wants to avoid the question of the end of philosophy at all costs, as it will (he thinks) lead him into the interminable debates of the philosophical tradition. He cleverly brackets the question of the end of philosophy by saying that metaphysics "does not lead where we want it to go", changing the objective question of the end of philosophy to the subjective question of whether it gives us what we want; and in Kant's case, it manifestly doesn't. And this is the bold stroke of the Enlightenment that allows it to summarily dismiss the classical philosophical tradition: It is the philosopher himself, and his subjective desires, that is the measure of philosophy.

We can sympathize with the motivation of the Enlightenment philosophers. The world seemed to be undergoing revolutionary change; from the discovery of new continents, to the staggering innovation that was the birth of modern science, to new, republican political ideas, everything was becoming new; and the philosophical tradition appeared (I emphasize appeared) to be inadequate to deal with it. What was needed was a revolutionary new philosophy to accompany the revolutionary new world in the making. Slogging through the finer points of the Five Ways or Plotinus to eventually disprove them would miss the point entirely. Columbus didn't spend a lifetime justifying his voyages to skeptics; he never would have gotten out of port if he had wasted time on the timid. Nor did Galileo or Newton puzzle themselves over whether their new physics could fit within Aristotelian metaphysics. Like Columbus, they simply and boldly went ahead with their investigations and discovered what would never have been discovered any other way. Aristotle must reconcile himself to the new physics, not the other way around. Similarly, the Enlightenment philosopher cannot bear to be bound within the philosophical tradition as in a cage. Like Columbus and Newton, he must leave the past behind and strike out for fresh lands.

But there is a key difference between Columbus and Newton on the one hand, and a philosopher on the other. In a certain sense it doesn't really matter if Columbus or Newton knew what they were doing; Columbus always thought he actually made it to the East Indies, and Newton spent much of his time in bizarre religious speculation. But you can still discover the Caribbean even if you're navigation is so poor that you think you've arrived in Indonesia. The philosopher, however, is the wise man, and the wise man, as opposed to the fool, knows what he is doing. Philosophy, perhaps, may even be defined as striving to know what you are doing. So the philosopher must be self-aware in what he is doing, and this holds true for the Enlightenment philosopher as much as the classical. Kant can't simply assert that he doesn't like classical philosophy and he's going to try something new; he's got to give a reason for dismissing classical philosophy.

As I've hope I've showed above, the reasons Kant gives for dismissing the philosophical tradition are a bit of a bluff. He says that philosophy has proven itself futile, but he never actually proves the point; he asserts that it has and hopes the reader goes along. He must bluff because the attempt to prove the point would lead him into the interminable arguments so beloved of the classical philosopher, and this is just what he wishes to avoid.

And this is what Richard Dawkins doesn't seem to understand. Similar to the typical Enlightenment philosopher, he doesn't really have time for classical philosophy, which he sees as a waste of time. He should, then, summarily dismiss it in the fashion of Kant. Not having the self-understanding of a true philosopher like Kant, however, he instead takes a halfway position that is unreasonable on any account. He gives a little time to classical philosophy, enough to rapidly refute classical arguments for God, he thinks. But all his simple refutations reveal is his simplistic and superficial understanding of the arguments involved. This doesn't bother him, however, because he has already decided on Enlightenment grounds (i.e. the manifest futility of classical philosophy) that the arguments are worthless. Rather than an insult, I suspect he sees his condescending to treat the classical arguments even in a superficial manner as generous, since from his perspective they rate no treatment at all.

Efforts like those of Richard Dawkins discredit the Enlightenment tradition (if we can call a "tradition" something that was born in the rejection of tradition). Kant dismissed classical metaphysics as a mere "groping" among concepts, but at least the classical philosophers knew what it meant to grope. Even more embarrassing is a contemporary thinker, supposedly freed two hundred years ago by Kant from even needing to address classical philosophy, blundering about in classical philosophical concepts in a manner that it would be too kind to call "groping."

The Devil, Religious and Secular

Here is a post at the Secular Right blog concerning the recent comments by Father Gabriele Amorth concerning exorcisms, the Devil, and the Vatican.

Now if you'd like to dismiss what Father Amorth says as nonsense, that's fine. What's interesting about Andrew Stuttaford's mention of it in the context of the Enlightenment ("How's that whole enlightenment thing going") is that, if you substitute "genes" or "memes" for "the Devil" in Father Amorth's comments, you've got a position that many Enlightenment followers would consider reasonable, and perhaps even scientifically established. The Enlightenment presents itself as hard-headed philosophical skepticism, but it always ends up in philosophical doctrines even harder to believe than the medieval notions it allegedly exploded.

There is a hint of this in Twain's comment where he mentions as an afterthought "On the other hand, very few neuroscientists believe in free will now either. Free will is just a useful fiction." Now I find it much easier to believe in the Devil, and even possessed men vomiting glass shards or pieces of iron, than I do that free will is "just a useful fiction." Free will is an obvious and undeniable reality that I experience directly every day; denying it as a "useful fiction" strikes me as incoherent. (If my belief in free will is merely a useful fiction, then isn't my belief that free will is a useful fiction, itself also a useful fiction? Then free will might actually not be a useful fiction. We haven't gotten anywhere, except possibly to increase our confusion.) The existence of the Devil or possessed men are, at least, straightforward propositions that make sense in their own terms. At least I know what it means to affirm or deny them.

The Enlightenment project was never, as advertised, a breakout from darkness into the sunny light of common sense reality. It merely substituted a lot of hard-to-believe propositions with other, even harder to believe propositions.

An example of the modern expert

In this earlier post, I wrote about how modern experts serve the same cultural function that priests once did: As the interface to the mysterious powers that dominate our lives.

There is a timely example of this in the latest issue of The Atlantic. The author even explicitly compares the modern therapist to a priest or a shaman:

And yet at the end of the day—literally during a five o’clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks—when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized … no. Heart-shattering as this moment was—a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history—I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family’s domestic construct back together.

Sandra Tsing Loh is talking about her decision to divorce her husband of twenty years. What is interesting is the manner in which Loh describes the situation in terms of abstract concepts and forces that have almost dictated her decision. She has committed adultery, apparently, and according to the therapist the "domestic construct" can survive only if Loh can replace the romantic memory of her lover with that of her husband. Can she do it? Well, she seems not to think so, saying that "I would not be able" to replace it. I wonder.. how does she know? Has she tried? And why does she so uncritically accept the therapeutic assertion that replacing romantic memories is the decisive act in restoring a marriage? Well, because the expert says so, and in the modern world, only experts know things, not ordinary people.

It's the fatalism of the passage that strikes me. The marriage cannot work unless Loh can peform the ritual memory replacement prescribed by the therapist. In the old days, evil spirits might roam the world looking for the ruin of souls, but there was nothing inevitable about their effect. Evil spirits ruin man through tempting him to sin, but through prayer, the sacraments, and the practice of ordinary virtue, temptation could be overcome and evil spirits thwarted. Even if man succumbs to sin - by committing adultery, for example - there was nothing inevitable about the result. Sin triumphs only if man allows it to triumph, which, unfortunately, man sometimes grants. But the inevitability of the triumph of sin, that there is a time when sin decisively undermines our freedom to overcome it and its effects, is something the modern therapist apparently accepts but the old priest would have resisted with every fiber of his being.

One difference between the old priest and the modern expert is that the priest never allowed that the mysterious powers were powerful enough to fully undermine the freedom of man. His main function, in fact, was to administer sacraments that restored man's freedom in the face of the powers that would dominate him. This includes every kind of power; the power of demons to tempt us to sin, or the power of political authorities to corrupt our conscience (see St. Thomas More and King Henry VIII). Now you may dismiss the angels and demons the priest believed in as fantasy - fair enough. But the point is that the priest always thought that man had the wherewhithal to side with angels against the demons, no matter his station or education. The wealthiest king was still as subject to the temptation to sin as much as the poorest peasant, and both had access to the sacraments that would save them both in this world and the next; in this they were perfectly equal. Not so much anymore. Now the poor peasant is the powerless victim of social and economic forces beyond his control, forces that are known only by the experts and those with the money to pay them. Only the woman with money is able to pay for the expert advice that would tell her how to knit her domestic construct together, unless she is lucky enough to get on the Dr. Phil show.

It's not just mysterious psychological forces that dominate us in the modern world, but chemical forces as well. Loh refers to a book that reveals the manner in which our romantic destiny is determined by chemistry (literally):

Why Him, Why Her explains the hormonal forces that trigger humans to be romantically attracted to some people and not to others (a phenomenon also documented in the animal world). Fisher posits that each of us gets dosed in the womb with different levels of hormones that impel us toward one of four basic personality types:

The Explorer—the libidinous, creative adventurer who acts “on the spur of the moment.” Operative neurochemical: dopamine.

The Builder—the much calmer person who has “traditional values.” The Builder also “would rather have loyal friends than interesting friends,” enjoys routines, and places a high priority on taking care of his or her possessions. Operative neurotransmitter: serotonin.

The Director—the “analytical and logical” thinker who enjoys a good argument. The Director wants to discover all the features of his or her new camera or computer. Operative hormone: testosterone.

The Negotiator—the touchy-feely communicator who imagines “both wonderful and horrible things happening” to him- or herself. Operative hormone: estrogen, then oxytocin.

Some of the combinations work and others don't. An Explorer marrying and Explorer, for example, isn't likely to work, but a Builder marrying a Builder will be boring but permanent. Loh's friend Ellen discovers through the book the reason that her marriage never did and never could work:

Exclaims Ellen, slapping the book: “This is why my marriage has been dead for 15 years. I’m an Explorer married to a Builder!” (Ron literally is a builder—like Ian, he crafts wonderful shelves and also, of course, cooks.) But what can Ellen do? Explorer-Explorer tends to be one of the most unstable combinations, whereas Fisher suspects “most of the world’s fifty-year marriages are made by Builders who marry other Builders.”

But what can Ellen do? In the modern world, nothing at all but accept the inevitability of the chemical forces that dominate her life. Dopamine and Serotonin are gods who brook no appeal.

P.S. Don't you just love the way Ellen identified herself as an Explorer? Why, I must be an Explorer, because I'm "creative"and an "adventurer." My boring old husband, however, is just a "Builder", attached to his "traditional values", his loyal but boring friends (friends, you see, are either loyal or interesting, but can't be loyal and interesting), and really is just a selfish boob, because he's mostly worried about taking care of his possessions (i.e. polishing his BMW). Fortunately for Ellen, chemistry dictates that she can do nothing but rid herself of this boat anchor of a guy.

The new priests: Experts

"Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity; nothing has been offered to his mind, but stories of invisible powers, upon whom his happiness was supposed to depend. Occupied solely by his fears, and unintelligible reveries, he has always been at the mercy of his priests, who have reserved to themselves the right of thinking for him, and directing his actions."

- Baron d'Holbach, 1772

The Baron's words are just as true today as they were in 1772, but the referents have changed. The "invisible powers" offered to man today are not angels and demons, but obscure material forces. These are the forces that make him contented or depressed, form his character, and direct his life without him knowing it. In place of the priests of old, we have "experts" who dispense therapy and pills to relieve his depression, other experts who construct government education and welfare programs, without which obscure social forces will inevitably turn him into a criminal, and yet other experts who inspect his genetic code like tea leaves and tell him that he is doomed to be a loser anyway. Instead of confession, we have therapy; instead of the sacrament of baptism, we have the sacrament of abortion; instead of Calvinism, we have genetic determinism. Man still vegetates in his primitive stupidity... but I cannot help but think that vegetating in front of American Idol is a little more primitive than vegetating before the Te Deum at High Mass.

Man's happiness depends on invisible powers. Unfortunately, that's just the way it is whether you are an atheist or a Calvinist, or something else altogether. The decisive question is not whether you can get rid of the stories altogether, but which stories you will believe.