Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell (2011)

In 1632, Galileo Galilei published a book entitled Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.  The book compared the Copernican System, in which the earth is described as orbiting the sun, with the Ptolemaic System, in which everything in the universe circles the earth.  A year later, based on the views expressed in the Dialogue. Galileo was convicted of heresy and the book was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, a list of publications prohibited by the Catholic Church because they were considered immoral due to theological errors.   Galileo knew the Church might be provoked by the book, because it defended the Copernican System.  Despite the fact that three paragraphs in the Bible stated that the earth did not move and the sun circled around the earth, Galileo had hopes he could persuade friends in the Church that the Copernican System was not a theological error.  St. Augustine, after all, took the view that not every word in the Bible was to be taken literally, and this should be the case with respect to the biblical assertions that the earth did not move. Galileo did not prevail with the Church in his defense of the Copernican System.  His book was banned, and he lived another nine years, the remainder of his life, under house arrest.   Of course, we now know that Galileo and Copernicus were right, the Church was wrong and it took the Church a couple of centuries to admit it was wrong.

Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632, the same year that the Dialogue was published:  a coincidence tinged with irony given the course Spinoza's life would take over the next 45 years.  A Book Forged in Hell, Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age is Spinoza biographer, Steven Nadler's third book about Spinoza's life, but in this book the subject is narrowed to Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico Politicus and what prompted Spinoza to not only write the book but also publish it during his lifetime (albeit anonymously, deceptively listing the location and name of the publisher).  Spinoza had written a number of unpublished works, several of which were never completed, and some of which were manuscripts circulated among a small group of intellectual sympathizers who questioned the divinity of Jesus, the nature of God, and organized religion and its relationship to the State.  In 17th century conservative, Calvinist Netherlands, these views were heresy. Fortunately for Spinoza, control of the Dutch Government was in the hands of Johan DeWitt and his States faction who favored religious toleration and opposed government oversight and censorship of religion. Spinoza did not rush to publish, because he knew he faced a Galilean type threat as well.  As Nadler describes it, Spinoza hoped to undercut ecclesiastic influence in politics and other domains and weaken the sectarian dangers facing liberal Netherlands.  Notwithstanding a formal policy of freedom of religion, Spinoza was taking on powerful clerical voices who sought to influence public policy.

In the March 12, 2012 post discussing Spinoza's Emendation of the Intellect (1660), his first unpublished, unfinished manuscript, the origin of Spinoza's post-excommunication intellectual journey is revealed.  "After experience had taught me the hollowness and futility of everything that is ordinarily encountered in daily life," he wrote, "and I realized that all the things which were the source and object of my anxiety held nothing of good or evil in themselves save insofar as the mind was influenced by them, I resolved at length to enquire whether there existed a true good, one which was capable of communicating itself and could alone affect the mind to the exclusion of all else, whether, in fact, there was something whose discovery and acquisition would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity."  He seeks to know "true good" by understanding "the circumstances with which the fictitious, the false, and the doubtful perception are concerned, and how we may be delivered from each of them."  The "true good" can be discovered by being delivered from superstition.  The pursuit of being delivered from superstition remained with Spinoza in writing the Tractatus, and through the end of his life.

By the time Spinoza published the Tractatus Theologico Politicus (Theological Political Treatise) in 1670, he had more or less completed his Ethics, which remained unpublished until after his death in 1677.  The Ethics was Spinoza's systematic view of nature, which he labeled 'god,' expressed in a Cartesian manner of postulates and proofs.  (See March 6, 2012 post).  A few friends had seen manuscripts of The Ethics, but for most reading the Tractatus, they would not have appreciated Spinoza's systematic view of nature, god and religion.  He had a reputation across Europe for being an atheist, although there was nothing in print by his hand that confirmed that reputation.  According to Steven Nadler, correcting that reputation was one of Spinoza's motivations for publishing the Tractatus.  The Tractatus failed to change his reputation, but ironically if we are looking for one book --- more than any other --- to discover the roots (although perhaps not the blueprint) of the American Constitution --- democratic, representative government that protected the individual's freedom to philosophize or practice religion and express himself without public sanction, it would be the reputed atheist's Tractatus.  Modern American religious fundamentalists would shiver and bristle at that notion, but it is undeniable.  Why would they shiver and bristle?  Here is how Nadler's fine biography about a book summarizes Spinoza's views in the Tractatus:

A central tenet of Spinoza's system, as explained in The Ethics, is the unity of nature:  everything in nature consists of substance (what I would label material); nature operates by discoverable laws.  Spinoza does not elaborate on this in the Tractatus, and hence the reader of the Tractatus in Spinoza's lifetime does not fully appreciate the worldview that Spinoza brings to the Tractatus.  The unity of nature has consequences for the proper way to look at religion: mind and body are both part of the single substance; there is nothing in the nature of the infinite universe that is immaterial, there are no forms that exist separate from reality, there are no spirits, no ghosts (holy or otherwise), and there is nothing transcendent.  This leaves little room for the way the human mind typically conceives the attributes of god and the human "soul."  Human mental life is made up of various passions and actions, which are determined just like everything else in nature. We know this now, nearly four and one-half centuries later, and Spinoza was not the first to advance the materiality of everything in the universe.    And even if the reader of the Tractatus in Spinoza's lifetime had read The Ethics and appreciated Spinoza's systematic worldview of the universe, humanity, and mental life, it is doubtful Spinoza would have been able to save his reputation.  While it is true, as I say, that we know now that thought and action are both material, it is also true that we still don't know it now.

Humans are natural born dualists, says Michael Gazzaniga.  (See September 27, 2009 post).  Paul Bloom has documented that dualism emerges early in the child's mind; children naturally see the world as two distinct domains: physical objects and real events, and mental states and entities.  While children show they know they have a brain and they use it for thinking, they do not understand that the brain is needed for physical action and consequently thinking and action are assigned to different parts of reality.  As Pascal Boyer writes in Religion Explained, "A human mind is not condemned to consider and represent only what is currently going on in its immediate environment.  Indeed, human minds are remarkable in the amount of time they spend thinking about what is not here and now.  Fiction is the most salient illustration. . . One of the easiest things for human minds to do is to produce inferences on the basis of false premises,such as, 'If I had had lunch I would not be hungry now.'  This can focus on future possibilities too.  Worries about what would happen if the roof caved in and came crashing down on your head do not require the usual input (e.g., seeing the roof coming down) and do not produce the normal output (an attempt to dash off as fast as possible).  This is why psychologists say that these thoughts are decoupled from their standard inputs and outputs. *** Decoupled cognition is crucial to human cognition because we depend so much on information communicated by others.  To evaluate information provided by others, you must build some mental simulation of what they describe."  Previous posts have elaborated on this decoupling mechanism within the human brain.  (See June 12, 2011 post, June 28, 2011 post, and February 15, 2012 post).  This "decoupling of thoughts from their standard inputs and outputs" is part and parcel of what enables humans to engage in self-deception and deception, the subject of Robert Trivers' The Folly of Fools. (See February 4, 2012 post).  Religion has its foundation in this decoupling.  (December 5, 2012 post, February 4, 2012 post, June 12, 2011 post, May 22, 2011 post and September 9, 2010 post). And as I have said in previous posts, so does science.  (See July 30, 2011 post).  The difference is that science is subject to test and verification. Religion is not and resides entirely in the imagination.  Spinoza's materialism or monism is at the core of his differences with the ecclesiasticals of his time, and it would be at the core of any differences with religious fundamentalists today.

Gods and Prophets.  Nadler describes Spinoza's account of God as follows.  "[B]ehind the major organized religions lies a a certain convenient but ultimately irreverent and harmful conception of God.  The superstitious rites and ceremonies of Judaism and Christianity, calculated to win God's favor and avoid his wrath, rest on the false assumption that God is very much a rational agent, endowed as we are with a psychological life and moral character.  God is, in other words, supposed to be a kind of person, possessed of intelligence, will, desire, and even emotion.  The Judaeo-Christian deity is a wise and just God, a transcendent providential being who has purposes and expectations, makes commands and judgments, and is capable of great acts of mercy and vengeance.***It is precisely this traditional religious picture of God that Spinoza rejects [in The Ethics] as foolish anthropomorphism.*** God is not some goal-oriented planner who then judges things by how well they conform to his purposes.  Things happen only because of Nature and its laws. *** To believe otherwise is precisely what leads to those superstitions that are so easily manipulated by preachers and rabbis."

Spinoza rejects revealed religion.  "Central to all faiths in the Abrahamic tradition is prophecy," Nadler says, "or the idea that certain people are endowed with the special gift to receive and pass on the word of God.  Like the power of diviners and seers of pagan antiquity, this endowment is usually construed as the ability to access information not available to others or by ordinary means.  The prophet may be someone who is the direct recipient of divine revelation, a beneficiary of angelic mediation, or simply an inspired interpreter of signs that God has placed before humankind.  He may have a real foreknowledge of the future, or a less infallible but still reliable ability to predict what the outcome of events will be, based perhaps on special interpretive powers to read the significance of past and present states of affairs.  Prophetic power may, on some accounts, be a supernatural gift or it may be grounded in natural faculties.  The information can come to the prophet by way of visions, or dreams, or (in the rarest instance) it might result from an unmediated encounter with God himself."  The evolution of this profession within human social structures was the subject of the previous post. "In Spinoza's system," says Nadler, "there is no transcendent God exercising supernatural, ad hoc communications.  There is room for divine revelation, but only in a very particular sense.  Because for Spinoza God is identical with Nature, and all human knowledge is natural, it follows that all human knowledge is divine.  If God is Nature understood as active, substantial cause of all things, then whatever is brought about by Nature and its laws is, by definition, brought about by God.  The human mind being as much a part of Nature as anything else is, its cognitive states all follow ultimately from 'God or Nature.'***When 'prophecy' or 'divine revelation' is correctly understood in this broad sense, as whatever knowledge casually and cognitively depends on God, then it includes natural knowledge.  More specifically, it includes philosophy and science, as well as other products of the intellect, and is therefore 'common to us all men."  And here is the crux of what bothers Spinoza about prophecy: prophecy is no more or less divine than any other kind of knowledge including science and philosophy, and prophets, ecclesiasticals, rabbis and preachers have no special claim to the truth and there is no reason why their authority should be superior to any other authority.  We see here, Spinoza continuing the theme that he began with in the Emendation of the Intellect (see March 12, 2012 post):  "I resolved at length to enquire whether there existed a true good, one which was capable of communicating itself and could alone affect the mind to the exclusion of all else, whether, in fact, there was something whose discovery and acquisition would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity."  Although Spinoza does not exactly say it this way, Spinoza is telling us exactly what I said two paragraphs ago in the penultimate sentence:  "science is subject to test and verification. Religion is not and resides entirely in the imagination."  For Spinoza, Nadler says, "prophecy is a highly subjective affair.  It is an individualistic product shaped by both nature and nurture.*** Since Joshua was no astronomer, he believed that the earth does not move and that the sun goes around the earth."

Miracles.  Spinoza's treatment of miracles rests on the same foundational view of Nature.  "Nothing happens in Nature that does not follow from her laws . . .her laws cover everything that is conceived even by the divine intellect, and . . . Nature observes a fixed and immutable order."  Belief in miracles, according to Spinoza, is not an expression of divine insight, but of ignorance.  "Miracles and ignorance are the same," wrote Spinoza.  "The word miracle can be understood only with respect to men's beliefs, and means simply an event whose natural cause we --- or at any rate the writer or narrator of the miracle---cannot explain by comparison with any other normal event."  Spinoza does not merely anticipate David Hume nearly a century later, (see February 27, 2011 post) who believed that miracles were not believable because a person does or does not have good reason to believe something, but Spinoza says that miracles are impossible.  This is the Spinoza of the Emendation of the Intellect written ten years earlier in pursuit of a true good that was capable of communicating itself, free of superstition.

Scripture.  If there was one subject in the Tractatus that was likely to confirm in the minds of god-believing persons that Spinoza was an atheist, it was Spinoza's view of scripture.  He was very knowledgeable about the contents of the The Bible.  He studied The Bible closely, and he had studied the views of others who commented on it.  Spinoza was not the first to adopt the view that scripture was a human document --- like a novel or a work of history --- and was not supernaturally delivered.  "It is not a message for mankind sent down by God from heaven."  Spinoza's view of the historical compilation and editing of The Bible is now widely accepted.  The ultimate teaching of scripture, says Spinoza, whether it is the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Gospels, is found in the various expressions of a single, universal mantra:  the Golden Rule (reciprocal altruism).  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Love your neighbor as yourself.  And as the previous series of posts have demonstrated, this universal expression across all cultures has natural, not divine supernatural origins.  (See September 12, 2012 post, September 17, 2012 post, and November 21, 2012 post). 

Judaism and Christianity.  In his discussion of organized religion, Spinoza says that what really defines them is their ceremonial rituals.  These rituals contribute nothing to blessedness.  They contribute only to group identity.  Rituals are not divine or supernatural in their origin.  Organized religions are a source of divisiveness in society.  (See for example December 2, 2011 post and April 1, 2012 post). Nadler points out that Spinoza's critique of organized religion focuses heavily on Judaism, and less so on Christianity.  This led some to believe that he had a favorable view of Yeshua and that he had accepted Christianity.  Nadler dismisses this for the simple reason that Spinoza's systematic worldview of nature, his view of miracles, prophets and God, would not tolerate that conclusion.

Religion and the State.  If Spinoza's views on scripture, organized religion, miracles and prophecy were not enough to alarm the ecclesiasticals, his views on the proper form of government would have alarmed the political leadership across Europe, many of who claimed their political legitimacy by the Divine Right of Kings.  Religion and political power, though separate, were mutually accommodating because they needed each other.  (See previous post).  Religious leadership curried favor with national crowns and was highly influential; political leadership reciprocated to legitimize the purported divine derivation of its authority.  It should not be surprising that ecclesiasticals and monarchs would share a common view of Spinoza.

Spinoza was a social contractarian.  As Nadler writes about Spinoza's views, "Political obligation is, at least in principle if not in historical fact, the result of a rational, voluntary agreement among individuals to hand over their right and power to pursue their own advantage to a common authority and to be governed by the will of all insofar as this will is guided by reason.  What they receive in turn is peace, a more secure life, and the stable enjoyment of the goods they value."  For this reason, individuals submit to an all-powerful state.  But for Spinoza, unlike his contemporary Thomas Hobbes, who shared Spinoza's views on religion, the all-powerful state does not have to invest sovereignty in a single individual or monarchy.  For Spinoza, it can be given to the people at-large.  A democratic polity is more stable from Spinoza's point of view:  when a sovereign becomes tyrannical and self-serving, citizens will resist authority and take back the power they originally gave to the sovereign.  "Democracy is the most natural form of state; approaching most closely to that freedom which nature grants to every man.  For in a democratic state nobody transfers his natural right to another so completely that thereafter he is not to be consulted; he transfers it to the majority of the entire community of which he is a a part." 

Notwithstanding his views on democracy, Spinoza was skeptical about the wisdom of the masses.  As Spinoza states in The Ethics, "It rarely happens that men live according to the guidance of reason.  Instead, their lives are so constituted that they are usually envious and burdensome to one another." Nadler is not the first to observe that Spinoza did not hold common humans in high esteem.  This is not to say that he was contemptuous of the masses.  But he did believe that there were certain people who, like Plato's "philosopher king," were "philosophically gifted," and enjoyed a capacity to understand Nature in a way that most people did not.  Those who were philosophically gifted were not enslaved to passions, gullible to superstition, or stuck in ritual.  Obviously, Spinoza would have treated himself as philosophically gifted.  But Spinoza believed firmly that a democratic sovereign would properly reflect the public will and determine the public good.

The democratic state, in Spinoza's view, could not tolerate the intermeddling of the ecclesiasticals, who "represent a threat not only to progress in philosophy and science, but to the well-being of the state as well," says Nadler.  "In fact, the ability of clergy to exercise censorship over philosophical inquiry is directly proportional to the influence in domestic politics.  Spinoza's argument in the Treatise for the freedom of philosophizing in the state is thus, at the same time, an argument for a state in which sectarian religious authorities have no influence over public affairs, including intellectual and cultural matters.  In the end, Spinoza goes even further and argues that religion, to the extent it is a matter of practice and public activity, is to be controlled by the secular leaders of society."  This latter view does not sound entirely in sync with the First Amendment of the American Constitution and it is not.  According to Nadler, Spinoza did believe that when it comes to religious belief, people should be left alone to believe (or not believe) whatever they want.  Furthermore, Spinoza believed that the free expression of one's religious beliefs should be tolerated by the state and the state should not prosecute anyone for heresy or atheism.  But for Spinoza, the expression of religion was not entirely free from political regulation.  That is true for the First Amendment of the American Constitution to a very limited extent, where the Government can show a compelling state interest.  But the First Amendment's separation of church and state has been interpreted by the US Supreme Court to prohibit the State from endorsing a particular set of religious practices or forms of worship.  For Spinoza, the sovereign was responsible for the "interpretation of religion."  The governing body in a democracy has authority to decide how religion is to be translated into practice, since it has the authority to decide what conduct is consistent with the public good. It was Spinoza's view, according to Nadler, that the "greatest threat to civil peace --- both in theory and as ancient (biblical) and contemporary (Dutch) events have shown --- is the divisions introduced into society by sectarian religion.  The multiplication of large, unregulated religious bodies, even the existence of one sizable congregation independent of the official public one, poses a danger to even a powerful and prosperous society.  Organized religions set citizens against each other --- Christians against Jews, Protestants against Catholics, Protestants against other Protestants --- and more important, against the state itself.  As soon as there are alternative sources of authority besides the sovereign, the citizens are divided."   Recall that in Spinoza's view, God is not a ruler, lawgiver.  The sovereign people are lawgivers.  "When priests and preachers acquire the authority to issue decrees and to transact government business, their individual ambitions will know no bounds, and the will each seek self-glorification both in religious and secular matters.  They will fall out among themselves, increasing sectarian divisions in society.  Corruption will necessarily follow, as the affairs of state will be run according to the self-interest of whichever sect happens to gain the reins of power."

But we find in Spinoza's Tractatus the combination of democratic republican government, the free expression of religion and the right of even heretics to be free from government persecution.  What Spinoza is more broadly interested in is the freedom to philosophize, free from not only government persecution but also from religious persecution.  This also reflects the freedom of speech component of the First Amendment as well.  It is this combination of democracy and tolerance that finds its way into the American Constitution and puts Spinoza as the seminal advocate for the political religious foundations that became enshrined in the American Constitution.

As with Galileo's book, the ecclesiastical authorities marshaled support from the political authorities to ban the Tractatus, even in the tolerant Netherlands.   Spinoza was never able to to persuade the Christian community, as he hoped.  It is difficult to categorize Spinoza, including claiming he was an atheist, and this is true for the ecclesiasticals of his time as well the 20th century Nazis who could not figure out why German intellectuals held him in high regard.  (See April 1, 2012 post).  But Nadler correctly concludes, "Without a doubt, the Theological Political Treatise is one of the most important books in the history of philosophy, in religious and political thought, and even in Bible studies.  More than any other work, it laid the foundation for modern critical and historical approaches to the Bible.  And while often overlooked in books on the history of political thought the Treatise also has a proud and well-deserved place in the rise of democratic theory, civil liberties, and political liberalism.  The ideas of the Treatise inspired republican revolutionaries in England, America and France, and it encourage early modern anticlerical and antisectarian movements."

Arthur Herman, How The Scots Invented the Modern World (2001)

Migration, when one first contemplates the subject, brings to mind human migration:  out-of-Africa, across the Arctic land bridge, the Silk Road, across oceans in boats, and perhaps some day to other planetary objects.   Reverting, however, to a theme that begins with the opening post in this blog, migration refers, at its most fundamental level, to the migration of information:  the migration of genetic information via biological mechanisms, such as sexual intercourse, and molecular mechanisms such transcription; the migration of culture and ideas and language through the movement of peoples; and to a lesser, but nevertheless equally significant extent, through the movement of other species and even atomic particles. (See August 15, 2011 post).

Arthur Herman's history of the Scottish Enlightenment, How The Scots Invented the Modern World, is a book about  the migration of people, culture, and ideas.  Herman's story begins in 1696, more than two decades after the death of Baruch Spinoza (see March 20, 2012 and March 12, 2012 post)  in The Hague, when a 19-year old Scottish theology student, Thomas Aikenhead, utters to some friends, while walking outside on a cold August evening in Edinburgh, "I wish right now I were in the place Ezra called hell to warm myself there."  The remark may have been intended as a joke, and his friends may have laughed, but it was repeated to local church authorities who did not find the remark to be humorous.  Others came forward and reported that young Aikenhead had told others that the Bible was not the literal word of god, but the invention of the prophet Ezra.  Aikenhead purportedly claimed that Jesus performed no miracles, and that reports of miracles were "cheap magic tricks."  Aikenhead reportedly said that the purported resurrection of Jesus was a myth, and that Moses had been a better magician and politician than Jesus.  Genesis was a myth as well.  He claimed that god, nature, and the world were one, and that had been the case for eternity.  Aikenhead must have heard about or read Spinoza.  These are Spinoza's ideas.  The migration of Spinozism across the North Sea is not a subject that Herman addresses in this book, but it is a subject that is central to Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment, which covers the continental migration of Spinozism during the late 17th and 18th centuries.  The outcome was different, perhaps reflecting differences between Dutch tolerance and Scottish intolerance.  Spinoza was excommunicated by his community; Aikenhead was condemned to death. 

By the end of Herman's history of the Scottish Enlightenment, it is Scotland's culture of tolerance that has infected other parts of the globe, setting off liberation movements.  Indeed, only fifty years later David Hume expresses many of the same thoughts (see May 24, 2010 post), and he lives to a ripe old age.  The seeds of Scottish tolerance, Herman writes, were planted a full century before the death of Thomas Aikenhead and a century in advance of John Locke, when George Buchanan, a Scotsman and tutor to the boy who became  James VI, son of Mary Queen of Scots, wrote the The Art and Science of Government Among the Scots.  All political authority, Buchanan said, ultimately belonged to the people, who "have the right to confer the royal authority upon whomever they wish."  James VI (he who was later James I of England for whom the King James Bible is dedicated) obviously disagreed and ignored his tutor.  But the Kirk --- the Church of Scotland --- did not disagree and the popular election of church elders and ministers was institutionalized in Scotland.
 
Just a few decades after the execution of Thomas Aikenhead, the Scottish assault on some of the basic tenets of Christianity resumed.  Deism was flowering in England at this time.  Scotland's Francis Hutcheson  was not only casting doubt on the trinity and the status of Jesus as the "son of god," but he also asserted that belief in Jesus was not necessary for salvation.  Hutcheson advocated "natural religion."  Man carries within him the spark of divine reason.  Man enjoyed natural rights in life and property.  Obedience to law was not established by submission to divine or kingly authority, but through common consent, including moral law.  Moral reasoning is a natural human faculty:  man carried with him the means to learn to be helpful to others, and in helping others, man finds pleasure.  Happiness --- the pursuit of happiness --- is found in making others happy.  Hutcheson's views were not entirely original, as the seeds had been planted by his teachers including John Simson at the University of Glasgow and Gershom Carmichael.  He was also influenced by the Earl of Shaftesbury.  It is Hutcheson who in 1729 refers to "unalienable rights" in An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. An unalienable right is our sense of private of judgement:  our right to think our own minds.  An unalienable right "acts as an essential limitation on all governments," Hutcheson avers.  We begin to see here the beginnings of ideas that would migrate to the North American continent and prove influential in inspiring a new form of government based on liberty the consent of the governed.

Harry Homes, a Scottish lawyer, later known as Lord Kames, advanced a view of the history of man in four stages:  the hunter/fisherman stage; the pastoral/nomadic stage where men sought cooperation from other men, but without the need for a government except at the family level; the agrarian stage where cooperation was combined with a need for sanctions and the beginnings of a state; and the commercial stage, which featured greater networks of social and economic cooperation of increasing complexity, including contractual cooperation that required a means for enforcement, including new laws and agencies of the state.  This was the Scottish Historical School, which recognized the commercial stage as that beneficial confluence and linkage of industry, knowledge and humanity that made men free.  Kames felt that the most important human instinct is the sense of property and desire to own things, which is tied to our sense of self.  Property therefore became linked with self-worth.  Kames' student, David Hume, advanced the idea that the role of government was to check other people's avidity for our own personal property:  to protect the property rights of individuals.  Again, we see in this emphasis on individual property rights the beginning of ideas that would migrate to North America and become foundations of a new republican democracy.
   
The migration of Scottish people to North America was quite substantial.  Two hundred thousand Ulster Scots from Northern Ireland with their own brand of Scottish Calvinism migrated broadly to the American colonies and particularly across the southern colonies; Highlanders migrated to Canada and the American colonies.  They all brought with them their sense of independence and industry as well their cultural institutions that embraced self-governance.  

Herman cites the influence of Benjamin Rush, an Englishman with a Scottish education, and Scotsman John Witherspoon, as influential in helping to establish the values of the Scottish Enlightenment as part of the new American democracy.  Witherspoon became the President of Princeton University, who promoted a spirit of freedom of inquiry within the college.  He was later a signatory of the Declaration of Independence.  James Madison, a future President of the United States and one author of the American Constitution, was a student at Princeton at the time of Witherspoon's leadership.  Herman writes that Madison found himself drawn to another Scotsman, David Hume, an intellectual nemesis of Witherspoon because of Hume's views on "natural religion," which were antithetical to Witherspoon's Evangelical Christianity.  In a little-known essay penned by Hume entitled "The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth," Herman says, Madison found his view that an extended republic might be most stable form of government of all.  "Although the people as a body are unfit for government," Hume wrote, "yet when dispersed in small bodies [such as individual states] they are more susceptible both to reason and order; the force of popular currents and ties is, in great measure, broken." In Hume's view, Herman says, the elite coordinate the movement of the various parts of the whole, rather than plotting its overthrow, and the parts "are so distant and remote, that it is very difficult, either by intrigue, prejudice, or passion, to hurry them into any measures against the public interest."  From this perspective evolved Madison's view of co-equal branches of government and and a government that pits smaller state interests against one another that results in either gridlock or compromise.  And within a polity that features gridlock or compromise, liberty is guaranteed.

Herman tells a good story, and if one has not fully appreciated the role of the Scottish people and persons of Scottish heritage in the spread of liberal ideas and the advancement of science and technology across the globe in the 18th and 19th century, they will now.  The more interesting phenomenon in my view is the broad concept of migration I outlined at the beginning of this post. This story is just one example of migration.  And it is myopic to think of migration in terms of this one example.  A broader, comparative approach would compare the migration of peoples, ideas, and cultures from other parts of the globe at the same time:  from Africa, from England, from the European continent and to understand how they collectively influenced North America; of Jews, of evangelical Christians, of deists, of Catholics, and even those whose persuasion some called atheism and others called "natural religion;" of those with property and those without property; of those who were indentured and those who came to govern.  One could walk away from Herman's story with the view that the Scots "invented" America, and we know that was not the case.  But they surely made a substantial contribution.

Irvin D. Yalom, The Spinoza Problem (2012)

The Finkler Question explored the subject of cultural and individual identity, and in a previous post about that book I explored the history of how the 18th century's "Jewish question" evolved to become the 19th and 20th century's "Jewish problem," a problem, which for minds tainted with hate, sought a "solution." (See December 2, 2011 post). In The Spinoza Problem, Irvin Yalom cleverly reweaves each of these themes in a work of historical fiction, that pits the mind of Enlightenment philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who reasoned his way out of his cultural identity, abandoning all cultural identity in favor of substance monism, against the troubled mind of one of Nazidom's principal racial propagandists, Alfred Rosenberg, for whom cultural identity was nearly everything and his personal identity was in constant crisis and ultimately sublimated to the personal identity of Adolf Hitler.

Yalom suggests that Spinoza may have had his own personal identity crisis. In the Portugese community he is Bento Spinoza; his Hebrew name is Baruch Spinoza; and following his excommunication, he latinized his name (meaning blessed) to Benedict Spinoza. There is a parallel with another identity transformation here: Yeshua (Joshua in English) of Nazareth who was latinized a few hundred years later "Jesus." The difference is that Spinoza made himself out of something he was not; in the case of Yeshua, others made him into something he was not.

Spinoza came to know himself as part of a larger system that transcended cultural identity. Rosenberg, on the other hand, never did come to know himself except as anything but his cultural identity.

The Spinoza "problem" is an interesting twist on Nazidom's "jewish problem." Spinoza presented a challenge for the "jewish problem." How could a jew not be a jew? How could a jew be viewed as a philosophical pillar by the pillars of German philosophy such as Goethe? In the rush to assemble a master race, was there room for exceptions? The "problem" was explored in the posting on The Finkler Question (see December 2, 2011 post). For the Nazis, race was a matter of "blood" (consanguinity) --- once a Jew, always a Jew; as I explained in previous post, group acceptance (or rejection) and group identity for Jews has more to do with a set of shared values rather than blood, although "blood" is not entirely removed from Jewish identity (there is a reason why the Book of Genesis traces generations of ancestors). In the end, according to this fictional narrative, Rosenberg finds no room for Spinoza in Nazidom's master race.

Much is made in this work of fiction of Spinoza's solitary life. Toward the end of the novel, the fictional character, Franco, asks Spinoza: "But, Bento, explain to me: how can you, how do you, live in such solitude? You are not by nature a cold, distant person. I'm certain of that because, whenever we are together, I feel such a strong connection --- on your part as well as mine. I know there is a love between us." Spinoza later responds, "But I don't envision man as a creature of solitude. It's just that I have a different perspective on the idea of connection. I seek the joyous experience that issues not so much from connection as from the loss of separateness." Two comments on this exchange. As Matthew Stewart describes Spinoza in The Courtier and the Heretic, Spinoza was far more connected than Yalom makes him out to be. Spinoza communicated with the European intellectual community both within Holland and beyond the Dutch borders Yes, he had forsaken a family life; yes, he was separated and isolated from his Jewish and Portuguese community; but he was not separated and isolated from the intellectual community. He traveled to some extent, and he had friends. Yalom almost makes Spinoza out to be a hermit, which he was not. He left a valuable body of correspondence behind. Secondly, Spinoza's fictional response to Franco in this novel is fair: "I seek a joyous experience that issues . . . from the loss of separateness." This is Spinozism, if you want to put a label on it. Like the biological history of DNA and genetic material from its earliest origins to wherever we find it as part of living organisms today, everything across time is made of the same substance; modes of substance are not separate from other modes. Yes, we can find different attributes with different modes of this substance. But everything is part of the same substance and when we consider all substance, we can call it god, says Spinoza. Rosenberg, blinded by hate, could never envision a loss of separateness. But hate is not the only thing that causes us to fail to experience a loss of separateness. The tug of the community, the family, the group, and the nation does much the same. Spinoza was a unique individual. I say that not only because he was at peace with himself in a system he called god, but because excommunication from one's community can engender ill-feelings toward others and Spinoza overcame all that through a greater knowledge than most individuals ever care to pursue.

Benjamin DeCasseres, Spinoza Liberator of God and Man (1932)

There has been a flurry of biographies in recent years about Baruch Spinoza. Among them: Spinoza, A Life by Steven Nadler ; Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind by Steven Nadler ; A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age by Steven Nadler ; Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity by Rebecca Goldstein; Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity: 1650-1750 by Jonathan Israel; The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart; Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain by Antonio Damasio

Each of these volumes is commendable to the reader interested in the man whom Albert Einstein called "The greatest of modern philosophers." And to read the written word of Baruch Spinoza himself, there is the relatively recent edition of Spinoza's Complete Works translated by Samuel Shirley.

When Benjamin DeCasseres wrote Spinoza: Liberator of God and Man, he cites only John Colerus' The Life of Benedict Spinoza (1705) and a unnamed volume authored by John Maximilian Lucas published in 1719 as his sources on the life of Baruch Spinoza. As the list of books above demonstrates, the late 20th and now the 21st centuries are increasing their attention to Spinoza.

DeCasseres' small book is not a biography, but it is what The Washington Post obituary writers would call "an appreciation." It is an appreciation of the philosophical foundations of the thinking of Baruch Spinoza: mystical pantheism born of the mind of Plotinus; Epicurus' pursuit of happiness and avoidance of anxiety; and Giordanno Bruno's pantheism. It is also an appreciation of how Spinoza's writings have influenced modern thinking.

An important aspect of Spinoza's thinking is his rejection of anthropotheism. DeCasseres, however, has a very different take on anthropomorphism or anthropotheism than Spinoza's works describe. "The evolution of the idea of God is an anthropomorphic evolution," DeCasseres writes. "It has grown and expanded with the growth and expansion of the consciousness of certain individual men. God is always, and will always be, a 'personal' God, for he is always generated in a unique and individual sensibility. He is the reflection of a man's consciousness. But God's liberation proceeds just in the minds of thinkers. When the greatest degree of universalization of the idea of God is reached, as it was in the brain of Spinoza, the personality of the universalizer becomes one with the universal generalization of all the shackles of relation melt in the Absolute, and the All and any one of its infinitesimally small modes of relative and fugacious existences become one, as in the case of Spinoza. Hence the consciousness of Spinoza and God become interchangeable."

"God in Spinoza is still anthropomorphic and Panmorphic because the mathematical reasoning which Spinoza used to reach him is man-form and has no reality that we know of outside of man's brain; because the peculiar mystical intuitions of Spinoza which urged him to use this process are man-form, and because the internal and external universes with which he identified God are man-form.

"God is, then, still a prisoner, even in Spinoza, of the human reason, of mystical intuition and of the phenomenal universe. And his liberation by Spinoza consists in this: that within the limits of the imaginative Absolute, the imaginative Eternity and Infinity and the imaginative intuitions of Spinoza's consciousness God ceases to be bound by any relation, special attribute, special law or special incarnation. What was Spirit became flesh, say the incarnationists. But Spinoza says, What was flesh now becomes Spirit, and other than Spirit nothing is or can be. Therefore I am --- and you are --- God."

This is poetic hogwash. [God] cannot be a prisoner and at the same time be liberated, and it was not so "even in Spinoza." DeCasseres treats every creation of human imagination as "anthropomorphic." For Spinoza, god was not the creation of human imagination; it was something (all of Nature) the human mind came to understand through reason. By DeCasseres' definition, the Big Bang is anthropomorphic as is quantum mechanics simply because it is the creation of the human imagination. DeCasseres is wrong about god as "prisoner"; DeCasseres is correct that Spinoza did liberate "god" from its anthropomorphic tether. Spinoza did imagine Eternity and Infinity, without special attribute or special incarnation, and he imagined the entire physical universe and everything within that universe, and he imagined it without limit in time and without limit in space, and he called it god. What is anthropomorphic is something with special attributes (mode and extension in Spinoza's parlance), and by acknowledging this much, DeCasseres is inconsistent in saying Spinoza's god "without special attribute or special incarnation" was anthropomorphic.

Spinoza's god does not choose between good and evil; Spinoza's god does not love or hate; Spinoza's god does not cause miracles to happen; Spinoza's god does not hear prayers or respond to them; Spinoza's god does not bring things into being because something that is "absolute" and infinite [meaning that it represents everything] does not create itself. On this last point, it is logical to be sure, but I have to part company with Spinoza, not because of his pantheism or because of his objection to anthropotheism, or because of his objection to a Creator, but because nature is constantly creating and bringing things into being. At some point, a physical system (even a system of nature called "god") --- such as Spinoza's system (see March 6, 2012 post) --- has to address the fact that "things" in that system are brought into being that did not previously exist, at least in the same form they previously did. While I can agree with Spinoza that an anthropomorphic god did not "create" man, evolution as we know it is a fact of nature and the human species certainly was created by evolutionary forces. If "god" represents everything in nature, than god certainly represents evolutionary creation and bringing things into being. That is the "logic" of Spinoza's system, in my view.

Spinoza had enormous influence on Enlightenment discussion of a deity. His was not the only view that varied from anthropocentric Christian, Jewish, and Muslim visions of god. (See May 24, 2010 post). But however we may agree that, in Spinoza's system, god is untethered from its anthropcentric chains, most humans today still believe in an anthropocentric deity who hates, kills, loves, creates, discriminates, is petty, responds to human pleas, and has a wide variety of other human features. (See December 20, 2011 post and May 12, 2010 post and June 12, 2011 post).

Baruch Spinoza, The Emendation of the Intellect (1660)

The life and works Baruch Spinoza have fascinated me since I was a teenager. A teacher who took an interest in my intellectual development assigned me a series of books to read, including Spinoza's Ethics. It was at that time I learned a little bit about Spinoza's life, including his excommunication from the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam. As for his work, Ethics, I was admittedly too young to appreciate fully what he had written. I did understand that he believed that through reason and scientific inquiry one could come to know nature (which Spinoza referred to as "god"). I also comprehended a monism that was systematically complete, avoiding theological inconsistencies that had plagued monotheism from its Hebrew foundations.

As one reads Ethics, it is difficult to fathom why his excommunication for heresy by Amsterdam's Jewish community was so harsh. While Spinoza's god is not the same as Yaweh of the Hebrews, Spinoza seems reverent and respectful enough to be considered "religious" in his own way. So what could Spinoza have done to offend the leaders of the Jewish community of mid-17th century Amsterdam to warrant excommunicating him from their community forever and ordering its members to have no communication with him or read any of his writings?

Steven Nadler has shed some light on the mystery of Spinoza's excommunication and banishment in his book, Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind and his earlier book, Spinoza, A Life. The curses uttered against him were as vague as they were vicious, and yet his later writings exhibit a reverence of the infinite that is seldom heard or seen. Nadler deduces that the offense leading to Spinoza's expulsion from the Jewish community was his refusal to anthropomorphize the deity and recognize one's soul as having eternal life.

Whether Nadler is correct, or whether there was a wider offense will never be known. There are some who suggest that he had drawn the attention of Amsterdam's civic leaders, who leaned on Jewish community leaders to control Spinoza's religous and philosophical discussions among the gentile community. According to his biographers, Spinoza did not believe in the literalness of the Scriptures and he was less than observant. The bible, Spinoza believed, was written by men, not god. Spinoza was skeptical that the rabbinate had special knowledge of of the Torah, and disagreed with their interpretations of the Torah. Spinoza also found contradictions in the Scriptures treatment of Judaism's anthropomorphic god: reminiscent of Jose Saramago's god in Cain (see December 20, 2011 post), in a monotheistic world controlled and determined by one god, what room was there for the devil? For sure the monotheistic god had to be responsible for both good and evil. God could not be infinite if it was only responsible for the good. Spinoza was also known to mingle and engage in intellectual studies and discussions with gentiles, some of whom were described by Dutch Calvinist leaders as atheists.

I will soon be attending a play entitled The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656 by David Ives. In anticipation of this theatrical event, my curiosity was piqued as to whether anything in Spinoza's first writing following his expulsion from Amsterdam's Jewish community might reveal his beliefs that apparently led to his condemnation. The Emendation of the Intellect is an unfinished work, only 30 pages long, and was not published during his life, but it does reveal some of his early critical thoughts. Spinoza was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam at age 23. Two years later, he began writing The Emendation of the Intellect.

Spinoza opens The Emendation of the Intellect with the line, "After experience had taught me the hollowness and futility of everything that is ordinarily encountered in daily life, and I realized that all the things which were the source and object of my anxiety held nothing of good or evil in themselves save insofar as the mind was influenced by them, I resolved at length to enquire whether there existed a true good, one which was capable of communicating itself and could alone affect the mind to the exclusion of all else, whether, in fact, there was something whose discovery and acquisition would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity." Freedom from anxiety is an Epicurean value, and biographers believe that Spinoza had been exposed to the philosophy of Epicurus. We can surmise that " Spinoza's "anxiety" includes the precarious financial position he finds himself in at the helm of his family's debt-laden trading business, which he and his brother Gabriel inherited from their father. Spinoza cites that "most men regard riches, honor, and sensual pleasure as the highest good, each of which can be viewed as by-products of the pursuit of commercial success, and Spinoza probably found little happiness in this endeavor. And while he is perhaps "trapped" in the family business, he is at the same time pursuing his intellectual interests, engaging with persons outside the Jewish community of Amsterdam, including Christian dissenters. In his intellectual pursuits, Spinoza "resolved" to discover whether there was a "a true good [that] could alone affect the mind . . and afford [him] a continuous joy to all eternity." This pursuit, he says, is the "highest happiness."

While lack of success and anxiety over risks in the commercial world may be a motivation to seek Epicurean peace of mind, Spinoza was also faced with a cognitive dissonance as his emerging intellectual beliefs became confrontational with his family and cultural community that had taught him much of what he knew in the first place. But Spinoza did not follow the traditional cognitive dissonance model that resolves the anxiety by living a lie or changing his beliefs to suit the majority. He pursued an independent course devoted to improving his intellect --- the subject of his first written (although unpublished) work. The Emendation of the Intellect is a precursor to his Ethics. The Emendation of the Intellect is not intended to explicate Spinoza's views on a deity. In The Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza refers to another planned work, which he calls his "philosophy." This is not Ethics. It is a reference to another unpublished work known as A Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being, in which he begins to explain his views on god in writing.

We can find in The Emendation of the Intellect several references to Spinoza's views on the human soul, which Nadler says were critical to the harshness of Spinoza's excommunication. For example, "When we clearly perceive that we sense such-and-such a body and no other . . . we clearly infer that the soul is united to the body." Later, "from the fact that I know the essence of the soul, I know that it is united to the body." For Spinoza, the "soul" is a reference to the "mind." And when he says that the soul is united to the body, he means that the mind is united to the brain. Ideas in the mind "correspond to the specific reality of its object [in nature]. This is identical to the saying of the ancients that true science proceeds from cause to effect, except that, as far as I know, they never conceived the soul, as we are here doing, as acting according to fixed laws, a sort of spiritual automaton." Clearly, at this early age of his intellectual life, Spinoza, in contrast to Descartes, did not accept the idea that the soul was separate from the body. He was not a dualist. When a person dies; his/her soul dies.

We find in this small pamphlet, an early Enlightenment rationalist trying to conquer skepticism. (See January 21, 2011 post). And to conquer skepticism in the pursuit of a "true good," he describes a "method" that demands to know "what are the circumstances with which the fictitious, the false, and the doubtful perception are concerned, and how we may be delivered from each of them." Spinoza seeks to confront superstition. What prevents us from having clear and distinct ideas about something and its attributes is confusion --- which causes us to have only partial knowledge of a complete whole or unity composed of many constituents -- failing to distinguish between the known and the unknown, and also attending at the same time without any distinction to the many constituents containing in a single thing. And the source of confusion is fictitious ideas. "The less men know of Nature, the more easily they can fashion numerous fictitious ideas, as that trees speak, that men can change instantaneously into stones or springs, that ghosts appear in mirrors, that something can come from nothing, even that gods can change into beasts or men, and any number of such fantasies." Part of the source of confusion and fictitious ideas arises from when we think of things in an abstract way --- abstraction. "The origin of Nature can neither be conceived in an abstract or universal way." Another source of confusion and fictitious ideas is failure to doubt [question critically], which arises from our "failure to reflect upon the deceptiveness of the senses." Spinoza believes, "if, after being in doubt, a man acquires true knowledge of the senses and of the manner whereby through their means distant things are represented, then the doubt is in turn removed." Finally, the limits of our memory (forgetting), unstrengthened by the intellect, is another source of confusion and fiction. Abstraction, failure to doubt, and forgetful memory give rise to imagination, "arising not from the power of the mind but from external causes, in accordance as the body, dreaming or waking, receives various motions."

Several of the postings in this blog have referred to the role of memory, imagination, and the fictitious. (See May 22, 2011 post; June 28, 2011 post; June 12, 2011 post; December 20, 2011 post). Unlike Spinoza, I don't believe that our capacity for fiction and fantasy is necessarily or absolutely detrimental to our ability to appreciate the good. Our capacity for creative arts and fiction have some relationship to our evolutionary success, and while fiction that amounts to self-deceit is not typically positive, it can be viewed in an evolutionary context. (See February 4, 2012 post). But certainly, human imagination has been critical to advance our knowledge of the physical world. (See July 30, 2011 post). Effective fiction may also help us understand our biases and transform the way we see the world, and all for the good. Similarly, we have seen that our capacity for abstraction is probably a key to our evolutionary success. (See October 25, 2011 post and June 12, 2011 post). One wonders what Spinoza would think of John Searle's "modern era of philosophy" infused with a huge body of knowledge, not known to the Enlightenment philosophers, that Searle says is "certain, objective, and universal." (See January 21, 2011 post). Yet at the same time, widespread belief in religious fictions that Spinoza found so troubling in the mid-17th century still permeate social discourse and obscure knowledge of truth (see June 12, 2011 post and February 4, 2012 post): would Spinoza think humanity has made much progress toward "something whose discovery and acquisition would afford [him/us] a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity" because we have now accumulated a larger body of knowledge about life and nature that is certain, objective, and universal? Spinoza, his biographers would argue, and I would agree, still has enormous relevance to the 21st century.

What I found most impressive him about his life is his independence of mind. While strong divisions among nations and and divisions among segments of a society during the mid-17th centure were attributable to slavish acceptance of group norms, our body politic in 21st century United States is likewise extremely divided among those subscribing to different group beliefs. The extent to which "reason" prevails in public disourse, as opposed to bias, emotion, and/or intuition has probably changed only modestly since the mid-17th century. Solutions are seldom sought behind the veil of ignorance that I described in a previous post with a view toward adopting an impartial lens toward justice, the public good, and nature (see January 11, 2011 post).

Donella Meadows, Thinking In Systems (2008)

Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century Dutch Jew and author of Ethics, was a systems thinker. Perhaps one of the greatest systems thinkers. Ethics is sometimes referred to as a "philosophical system," but it is that and more than that in describing a system. Spinoza is a material naturalist. He contemplates a deterministic system that incorporates the entire material world, and his name for that system is "god." While his contemporary detractors unfairly described him as an atheist, he was, in fact, a pantheist.

Professor Michael Morgan, the editor of Spinoza Complete Works, wrote this paragraph in his Introduction to the book:

"If the key that unlocked the secrets of possibility for us as human beings was unity and totality, the wholeness and order of all things, then the reality that grounded the aspiration to this unity and order was the fact that each of us, as natural objects and as human beings, was precisely located in that unity and order; each of our places was determined in every way, and we were thereby endowed with a very particular point of view on the whole. In a letter to Henry Oldenburg of November 1665, as he attempts to clarify the nature of parts and wholes, Spinoza provides us with a famous image. Each of us is, he tells us, like a little worm in the blood. Nature is like the entire circulatory system or like the entire organism, interacting with only a small part of it and experiencing only a very limited region. Even if we grasp the fact that there is a total system and understand its principles to some degree, our experience is so circumscribed and narrow that we are bound to make mistakes about our understanding of they system and our place in it. Myopia confines our understanding, no matter how we seek to overcome it. And we do. We aspire to experience every detail, every event, and every item as part of the whole, to see it from the perspective of the whole rather than from our own narrow point of view. Our success is limited; we can free ourselves and act in terms of the whole, but only within limits. Our goal is to free ourselves from the distortions and corruptions of our finitude, to become free, active, and rational. These are all the same, and are aspects of becoming like the whole, which is what the tradition dignifies with the title "God" or "divine" or "the Highest Good."

For Spinoza, as Professor Morgan writes, "reason in us was akin to reason in nature; one order permeated everything and enabled us, as rational beings to understand ourselves and the whole and to live peacefully and calmly within it. This was the key to science, to ethics, and to religion. It was the key to all of life. It was his goal to show, clarify, explain and teach it --- to the benefit of all humankind." Morgan's remarks about Spinoza could have formed a preface to Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems. My purpose in highlighting Professor Morgan's statement is that systems thinking is not new. It has been going on for centuries, and I doubt if Spinoza was the first systems thinker.

By the 1960s, systems thinking had become more widely adapted in academic curriculum, at least at the collegiate level. Robert McNamara, John F. Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, is widely credited with introducing systems analysis to public policy during his tenure from 1961-1969. Systems analysis grew to become integrated in addressing engineering problems, business problems, communities, as well as looking at systems in nature (the environment). And it was during this time that Jay Forrester founded the System Dynamics group at MIT. Donella Meadows emerged from the System Dynamics group at MIT and began thinking about socio-ecological systems. Meadows' objective, as with Spinoza, was to "help us understand ourselves and the whole and to live peacefully and calmly within it."

"A system is not just any old collection of things," she writes. "A system is an interconnected set of elements ["people, cells, molecules, or whatever" she says elsewhere] that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose." These elements are "interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered or driven by outside forces. But the system's response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world." Systems can be simple, or they can be extremely complex. Spinoza's system, if you think about it, may be the most complex of all, because it attempts to contemplate all of physical nature as a system. At that level, one can only discuss a system in terms of grand generalities, as Spinoza does in Ethics.

I go back to the very first posting on this blog (see August 17, 2009 post) and the discussion of units of information as the most fundamental unit of physical nature. "Systems of information-feedback control are fundamental to all life and human endeavor, from the slow pace of biological evolution to the launching of the latest space satellite," Meadows quotes Jay Forrester from his book Industrial Dynamics. "Everything we do as individuals, as an industry or as a society is done in the context of an information-feedback system." The mechanism that provides that information-feedback is known as a "feedback loop," and it is regarded as responsible for creating consistent behavior within a system over time. A feedback loop is a mechanism that monitors the parameters of the system that triggers adjustments (which Meadows refers to as "resilience" or elasticity) and ensures stasis within parameters which, in many cases, ensures the survival of the system (human body, community, ecological niche) or continuation of functional purpose in the case of an engineered artifact or system of artifacts. Stasis and survival are not guaranteed; sometimes perturbations can overwhelm feedback systems resulting in the demise of the system.

This is reminiscent of Antonio Damasio's discussion of the brain's role in maintaining homeostasis in the body. "Life requires," Damasio wrote in Self Comes to Mind, "that the body maintain a collection of parameter ranges at all costs for literally dozens of components in its dynamic interior. All the management operations to which I alluded to earlier --- procuring energy sources, incorporating and transforming energy products, and so forth --- aim at maintaining the chemical parameters of a body's interior (its internal milieu) with the magic range compatible with life. The magic range is known as homeostatic, and the process of achieving this balanced state is known as homeostasis." (See April 8, 2011 post). Damasio is describing at least the human nervous system of which the brain is a part, but probably more than one system comprising a larger system that is the human organism.

Spinoza's system can only be explained in generalities because there is simply too much information in the universe for any intelligent body to comprehend. We are forced to acknowledge and live with a laissez-faire dynamical system for all of nature in the hopes that perturbations across nature are managed by nature's own information-feedback systems and stasis is achieved. We can try to control or engineer only the small subsystems we can touch in our remote corner of the universe (or multiverses). "People who are raised in the industrial world," writes Meadows, "and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely the mind-set of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control. . . . "Self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never understand our world, not in the way our reductionist science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the trivial, we can't optimize; we don't even know what to optimize. We can't keep track of everything. We can't find the proper, sustainable relationship to nature, each other, or the institutions we create, if we try to do it from the role of omniscient conqueror." We are also returning full circle to a previous discussion of "entropy" and the "thermodynamic condition." (See August 15, 2011 post).

Spinoza would be disappointed by Meadows' conclusion, but she is right. Our scientific method, our philosophy has largely abandoned deterministic systems; we think in terms of probabilities in order to manage uncertainty. (See July 30, 2011 post). This does not mean, Meadows says, that we should stop "doing" just because we can't control something or anticipate every surprise. But we can listen to what the system tells us and "discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone." And with this conclusion, Spinoza would have felt more comfortable.

Harold A. Ellis, Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy (1988)

Bernard Mandeville (January 31 post) and Henri Boulainvilliers may not have known of each other, but they were contemporaries, separated by the English Channel, during the era of the War of Spanish Succession and it is possible to loosely connect them with this War. Mandeville's idea that there is Virtue (public benefit) in Vice (war) was employed to justify England's participation in the War of Succession because of the benefit to the English economy. Boulainvilliers was obsessed with and conflicted by the idea of hereditary succession in France, and 300 years later we know this because of a series of pamphlets he wrote for the possible successors to Louis XIV.

Historian Harold Ellis' account of Boulainvilliers as an advisor to the Duke of Burgundy and later the Duke of Orleans (regent to Louis XV) unveils an intellectual crack in the ancien regime, decades before the French Revolution that toppled the French Monarchy. Boulainvilliers was part of a public discussion between representatives of the subgroups of the Second Estate (the aristocrats who inherited their titles, the peerage who owed their titles to the monarch, and others of noble heritage (such as Boulainvilliers) who were property owners) about their role in political decision-making. This was not a democratic movement as we think of it today or even as contemplated by the American Constitution later in the 18th century; yet it was incipient republicanism, which even the royal recipients of Boulainvilliers' essays seemed to understand because Boulainvilliers' failed in his efforts to persuade the regent, Orleans, to accept his idea that the Second Estate ought to have a voice in deciding of who succeeds a dying monarch who leaves no direct heirs. Succession was the limited issue for this incipient republicanism; no one was advocating the overthrow of the French monarchy and Boulainvilliers limited his criticism of a monarchy to the concept of "absolute" or decadent monarchy. The most interesting aspect of this history to me is that the discussion was even happening at all, beginning while the Sun King was still alive.

Yet this was the Enlightenment. Boulainvilliers is also responsible for spreading Spinoza's ideas in France, and he wrote a treatise on Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise , which was a defense of secular government and religious tolerance that was not well-received by the European ruling class. Among Spinoza's "radical" ideas are the seeds of democratic institutions, freedom of speech and religious toleration, freedoms that only six decades after Boulainvilliers' death found expression in the United States Constitution.  And while Boulainvilliers is not espousing radical ideas in the Spinozan sense, the discussion within the Second Estate of which Boulainvilliers was a part is that same expression of freedom in its incipiency.

Boulainvilliers, as with others who were part of this discussion, turned to French history to identify the source of the royal authority and its legitimacy, and Boulainvilliers' survey of French history back to the Frankish conquest of Gaul led him to conclude that the authority of the monarchy is derived from the "nation." The nation does not include serfs or others of the Third Estate who were later responsible for overthrowing the French monarchy, but it did include The Second Estate, and the discussion revolved around which members of the Second Estate: just the royal aristocracy? the peerage? Or as Boulainvilliers advocated --- members of the Estates-General, even other propertied nobles such as himself?

As revealed by Ellis, Boulainvilliers was intellectually conflicted. Boulainvilliers appears at times to be hostile to hereditary titles, yet his adult intellectual life is devoted to and in defense of royals who solicited his histories and opinions. He was openly hostile to "absolute" monarchy, but did not challenge the Bourbon monarchy. Central to Boulainvilliers' thought, however conflicted he might have been, is the idea of a meritocracy. He appears greatly bothered that persons who were in positions of responsibility --- either because they inherited that position or they were awarded it by the King --- were not qualified to hold those positions. Apparently he believed that his patron, the regent -- Duke of Orleans -- was qualified, and Boulainvilliers was greatly disappointed that Orleans did not seize the opportunity to turn the monarchy in only a slightly more liberal direction.