A key idea here is anthropomorphism. In prior posts, this term (or anthropocentric) refers to the human projection of human qualities to imaginary spirits, including gods, lesser gods, angels, devils and the like. But Frans De Waals, a primatologist whose research is cited in the books discussed in several previous posts, considers anthropomorphism from a different perspective in The Ape and the Sushi Master: the willingness or unwillingness of humans to consider that human qualities (intelligence, consciousness, intentionality, emotions, morals, social behavior, art, culture, and the like) are shared by other animals, particularly those that are evolutionarily close to humans --- the willingness or unwillingness (anthropodenial) to acknowledge continuity between humans and other animals. Not surprisingly, just as there is a spectrum of views or biases on whether imaginary spirits are real and have human characteristics such as intelligence, consciousness, intentionality, emotions and the like, there is a spectrum of views or biases about just how similar humans are to other animals. Animal research, as De Waals demonstrates, is breaking down and eroding the bias that regards humans outside the rest of the animal kingdom and dismisses any continuity between the human species and other animal species.
Whatever our view is of the merits of anthropomorphism in the spirit-world context, anthropomorphism in the context of studying other species is a constructive approach to understanding our own species. The opposite of anthropomorphism is anthropodenial, which denies the continuity between humans and other animals. Anthropomorphism is part and parcel of the way the human mind works, writes De Waals, but it comes in many shapes and forms: the naive view studies an animal and asks, how would I feel in this situation? An interesting, but nevertheless difficult view is mental role-reversal that asks: what is it like to be that animal? And a practical, neutral view is to recognize that as we humans try our best to understand animal behavior, we recognize that we are all animals and that we use our own perspective to develop testable theories that would help us understand what animals are really doing. In other words, humans just need to take command of their anthropomorphic instinct and filter out biases that the instinct may generate.
Animal research is not limited to genetic similarities and differences, but it is beginning to document the existence of animal culture and the capacity of animals other than humans to learn from others in their species. Observations on the nature vs nurture debate are not limited to bipedal hominids. In the human context, there is still much confusion about the extent to which our behavior and culture is defined by nature or nurture. The confusion is revealed in the discussion of Richard Powers' novel Generosity (November 30, 2009 post) about whether there is a "God gene" in the human genome that dictates our species' inclination to believe in a creator of the universe that is an ultimate cause of all physical reality. Those in anthropodenial seem inclined to think there is such a gene. The vast majority of humanity who now accept the continuity among species, and particularly genetically similar species, understand that god is a part of culture, is something that is learned, and varies among human cultural communities.
For De Waal, the bias of anthropodenial is reflected in the claim that only humans enjoy culture. While it is true that humans have a unique and expansive culture not enjoyed by any other species, it is not true that other animals are without culture. To explain this fact, De Waal asserts that we must first have a definition of culture, and for him it is not a definition that is tied to religion, the arts, language, or politico-economic systems and institutions. Culture is the transmission of habits and information by social means. The social environment includes the immediate family, the extended family, the community, and communities beyond, and the "social means" includes all forms other interacting within the species as well as with other species, such as observing others, feeding, grooming, sex, communicating, sharing, ignoring, rewarding, punishing, empowering, establishing moral rules, and killing. When culture is described in these broader, more general terms, barriers to appreciating the similarities between humans and other primates can be avoided.
The unanswered question here is whether behavior, human or non-human, is entirely genetically determined, culturally determined, or some mixture of both. De Waal sides with the latter view.
Genes code for physical attributes: at the basic constituent level, genes code for biological and electro-chemical processes: how atomic matter attracts, coheres, mixes, reacts, communicates, and repels. Genes contain information that, when expressed in any given phenotype, cause chemicals and electrical signals in the animal body to trigger movement, rest, perhaps feelings of warmth, cold, alarm, fear, pleasure, drowsiness, satiousness, hunger, comfort, repulsion, and emotions as well. These electro-chemical reactions influence both individual and social behavior. Genes code for morphology and embryonic development, as well as, to some extent, post-natal development (for example, the amount of time it takes to achieve maturity or adulthood), which also influences individual and social behavior. Genes code for the construction of biological systems, including physiological systems such as the nervous system, the circulatory system, neural networks, and the like, all of which regulate behavior. These things are true for all of the animal kingdom. But aspects of behavior are learned, either from others or from individual experience, and if the brain of a given species has a memory capability, that learning influences behavior.
De Waal neatly summarizes the linkage between nature and culture. Culture and genetics have one thing in common --- the transmission of information: in the case of genetics information is transmitted by biological/chemical means, in the case of culture it is transmitted by social means. "This is not to say that both forms of behavioral inheritance --- the one traveling across time via genotypes, the other via phenotypes --- should not or could not be conceptually linked. Ironically, the Lamarckian idea that acquired characteristics can be inherited has found its realization not in the physical characteristics he was thinking of, but in behavior. Genetic predispositions feed into culture, culture affects survival, and survival and reproduction determine which genotypes spread in the population. In other words, there exists a dauntingly complex interplay between genetic and cultural transmission. Brave and inspiring attempts at a theory of dual inheritance, or coevolution, have been made, without, however, in any way confusing the two processes."
The research is now focused on what information exactly is transmitted genetically and what is transmitted socially. First, of course, the question focuses on behavior that is considered instinctive: is it instinctive because the genes have programmed the species to make a certain behavior more likely or highly probable? Or is behavior instinctive because it is learned at an early age or learned as a result of some experience or learned over the course of a lifetime and this is communicated inter-generationally?
There is also the question of the feedback loop between nature and culture. As De Waal explains, "Although the relation between culture and nature can be tense, culture mostly tries to get along with nature." Culture cannot change nature; culture can evolve behavior to act consistently with nature. For example, the incest taboo - an avoidance of sex among family members, long a cultural regulation, is now known to be a form of behavior in the primate world that appears to be innate in some aspects (an aversion rather than an avoidance) and perhaps learned in other respect.
So when humans establish moral or ethical rules to regulate human behavior (or even our behavior vis a vis other species, such as animal rights), is that an example where "culture mostly tries to get along with nature?" De Waal describes what he calls "moral emotions," such as sympathy and empathy, which he recognizes emerge, at least initially, from parental care. Through culture --- the transmission of habits and information by social means --- these moral emotions become moral rules. This is the subject of Paul Bloom's book Descartes' Baby. Research on newborns and infants establishes that they have innate social instincts --- that humans are hardwired by evolution with the capacity to understand and respond to the minds and movements of other people. Bloom also shows how humans are hardwired to perceive and reason about inanimate objects as well. It is this capacity that enables learning --- at a very early age, through mimicry, for example --- and De Waal shows us that this capacity exists in other species in addition to human species. The ape, and the sushi master who spends months and months merely observing how sushi is made from mentors, are more similar than we generally think.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)
Robert Wright's discussion of intelligent design and a "designing process" in The Evolution of God (May 13, 2010 post) recalled a book on the bookshelf that I have been intending to read for a couple of years --- David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Hume, I read once, had actually criticized William Paley's intelligent design "watchmaker" argument decades before Paley wrote about it, and the Dialogues, a carefully crafted discussion among three friends, representing three different 18th century views on the nature of a deity, includes a debate between an anthropocentric advocate of god as an intelligent designer (Cleanthes) and a skeptic (Philo) who, while willing to acknowledge that nature appears to be a purposeful creation, is unwilling to assume a parallel between the human mind (which does create works of art) and a divine mind.
A modern eye will recognize that this pamphlet, initially written in the 1750s, anticipates Darwin's theory of natural selection, which was not published until a century later, as well as Gregor Mendel and Crick and Watson. When the third friend, Demea, asks the skeptic, Philo, "How is it conceivable that the world could arise from anything similar to vegetation or generation?" Philo replies: "Very easily. In like manner as the tree sheds its seed into the neighboring fields, and produces other trees; sothe great vegetable, the world, or this planetary system, produces within itself certain seeds, which being scattered into the surrounding chaos, vegetate into new worlds. A comet, for instance, is the seed of a world; and after it has been fully ripened, by passing from sun to sun, and star to star, it is at last tossed into the unformed elements, which everywhere surround the universe, and immediately sprouts up into a new system. Or, if, for the sake of variety, we should suppose this world to be an animal; a comet is the egg of this animal; and in like manner as an ostrich may lay its egg in the sand, which, without any further care, hatches the egg and produces a new animal." Demea says he understands, but asks, "What data do you have for such extraordinary conclusions? And is the slight, imaginary resemblance of the world to an animal or a vegetable sufficient to satisfy the same inference with regard to both?" Right, says Philo, "we have no data to establish such a system of cosmogony. . . but if we must fix on some hypothesis . . . Is there any other rule other than the great similarity of the objects compared? . . . When I see an animal, I infer, that it sprang from generation; and that with as great as certainty as you conclude a house to have been reared from design."
I reprint this extensive quote, because, while it lends some support to Richard Dawkins' conclusion in The Blind Watchmaker that Hume did not have either Darwin's biological "data" or his theory of evolution in hand and failed to fully appreciate "biological design," the quote also reveals that Hume enjoyed a much greater insight into nature than Dawkins is willing to concede. Darwin too was unaware of Gregor Mendel's work on genetics and was a century ahead of the discovery of DNA, but nevertheless deduced that plants and animals sexually transmitted their traits generationally. And Hume does fully appreciate this (which Darwin, himself, appreciated a century later): we have more to learn about nature from vegetation and animals than we could possibly learn from how machines are built. And Hume appreciates what has been a central topic of this blog since the first post discussing Seth Lloyd's Programming The Universe (see August 17, 2009 post): life, as we know it (and do not know it) and its creation is reducible to units of information, the transmission of information, and adaptation to new or changed information.
There is, in the Dialogues, much the same debate that plays out now between theists advancing the proposition that all life reflects the work of an intelligent designer and atheists, such as Dawkins, who advance Darwin's theory of natural selection as a sufficient explanation for the creation of life. It is impressive, to say the least, that this discourse was published over two hundred years ago. Was Hume an atheist in the sense we think of atheists today? Skepticism is a term that is most often associated with Hume, as well as Hobbes and Spinoza, and the theologians and theological philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries tended to label any skeptic an atheist. Hume, Hobbes, and Spinoza all shared a strong objection to an anthropomorphic deity as nothing more than man projecting its image onto an imaginary creator. Spinoza, however, did not fully abandon the term "god." Spinoza was a pantheist who marveled at all of nature and called the totality of the universe "god." Hume does not reveal his views on the existence of god in the Dialogues: all three characters in the Dialogues accept the existence of a god, and they merely disagree about its nature, but it is by no means clear that Hume shares this view and commentators are uniform on this perspective. Hume is definitely not a theist, and he is hostile to organized religion, religious doctrine and ritual. But he never denies the existence of a nonanthropomorphic deity of some sort.
This is the sort of discussion that would have benefitted Robert Wright's historical survey on god and religion. Instead, as I mention in the May 13, 2010 post, Wright ends his survey in the 8th century. In The Evolution of God, Robert Wright does not seem to be able to part with the idea that because a belief in a deity has survived in our many human cultures for many thousands of years, there must be some "purpose" to its survival and "evolution" must have something to explain for its survival and purpose. In my view, Wright has a soft spot for intelligent design that he cannot shake. Wright's "designing process" is nothing more than an "apparent design" argument that appears to embrace Darwinian evolution. That is the same argument that some biologists (who reject intelligent design), including Kenneth Miller in Finding Darwin's God, embrace today, purporting to capture evolutionary biological processes as part of god's initial design. Of course, evolutionary theory cannot deny or negate the existence of a creator, but neither can evolutionary theory negate the non-existence of a creator.
A modern eye will recognize that this pamphlet, initially written in the 1750s, anticipates Darwin's theory of natural selection, which was not published until a century later, as well as Gregor Mendel and Crick and Watson. When the third friend, Demea, asks the skeptic, Philo, "How is it conceivable that the world could arise from anything similar to vegetation or generation?" Philo replies: "Very easily. In like manner as the tree sheds its seed into the neighboring fields, and produces other trees; sothe great vegetable, the world, or this planetary system, produces within itself certain seeds, which being scattered into the surrounding chaos, vegetate into new worlds. A comet, for instance, is the seed of a world; and after it has been fully ripened, by passing from sun to sun, and star to star, it is at last tossed into the unformed elements, which everywhere surround the universe, and immediately sprouts up into a new system. Or, if, for the sake of variety, we should suppose this world to be an animal; a comet is the egg of this animal; and in like manner as an ostrich may lay its egg in the sand, which, without any further care, hatches the egg and produces a new animal." Demea says he understands, but asks, "What data do you have for such extraordinary conclusions? And is the slight, imaginary resemblance of the world to an animal or a vegetable sufficient to satisfy the same inference with regard to both?" Right, says Philo, "we have no data to establish such a system of cosmogony. . . but if we must fix on some hypothesis . . . Is there any other rule other than the great similarity of the objects compared? . . . When I see an animal, I infer, that it sprang from generation; and that with as great as certainty as you conclude a house to have been reared from design."
I reprint this extensive quote, because, while it lends some support to Richard Dawkins' conclusion in The Blind Watchmaker that Hume did not have either Darwin's biological "data" or his theory of evolution in hand and failed to fully appreciate "biological design," the quote also reveals that Hume enjoyed a much greater insight into nature than Dawkins is willing to concede. Darwin too was unaware of Gregor Mendel's work on genetics and was a century ahead of the discovery of DNA, but nevertheless deduced that plants and animals sexually transmitted their traits generationally. And Hume does fully appreciate this (which Darwin, himself, appreciated a century later): we have more to learn about nature from vegetation and animals than we could possibly learn from how machines are built. And Hume appreciates what has been a central topic of this blog since the first post discussing Seth Lloyd's Programming The Universe (see August 17, 2009 post): life, as we know it (and do not know it) and its creation is reducible to units of information, the transmission of information, and adaptation to new or changed information.
There is, in the Dialogues, much the same debate that plays out now between theists advancing the proposition that all life reflects the work of an intelligent designer and atheists, such as Dawkins, who advance Darwin's theory of natural selection as a sufficient explanation for the creation of life. It is impressive, to say the least, that this discourse was published over two hundred years ago. Was Hume an atheist in the sense we think of atheists today? Skepticism is a term that is most often associated with Hume, as well as Hobbes and Spinoza, and the theologians and theological philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries tended to label any skeptic an atheist. Hume, Hobbes, and Spinoza all shared a strong objection to an anthropomorphic deity as nothing more than man projecting its image onto an imaginary creator. Spinoza, however, did not fully abandon the term "god." Spinoza was a pantheist who marveled at all of nature and called the totality of the universe "god." Hume does not reveal his views on the existence of god in the Dialogues: all three characters in the Dialogues accept the existence of a god, and they merely disagree about its nature, but it is by no means clear that Hume shares this view and commentators are uniform on this perspective. Hume is definitely not a theist, and he is hostile to organized religion, religious doctrine and ritual. But he never denies the existence of a nonanthropomorphic deity of some sort.
This is the sort of discussion that would have benefitted Robert Wright's historical survey on god and religion. Instead, as I mention in the May 13, 2010 post, Wright ends his survey in the 8th century. In The Evolution of God, Robert Wright does not seem to be able to part with the idea that because a belief in a deity has survived in our many human cultures for many thousands of years, there must be some "purpose" to its survival and "evolution" must have something to explain for its survival and purpose. In my view, Wright has a soft spot for intelligent design that he cannot shake. Wright's "designing process" is nothing more than an "apparent design" argument that appears to embrace Darwinian evolution. That is the same argument that some biologists (who reject intelligent design), including Kenneth Miller in Finding Darwin's God, embrace today, purporting to capture evolutionary biological processes as part of god's initial design. Of course, evolutionary theory cannot deny or negate the existence of a creator, but neither can evolutionary theory negate the non-existence of a creator.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Robert Wright, The Evolution of God (2009)
This was an informative, but nevertheless disappointing book in several respects. The title, The Evolution of God , together with its opening pages suggest that the book is about a "meme" --- the idea of God and its manifestation as a transmittable unit of culture --- but quite a bit of this book reads as a history of Abrahamic religions, an investigation of who wrote The Bible and The Koran and when, and the historical search for Jesus. Other writers have delved into these subjects previously and Wright does not hide his reliance on them: Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained, Richard Friedman's The Bible with Sources Revealed, Karen Armstrong's A History of God, and E.P Sanders' The Historical Search for Jesus. But if Wright's thesis is about an evolving unit of culture capable of tranmission from one human mind to another, there is virtually no insight offered from the perspective of the major oriental religions, and the evolutionary story of the Abrahamic god stops with Mohammed --- there is nothing after the 9th century C.E. --- and so the meme in its deistic, pantheistic, and even atheistic manifestations that became a force in the next millenium --- the God of Spinoza, for example, that Einstein noted --- is missing from this evolutionary discussion.
Wright's account of what we know from modern science is weak. He equates the human mind's inability to physically see a god with the our inability to physically see an electron and suggests that religion and science have much in common. The existence of an unseen divine spirit is an article of faith --- Wright, sure to anger most theists when he correctly says that the divine spirit originated in the human mind as an act of self-deception, accepts as much. But the existence of an electron is not an article of faith: we can "see" an electron when we experimentally crash another electron into it. There is no self-deception in this knowledge.
Similarly, Wright's discussion of associating the "God meme" with a "higher purpose" vacillates on the border of accepting William Paley's teleological watchmaker perspective on god as an intelligent designer before backing away toward something based in Darwinian natural selection called a "designing process." But with a virtual nod to the intelligent design community, Wright says that the believer would be entitled to co-opt natural selection by answering with a question --- "where did the amazing algorithm of natural selection come from?" --- indicating that it must come from Paley's designing god. Wright cannot have it both ways. Wright misses the distinction between teleology and teleonomy.
Wright divines that in the meme we call God is a "higher purpose" that can be described in terms of moral progress. And it is "moral progress" that is evolving. The evolution of "god" is correlated with the "tendency to grow morally." I am not convinced that there is both a purpose and a tendency along these lines that conflate or move in parallel paths along an arrow of time. It is true that human society is evolving and because of technology our world is smaller and social units across the globe are more interdependent than they were previously. And with greater cultural and economic interdependence there is more opportunity for non zero-sum exchanges that might reduce conflict and promote social harmony --- arguably a form of "moral progress." But there is no reason to label social, technological, and economic evolution with a "purpose" and juxtapose "purpose" with "moral progress." Wright uses terms like "moral truth" and "moral order" as though they are or will be a historical event in human history, but nowhere are these terms defined so that we would know what they are if they were staring us in the face.
Wright's book would have benefitted from research like that covered in Marco Iacobonni's Mirroring People (see September 18, 2009 post) and Marc Hauser's Moral Minds. In these works we see evolutionary biology's and neuropsychology's explanations for non-zero sum exchanges and innate strategies for recognizing that another's gain is also our gain as well. We can understand that while the human mind is not necessarily genetically hardwired with the golden rule, the human mind and body is genetically hardwired so that the golden rule is intuitive. Wright dances around this subject, but does not develop it.
So what is informative about The Evolution of God despite these confusing distractions? Certainly the opening discussion of the birth and growth of divine spirits as human communities evolved from a hunter-gatherer community to a society dominated by shamans and chiefdoms, to the age of organized political units and states, along with the closing discussion of Pascal Boyer's multidisciplinary approach to understanding the evolutionary origin of religion based on anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and biology is informative. Wright's view that our beliefs in divine spirits are best understood by the "facts on the ground" rather than our imagination of what is in the sky is compelling: politics and economics, he says, gave us the "one true god" of the Abrahamic faiths. Separately, the history of the Abrahamic religions is informative although not new, and if one has not read anything on this subject previously Wright's story is well-told and researched.
Wright is aware of the fact that religions have a history of being social dividers with built-in mechanisms to keep outsiders (non-believers) isolated from insiders (believers). Yet this book is the work of an apparent optimist who believes it is possible for humanity to become morally unified. There are numerous examples in the history of religion where religions coexisted and cultures mutually benefitted from coexistence and tolerance. Wright optimistically believes we can identify the circumstances that are ripe for tolerance, love and coexistence, find our way to embrace them as part of a permanent social order and achieve moral progress along the way. But, according to Wright, this will require the religious to look themselves in the mirror and say, with respect to their religion and their god, "I am not special." That's a little like John Rawls' "veil of ignorance" in A Theory of Justice: an interesting thought expermiment to wipe away self-interest, social, cultural, sexual and ethnic preferences and prejudices to rationalize a "just" society. Good luck.
Wright's account of what we know from modern science is weak. He equates the human mind's inability to physically see a god with the our inability to physically see an electron and suggests that religion and science have much in common. The existence of an unseen divine spirit is an article of faith --- Wright, sure to anger most theists when he correctly says that the divine spirit originated in the human mind as an act of self-deception, accepts as much. But the existence of an electron is not an article of faith: we can "see" an electron when we experimentally crash another electron into it. There is no self-deception in this knowledge.
Similarly, Wright's discussion of associating the "God meme" with a "higher purpose" vacillates on the border of accepting William Paley's teleological watchmaker perspective on god as an intelligent designer before backing away toward something based in Darwinian natural selection called a "designing process." But with a virtual nod to the intelligent design community, Wright says that the believer would be entitled to co-opt natural selection by answering with a question --- "where did the amazing algorithm of natural selection come from?" --- indicating that it must come from Paley's designing god. Wright cannot have it both ways. Wright misses the distinction between teleology and teleonomy.
Wright divines that in the meme we call God is a "higher purpose" that can be described in terms of moral progress. And it is "moral progress" that is evolving. The evolution of "god" is correlated with the "tendency to grow morally." I am not convinced that there is both a purpose and a tendency along these lines that conflate or move in parallel paths along an arrow of time. It is true that human society is evolving and because of technology our world is smaller and social units across the globe are more interdependent than they were previously. And with greater cultural and economic interdependence there is more opportunity for non zero-sum exchanges that might reduce conflict and promote social harmony --- arguably a form of "moral progress." But there is no reason to label social, technological, and economic evolution with a "purpose" and juxtapose "purpose" with "moral progress." Wright uses terms like "moral truth" and "moral order" as though they are or will be a historical event in human history, but nowhere are these terms defined so that we would know what they are if they were staring us in the face.
Wright's book would have benefitted from research like that covered in Marco Iacobonni's Mirroring People (see September 18, 2009 post) and Marc Hauser's Moral Minds. In these works we see evolutionary biology's and neuropsychology's explanations for non-zero sum exchanges and innate strategies for recognizing that another's gain is also our gain as well. We can understand that while the human mind is not necessarily genetically hardwired with the golden rule, the human mind and body is genetically hardwired so that the golden rule is intuitive. Wright dances around this subject, but does not develop it.
So what is informative about The Evolution of God despite these confusing distractions? Certainly the opening discussion of the birth and growth of divine spirits as human communities evolved from a hunter-gatherer community to a society dominated by shamans and chiefdoms, to the age of organized political units and states, along with the closing discussion of Pascal Boyer's multidisciplinary approach to understanding the evolutionary origin of religion based on anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and biology is informative. Wright's view that our beliefs in divine spirits are best understood by the "facts on the ground" rather than our imagination of what is in the sky is compelling: politics and economics, he says, gave us the "one true god" of the Abrahamic faiths. Separately, the history of the Abrahamic religions is informative although not new, and if one has not read anything on this subject previously Wright's story is well-told and researched.
Wright is aware of the fact that religions have a history of being social dividers with built-in mechanisms to keep outsiders (non-believers) isolated from insiders (believers). Yet this book is the work of an apparent optimist who believes it is possible for humanity to become morally unified. There are numerous examples in the history of religion where religions coexisted and cultures mutually benefitted from coexistence and tolerance. Wright optimistically believes we can identify the circumstances that are ripe for tolerance, love and coexistence, find our way to embrace them as part of a permanent social order and achieve moral progress along the way. But, according to Wright, this will require the religious to look themselves in the mirror and say, with respect to their religion and their god, "I am not special." That's a little like John Rawls' "veil of ignorance" in A Theory of Justice: an interesting thought expermiment to wipe away self-interest, social, cultural, sexual and ethnic preferences and prejudices to rationalize a "just" society. Good luck.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
John Banville, The Infinities (2009)
In The Beginnings of Western Science (March 24, 2010 post), David Lindberg states that the Sixth Century (B.C.) Milesians of antiquity posed a question that had never been previously asked in either Greek or Middle Eastern culture: "what is the material origin of things---the single and simple underlying reality that can take on a variety of forms to produce the diversity and order behind chaos?" And importantly, Lindberg adds, "in the answers offered by these Milesians we find no personification or deification of nature; a conceptual chasm [that] separates their worldview from the mythological world of Homer and Hesiod. The Milesians left the gods out of the story. What they may have thought about the Olympian gods we do not (in most cases) know; but they did not invoke the gods to explain the origin, nature or cause of things." And while the idea of a god as a creator or prime mover later found a place in the ideas of Plato (Timaeus) and Aristotle in subsequent centuries, these were not anthropomorphic gods that meddled in earthly affairs. Similarly, Yahweh gradually abandoned its personal intermeddling in the history of the Hebrew people over these centuries as well. Only later in Christian mythology, with its story of a miraculous virgin birth, do we come close to a story, now about 2000 years old, of divine intermeddling that some people to this day believe is part of human history.
Occasionally, a novelist brings to life mythological dieties who intervene in human affairs to tell a story. Jose Saramago brought the god of the Jewish people to Galil to the bedroom of Mary and Joseph in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and behold, Mary, was with child. That other Christian demiurge --- the devil ---also enters an appearance in the Saramago story. Greek mythological gods are central to John Barth's Chimera, with the objective of showing that these gods are real human beings with all the characteristic foibles of humanity. And so it is with John Banville in The Infinities, where Hermes, Zeus, and Pan lurk over and intermingle in the life of the Godley family as their patriarch, Adam Godley, sits in a coma facing his last day of life.
Early in The Infinities, Zeus slides into bed with dying man, Adam Godley's daughter-in-law for sexual intercourse. This is not new to storytelling. Even in the early chapters of Genesis (6:4), heavenly gods came down to earth, in the Greek tradition, and impregnated women who bore their children. The miracle of Jesus' divine paternity merely repeats this storytelling technique, as do other parts of the Gospel that seek to build on the Hebrew stories to form a continuous history.
The term "infinities" has multiple meanings for this playful, amusing tale, which could have been titled, with apologies to Shakespeare, A Midsummer Day's Coma. Facially, the Infinities refers to the mythological gods of Greek lore, who, without apparent conspiracy, find their way to the home of a dying mathematician as he lifelessly waits out the final day of his life. But equally, it refers to the conundrum that has plagued quantum physicists and string theorists who have pursued the theory of everything that will mathematically unite quantum mechanics and general relativity, only to find failure in the mathematical equations that produce bedeviling infinities. The dying mathematician has purportedly solved the problem (although we are not told how). The closest we come to learning of Adam's stunning achievement is the statement of Pan, in the guise of the dying man's long-time friend Benny, who says, "you see, the infinities, the infinities that cropped up in everyone else's equations and made them null, and which cropped up in his, too, he saw as exactly what----an infinity of infinities, all crossing and breaking into each other, all here and invisible, a complex of worlds beyond what anyone before him had imagined ever was there---well, you can imagine the effect. . .Well, well, you can imagine." Pan appears to be saying that the dying mathematician simply accepted the infinities and their inherent contradictions for what they are and posited the existence of multiverses, a subject addressed by Charles Seife in Decoding The Universe (August 23, 2009 post). Inquiring minds, however, would like to know more.
In this novel, the dying man in a coma can still think, and for a chapter the reader is treated to his memories and thoughts, including one glimpse of the infinities that he stared in the face and understood. "My equations spanned a multitude of universes yet they posited a single world of unity and ultimate order. Perhaps there is such a world, but if there is we do not live in it, and cannot know how things would be there." An admission that countless authors and religious leaders have contemplated for millenia: human limits in the face of a universe (and perhaps an infinite number of universes) that seem(s) to be without limit. Echoing Pan, humans can imagine multiple universes and infinity, but the limitations that make us "human" mean that we will never know the infinite how things really are in those other universes that we cannot live in.
Each of the characters in this novel seems to be coexisting in their separate universes. They notice each other and talk to each other, but they don't appear to be truly intersecting. They are almost invisible to each other.
Banville closes his treat with this observation from Zeus: "This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed forever in a luminous, unending instant." These are themes that return us to information theory, described by Seth Lloyd and Charles Seife (August 2009 posts). As Seife noted, while the universe may be infinite, information processing cannot go on forever --- and at some point information processing will stop and the gezillions of bits of information that life has stored and preserved will be dissipated (not destroyed) so it is useless and life in the visible universe (not just human life) will become extinct. That is a universe where "nothing is lost," but in contrast to Banville, all cannot be accounted for because of entropy. Banville does not contemplate entropy or the dissipation of information, and if he did the mildly upbeat ending would likely turn out to be more pessimistic instead.
This is a deep novel, probably one people can afford to read more than once. And a dose of Greek mythology in your academic background could make it enjoyable on another level.
Occasionally, a novelist brings to life mythological dieties who intervene in human affairs to tell a story. Jose Saramago brought the god of the Jewish people to Galil to the bedroom of Mary and Joseph in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and behold, Mary, was with child. That other Christian demiurge --- the devil ---also enters an appearance in the Saramago story. Greek mythological gods are central to John Barth's Chimera, with the objective of showing that these gods are real human beings with all the characteristic foibles of humanity. And so it is with John Banville in The Infinities, where Hermes, Zeus, and Pan lurk over and intermingle in the life of the Godley family as their patriarch, Adam Godley, sits in a coma facing his last day of life.
Early in The Infinities, Zeus slides into bed with dying man, Adam Godley's daughter-in-law for sexual intercourse. This is not new to storytelling. Even in the early chapters of Genesis (6:4), heavenly gods came down to earth, in the Greek tradition, and impregnated women who bore their children. The miracle of Jesus' divine paternity merely repeats this storytelling technique, as do other parts of the Gospel that seek to build on the Hebrew stories to form a continuous history.
The term "infinities" has multiple meanings for this playful, amusing tale, which could have been titled, with apologies to Shakespeare, A Midsummer Day's Coma. Facially, the Infinities refers to the mythological gods of Greek lore, who, without apparent conspiracy, find their way to the home of a dying mathematician as he lifelessly waits out the final day of his life. But equally, it refers to the conundrum that has plagued quantum physicists and string theorists who have pursued the theory of everything that will mathematically unite quantum mechanics and general relativity, only to find failure in the mathematical equations that produce bedeviling infinities. The dying mathematician has purportedly solved the problem (although we are not told how). The closest we come to learning of Adam's stunning achievement is the statement of Pan, in the guise of the dying man's long-time friend Benny, who says, "you see, the infinities, the infinities that cropped up in everyone else's equations and made them null, and which cropped up in his, too, he saw as exactly what----an infinity of infinities, all crossing and breaking into each other, all here and invisible, a complex of worlds beyond what anyone before him had imagined ever was there---well, you can imagine the effect. . .Well, well, you can imagine." Pan appears to be saying that the dying mathematician simply accepted the infinities and their inherent contradictions for what they are and posited the existence of multiverses, a subject addressed by Charles Seife in Decoding The Universe (August 23, 2009 post). Inquiring minds, however, would like to know more.
In this novel, the dying man in a coma can still think, and for a chapter the reader is treated to his memories and thoughts, including one glimpse of the infinities that he stared in the face and understood. "My equations spanned a multitude of universes yet they posited a single world of unity and ultimate order. Perhaps there is such a world, but if there is we do not live in it, and cannot know how things would be there." An admission that countless authors and religious leaders have contemplated for millenia: human limits in the face of a universe (and perhaps an infinite number of universes) that seem(s) to be without limit. Echoing Pan, humans can imagine multiple universes and infinity, but the limitations that make us "human" mean that we will never know the infinite how things really are in those other universes that we cannot live in.
Each of the characters in this novel seems to be coexisting in their separate universes. They notice each other and talk to each other, but they don't appear to be truly intersecting. They are almost invisible to each other.
Banville closes his treat with this observation from Zeus: "This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed forever in a luminous, unending instant." These are themes that return us to information theory, described by Seth Lloyd and Charles Seife (August 2009 posts). As Seife noted, while the universe may be infinite, information processing cannot go on forever --- and at some point information processing will stop and the gezillions of bits of information that life has stored and preserved will be dissipated (not destroyed) so it is useless and life in the visible universe (not just human life) will become extinct. That is a universe where "nothing is lost," but in contrast to Banville, all cannot be accounted for because of entropy. Banville does not contemplate entropy or the dissipation of information, and if he did the mildly upbeat ending would likely turn out to be more pessimistic instead.
This is a deep novel, probably one people can afford to read more than once. And a dose of Greek mythology in your academic background could make it enjoyable on another level.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (2d ed. 2007)
Following footnotes, I fear, is not a passion of many students today. Lawyers understand the importance of following footnotes, because the footnote or citation in a judicial opinion is just as important to understanding how the court arrived at its decision as the text of the opinion itself. Footnotes and citations document the development of the common law --- the precedent, rationale, and history on which the court relied.
A footnote in Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind (2005) brought my attention to the 1992 edition of David Lindberg's book, The Beginnings of Western Science, several years ago. I put the book on my Amazon wish list. Freeman also cited Edward Grant's The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages, which I subsequently read. The subject here is the history of science from the classical period up the period preceding the Enlightenment, and the extent to which cultures and institutions either encouraged or restrained scientific inquiry during this period. Freeman's thesis is that the unification of Roman state authority and Christian faith by Constantine stifled, if not suppressed the Greek intellectual tradition that relied on mental reasoning, a thesis that fits well with the nomenclature used to describe these times: the "dark" ages, and the "medieval" period. Not so fast, warns Lindberg. While not denying that much of Western Europe lost touch with Aristotelian philosophy and Greek mathematics. medicine, and science from the classical era, and observing that Aristotle and Greek mathematics, medicine, and science became a foundation for scientific progress in the Arab and Muslim world that ultimately found its way to Spain, Lindberg documents that there remained at some, scattered level an awareness of Aristotle and Greek math, medicine and scientific research that was not entirely lost to the Western world and certainly enough for Lindberg to claim that the history of western science from the classical era had some degree of continuity.
Throughout this treatise, Lindberg reminds his reader that it is error to appreciate (or critique) scientific inquiry in the Dark Ages or the Medieval Period based on our modern vantage point, and essential that scientific inquiry during these periods be examined in light of the the culture, institutions, and scientific knowledge then existing. Lindberg's focus, in contrast to Freeman, is less on the influence that Christian institutions had on scientific inquiry and more on the actual historical record of scientific investigation and research. His ultimate goal is to identify what, if anything, in the history of science was revolutionary about the Enlightenment. And to this end, Lindberg concludes, contrary to what most of us have believed or surmised, that the Enlightenment was not revolutionary because faith and magic was replaced by experimental methodology testing reasoned hypotheses with empirical research. Examples of testing reasoned hypotheses about nature, the cosmos, and medicine with experimental investigation can be found across the Dark Ages and the Medieval Period. The revolution of the Enlightenment, Lindberg says, was "metaphysical and cosmological." Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics, which had "skirmished" throughout the medieval period, came to be replaced by another Greek tradition: Epicurean atomism, which describes "a mechanistic universe of lifeless, indivisible atoms moving randomly in an infinite void." At the core of the difference between these Greek traditions (Plato and Aristotle on the one hand, and atomists on the other) are differences in viewpoints toward a teleological principle, which has meaning for both religious institutions and science to this day.
Teleology. The principle that physical phenomena are explained by a purpose or design has been debtated since antiquity, and it continues to be debated today under the rubric of "intelligent design." Teleology implies that creation is an act of foresight and planning. I first read about teleological principle nearly 30 years ago in Jacques Monod's book, Chance and Necessity. Monod denied that a teleological force was behind the creation of life, and instead subscribed to a teleonomical principle, whereby a non-purposeful evolutionary process that relies on hindsight and the acquisition of information that allows life to cope with the future. Richard Dawkins, the author of The Blind Watchmaker, is a natural ally for this view. Ironically, a teleonomical approach fits comfortably within Hebrew literature, whose "prophets" did not actually foretell the demise of the ancient Jewish state, but in hindsight explained that demise. I mention this not specifically to support Monod's argument, but to demonstrate that the creative human mind finds a way of defining purpose not on the intentionality of some one or thing in the past, but on what it discerns in the design of things as they already exist, and then confusing the two.
Plato and Aristotle both fell victim to this confusion. Plato concluded, based on his view of the structure of the world and its a priori order in the world of forms that some intelligent god was behind the creation of the universe. Aristotle, on the other hand, saw the hand of an intelligent unmoved mover, not a creator, behind the moving forces in the cosmos, but this view was based on the orderliness of the world as he observed it. Teleology embodies an anthropomorphic bias, which ascribes to non-human spirits the same purpose that human actors would ascribe to something they had created. There is no reason to believe this bias is objectively warranted, especially if the non-human spirit is an omniscient deity for which anything is possible.
Lindberg is on to something when he says the Enlightenment is more about a change in metaphysical views than it is about a revolution in scientific inquiry. To be sure, the rate in which experimentation and empirical knowledge was employed by the scientific community accelerated during and after the Enlightenment, and perhaps Lindberg does not give enough weight to this fact, but the revolution in metaphysical orientation meant that atheism, deism, and theism all found opportunity to claim the new science for themselves. Atomism replaced the Aristotelian concept of teleology that prevailed by the end of the Medieval Period and enabled theists and deists to claim that there was an intelligent creator whose initial design of the universe set in motion the evolution that we now witness in hindsight (with some theists believing that a god can still intervene in earthly matters), and it enabled atheists to deny any initial or continuing design or purpose to nature and to appreciate the successes and failures in nature over time, as well as the chaos and order of nature, as some combination of both chance and necessity.
A footnote in Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind (2005) brought my attention to the 1992 edition of David Lindberg's book, The Beginnings of Western Science, several years ago. I put the book on my Amazon wish list. Freeman also cited Edward Grant's The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages, which I subsequently read. The subject here is the history of science from the classical period up the period preceding the Enlightenment, and the extent to which cultures and institutions either encouraged or restrained scientific inquiry during this period. Freeman's thesis is that the unification of Roman state authority and Christian faith by Constantine stifled, if not suppressed the Greek intellectual tradition that relied on mental reasoning, a thesis that fits well with the nomenclature used to describe these times: the "dark" ages, and the "medieval" period. Not so fast, warns Lindberg. While not denying that much of Western Europe lost touch with Aristotelian philosophy and Greek mathematics. medicine, and science from the classical era, and observing that Aristotle and Greek mathematics, medicine, and science became a foundation for scientific progress in the Arab and Muslim world that ultimately found its way to Spain, Lindberg documents that there remained at some, scattered level an awareness of Aristotle and Greek math, medicine and scientific research that was not entirely lost to the Western world and certainly enough for Lindberg to claim that the history of western science from the classical era had some degree of continuity.
Throughout this treatise, Lindberg reminds his reader that it is error to appreciate (or critique) scientific inquiry in the Dark Ages or the Medieval Period based on our modern vantage point, and essential that scientific inquiry during these periods be examined in light of the the culture, institutions, and scientific knowledge then existing. Lindberg's focus, in contrast to Freeman, is less on the influence that Christian institutions had on scientific inquiry and more on the actual historical record of scientific investigation and research. His ultimate goal is to identify what, if anything, in the history of science was revolutionary about the Enlightenment. And to this end, Lindberg concludes, contrary to what most of us have believed or surmised, that the Enlightenment was not revolutionary because faith and magic was replaced by experimental methodology testing reasoned hypotheses with empirical research. Examples of testing reasoned hypotheses about nature, the cosmos, and medicine with experimental investigation can be found across the Dark Ages and the Medieval Period. The revolution of the Enlightenment, Lindberg says, was "metaphysical and cosmological." Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics, which had "skirmished" throughout the medieval period, came to be replaced by another Greek tradition: Epicurean atomism, which describes "a mechanistic universe of lifeless, indivisible atoms moving randomly in an infinite void." At the core of the difference between these Greek traditions (Plato and Aristotle on the one hand, and atomists on the other) are differences in viewpoints toward a teleological principle, which has meaning for both religious institutions and science to this day.
Teleology. The principle that physical phenomena are explained by a purpose or design has been debtated since antiquity, and it continues to be debated today under the rubric of "intelligent design." Teleology implies that creation is an act of foresight and planning. I first read about teleological principle nearly 30 years ago in Jacques Monod's book, Chance and Necessity. Monod denied that a teleological force was behind the creation of life, and instead subscribed to a teleonomical principle, whereby a non-purposeful evolutionary process that relies on hindsight and the acquisition of information that allows life to cope with the future. Richard Dawkins, the author of The Blind Watchmaker, is a natural ally for this view. Ironically, a teleonomical approach fits comfortably within Hebrew literature, whose "prophets" did not actually foretell the demise of the ancient Jewish state, but in hindsight explained that demise. I mention this not specifically to support Monod's argument, but to demonstrate that the creative human mind finds a way of defining purpose not on the intentionality of some one or thing in the past, but on what it discerns in the design of things as they already exist, and then confusing the two.
Plato and Aristotle both fell victim to this confusion. Plato concluded, based on his view of the structure of the world and its a priori order in the world of forms that some intelligent god was behind the creation of the universe. Aristotle, on the other hand, saw the hand of an intelligent unmoved mover, not a creator, behind the moving forces in the cosmos, but this view was based on the orderliness of the world as he observed it. Teleology embodies an anthropomorphic bias, which ascribes to non-human spirits the same purpose that human actors would ascribe to something they had created. There is no reason to believe this bias is objectively warranted, especially if the non-human spirit is an omniscient deity for which anything is possible.
Lindberg is on to something when he says the Enlightenment is more about a change in metaphysical views than it is about a revolution in scientific inquiry. To be sure, the rate in which experimentation and empirical knowledge was employed by the scientific community accelerated during and after the Enlightenment, and perhaps Lindberg does not give enough weight to this fact, but the revolution in metaphysical orientation meant that atheism, deism, and theism all found opportunity to claim the new science for themselves. Atomism replaced the Aristotelian concept of teleology that prevailed by the end of the Medieval Period and enabled theists and deists to claim that there was an intelligent creator whose initial design of the universe set in motion the evolution that we now witness in hindsight (with some theists believing that a god can still intervene in earthly matters), and it enabled atheists to deny any initial or continuing design or purpose to nature and to appreciate the successes and failures in nature over time, as well as the chaos and order of nature, as some combination of both chance and necessity.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of The Bees (1723)
I first learned of Mandeville when reading Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment, a history of the 17th century ideas that largely spawned with Baruch Spinoza and later found political institutionalization in the United States of America. Mandeville, like Spinoza, was Dutch, but emigrated to England where he practiced medicine and wrote a few treatises about society and human nature. Born toward the end of Spinoza's life, Mandeville found his intellectual groove toward the end of John Locke's life and while David Hume was but a child. Jonathan Israel's description of Mandeville piqued my curiosity. Mandeville apparently roused the ire of those who spoke from the English pulpit, as well as government, and his book The Fable of The Bees was condemned as a nuisance by a British grand jury.
The Fable is not an easy read because of the period vernacular and literary style. And to my surprise, the "fable," originally published in 1705 as "The Grumbling Hive," is as much of a statement about political economy and global trade anticipating Adam Smith 70 years into the future as it is a statement about society and human nature. Yet a particular understanding of human nature is implicit in The Grumbling Hive, which Mandeville later detailed in a series of "Remarks," added to this book in the 1723 edition. Don't look for a scientific explanation of the social insects such as E.O Wilson's Superorganism, which is discussed in the post of November 4, 2009. Mandeville's bees are the working and employer classes of early 18th century England, a prosperous nation that is nevertheless corrupted by Vices (Mandeville's word for "sloth, lust, avarice and pride"). Halfway through the fable, God (on behalf of those within the hive who preach for a virtuous society) rids the hive of these Vices and "fraud departs," "hipocrasie is flung down," debtors pay their debts, and government ministers live within their means. The consequence of a purely virtuous society, however, is that the hive becomes less prosperous and ultimately the hive collapses. In Mandeville's view, "Vice nursed ingenuity, which joined with Trade and Industry, had carried Life's conveniences, its real pleasures, comforts, ease to such a height, the very poor lived better than the rich before, and nothing could be added more."
By Vice, Mandeville does not merely contemplate crimes and immoral activity, but, more generally, individuals merely acting in their self-interest. He sometimes refers to this as self-love or pride. As Jonathan Israel explains, "Mandeville's republicanism, deism, and libertinism are thus all parts of a larger philosophical vision of man driven by egotistical impulses, always seeking his own individual self-preservation and advancement, but gradually becoming accustomed, through a protracted civilizing process, to management by lawmakers and statesmen whose chief expertise lies in their ability to regulate and restrain man's self-seeking drives by playing on man's insecurity and fear." For Mandeville, so-called Virtues are more often than not actually driven by Vices such as Pride, such as the case of charitable gift passed on by a testamentary instrument where one is motivated to preserve the memory of his own name after death.
In regards to national wealth and prosperity, Mandeville anticipates Adam Smith because individual egotistical activity collectively operates to improve the welfare of the nation (hive) and the persons (bees) within. Suspending egotistical behavior and supplanting it with acts of charity, saving, and self-denial will only diminish the general welfare. In regards to political theory, Mandeville falls in the tradition of Niccolo Machiavelli, examining society and the polity as it is rather than deriving a philosophy from a set of first principles. Mandeville, like Machiavelli, seems to be interested in "a well-ordered republic" that does not have to resort to extra-constitutional measures to preserve itself. Jonathan Israel summarizes Mandeville's view that "governments maintain themselves through their power to conserve themselves," which implies a stable political system that changes via consensus and wisdom.
Science and experimental research in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries has brought us a long way from the philosophical mind experiments of 17th and 18th Enlightenment period. We now know, and this is documented in recent books like Wilson's Superorganism (November 4, 2009 post), Gazzaniga's Human (Sept 27, 2009 post), and Iaccoboni's Mirroring People (Sept 18, 2009 post), as well as several other books cited in these prior posts, that there are human biological characteristics that underlie reciprocal or cooperative behavior and certain moral values such as The Golden Rule. Humans are not entirely egotistical from a biological imperative. While the few social insect societies forming superorganisms identified by Wilson seem to be the exception to a biological imperative based on self-preservation rather than rule, reciprocal behavior in humans and other species is not, as Mandeville suggests, so easily separated from self-preservation and the Vice of self-interest. Mandeville thus remains relevant for this point, which is at the heart of both of his Enlightenment social philosophy and political economic views.
Mandeville drew the ire of the early 18th century pulpit because he questioned the sincerity of motivations that were undertaken in the name of charity. The Fable of The Bees contains An Essay on Charity and Charity Schools. The Grumbling Hive did not draw critical comment when it was first published in 1705, but with the edition of The Fable incorporating the Essay on Charity and Charity Schools in 1723, the attacks on Mandeville began in earnest. The authorities (secular and non-secular) who promoted charitable giving and saving in the name of self-denial were probably motivated by their self-interest to see that The Fable was declared a nuisance.
The Fable is not an easy read because of the period vernacular and literary style. And to my surprise, the "fable," originally published in 1705 as "The Grumbling Hive," is as much of a statement about political economy and global trade anticipating Adam Smith 70 years into the future as it is a statement about society and human nature. Yet a particular understanding of human nature is implicit in The Grumbling Hive, which Mandeville later detailed in a series of "Remarks," added to this book in the 1723 edition. Don't look for a scientific explanation of the social insects such as E.O Wilson's Superorganism, which is discussed in the post of November 4, 2009. Mandeville's bees are the working and employer classes of early 18th century England, a prosperous nation that is nevertheless corrupted by Vices (Mandeville's word for "sloth, lust, avarice and pride"). Halfway through the fable, God (on behalf of those within the hive who preach for a virtuous society) rids the hive of these Vices and "fraud departs," "hipocrasie is flung down," debtors pay their debts, and government ministers live within their means. The consequence of a purely virtuous society, however, is that the hive becomes less prosperous and ultimately the hive collapses. In Mandeville's view, "Vice nursed ingenuity, which joined with Trade and Industry, had carried Life's conveniences, its real pleasures, comforts, ease to such a height, the very poor lived better than the rich before, and nothing could be added more."
By Vice, Mandeville does not merely contemplate crimes and immoral activity, but, more generally, individuals merely acting in their self-interest. He sometimes refers to this as self-love or pride. As Jonathan Israel explains, "Mandeville's republicanism, deism, and libertinism are thus all parts of a larger philosophical vision of man driven by egotistical impulses, always seeking his own individual self-preservation and advancement, but gradually becoming accustomed, through a protracted civilizing process, to management by lawmakers and statesmen whose chief expertise lies in their ability to regulate and restrain man's self-seeking drives by playing on man's insecurity and fear." For Mandeville, so-called Virtues are more often than not actually driven by Vices such as Pride, such as the case of charitable gift passed on by a testamentary instrument where one is motivated to preserve the memory of his own name after death.
In regards to national wealth and prosperity, Mandeville anticipates Adam Smith because individual egotistical activity collectively operates to improve the welfare of the nation (hive) and the persons (bees) within. Suspending egotistical behavior and supplanting it with acts of charity, saving, and self-denial will only diminish the general welfare. In regards to political theory, Mandeville falls in the tradition of Niccolo Machiavelli, examining society and the polity as it is rather than deriving a philosophy from a set of first principles. Mandeville, like Machiavelli, seems to be interested in "a well-ordered republic" that does not have to resort to extra-constitutional measures to preserve itself. Jonathan Israel summarizes Mandeville's view that "governments maintain themselves through their power to conserve themselves," which implies a stable political system that changes via consensus and wisdom.
Science and experimental research in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries has brought us a long way from the philosophical mind experiments of 17th and 18th Enlightenment period. We now know, and this is documented in recent books like Wilson's Superorganism (November 4, 2009 post), Gazzaniga's Human (Sept 27, 2009 post), and Iaccoboni's Mirroring People (Sept 18, 2009 post), as well as several other books cited in these prior posts, that there are human biological characteristics that underlie reciprocal or cooperative behavior and certain moral values such as The Golden Rule. Humans are not entirely egotistical from a biological imperative. While the few social insect societies forming superorganisms identified by Wilson seem to be the exception to a biological imperative based on self-preservation rather than rule, reciprocal behavior in humans and other species is not, as Mandeville suggests, so easily separated from self-preservation and the Vice of self-interest. Mandeville thus remains relevant for this point, which is at the heart of both of his Enlightenment social philosophy and political economic views.
Mandeville drew the ire of the early 18th century pulpit because he questioned the sincerity of motivations that were undertaken in the name of charity. The Fable of The Bees contains An Essay on Charity and Charity Schools. The Grumbling Hive did not draw critical comment when it was first published in 1705, but with the edition of The Fable incorporating the Essay on Charity and Charity Schools in 1723, the attacks on Mandeville began in earnest. The authorities (secular and non-secular) who promoted charitable giving and saving in the name of self-denial were probably motivated by their self-interest to see that The Fable was declared a nuisance.
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