Split Worlds and Fake News

     On June 8, 1978 the Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave a Harvard graduation speech entitled “A World Split Apart” on the topic of world crises.  This speech kindled a firestorm of critical comment in the Western press.  On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the speech, the National Review has republished, in its June 25, 2018 print edition, Solzhenitsyn’s own reaction to the ensuing Western commentary.  His reaction was written during the autumn of 1978.  In his view, the crises themselves, as well as the critical reception of his speech, underscore “the ancient truth that a kingdom - - in this case, our Earth - - divided against itself cannot stand.”  

     It would seem advisable to meditate upon this speech and its aftermath in order to draw lessons, if possible, for the contemporary phenomenon of “fake news,” which is a neologism used to refer to fabricated news, which has no basis in fact but which is nevertheless presented as being true.  For Solzhenitsyn, the Western commercialized press (journalism or news media generally) presents current events and commentary with an overriding concern to remain within the letter of the law, within conventional bounds of taste that will not damage sales or advertising, and without any journalistic responsibility to the readership or to history.  If Solzhenitsyn could have had access to the vocabulary of 2018 while writing in 1978; then, arguably, he might have substituted “fake news” for the “Western commercialized press.”

     Solzhenitsyn had served with distinction as an artillery officer for the U.S.S.R. in World War II.  However, in February 1945 he reportedly made an unguarded remark critical of Stalin and was sent to a Gulag camp until Stalin’s death in 1953.  He remained in internal exile until Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, whereupon Solzhenitsyn was “rehabilitated” in 1957.  Since Solzhenitsyn’s experience was commonplace, and since Khrushchev was attempting a liberalization of sorts, in 1962 Khrushchev approved the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch about life in a Soviet concentration camp.  However, Khrushchev died in 1964, and by 1974 Solzhenitsyn had been exiled again, this time to West Germany.  In 1976 he moved to Cavendish, Vermont.  He gave his celebrated Harvard speech in 1978, returned to post-Soviet Russia in 1994, and died in 2008.

     In the Harvard speech, Solzhenitsyn noted that the split between world powers coexisted with another, more profound split in ways of life.  Historically speaking, only a short time ago, “the small world of modern Europe was easily seizing colonies all over the globe, … the conquests proved to be short-lived, …  but the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold … [that societal development requires] pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life.”  However, Solzhenitsyn found that the Western states have become an amalgam of welfare state and consumerist society, which do “not in the least open a way to free spiritual development.”  While he agreed, based on his own bitter experience in the U.S.S.R., that a society without an objective legal code is terrifying; he also asserted that “the defense of individual rights … [has rendered] society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals … [and that] life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil,” ranging from immoral movies to the inordinate concern that rooting out terrorism will impinge upon terrorists’ civil rights.  

     Solzhenitsyn found it incomprehensible that “though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime.”  He linked the misuse of freedom for evil with society’s humanistic, but false, presupposition that man is master of the world and is without taint of evil.  He was astonished that those in the West who are most dissatisfied with their society do not rail against a false humanism but rather drift towards socialism.  Noting with approval Shafarevich’s demonstration that socialism “leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind unto death,” Solzhenitsyn told his Harvard audience that “the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive … [characterized as it is] by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.”  This calamity stems, he continued, from an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.  In contrast, Solzhenitsyn was looking for “a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.”

     In his response to the Western critical disapproval of his speech, Solzhenitsyn said that he was surprised, not by the newspapers’ attacks, but by their obtuse nature.  Initially, the press was apoplectic in its denunciation of the speech as the reactionary ravings of an unhinged soul in thrall to Orthodox mysticism, if not indeed of “a mind split apart.”  Others said that Solzhenitsyn was ungrateful for his asylum and that some patriotic American should step forward to grant this Nobel laureate the additional prize of a one-way airline ticket back to the U.S.S.R.  Solzhenitsyn responded that he had been naïve to believe that he had found a society that did not require flattery as a precondition for free speech.  Moreover, he believed that the initial criticism betrayed rank hypocrisy: It was acceptable for him to proclaim, “Live not by lies” while living in the U.S.S.R. but not while living in the West.

     As more readers’ reactions to the speech were printed by what Solzhenitsyn referred to as “the heartland press,” the tone of the discussion became more varied and comprehending.  Among the later responses that Solzhenitsyn collected was the comment that “the Washington Post may smile at the Russian accent of Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s words, but it cannot detract from their universal meaning.”

     If Solzhenitsyn were alive today, then he might well counsel that more attention be paid to what he would regard as the real issues of socialism and spirituality.  Such redirection of attention would ipso facto tend to crowd out the contention over the second-order issue of “fakeness.”  But of course, Solzhenitsyn lived in a print world in which there was some editorial control over the quality of the debate.  In the Internet era, there is no such editorial control; and one is left with the manipulation of sources (alleging fake or non-fake status) rather than the marshaling of arguments (adducing historical evidence) as the basis for what passes as reasoned debate.  Now, more than ever, Solzhenitsyn would flee from the Western world with its appalling “commercial advertising, TV stupor, and intolerable music.”

You Do Not Have a Right to Conflate Descriptive and Evaluative Statements

     There is a metaphysical distinction between judgments of fact (what is) and judgments of value (what ought to be).  Judgments of fact give rise to descriptive beliefs that have propositions as objects and that find expression in descriptive statements.  Evaluative (normative) judgments give rise to evaluative beliefs that have propositions, imperatives, or personal emotive states as objects and that find expression in evaluative statements.  Evaluative judgments are either moral or non-moral.  Moral evaluative judgments are either deontological (fulfilling duty) or eudaimonistic (promoting the individual’s essential nature).  Non-moral evaluative judgments are hypothetical (instrumental).  Finally, any statement, descriptive or evaluative, expressing a belief that is justified (supported by evidence and argument) is itself said to be justified: To justify a statement means to justify its expressed belief.  

     As Professor Daniel DeNicola has recently noted, descriptive beliefs “aspire to truth”: It would be absurd to admit seeing a “broken” straw in a glass of soda, but yet to deny believing in the laws of optical refraction.  On the other hand, most people have not had the chance to study optics; hence, “in any complex society, one has to rely on the testimony of reliable sources.”  DeNicola is right in avoiding Clifford’s “stern evidentialism,” in which each person must assimilate (be prepared in principle to recite) all of the evidence that underlies each of his or her justified beliefs.  In opposition to Clifford, an indigenous spear fisherman does not internalize an encyclopedia of optics before plying his craft, but rather relies on his memory of family testimony about spear fishing.  Generally speaking, each person assembles some grounds for, but not all evidence pertaining to, each of his or her descriptive and evaluative beliefs from a justificatory smorgasbord including testimony, memory, perception, self-evident truths, empirical research, and discursive reasoning. 

     In any inquiry involving both descriptive and evaluative beliefs, each belief must be justified separately: Hume famously maintained that no “ought” may be derived from an “is.”  Searle has contested the generality of Hume’s thesis.  We cannot adjudicate that dispute here, but we will assume that each descriptive and evaluative belief must be justified separately.

     Now what are we to make of the celebrated contemporary scoffer who asserts “I believe that the public policy prescription, X - - presented to the citizens of the sovereign country, Y, and based on policy analysis from ‘think tanks’ and international organizations, Z - - consists of a set of descriptive and evaluative statements, some of which are known to be false, unjustified, or unduly emotive”?  In an abbreviated form, one might characterize the scoffer as saying “I believe that X is a hoax, that I have a personal-autonomy right to hold that belief, and that I have a free-speech right, secured by the sovereign power of Y, to promulgate that belief.”

     The abbreviated characterization of the scoffer’s verbal performance creates problems by masking important details, such as whether the scoffer is referring to descriptive or evaluative statements encapsulated in X, whether some of those evaluative statements are merely emotive, whether there is an agreed acceptance of the concept of “sovereign nation,” and if so, whether the experts from Z have any business meddling in the politics of sovereign country Y.  Abbreviated characterization results in a conflation of statements (and beliefs), some of which may be justified, while others only seem to attain an aura of justification by being in the rhetorical neighborhood of other statements (and beliefs) that are justified. 

     Let us now suppose that the scoffer directs his wrath against a particular X, defined as “Power plant P in country Y must be closed, because experts from organization Z calculate that P’s closure will mitigate global warming even while leaving the average income in Y above a specified minimum.”  Let us further assume that the scoffer, although personally lacking the resources to calculate the effects of global warming or the average incomes of nations, does know that his livelihood depends on P.  As a slogan or rallying cry, the scoffer may say that he “denies global warming,” but global warming per se is not the issue: X is the issue, and X contains more than descriptive statements about global ice masses and temperatures.  X contains or presupposes moral and political judgments.  For example, is it justified to expropriate property or income provided that those expropriated still retain more resources than the average citizen of the world’s poorest country?

     By way of analogy, consider the true descriptive statement, “The U.S.S. Maine exploded and sank in Havana harbor in February of 1898.”  (Whether the explosion originated from an event internal or external to the ship was never definitively established - - nor thought to be important.)  At the time, there was an ongoing debate in the United States over the advisability of acquiring overseas territories.  For the proponents of the soon-to-be-declared Spanish-American War, “Remember the Maine!” was a slogan bringing to mind the related descriptive statement about the Maine as a means to generate support for a war of territorial expansion.  This support accrued independently of any explicit justification of evaluative statements pertaining to politics or ethics.

     Now consider the true descriptive statement, “The earth is warmer in 2018 than in some previous epochs.”  There is a contemporary debate regarding how many scarce economic resources should be expended today, and by whom (China, India, Europe, North America?), in order to obtain some climate benefit in the far distant future.  For some in this debate, “Reduce global warming!” is a slogan evoking the related descriptive statement about earth temperatures as a means to obtain certain policy objectives without completely justifying all relevant evaluative statements.

     “Remembering the Maine” or “reducing global warming” may lead to justifiable policies: In 1898, Cuba may indeed have required a new administration.  In 2018, the power plant P may, regrettably, have to be closed.  But in 1898, was it really justified also to acquire Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines?  In 2018, is it really justified to acquiesce in the economic decline of broad swaths of entire continents?

     One does not justify evaluative statements by conflating them with even the most solidly confirmed descriptive statements.

Philosophy on the 86th Floor

     Decades ago, someone jumped from the observation deck on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, only to be blown by a gust of wind to a lower ledge from which she was saved.  Glowing endorsements of the philosophy of existentialism and authenticity bring to mind that vertiginous observation deck: Surely, if existentialism entails radical human freedom, construed as the power to make a choice, any choice; then how could any truly authentic existentialist repeatedly visit that deck and yet never decide to jump from it?  One is left to speculate whether any existentialists have ever visited that deck, and if so, whether favorable winds have saved some of them from true authenticity. 

     The present writer thought again of that 86th floor while reading a favorable account of existentialism in the book review “Choose Your Own Adventure” by Professor John Kaag in the May 11, 2018 Wall Street Journal.  The reviewed book is entitled “The Existentialist’s Survival Guide,” by Professor Gordon Marino, who “has produced an honest and moving book of self-help for readers generally disposed to loathe the genre.”  Marino paraphrases Camus in writing that many people “have committed intellectual hari-kari … [in part by] mentally constructing an apparatus like faith in God” to order their lives.  Kaag writes that “it’s not that Mr. Marino disparages faith … [but] contends that faith never gives the certainty many religious seekers crave.”  However, if the charge of “intellectual hari-kari” does not count as a disparagement of faith, then it is hard to see what would so count.  Moreover, great numbers of Christians understand faith as the assurance of things hoped for and not as an expression of post-Cartesian certainty.  One might wish to consider alternatives to existentialism.

     Such an alternative is found in essentialism, whose paradigm, Platonic philosophy, considers that Ideas are essences and that essence is ontologically prior to existence.  Plato’s Demiurge looks to Ideas when setting about to fashion pieces of creation, thereby adding to the stock of existent things.  To the extent that Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, essentialism has been the long-term winner in the debate with existentialism, which holds the opposing view that existence is prior to essence.  How can one explain the post World War II fascination with the priority of existence?

     One might view existentialism as arising from an objectionable definition of human freedom as the power to make a choice, any choice.  It would seem that this freedom is more reasonably construed as the power to do what one ought, leaving open the question of what theoretical apparatus best controls the discussion of what one ought to do.  The impression arises that, to the extent that an existentialist cannot find a moral theory affording desired results, he or she finds it expedient to excise the moral theory intervening between freedom and action and to adopt the definition of freedom based on “choice, any choice.”

     Is there a theoretical preference for the priority of essence or existence?  For Hegel, natural consciousness contains movements of thought that proceed by (what others termed) “thesis-antithesis-synthesis,” which is a teleological process whose final cause is the ultimate, or essential, state of Absolute Knowing.  In the Aristotelian tradition, a final cause is first in specification (essence) and last in generation (existence). Thus, Hegel’s system is essentialist and, eo ipso, objectionable to the existentialist, Sartre. 

     For Sartre, being in itself (massive, mysterious, and lacking freedom) undergoes a type of ontological fission, or “self-splitting,” from which arise the existence of consciousness and a world of finite beings. Human freedom lies in the structure of human consciousness and is not a property of any human essence, which must be constructed piecemeal from human actions.  But on Sartre’s theory, what is the first existent thing?  It would seem to be a reality capable of creating its own essence.  But this reality might be supposed to have other characteristics as well and to constitute the human essence, in which case existence and essence would be co-primeval.  Moreover, as an empirical matter, human freedom seems to be limited by sociological, psychological, and moral factors; hence, “what a person becomes” is likewise limited.  On balance, the present writer finds that essentialism is more compelling than existentialism.

     One concludes from these considerations that erstwhile existentialists may be permitted to take the elevator down from the 86th floor.

Specters Old and New

     In a news item from May 5, 2018 it is reported that the Chinese government has given Karl Marx’ hometown (Trier, Germany) an 18-foot tall statue of Karl Marx to commemorate his 200th birthday anniversary.  While former anti-communists such as Vaclav Klaus believe that the statue makes a mockery of history, mere history cannot compete with economics: The city of Trier has been benefitting from Chinese tourism, and its mayor says that “it’s the right time to deal with Marx in this form.” 

     Judging from the tepid public reaction to the new statue of Marx in Trier, the historical memory of Marx, Engels, and the Communist Manifesto seems to be fading.  Hence, we will mention that the relatively youthful Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels collaborated on writing the Manifesto during the winter of 1847 to 1848, publishing it in London in February 1848 as a 23-page brochure.  At the time, governments across Europe were already tottering for various reasons, and the communists needed an official creed in order to unify their approach to the ongoing crises.  

     The Manifesto introduces the specter of communism as haunting (going around in) Europe: All the powers of old Europe [Pope, Tsar, Metternich (Austrian chancellor), and Guizot (French premier), among others], although failing to define the precise nature of this specter, have created fairy tales (Märchen) about it and have allied themselves in a kind of wild-animal chase (Hetzjagd) after it.  (One thinks of hounds in a fury of bloodlust hunting a fox.)  It is in opposition to these fairy tales and on behalf of the newly formed Communist League that Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto, including several sections on the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, and the communist version of world history.  The visible ill effects of communism awaited the Russian Revolution, and it took longer still for critics such as Boris Pasternak (Dr. Zhivago) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago) to document those ill effects.

     Having died seventeen years before the Manifesto, Hegel cannot fairly be blamed for its excesses.  Indeed, he had shown the good sense to say that, even if world history is the self-unfolding of Spirit, we cannot predict the details of history.  Post-Hegelian radicals, however, had to make such predictions in order to attract attention.  Some Marxist predictions presupposed that “all social facts can be reduced to economics,” a view that became known as “economism.” 

     Although today’s specter of obsequious statuary is less ominous than 1848’s specter of communism, the contemporary specter of economism could become quite serious.  In the April 2018 edition of First Things, Richard H. Spady focuses on the gradual transformation of what had been convenient and contingent assumptions in economic models into normative goals for social planners.  For example, some economic models assume that trade expansion, mobility of labor and capital, and technological change are always good.  Spady finds that there is countervailing evidence that these economic factors also bring some negative consequences: Recent economic change has brought “widespread despair, resentment, and dysfunction among the lower two-thirds of American society,” consistent with Case and Deaton’s data on “dramatic decreases in life expectancy among white, high-school-educated Americans.”  Spady believes that this new specter of economism, if not explicitly dealt with, will lead to an era of increased societal conflict.

     Concurring with the spirit of Spady’s analysis, albeit without recourse to the terminology of “economism,” the dean of the Columbia Business School recently commented on the problematic nature of trade and immigration: He described a recent field trip that he took with 20 M.B.A. students - - not to the usual, globally-elite destinations such as Hong Kong, London, or Delhi - - but to Youngstown, Ohio in order to observe the specter of real industrial decline.  “Whether it’s Brexit in the U.K. or the debate over trade and immigration in the U.S.,  … [people ask] ‘Why am I supporting something that benefits on average, when this just means [that] Columbia M.B.A.s get it all?’ ”

Of Emmaus and Enlightenment

     Writing in separate Wall Street Journal articles during the past month, George Weigel and Yoram Hazony discussed the roads through Emmaus (4/1/18) and through the Enlightenment (4/8/18), respectively.  The initiation of a gradual legalizing of Christian belief and practice from the time of Constantine I to Theodosius I (300’s A.D.) is typically attributed to Constantine’s perception of a divine mandate for, or at least of an administrative convenience accruing to, such legalization.  On this account, this legalization began shortly after Constantine’s victory over his western competitor at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on October 28, 312 A.D.  Weigel finds that the revolutionary effect of Jesus of Nazareth on his disciples on the road to Emmaus and elsewhere nearly three centuries earlier had galvanized the first Christians to become “a dominant force” within the Roman Empire.

     In contrast, defining the time, place, and content of Enlightenment thought may be more contentious.  The first roots of the Enlightenment seem to extend to the early modern period of Western philosophy, when Descartes (1596 – 1650) issued his clarion call for systematic doubt before accepting absolutely certain, true beliefs into a foundation for knowledge in all areas of inquiry.  Locke (1632 – 1704) reduced the foundational requirements from certainty to probability in empirical areas of inquiry.  Synthesizing both rational and empirical outlooks, Kant (1724 – 1804) famously became a transcendental idealist in order to remain an empirical realist.  We assume here that the full flowering of the Enlightenment occurred from 1715 (death of the French “Sun King”) to 1789 (start of the French Revolution).  

     The supposedly irrefutable, cutting-edge arguments promulgated by the French Enlightenment philosophes included statements to the effect that “man is a machine” (Julien de La Mettrie) and that “the brain secretes thought like the liver secretes bile” (Pierre Cabanis).  Following up on a remark by the philosophical historian Frederick Copleston, one observes that Cabanis must have found a truly remarkable bile-analog if it could serve as a “litmus test” for truth!  Hazony finds that contemporary advocates of the Enlightenment oversell the benefits of unfettered reason (because beneficial trends in science, medicine, and politics had already started before the Enlightenment) and underestimate the contributions of tradition, religion, and national identity (because any arrangements that could have prevented the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the Russian Revolution would have been highly desirable).  How could things have gone so wrong?

     Regarding politics, in 1784 Kant authored the highly regarded essay, Was ist Aufklärung? (What is Enlightenment?), in which Kant self-servingly praised Frederick the Great (1712 - 1786): It turns out that true Enlightenment freedom pertains to the public speech that Frederick granted to academics such as Kant, even while all others might appropriately be required to espouse the party line of the institutions employing them. 

     Regarding religion, in 1793 Kant wrote the book, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloβen Vernunft (Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone), in which he predicted that that the Enlightenment would lead people to cast aside dogma, authority, and tradition in favor of the rational principles that he believed formed the basis of all religions.  According to Kant, for example, it is not ritual or doctrinal profession that makes one pleasing to God, but rather having a rigorously disinterested moral attitude.  Such an approach to religion, however, entails a comprehensive demythologization in which Jesus’ presence on the road to Emmaus is symbolic at best, and the “dominant force” seen by Weigel is nowhere to be found.  Although Kant sees that historical faith has served as a vehicle for spreading elements of the rational faith, he seems to have hoped for a time when mankind can finally dispense with such vehicles.

     Ultimately, Kant never managed to cancel at least one contradiction in his thought: Frederick, Kant had enthused in 1784, was the only ruler “who is himself enlightened … [and] who likewise has at hand a well-disciplined and numerous army to guarantee public security.”  So far from boldly discarding all authority, Kant relied on princely heroes who would encourage Kantian academic debate, establish increasingly liberal parliaments and state churches, and enforce obedience to the state - - all by virtue of their princely authority.  But if authority is allowed to temporal sovereigns in the 1784 analysis, why should it be denied to historical religions in the 1793 book?  As Hazony concludes, “national and religious institutions may not fit with the Enlightenment, but they may have important things to teach us nevertheless.”