Seasons’ Greetings, 2018

Once upon a time, extending best wishes to others on a holiday was unproblematic, despite any holiday’s being specific to a tradition: There was a limited number of tradition-bearing civilizations in the world, each clinging precariously to survival in a well-separated geographical niche; and it was not thought to be an insurmountable challenge to associate holiday references with their respective traditions or niches.  In England, an early “Merry Christmas” occurred on Christmas Day, 1066, when the coronation of William the Conqueror became so merry, or turbulent, that some nearby houses were burned down.  But, alas, time passes, meat spoils, pepper and spices are required, the Age of Exploration occurs, and now each tradition competes for attention in all geographical niches.  The words “Merry Christmas” have come to be seen, by many, as an expression either of illicit proselytization or of commercial speech.  Given this dichotomy, some maintain, it is far safer to endorse the commercial branch, in which hopes for a new Lego, “hung by the chimney with care,” elide into ambitions for a new Lexus, “parked by the curb while St. Nick was still there.”

In fact, however, it seems that Christians also express a second, parallel, non-economic meaning with the words, “Merry Christmas.”  This non-economic meaning divides into two branches: First, there is an invitation for the Christian faithful to recollect, and to reflect upon, the love, joy, peace, and hope arising from the advent of Jesus of Nazareth into the world at Christmastide.  Second, there is an invitation for the curious to investigate the doctrines embedded in the traditions underlying the historical Christian liturgies.  In practice, the words “Merry Christmas” express meaning not only as a wish for prosperity but also as an invitation for reflection or research.

The commercial interpretation of the words “Merry Christmas” finds some support among the tidings of comfort and joy (news of prosperity and joy) in the old English carol “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.”  The meaning of the title is “May God continue to grant you prosperity, gentlemen.”  Some extra Christmas bounty for the householder and his family would be much appreciated by Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim, et al. in the novel, A Christmas Carol.

The Crachit family members sought to survive at the margins of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Long before, there had been a Roman Revolution (133 - 31 B.C.) in response to wars of conquest, expansion of slavery, dispossession of small landowners, and concentration of land ownership by Roman aristocracy.  Economic anxiety continued during the ensuing Roman Empire with its embedded Christian communities. 

The classical scholar E.R. Dodds studied the ancient Roman Empire from the accession of Marcus Aurelius (161 A.D.) to the death of Constantine I (337 A.D.).  Dodds concluded that this period was a veritable “age of anxiety.”  One infers that this was an age well suited for producing legions of Bob Crachits.  Despite competing mystery religions, Gnosticism, and the Marcionite heresy, an orthodox Christianity was accepted by increasing numbers of anxious individuals within the Roman Empire.  Constantine seems to have accelerated this Christianization after receiving some vision or dream-like instruction to inscribe his army’s shields and battle standards with a “chi-rho” symbol (based on the first two letters of “Christ” in Greek); defeating his competitor, Maxentius, at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (312 A.D.); and becoming a Christian himself.  Some Imperial coins and medallions from the post Milvian-Bridge era display the chi-rho symbol.  Theodosius I (347 - 395 A.D.) largely completed the Christianization of the urban parts of the Empire by rooting out most vestiges of cultural paganism.

Some professional historians find the preceding account of the Christianization of the Roman Empire to be defective, because, in their view, if Constantine had truly and sincerely converted to Christianity, then Theodosius would have been left with nothing more to do.  But Theodosius did find, and terminate, some residual pagan practices and institutions.  Hence, Constantine’s conversion must have been insincere or ineffective, consistent with his purported vision being a later invention by disingenuous clerics. 

Any professional historian is entitled, if he or she so pleases, to a Weltanschauung of mortal antagonism between faith and reason.  In contrast, however, one notes that some philosophers of history, like Hegel, believed that religion is an attainment of consciousness during its progression towards absolute philosophical knowing.  “This incarnation of the divine Being … is the simple content of the absolute religion.”  (See the Phenomenology of Spirit, “The Revealed Religion,” Paragraph 759 of the A.V. Miller translation.)

But an alternative Weltanschauung has long been available in which faith complements reason, as in the “Credo ut intelligam” of Anselm of Canterbury (1033 – 1109 A.D.).  In this alternative approach, the Bible is meant to be a means for eliciting the reader’s response, not for fulfilling the historian’s demand for biographical data (as in the problematic 19th century quest for the historical Jesus).  Are we to evaluate faith and reason based upon the best surviving historical evidence or upon a vast conspiracy theory in which medieval monks falsified or suppressed inconvenient texts so comprehensively that only secular history is credible?  During this holiday season it seems preeminently reasonable to respond positively to the words of the Biblical author Luke, who relates that, at the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, “a great company of the heavenly host [angelic choir] appeared with the angel [who spoke to the shepherds], praising God and saying ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace [not anxiety] to men upon whom his favor rests.’”

God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen … and Ladies and Children Alike!

(The next posting to this blog will occur on February 1, 2019.)

Philosophical Reflections for Election Day, 2018

The U.S. Constitutional Convention adjourned on September 17, 1787, which was the occasion for Benjamin Franklin to say that you, the people, now have “a Republic, if you can keep it.”  Nine states had ratified the Constitution by June 21, 1788, allowing plans for the first Presidential election to proceed.  The last of the thirteen ratifying states did so by May 29, 1790, when a dubious Rhode Island finally voted in favor of ratification.

Suffrage in the United States of America advanced in several steps towards the goal of universal political participation.  Property requirements were attacked early on, even attracting Benjamin Franklin’s satirical denunciation.  The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) to the U.S. Constitution prohibits denial of voting rights based on race.  The Nineteenth Amendment (1920) prohibits denial of voting rights based on sex.  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 enforces previous suffrage amendments.

A judge on the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has recently written that “popular sovereignty isn’t just a theory; it is a duty.”  In other words, the Constitutional system presupposes an enlightened citizenry exercising its rights of suffrage.  However, recent surveys show that 71% of Americans cannot identify the Constitution as the supreme law of the land, and that 10% of U.S. college graduates think that the television personality “Judge Judy” is on the Supreme Court.  

Public ignorance of history and economics ensures that political debate degenerates into an uninhibited quest for unsustainable economic subsidies and social preferences.  It is assumed that this ignorance cannot be remedied by civic-competency tests of any kind, because of past, unhappy experience.  Other remedies for uninformed voting not springing readily to mind, a sudden, widespread outbreak of enlightened voting seems unlikely.

Voters in many states will soon be selecting Senators.  Among other issues for voters’ consideration are, surprisingly, Senatorial candidates’ positions on the right of an accused person to a presumption of innocence absent any corroborating evidence.  Some sitting Senators think that this right, seemingly implied by the due process provisions of the U.S. Constitution, ought to be suspended during confirmation hearings for appointments to the Supreme Court.  Suppressing such a fundamental right would dramatically alter the long-standing legal landscape.  In contrast, as the senior Senator from Maine said in a speech on the Senate floor on October 5, 2018, “certain fundamental legal principles about due process, the presumption of innocence and fairness do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them.  In evaluating any given claim of misconduct, we will be ill served in the long run if we abandon innocence and fairness, tempting though it may be.  We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.”

Among the philosophical questions raised by current attempts to eviscerate due process provisions of the U.S. Constitution are “Who could make such a change?” and, ultimately, “Who is sovereign?”  According to its text, “we the People” ordained and established the U.S. Constitution and its method of amendment.  But what happens if 10% of “us the People” place Judge Judy on the Supreme Court, while 71% of “us the People” cannot identify the Constitution as the nation’s highest law?  Hypothetically speaking, if “we the People” become functionally illiterate or incapacitated, then what serves as the analog of the 25th Amendment (dealing with executive incapacities) for “us the People” as a whole?  Does sovereignty reside in the faction that can most loudly declare an emergency in sovereignty?  On the hypothesis of popular incapacity, it would appear that a Hobbesian state of nature must ensue, with a sovereign emerging from a primordial political soup.

Election day will soon be upon us.  One can only vote in the hope that the results will once again stave off the advent of a political order in which life is ever more “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

The Reputation of Nations

Although nationalism is often defined as a political, social, and economic system dedicated to promoting the interests of a particular people in a definite territory, this definition fails to specify which people and to demarcate which territory.  Which comes first, political theorists seeking to convince the population of some geographic area to subscribe to the theorists’ system and to develop common interests, thereby becoming a nation; or does a certain population, possessed of a well defined culture, recruit a political theorist to draft documents announcing the existence of a nation?  Historically, both routes to nationhood have been observed: Defeated empires may be divided into nations by arbitrarily inventing borders in the hope that the included populations will find commonalities.  (One thinks of the partitioning of some of the Middle Eastern territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire.)  Alternately, rebelling colonies, identifying with a common culture, may declare their independence.  (One thinks of the American Declaration of Independence.)

      According to the doctrine of nationalism, once a nation exists, its leaders aim at gaining and maintaining sovereignty over a homeland, holding it as axiomatic that an ascendant nation should both govern itself and exert hegemony over any other territories that might fall under an implicit or explicit imperial purview.  Nationalism also promotes developing and maintaining a national identity based on factors such as culture, language, religion, politics, and, where applicable, a common ancestry.  In a book to be published before this blog post appears, Yoram Hazony has catalogued some of the successes and failures of nations.

      Some have criticized the very idea of empires and nations: In the nineteenth century, the English historian and Latinist, Sir John Robert Seeley, wrote of the British Empire, "we seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind."  In the twentieth century, George Orwell thought that nationalism supports political extremism in favor of a limited societal group.  Others have thought that competing nation states lead not to a quasi-equilibrium drifting towards social progress, but to a vicious circle of violence based on the fact that national borders do not typically coincide with national cultural identities.  For example, in the twenty-first century the Myanmar government has perceived the Rohingya people as a foreign body threatening the Myanmar nation.  In addition, nationalism has been seen as a driving force for the Trump and Brexit phenomena, as well as for the resistance of Southern and Eastern Europe to the immigration policies of the European Union.

      Although some critics see nationalism as a dangerous trend, the historical successes of nationalism should be noted as well.  Western traditions of limited government and individual liberty were nurtured by the national cohesion existing within each of the nations of England, Scotland, and the Netherlands.  The original American colonies inherited a common language, a legal tradition, and a limited range of religious practices.  The eclipse of these common factors in contemporary American society (e.g., McGuffey’s Readers haven’t been prominent for quite some time) can be seen as a source of the increasingly bitter contention in American politics.

      Thus, we see that there is a necessary trade-off in political theory: Inordinate favoring of a limited societal group is bad, but some favoring of one’s own way of life is required for the national cohesion that has historically preceded eras of limited government and individual liberty.

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.