David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (2006)

David Nasaw's thorough biography of the life of Andrew Carnegie  compels one to think about the subject of the distribution of wealth and income.  Carnegie was the wealthiest person of his time:  although it is fair to say that he was not a student of the subject, Carnegie certainly considered the distribution of wealth to be an important social issue of his time and he wrote about it. 

Only inferentially in my discussion of Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice (see January 11, 2011 post) --- a fleeting reference to distributive justice ---  have I broached the subject of the distribution of wealth and income in this blog.  In that book, Sen did not dwell on the subject of income distribution since he was less focused on the rules that would describe a just arrangement and more focused on the process that would realize a just outcome.  In contrast, Sen's sparring partner on the philosophical question of justice, John Rawls, did dwell on the subject of income distribution and developed principles of justice that tolerated income inequality as long as it maximized the welfare of the least advantaged.  This is the difference principle, and it has been explained as follows: 

"The difference principle requires that social institutions be arranged so that inequalities of wealth and income work to the advantage of those who will be worst off. Starting from an imagined baseline of equality, a greater total product can be generated by allowing inequalities in wages and salaries: higher wages can cover the costs of training and education, for example, and can provide incentives to fill jobs that are more in demand. The difference principle requires that inequalities which increase the total product be to everyone's advantage, and specifically to the greatest advantage of those advantaged least.

"Consider four hypothetical economic structures A-D, and the lifetime-average levels of income these would produce for representative members of three different groups:

Economy	Least-Advantaged Group	Middle Group	Most-Advantaged Group
A	10,000	10,000	10,000
B	12,000	15,000	20,000
C	20,000	30,000	50,000
D	17,000	50,000	100,000

"Here the difference principle selects Economy C, because it contains the distribution where the least-advantaged group does best. Inequalities in C are to everyone's advantage relative to an equal division (Economy A), and a more equal division (Economy B). But the difference principle does not allow the rich to get richer at the expense of the poor (Economy D). The difference principle embodies equality-based reciprocity: from an egalitarian baseline it requires inequalities that are good for all, and particularly for the worst-off.

"The difference principle gives expression to the idea that natural endowments are undeserved. A citizen does not merit more of the social product simply because she was lucky enough to be born with gifts that are in great demand. Yet this does not mean that everyone must get the same shares. The fact that citizens have different talents and abilities can be used to make everyone better off. In a society governed by the difference principle citizens regard the distribution of natural endowments as an asset that benefits all. Those better endowed are welcome to use their gifts to make themselves better off, so long as their doing so also contributes to the good of those less well endowed. “In justice as fairness,” Rawls says,“men agree to share one another's fate.”

I mention Rawls' difference principle not to endorse it, but to tee up a discussion about whether the distribution of wealth is something we have mistakenly ignored for several decades at our peril.  Income inequality is but one parameter that can affect the stability of a society.  As previous posts on this blog have discussed, homeostasis is a life regulating principle relating to the stability of living systems, whether the system is ecological, the biosphere, the plant or animal, or components of plants or animals (e.g. circulatory system, neurological system, digestive system).  (See March 6, 2012 post and April 8, 2011 post). Living systems function within a narrow range of certain parameters.  Temperature, pressure, concentrations or ratios of certain chemicals are but a few examples of the parameters.  Homeostasis refers to the living system's ability to stay or return within the range of parameters that is often tied to survival, but certainly health and well-being. Homeostasis operates through what are referred to negative feedback and positive feedback loops.  These are essentially a combination of sensors that determine the system is trending or operating outside the range of one or more parameters triggering responses that function to reverse or accelerate the change.  There is no reason why the concept of homeostasis as applied to living systems should not be applied to social systems, which are living systems in my view.  There are many who recognize income inequality as a key pararmeter in the stability of a social system, and there are those who subscribe to the view that there is a measurement (albeit no consensus on precisely what that measurement is) that reflects the degree of income inequality that is tolerable within a stable society.  Rawls' difference principle is one example of how that measurement might be derived.  Even if one would not select the difference principle, how large of a deviation from the difference principle should be tolerated?  Is there another income group we should pay attention to?

A recent article in the National Journal about Nick Hanauer, who became incredibly wealthy as an early investor in Amazon.com, describes a not-uncommon view among the wealthy that tax policy should be designed to transfer wealth in the interest of the stability of the economic system. In recent times, we have heard similar kinds of statements from Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.  Hanauer argues that expanding income inequality, such as that experienced in the United States in recent years, is injurious to the middle class whose role in the economy is critical to continued economic growth.  A recent book by political pundt, James Carville, titled It's the Middle Class, Stupid, suggests that there is a political dimension to Hanauer's economic concerns about the middle class.  President Obama's re-election rhetoric has certainly latched on to this view.  If the middle class is the object of public policy's attention on the subject of income distribution --- the gruop whose welfare is to be maximized --- then Economy D in the example above, not Economy C under the Difference Principle, is selected (which, by the way, happens to maximize the welfare of the wealthiest as well).

Hanauer takes a systems approach, replete with its feedback loops to the problem, as described in the National Journal article:

"The garden is one of Hanauer’s favorite metaphors to describe a well-functioning economy. He developed it over 20 years of reading on complex systems, chaos theory, and evolutionary biology. Eventually, he says, he arrived at a place where 'you realize that the economy is characterized by the same kind of circle-of-life, natural feedback loops that characterize natural ecosystems.' The plants need the bugs need the birds need the predators. Throw off the balance, and everything wilts."

The feedback loops in a social system that "regulate" the system are communications tools active in political and and other institutional structures (e.g. religion, business, families), but ultimately political. Tax policy is one "response" that a feedback loop can trigger to make that adjustment with respect to income equality.  In a system characterized by coercion, oppression, and dominance, the feedback loops may have little chance of adjusting an out-of-balance measurement of equality, unless there is a moral lever in the hands of the benevolent dictator that would make that adjustment.  For example, we see Saudi leaders from time to time dispensing national/royal wealth to maintain stability.  A system characterized by liberty, democracy, widespread dissemination of information, and protection of individual rights arguably enables feedback loops that, albeit imperfectly, permit adjustments in key social parameters to ensure that a certain stasis is maintained. But lately, the American political system, which is supposed to be the shining example of liberty, democracy, widespread dissemination of information, and protection of individual rights, cannot seem to engage in a civil discourse that addresses this issue.  The arteries of the feedback loops are clogged with polarization.  Next year, experts say, our nation will have to address tax reform, and we will have to see whether the system is capable of making balancing adjustments "to promote the general welfare" and whether the political will exists to keep its eye on that ultimate goal rather than descending into disagreements to exploit petty political opportunity and whether inequality of wealth and income, which has been widening for several decades now, will be an element of the discussion. 

What does this have to do with Andrew Carnegie?  Carnegie was not born into wealth, but he died the world's richest man thanks to the sale of his Carnegie Steel Company for $400 million to J.P. Morgan, who consolidated Carnegie into other steel entities to create U.S. Steel.  Carnegie was a wealthy man before he disposed of his business holdings, and at a relatively early age he pledged to give away his wealth before he died.  He acquired his wealth, not just because of his own skill and acumen, but because he was invited by friends who were building the nation's railroads in the 19th century to participate in their investments and he shared in the wealth they created.  His wealth grew because he exploited insider knowledge, which may or may not be legal today, and was enlarged later because of activity that would certainly be deemed illegal today such as securities fraud and cartelization behavior such as price fixing and agreements with competitors to allocate markets and customers and curtail production.  All of this is documented in David Nasaw's exhaustive research of  Andrew Carnegie and his times.  As Carnegie gradually withdrew from the day-to-day operations of his steel business, he turned more of his attention to the disposition of his wealth, establishing libraries across the United States and Europe, supporting educational institutions and teachers, as well programs to support arbitration of international disputes.  Ironically, Carnegie's interest in preventing war and international disputes was not founded in some moral conviction, but because he found that political instability made it difficult to sell bonds and raise capital for some of his iron and steel bridge and other railroad related projects.  Carnegie advocated that government should impose significant estate taxes on wealth to encourage the wealthy to dispose of their wealth during their lifetime. He wrote a book, The Gospel of Wealth, to spread his views.   Ironically, income taxes were not part of the public policy toolkit of the time to deal with issues of equity during the late 19th century.  Shortly after the ratification of the 16th amendment that exempted a federal income tax from the constitutional restrictions on direct taxes, Carnegie told President Wilson he favored a progressive income tax.  "Citizens should pay taxes in proportion to their ability to do so.  Millionaires have undoubted ability to pay," he wrote.  Just a few years before Carnegie died in 1919, he established the Carnegie Corporation as a trust to receive and hold most of his wealth.  He could not dispose of his wealth (measured in billions of dollars in today's money) fast enough, and so he parted with it before he died and it still remains a fund for its beneficiaries today.  Carnegie was not the only wealthy person who dealt with his wealth in this manner:  the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bessemer Trust have similar origins.  Carnegie was a model a century later for today's wealthy such as Howard Hughes, Buffett and Gates.  Carnegie did not have any recommendations about income or wealth inequality for public policy; he seemed to say that a person should not be restrained in how much wealth they can accumulate during their lifetime as long as they arrange to dispose of it in a manner consistent with their own view of the public good during their lifetime.  Enlightened laissez-faire to say the least.

Despite a nearly unrivaled record of philanthropy during his lifetime, Carnegie's public persona was a mask. He was certainly generous, but he never apologized for his wealth, his company's profits or its conduct in generating that wealth, or his constant battle to reduce the wages of those who worked in his factories and mills. He was a devotee to the social philosophy of Herbert Spencer.  He practiced self-deception and he was deceitful, as Nasaw documents.  He perhaps exemplifies Robert Trivers' thesis that humans deceive themselves in order to better deceive others. (See February 4, 2012 post).   Carnegie's ego was central to his deception.   He craved public attention and sought the attention of the public and other world and cultural leaders, but almost always conveyed the impression that it was the public or world leaders who were seeking him out.  He was one of those Scots who "invented the modern world."  (See May 20, 2012 post). 

David Liss, The Whiskey Rebels (2008)

At the dawn of the American republic, the new nation was in a precarious financial condition.  The nation was indebted to France for financing the rebellious colonies during the revolutionary war, and the States were indebted to the soldiers of the continental army for war pay they never received.  What's the solution to reducing the national debt?  Why taxes, of course:  in this case, sin taxes on the production of whiskey that agitated a minority living in the woods of western Pennsylvania, which prompted the President of the United States, George Washington, to get on his horse as commander and chief, head west toward Pittsburgh and suppress the agitators.  And simultaneously, Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton proposed the creation of the Bank of the United States, partly owned by the United States, but further capitalized by private investment through the issuance of stock. 

If you believe that 21st century American politics and finance are riddled with corruption now, if you believe that taxes are not the price we pay for civilization, than not much has changed in 220 years or so since the era described in David Liss' work of historical fiction, The Whiskey Rebels.  While the Whiskey Rebellion sets the stage for Liss' storyline, this novel is thematically a continuation of Liss' interest in insider trading and market manipulation covered in the early London stock exchanges in The Paper Conspiracy.  (See November 16, 2011 post). As in The Paper Conspiracy, many of the protagonists are real, historical figures, and the story is at its core true. The key difference between the stock exchanges of early 18th century London and late 18th century Philadelphia and New York is that stocks are traded in coffee houses in London and taverns in New York and Philadelphia.   William Duer, a financial speculator, who caused the nation's first financial panic by trying to manipulate the market for government securities and bank stocks is a prominent figure here.  Alexander Hamilton, masterfully covered in Ron Chernow's recent biography, is more of a mystery in this story.

The Whiskey Rebels is a good read, but the interview with David Liss in the back of the paperback version of this novel is most interesting.  "What I think about the function of this historical novel," Liss says, "I tend to think about what it can do that history cannot.  I think if you want simply to learn about the root causes of the Whiskey Rebellion or the Panic of 1792, there are numerous excellent works that you can reference that can provide all the important information you need.  On the other hand, fiction can attempt to recreate the human experience of these events, the emotion context and specific subjectivity of living through such pivotal moments.  It is all guesswork, of course.  We can never really know how people in the past experienced their lives, but it is great fun, and interesting to try."  This statement speaks volumes about how the Bible was written.  (See May 22, 2011 post).

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).

Bill O'Reilly, Killing Lincoln (2011)

Was Abraham Lincoln the 19th century equivalent of Jesus Christ (nee Yeshua, English name Joshua)? Or was he the 19th century equivalent of Julius Caesar? Bill O'Reilly seems to believe he is one or the other, or perhaps both. Like Jesus, Lincoln was well-read in the scriptures and had a premonition of his death. The biblical story of the death of Jesus, however, reads more like an assisted suicide. (See September 9, 2010 post). A lingering question over Lincoln's death is whether the President and some in his inner circle were negligent in failing to make a more robust effort to protect the President given that there were both intelligence and rumors indicating that persons might try to take his life. Lincoln did not have death wish. As O'Reilly points out, the President was turning his attention to the reunification of the States now that the war was over and a man with that objective would not have had a death wish.

Others have attempted to draw parallels between Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln, but the only meaningful similarities are that both were leaders and both were assasinated at approximately 56 years of age. The more interesting angle, which is not lost on O'Reilly, is Lincoln's interest in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and the fact that Mary Lincoln bought her husband a copy of the Shakespeare play shortly before he was killed. Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, had acted in the Shakespeare play, the only play in which he performed with both of his brothers.

In the epilogue, O'Reilly concludes, "Just as the story of Julius Caesar has been told and retold for centuries, the tragedy that befell Lincoln should be known by every American. His life and death continue to shape us as a people, even today. America is a great country, but like every other nation on earth it is influenced by evil. John Wilkes Booth epitomizes the evil that can harm us, even as President Abraham Lincoln represents the good that can make us stronger." Here, O'Reilly uses the word tragedy to refer to an event. In contrast, Shakespearean tragedy, such as Julius Caesar, is not an event, but a story-form , in which (typically) the protagonist represents an admirable, but nevertheless flawed character, who suffers a fall. Most would probably concede that the death of Julius Caesar was not a tragedy: a dicator was overthrown in the name of the people of Rome. And the admirable but flawed character of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar who meets his demise, is not Caesar, but one of Caesar's assassins, Brutus. While Lincoln's interest in the story of Julius Caesar makes for an interesting coincidence, the parallels between Lincoln's death and Julius Caesar are limited. Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, is not an admirable but flawed character. As O'Reilly acknowledges, Booth was undoubtedly flawed by his false sense of self-importance, but he was not admirable: he was evil.

O'Reilly calls his book a "thriller," and it is certainly written as a page-turner. Despite a number of minor factual errors, O'Reilly's book is documented history. It is not historical fiction. This book therefore demonstrates that even historical research, if all of its purported facts are uncritically accepted, might have the power to shape belief in an uninformed way. While this outcome is unlikely with respect to beliefs about the good represented by Abraham Lincoln or the evil represented by his assassin, Booth, it could misinform the public about how Mary Surratt was treated (p.278) while she awaited her fate.

The "tragedy" in the story of Lincoln's death, if you want to call it that, lies in the unfinished business of reconciling the war-torn nation. Six weeks before his death and five weeks before the end of the Civil War, Lincoln sets out his vision for a post-Civil War America in his second inaugural address: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." Would the Reconstruction have been any different had Lincoln lived to fill out his second term? Would a subsequent Supreme Court have tolerated Jim Crow? And would we have experienced the level of racial lynchings across the southern states that ensued in the decades after the Civil War was over? (See December 16, 2010 post). We will never know, but if Booth's murderous act had consequences, these are the kind of consequences that were possibly put into motion by his act.

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).