[Revised and improved, Thursday, February 8, 2024, 2:32pm]
Some words are worth a thousand pictures; some moves are worth a thousand random steps.
Science & the Forces of Nature
Science says the world is determined by causes acting relentlessly as dictated by the universal laws of nature, impervious to worthy human ends and values.
Realism says the world of human affairs is analogous, with the situational requirements of national survival dictating conditions that limit the range within which suitable policies are found, regardless of the internal constitutional form of government.
From that follows the notorious claim that nations are as identical in their geopolitical imperatives and policies as billiard balls (Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p. 18).
Both claims are true, so far as they go.
No human agent — whether an individual man or a collective agency like a nation-state — can act against the laws of nature.
There are no such things as superheroes, and nations are even farther from idealized agents free from limits than are real people.
So, scientific reality must be deferred to, even when sects arise that deny the evidence of science because it undermines claims upon which their ideology’s support rests.
But reality can be ignored for a while, if the consequences are long-term. Those lacking foresight or a deep understanding of the accelerating changes going on around them may not see or recognize the consequences in their lifetimes. Sometimes a generation can pass before the consequences become apparent to all. People and nations can argue and dither, delaying effective measures until the late innings.
The risk here is that by the time the signs of trouble are too evident for even the most resistant observers to ignore,the threat may have become lethal, the cancer metastasized, leaving he who hesitates trapped in an untreatable condition (Machiavelli, The Prince, chap. 3).
If the threat is grave enough, science will steamroll public opinion, in its own sweet time.
So, science wins in the end, winnowing out all those who cannot or will not adapt to shifting empirical realities.
History and Its Underlying Currents
Geopolitical realism works similarly.
As with the relentless and incessant forces of nature, so with the irresistible undercurrents of history.
Leaders and nations that fail to perceive changes to which we must all adapt — whether for lack of understanding or a contrary will –will be winnowed out by the sifting processes of natural selection and its social equivalents in demographics, economics, geopolitics, and the technological advances and social reactions that drive or follow them.
They will decline or disappear, leaving standing the survivors of the old order and the emerging powers of the new order.
Evolutionary competition eliminates those unprepared for what is coming, whether natural or historical events. Those who cannot or will not adapt to changing circumstances leave the world to those who do.
But when ill-informed and unprepared leaders run nations, they can take whole nations down with them.
Both scientific and geopolitical claims about what’s coming can be disputed. Such claims, whether true or false, can win or lose the battle for public opinion.
But underlying causal forces will grind on regardless.
Sadly, in the arena of politics, manipulation, rhetoric and persuasion are more powerful than knowledge or understanding.
Wrong decisions, whether formed in free nations by public opinion, filtered through the election process, or by the proclivities and obsessions that lurk in the inner chambers of an autocrat’s mind, the causal forces at work in nature and history, not mistaken perceptions about them, determine outcomes.
Room for Maneuver; Room for Hope
So, there are causal limits against which one cannot fight. One can only adapt to them, preserving human values as best one can.
But as an agent/agency adapts to changing circumstances, it can leave room for human values, both pragmatic and moral, within its range of feasible choices, sometimes more, sometimes less, but always to some degree.
In the most extreme cases, choice may be limited to the scope of a prisoner in a concentration camp holding to their nature and their principles despite all that is done to them which they are helpless to prevent.
So, there is room for moral agents to maneuver in this relentlessly causal world that envelops us. They may not always be able to prevent undesirable outcomes, some of which are inevitable (given the circumstance that lead up to them), but they can always show the strength of their nature and their principles as they struggle against the odds.
And there are some inevitable outcomes — death and taxes among them — that cannot be prevented, but only deferred to our own advantage.
But, by deferring the inevitable, moral agents can build a life worth living — and worth having lived, when it comes to that.
…and multiply their net worth with tax deferral and the magic of compounding growth.
And, honestly, life works pretty much like that, too.
I’m not talking about geopolitics, although that is increasingly multipolar as well, as you must already know, unless your head is lodged firmly in the sand or up your nether regions.
I mean instead that no single analytical perspective unlocks all the treasure chests of knowledge.
Different perspectives, and the methods they employ, are suited to different purposes.
The Scientific Method
angles and measurements
The most obvious perspective fitted out with its own, defining method is the scientific perspective and its scientific method.
This has established itself beyond all doubt — which is not to say that the world isn’t crawling with people diving into the worldwide communal soup bowl (into which con men, cultists, social influencers, ideologues and demagogues are constantly pissing).
Anyone who doesn’t want to face facts, whether of science or of credible news reporting, has record-breaking spreads of viral gossip and nonsense laid out for their effortless consumption.
It’s a feast for burnt tongues and a sight for sore eyes!
Nonetheless, those who build their futures on firm foundations know they can’t credibly interpret data, make claims or offer explanations unable to withstand the evidence of measured and controlled experiment and observation.
Not if you have self-respect, in the deepest sense.
For the scientific method imposes standards on what one can claim with the badge of science.
But to impose standards is to place requirements and limitations.
And this is done prior to weighing any particular evidence. In other words, this is a precondition required for the practice of the method to live up to its own standards.
Such preconditions suit the method and its perspective to some matters, while unsuiting it for others.
The scientific method essentially forces all practicing scientists into a universal consensus perspective that accumulates over time a body of knowledge based on proven and repeatable results of experiments, carefully measured, and reduplicated by all who attempt reduplication while following the standards.
The universal consensus is achieved because it is built into the method as its prerequisite conditions and approved procedures.
Of course, there are disputes and divergences at the stage of hypothesizing, but the scientific method is designed to force decisive showdowns between rival hypotheses, namely, experiments for which the rival hypotheses predict conflicting measurable outcomes.
The scientific perspective is that of cause and effect. For outcomes can be predicted with certainty only where one independent variable determines a precisely measurable effect (that effect being a dependent variable wholly dependent on the variable being tested for its causal connection to the effect) when that independent variable is isolated from the other conditions (which are held constant) in the effect’s matrix of causal conditions.
Thus the scientific perspective, the perspective of cause and effect, depends upon the ability to vary one single variable — deterministic, when so isolated — from among the complete set of variables, establishing a one-to-one correspondence between the two variables by directly varying the independent variable and observing the effect of that on the dependent variable.
Here, determinism is less a claim about the world in general than an engineered condition required if the scientific method is to work properly.
Put differently, this engineered relationship of independent and dependent variables critical to the workings of the scientific method of experimentation would necessarily be correct (if the method were to be reliable), whether or not the world outside the experiment ran solely in accordance with the causal perspective.
The world, of course, run according to that perspective in at least some domains, if the scientific method were to be at all applicable. So, we can rest assured of that.
But the assumption that it is the only perspective applicable to the world is an assumption external to the scientific method itself and not necessary for that method to produce valuable results, result that are definitive in areas where the object character of event is sufficient to understand it.
The Historical Method
One obviously opposed perspective is that of the historical method, the basis of history, credible journalism and juridical verdicts, all of which require the continuous cross-referencing of the often conflicting accounts of different witnesses.
But in all of these applications, the trail of evidence is seldom alone enough to determine all we need to know to render a judgment. We must also construct interpretive narratives, making conjectures about motives, means and opportunities. Any competent investigator constructs a plausible hypothesis– a provisional or working theory — as a way to direct their search for further evidence.
Whodunnit? and Why?and How?
The Work of the Working Hypothesis
Come to think of it, working theories (working hypotheses) are crucial in the scientific method, where they are also the organizing principle used to gather evidence. For every experiment is designed to put to the test a suspected cause, which becomes the independent variable that the design of the experiment is engineered to isolate from the other variables that might add static to the measured effect attributable to the independent variable.
In science, negative results are almost as valuable as positive ones, for they eliminate rival causes, narrowing down the suspect pool. Indeed, most positive results ae preceded by a long process of eliminating alternative hypotheses, and this is especially the case where the true hypothesis is counterintuitive or (which may be much the same thing) runs counter to a dominant paradigm of the discipline.
However, the great advantage of the scientific over the historical method is that the scientific method can always hope for a decisive experiment that ends a rivalry of hypotheses for good.
For the historical method, certainty is a mirage as often as not, and its certainty is mostly certainty ‘for all practical purposes’.
So, history must live with perpetual uncertainty, and with the perpetual threat of new evidence, revisionist theories or changing social norms, any of which can overturn old judgments.
And all this uncertainty leaves much more room for advocacy which, like power, abhors a vacuum. And advocacy, if one needs reminding, is cherry-picking the facts — when not distorting them outright — to better suit one’s preconceptions.
While this creates a bias in favor of one’s pet theory, especially if it leads to further evidence, it should remain one hypothesis among many being entertained, until its rival hypotheses are excluded beyond reasonable doubt, a criterion as indispensable as it is inexact.
But, to turn Hume on his head, one cannot derive an Is from an Ought.
so, putting historical facts to use always requires a series of judgments, which can always be challenged or overturned.
But, for just this reason, it’s not enough to dispute facts without providing a viable alternative theory — and conspiracy theories with unsourced or dubious support, the classic recourse of know-nothings, don’t count.
The Historical Method & Witness Perspectives
Thus, the historical method is beset by ineradicable inexactness and uncertainties, in any case that is not a forensic slam-dunk.
This first uncertainty follows form the required method of investigation. A second uncertainty follows from the nature and character of what is being investigated.
The historical method is by nature and definition multipolar because its task is to reconcile the differing perspectives involved in a dispute.
Further (excepting any metaphysically infallible witness), the witness accounts are all, in principle, both limited in perspective and subject to bias.
Thus, the historical method cannot begin, as does the scientific method, from the presumption of possible completion in a single perspective enjoying a universal consensus among all qualified observers.
Put in positive form, the historical method involves reconciling irreducibly multiple perspectives by continuously cross-referencing them against one another and against forensic evidence, that is, evidence provided by the scientific method, in the limited, but often decisive, areas where it can be applied.
Joining the scientific and historical perspectives, one can build an assessment of the actions comprising human events, past and current, that is less certain than a purely scientific analysis, though more useful for analyzing human events than laboratory science.
The Causal Perspective
One can produce, by combining historical methods with scientific methods, a purely causal account of human events. One does this by viewing human actions as instrumental and technical, and choice as simply a matter of choosing the most effective means to ends given by the natures and situations of the historical agents.
But such a purely causal account is devoid of moral judgments as to the worth or goodness of actions and motives, for it only assesses their instrumental effectiveness as means to ends.
A vivid illustration of what this would look like is Machiavelli’s Prince, and the perspective known as realism in the field of international relations, though the perspective is applicable to all human events.
The Moral Perspective
If you balk at accepting the realist causal explanation as the final word on a human act, hesitating to leap onto the winner’s bandwagon in full acceptance of the winning tactics, you have discovered a third perspective, the moral perspective.
You may still accept the realist explanation as the causal explanation of events, yet insist that another judgment from another perspective is still called for.
Whether it is the 10 Commandments, the Golden Rule, or some other moral standard, your hesitation in joining the victors’ celebration of their deed marks you out as a human agent with a moral conscience, a moral agent.
The moral perspective is not bottom-up and data-driven like either the scientific or historical perspectives.
It is a top-down perspective, a trait caught well in terms like commandments, rules, laws, scruples, virtue, character or Kant’s categorical imperative.
The moral perspective looks to the evidence — since all human acts have precedents, customs, habits, enabling conditions, provocations or invitations, that is, they all arise with an ongoing context of personality formation and social interactions — but that is only its secondary determinant.
The primary determinant of the moral perspective is the unifying system of laws and customs or character of virtues and habits that define the acting agent, the moral subject.
Causal explanations view agents as objects caught inescapably in causal chains and causal matrices. And this we all are. but not only this.
We are all also subjects imprinting our personal character and our social culture — our individual and our communal choices — upon an environment that is, if not simply indifferent to them (i.e., existentialism, stoicism, fatalism, nihilism), then at least resistant to them, if for no other reason than because we are not the sole agents trying to impose our own character and culture upon the world.
And that’s what the moral perspective is all about: whose character and which culture should be imprinted the world, on how much of it, and through what means?
And should the world allow multiple perspectives, multiple cultures and multiple kinds of personality?
And this is what the war in Ukraine is about, and the war in Gaza, and the threat of war in Taiwan, and the culture wars raging across that part of the world free enough to permit open dissent, not to mention our daily struggle to do right by others, and be done right by them, as we all struggle to make our way in the realist’s world of researchable facts and accessible but limited resources and the current and future distribution of property and status, of skills, capabilities and powers.
Determinismcan mean no single thing in a creature as divided (multi-faceted, to show it in a more flattering light) as the human being, which has, at the least, three parts providing motivations, each in its own way and in its own direction.
Each of these directions may interfere with or amplify the directions of the other two.
1. Survival-Machine
The most deeply rooted mover is the survival-machine, driven by a set of motivations common across all life, plants as well as animals.
Animals differ from plants because in animals data is not simply collected or registered to trigger mechanical, chemical and other strictly deterministic chains of cause and effect.
Animals add a middleman, the neurological system.
Animal senses — in a wild variety of kinds, ranges and sensitivities — collect inputs (as do plants) but process them as inputs to a nervous system, that is, as sensory inputs. Sensory inputs are always incomplete because they are but samples of the surrounding environment filtered through a single nervous system, and limited by the sensory parameters of its species, and of any defects or surpluses in that individual.
The nervous system works like a clearinghouse or a switchboard, matching certain combinations of sensory inputs with certain combinations of motor outputs.
Plants respond to chemical messages within their network of tissues — and, we are now discovering, within underground mycorrhizal networks in which fungal filaments connect the roots of communities of plants, passing chemical messages between plants so networked.
An animal’s sensory system differs from a plants system of electro-mechanical signals, for the sensory inputs are treated as data in some virtual workspace, and assembled into an image or model of the outside world to which the animal reacts. The animal reacts, not to an objective reality directly, but to its image as assembled in the animal’s nervous system, whether correctly or incorrectly.
For example, the human immune system reacts directly and in causally deterministic fashion to pathogens tagged as invasive. But the human, unable to perceive the microbes, reats to them only through an acquired knowledge of symptoms, leading to a diagnosis, always in principle fallible, for it is but a model assembled in the mind through experience, education or reasoning.
Here enters error, a form of divergence from reality that can only occur in a nervous system, and only in reference to an internal model of external reality that misses the mark widely enough to be a strategic liability if acted upon.
In short, animals react to their environments through the medium of a sensory image or internal representation of the external world. And the testing and refining of those models becomes part of the tactics of survival.
Thus nature selects for camouflage in prey and in ambush predators. Camouflage is not not just the camouflage of form and color but also of behavior, both instinctive and learned. Thus the low to the ground creep of a stalking cat is a camouflage of behavior.
The relevant conclusion for our purposes is that plants are survival-machines that operate through strictly mechanical causal triggers, animals operate the same way in what we call their autonomous functions (breathing, digesting, discharging waste, immune system responses, and so on) but also with voluntary motion, by which we mean motion initiated by a combination of four elements.
First, an image assembled from sensory data forms, representing approaching threats and accessible opportunities.
Second, perceived threats provoke fear and flight, while perceived opportunities provoke desire and pursuit.
Third, a counterfactual image is formed of a future state enjoying desired outcomes or suffering painful ones.
Fourth, the animal follows a course of pursuit or avoidance, which may be driven by a reflex (at the less voluntary end) or an imaginable response or a multi-stage plan (at the more voluntary end).
Fear and desire (respectively, of pain and pleasure) are the instinctive, pre-rational motives to animate action.
The greater the foresight and rationality of the animal, the more reasoning about long-term consequences can override instinctive feelings of fear and desire.
In sum, animals differ from plants in their capacity to assess sensory inputs through images and feelings constructed from sensory data in a virtual space provided within the nervous system in which fallible models of the external world are constructed internally to guide the animal’s reactions to events affecting it.
So, the most primitive level of voluntary determination in a human being is that of the sensory or image-activated survival-machine, which I will hereafter shorten to survival-machine.
Survival-machines are guided by the survival of the individual animal, without other considerations.
The iconic survival-machine is the praying mantis. It begins life folded in half , covered in a sticky gelatinous substance, one among several hundred falling to the ground beneath the egg-case from which they all hatch simultaneously. After flopping around as they slowly unfold themselves, the fastest among them stand erect and immediately begin killing and eating their nearest siblings. Looking ahead, it’s hard to see how ethical behavior could ever arise among such creatures, although John Scalzi, in the later books of The Old Men’s Wars, a 6-part series, gives it a go, in a narrative that is both entertaining and thought-provoking.
Survival-machines are driven, in their first stage, by fear and desire, up to and including obsessive forms of each.
In the second stage, they are driven by the ruthless calculations of survival famously expressed by Niccolo Machiavelli in the West and by Sun Tzu in the East.
And, since survival is a long game — not a constant barrage of life-and-death crises — the survival-machine in daily life is an advantage-seeking-machine, with self-interest its guiding light.
The more advanced the culture, the more self-interest is softened by the social veneers of polite society.
But it still erupts in its more naked forms in politics, especially in times of change and stress, like the ties we live in. We live in such times.
But human beings have two more levels of organization, built atop that first and most primitive level.
2. Social Animal, Social Ape
The second level of organization (or aspect of human behavior) is the social animal, specifically, the social ape.
Social apes are effective survival-machines — at their best, not in isolation, but as members in good standing of a troop.
The power of the troop is decisive, so troops must consist of sufficiently effective members and in sufficient numbers to fend off predators and compete with rival troops — for troops of social apes, having all the same needs, are in direct competition with one another — and they must be led by sufficiently effective leaders.
The social ape is thus driven by its status within its troop, a sort of group-determined self-image, that determines its membership, qualifying it for the basic benefits of membership. The more assertive members, typically alpha males, are driven to seek leadership rank, which determines access to special benefits and privileges within the troop.
These drives manifest as peer pressure, conformism, solidarity , and the like, but also as nobleness and belongingness — and even redemption of sins — as Shakespeare’s Henry V has it :
The social ape surges with passions, noble and ignoble, lofty and base.
It is a precarious platform upon which to set one’s moral compass, a platform open to your stoutest friends and your most unyielding enemies; it is the dynamic of conflicts and wars.
The ancient Greeks embraced it, and their constant internecine wars made them easy prey for the Romans, who were inclined to admire them more than conquer them. But the fratricidal and quarrelsome Greeks left the Romans little choice, for their quarrels would have undone the Empire.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,…
3. Rational Being
The last and highest level, but also the least compelling and importunate, is the rational being.
In survival-machine terms, rationality can be thought of as a tool for survival, culminating in Machiavelli’s new prince or Sun Tzu’s general with the way of Tao.
It can also be thought of as partly extending and surpassing the survival-machine, rising to a more long-term, even universal mindset. Put differently, rational beings can look beyond mere survival to pursue instead an idealized survival of the best aspect of human beings, even when that may require individual sacrifice in hope of a better future. In more familiar language, rational beings can choose the risks of heroism or the price of martyrdom, not an ordinary choice for a survival-machine.
Make no mistake, the willingness to self-sacrifice is not unique to rational beings.
It belongs as much — and, by the numbers, likely more) to the battlefield bonding of the bands of brothers discussed above.
The downside of this wider reach of striving for “something bigger than” one’s mortal self is that this kind of courage is just as potent when serving genocidal, racist and bloodily sectarian causes as when serving praiseworthy ones.
Armed with an ideology that screams for authority and justifies any action that spreads its power, many will set no limits to what they will do.
And a classic tactic of tyrants is to make the populace, and its leading figures, partners in their crimes, for then the people’s destiny is tied to their master’s, for should the victims of their crimes ever gain the upper hand, reprisals will come.
So, the wrath visited upon a defeated enemy becomes the chains linking blind followers to their masters for life.
The Rational Being Not a Species, nor a Tribe of Blood and Soil, But an Aspiration Open to All Who Can Will It
The rational being is also not a species but an abstract category defined by a general capacity. If species, as products of natural selection, are locked in competition for resources and survival, then rational beings, defined not by blood but by a shared capacity, are able to be guided by the defining characteristics of that general capacity, rather than by blood and lineage.
In other words, shared capacities inherently offer a common ground, although many motives, biological and social, may work against this impulse toward the universality inherent in the mutually recognizable recognizable likeness to one another of rational beings, of beings willing to “listen to reason”.
Free Will: the Multifaceted Nature of Being Human
Each of these three levels “determines” outcomes in foreseeable ways (thus, rivals, followers and enemies can all think strategically about which of these levels will best explain an agent’s likely actions (and thus how best to anticipate their actions or react to them), but none of them is, by itself, simply predictive.
In other words, free will, like strategy, maps out scenarios, not certainties.
And that is the scope and measure of free will in beings capable of rational action.
It does not mean that they are absolutely unconditioned.
To be unconditioned in that sense would be to be a god, not a human being. Their every act would be a miracle, an act independent of the laws of nature that govern all physical objects.
Free will can not and does not mean that.
Any act of a human being can be free, not in the sense that it follows from no prior circumstances (of birth, upbringing, culture, personal influences or personal experiences) but only in the sense that it is not mechanically predetermined but instead determined by its nature and circumstances as either a survival-machine, a social ape or a rational being.
For an agent to be free of all determining preconditions, including education, beliefs and personal experience, would to be a rudderless amnesiac without commitments, loyalties or responsibilities.
Far from being a model to aspire to, anyone in that condition would be shunted into an institution as a danger to themselves and others.
In conclusion, then, free will, when examined in abstraction from the context within which it arises and derives whatever meaning it has, can only be a nonsense concept, an empty word devoid of meaning, a term of magical thinking.
What it can be, considered within that context, has just been outlined.
In my last post, I spoke of power-seekers as a single category, overlooking that, for purposes of distinguishing good from bad (especially, bad in the sense of evil), there are crucial sub-categories.
An Interlude: Thinking is Born of Dialogue
That post, and this addendum, was stimulated by a delightful conversational dialogue I had with two visitors, Matthew of Malta and Linda of Miami-Barcelona-Vienna. They will both recognize the jumping-off points — and the big question left hanging — that triggered my subsequent reflections.
I should add that they are both thoroughly enmeshed in the practical world, yet hold a place in their busy lives for reflection, for thinking and for philosophy. This places them closer to the model of the philosopher-king than I am, whose career has fostered every form of expertise except the lucrative kind.
While on the subject, I’d like to mention that I heard from another former Gables grad (Coral Gables High School, especially its magnet programs in IB and DE, but including whoever had a taste for thinking things through), Jiyansh Agarwal, who is literally, a budding rocket scientist at UF, but who still finds time to read this blog and other philosophical writings, and to think and philosophize for himself.
And that makes me a little more like the philosopher-king, following the model of Socrates, whose practical profile owed more to those of his students who were active, practical agents of change, and of conserving that which merits conservation, than hewas, preferring to work outside the spotlights of power.
Teaching is an odd profession, whose practitioners are practical more in their vicarious investment in the lives of their students than as manifested in their own lives.
So, I will continue to work quietly in my non-lucrative way, hoping to benefit the world more in my legacy than in my lifetime.
Power-Seeking and Its Kinds
Leaders are power-seekers, I wrote in my last post, focusing on the the more Machiavellian and realpolitik side of power.
That’s a little too grimdark, a subgenre of ” of speculative fiction with a tone, style, or setting that is particularly dystopian, amoral, and violent. The term is inspired by the tagline of the tabletop strategy game Warhammer 40,000: “In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.” Many of you are familiar with this subgenre from Game of Thrones, or from Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, which introduces Logan Ninefingers, whose motto “You can never have too many knives”, is underlined time after time in his tale. (A fun read, whose grimdark is relieved by wit, wordplay and dark humor.)
So, I need to make two further distinctions, between 1) power over self and 2) power over others, and sub-dividing that latter category into power over others 1) for one’s own ends or 2) for the good of those over whom one holds power.
Power over self means self-understanding, self-control. and self-discipline. It is the foundation of personal freedom, the independence in thought and action of the free man, who is identical to the moral agent.
Thus, the free man can be a slave, like Epictetus, a martyr nailed to a cross, like Christ, or a persecuted and/or executed dissident like Socrates or Alexander Navalny.
The tensions that live within the free man is the subject of the least read of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s masterpieces, The Idiot, where Prince Leo Myshkin is a man of complete moral purity in the inevitably impure society, the only place where human life occurs, and thus the crucible within which moral agency must emerge, if it is to emerge.
Alexander Navalny, whose prison term is set to grow longer and harsher for opposing the Russian invasion of UkraineSocrates, drinking the poisoned chalice, so as to speak the truth while obeying the laws of his homeland Athens
In modern market societies where individuals are allowed to make their own choices, and to make their own ways, the free man must first become self-sufficient, pulling his own weight and owing his living to no other. In terms of one’s way of life, this means that one must be a partner in the running of a household, managing the responsibilities of a household and, likely, a family. As for a career, it means one must be one’s own boss, whether literally (i.e., entrepreneur, self-employed, contract freelancer) or, effectively, as one who maintains an employable resume across jobs and bosses, always prepared to find a new boss, if they have outgrown the role for which their current one will pay them or if their purposes or values diverge too far from those of their employment.
Power over self is thus an absolute and necessary good, a prerequisite for being a free man and moral agent.
Power Over Others and Its Kinds
Power over others is more dubious, more complicated and more ambiguous.
The crudest version is the tyrant (in modern parlance, the dictator, although that is a profound misunderstanding of the original meaning of the term in the Roman Republic, before it was corrupted by the likes of Sulla and Caesar).
The tyrant is an asocial monster who uses others for his own pleasure and benefit. He (or she) is the serial killer who has taken hostage an entire nation, viewing his followers, citizens and slaves (all one in the end) as mere objects to be used, favored and discarded as suits his needs.
In modern terminology, the tyrant is a sociopath who achieves ultimate power in a nation. Kim Jon Un is the perfect current example.
The tyrant is a narcissist who gains the power to work his fantasies out in real life on real people. He is obsessed with personal loyalty and revenge, considers himself above all laws, and acts with impunity whenever he has the power to do so.
Power over others for one’s own ends is tyranny (dictatorship if you are irremediably modern in your viewpoint). In it the one with power views themselves as the only existing subject. All others are mere objects without rights or perspectives that the tyran need concern himself with.
Tyrants can have favorites for a while, or even a lifetime, but favorites hold only a provisional status and are on lifetime probation. To renounce their loyalty to the tyrant, to betray him or merely to displease him is grounds for revenge, banishment or execution.
An example from history is Henry VIII, who had beheaded his mentor (Thomas More), his right-hand man (Thomas Cromwell) and two of his wives (Ann Boleyn and Catherine Howard).
An example from current events? Pick any of the dozen or more headlines a year in which an estranged ex-husband (it’s almost always a man) slaughters his ex and his children by his ex, usually by gunshot or arson.
Love that destroys what does not return its love is not love, better, it is the perversion of love that reaches no higher than self-love disguised as a love for those in one’s power.
Can Power Over Others Ever Be Good?
Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s
Power over others can never be wholly without its Machiavellian or Realpolitik character, for we live in a world of peoples and nations competing for resources.
The nations of Europe (which now decisively excludes Russia, in the political sense), formerly the cockpit of World Wars, have subsided into an arena of peace, under the now-shuddering Pax Americana, marred only by economic squabbling, which is only to be expected.
Resources will still be squabbled over, even after we all put down our cudgels.
But geopolitics, where civilizations clash, is as much a cockpit as ever, but the stakes are higher, and more final, in the nuclear age (soon to become the age of a manifold weapons of mass destruction).
So, the cold, hard Machiavellian perspective cannot be lain aside.
But political realism can be exercised on behalf of better and worse ends, and that makes all the difference that counts for anything in this world of realism, the world as it is, behind the veils of rhetoric and propaganda, of ideology and party-thinking, of polarization and denial.
Even comparatively good governments and parties must meet, withstand and ultimately defeat or outlast worse parties and governments.
If only true (or sufficiently true) moral agents follow at all the laws and rules of peace, they will die at the hands of the immoral and amoral.
When the rules of peace are broken, war or slavery must follow.
Ukraine is a clear case. Taiwan would be another. The Israeli-Hamas War is a far muddier case (most liberals will be under peer pressure to disagree; I will only say that sympathy born of the moment overlooks the long-term strategic realism driving the belligerents, and such essentially disengaged bystanders are an easy audience for belligerents to manipulate and plan for). But that’s a topic for another occasion.
And, by the way, Caesar himself is a debatable case. He did introduce benefits for the plebians but he did so by destroying the republic.
Opinion, then and now, is strongly divided over whether he was a democrat serving the people or a demagogue serving himself. Though the case is mixed, I find myself mostly siding with the latter.
Amended Conclusion
So, I have amended the implied conclusion of my last post in two ways.
1) Power over oneself is an absolute and necessary good and the foundation of personal freedom and moral agency.
2) Power over others is necessary in any organized human community or common endeavor (whether a nation, a party, a corporation, an NGO or even a sports team).
Power over others is good or bad depending upon whether it is exercised: 1) primarily for the good of those in power or for the good of the ruled (among which are the rulers, under the rule of law), and 2) whether those who are ruled entered into this hierarchy of power as free persons and independently-choosing moral agents or not.
And the signs of the free citizenship is that no one is assigned higher or lower rank in the hierarchy of power by birth, and that no one either rules over or is ruled, except in rotation and according to free, independent and periodic votes of all who are to be ruled. In short, you are free, not if you are without rule but if you are ruled by consent.
Final qualifier: now, more than ever, freedom must be understood in terms of freedom from manipulation by misinformation, disinformation and by other ways of perverting truth to serve power, so greatly amplified in our day by the wide-open Wild West of the Internet.
Being a moral agent has, in this sense, never been harder. Or perhaps it’s just that, before, information silos were imposed from without, by insularity, ignorance or autocracy, while now, information silos are self-imposed by the agent’s own free choice but governed by their ignorance and thoughtless biases.
Let me explain what a philosopher is, in the original and true sense.
The term philosophy comes from the Greek philos (lover) sophia (wisdom). It means one who pursues wisdom as a lover pursues their beloved. They pursue it with abandon, neglecting all else. They prefer loving their beloved to what would seem to be their own interest.
But that is a misperception, for selves are defined and shaped by the objects they pursue.
The character of the pleasure-seeker is shaped by the character of the pleasures pursued: impulsive, extreme and transient (the Dionysian), measured and temperate (the Epicurean) or with viewing distance (the Apollonian).
The character of the wealth-seeker is calculating, relentless, nitpicking when necessary, venal, following the precise letter of the contract rather than its spirit, or any sense of fairness, that is, forever ready to opportunistically exploit any advantage allowed by markets or courts of law.
Leaders are power-seekers.
The character of the leader is both charismatic and calculating, alternating from cunning (Machiavelli’s fox) to forceful (Machiavelli’s lion) as the situation requires.
Leaders project charismatic personas, some due to their inherently charismatic nature, some by deploying squads of image-makers, publicists, artisans, mouthpieces (a tactic as old as Moses and Aaron, and older), poets laureate and court historians — in our day, talk-show hosts, influencers, media personalities and trolls. Leaders must be realists — if they are to last long rather than disappear in smoke and flame as martyrs — and ruthless when necessary.
The model of leaders is Machiavelli’s new prince, who astutely practices an economy of violence that deploys as much violence as necessary to secure his rule, and not a jot more, or Sun-Tzu’s general steeped in “the ways (Tao) of deception” (Sun Tzu, Art of War, trans. Sawyer, Ralph D. Basic Books: NY, NY; 1994. P. 168), who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, and who knows that “the highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy’s plans; next is to attack their alliances; next to attack their army; and the lowest is to attack their fortified cities” (177).
Sun TzuMachiavelliAdvisors to generals and princes
The only leader who escapes this necessity is the philosopher-king, as difficult to sustain in a succession as to bring to power in the first place.
It is probably an ideal rather than a reality, but it is the face every leader wears in public, however distant it may be from their inner reality.
Machiavelli’s new prince and Sun Tzu’s masterfully deceptive general know this well.
Philosophers are truth-seekers.
The character of the philosopher is to seek truth — that elusive and evanescent substance. Given the slippery nature of truth, the philosopher must be flexible and adaptable, must never prematurely commit to any one hypothesis, seeking always the counterexamples, counterarguments and contraindications of any favored hypothesis.
The philosopher must thus be the inveterate enemy of dogmas and presumed authorities, even those that are well-intentioned and follow their hypothesis or faith from honest overcommitment rather than vanity and vested interest.
And, since sitting authorities always develop a class-interest as the defenders of the faith — the faith upon which their authority, prestige and life’s works rest (that is the true character and meaning of the Pharisees of the New Testament), the true-philosopher, the truth-seeker, is a disrupter and dissonant voice against the riptide of conventional wisdom.
And, as often as not, a voice that cryeth in the wilderness.
For the human being — the fully-realized emergence of a knower and moral agent from the mere potential of a naturally-evolving set of capacities, a becoming rather than a being, as Nietzsche, the existentialists and the post-modernists would say — can only emerge from within the range of species of survival-machines produced by nature through the blind mechanics of natural selection.
But thinking and doing right can only develop over generations (through a genealogy) of a species with the necessary potential present in the form of raw, undeveloped capacities.
And yet, every advance toward this generational realization must be led by individuals or small networks, for the lifespan of an individual does not suffice for this lengthy upward process — filled with plateaus, valleys and hills, alongside gentle ascents within an encompassing community stable enough to support them (Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”, “Sixth Proposition”.
This usually struggles against intense resistance (ranging form the subtly covert to the ferociously overt) from entrenched interests and authorities, who stand to lose much when the playing field, heretofore stacked in their favor, is leveled, or at least inclined to reflect the new bias of a new ruling class busily entrenching itself (the fate of most revolutions, even those made in the name of the people or some other society-wide or universalizing ideal.
As the new ruling class, along with their new, or newly-realigned power base, entrenches itself, the ideal devolves into an empty slogan, masking the new class structure with empty words, that become more formulaic and devoid of meaning as the new arrangements become all that anyone remembers.
Thus, human beings begin, not simply as survival-machines, but also, on top of that, as social animals, in our case, social apes.
And under stress, that is when either their survival or their social standing within their pack of peers is threatened, human beings revert from their aspirational nature as beings gifted with reason — and the attendant ability to identify themselves under the universal sign of the rational being and moral agent — to being earthbound members of a tribe of social apes, the essence of the current culture wars(not a uniquely American phenomenon but pervasive within the affluent free states, Western ones especially)— or to being predatory survival-machines — the overriding meme of tales of disasters or dystopias, from blockbusters like Towering Inferno to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
The future of humanity is always both bright and dark.
For that is what it means to be on the way to becoming, as a species, rational beings and moral agents.
The better, longer answer is that human nature has 3 components, each with its own characteristic relation to truth.
The 3 natures: survival-machine, social ape and rational being.
Only the last has a positive relation to truth.
A tiger’s tale
Survival-Machine
For the survival-machine, the only truths that matter are truths about their environment useful for their own survival. Street smarts, cunning, guile, making excuses for their failings and explaining away their misdeeds are the order of the day.
Objective facts, like the location of prey or the coordinates of an enemy position being shelled, are the truths they honor. All else is filtered through their own interests, needs and desires.
Some lie to create trust that they later exploit, some make promises they lack the discipline to follow through on, some hide their true intentions by silences, omissions or misdirection without needing to lie openly, a subtler way to remain unaccountable.
This is the truthiness of propaganda and diplomacy, of political pandering and the hustling of con artists. Even when they’re not simply lying, they mislead and misdirect.
In a less brazen form — statements and replies loaded with qualifications and ambiguities — it’s what you can expect from persons speaking in an official capacity, that is, representing organizations revolving around a shared group interest: corporations, political parties, governments, labor unions, and the like.
Even NGOs and charities are not wholly exempt. Organizations formed and sustained to serve an interest stay true to that interest rather than to any impartial perspective of truth. Their public responses are limited by company policy, talking points and the expectations of those higher up the food chain.
Were it otherwise, organizations would be more heroic and virtuous than individuals. But that is never the case. The best individuals will sacrifice their interests when called to by duty, while interests are the limit of an organization’s actions, for only interests hold them together.
For this reason, the moral character of organizations is determined by the lowest common denominator needed to hold group membership at s,optimal (or at least sustainable) levels. For in the dynamics of power a leader’s power is proportional to the resources they command, and that is a product of the size and per capita resources of their following, whether measured in bullion, bullets, ballots or simply by attendance or “following”.
Strength in numbers
Social Ape
More admirable, yet also more dangerous, is the social ape. Their driving need is to stay in good standing within their pack or identity group, and to maintain their status and standing within it.
Their only truth is the truth of the tribe. This group includes extremists, ideologues, dogmatists, single-issue voters, anybody whose sense of self is so tied up in a group identity, that nothing else can rival its hold on them — not facts, not evidence, not sound argument, not any kind of method or procedure, not science, not forensics, not legal standards of evidence nor standards of journalistic credibility, not even a sense of fair play.
Among children and adolescents, we readily recognize this as peer pressure. Adults are, if anything, more susceptible to peer pressure because it affects their ability to earn a living, but they’ve learned to disguise it as adherence to an authority, a doctrine or an ideology or as an adherence to cultural values, displaying a self-serving bias dressed to look like virtue and moral integrity.
It’s still putting lipstick on a pig.
Let me qualify this stark picture. To name and categorize behaviors is to lift them out of their context in complex personalities showing the imprint of many influences, some at cross-purposes. The result is that most people harbor a few quirks or contradictions, not being wholly one thing or another. The lover who betrays you may really have loved you with part of their being. Yet the outcome is the same. We are all mixtures, with different proportions of strength and weakness, of the admirable and the regrettable.
If you’ve never felt the need to apologize, you’re more likely an asshole than a saint.
Rational Being
We have already covered the fat middle of the bell curve of human truth awareness — and of moral integrity as well. What remains are the diametrically opposed tails of the “normal” distribution, the leading edge and the trailing edge.
The trailing edge are the monsters, the callous criminals, the ruthless seekers of power, wealth, prestige and pleasure, for whom others are mere objects, means to the ends they use them for.
There’s nothing new to say about these people. No one doubts they exist, they just point their fingers in different directions, depending on the weight of survival-machine, social ape and rational being in their natures.
The only new thing to say about them (not altogether new, but not much heard) is that they were given the chance to be fully-realized moral agents but they declined the honor.
The leading edge are the virtuous, the heroes, the martyrs (in the rare circumstances where that is called for).
When these act out of deliberate intention and a prudent assessment of the long-term costs and benefits to humankind of their act of sacrifice, these are rational beings, those few in whom the rational being predominates over social ape and survival-machine.
Socrates and Christ leap to mind, given my upbringing, education and cultural roots. Any culture or civilization worthy of the name has their own exemplars.
Nevertheless, much as such shining exemplars leap to mind, nearly as great in the scales is the larger set, yet still rare and choice, of those who maintain themselves, their honor and the good of their society — and to a lesser yet not negligible extent — the good of humanity as a whole, without sacrificing themselves or putting at risk their followers, associates and family.
Prudence is, after all, generally a matter of rational self-interest, where the self is determined as much by a principled identity as by a mortal lump of tissues and organs.
Hume famously remarked that you can’t get an Ought from an Is.
He was not altogether wrong, but less right than he and those who follow him think.
You can’t get an Ought from an inert material Is.
Inanimate material is inert, without function or purpose. It lasts forever because it aims at nothing beyond what it already is. There’s nothing for it to do or not do to maintain its existence.
It just exists. End of story. (Because there is no story, no narrative, grand or otherwise.)
Inanimate material also depends upon no particular configuration for its existence. It falls into temporary configurations of convenience, which serve no purpose, and whose continuing existence is a matter of indifference.
Seeming wholes (galaxies, suns, solar systems) are merely the aggregate outcomes of universal forces acting on the units of matter or energy (particles or waves or probability-distributions) whose changes are determined by those forces.
The laws of physics command what they command without regard to such temporary configurations, configurations lacking distinct powers or processes of their own designed to maintain their internal stability.
Bits of matter or energy are at the beck and call of universal forces, blind to particular local configurations.
In this sense, aggregates of inert matter are less ‘substantial’ than the functional wholes which are the toehold of animate matter in the surrounding world of inanimate matter (whether by functional wholes we mean whole organisms or the functional units, i.e., cells, tissues or organs) out of which multicellular organisms are built.
Functional animate wholes differ from inanimate material aggregates in having local processes that maintain their existence as wholes, distinct from the universal forces that lend motion to inanimate material.
Those local processes are what distinguish the living from the lifeless, and when they cease, so does that individual life. Material remains, but it is no longer a living whole, just an aggregate of permanent material lacking any sustaining processes or any need for such processes to continue existing. Junk matter, debris.
Biological processes thus define life.
Functions can only arise from biological processes, because only biological processes serve an inbuilt end, that of preserving life or survival.
And survival is but the end dictated by natural selection, a blindly mechanical process (though one whose effects register at the statistical level of the aggregate, not the deterministic level of the unit).
Now, back to Hume.
Humean, All-Too-Humean
(Apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche)
Oughts are the pivotal term in the formulation of purposes. An agent aiming at a purpose ought to adopt means suitable to that end or purpose.
Purposes are a subset of functions, being those functions that are adopted consciously and voluntarily by a choosing agent.
And agents follow only their passions, Hume says.
But Hume has overlooked another, overlapping, explanatory path.
Since only animate wholes are constituted by processes serving inbuilt ends (i.e., functions), only animate wholes can have purposes with respect to which oughts apply.
For an Ought is a rationale for a means, and that can only be an end.
Given an end, one ought to perform act X and/or are prohibited from performing act Y.
In terms not associated with agency, this goes as follows. Given an end, process X is required and process Y prohibited.
Short of that, Hume is correct: the next step in a causal chain (whether voluntary or mechanical) is determined by a causal Is, not a calculated Ought. And the causal Is that must accompany any voluntary action is a passion (i.e., a desire, however dressed up with memory, imagination or calculation).
But functional means-ends relations bring with them an overlapping level of instrumental causality with reference to the purpose of their function in some system selected (by natural selection or human agency) for helping maintain the internal stability of some temporary biological configuration.
Biology is the birthplace of means-ends functionality.
This is the tricky bit: we must refer to two distinct perspectives (paradigms), the reductive perspective of universal causality embodied in physics and chemistry (the sciences of the inert), but also the functional perspective of self-sustaining, local, provisional configurations (the science of biology).
Biology violates neither chemistry nor physics. Rather, it is an extra layer of organization built atop them that introduces new requirements and prohibitions for biological configurations, which all revolve around survival and functionality in service to survival.
When the adequacy of means-ends experiments are sifted by mechanical means, we speak of natural selection sifting random mutations for advantages to survival; when that adequacy is sifted by calculation, we speak of agency sifting perceived threats and opportunities for advantages to survival and the resources helpful to survival.
Where the end is survival, the means is fitness for survival.
Thus, any possible Ought comes from an Is, but only from an Is of the kind defined by functional processes, that is, biological ones (even if those are served by passions, as hunger serves the process of digestion and nutrition, from which cells derive their needed energy).
Pleasure, it is true, though it begins as a biological process for guiding voluntary behavior, becomes an end for passions in its own right, sometimes to the detriment of the biological process from which it began (as gluttony leads to bad health).
The Original End and the Primal Ought
The first, original, and primal Ought is known as the survival instinct, serving the purpose of survival.
While Hume is correct that our reason serves our passions, he overlooks that those passions that survive as motives of human behavior must first survive natural selection.
And they do this by serving survival in the statistical aggregate of a species population.
The biological processes which support life, sustaining it for as long as it can be sustained, are the defining powers of organisms. They are impermanent clusters of powers whose continued operation make that individual life possible, for as long as it remains possible.
In this way, purpose implies mortality.
Ends upon Ends
These life-supporting biological processes which sustain life also serve as a platform, the only platform, for further powers from whose potential and exercise further functions and purposes can develop.
Choosing agents, in particular, can fashion goals from the exercise of their innate powers, to design and adopt as further purposes.
Thus arise such life’s work Oughts as art, industry, fame, fortune, conquest, self-government, science and philosophy, to mention some major human ambitions, of mixed characters. Within each profession, the pursuit of excellence becomes a further Ought, extending beyond the Ought of achieving the minimal functional competence required to continue in the profession (i.e., survival within the profession).
Agents can also adopt as ends the pursuit of states of mind like hedonistic gratification, security, happiness, fulfillment or serenity, aiming to achieve these by the right mix of activities.
A further Ought arises because choosing agents pursue each their own ends, which creates conflict and disorder, damaging to all agents, unless they forge a consensus to minimize conflicts of ends among themselves as each pursues opposed, rival, or incompletely collaborative ends.
Thus emerges the moral Ought, at first little more than an agreement within a group formed from mutual need – family, clan or tribe – to protect themselves from rival groups by whatever combination of defenses and attacks prove necessary.
So far, this proto-moral Ought, although it does create a moral Ought internal to the group, is no more than an expedient adaptation serving survival when rival groups compete for resources.
But universalization of agency-membership, envisioned in the social contract, federation of nations, and categorical imperative, transforms this expedient more and more into a moral Ought binding on all agents, at least among those who desire to thrive alongside others like themselves, willing both to collaborate for the common good and to compete within consensual rules for what cannot be shared.
This can only progress by fits and starts as a history of agents and their gradual socialization through their cultures and their civilizations.
Throughout this long historical process tensions abound between loyalty to one’s survival-group and loyalty to the virtual community of moral agents.
And survival-groups continually appropriate the language of morality to justify acts of group expediency.
To be loyal only to the virtual moral community is to court martyrdom; to be loyal only to the survival-group is to degrade individual morality into group expediency.
The difficult task of being a moral agent is to find the right balance between the two, leaning toward the moral community as circumstances allow. Only so are the sins of entire societies (the raiding life, genocide, slavery) ever put behind us. Only so do moral agents redeem themselves over time, becoming members of increasingly moral communities.
Summing up, no Ought can arise from a lifeless, material Is. But an Ought can arise from the functional processes of life, physiological, physical and mental. Indeed, Oughts could come from nowhere else.
There is an ancient Jewish mystical tradition that God holds in abeyancehis anger at human moral failure out of regard for 36 righteous men who wander the earth unnamed and unknown.
Just 36 of them… and the rest of us are spared
Much of empirical history and Darwin suggest that human beings are survival-machines, smoothed down somewhat and refocused as advantage-seeking machines within societies where some form of law holds, if not always the rule of law.
Doin’ watcha gotta do, being practical, being pragmatic, showing prudence and seasoned judgment, Realpolitik, getting real, talking turkey, street-savvy, facing the facts, are all ways of expressing aspects of this.
But we all want to think well of ourselves.
It’s probably an internalization of a social animal’s need to be well regarded within its troupe if it is to survive, for expulsion from the group means misery, fear and death, an existence “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” in the memorable words of Thomas Hobbes.
That’s not a promising beginning for moral agency, but it’s likely the rudimentary form from which it arises. (After all, animal rutting looks a poor start for either romance or raising a family.)
For, if a survival-machine ranks its needs as a social animal by urgency, it gets this: physical survival, social belonging, a positive self-image (i.e., social belonging internalized), with actual goodness dead last.
In other words, from the survival machine’s point-of-view, two gaps arise between appearing good and actually being good — the axis about which Plato’s Republic, properly understood, revolves (see Glaucon’s challenge to Socrates, at the beginning of Book II, 357a-362c) — the first because how we seem to others (again, from the survival-machine point-of-view) is more important than how we know ourselves to be, the second because how we seem to ourselves is more important than how good we are from an unbiased point-of-view.
The first gap produces hypocrisy, with virtue signaling on the outside and hidden corruption on the inside. concealing inward corruption.
Political and social satire, and much of comedy, explore the first gap extensively, and also the second gap.
The second gap produces self-deception and rationalization of actions chosen for selfish reasons but felt as though they were performed for higher-minded reasons or were compromises forced upon us by circumstances beyond our control.
Narrative literature, cinema, psychology and pop psychology explore the second gap at great length.
But I want to speak of a whole other kind of self-deception, the one that takes place on the highest planes of abstraction, namely, the systematic construction of seemingly moral perspectives coupled with a deep-seated unwillingness to acknowledge countervailing facts and evidence.
In other words, I am looking at the phenomena of the willful retreat into generalized abstractions and slogans disengaged from the need for evidence or facts, carefully-reasoned judgments or relevant demonstrable knowledge.
The topicality of this topic is obvious, matching as it does the temper of our times.
Every ideology, religion, or sect — however right in its thinking or good in its intentions — is capable of being deformed in this way, if not by all its adherents, then by enough of them to emerge as a potent social/political force for confusion and chaos, and for the corruption that thrives amidst confusion, chaos and the resulting despair.
In sum, any systematic exposition of morality can be perverted for use as a cover story for the pursuit of its own special interests by whatever social group forms its base of support.
In a world dominated by survival-machines, posing (even to themselves) as moral agents, survival-machines would either transform their birth cultures into misshapen forms serving their group interests, or they’d seek out from afar cultural perspectives more suitable to their ends ,a la American Taliban.
Whatever ideology or sect comes closest to justifying their already-formed interests and self-image looks good to them.
In either case, they would truly believe that their adherence to that perspective were simply right, justified in its own, unbiased terms, however little they exerted themselves to examine their beliefs and guarantee their soundness.
For such persons, critical thinking is optional. It can be applied to rival perspectives. It can be applied to instrumental and technical means of attaining their chosen ends. But it can never be applied to their own deepest beliefs, the one’s that justify their behavior, making it seem right in their own eyes, and in the eyes of their chosen fellowship.
And they are fortified in this belief by the real sacrifices they must make to stay in good standing within their own group and own self-image.
After all, something must be sacrificed, some little freedoms, part of the trade-off involved in achieving social standing, security and survival.
Sun TzuMachiavelliThe Way of This World: Be observant of others while a blank to them; know what moves men, and act on it.
There is an old philosophical game of defining human nature and then deducing ethics and morality from that definition.
Plato defines human nature, analogically, as a chariot guided by the charioteer Reason, pulled and moved by the black horse of Desire and the white horse of Spirit (by which he means determined yearning, whether for honor and reputation in its best form or the unbridled pursuit of power, wealth and pleasure in its worst).
Aristotle defines human nature as the rational animal, the union of desire and intellect, that is, the being capable of choice and deliberate action.
The Christian fathers and medieval scholastics defined it as divided between a corrupt, earthly part and a divine part.
Hobbes defined it as amoral, a rational animal calculating its own survival and best interests.
Locke defined it as a rational being able to reason beyond immediate self-interest to a shared interest in the rule of law that allows the individual pursuit of life, liberty and property (Jefferson substituted the pursuit of happiness for property)
Hume defined it much the same as Hobbes, but tempered by the moral sentiment of sympathy.
The British empiricists and the British utilitarians all defined human nature as some kind of rational self-interest, with differing nuances.
Rousseau in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality) defined human nature as simple and noble, before it was corrupted by civilization and culture, while in The Social Contract he defined it as self-legislating autonomy created by the social contract in what had previously been merely a stupid animal. (Ah, the French, so contrary!)
Kant viewed human beings, insofar as they were but parts of all-encompassing Nature as having no distinctive nature of their own; that could only be ascribed to them insofar as they were rational beings, cognizant of the categorical imperative, and freely choosing to follow it.
Nietzsche viewed the whole idea of human nature as a mistake, for in his eyes man is a becoming, not a being, a thing continually remaking its own nature as it goes along.
I’m going to propose, instead, that human beings have four natures, ranging from their most primal to their most elective nature. This borrows from many of the views listed above, without quite conforming to any one of them.
Human beings are: first, survival-machines, second, social animals, third, rational beings, and fourth, moral agents.
1st Nature: Survival-Machine
A mind with but a single thought…
The first nature of the human being is that of survival-machine because they are, like every surviving product of evolution, residual forms of life that have so far escaped winnowing by natural selection.
This is their most primitive and primal nature. It surfaces in times of desperation, war, famine, or any lawless fight over limited resources. This dwindling down to the primal nature is the subject of every post-apocalyptic scenario you’ve read or viewed.
This is no inescapable devolution of character, but the pressures and temptations to succumb to it mount as a situation becomes ever more desperate.
But one can always choose to die as a human being in its highest nature (the 4th). And if it is true, as many who should know claim, that everyone has their breaking-point, then we can only ask of this highest form of human nature that it hold out as best it can, clinging to the identity and character it has freely elected for itself.
Some barely rise above their 1st nature. They are the predators who move among us, wearing, when needed, the mask of humanity.
2nd Nature: Social Animal
They fit in, it’s plain to see…
The second nature of the human being is that of social animal, a capacity greatly magnified by the first two breakthrough social media — language and reason.
Human beings, in this sense, care what their fellows think of them. Many of their actions are motivated by the desire to look good to their fellows (and to key sub-groupings like friends, potential mates, allies, and the dichotomy or hierarchy of leaders and followers).
From this arises self division, in which the unified self divides into a private personality and a public persona. Some of us try to make them match, while others deliberately hide a secret self behind their public façade.
Where some seem to rise above the mere desire to be esteemed by those they need or esteem, I think in childhood it always begins with this. The child seeking approval from its parents will be motivated towards obedience and good behavior. With puberty, the young want to be impressive in the eyes of those to whom their sexual desires turn them.
Even the pursuit of honor, truth or martyrdom is driven by the anticipated esteem of those whose esteem we crave, in their networks and communities, with sometimes perfect virtual ones replacing the real but imperfect ones we face directly. What else is the Kingdom of Heaven?
3rd Nature: Rational Creature
Anticipation and calculated response
The third nature of the human being is the rational creature.
In the first instance, the rational creature sees advantage in pursuing its long-term good in preference to its short-term good, where the two dramatically diverge. But in a good way of life, the two largely converge, as one trains oneself to take pleasure in things whose benefits are durable, sustainable and healthy, not fleeting or self-destructive.
In the second instance, the rational creature sees a basis for greater security, freedom, prosperity and happiness in a community of rational beings living under the rule of law, each with a fair chance to pursue their own prosperity and happiness.
In this sense, the Golden Rule is the broadest manifestation of rational self-interest, and the social contract its minimalist form, that is, the form short of which we devolve into an anarchic free-for-all. In other words, rights granted under a social contract allow individuals to do all sorts of things that are dubious or even harmful but not illegal. (You have, for instance, the right to be an asshole, but use the right sparingly.)
Moral agency…may come at a cost.
4th Nature: Moral Agent
The fourth nature of the human being is the moral agent.
This is the last and most authoritative nature because it alone dictates ends from within itself; the other natures merely respond to circumstances, internal and external. In other words, it is an autonomous or self-ruling nature.
It is not so much a rejection of the prior natures within it as a reincorporation of them into a more complex and comprehensive whole.
For example, moral agency can be suspended in circumstances where martyrdom is neither practical (futile yet fatal grand gestures) nor proper (statesmen have no right to choose martyrdom for others, even their followers).
Political realism, then, is not simply amoral, but recognizes the limits to effective moral action in an imperfect world; by contrast, a power both unlimited and moral would have no need for realism, simply decreeing its will, as good as it is irresistible, in accordance with the highest standards of social contract and categorical imperative.
And moral agency, in extreme circumstances like moral dilemmas or crises, may require that those other natures be set aside for the moment. Thus, hard decisions take courage and can have painful consequences.
Human Nature: A Complex and Comprehensive Network of Behaviors
The development of human nature can be arrested at any of these four stages. There is no necessity that the inherent capabilities be developed or realized in every human being.
The more primal the nature, the more urgent its urges, the more elective the nature, the less urgent. You can only become a moral agent by choice, however much your upbringing and experience may prepare you for it.
Cool consideration, albeit assisted by passions shaped by training and self-discipline, must replace inbuilt urges to bring about these more elective natures.
The reason to think of them all as natures is that each supports its own behavioral network of desires, experiences, and learned habits, of motives, relationships and expectations. And these behavioral networks shape characteristic actions. And that is all the nature of a human being can mean.
For all these reasons, human character will always be spread across a range — most likely a bell curve — for hot urges will always remain and cool consideration will always be an achievable if taxing effort.
What’s the difference between a Christian and a follower of another faith or of no faith at all?
The core of morality seems to me to be the same for all people of good will, and to be well-expressed by the Golden Rule.
The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The differences between faiths, both religious and secular, seem to me to be differences in how they apply the Rule in different contexts and to different groups.
Every faith, religious or secular, includes those who apply the Golden Rule broadly to all human beings and those who apply it differently — and sometimes not at all — depending on the context.
There is one context where everyone suspends the Rule. Everyone acts differently toward declared friends and foes; that is simply a matter of self-defense and survival.
However, many — though not all — apply the labels of friend and foe preemptively to insiders and outsiders with respect to their faith, especially in times of conflict, polarization or disruptive economic and social change. In other words, for many, outsiders are guilty until proven innocent, insiders innocent until proven guilty.
Clearly, we live now in a time of major disruptive change — technological, economic, social and geopolitical.
And this is not merely a parochial matter, an American exceptionalism. It is clearly global, in origins, causes and effects. But those effects are most manifest in more affluent and freer nations because those are where technological, economic and social changes occur first and fastest, and because the grievances and frictions they generate are expressed most freely.
The division of populations into insiders and outsiders occurs in two further contexts:
Between faiths.
Faiths, along with languages, are the primary carriers of culture, both serving to set cultures apart from one another, both presenting barriers to mutual understanding between cultures.
Within faiths.
Faiths, whether religious or secular, are prone to schism.
Religions are famously schismatic. Christianity arose as a schism within Judaism, Islam as a schism from Judeo-Christianity, and Protestantism as a schism within Catholicism.
And Protestantism has given rise to myriad further schisms and denominations, and continues to do so.
The Enlightenment ideology of national self-determination and human rights (a secular faith, though not without some supports within religion) gave rise to the schism between the progressive left and the conservative right, that is, between those who stressed progress toward ideals while redressing injustices and inequalities and those who stressed conserving traditions while cautiously assessing consequences of changes underway.
My own view is that the two together balance one another, with the political pendulum swinging between the two, accommodating generational adaptation, as new circumstances encourage adaption within an emerging generation not already set in their expectations and ways of life. (In other words, individuals are less adaptive on average than are human lineages.)
If Enlightenment humanism is the good example of a secular faith, communism is the bad example, prone to schisms and inquisitions comparable to historical forms of sectarian intolerance.
The schismatic tendency in secular faiths is also demonstrated by the schisms that invariably occur when parties of national self-determination, or of winning or broadening the franchise, come to power.
If the French Revolution was a stark example of this, and the Russian Revolution a starker one, even the more pragmatic and balanced American Revolution quickly developed schisms between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian wings of the Founding Fathers.
Religious and Secular Versions
United in diversity
In the religious version, the Golden Rule is the core teaching of morality, apart from the act of faith itself. (Observance of laws and rites are taken as measures of that faith and of one’s commitment to it.)
The Golden Rule here is a strong bond between insiders and can extend to outsiders as well, as in Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37).
It is founded on the equality of believers faced with the absolute inequality between them and their Maker.
The Golden Rule can extend, in more limited ways, to prospective insiders (children) and to non-members (e.g., animals).
Children have some of the protections of adults.
Animals may be treated humanely, and in the case of pets, affectionately.
Even food animals can be slaughtered humanely, as in the rules of kosher and halal.
There are two secular belief systems comparable to faiths:
Enlightenment humanism:
The Golden Rule here is a strong bond between rational beings able to recognize and respect one another’s worth as potential moral agents (the insiders of humanism).
It is founded on the equal capacity of rational beings to act as responsible moral agents.
Communism:
The Golden Rule here is a strong bond between insiders (“comrades”) which extends only to insiders.
It is founded on the equality of followers faced with the absolute inequality between them and the true insiders (the Party” and its supreme leader).
I use communism here instead of socialism because of its parallels with absolutist versions of religion. Communism is socialism merged with absolutist autocracy, and it is the absolutism and the autocracy that give it its negative character. Socialism merged with humanism is social democracy, manifest in European democracies as a party of the left rotating in government with parties of the right, conservative (and often religious) in character.
Faith, the capacity for agency and the capacity for suffering, respectively, define insiders in religion, humanism and socialism; for they are defined by, respectively, acts of faith, acts of agency, and vulnerability to suffering. In other words, it is the mutual recognition of a shared faith, the capacity for moral agency or the capacity to suffer that confers membership; again, faith, agency or need confer equality.
All faiths, religious and secular, attract hypocrites along with the true believers, for there are always people who want to claim the benefits of the faith. These benefits can be classified as:
Moral positive: the hope of attaining the moral completion, redemption or salvation
Moral negative: avoiding punishment in an afterlife
Social/Material positive: justice, prosperity or authority in this world
Social/Material negative: freedom from discrimination or persecution
Three levels of authenticity from the genuine to the disingenuous.
Faith helps good people be better
Faith allows morally average people to behave better toward insiders, though often worse toward outsiders
Faith provides cover for bad people who use it to justify unjust actions against outsiders
The Golden Rule is the core of morality that unites people of good will.
“Can’t we all just get along together?”
Uniting & Dividing
The act of faith is a commitment to a belief that divides people, whether of good will or not.
It cannot help doing so because it asks each new prospect to choose:
Are you in or out? (which easily slides into…)
Are you with us or against us?
There is an ecumenical spirit that aims to remove this all or nothing perspective, but it is a latecomer and has always been weaker than the traditional forms that aim at higher levels of cultural unity at the expense of deepening the division between insiders and outsiders.
Even Enlightenment humanism cannot entirely escape this, for if one defines morality by first principles — as does any faith or ideology — stubborn resistance to those principles can only be seen by the faithful as immorality.
Two examples:
Toleration: communities built on the principles of toleration cannot tolerate the intolerant (e.g., speech directly invoking the violent overthrow of the government, hate speech, slander, libel).
Liberal internationalism: free communities cannot willingly accept the deprivation of civil rights abroad nor the subjugation of free peoples, whether from within national boundaries or from without.
When All Is Said and Dunn 