Only in Russia

I simply must note here an event reported in the New York Times this morning. Two men stood in line somewhere in southern Russia waiting to buy a beer at an outdoor festival. They were discussing the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. (Of course, one might add.) The argument grew heated. One man pulled a gun loaded with rubber bullets and shot the other in the head. The man attacked survived—fortunately. The very brief NYT story ends with this deadpan sentence: “Among educated Russians, classical literature and philosophy are sometimes debated in casual social settings, the way sports often are in Western countries.” Based on my own experiences, Russians need not be all that “educated” to fall into such discussions. Mother’s milk and so on.

Philosophy as a Sport

My interest in philosophy, if it has to be assigned to some social sphere, has much more kinship to navigation, as at sea. For me it is an activity of orientation in non-spatial reality. But like all activities principally centered in the mind, philosophy may also be viewed as exploration, archeology, cathedral building, belle lettres (now that is rare), and also as sport. A champion performer in that sport is Edward Feser, with an eponymous blog, an Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopher who takes great relish in entering the fray. Occasionally, just to enjoy the game, I visit his site. I did so most recently to read his “Reading Rosenberg, Part IX,” which I take to be round nine of a championship boxing match with one Alex Rosenberg, the author of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (link). What surprises me is that it has lasted so long—seeing that Rosenberg’s thesis is “that neither our thoughts nor anything else has any meaning whatsoever,” to quote Feser’s summation. Thoughts are neurons, neurons are ultimately just fermions and bosons and haven’t a clue. One wonders, then, why Rosenberg wrote a book, intending (or rather not-intending, because there is intention either) to communicate meanings, his fermions and bosons addressing Feser’s presumably, and neither being home. That should have been the first punch thrown, and it should have been the end of things. Thus ran my thoughts after delving rather too long on Feser’s post—and the wonder arose why I was doing it. Then came the realization (Feser is such a great writer) that I was doing so for the love of the sport alone. It doesn’t serve for purposes of navigation.  Feser is saying that a discarded left shoe is not a compass.

Ancient, Ambiguous, Odorous Words

“simplicity IS THE ULTIMATE SOPHISTICATION.” - L. DA VINCI

The above is from a Hyatt Hotels advertisement of their Visa card in today’s New York Times. I love the abbreviation L. for Leonardo. So sophisticated. Here is one of those wondrous ancient words; it has undergone so many cycles of use over time that quite contradictory meanings attach to it. The root is sophia, the Greek for wisdom—and I should really render it Sophia in honor of the Goddess of Wisdom. We find this root in philosophy, the love of wisdom; there its ancient meaning is preserved unsullied if also, perhaps, mostly unnoticed.

Precisely at the time when Greece emerged from its own religious (call it medieval) period—thus around the time of Socrates in the fifth century BC—the high arts began a descent into the world of commerce. Socrates was condemned to death by the state of Athens for supposedly corrupting the minds of the young—but the Oracle of Delphi considered him the wisest of men. In Socrates’ time emerged a profession of “teachers of wisdom,” the Sophists, who taught for a fee. Money and wisdom rarely mix well. Some of the sophists were, of course, genuine and serious teachers of philosophy; and far be it for me to deny the honest teacher his income. But many others—and they came, in the long run, to set the tone—“diversified” their product and began to teach cleverness in argument.

Here I’d note a more modern instance of ambiguous labeling. In the seventeenth century the Jesuits were accused of similar “sophistication,” so that the word jesuitical has a bad smell for those who know about such things. But the Jesuits are an upstanding and respected order, and I count myself lucky in having had them as my teachers.

In Greece we had an early split between philosophy and sophism—and lucky for philosophers that the language managed to produce a word that has retained its purity. The word itself, philosophy, was apparently introduced by Pythagoras, another fifth century figure. Rhetoric, the very serious science of oratory and of communications generally, suffered from an ambiguous reputation throughout its long, long history—having only been freed of this taint in modern times when, finally, we have differentiated advertising and public relations as the honestly dishonest forms of paid public discourse.

Isn’t it delightful, therefore, to see an ad in the New York Times lauding sophistication—the child honoring its parent?

Stone Motto Addendum

I was delighted to get from Brandon of Siris, as comment to the last post, indications where the wondrous motto quoted yesterday originated—and how it was first transformed by Chaucer and one of his “translators” before it appeared on stone, in a shortened and, as it were, updated version in a garden in Georgetown in Washington, DC.

Brandon informs us that the original concept was framed by Boethius in Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius (480-524) was a high-level imperial civil servant and philosopher. He fell victim to political intrigues while serving Theodoric the Great and was imprisoned. While in prison, he consoled himself with philosophy, and hence we are heir to his thought. He was executed within a year of his arrest.

Brandon identifies the spot in Consolation where the verse I quoted undoubtedly originated, Book I, Meter V. To make this account complete, I thought I’d quote the passage from what is known as King Alfred’s Version of the Consolations of Boethius. A Google Books digitized version is available here. The book was a translation prepared for King Alfred by Walter John Sedgefield and internally dated 1900. Herewith the passage:

THOU Creator of heaven and earth, that rulest on the eternal throne, Thou that makest the heavens to turn in swift course, and the stars to obey Thee, and the sun with his shining beams to quench the darkness of black night, (so too the moon with her pale beam maketh the stars to grow dim in the heaven, and at times robbeth the sun of his light, coming between him and us men; and that bright star too that we call the morning star, and which by its other name we call the evening star), Thou that givest short hours to the days of winter, and longer ones to those of summer, Thou that in autumn with the strong north-east wind spoilest the trees of their leaves, and again in spring givest them fresh ones with the soft south-west winds, lo! all creatures do Thy will, and keep the ordinances of Thy commandments, save man only; he setteth Thee at naught.

Reading, Studying

In reading books that give me facts, I can always learn something of interest even if the penumbra of interpretation the author radiates strikes me as wrong. Interpretation is a species of valuation, to be sure; it is always possible that the author’s system of values has influenced his choice of facts; but in the realm of givens, many other sources are available to check that.

In looking at books largely about values—thus most philosophical works—I always first try to discover the author’s fundamental orientation. By that phrase I really only mean his epistemology. An example: let’s say that the author is a thorough-going empiricism. In that case the motive for going on—if on I go—will change. The only real content the author can possibly give me is the truth of empiricism itself, namely that nothing reaches me, or ever has, except through my senses. The logic of empiricism suggests that any other derived values will have a sensory basis. Such a book will attempt to persuade me, to be sure; the author will argue and reason; but his own starting premises suggest that reasoning itself has only a sensory basis. And, furthermore, I already know what such experience can teach me about values, as in “Don’t jump off five-storey buildings.” I may go on and read some or all of the work anyway, but for other reasons: to find out how people with such an orientation see things. But then I switch from reading about values to increasing my general awareness of people and society. The content doesn’t interest me as such. I become more open when the author’s epistemology makes room for reason and intuition as genuinely separate sources of knowledge. Then, possibly, all else equal, there may be something of interest in the opus.

Studying a work is the next level up from simple reading. Here I make distinctions between personal and professional study. I’ve studied a lot of things for professional or vocational reasons; the effort often requires the strong exertion of the will because the materials may not be pleasing. I devote personal study only to those works that pass my own test: I have to share their authors’ orientation.

Nomology?

It must be the new hot word among intellectuals. It means theory or science of laws, from the Greek nomos meaning law or convention. I came across it the other day when trying to understand what supervenience means and consulted the online version of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Thus followed a search-for-a-word within a search-for-a-word—because I’d never consciously seen that word before. The use of the term, as I saw it in context, was insider talk among philosophers, people who routinely use a word like iff [sic] meaning “if and only if” and fully expect their readers instantly to get it. Now that one I got—but only because I have computers in my background and have been known to curl up, in pleasant anticipation, to enjoy books like Bjarne Stroustrup’s The Design and Evolution of C++. But as for nomology, which I took in stride once I understood it, I did not expect to encounter it ever again unless it was in one of those “if you don’t understand it you don’t belong here” contexts of academic discourse. Well! Three days later here’s the same word in a political magazine we rather enjoy around here, The American Conservative.

This immediately brought to mind a brief exchange we had with Michelle on the French word, la marotte, meaning “the fool’s scepter,” “fad,” “idée fixe,” “hobby.” She’d never heard the word and at first refused to believe that it was French. At last her dictionary cowed her. Then she said: “I swear I’ll probably encounter it four or five times in the newspapers over the next couple of weeks. That happens all the time, doesn’t it?”

Yes, it does. At least it happens to all the rest of us in Ghulfdom, and I expect that it’s a universal experience the root of which is probably banal, but I prefer to think of it as “significant” somehow. That’s how you separate the inwardly living from the dead. The former are romantics. I expect to see nomology next in the New York Times. And six months out Bill Saffire, in the New York Times Magazine, will give us the lowdown. These words start going around when they come around. Those who use them use them as badges of distinction, however dubious.

Abstraction and Experience

In college I did rather poorly in required science courses, owing perhaps to the disconnect I felt between an abstract and an experiential level of knowledge. In these courses the two were separated and acquired side by side—if at all. We got the conceptual material in lectures, the experience in lab work. Try as I might, I couldn’t connect the two, especially not in chemistry.

In the sciences generally, as taught at universities (at least in my day—perhaps the methods have improved), the actual experience of discovery is too much compressed. The messy lab experiments did not, for me, actually illustrate the elegant formulae of chemical transformation that I’d jotted down in notes. The lab time was too short; the stuff I dribbled from jars into tubes was alien and messy; things never seemed to work out; the smells, the fumes…. Those who had originally discovered all the formulae had spent months and years in what must have been a fascinating process. We were supposed to absorb all that in two-hour stints—without training or time enough to hone the many skills involved. It didn’t work out for me.

Passing grades could be achieved by memorizing formulae and abstract tokens in chemistry and Latin names for species and body parts in biology. Rubber stamp on forehead. Passed required course. Keep the line moving.

Later on I really did learn a good deal about chemistry by working in industry. There I saw problems in a brand new and active context. I had to understand what really transpired and why. I got my knowledge by interaction with lots of people and spending time looking at things in refineries and chemical plants. The formulae became a language by which to talk about the bigger, the real thing. In college the lab was an interlude of chaos. In working life it was the center of events, the real thing, Kant’s Ding an Sich—even if not in the way Kant meant it. Behind the abstract thought now loomed this vast, real, imposing and concrete reality. The thought was thin, the thing was thick.

Yet later—decades later—I learned a lot about biology as well. Surprisingly my greatest help in comprehending that mysterious world came from years of experience I’d had of human institutions and technology. That gave me what amounted to an almost reflexive recognition of the Hermetic slogan: As above, so below. Human experience in its complexity mirrors the arrangements of organic nature at another level, enlarges it to ordinary view. The parallel reaches way down, down to the behavior, characteristics, and arrangements of sub-cellular organelles and their constituents in turn.

I came to believe, as a consequence of this experience, that education should be inverted. First, after high school, let us say, should come ten to twenty-five years of work in the world’s economy. Then college! Only fractions of effort would be required and would then yield ten times the benefit that would have been available to the same person at eighteen or nineteen. Education could thus be seen as completing the human, not to prepare him or her for work. Real preparation could still be provided by apprenticeship programs under patient masters.

Now, to be sure, I had more native inclination in my youth to understand literature, history, and philosophy—the humanities generally—than the sciences. But the same rules, it seems to me, also apply to these fields. Experience is the real teacher. Before we learn the names we ought to have experience of das Ding an Sich. If high schools were properly organized—and here and there they are—they would suffice for minimal preparation, not least in ethics and philosophy. At higher levels these subjects really require a rich experience of life before the problems they deal with even fully surface in human life and, therefore, the raw materials for understanding become available.

My own experience is that the really educated are self-taught—yes, even if, nominally, they already have advanced degrees when this real learning begins. It is thought based on experience that educates. By thought I don’t mean simple musing—not merely the storing of knowledge into cubicles provided by a classification system ready-made by public opinion. I mean genuine, ordered reflection.

Here, perhaps, it may be well to reflect for a moment on that word itself—reflection. It rests on abstractions, concepts, immaterial memories, phantasms, but it carries the richer connotation of the inner life that I’m seeking to portray here. Abstraction is a technical sort of word—not something we experience. What we experience is reflection. And it is a rich sort of thing, not the dry, shrunken head of something that once lived—rather something still vital and alive but on another level…

Plato has Socrates say that “the life which is unexamined is not worth living” (in Apology, the text is here). The statement is odd. The person who fails in examining his life wouldn’t know, would he, having never looked; thus the opinion is that of a third party. The phrasing is poor, but the meaning is clear enough. It signals that experience, as such, however valuable and indispensible it is to genuine knowledge, does not really reach the authentically human level until we view it separated from itself, thus in reflection. The experience, needless to say, may be mental, emotional, or spiritual. It doesn’t have to be sensory. But it should have been perceived.

At the same time, reflection without experience, which seems so common in many philosophical contexts, is next to useless. It reminds me of a ping-pong game without a ball. Such a game would feature many wild gestures at two ends of a table, many loud outcries no doubt, many loud arguments about who just scored a point, with denials and passionate affirmations—but really nothing there to prove the facts one way or the other.

Words

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.

Many years have passed now since my first encounter with the word “epiphenomenon.” I came across the term in studying modern theories of mind. To be sure I’d seen it earlier too, but I’d carelessly assumed that those who used the word, especially in reference to mind, meant “above the phenomenal,” thus separate from, indeed superior to the latter. That meaning seemed legitimate enough because the Greek prefix may be taken as indicating upon, besides, among, on the outside, above, over, and anterior. But later I discovered that the word, as used in the scientific literature, seemed to be understood in quite a different way. Eventually this sent me off to a succession of dictionaries. And I discovered that epiphenomenon actually meant—meaning that it was used by everybody except me—to indicate the very opposite of what I’d understood the word to signify. They meant that mind was a secondary phenomenon—not superior but, to the contrary, inferior, menial, a servant, a non-entity. Indeed, the word meant that mind was entirely the product of an underlying physical phenomenon which caused it. Deeper excursions confirmed this. With that confirmation I placed the word on my personal Index, as it were, and whenever I encountered it used even with vague approval, I would mentally do the sign of the cross, reach for my rabbit’s foot, cross my fingers, and mutter incantations.

Now the other day, perusing one of my favorite blogs, Siris, I came across this passage:

In Toronto I once brought a group of my fellow graduate students almost to tears of laughter by commenting offhand that I thought that anyone who talked much about supervenience ought to be drug out in the street and shot.

That word, supervenience, only served Brandon as a take-off point for an amusing discourse on the way Texans express their frustrations or their pride. And there was more of anthropological interest to those of us beyond the borders of the Lone Star State. After I read the posting, a strange feeling caused me to return to its beginning. I found the word again, stared at it hard, and had the sensation of once more being face-to-face with a small but malevolent something disguised, this time, in Roman garb. I went to Merriam-Webster to find confirmation, and indeed I did. Here was a close relative, at minimum, of my much-loathed epiphenomenon. The definition is “Coming or occurring as something additional, extraneous, or unexpected.” This definition seemed to me, however, to deserve horse-whipping at worst, little more, so I went on to see what the Wise, in this case the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online) had to say on the subject. Here the first sentence of the article on the subject indeed made me regret that I do not own a gun:

A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. In slogan form, “there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference”.

This may be familiar ground for some (say two out of twenty million) but in a humble descendant of a man ennobled by an archduke in the current region of Baden-Württemberg circa 1475 or thereabouts for having been a court-jester of note (I kid not), this sort of thing sets up an urge to crack jokes. But I’ve deteriorated from that lofty status and actually practiced computer coding and such, the menial way of thinking mathematically; thus I plowed on, learned that the vernacular (dictionary) meaning is not to be accepted. I learned that supervenience is a technical term, that it is “proprietary,” meaning that it relates to the properties of things. I went beyond and eventually discovered the following paragraph and nutritious morsel of a quote:

But regardless of how long the notion of supervenience has been around, or who first used the term ‘supervenience’ in its philosophical sense, it is indisputable that Donald Davidson played a key role in bringing the idea to center stage. He introduced the term ‘supervenience’ into contemporary philosophy of mind in the following passage:

Mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics. Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events exactly alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respects, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respects without altering in some physical respects (1970, 214).

At last I’d traced the family lineage of this word to my own favorite bête noir. In the process I’d also discovered its home of origin, analytical philosophy, that realm of sentence parsers who, for lack of any meanings to discuss, cavort with grammar instead. Oh, how wonderful it is to discover that those who don’t believe that minds exist except as chemical traces will use so many tricky, tricky words to say what the chemicals are really saying....

Sukie sits back down politely and…here is hoping that…you know, cause I don’t have a clue.
Oh words, words, words, I can never find the words, words, words...
I can never find the words.
[But when I do, Sukie, then I weep.]

Maria Friedman for The Witches of Eastwick

Other Transitional Figures

Emerging as I did from a Jesuit education—which I value, incidentally—one of the amusing paradoxes I encountered was that some famous authors of my youth were labeled heretics by both sides—my teachers as well as the Pundocracy of Unbelief. I use that ponderous term in order to signal a difference between science and scientism. Practitioners of science—physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology—are too busy to be ideological. They tend to be confident—but only too aware of their own and of their craft’s limitations. To have a dogmatic spirit must be a special cross to bear. It is a temptation to exercise power rather than a yearning for truth. I’d rather suffer from the latter. But the point is that any system of belief, religious or atheistic, will have those who yield to the temptation and thus morph into irritating busybodies.

The authors I have in mind, those who didn’t fit the orthodoxies on offer, I call transitional figures, believing (maybe with an excess optimism) that what comes around goes around, hence no curve ever just goes up. There will be seasons. And if rationalism (however much I value it) goes too far, it will be corrected by intuition. And vice versa.

I’ve mentioned two of these figures recently—Carl Jung and Teilhard de Chardin. The first began as a Freudian and then reintroduced the West to God in the form of the Collective Unconscious. The other began in Darwin’s neighborhood and produced an evolutionary theory which gradually forms a sphere of mind straining towards Omega. Both of these terms are nicely ambiguous. Both thinkers clung to naturalism when you get right down to it, but of an antsy sort. It’s a naturalism clawing away at veils and trying to break free. Messy, too. Over against it a stolid, Stoic atheism appears downright noble—but, alas, the Stoic must eventually confess that pop culture is its lineal descendant, and it ain’t pretty, much less noble. Slimy wiggle-things: are they new birth or corruption?

Other figures I think of as transitional are William James, Pierre Lecompte du Noüy, and David Bohm. They were a psychologist, a doctor, and a physicist. James influenced me greatly with his book entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience; du Noüy wrote on evolution. David Bohm strayed from physics enough in his late years to commit cosmology.

James was one of the first of those who almost touched the transcendental in his writings—and certainly did so in his actual life. He keenly felt the constraining limits of naturalistic science but was a modern man rooted in empirical soil and resistant to the older practice of “natural philosophy.”

Du Noüy’s book, Human Destiny, lay waiting for me a-mouldering on the shelves of the Grosse Pointe Library; written in 1947, it must have been enormously popular to make it to these shelves. Grosse Pointe is an auto-baron’s sleeping quarters (although I live, so to say, in the servant’s wing of it). The Library here is the worst I’ve ever had to call my own. By the time I was fully grown, the name had disappeared, but de Chardin, who had a similar take on evolution, was all the rage. De Chardin saw evolution is cosmic terms, du Noüy under a moral sway. He saw the triumph of life as “conscience” and pictured morality as the future path of evolution. Conscience will somehow lead to another leap forward in some remote future time. He offered very meager hopes for individuals in that he seemed to doubt that “souls” exist and thus continue beyond the grave. His focus of admiration was “human dignity.” He also embraced the piety that seems to have come down to us from the nineteenth century—held by scientifically inclined but well-meaning people (like my Mother)—that we “live on” through our deeds and contributions. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, etc. The man must have been a moral paragon to think that such a view could possibly inspire humanity to heroic self-denial; at bottom his vision offers no hope for the individual. But du Noüy was clearly not an intuitive, poetic type and therefore missed a whole dimension of his theme. He thought that the miracle—at least the last miracle—was the human brain—which tells me that he never pondered the paradoxes of consciousness or the mysteries of inner life. The book has a distinctly nineteenth century flavor. The New Age was still aborning…

David Bohm wrote the definitive textbook on quantum theory, under that very title. It is still used in teaching the subject—and a copy of it is on sale at my local Barnes & Noble. His claim to fame, however, is an alternative hypothesis to quantum theory; when applied it explains the same phenomena giving the same physical results, but the underlying theory requires a new cosmological view. The theory is laid out in a book, written with B.J. Hiley, titled The Undivided Universe: An ontological interpretation of quantum theory. His take on intelligence—as the manifestation of what he describes as an “unconditioned order” in the cosmos—is developed in a much more accessible work (almost no equations), Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order; it is available in trade paperback from Amazon.

One is tempted to include in this listing Henri Bergson as well, but he does not fit my criteria. He was not a scientist by avocation or profession. His poetic élan vital was the product of a philosophical intuition, not a diversion from a narrow scientific path forced on him by intuition. And ultimately the famed élan is the assertion of a “it is what it is,” thus “life is life.”

There are probably other important figures I just failed to come across, notice, or remember. But these five individuals have been important in forming my conviction that we are in a transitional period. Thought always leads. What I see around me contradicts that which I feel, but then the present is always a drag on the future. And the Renaissance dreamers were also surrounded by the mediaeval inertia, and its corruptions, visible all around them.

Ends, Means

It is almost a truism that “the end does not justify the means.” For that very reason, the rule or doctrine contained in that phrase invites a closer look. If it is true, why is it violated in so many small and, indeed, shocking ways. One of the most visible and outrageous examples is the sanctioning of torture by artful interpretation of Section 2340 of 18 U.S.C. The United States Code actually prohibits torture; it defines it as follows:

[A]n act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody of physical control.

One is tempted to ask Jay Bybee: What part of “no” don’t you understand? Is it the “n” or is it the “o”? Bybee was an Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department, the man who gave the CIA the green light to use waterboarding and several other nasty techniques. The artful way of escaping this dilemma, adopted by Mr. Bybee, was to find that (1) the CIA did not intend to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering; it had other, more lawful intentions; and (2) so carefully, indeed artfully, parsing the concept of pain and of suffering that, miraculously, the actual effects of waterboarding (it makes you feel as if you’re drowning) don’t quite measure up to the definitions of 18 U.S.C.—or so at least Bybee argues. If you wish to read the memorandum yourself to check on my veracity, you can begin on this site. The item to download is labeled as “A 18-page memo, dated August 1, 2002, from Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.” Finally a footnote to the definition above: the parenthetical phrase refers to such things as capital punishment.

Having laid this out, I’m not going to say too much more about this business except to point out that the Administration’s acrobatics, turning itself into a pretzel to get around the law, was done for a “worthy cause.” That cause is the security of the United States and the prevention of another terrorist attack. That is the “end” for which “torture” is the means. And it’s that relationship I want to examine.

The more I pondered that relationship—and why it is both misunderstood, misstated on the Internet in discussion forums, and ignored in legal tight-rope walking—the more puzzled I became—until the actual solution to this problem hit me. But before I go there, I want to point out what I stumbled upon on the way. One is that the phrase is understood by young people in a reverse formulation: “the end justifies the means.” I found a site where this very concept was being stoutly defended, although, to be sure, by what sounded like teenagers. In slightly more adult discussions, the emphasis of the argument is on the nature and grandeur of the end. The glorious end is then allowed to shed its radiance backward, haloing whatever kind of action is sincerely undertaken for the noble cause. It does not surprise me, therefore, that senior senators will actually use the same argument, not quite as bluntly of course, but in circumlocutions. For a sample of such a presentation, I would suggest you check out this interview on PBS’ NewsHour aired April 22, 2009 and available in transcript here.

Now for my insight. The reason it didn’t come to me at once is because I hold, as a matter of habit, an old-fashioned concept of truth. And the insight, really, is that many people must not. The fundamental issue that illuminates the end/means argument is that there is such a thing as absolute truth. Some things are simply wrong, and they are wrong in an absolute and not merely in a relative sense. In the modern usage, including the way senators and teenagers approach this subject, an act, a means, is neither right nor wrong, not on the surface, not out of the box. You have to ask what the circumstances were. If the means served some noble end, its character undergoes a change. If it serves some low or indifferent end, then it may seem loathsome. This is moral relativism, and it seems to be widespread—not because the public is malevolent but merely because it’s ignorant.

The final point that I think must be made is that any kind of absolute truth also implies a hierarchical order in the entire universe, hence demands that there be a God. If the prevailing worldview is very fuzzy about such a being, the public's morality will eventually become quite blurred. The public will instinctively adopt a stand-in for the highest value, typically choosing the political collective. This view will be interestingly self-centered, so that waterboarding captured Muslims will be far more acceptable than waterboarding CEO’s of too-big-to-fail financial institutions. But I’d better curb my lower instincts here and stop.

Messing With Material Gods

Adam Smith’s Hidden Hand, Darwin’s Natural Selection, and today’s Public Opinion are instances of forces ancient people called gods or demigods. What they actually felt about these forces, I’m guessing, was similar to our feelings about, say, being laid off because the Market frowns. Gods give and take away, but we generally endow them with positive values. The invisible hand dispenses the wealth of nations, selection bestows survival, and public opinion, if only we obey it, guarantees collective happiness. Our view simply echoes the Roman saying: Vox populi, vox dei.

Smith’s hand really means that various kinds of feedback loops control human greed so that, if you let people freely trade optimal results will come about. See his own words, along with an early definition of GDP, here. Darwin’s natural selection really means that whatever species survive survive and those that don’t weren’t fit. Extending that concept from biology to social life we get social Darwinism. The rigorous practice of that doctrine suggests a glad embrace of the free markets and manly acceptance of what some call creative destruction. Public opinion is feared and courted not because it’s right in any absolute sense but because, having developed instruments to tap and to decant it, we can use it to do or to prevent what we wish or dread. If we get it wrong, never fear: popular opinion will rapidly change to correct us.

Smith, however, didn’t preach the hidden hand because he saw it everywhere at work. No. He preached it because monopolistic practices were choking off and impeding efficient trade. The eighteenth century was doing its utmost to shake off centralized controls everywhere. The French version, Laissez faire, laisser passer, dates from the same time and was the coinage of François Quesnay. To whom was that saying directed? To governments dominated by hereditary nobilities: Let it be, let it pass—let the people be heard! Well, it happened. In the French Revolution, the people were heard at last, and those displaced from rule departed saying, “Après nous le déluge.” The saying is attributed variously to the Marquise de Pompadour or to Madame de Pompadour, but happens to be an old French proverb, strongly suggesting that what comes around goes around.

Darwin’s core doctrine did not arise because he wished to counter human interference with the gods. Instead, looking for an agency of some sort sufficient to explain changes in the biosphere, he got a hint from human interference. His theory of evolution owes a great deal to studying how people, in raising livestock, fostered the development of varieties pleasing to people by keeping and breeding specific individuals that met the human criterion and simply eating those that didn’t. It then struck him that nature itself did the same—with a single objective guiding the process: survival. The agency, however, was simply anything and everything that happens. A modern phrase comes to mind here…

When the ancients spoke of Fate, they meant something rather absolute, unbendable, beyond human influence. The gods, however, could be cajoled by flattery, sacrifices, and other acts of real or pretended submission. So it is with those who’d use public opinion. It can and must be swayed—hence the prominence of politics and advertising in our times.

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What emerges from all this, as I ponder it, is a dualism or a pairing obscured by our wish to influence that reluctant element, the collective inertia of all and everything beyond but around us. Two forces are at work here: the free action of the human will and the resistant force of nature. Public opinion illustrates this paradoxically. One opinion expresses an individual will. When wills are added they take on a more and more material form.

When I worked at Midwest Research Institute long ago, we once had a project intended to discover ideal highway configurations for various levels of traffic over a 24-hour period. One of our investigators chanced on the bright idea that a model of the roads, made of grooves, could simulate the highway system. That model, lilted up into a slant and covered with glass, could be tested by pouring kernels of rice into the system and observing which particular designs got clogged and which permitted the rice to fall through to the bottom faster. In the collective, tiny objects without any intentionality could easily model masses of people in cars.

Our humanity is submerged by our very numbers in the vast societies in which we live. When Emerson said that “Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind,” he was simply putting this fact in a short phrase. The very weight of this dimension, its massive materiality, submerges an element that is of a radically different character. It is our own conscious reality. Its action, of course, also screws up the machine. Without it no one would ever bite or constrain the invisible hand, interfere with natural selection by genetically modified crops, creative destruction would rage on without cries of woe, and no one would have to court vox populi.