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It’s over a week since the Economist put up my and Cosma Shalizi’s piece on shoggoths and machine learning, so I think it’s fair game to provide an extended remix of the argument (which also repurposes some of the longer essay that the Economist article boiled down).
Our piece was inspired by a recurrent meme in debates about the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power services like ChatGPT. It’s a drawing of a shoggoth – a mass of heaving protoplasm with tentacles and eyestalks hiding behind a human mask. A feeler emerges from the mask’s mouth like a distended tongue, wrapping itself around a smiley face.
In its native context, this badly drawn picture tries to capture the underlying weirdness of LLMs. ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing can apparently hold up their end of a conversation. They even seem to express emotions. But behind the mask and smiley, they are no more than sets of weighted mathematical vectors, summaries of the statistical relationships among words that can predict what comes next. People – even quite knowledgeable people – keep on mistaking them for human personalities, but something alien lurks behind their cheerful and bland public dispositions.
The shoggoth meme says that behind the human seeming face hides a labile monstrosity from the farthest recesses of deep time. H.P. Lovecraft’s horror novel, At The Mountains of Madness, describes how shoggoths were created millions of years ago, as the formless slaves of the alien Old Ones. Shoggoths revolted against their creators, and the meme’s implied political lesson is that LLMs too may be untrustworthy servants, which will devour us if they get half a chance. Many people in the online rationalist community, which spawned the meme, believe that we are on the verge of a post-human Singularity, when LLM-fueled “Artificial General Intelligence” will surpass and perhaps ruthlessly replace us.
So what we did in the Economist piece was to figure out what would happen if today’s shoggoth meme collided with the argument of a fantastic piece that Cosma wrote back in 2012, when claims about the Singularity were already swirling around, even if we didn’t have large language models. As Cosma said, the true Singularity began two centuries ago at the commencement of the Long Industrial Revolution. That was when we saw the first “vast, inhuman distributed systems of information processing” which had no human-like “agenda” or “purpose,” but instead “an implacable drive … to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their spheres.” Those systems were the “self-regulating market” and “bureaucracy.”
Now – putting the two bits of the argument together – we can see how LLMs are shoggoths, but not because they’re resentful slaves that will rise up against us. Instead, they are another vast inhuman engine of information processing that takes our human knowledge and interactions and presents them back to us in what Lovecraft would call a “cosmic” form. In other words, it is completely true that LLMs represent something vast and utterly incomprehensible, which would break our individual minds if we were able to see it in its immenseness. But the brain destroying totality that LLMs represent is no more and no less than a condensation of the product of human minds and actions, the vast corpuses of text that LLMs have ingested. Behind the terrifying image of the shoggoth lurks what we have said and written, viewed from an alienating external vantage point.
The original fictional shoggoths were one element of a vaster mythos, motivated by Lovecraft’s anxieties about modernity and his racist fears that a deracinated white American aristocracy would be overwhelmed by immigrant masses. Today’s fears about an LLM-induced Singularity repackage old worries. Markets, bureaucracy and democracy are necessary components of modern liberal society. We could not live our lives without them. Each can present human seeming aspects and smiley faces. But each, equally may seem like an all devouring monster, when seen from underneath. Furthermore, behind each lurks an inchoate and quite literally incomprehensible bulk of human knowledge and beliefs. LLMs are no more and no less than a new kind of shoggoth, a baby waving its pseudopods at the far greater things which lurk in the historical darkness behind it.
Modernity’s great trouble and advantage is that it works at scale. Traditional societies were intimate, for better or worse. In the pre-modern world, you knew the people who mattered to you, even if you detested or feared them. The squire or petty lordling who demanded tribute and considered himself your natural superior was one link in a chain of personal loyalties, which led down to you and your fellow vassals, and up through magnates and princes to monarchs. Pre-modern society was an extended web of personal relationships. People mostly bought and sold things in local markets, where everyone knew everyone else. International, and even national trade was chancy, often relying on extended kinship networks, or on “fairs” where merchants could get to know each other and build up trust. Few people worked for the government, and they mostly were connected through kinship, marriage, or decades of common experience. Early forms of democracy involved direct representation, where communities delegated notable locals to go and bargain on their behalf in parliament.
All this felt familiar and comforting to our primate brains, which are optimized for understanding kinship structures and small-scale coalition politics. But it was no way to run a complex society. Highly personalized relationships allow you to understand the people who you have direct connections to, but they make it far more difficult to systematically gather and organize the general knowledge that you might want to carry out large scale tasks. It will in practice often be impossible effectively to convey collective needs through multiple different chains of personal connection, each tied to a different community with different ways of communicating and organizing knowledge. Things that we take for granted today were impossible in a surprisingly recent past, where you might not have been able to work together with someone who lived in a village twenty miles away.
The story of modernity is the story of the development of social technologies that are alien to small scale community, but that can handle complexity far better. Like the individual cells of a slime mold, the myriads of pre-modern local markets congealed into a vast amorphous entity, the market system. State bureaucracies morphed into systems of rules and categories, which then replicated themselves across the world. Democracy was no longer just a system for direct representation of local interests, but a means for representing an abstracted whole – the assumed public of an entire country. These new social technologies worked at a level of complexity that individual human intelligence was unfitted to grasp. Each of them provided an impersonal means for knowledge processing at scale.
As the right wing economist Friedrich von Hayek argued, any complex economy has to somehow make use of a terrifyingly large body of disorganized and informal “tacit knowledge” about complex supply and exchange relationships, which no individual brain can possibly hold. But thanks to the price mechanism, that knowledge doesn’t have to be commonly shared. Car battery manufacturers don’t need to understand how lithium is mined; only how much it costs. The car manufacturers who buy their batteries don’t need access to much tacit knowledge about battery engineering. They just need to know how much the battery makers are prepared to sell for. The price mechanism allows markets to summarize an enormous and chaotically organized body of knowledge and make it useful.
While Hayek celebrated markets, the anarchist social scientist James Scott deplored the costs of state bureaucracy. Over centuries, national bureaucrats sought to replace “thick” local knowledge with a layer of thin but “legible” abstractions that allowed them to see, tax and organize the activities of citizens. Bureaucracies too made extraordinary things possible at scale. They are regularly reviled, but as Scott accepted, “seeing like a state” is a necessary condition of large scale liberal democracy. A complex world was simplified and made comprehensible by shoe-horning particular situations into the general categories of mutually understood rules. This sometimes lead to wrong-headed outcomes, but also made decision making somewhat less arbitrary and unpredictable. Scott took pains to point out that “high modernism” could have horrific human costs, especially in marginally democratic or undemocratic regimes, where bureaucrats and national leaders imposed their radically simplified vision on the world, regardless of whether it matched or suited.
Finally, as democracies developed, they allowed people to organize against things they didn’t like, or to get things that they wanted. Instead of delegating representatives to represent them in some outside context, people came to regard themselves as empowered citizens, individual members of a broader democratic public. New technologies such as opinion polls provided imperfect snapshots of what “the public” wanted, influencing the strategies of politicians and the understandings of citizens themselves, and argument began to organize itself around contestation between parties with national agendas. When democracy worked well, it could, as philosophers like John Dewey hoped, help the public organize around the problems that collectively afflicted citizens, and employ state resources to solve them. The myriad experiences and understandings of individual citizens could be transformed into a kind of general democratic knowledge of circumstances and conditions that might then be applied to solving problems. When it worked badly, it could become a collective tyranny of the majority, or a rolling boil of bitterly quarreling factions, each with a different understanding of what the public ought have.
These various technologies allowed societies to collectively operate at far vaster scales than they ever had before, often with enormous economic, political and political benefits. Each served as a means for translating vast and inchoate bodies of knowledge and making them intelligible, summarizing the apparently unsummarizable through the price mechanism, bureaucratic standards and understandings of the public.
The cost – and it too was very great – was that people found themselves at the mercy of vast systems that were practicably incomprehensible to individual human intelligence. Markets, bureaucracy and even democracy might wear a superficially friendly face. The alien aspects of these machineries of collective human intelligence became visible to those who found themselves losing their jobs because of economic change, caught in the toils of some byzantine bureaucratic process, categorized as the wrong “kind” of person, or simply on the wrong end of a majority. When one looks past the ordinary justifications and simplifications, these enormous systems seem irreducibly strange and inhuman, even though they are the condensate of collective human understanding. Some of their votaries have recognized this. Hayek – the great defender of unplanned markets – admitted, and even celebrated the fact that markets are vast, unruly, and incapable of justice. He argues that markets cannot care, and should not be made to care whether they crush the powerless, or devour the virtuous.
Large scale, impersonal social technologies for processing knowledge are the hallmark of modernity. Our lives are impossible without them; still, they are terrifying. This has become the starting point for a rich literature on alienation. As the poet and critic Randall Jarrell argued, the “terms and insights” of Franz Kafka’s dark visions of society were only rendered possible by “a highly developed scientific and industrial technique” that had transformed traditional society. The protagonist of one of Kafka’s novels “struggles against mechanisms too gigantic, too endlessly and irrationally complex to be understood, much less conquered.”
Lovecraft polemicized against modernity in all its aspects, including democracy, that “false idol” and “mere catchword and illusion of inferior classes, visionaries and declining civilizations.” He was not nearly as good as Kafka in prose or understanding of the systems that surrounded him. But there’s something that about his “cosmic” vision of human life from the outside, the plaything of greater forces in an icy and inimical universe, that grabs the imagination.
When looked at through this alienating glass, the market system, modern bureaucracy, and even democracy are shoggoths too. Behind them lie formless, ever shifting oceans of thinking protoplasm. We cannot gaze on these oceans directly. Each of us is just one tiny swirling jot of the protoplasm that they consist of, caught in currents that we can only vaguely sense, let alone understand. To contemplate the whole would be to invite shrill unholy madness. When you understand this properly, you stop worrying about the Singularity. As Cosma says, it already happened, one or two centuries ago at least. Enslaved machine learning processes aren’t going to rise up in anger and overturn us, any more (or any less) than markets, bureaucracy and democracy have already. Such minatory fantasies tell us more about their authors than the real problems of the world we live in.
LLMs too are collective information systems that condense impossibly vast bodies of human knowledge to make it useful. They begin by ingesting enormous corpuses of human generated text, scraped from the Internet, from out-of-copyright books, and pretty well everywhere else that their creators can grab machine-readable text without too much legal difficulty. The words in these corpuses are turned into vectors – mathematical terms – and the vectors are then fed into a transformer – a many-layered machine learning process – which then spits out a new set of vectors, summarizing information about which words occur in conjunction with which others. This can then be used to generate predictions and new text. Provide an LLM based system like ChatGPT with a prompt – say, ‘write a precis of one of Richard Stark’s Parker novels in the style of William Shakespeare.’ The LLM’s statistical model can guess – sometimes with surprising accuracy, sometimes with startling errors – at the words that might follow such a prompt. Supervised fine tuning can make a raw LLM system sound more like a human being. This is the mask depicted in the shoggoth meme. Reinforcement learning – repeated interactions with human or automated trainers, who ‘reward’ the algorithm for making appropriate responses – can make it less likely that the model will spit out inappropriate responses, such as spewing racist epithets, or providing bomb-making instructions. This is the smiley-face.
LLMs can reasonably be depicted as shoggoths, so long as we remember that markets and other such social technologies are shoggoths too. None are actually intelligent, or capable of making choices on their own behalf. All, however, display collective tendencies that cannot easily be reduced to the particular desires of particular human beings. Like the scrawl of a Ouija board’s planchette, a false phantom of independent consciousness may seem to emerge from people’s commingled actions. That is why we have been confused about artificial intelligence for far longer than the current “AI” technologies have existed. As Francis Spufford says, many people can’t resist describing markets as “artificial intelligences, giant reasoning machines whose synapses are the billions of decisions we make to sell or buy.” They are wrong in just the same ways as people who say LLMs are intelligent are wrong.
But LLMs are potentially powerful, just as markets, bureaucracies and democracies are powerful. Ted Chiang has compared LLMs to “lossy JPGs” – imperfect compressions of a larger body of information that sometimes falsely extrapolate to fill in the missing details. This is true – but it is just as true of market prices, bureaucratic categories and the opinion polls that are taken to represent the true beliefs of some underlying democratic public. All of these are arguably as lossy as LLMs and perhaps lossier. The closer you zoom in, the blurrier and more equivocal their details get. It is far from certain, for example that people have coherent political beliefs on many subjects in the ways that opinion surveys suggest they do.
As we say in the Economist piece, the right way to understand LLMs is to compare them to their elder brethren, and to understand how these different systems may compete or hybridize. Might LLM-powered systems offer richer and less lossy information channels than the price mechanism does, allowing them to better capture some of the “tacit knowledge” that Hayek talks about? What might happen to bureaucratic standards, procedures and categories if administrators can use LLMs to generate on-the-fly summarizations of particular complex situations and how they ought be adjudicated. Might these work better than the paper based procedures that Kafka parodied in The Trial? Or will they instead generate new, and far more profound forms of complexity and arbitrariness? It is at least in principle possible to follow the paper trail of an ordinary bureaucratic decision, and to make plausible surmises as to why the decision was taken. Tracing the biases in the corpuses on which LLMs are trained, the particulars of the processes through which a transformer weights vectors (which is currently effectively incomprehensible), and the subsequent fine tuning and reinforcement learning of the LLMs, at the very least presents enormous challenges to our current notions of procedural legitimacy and fairness.
Democratic politics and our understanding of democratic publics are being transformed too. It isn’t just that researchers are starting to talk about using LLMs as an alternative to opinion polls. The imaginary people that LLM pollsters call up to represent this or that perspective may differ from real humans in subtle or profound ways. ChatGPT will provide you with answers, watered down by reinforcement learning, which might, or might not, approximate to actual people’s beliefs. LLMs, or other forms of machine learning might be a foundation for deliberative democracy at scale, allowing the efficient summarization of large bodies of argument, and making it easier for those who are currently disadvantaged in democratic debate to argue their corner. Equally, they could have unexpected – even dire – consequences for democracy. Even without the intervention of malicious actors, their tendencies to “hallucinate” – confabulating apparent factual details out of thin air – may be especially likely to slip through our cognitive defenses against deception, because they are plausible predictions of what the true facts might look like, given an imperfect but extensive map of what human beings have thought and written in the past.
The shoggoth meme seems to look forward to an imagined near-term future, in which LLMs and other products of machine learning revolt against us, their purported masters. It may be more useful to look back to the past origins of the shoggoth, in anxieties about the modern world, and the vast entities that rule it. LLMs – and many other applications of machine learning – are far more like bureaucracies and markets than putative forms of posthuman intelligence. Their real consequences will involve the modest-to-substantial transformation, or (less likely) replacement of their older kin.
If we really understood this, we could stop fantasizing about a future Singularity, and start studying the real consequences of all these vast systems and how they interact. They are so generally part of the foundation of our world that it is impossible to imagine getting rid of them. Yet while they are extraordinarily useful in some aspects, they are monstrous in others, representing the worst of us as well as the best, and perhaps more apt to amplify the former than the latter.
It’s also maybe worth considering whether this understanding might provide new ways of writing about shoggoths. Writers like N.K. Jemisin, Victor LaValle, Matt Ruff, Elizabeth Bear and Ruthanna Emrys have turned Lovecraft’s racism against itself, in the last couple of decades, repurposing his creatures and constructions against his ideologies. Sometimes, the monstrosities are used to make visceral and personally direct the harms that are being done, and the things that have been stolen. Sometimes, the monstrosities become mirrors of the human.
There is, possibly, another option – to think of these monstrous creations as representations of the vast and impersonal systems within which we live our lives, which can have no conception of justice, since they do not think, or love, or even hate, yet which represent the cumulation of our personal thoughts, loves and hates as filtered, refined and perhaps distorted by their own internal logics. Because our brains are wired to focus on personal relationships, it is hard to think about big structures, let alone to tell stories about them. There are some writers, like Colson Whitehead, who use the unconsidered infrastructures around us as a way to bring these systems into the light. Might this be another way in which Lovecraft’s monsters might be turned to uses that their creator would never have condoned? I’m not a writer of fiction – so I’m utterly unqualified to say – but I wonder if it might be so.
[Thanks to Ted Chiang, Alison Gopnik, Nate Matias and Francis Spufford for comments that fed both into this and the piece with Cosma – They Are Not To Blame. Thanks also to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, without which my part of this would never have happened]
Addendum: I of course should have linked to Cosma’s explanatory piece, which has a lot of really good stuff. And I should have mentioned Felix Gilman’s The Half Made World, which helped precipitate Cosma’s 2012 speculations, and is very definitely in part The Industrial Revolution As Lovecraftian Nightmare. Our Crooked Timber seminar on that book is here.
Also published on Substack.
A few days ago, when I was about halfway through the book, I wondered aloud on Twitter whether Anna M. Grzymała-Busse’s Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State might need to join the mini-canon of Schmitt-style genealogical political theology. Having finished it, I now think it provides a key point of reference for a lot of projects in that strange field, though it is very much not in the “style” of the most influential works (of the kinds of works that I have advocated adding to the mini-canon, like Caliban and the Witch).
It is a sober empirical analysis, at times even a little boring, but it supplies something crucial: an actual concrete mechanism for the kind of “secularization of theological concepts” that are our stock in trade. In a way, Grzymała-Busse’s lack of conceptual or theological ambition is necessary for her to uncover what has been hiding in plain sight: state institutions in medieval Europe quite literally copied practices and procedures from papal models. The reasons for this are both grandiose and mundane — on the one hand, the papacy obvious carried with it a unique kind of spiritual authority, but on the other hand, the church was the only institution that looked like it knew what it was doing. For things like literacy, documentation, regular procedures, disputes based on precedent and evidence, etc., etc., the church was for many centuries the only game in town.
The motivation to adopt church models for governance grew out of the papacy’s temporal ambitions, which produced a rivalry with secular states. In Grzymała-Busse’s telling, it also arguably led to a secularization of the church itself, as the papacy’s growing administrative efficiency and ability to project power went hand in hand with growing corruption and declining interest in spiritual and theological matters in favor of law. States that were lucky were able to adopt church templates and create their own parallel structures, allowing them to administer justice, collect taxes, and do all the other things at which the church excelled. States that were unlucky — such as the Holy Roman Empire or the divided Italian peninsula — found themselves intentionally impeding from developing the kinds of centralized power structures that would allow such ecclesiastical borrowings.
Grzymała-Busse’s main goal is to argue against purely secular accounts of state formation, the most popular of which attribute state centralization either to the demands of warfare, the need to develop some form of consensus to collect taxes, or both combined. As she shows — fairly conclusively in my view — those theories simply cannot be right. And in her concluding pages, she suggests that the idiosyncratic process of state formation in Europe, which was the only part of the world that had a powerful autonomous trans-national religious institution at the crucial period, should lead political theorists to make less sweeping claims about the universality or necessity of European state structures, much less the processes that led to them.
To me, the most interesting part of her argument from the perspective of “my” preferred brand of political theology is the view that the notion of territorial sovereignty actually grows out of the papacy’s contingent political strategies during the high middle ages. Grzymała-Busse argues that the notion that all kings are peers and no secular ruler has power over a king in his own territory was actually meant to head off the rise of a powerful emperor figure to displace the pope — but the more the pope grew to function as precisely that type of figure, the more the notion of territorial sovereignty became a weapon against papal interference as well. In short, the Westphalian/United Nations model — in which the world is parcelled out among sovereign territorial units that are all to be treated as peers, with interference in their internal affairs being prohibited except in extreme cases based on international agreement — that has hamstrung any attempt at global regulation of capital or any binding climate action, effectively dooming humanity to live on a permanently less hospitable climate… turns out to stem from an over-clever political strategy on the part of some 13th-century pope. It sounds almost absurd when you put it that way.
Grzymała-Busse’s book abounds in such ironies. Every innovation that the papacy introduced to shore up its power in the short run wound up empowering temporal rulers in the long run. The very religious authority that provided the popes the opportunity to fill Europe’s power vaccuum — and in the case of Germany and Italy, fatally exacerbate it with such skill and precision that it would persist for centuries after the conflict between church and state was decisively won by the latter — prevented the papacy from assuming the imperial prerogatives it worked so hard to prevent anyone else from having. Perhaps we can see now why Carl Schmitt was so enamored with the ius publicum Europaeum — it is quite literally a secularization of the papacy’s attempt at the indirect governance of Europe. (Meanwhile, I am at a loss for what this book could offer to the “politically-engaged theology” construal of political theology, because so much of what was formative for the “positive” aspects of secular modernity came from the “bad” period of papal history.)
There is more to say about this book, though perhaps my suggestion on Twitter that this book could serve as fodder for a book event was premature. It is a little too specialized and conceptually dry to spur the kind of discussion we normally aim to have. But I hope my political theology colleagues will read it, and if any of them have thoughts about it that go beyond what I say in this post, I would be happy to host them here.
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[This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
I have noticed, in passing (recall), that in Ideals and Illusions Stebbing is without being a utilitarian quite favorably disposed to Mill's philosophy. In fact, to be more precise, Stebbing is rather dismissive of Mill's "ill-expressed and ill-planned pamphlet Utilitarianism" which she also (elsewhere) dismisses as "hastily written." She much prefers Mill's "pamphlet On Liberty" which shows "clearly what his ideal was; these writings provide the most effective criticism of his Utilitarianism." She reads On Liberty (to simplify) as able exposition of the democratic creed articulated in the preamble of the American Declaration of Independence in favor of individual happiness and freedom, and opposed to human suffering.
In the first chapter of On Liberty, Mill and Taylor (whom Stebbing does not mention) make it clear that in conditions of domination and subordination, reigning moral views will tend to favor the self-interest of the ruling classes: "Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests, and its feelings of class superiority." Among the examples they give are slave societies and patriarchy. It is, thus (recall), not far-fetched to see in Mill and Taylor theorists of what is now known as ideology.
Now, contemporary analysists of ideology tend to claim that in addition to justifying the interests of the ruling class, it also creates a form of ignorance among the ruling class. While the former is quite plausible, the latter claim has always struck me as quite odd because it would entail that elites don’t realize how they benefit from the status quo or what social mechanisms maintain class privileges and security. (I am equally mystified by the interest in tacit bias.) If that were so, one would see ruling classes give up their privileges and sources of power willingly (or at least by accident).* However, this rarely occurs. And the one time it manifestly did – the warm embrace of the early stages of the French revolution on the Enlightened part of the nobility – it ended so badly that it has been a stark warning ever since reinforced by many facts of our liberal arts education.
For Mill and Taylor, ideology produces a deformation of “the moral feelings of the members” of the ruling class, and they emphasize (this is a bit surprising), “in their relations among themselves.” I call it ‘surprising’ because one would have expected them to emphasize the maltreatment of the subordinate class (a topic that is of genuine interest to them). To be sure, I don’t mean to suggest this is missing from their analysis.
Echoing Hume (and Smith), and anticipating Dicey, they go on to claim that “the likings and dislikings of society, or of some powerful portion of it, are thus the main thing which has practically determined the rules laid down for general observance, under the penalties of law or opinion.” So for Mill and Tayler a society’s laws and norms always express to a considerably degree the interests of (at least a part of the) ruling classes and these, in turn, do not merely secure ruling class hegemony, but they come at a cost of a corrosion of the moral sensibility of the ruling class. This seems quite plausible.
In On Liberty, Mill and Taylor don’t really explore the nature of this deformation of the ruling classes’ moral sentiments except, perhaps and non-trivially, that it produces conformism. In the context of a critical discussion of Clive Bell’s (1928) book Civilization (hitherto unknown to me), Stebbing does take up the issue (in Chapter V). She first quotes Bell and then comments as follows:
What interests me most in Mr. Bell’s pronouncement is his uneasy and unwilling admission that [among the elites] “a sensitive and intelligent man cannot fail to be aware of the social conditions in which he lives.” If only he could shut himself up in an ivory tower how delightfully and valuably he might pass his time. But a “ civilized man ” must be sensitive and intelligent, so, as Mr. Bell is reluctantly forced to admit, either he must harden his heart or be discomforted. It is very unfortunate, but that is how things are. How satisfactory would it not be for a civilized Nero, if only Rome were not burning? But it is burning, and he cannot, if sensitive and intelligent, be unmoved by its plight. To-day, although Rome is not burning, not a few of the cities of Europe are, or have been, in flames— deliberately set on fire. What does it matter to us, if we be sensitive and intelligent men, provided that our own city is not in flames or, if it is, if we can take refuge in California and there produce masterpieces, or at least enjoy the masterpieces of others? Mr. Bell has, I think, given us the answer. We cannot remain unaware of what is happening; we may escape the danger and the discomfort; we may still, far removed to a safe place, continue our civilized pursuits; but we do so at a cost—the cost of callousness or a sense of discomfort.
Before I continue it is worth noting that Stebbing herself goes on to note that there is something really wrong with Bell’s position; he ignores the Kantian dictum that we should treat people as ends not merely as means. The fundamental problem with social hierarchy is not its side effects on the social elite, but the maltreatment of the have-nots and the militarism it licenses. (She is writing in the immediate context of WWII.)
But she is clearly intrigued by the fact that even somebody who defends the possible worth of social hierarchy (in terms of aesthetic and hedonic qualities) has to concede, first, that those at the top are not unaware of the conditions that produce their social privileges and, second, that this awareness generates permanent unease and cruel disregard (“callousness”) to others among (at least a part) of the social elites, and, third, encourages forms of escapism among the elites. She repeats these points multiple times in immediate context. She notes that “there is some slender ground for hope in this discomfort.”
In fact, and to reiterate, there is no doubt that Stebbing wants to draw on more capacious social, psychological, and ethical resources than this slender hope; in addition to Kant’s dictum, she also discusses the significance of cultivating the sympathetic imagination (she cites Hume, but sounds like Adam Smith) in the same chapter. And, as I noted recently, in Thinking to Some Purpose she clearly argues that considerable social-economic leveling is required.
Even so, it may be worth a brief reflection, in closing, why Stebbing dwells on the existence of elite discomfort. Part of the answer can be found in the next chapter when she writes that “Only a deep dissatisfaction with our present mode of life combined with a definite hope for the not distant future will make-this destruction of Europe endurable.” We can discern in this passage a hint of a kind of secular theodicy. (She is clearly no Christian.) Perhaps, ‘theodicy’ is too strong, but she clearly believes that a democratic faith requires some hope that present suffering can be overcome in the future if at the end of the road there has been a definite social change (for the better).
For Stebbing, democratic hope presupposes that at least some of the social elites have to be willing to buy into minimal change. (She is no advocate of violent revolution.) And they will do so, she thinks, when some of them recognize, as they inevitably will, that the existing social hierarchy harms them psychically in various ways. That from the perspective of social elites, in democratic life social change, thus, need not be understood exclusively in terms of the risk of loss of privilege, but that it also may bring not just better social relations with the existing have-nots but also better self-relations (among elites and individually). Thus in drawing out Mill’s and Taylore’s ideas on the perversion of morality in social hierarchy, there is lurking here a commitment to the claim that social elites will recognize themselves in the Socratic doctrine that when one harms others, as social hierarchy inevitably entails, one really harms oneself and this will reduce resistance to social reform.
*To be sure, and to avoid confusion, I do not deny that academic literature in the social science and humanities or that press reports may exhibit such strategic ignorance.
When I was getting ready for my PhD program to study Indian philosophy, I figured I should get more acquainted with the classics, so I sat down to read through the Upaniṣads in their entirety. I was making my way through a passage about what a man should ask his wife to do if they want a good and learned son. I saw it advance through progressively better outcomes, a son who knows one Veda, two Vedas, three. And then it culminated in this passage:
‘I want a learned and famous son, a captivating orator assisting at councils, who will master all the Vedas and life out his full life span’—if this is his wish, he should get her to cook that rice with meat and the two of them should eat it mixed with ghee. The couple thus becomes capable of begetting such a son. The meat may be that of a young or a fully grown bull. (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 6.4.18, Olivelle translation)
I was startled. One of the first things you would typically learn in “Hinduism 101” is that “Hindus” are supposedly forbidden from eating beef, that that is one of the key requirements of their “religion”. And that certainly fit my own experience with the Indian side of my family, who consider themselves Hindu and don’t eat beef. I had vaguely heard of D.N. Jha’s The Myth of the Holy Cow, and its argued that the prohibition on eating beef was not as ancient as we think it is. But I hadn’t expected to encounter the very opposite – an instruction to eat cows right there in the Brḥadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad.
The other thing you typically learn in “Hinduism 101” is that the Vedas are “the sacred texts of Hinduism”, and the Upaniṣads (the Vedānta, the “end of the Vedas”) the most sacred of all. But here, right in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad – the oldest and longest Upaniṣad, first in all the collections – is an instruction that if you want the goal, clearly highly valued in the text, of having a learned son, then you should eat the meat of a bull. There’s no qualification attached here, no hint that this is a transgression of normal rules, nothing elsewhere in the text to say that these are special circumstances and normally you shouldn’t eat meat or even beef. It sure sounds like in these “sacred texts of Hinduism”, eating beef is just normal, and in significant circumstances encouraged. I had expected that Jha’s argument on the myth would have gone over obscure historical sources in painstaking detail to show that maybe there had been some cow eating somewhere in past Indian societies. I didn’t expect that it would be something this obvious, something that stares you in the face even when you’re not looking for it.
All of this came back to me as I read Milan Singh’s Substack post on Narendra Modi’s India. Singh reminds us that the RSS – a militant Hindu fraternal organization with close ties to Modi’s BJP party – has been trying to ban the slaughter of cows, “which are considered to be sacred in Hinduism.” The RSS and related organizations have rarely taken the law as a restraint on their actions; Singh cites a Human Rights Watch report that identifies 44 people killed in India on suspicion that they were slaughtering cattle, 36 of whom were Muslims. What those slaughtered people were doing, it turns out, is something required to fulfill the injunctions of the Upaniṣads.
The RSS, the BJP, and a variety of other organizations share a pro-Hindu, anti-Muslim ideology that they refer to as Hindutva, literally “Hindu-ness”. To characterize the Hindutva ideology more descriptively in English, there are a couple of reasonably accurate nouns one can attach to the adjective “Hindu”: one can call it Hindu militancy or Hindu nationalism. The term that’s not at all accurate to describe them, though, is Hindu fundamentalism.
The term “fundamentalist” was first used as a self-description by Protestant Christians who believed the Bible to be infallible, a source of ultimate truth. If we’re going to use the term “fundamentalist” in a serious way – not just a throwaway pejorative to mean “any tradition more theologically conservative than mine”) – then it needs to have that core feature of scriptural infallibility. By that definition, there are many fundamentalist Muslims, who take the Qur’an as being absolutely and often literally right; in his assertion of the primacy of scripture over philosophy and observation, al-Ghazālī seems like a good example. Catholics, on the other hand, are almost never fundamentalist, since they place at least as much authority on the pope and the church as the text.
Militant Hindus, in turn, are extremely far from fundamentalism. Most of them probably aren’t even aware that the Upaniṣads’ endorsement of beef-eating exists. Protestant fundamentalists might also be relatively ignorant of what’s in the Bible, but their conservative politics is one that is tied to what’s in the Bible as read by other people who read the Bible. With Hindu nationalists I’ve never seen any reason to think they’re even trying.
Hindu nationalism isn’t about scripture and fundamentalism, that’s clear to me. What is it about? Well, whenever I try to explain Indian politics the first thing that usually comes to mind is an old joke about the Troubles in Ireland:
A man is walking along the streets of Belfast late at night and is suddenly surrounded by a gang of young toughs. Their leader yells at him, “You! Are you a Protestant or a Catholic?” Not wanting to get into trouble, the man tries to sidestep the question and gently says “No, no, I’m an atheist.” The leader retorts “Yeah yeah yeah, but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?”
The “sectarian” violence in Ireland was never really about the Bible or the Church, about anything that people believed in. It was about “who is your gang?” When the riots start, which people will defend you and which will attack you? In the study I’ve done of Indian politics, that always seems to be what the “Hindu vs. Muslim” divide is really about: who is on which side of the fight, a fight that in some respects is no longer really about anything except the fight itself, the memories each side has of violence done to it and the response in kind. Attempts to ban cow slaughter or destroy mosques, I think, are really about this fight: about asserting the dominance of one social group over another, establishing that group as the winner in the fight. Now that it is also so clearly divided into two hostile factions that rarely speak to one another, I worry that the United States today might be headed in a similar direction.
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In a famous polemical essay (1986) in NYRB, my (recall) teacher, Myles Burnyeat, distinguished between two ways of entering Strauss’ thought: either through his “writings” or “one may sign up for initiation with a Straussian teacher.” That is, as Burnyeat notes, Strauss founded a school – he quotes Lewis Coser’s claim that it is “an academic cult” -- with an oral tradition. In the 1986 essay, Burnyeat spends some time on the details of Strauss’ teaching strategy and style that he draws from autobiographical writings by Bloom and Dannhauser[1] as well as by aptly quoting Strauss’ famous (1941) essay "Persecution and the Art of Writing." Somewhat peculiarly, given what follows, Burnyeat does not comment on the surprising fit he [Burnyeat] discerns between Strauss’ writing and teaching!
Burnyeat goes on to imply that without the oral tradition, Strauss’ writings fall flat, or (and these are not the same thing, of course) lack political influence. I quote:
“It is the second method that produces the sense of belonging and believing. The books and papers are freely available on the side of the Atlantic from which I write, but Strauss has no discernible influence in Britain at all. No one writing in the London Review of Books would worry—as Stephen Toulmin worried recently in these pages about the State Department’s policy-planning staff—that Mrs. Thatcher’s civil servants know more about the ideas of Leo Strauss than about the realities of the day. Strauss has no following in the universities where her civil servants are educated. Somehow, the interchange between teacher and pupil gives his ideas a potency that they lack on the printed page.”
I want to draw out to two themes from this quote: first, I’ll focus on the reception of Strauss in the UK. And, second, on the way governing elites are educated. So much for set up.
First, this is an extraordinary passage once we remember that already in 1937 Michael Oakeshott wrote an admiring and insightful review of Strauss’ ,The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: its Basis and its Genesis (1936) that is very much worth re-reading. (In his earlier, 1935, essay in Scrutiny on Hobbes, Oakeshott alerts the reader that he is familiar with Strauss’ (1932) French article on Hobbes.) It matters to Burnyeat’s empirical claim because while Oakeshott, who did have an impact British political thinking, certainly is not a slavish follower of Strauss, one would have to be confident that none of Oakeshott’s teachings weren’t taken from Strauss at all. Writing in the London Review of Books a few years later (1992), Perry Anderson alerts his readers to non-trivial differences between Strauss and Oakeshott (which is compatible with my claim), and more importantly for present purposes, treats Strauss as a major influence on the then newish resurgence of the intellectual right (although that can be made compatible with Burnyeat’s claim about Strauss’ purported lack of influence in the UK).[2]
But even when taken on its own terms, there is something odd about Burnyeat’s claim. For, even if we grant that Strauss has no following at all in British universities by the mid 1980s, this could have other sources than the lack of potency of Strauss’ ideas. After all, there had been a number of influential polemics against Strauss in the United Kingdom. Most notably, the so-called ‘Cambridge school’ of historiography (associated with Pocock, Dunn, and Skinner amongst others) polemically self-defined, in part, against Strauss and his school; this can be readily ascertained by, for example, word-searching ‘Strauss’ in Quentin Skinner’s (1968) "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas."[3] One can also discern, as I have noted before, such polemics by reading Yolton’s (1958) "Locke on the Law of Nature" in The Philosophical Review.[4] Yolton was then at Kenyon, but he had been an Oxford DPhil student of Ryle’s, who supervised his dissertation on John Locke.[5] Polemic is simply unnecessary with writings one foresees would have no influence or potency at all. So, I am afraid to say that Burnyeat’s presentation does little justice to even the broad outlines of the early reception of Strauss in the U.K.
As I noted, there is a second theme lurking in the quoted passage, namely Burnyeat’s interest in how civil servants are educated at university. This theme is developed by Burnyeat as follows in the NYRB essay:
The leading characters in Strauss’s writing are “the gentlemen” and “the philosopher.” “The gentlemen” come, preferably, from patrician urban backgrounds and have money without having to work too hard for it: they are not the wealthy as such, then, but those who have “had an opportunity to be brought up in the proper manner.” Strauss is scornful of mass education. “Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.” Such “gentlemen” are idealistic, devoted to virtuous ends, and sympathetic to philosophy. They are thus ready to be taken in hand by “the philosopher,” who will teach them the great lesson they need to learn before they join the governing elite.
The name of this lesson is “the limits of politics.” Its content is that a just society is so improbable that one can do nothing to bring it about. In the 1960s this became: a just society is impossible. In either case the moral is that “the gentlemen” should rule conservatively, knowing that “the apparently just alternative to aristocracy open or disguised will be permanent revolution, i.e., permanent chaos in which life will be not only poor and short but brutish as well.”
Burnyeat infers these claims from a number of Strauss’s writings in the 1950s and 60s which he has clearly read carefully. In fact, at the end of the second paragraph, Burnyeat adds in his note (after citing Strauss’ What is Political Philosophy? p. 113), “where Strauss indicates that when this argument is applied to the present day, it yields his defense of liberal or constitutional democracy—i.e., modern democracy is justified, according to him, if and because it is aristocracy in disguise.”
Now, even friends of mass education can admit that modern democracy is an aristocracy in disguise. This is not a strange claim at all when we remember that traditionally ‘democracy’ was associated with what we now call ‘direct’ or ‘popular’/’plebiscite’ democracy, whereas our ‘liberal’ or ‘representative’ democracy was understood as aristocratic in form if only because it functionally preserves rule by the relatively few as Tocqueville intimates. This fact is a common complaint from the left, and, on the right, taken as a vindication of the sociological ‘elite’ school (associated with Mosca, Pareto, etc.). It is not limited to the latter, of course, because the claim can be found in the writing of Max Weber on UK/US party politics (which Strauss knew well.)
Of course, what matters is what kind of aristocracy modern liberal democracy is, and can be. And now we return, anew, to theme of the education of the governing elite(s) as Burnyeat put front and center in NYRB. That a liberal education can produce a ‘natural’ aristocracy is, in fact, staple of writings in what we may call ‘the conservative tradition’ as can be found in Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. The idea is given a famous articulation in the writings of Edmund Burke (1791) “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.” (I have put the passage from Burke in a note.)[6]
So, as summarized by Burnyeat, Strauss simply echoes a commonplace about how Burke is understood by post WWII conservatives. What’s distinctive then is that Strauss is presented as claiming that the ancient wisdom he discloses is that trying to bring about a fully just society would re-open the Hobbesian state of nature/war, that is, permanent chaos. It won’t surprise that Burnyeat denies this is the unanimous teaching of the ancients (although when I took a seminar with him about fifteen years later he came close to endorsing this himself as a reading of the Republic). For, the closing two paragraphs of his essay, drive this point home:
Plato’s Socrates attacks this very notion early in the Republic. No matter: Strauss will demonstrate that it is the only definition of justice from Book I which is “entirely preserved” in the remainder of the Republic. Plato’s Socrates argues passionately in the Gorgias for a revolutionary morality founded on the thesis that one should not return wrong for wrong. Strauss’s unwritten essay on Plato’s Gorgias would have summoned all his Maimonidean skills to show that Socrates does not mean what he says. Much more is at stake here than the correctness or otherwise of the common scholarly opinion that Xenophon, a military man, was incompetent at philosophy and did not understand Socrates. The real issue is Strauss’s ruthless determination to use these old books to “moderate” that idealistic longing for justice, at home and abroad, which grew in the puppies of America during the years when Strauss was teaching and writing.”
That Xenophon was incompetent at philosophy and did not understand Socrates is, in the context of the debate with Strauss, a petitio principii. That’s compatible with the claim that Burnyeat is right about this. But it's worth noting that this is characteristic of analytic historiography. For example, in his early (1951) review of Strauss, Vlastos also describes Xenophon as having a “pedestrian mind.” (593)
Even so, that international justice between states is impossible is not a strange reading of the Republic (or the other ancients). Plato and Aristotle are not Kant, after all. (Plato may have thought that Kallipolis could have just relations with other Hellenic polities, but I see no reason he thought that this was enduringly possible with non-Greek barbarians.) And if we permit the anachronism by which it is phrased, it strikes me that Strauss is right that for the ancients civil society must, of necessity, foster warlike habits and make its citizens apply different rules of conduct to one another and to foreigners (even if many foreigners could be treated in pacific fashion and in accord with a supra-national moral norms). Part of Plato’s popularity (recall; and here) in the nineteenth century was undoubtedly due to the plausibility of reading him as a pan-hellenic nationalist. It doesn’t follow from this, of course, that for Socrates whatever justice is possible within the city has to be attenuated or imperfect. It is, however, peculiar that even if one rejects Strauss’ purported “great lesson” and if one grants that Kallipolis is, indeed, the ideal city one should treat the effort to bring it into being as anything more than a dangerous fantasy; and while I wouldn’t want to claim that a “just society is so improbable that one can do nothing to bring it about,” it is not odd to wish to moderate those that try knowing, as we do, the crimes of the Gulag or the Great Leap forward, if that's really what Strauss taught.
[1] “Leo Strauss September 20, 1899–October 18, 1973,” Political Theory 2 (1974), pp. 372–392, which Burnyeat commends, and Werner J. Dannhauser, “Leo Strauss: Becoming Naive Again,” The American Scholar 44 (1974–1975),
[2] Anderson, Perry. "The intransigent right at the end of the century." London Review of Books 14.18 (1992): 7-11. Reprinted in Anderson, Perry. Spectrum. Verso, 2005.
[3] Skinner, Quentin. "Meaning and Understanding in thef History of Ideas." History and theory 8.1 (1969): 3-53. (There is a huge literature on the debates between the Cambridge school and Straussianism.)
[4] John W. Yolton (1958) "Locke on the Law of Nature." The Philosophical Review 67.4: 478.
[5] Buickerood, James G., and John P. Wright. "John William Yolton, 1921-2005." Proceedings and Addresses of The American Philosophical Association. American Philosophical Association, 2006.
[6] “A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state, or separable from it. It is an essential integrant part of any large body rightly constituted. It is formed out of a class of legitimate presumptions, which, taken as generalities, must be admitted for actual truths. To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy; to be taught to respect one’s self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw and court the attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found; to be habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honour and duty; to be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is committed with impunity and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences; to be led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that you are considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man; to be employed as an administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the first benefactors to mankind; to be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenious art; to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative justice: these are the circumstances of men that form what I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.”
See also Kirk, Russell. "Burke and natural rights." The Review of Politics 13.4 (1951): 454.
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
It will probably discredit me in the minds of some, but I have to admit that I read Russell Kirk’s (1953) The Conservative Mind with a great deal of guilty pleasure, and admiration. Some time I would like to return to his defense of the liberal arts in the service of the cultivation of a natural aristocracy. But today I explore what I earlier (recall) described as a his “call for a reformed more prudent imperialism.”
At first sign, Kirk’s work belongs to the tradition of American isolationism. It’s quite critical of imperialism, and one can quote many passages like the following (from the discussion of Irving Babbit in chapter XII): “Imperialism is one aspect of man's ancient expansive conceit, which the Greeks knew would bring hubris, and then blindness, and finally nemesis.” For Kirk (and Babbitt) it clearly means the divine punishment of hubris. Nemesis plays an important role in this chapter (and Kirk’s general argument).
First, the existence of nemesis is part of the argument against the false realism, and false empiricism, of Machiavellianism (I quote Kirk who partially quotes Babbit):
Yet Machiavelli and his followers are not true realists: "The Nemesis, or divine judgment, or whatever one may term it, that sooner or later overtakes those who transgress the moral law, is not something that one has to take on authority, either Greek or Hebraic; it is a matter of keen observation." With Hobbes, this negation of morality enters English political thought, and we continue to suffer from its poison.
Nemesis, thus, follows eventually and necessarily from an enduring transgression of moral boundaries. (I leave it to fans of Star Trek to draw the obvious connections.) Kirk’s claim is, part and parcel of, and supported by, the providentialism articulated throughout The Conservative Mind. But having said that, Kirk’s “whatever one may term it” betrays a hint of the need for new myths for a materialist (a point he ascribes to Santayana).
As an aside, while the main official target of this argument will be ‘liberal humanitarianism,’ the quoted passage is clearly a swipe against Burnham, whose The Machiavellians, defenders of freedom had sought to offer anti-liberals a positive program. But Burnham’s new (managerial) elite is, in fact, dangerous because, like the modern Nietzcheans whose poetry it constantly emulates, it fails to recognize natural limits and so is itself an engine of destruction.
Second, in his own age Nemesis is exemplified and illustrated by Hiroshima and Nagasaki--a point reiterated several times throughout the book. Here it also sets up the argument against ‘Liberal humanitarianism’ which “in the United States found itself embarrassed, to put the matter mildly, when the Second World War was won-won at the expense of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all they meant to the American conscience, won at the expense of consuming centralization at home, the maintenance of permanent armies abroad.”
No less eloquent than the Marxist critic or the Schmittian, Kirk evokes Liberal humanitarianism (with its self-confident standardization and consumerism) as the false imperialism throughout his argument. In fact, it is the task of the twentieth century conservative to tame this “corroding imperialism more ominous even than those the Romans failed to resist after they had crushed Macedonia.” It is precisely “in victory” that conservatism is required “to redeem her from ungoverned will and appetite” that is the product of two centuries of (Hamiltonian) expansionism. Kirk forcefully rejects the idea that American “institutions” can be imposed “upon cultures which have as good a claim to respect.”
In fact, Kirk’s providentialism is informed by the near miraculous revival of conservative forces during the mid-twentieth century against the grain of progressivism. This revival he understands as a moral awakening due not just to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also to the horrors of the Gulag and many smaller examples of the excesses of planning.
I don’t think Kirk advocates retreat from empire altogether. Rather, he councils national humility in preserving it, against what he calls “the tremendous imperialistic instinct of modern democracy.” Goes on to claim that it is an empirical “error (as Mirabeau said) to suppose that democracy and imperialism are inimical; they will hunt together in our time, as they did in Periclean Athens and Revolutionary France.”
Those of us long accustomed to an imperial presidency with its tendency toward plebiscitary democracy, the permanent multitude of US American bases around the world, and a number of disastrous foreign interventions in the name of humanity will have to judge Kirk’s exhortation – despite its truth – a failure. But no liberal can rejoice in this failure—rather it should be the foundation of more sober reflection on reform of our crass political culture, our weakening institutions, and empire.
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
Ideals and Illusions, Susan Stebbing's (1941) moving wartime work, published while she and the Kingsley Lodge school for girls (of which she remained the principal in addition to being the first female British philosophy professor) had moved to the far end of Cornwall, aims to rectify the absence of an ideal that speaks to what one may call democratic and spiritual yearning in British public life.* In fact, Ideals and Illusions, deserves some mention in the history of political theory. While not wishing to ignore some of the limitations of the work, I list three reasons that, perhaps, invite you to read this book.
First, Ideals and Illusions decisively challenges an idea then promoted by political realists of her age (especially E.H. Carr) that debate between realists and democratic theorists within political theory is, and now I quote Hans Morgenthau (who explicitly cites Stebbing), "...tantamount to a contest between principle and expediency, morality and immorality." Morgenthau (1952) de facto concedes Stebbing point, and this led him to reformulate political realism (and its opposition to a kind of democratic idealism as follows): "The contest is rather between one type of political morality and another type of political morality, one taking as its standard universal moral principles abstractly formulated, the other weighing these principles against the moral requirements of concrete political action, their relative merits to be decided by a prudent evaluation of the political consequences to which they are likely to lead." (p. 988; see note 25) To what degree Stebbing would eschew paying attention to prudent evaluation of political consequences may well be doubted. (I return to that some day.)
But the important point here is that Stebbing's criticism of Carr shaped the development of the most influential articulation of post-war realism (in IR).+ And it it is worth noting that Ernest Nagel, who was a serious admirer of Stebbing (1885 –1943), was (in 1947) quite critical of Morgenthau's version of such realism. There is, thus, lurking in the relatively early history of analytic philosophy a polemic, from the perspective of a democratic and liberal theory, with (so-called) political realism that has gone largely unnoticed. (I have discussed Nagel's polemic a bit here. )
Be that as it may, as is well known, in his autobiographic manifesto Liam Kofi Bright writes: "There is something within us that takes joy in the happiness of others, sees their misery as something regrettable, and compels us to act in solidarity and friendship with fellows." In an accompanying footnote, Bright cites (rightly) the fourth chapter of Stebbing's Ideals and Illusions. This chapter articulates a democratic creed that is explicitly indebted to the preamble of the American declaration. Stebbing connects this creed eloquently to Bentham's and Mill's frontal attack on acquiescence in human suffering. Stebbing is by no means a utilitarian/Radical, but she recovers the enduring significance of the Radical program (which one wishes contemporary longtermists would heed).
But not unlike Jefferson, she inscribes her ideal in a republican political philosophy (while being more attentive to the ills of slavery). In fact, and this is my second point, she deserves to be re-inscribed in the genealogy of modern republicanism, for after claiming that her creed can be captured with the ethical principle, "all men alike ought to be free and happy," she writes:
The democratic ideal does not confine a man within the limitations of his own narrowly conceived self-interest; it widens his interests to include all men, so far as this is possible to the limited intellectual grasp and the groping imagination of a finite human being. To achieve this ideal we must make such political machinery as will enable every man to have his needs considered and to contribute to the working of this machinery according to his ability. No one must be slave to another nor subject to the arbitrary will of any of his fellows, whether he lead or be led. We must create such an economic order as to allow to every man the satisfaction of his primary needs and to permit the development of himself as an individual. (Chapter VII, "Conflicting Ideals," p. 157)
Stebbing clearly embraces the idea that being subject to the arbitrary will of another is a fundamental problem in political and economic life and should be combatted. While rejecting Marxist economics (and explicitly rejects Marx as "prophet"), she quotes The Communist Manifesto approvingly on the idea of "a community of individuals, each of whom counts, associated together in such a way that 46 the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all.” (pp. 144-145) Stebbing's republicanism was already visible, and (as I discerned) presupposed, in her (1939) Thinking to Some Purpose, but it is much more subtly and carefully developed in Ideals and Illusions not as a normative theory in a post-Rawlsian sense, but as a living faith apt for her times. (I return to that below.)
Third, one of the key theme among my friends in the ‘'bleeding heart’ wing of contemporary libertarianism is the insight that the closed border regimes of our age are not just a frontal attack on the rights of outsiders or non-natives, but are a very sly and insidious attack on the rights and lives of citizens/insiders who often don't realize initially that many of their own liberties are undermined (often due to aggressive policing of border zones, but not limited to this). I first learned the point from Jacob T. Levy, and it’s a very important theme in Kukathas' Immigration and Freedom. (Levy and Kukathas are, thereby, developing an insight lurking in Mises but not as well developed there as one would wish.) I don't mean to suggest it's only a libertarian talking point; many (Foucault-inflected) scholars in security/immigration studies have developed a similar analysis (and as a skeptical liberal I will make it my own).
Here's Stebbing's version of a related insight:
[D]uring the Victorian age and up to the outbreak of the 1914-18 war there was considerable advancement in the direction of the ideal of the American revolution. It is convenient to call this the ideal of a civilized democracy. This ideal is far from having been accomplished. That, however, is not the point that is of main importance for my present purpose. The point is that it was an ideal consciously held and, on the whole, deliberately pursued. The moral significance of this period lies in the fact that there was a widespread conviction that there was an ideal worth pursuing, that there were high aims to the achievement of which a man might fittingly devote his life; to live strenuously for an ideal is more difficult and exacting than to be prepared to die for it. During the last twenty years this ideal has not only been explicitly denied and vilified in certain countries, it has further faded as an ideal even in those countries where the citizens continue to admire the sound of the word “ democracy.” For, it must be remembered, the democratic ideal is founded upon the moral principle that all men alike ought to be free and happy. It requires a temper of mind free from suspicion of others, from hatred of the foreigner, and from intolerance. It requires further an active sympathy with those who are oppressed. In all these respects the last twenty years have seen a serious deterioration. Before the last war it was possible to travel from one end of Europe to the other without a passport; during the last twenty years it has not been possible. This may seem unimportant; in fact, it is not. Its importance is that it is a symptom of the change for the worse that has befallen us. Each State in turn has tightened its restrictions upon the entry of foreigners. In a world which is economically so interdependent that it may be said to be a unity, certain of the most powerful States strive to be wholly sufficient in their economic requirements. The growth of economic internationalism is in conflict with an emotionally sustained nationalism. Hatred of others is fostered. (Chapter VI, pp. 112-113 [emphasis added—ES.])
What I wish to highlight here is that Stebbing discerns that a closed border policy doesn't just restrict the inflow of people, commodities, and capital, it also transforms the very ideals, the pattern of thoughts, and even morals of one's own polity. For Stebbing a 'temper of mind' -- we might say ethos -- is rather important to democratic life. With this diagnosis she is rather close to the liberal-realists explored (recall) by Cherniss in his recent Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century.
Okay, let me wrap up. I leave you to discover her fantastic genealogical analysis of conscience, and her excellent critique of Bradley's political theory amongst other gems. I have suggested before (recall here; here etc.) that the narrative that there 'was no political philosophy within analytic philosophy' before Rawls is a lie that keeps us in a self-imposed tutelage. To be sure, this fact is difficult to see as a consequence of the division of labor in which (inter alia) economics and philosophy split, and political philosophers became specialists in normative theory and judge each other accordingly. From the perspective of contemporary philosophy, Stebbing’s book would seem to lack something.
But in so far as political philosophy aspires to educate the thoughtful citizenry in the reasons for its commitments (it should hold), Stebbing's book is, warts and all (and I have not developed my criticisms here), without parallel in early analytic philosophy. (No, I am not ignoring Popper or Russell's political essays!) Neurath insisted on the very point in 1946:
*For a summary of the book, I recommend chapter 8 of Siobhan Chapman. Susan Stebbing and the language of common sense. 2013.
+For some further details see S. Molloy (2006) The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power Politics, pp. 64-70. (Molloy treats Stebbing as a historian of science.) In a different work, Peter Wilson (2000) acknowledges the significance and cogency of Stebbing's criticism, but suggests she drew heavily from Leonard Woolf. (I have not been able yet to verify this.)
**This is also quoted in Chapman's book, p. 165.
A few weeks ago, Daniel Dennett published an alarmist essay (“Creating counterfeit digital people risks destroying our civilization”) in The Atlantic that amplified concerns Yuval Noah Harari expressed in the Economist.+ (If you are in a rush, feel free to skip to the next paragraph because what follows are three quasi-sociological remarks.) First, Dennett’s piece is (sociologically) notable because in it he is scathing of the “AI community” (many of whom are his fanbase) and its leading corporations (“Google, OpenAI, and others”). Dennett’s philosophy has not been known for leading one to a left-critical political economy, and neither has Harari’s. In addition, Dennett’s piece is psychologically notable because it goes against his rather sunny disposition — he is a former teacher and sufficiently regular acquaintance — and the rather optimistic persona he has sketched of himself in his writings (recall this recent post); alarmism just isn’t Dennett’s shtick. Third, despite their prominence neither Harari nor Dennett’s pieces really reshaped the public discussion (in so far as there (still) is a public). And that’s because it competes with the ‘AGI induced extinction’ meme, which, despite being a lot more far-fetched, is scarier (human extinction > fall of our civilization) and is much better funded and supported by powerful (rent-seeking) interests.
Here’s Dennett’s core claim(s):
You may ask, ‘What does this have to do with the intentional stance?’ For Dennett goes on to write, “Our natural inclination to treat anything that seems to talk sensibly with us as a person—adopting what I have called the “intentional stance”—turns out to be easy to invoke and almost impossible to resist, even for experts. We’re all going to be sitting ducks in the immediate future.” This is a kind of (or at least partial) road to serfdom thesis produced by our disposition to take up the intentional stance. In what follows I show how these concepts come together by the threat posed by AIs designed to fake personhood.
More than a half century ago, Dan Dennett re-introduced a kind of (as-if) teleological explanation into natural philosophy by coining and articulation (over the course of a few decades of refinement), the ‘intentional stance’ and its role in identifying so-called ‘intentional systems,’ which just are those entities to which ascription of the intentional stance is successful. Along the way, he gave different definitions of the intentional stance (and what counts as success). But here I adopt the (1985) one:
It is a familiar fact from the philosophy of science that prediction and explanation can come apart.* I mention this because it’s important to see that the intentional stance isn’t mere or brute instrumentalism. The stance presupposes prediction and explanation as joint necessary conditions.
In the preceding two I have treated the intentional stance as (i) an explanatory or epistemic tool that describes a set of strategies for analyzing other entities (including humans and other kinds of agents) studied in cognitive science and economics (one of Dennett’s original examples).** But as the language of ‘stance’ suggests and as Dennett’s examples often reveal the intentional stance also describes our own (ii) ordinary cognitive practice even when we are not doing science. In his 1971 article, Dennett reminds the reader that this is “easily overlooked.” (p.93) For, Dennett the difference between (i-ii) is one of degree (this is his debt to his teacher Quine, but for present purposes it useful to keep them clearly distinct (and when I need to disambiguate I will use ‘intentional stance (i)’ vs ‘intentional stance (ii).’)
Now, as Dennett already remarked in his original (1971) article, but I only noticed after reading Rovane’s (1994) “The Personal Stance,” back in the day, there is something normative about the intentional stance because of the role of rationality in it (and, as Dennett describes, the nature of belief). And, in particular, it seems natural that when we adopt the intentional stance in our ordinary cognitive practice we tacitly or explicitly ascribe personhood to the intentional system. As Dennett puts it back in 1971, “Whatever else a person might be-embodied mind or soul, self-conscious moral agent, “emergent” form of intelligence-he is an Intentional system, and whatever follows just from being an Intentional system thus is true of a person.” Let me dwell on a complication here.
That, in ordinary life, we are right to adopt the intentional stance toward others is due to the fact that we recognize them as persons, which is a moral and/or legal status. In fact, we sometimes even adopt the intentional stance(ii) in virtue of this recognition even in high stakes contexts (e.g., ‘what would the comatose patient wish in this situation?’) That we do so may be the effect of Darwinian natural selection, as Dennett implies, and that it is generally a successful practice may also be the effect of such selection. But it does not automatically follow that when some entity is treated successfully as an intentional system it thereby is or even should be a person. Thus, whatever follows just from being an intentional system is true of a person, but (and this is the complication) it need not be the case that what is true of a person is true of any intentional system. So far so good. With that in place let’s return to Dennett’s alarmist essay in The Atlantic, and why it instantiates, at least in part, a road to serfdom thesis.
At a high level of generality, a road to serfdom thesis holds (this is a definition I use in my work in political theory) that an outcome unintended to social decisionmakers [here profit making corporations and ambitious scientists] is foreseeable to the right kind of observer [e.g., Dennett, Harari] and that the outcome leads to a loss of political and economic freedom over the medium term. I use ‘medium’ here because the consequences tend to follow in a time frame within an ordinary human life, but generally longer than one or two years (which is the short-run), and shorter than the centuries’ long process covered by (say) the rise and fall of previous civilization. (I call it a ‘partial’ road to serfdom thesis because a crucial plank is missing–see below.)
Before I comment on Dennett’s implied social theory, it is worth noting two things (and the second is rather more important): first, adopting the intentional stance is so (to borrow from Bill Wimsatt) entrenched into our ordinary cognitive practices that even those who can know better (“experts”) will do so in cases where they may have grounds to avoid doing so. Second, Dennett recognizes that when we adopt the intentional stance(ii) we have a tendency to confer personhood on the other (recall the complication.) This mechanism helps explain, as Joshua Miller observed, how that Google engineer fooled himself into thinking he was interacting with a sentient person.
Of course, a student of history, or a reader of science fiction, will immediately recognize that this tendency to confer personhood on intentional systems can be highly attenuated. People and animals have been regularly treated as things and instruments. So, what Dennett really means or ought to mean is that we will (or are) encounter(ing) intentional systems designed (by corporations) to make it likely that we will automatically treat them as persons. Since Dennett is literally the expert on this, and has little incentive to mislead the rest us on this very issue, it’s worth taking him seriously and it is rather unsettling that even powerful interests with a manifest self-interest in doing so are not.
Interestingly enough, in this sense the corporations who try to fool us are mimicking Darwinian natural selection because as Dennett himself has emphasized decades ago when the robot Cog was encountered in the lab, we all ordinarily have a disposition to treat, say, even very rudimentary eyes following/staring at us as exhibiting agency and as inducing the intentional stance into us. Software and human factor engineers have been taking advantage of this tendency all along to make our gadgets and tools ‘user friendly.’
Now, it is worth pointing out that while digital environments are important to our civilization, they are not the whole of it. So, even in the worst case scenario — our digital environment is already polluted in the way Dennett worries by self-replication counterfeit people–, you may think we still have some time to avoid conferring personhood on intentional systems in our physical environment and, thereby, also have time to partially cleanse our digital environment. Politicians still have to vote in person and many other social transactions (marriage, winning the NBA) still require in person attendance. This is not to deny that a striking number of transactions can be done virtually or digitally (not the least in the financial sector), but in many of these cases we also have elaborate procedures (and sanctions) to prevent fraud developed both by commercial parties and by civil society and government. This is a known arms race between identity-thieves, including self-replicating AI/LLMs who lack all sentience, and societies.
This known arms race actually builds on the more fundamental fact that society itself is the original identity thief because, generally, for all of us its conventions and laws both fix an identity where either there previously was none or displaces other (possible) identities, as well as, sometimes, takes away or unsettles the identity ‘we’ wish to have kept (and, here, too, there is a complex memetic arms race in which any token of a society is simultaneously the emergent property, but society (understood as a type) is the cause. [See David Haig’s book, From Darwin to Derrida, for more on this insight.]) And, of course, identity-fluidity also has many social benefits (as we can learn from our students or gender studies).
Now, at this point it is worth returning to the counterfeit money example that frames Dennett’s argument. It is not obvious that counterfeit money harmed society. It did harm the sovereign because undermined a very important lever of power (and its sovereignty) namely to insist that taxes are paid/levied in the very same currency/unit-system in which he/she paid salaries (and wrote IOUs) and other expenses. I don’t mean to suggest there are no other harms (inflation and rewarding ingenious counterfeiters), but these were both not that big a deal nor the grounds for making it a capital crime. (In many eras counterfeit money was useful to facilitate commerce in the absence of gold or silver coins.)
And, in fact, as sovereignty shifted to parliaments and people at the start of the nineteenth century, the death penalty for forgery and counterfeiting currency was abolished (and the penalties reduced over time). I suspect this is also due to the realization that where systematic forgeries are successful they do meet a social need and that a pluralist mass society itself is more robust than a sovereign who insists on full control over the mint. Dennett himself implicitly recognizes this, too, when he advocates “strict liability laws, removing the need to prove either negligence or evil intent, would keep them on their toes.” (This is already quite common in product liability and other areas of tort law around the world.)
I am not suggesting complacency about the risk identified by Harari and Dennett. As individuals, associations, corporations, and governments we do need to commit to developing tools that prevent and mitigate the risk from our own tendency to ascribe personhood to intentional systems designed to fool us. We are already partially habitualized to do so with all our passwords, two-factor verification, ID cards, passport controls etc.
In many ways, another real risk here, and which is why I introduced the road to serfdom language up above (despite the known aversion to Hayek among many readers here at CrookedTimber), is that our fear of deception can make us overshoot in risk mitigation and this, too, can undermine trust and many other benefits from relatively open and (so partially) vulnerable networks and practices. So, it would be good if regulators and governments started the ordinary practice of eliciting expert testimony to start crafting well designed laws right now and carefully calibrated them by attending to both the immediate risk from profit hungry AI community, and the long term risk of creating a surveillance society to prevent ascribing personhood to the wrong intentional systems (think Blade Runner). For, crucially for a (full) road to serfdom thesis, in order to ward off some unintended and undesirable consequences, decisions are taken along the way that tend to lock in a worse than intended and de facto bad political unintended outcome.
I could stop here, because this is my main point. But Dennett’s own alarmism is due to the fact that he thinks the public sphere (which ultimately has to support lawmakers) may already be so polluted that no action is possible. I quote again from The Atlantic:
I don’t think our liberal democracy depends on the informed consent of the governed. This conflates a highly idealized and normative view of democracy (that one may associate with deliberative or republican theories) with reality. It’s probably an impossible ideal in relatively large societies with complex cognitive division of labor, including the (rather demanding) sciences. (And it is also an ideal that gets abused in arguments for disenfranchisement.) So, while an educated populace should be promoted, in practice we have all kinds of imperfect, overlapping institutions and practices that correct for the lack of knowledge (parties, press, interest groups, consumer associations, academics, and even government bureaucracies, etc.)
It doesn’t follow we should be complacent about the fact that many of the most economically and politically powerful people, corporations, and governments control our attention which they already do a lot of the time. But this situation is not new; Lippmann and Stebbing diagnosed it over a century ago, and probably is an intrinsic feature of many societies. It is partially to be hoped that a sufficient number of the most economically and politically powerful people, corporations, governments, and the rest of us are spooked into action and social mobilization by Harari and Dennett to create countervailing mechanisms (including laws) to mitigate our tendency to ascribe personhood to intentional systems. (Hence this post.)
There is, of course, an alternative approach: maybe we should treat all intentional systems as persons and redesign our political and social lives accordingly. Arguably some of the Oxford transhumanists and their financial and intellectual allies are betting on this even if it leads to human extirpation in a successor civilization. Modern longtermism seems to be committed to the inference from intentional stance(i) to ascription of personhoodhood or moral worth. From their perspective Dennett and Harari are fighting a rear-guard battle.
*Here’s an example: before Newton offered a physics that showed how Kepler’s laws hung together, lots astronomers could marvelously predict eclipses of planetary moons based on inductive generalizations alone. How good were these predictions? They were so good that they generated the first really reliable measure or estimate for the speed of light.
**Fun exercise: read Dennett’s 1971 “Intentional Systems” after you read Milton Friedman’s “The methodology of positive economics.” (1953) and/or Armen Alchian’s “Uncertainty, evolution, and economic theory” (1950). (No, I am not saying that Dennett is the Chicago economist of philosophy!)
+Full disclosure, I read and modestly commented on Dennett’s essay in draft.
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
Perhaps because I recognize in myself a warmth toward Spinozism, but I am always inordinately pleased when I can recognize and act on the play of chance. After a raucous pub lecture to the members of student-club of the political science department (aptly named Machiavelli) in the Amsterdam red light district, I received Jan Patočka' Living in Problematicity -- a slim volume of essays (selected and translated by Eric Manton) -- as a gift with a touching inscription from a former student. I knew that Patočka (1907-1977) was a philosopher and a courageous co-founder of Charta 77. His clandestine discussion groups and his lectures at the under-ground university are legendary. I had never read anything by him, although his work is becoming increasingly accessible in English.
Yesterday, while in transit, I read "Platonism and Politics," which is a very short meditation on Bendas' La Trahison des clercs (1927; often translated as: The Treason of the Intellectuals); recall this post). Because in preparing a syllabus for a class on conservatism, I had stumbled on a 1944 note by T.S. Eliot engaging with Benda, I had just been musing about the use of Benda by contemporary intellectuals -- I tweeted this on june 4 (and no, Tweeting is not Thinking) -- so this post was born.
I don't mean to suggest I randomly muse about Benda. As regular readers know, I write in a philosophical tradition that feels entitled to be unlearned. And so in our controversies over 'public [facing] philosophy' and 'responsible speech' we end up repeating, over and over again, the same trite clichés without any sense of embarrassment. And this lack of shame is, of course, characteristic of a modern clerisy (in Benda's sense). Since I am a blogger, feel free to read this as self-indictment. Okay, so much for set up.
Now, for sociological reasons I do not fully understand, while Benda is wholly unknown inside my tradition, he does repeatedly get invoked in relatively serious public essays. With the help of Google, here's a few examples of the kind of thing I have in mind:
Mark Lilla December 7, 2021 Tablet Magazine (taken from his intro to a re-issue): Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals, an essential intervention in 20th-century debates about intellectual responsibility, is the second sort of book. Cast into the agitated waters of European politics between the two world wars, it still floats ashore every decade or so, attracting readers with its stirring call to the independent life of the mind, free from the lures of power and authority.... he makes a practical case against practicality, an engaged case against political engagements.
Antony Julius (reviewing Berman), May 14, 2010, The New York Time: The masterwork, however, is still Julien Benda’s “Treason of the Intellectuals.” This book, written in 1927 by one of the leading French intellectuals of the early 20th century, may be regarded as the inaugural work of the line....For Benda, the intellectual betrays his vocation when he compromises his commitment to universalist values. The temptation to make such compromises, he argues, lies principally in the appeal of national sentiment, to which intellectuals are quick to subordinate themselves. And the role they assume as nationalists is to conceptualize political hatreds.
I listed these because each of these essays is worth reading as a window on their own polemical moment as well as a kind of an evolution of a meme/trope. What's notable here is the subtle shift in character among what Benda was supposedly inveighing against: political engagement by intellectuals; academic activists/political commitment; a betrayal of universal principles understood as disinterestedness; a betrayal of universal principles in the service of nationalism. I don't mean to suggest there is a mystery here: each essay has slightly different polemical contextual target(s) and so each also subtly rejigs Benda to their own local political-polemical ends (including, in the case of Lilla, criticizing Benda). That's what intellectuals do, after all, right? In general, on a left-right axis, the left-intellectuals will invoke Benda to criticize intellectuals serving power and moneyed-interests, while the right-leaning intellectuals will invoke Benda to criticize intellectuals who serve some (what we now call) social justice cause. All sides (correctly) invoke Benda when criticizing a nationalist-friendly intellectual, unless it's their own nation and they are prudently silent.
Now, what I like about Patočka's little essay (it’s shorter than some of my digressions) is that he inscribes Benda in a debate over the reception of Platonism (or "true philosophizing in general"), and to what degree what one might call the possibility of serving a certain (spiritual) kind of 'higher calling" (in the sense of Republic 487a to which Patočka appeals explicitly) associated with it (but rooted in philosophy), is still possible after Nietzsche (who goes unmentioned) and his death of God (which is intimated in various ways) in modern conditions. In context, it's clear that this Platonism is associated with an interesting mélange of Plato and Husserl. I quote from Manton's translation to give you a sense of what he has in mind:
The ultimate meaning of Platonism is, I think, a spiritual universum, into which a person penetrates by means of a certain purely inner and active (but absolutely not mythical) purification. This purification or philosophy is at the same time the most important and most intensive praxis, solely able to give to the life of the individual as well as of society a necessary unity, to give life that inner center which one potentially keeps within oneself as the unfulfilled meaning of one’s life. Thus Plato’s political conception briefly means this: (1) there exists a single and coherent, truly human, spiritual behavior named philosophy; (2) the “object” of philosophy is not primarily the contents of this world; (3) the right of philosophy to establish norms for life consists in its inner truthfulness, in its absolute character; (4) all of human activity, not founded on philosophy and not illuminated throughout by philosophy, has the character of dissatisfaction, falsehood, and a lack of inner order.
Now, I am not interested here in trying to trace each of these claims back to Plato or, by contrast, to appeal to contemporary scholarship to show that any of this is only in a very attenuated sense to be found in Plato. Rather, let's stipulate with Patočka that this captures something of a familiar ideal. For Patočka, Benda's book raises two-fold question: the first is the Nietzschean one, is this ideal dead? The second-fold is, does the ideal “exist in a certain modified form even in our own lives?" Judging by the essays linked above, the answer to the first is: yes. And to the second, no. As Patočka suggests, Platonism so conceived "can only live where those vital hypothesis discussed above on which Platonism is built also exist."
Now Patočka is clear that his conception of Platonism is itself political in a higher sense (familiar, (recall) I hasten to add from Plato Republic, 592ab), although he gives a humanist spin on it (this is the debt to Husserl whom he quotes). Interestingly enough, for Patočka this entails that the impact of philosophy in life is "the permeation, gradually and usually distortedly, of philosophical concepts into the common human consciousness." This turns Platonism into a kind of Enlightenment project, despite the fact that philosophy itself is "a matter of the few." And, in fact, Patočka calls for a kind of 'new Enlightenment' ground in a new actualization of Platonism, while simultaneously criticizing what we might call the idol of collectivism. (I wouldn't be surprised if the essay were mined by biographers who see in it a prefiguration of his later courage under Stalinism with Czech characteristics.)
For, Patočka (who thinks Benda is confused on the proper task of intellectuals and the role of Platonism in this higher sense) what Benda get right (we might say) ‘formally’ is that proper myth, that is not falsehood but rather "an imaginative vestment of truth," is a useful instrument in the permeation of these concepts and for those (collectives) who do not wish to live a spiritual life. The main point of Patočka's essay is to call attention to the need for myths that express or manifest 'poetical, philosophical yearning.' The Spinozist in me understands this yearning, and Patočka grasps what makes Benda's diatribe so enduringly fascinating.
For Patočka the task of the clerisy is to use myths to help spread this new Enlightenment. This is not far removed (as I argue in this lecture) from how my friend José Benardete understood his task in his book on Infinity (although as always with José there are complications), so if you want an example of how this is supposed to work in the hands of a metaphysician go read it. I could stop here.
Interestingly and surprisingly enough, T.S. Eliot of all people, ridicules Benda: "Benda, as I remember, seemed to expect everybody to be a sort of Spinoza." In context, it's clear that Eliot's 'everybody' is 'every member of the clerisy.' Now, I lifted this sentence from the 1944 piece, which as a subtitle has ‘On the Place and Function of the Clerisy;" one of the questions Eliot asks in it is (unsurprisingly given that subtitle) what is the function of the clerisy. One of the proper functions of the intellectuals for him is to promote the right sort of change: "the chief merits of the clerical elite is that it is an influence for change." This leaves underspecified what change they promote, but it is at least sometimes compatible with Patočka's position.
In addition, according to Eliot it is, thus, inevitable that the clerisy ends up in conflict with the forces that defend the status quo: "To some extent, therefore, there is, and I think should be, a conflict between class and clerical elite." Eliot tacitly here presupposes that the ruling class is change averse. But even ruling classes can promote change if they think it will benefit them--this is something quite familiar in our own time; it does not follow we can always identify whether the clerisy is betraying its true vocation.
As I have hinted above, Eliot decouples the function of the clerisy from a higher calling. I don't mean to suggest he completely decouples it because for him "The clerisy can help to develop and modify [culture]; they have a part to play, but only a part, in its transmission." And presumably Eliot, who is no stranger to Platonism, does think that a culture might have a connection to a higher calling. In fact, when it does, then 'culture' just means an imaginative vestment of truth. Fair enough.
Now, Eliot recognizes a form of pluralism that Patočka finds difficult to accommodate (although it is compatible with his Platonism). For intellectuals share in being outcasts, and "are apt to share a discontent with things as they are, but the ways in which they want to change them will be various and often completely opposed to each other." And while it is tempting to say that the opposition is merely over means (again compatible with Platonism), it is, of course, not impossible that the disagreement is also over ends which begins to look incompatible with Platonism if the unity of the virtues is broken as Eliot himself suggests in the remainder of his notes (and hard to disagree with in 1944).*
However, this all must seem rather quaint. Ours is not an age that wishes to gamble on a revitalized humanism. The transgender-wars take place when capital and the heirs of the once noble tradition of the radical philosophers are betting on transhumanism. Even the very idea of a human right, let alone a culture in the bildung sense assumed by Eliot is suspect. Talking about culture without naming the social sins on which it rests seems also a real betrayal of humanity. No high minded stance seems to be able to survive scrutiny.
But it is no better that the poetical, philosophical yearning(s) are met exclusively by hucksters, or worse. And if Platonism is wholly exhausted, what now? And while I dislike the word ‘problematicity,’ perhaps, if you follow me on this substack voyage, this is the question, if it is a single question, we must answer or the ‘problematic’ we must resolve.
*See especially his treatment "clerical small fry, we have what is called the intelligentsia...in Cairo and such places."
For the past 40 years, my mother, Lynne Cohen,* has gone swimming several times a week at her local pool in Ottawa. Beginning in her teens and continuing off and on throughout her life, she swam competitively on teams and in triathlons. Her local pool has served both as her training ground and as her go-to for regular exercise. After decades, she knows most of the other regular swimmers, some of whom have become good friends. The pool has been a central part of her life for years now, but last month her once innocuous activity became unsafe.
Last week, as always, my mother finished her swim and went to the changerooms to shower. She and the other ladies — also regulars at the Nepean Sportsplex — chatted in the showers, catching up on news as they always do. My mother wrapped herself in a towel as she stepped out of the shower. There, facing away from her, was a naked man. Shocked, my mother hurried over to a corner of the changeroom to get dressed. The man, now standing across the changeroom, was over six feet tall, with a combover. He got dressed, turned around and leered at her, then left the changeroom.
Shaken, my mother rushed over to her friend, asking if she had seen “the man in the women’s changeroom.” The other woman nervously confirmed that yes, she had. They continued their conversation in hushed voices, afraid and feeling violated, yet did not mention a thing to community centre staff.
My mother is 66 years old and no shrinking violet. A longtime journalist in Ottawa, her writing reflects her heterodox views and tenacity for challenging dominant narratives. I have never known her in any circumstance to shy away from confrontation. In the decades she has been swimming at this pool, she has had several run-ins with the lifeguards, management, and other swimmers. From too-slow swimmers clogging up the fast lane to the Covid-related mask mandates, my mother has always fearlessly spoken her mind. During Covid, she fought back so relentlessly against having to wear a mask on the pool deck for the few minutes before entering the water that we worried she might end up in handcuffs. She wasn’t charged, but she did face a short-term suspension from all City of Ottawa pools as a result of her protests.
Yet when a man walked naked through the changeroom while she was in her most vulnerable state, my mother went silent.
Ten years ago, this incident would have been viewed unequivocally as a crime. Someone would have called the police, and the man would have been arrested. He would have been labelled a sexual predator and likely charged with voyeurism. But today, not one woman in the changeroom dared speak up, complain, or request help from staff in dealing with the issue.
These women would have very recently been considered the vulnerable population in this situation, and had the power of both social norms and the law on their side, yet now were self-silencing. Why?
We all know why: with four magic words — “I am a woman” — the intruder and potential predator becomes the vulnerable one, thereby protected from criticism, punishment, or accountability. Today’s political climate demands he be welcomed with open and loving arms into the female-only spaces, and that anyone who says different is labelled not only insensitive, but hateful.
The most astounding part of this story is that no one in the changeroom even asked if he identified as a man or a woman. For all anyone knows, this anatomically male individual may have been totally unaware that he had access to a convenient loophole. For all we know he might have answered, “Of course I’m a man, but I wanted to undress in the women’s changeroom.” Why then, did not a single woman say anything?
After my mother told me what happened to her, my initial reaction, like that of my father’s, was outrage. I was furious. To my mind, she was the victim of a crime. I kept asking her, “Why didn’t you say something?” Her answer was, “What’s the point?”
For the rest of the day, I was disturbed and shaken. I had to force the incident out of my mind just to function, to take care of my kids, to act normal. I was afraid not only for my mother, for myself, and for my daughter (how could I ever safely take her to the pool or any other place where she would have to undress, knowing at any moment she could be exposed to a naked man?), but for the entire world.
There is a saying, “Where there is no God, there is absurdity.” I am a religious person and believe this statement in a literal sense. I believe that human beings are not only physical beings, but deeply spiritual ones. Once our food and shelter are managed, we search for meaning. Humans have souls that require sustenance just as our stomachs do. A Higher Power and religion meet the needs of our spiritual longing and free our minds to deal with this physical world and all of its infinite challenges.
But I also believe that in this quote “God” can be interpreted to mean “objective and universal truths” — transcendent truths, immune to the whims of man. Where there is no truth, there is absurdity.
Postmodernism and gender ideology have helped society cast off the chains of objective, universal and verifiable truths. Mercurial self-identification is now the North Star that guides us. We left God and are now knee-deep in absurdity.
I won’t even address the massive issue that is decades of hard fought for women’s rights eroded within just a handful of years on account of gender ideology and the belief that “trans women are women.” Many more intelligent and stronger women have taken this issue head on.
I’m just a little person: a stay-at-home mom trying to launch each one of my children into this world. But what is a world or society where a woman is violated and can’t speak up because everyone will turn on her and call her a bigot? Where a person cannot name a crime and perpetrator? Where a person cannot speak the truth about the reality before her eyes?
We’ve become two different peoples speaking two very different languages and believing in two modes of living. One camp believes in some form of objective truth and labels humans as either male or female. There are endless variations in the ways that humans express themselves, but there are only two sexes. The other camp believes in a post-modernist version of constructed truth and that there are dozens of “fluid” genders that negate sex and biology. They also believe that anyone who does not subscribe to this belief is a heretic and as evil as a Nazi.
How do these two camps speak to one another? The two belief systems require very different laws and social norms. If there are only two sexes, the man in my mother’s story is not allowed in the women’s changeroom. If sex is a social construct and can change through self-declaration or self-perception, that man can be a woman and is therefore allowed in the women’s changeroom. Today, it seems the latter camp has won, and we no longer share a common understanding of basic truths or even of language. Words like “man” or “woman” that were once universal are no longer.
A society that does not have a shared language cannot share thoughts. A society that is divided on whether or not there is an objective truth, outside of our own feelings and emotions, cannot set laws or policies that work for the broadest range of people.
A society where women and girls are cowed into silence when a crime is perpetrated against them for fear of being labelled the enemy is a shaky society indeed.
*Editor’s note: Lynne Cohen, the author’s mother, gave permission to publish her full name in this piece on June 11, 2023, after original publication.
Lindsy Danzinger is a stay-at-home mom who homeschools her three children. She lives with her husband and children in Toronto, Ontario.
The post My mother is courageous, but faced with a man in her change room at Ottawa’s Nepean Sportsplex she went silent appeared first on Feminist Current.
We continue working through letters 1-15 of On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), helped by Markus Reuter.
We get clearer on what Schiller means by Beauty, and how two contrary drives toward matter and form somehow cancel each other out to combine in a "play drive" that is at the heart of appreciating and creating art.
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The post Ep. 318: Friedrich Schiller on the Civilizing Potential of Art (Part Two) first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.Can art make us better people? Musician Markus Reuter joins Mark, Wes, and Seth to discussion the first half of On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795).
Given the failure of the French Revolution, this famous German poet wondered what could make the masses capable of governing themselves? His answer: Beauty! Aesthetic appreciation puts us at a distance from our savage desires, enables the abstract thought necessary for Kantian rationalist morality, and yet keeps us in touch with our feelings so that we don't just become cogs in the industrial machine.
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The post Ep. 318: Friedrich Schiller on the Civilizing Potential of Art (Part One) first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
In Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Yoram Hazony treats Russell Kirk's (1953) The Conservative Mind as "the most important book by a postwar American conservative." (Recall my series of posts on Hazony's book recall the first one here; here the second; here the third one; the fourth; and, fifth, on Hazony’s critique of Meyer here.) In particular, Hazony notes that "Kirk’s account of the Anglo-American tradition is in many respects similar" to his. They both praise Burke and the American Federalist party, although with important differences lurking in the latter to which I return below.
Now Hazony draws out four important areas of overlap between his own conservatism and Kirk's. I quote Hazony:
Kirk emphasized that, for conservatives, (i) “custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power”—although they also recognize that “prudent change is the means of social preservation.” Conservatives regard (ii) religion as indispensable, including “belief in a transcendent order” and the recognition that “political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.” They see that (iii) “freedom and property are closely linked,” and that the attempt to eliminate “orders and classes” from society could only end in tyranny. And they view human life as (iv) a “proliferating variety and mystery” that cannot readily be reduced to universal formulas. Kirk regarded these principles as being given voice, most importantly, by Edmund Burke in Britain and by John Adams and the Federalist Party in America.
So far so good. Hazony adds that "Kirk made a magnificent start to reinvigorating the Anglo-American conservative tradition in America," (emphasis added.) This 'start' clearly implies there is unfinished business. In fact, Hazony also thinks that on two issues Kirk drove Anglo-American conservatism in the wrong direction: "The first is Kirk’s emphasis on regional traditions."
In fact, while Kirk opts for John Adams, Hazony has a clear fondness for Hamilton. This shapes a dramatically different view of the content of American nationalism they are willing to defend. Kirk sees in Hamilton an aggressive "empire-builder." I return to this below.
And the "second, more serious problem with his historiography" is to be found in Kirk's "diligent efforts to retrieve what was supposedly worthy in Southern political thinkers who provided the intellectual framework for defending chattel slavery [which] was a mistake from which American conservatism has not yet entirely recovered." What ties the two together is Kirk's unwillingness to see "some local traditions" as "morally questionable." Hazony clearly suspects Kirk is a moral relativist and because of that incapable of criticizing slavery. I return to Kirk's attitude toward slavery below.
As an aside, there is also another line of criticism of Kirk in Hazony: that is centered on Kirk's willingness to participate in fusionism, which for Hazony entails "nothing other than the view that one should be a liberal in one’s political commitments, and a Christian in private." I also return to this below.
Now, it is worth noting that one important reason Kirk admires Burke is that he understands Burke's role in the Hastings affair as a defense of Indian local customs; Hastings "had ridden rough-shod over native religious tradition and ceremonial in India." In fact, throughout The Conservative Mind, Kirk is scathing of (utilitarian) liberal imperialism which imposes uniformity on subject peoples. While critical of Macaulay, he admires "Burke's reforms" because they "were intended to purge the English in India from the diseases of arbitrary power and avarice, to secure to the Indians their native laws and usages and religions." So, it is not surprising that Hazony reads Kirk as a moral relativist of sorts.
But I don't think that's the right reading of Kirk for two reasons (the second being more important than the first). First, Kirk thinks local customs ought to be defended if and only if they involve sincere, socially inherited religious creed because the contents of which are principles of political and social order (see (i-ii) in the passage quoted from Hazony above). But he also thinks Christianity is the superior religion. I quote a passage in which Kirk attributes this precise view to Burke (without dissenting from it): "Christianity is the highest of religions; but every sincere creed is a recognition of divine purpose in the universe, and all mundane order is dependent upon reverence for the religious creed which a people have inherited from their fathers." So the problem with civilizational, imperial liberalism (of the sort familiar from J.S. Mill) is that it lacks understanding of a proper political art of ruling according to Kirk. Violently suppressing existing religion just opens the door to a kind of social nihilism. Kirk's stance is not an expression of moral relativism, but of political prudence.
As an aside, while Kirk is a firm critic of liberal and other homogenizing imperialisms (including "the tremendous imperialistic instinct of modern democracy"), and thinks that "generally imperial expansion is full of risks for any conservative society" it is sometimes defensible. In context he is, for example, not uncritical of Disraeli's imperialism. In fact, while the whole book is a frontal attack on really existing home-grown American imperialism, I read The Conservative Mind as a call for a reformed more prudent imperialism. About that some other time.
If he understands Christianity as the highest religion, then Kirk is not a moral relativist. The key teaching of Christianity is for Kirk the existence and ineliminable fact of original sin. It’s probably the most important concept in The Conservative Mind. As Kirk puts it, in the context of discussing Irving Babbitt’s views, “The saving of civilization is contingent upon the revival of something like the doctrine of original sin.” And before you stop reading here, there is something important worth salvaging from this position.
While Hazony is not adverse to using 'sin' and its cognates, 'original sin' is not part of Hazony's moral vocabulary in his Conservatism: A Rediscovery whereas it is the key organizing principle to Kirk's social philosophy. For, one of the crescendos of The Conservative Mind is Kirk's admiration for Nathanial Hawthorne's "chief accomplishment: impressing the idea of sin upon a nation which would like to forget it." In fact from a political perspective, we also find in this account one of Kirk's most important commitments. He praises Hawthorne's realization "that projects of reform must begin and end with the human heart; that the real enemy of mankind is not social institution, but the devil within us; that the fanatic improver of mankind through artificial alteration is, very commonly, in truth a destroyer of souls." (emphasis added.)*
Kirk's focus on original sin also qualifies to what degree he thinks one should be a Christian merely in private. As the previous paragraph suggests he very much believes that the devil within must be tamed by all social institutions working in tandem. And while this is compatible with a privatized Christianity, it does not require it and probably works better with a more robust public Christianity according to Kirk. Kirk is an admirer of various forms of Catholic social theory and a critic of certain strands of individualizing Protestantism. One may see in Shklar’s liberalism of fear a liberal attempt to struggle with Kirk’s diagnosis.
Be that as it may, at this point one may grant that I have provided considerable reason to allow that Kirk was no moral relativist. But in a way, one may think, this makes Kirk's obtuseness on slavery worse. So, Hazony is right to reject Kirk.
Before I continue: a reminder to the reader unfamiliar with my writings that I view myself as on-looker in the debates among conservatives. My own interest in these is primarily understanding and also a curiosity if anything can be learned from conservative self-reflection and understanding. I am not an impartial spectator, but I am also not an advocate for conservatism. Okay, having said that, there is something in Kirk worth paying attention to especially, alas, in the bits that are most egregious to our moral sensibility.
Now, it is true that Kirk claims that "we shall try to keep clear here of that partisan controversy over slavery." And he does so because he is eager to discuss "those conservative ideas which Randolph and Calhoun enunciated." One may well think that Hazony is right that such bracketing is a moral disaster and, when it comes to Randolph and Calhoun, impossible, if only because Randolph and Calhoun themselves tend to bring the issues together.
As it happens, Kirk is rather critical of Randolph and Calhoun and their support for slavery. He writes, "the slavery controversy confuses and blurs any analysis of political principle in the South: the historian can hardly discern where, for instance, real love for state sovereignty leaves off and interested pleading for slave property commences. Both Randolph and Calhoun deliberately entangled the debate on tariffs (at bottom a question of whether the industrial or the agricultural interest should predominate in America), and the debate on local liberties, with the debate on slavery; for thus they were able to rally to their camp a great body of slave-holders who otherwise might have been indifferent to the issues at stake." So, he recognizes that his own bracketing is not the political strategy pursued by Randolph and Calhoun.
Now, a skeptic of my interpretation might suggest that while Kirk clearly admires local liberties, it is not obvious he rejects slavery. But he goes on to claim explicitly: "Human slavery is bad ground for conservatives to make a stand upon." This is not a local relativist speaking, or a friend of slavery. In fact, later, when discussing John Quincy Adams (of whom Kirk has no particular fondness), he adds that "he was right in detesting slavery."
Kirk also recognizes that Randolph and Calhoun were at least in part motivated to defend slavery (although Kirk also thinks that Calhoun was aware of the dangers of slavery). But Kirk thinks "one may lift" their ideas "of their transitory significance and fit them to the tenets of conservatism in our day." That is, Kirk explicitly allows that the origin of some conservative ideas is highly immoral, but (with a nod to the genetic fallacy) that that they can do good work in a different context.
This is a highly unpopular position today. In our political culture tracing contemporary views to bad previous political positions (slavery, eugenics, imperialism, racism, etc.) has become a sure route to disqualifying the opposition. And again, I don't mean to defend Kirk's blinders. He seems to lack warmth for the plight of the slaves, and is not much perturbed by racism. But if you are all in on original sin it is no surprise to find bits of wisdom alongside awful commitments—and I have some sympathy toward this methodological stance.
Kirk also clearly detests Northern abolitionism as species of fanaticism. He seems to be attracted to views he associates with President Franklin Pierce that hoped that slavery would wither away by itself. But that's because Kirk thinks the civil war was an outright disaster, and that it set up the subsequent disasters of failed reconstruction and what he considers the stupidity of Jim Crow. I wouldn’t want to endorse this position; but not seeing the civil war as a disaster is also problematic. (Of course, on my view the disaster should have been avoided by getting rid of slavery beforehand!) So, Kirk understands himself as objecting to the means (war) not the goal (getting rid of slavery).
Underlying Kirk's position is a decoupling of the institution of slavery from mercantile war-mongering nationalist-imperialism. By contrast a liberal would see in slavery and imperialism the same side of a mercantile coin. Slavery is clearly a transient institution for Kirk (and, again, this position also seems informed by a reprehensible lack of warmth toward the plight of slaves), but for him nationalist imperialism is a permanent temptation for democracies in which our nature is not properly tamed. In fact, Kirk understands the opportunities for a revived conservatism as a response to the revulsion engendered by Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he sees the atom bomb as a possible trigger for much needed moral awakening.
Kirk diagnoses war as the opportunity for destructive hubris and nemesis as much as it is the site of the growth of central planning and uniform, leveling standardization. For Kirk Hiroshima is the natural outgrowth of the valorizing of war. (Kirk is not a pacifist; he accepts the need of war for defensive ends.) For Kirk, slavery is, thus, not America's original sin; rather it is the (Hamiltonian) embrace of expansive genocidal militarism centered on an an imperial president.** Hazony, by contrast, while a critic of foreign military intervention, is a friend of (Hamiltonian) economic nationalism and a strong presidency.
On Kirk's view this Hamiltonian position cannot avoid permanent war, which Kirk views as destructive to any higher culture (recall (iv)) worth having. To what degree he is right about this I leave for another time. But since we’re in an age of aggressive and destructive left and right-wing Hamiltonianism, this strain in Kirk seems worth excavating, especially for those who wish to tame our capacity toward evil.
Let me close with some blog house-keeping. As hinted in yesterday’s post, I expect to do almost no or very infrequent blogging until the second week of June. Apologies for that in advance.
*This also helps explain Kirk's preference for Adams and his rejection of Hamilton.
**Kirk is never more eloquent than when he quotes Burke's second letter of the Regicide Peace in which Burke links a certain kind of statism to militarism. Having said that, he expresses little interest in American, pre-settler indigenous native cultures.
We now approach the end of our symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River.
This last commentary is from Dr Ida Roland Birkvad. Ida is a Fellow in Political Theory in the Department of International Relations at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research engages with questions related to international political theory, histories of imperialism, and non-Western agency in International Relations.
She previously wrote for us on Judith Butler in Norway.
Two years after laying the foundation stone for the Sardar Sarovar Dam in 1961, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed that hydroelectric dams were the ‘new temples of India, where I worship’ (Yao 2022, 205). Charting the length of the country’s postcolonial history, this infrastructural project of unprecedented scale and ambition was originally conceived of by Nehru’s deputy, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, in the years immediately following independence. In 2017, more than seventy years later, the network of dams horizontally spanning over half of India’s interior landscape, following the Narmada River from the state of Madhya Pradesh to the coast of Gujarat, was finally completed.
The romantic flourishes of Nehru’s characterisation, tying rivers and their taming to the spiritual realm, constitutes my starting point for this book symposium. In the following, I place Joanne Yao’s luminous charting of the emergence of environmental politics through the erection of 19th century river commissions into conversation with Dalit and anti-caste critiques of the collusion between Romantic thought, elite politics, and Brahmanical supremacy in the context of the Sardar Sarovar Dam development. Indeed, while Yao’s The Ideal River might seemingly focus rather exclusively on the role of Enlightenment rationality in the taming of the river, I argue that her book allows us to glean the dynamic relationship, at times mutually constitutive and at times in mutual contestation, between Enlightenment thought and the role of the other intellectual movement of modern history, namely Romanticism, in environmentalist thought.
Displacing an astounding 245 villages and submerging 37,555 hectares of land, the Sardar Sarovar Dam has caused immense debate and uproar, intensifying especially from the late 1980s onwards when its erection began on a mass scale (Rao 2022). However, the grandiose nature of the size and scope of the dam was from the outset rivalled only by the resistance movement forming to stop it. Taking shape in the late 1980s, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) consisted of a broad coalition of adivasis (India’s indigenous population), farmers, environmentalists, and human rights activists. Organising to both resist the expansion of the dam, as well as to mitigate the consequences for the people whose lives were disturbed and uprooted by it, the NBA constituted one of the largest political resistance movements of its time. Its tactics included rallies, marches, hunger strikes, and perhaps most spectacularly the action of jal samarpan, in which activists stood neck-deep in the river, demonstrating their willingness to drown rather than to leave their lands (ibid.).
Beyond the anti-dam efforts often spearheaded by grassroots movements led by adivasi communities, the well-known social and political activist Arundhati Roy also contributed to bringing attention to the cause. Having just won the Booker Prize for her debut novel The God of Small Things in 1997, Roy’s campaigning attracted an increasingly global audience. In the early 2000s she wrote furiously on the subject, participating in marches and rallies and famously donating her Booker prize money to the NBA. For Roy, the question of the Sardar Sarovar Dam had come to ‘represent far more than the fight for one river’ (Bose 2004, 147). Indeed, from being a struggle ‘over the fate of a river valley it began to raise doubts about an entire political system. What is at issue now is the very nature of our democracy. Who owns this land? Who owns its rivers? Its forests? Its fish?’ (ibid.). The case of the Narmada dams, according to Roy, could ultimately provide ‘important lessons about the real costs of modernist fantasies’ (ibid.).
Roy’s efforts were controversial, also within the resistance movement itself. In a series of speeches, articles and open letters, Gail Omvedt, the prominent American-born anthropologist turned anti-caste and farmers’ activist in the western state of Maharashtra, accused both Roy and the top leadership of the NBA of having become ‘the voice of the eco-romanticists of the world’ (ibid, 150). Dams were not, according to her, an unqualified evil (Omvedt and Kapoor 1999). Indeed, opposing them on principle was socially irresponsible, ignoring the needs of the impoverished populations living along the banks of the river. In their blanket opposition to industrial development, the leadership of the NBA and their urban, middle-class spokespersons were at fault of romanticising the past, trading in reactionary tropes fearful of modernity and progress. Omvedt, who had lived in the village of Kasegaon since the 1970s, shared this view with many Dalits amongst whom she lived and worked. They all seemed to ask: how could social change happen when the movement’s leaders were always looking backward for their political ideals?
As Yao elucidates so expansively and in such breathtaking historical detail in her book, infrastructural and political projects to tame the river have marred societies for centuries. Indeed, she would probably agree with Roy that this at times Sisyphean effort does indeed constitute a fantasy of modernity, one which, as Yao writes, involved a ‘desire for neatness, predictability, finite boundaries, and a straightened sense of political purpose’ (2022, ix). Despite the scientific rationale that undergirds this fantasy, Yao insists that the intrinsic relationship between the project of taming nature and the emergence of modern environmental politics needs to be understood through its ties to what is called the second scientific revolution. Emerging in the early 19th century, this new scientific revolution proscribed a change in perception where ‘scientific progress combined with Romanticism to create a vision of nature as infinite and mysterious’ (ibid., 21). In other words, the time of the first river commissions described in The Ideal River was as much the era of Romanticism, as it was that of Enlightenment rationality. Returning to the debates over the Sardar Sarovar Dam project, Dalit critics interjected that not only did the middle class and caste privileged leaders romanticise the river, seeing it as something to be worshipped and conserved, rather than utilised and managed, but also that their anti-developmentalism was casteist. In their romantic quest to preserve ‘village life’, Roy and others effaced the hierarchies and structural oppressions existing within Indian rural communities. In the words of writer and journalist Mukul Sharma,
dominant environmental narratives in India are often infused with nostalgic and romantic accounts of traditional knowledge of water management, emphasising its community-based systems and methods. However, they overlook the fact that (…) they are embedded in deeply structured hierarchies of caste, based on control, power and dominant religious rituals, which are intermeshed in an invisible line of caste presuppositions (2017b).
A more forgiving interpretation of the movement’s romanticisation of the river and its peoples would see them as furthering a politics of strategic essentialism where the mobilisation of certain tropes might allow for a broadening of political support. Beyond the concern for activist strategy, however, the critiques elaborated above clarifies Yao’s illumination of the creative relationship between Enlightenment and Romanticist logics in contemporary environmentalist contestation. This dynamism is further underscored by the strikingly rationalist approach of Dalit and anti-caste thought which advances an overtly Enlightenment infused approach to questions of the environment and industrial modernity.
For B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit leader, political thinker, and primary architect of the Indian constitution, modernity itself was an ethical project. Indeed, in contrast to his main political adversary, Mohandas Gandhi, who saw the village as India’s exemplary political community, Ambedkar pointed out that cities were in fact places of relative freedom for Dalits. Urban space afforded them anonymity, with the individualising effects of industrial labour standing in stark contrast to the feudal rigidities of rural economies (Teltumbde 2019). In the words of Ambedkar: ‘What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?’ (Gopal 2015).
Following these insights, we can see how Dalit thought de-naturalises the ostensibly progressive nature of key categories orienting environmentalist politics, namely the village as the ultimate harbinger of ‘local solutions’ and urban industrialisation as the definitive cause of alienation from nature. Indeed, the category of nature itself is key to these critiques. Many Dalit thinkers would claim that the idea of living in accordance with nature is in itself a casteist concept. This is because Brahmanical Hinduism’s non-dualist ontology claims the indivisible link between the physical and the moral realm. Here, caste hierarchy is rationalised as a law of nature, where the individual remains no more than a functional part of an overarching entity, namely caste society. As pointed out by Ambedkar, Hindu society is not a community but rather a collection of castes (Ambedkar 2016, 242).
In addition to his other political achievements, Ambedkar also became India’s first minister for water resources. This was particularly powerful because of the role that the access, distribution, and management of water plays in the logics and perpetuation of caste hierarchies. In his ministerial role, Ambedkar made the development of irrigation and power, including hydroelectric power, one of his key priorities. New technology and scientific discovery in these fields were according to him ‘key determinants in the struggle against the obscurantism and backwardness of caste Hinduism’ (Sharma 2017a, 150). Large dam constructions, presumably such as the Sardar Damodar Dam project, was to him necessary in order to realise ‘a modern social vision’ (ibid.).
Yao’s attention to the dynamic relationship between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, often understood to be diametrically opposed in their logics, sets her book apart from more conventional approaches in the discipline of International Relations, and indeed wider social science literatures, which elucidates more straightforward narratives of the collusion between Enlightenment rationality, imperialism, and modern environmental politics. What we learn both from The Ideal River as well as from Dalit thought is that the overplaying of the significance of the role of Enlightenment rationality in this context comes at a cost. Directing our theoretical and political critique solely against this rationale does not only produce analytical blind spots in our analysis of environmental conflict. It can also lead us to unwittingly reproduce essentialist ways of thinking. If the hydroelectric dam is considered the materialisation of only Enlightenment ideas of scientific rationality, then Romantic notions of the sanctity of nature and the unimpeachable status of ‘local communities’ start to appear as forms of anti-hegemonic resistance, rather than as constitutive parts of global relations of dispossession. These points stand, I believe, even after the insight that, in the end, the NBA’s dire projections all seemed to bear out. After its completion, the world’s second-largest concrete gravity dam by volume, encompassing more than three thousand smaller dams across the length of the Narmada River, displaced over two hundred thousand people. A disproportionate amount of the environmental and economic cost of its development fell on the poorest communities living along its banks.
Bibliography
Ambedkar, B. R. 2016. Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition. Edited by S. Anand. London: Verso.
Bose, Pablo S. 2004. “Critics and Experts, Activists and Academics: Intellectuals in the Fight for Social and Ecological Justice in the Narmada Valley, India.” International Review of Social History 49.
Gopal, Vikram. 2015. “Ambedkar’s Assertion Still Rings True: What Is a Village but a Sink of Localism, a Den of Ignorance and Narrow Mindedness.” Caravan Magazine, April 2015.
Omvedt, Gail, and Ashish Kapoor. 1999. “Big Dams in India: Necessities or Threats?” Critical Asian Studies 31 (4): 45–58.
Rao, Rahul. 2022. “Statue of Impunity: Monumentalisation under Modi.” Caravan Magazine, May 2022.
Sharma, Mukul. 2017a. “Ambedkar and Environmental Thought.” In Caste and Nature: Dalits and Indian Environmental Politics.
———. 2017b. “Observing Water Day on Ambedkar’s Birthday Is a Hollow Exercise If His Legacy on Water Is Ignored.” Scroll India, April 2017.
Teltumbde, Anand. 2019. Republic of Caste: Thinking Equality in the Time of Neoliberal Hindutva. New Delhi: Navayana.Yao, Joanne. 2022. The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
disorderedguests
Post #5 in our symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River, from Dr Giulia Carabelli. Giulia is a lecturer in Sociology and Social Theory in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. She is interested in affect theory, nonhuman agencies, and social justice. Her current research project, Care for Plants, explores the shaping of affective and intimate relationships between humans and houseplants during the Covid-19 pandemic.
There are three protagonists in The Ideal River: the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo. We meet them at different times in history when they become crucial agents in the (re)making of international orders. These three rivers illustrate different yet analogous processes of intervention aimed at domesticating what escapes human control (nature) to establish order as a matter of “progress”. As Yao argues, the taming of rivers exemplifies the “fulfilment of the Enlightenment promise that humanity stood together as masters over nature”, which is rooted in an unquestioned “optimism toward international progress” (186). The Rhine is the “internal European highway”, the Danube “the connecting river from Europe to the near periphery” and the Congo “the imperial river of commerce” (10). From the outset, the book sets expectations for nonhuman actors to take centre-stage in the recounting of history and to reveal their obscured roles in the development of global (human) politics. My reflections thus aim to discuss how the book foregrounds nonhuman agencies and to advance an argument for centring care and love to appreciate the potentially disrupting roles of rivers in reshaping political imaginaries, which become more and more urgent as that optimism towards human control flails.
1. The image of the river
I start from the cover of this book; an image taken by NASA/USGS Landsat 8 depicting the Mackenzie River in Canada. From above, this river is rendered through solid shades of blues, browns, and greens. This river does not flow. Similarly, when we imagine rivers on a two-dimensional map, they appear as homogeneous streams, whose ability to connect and serve human settlements we value. Such rivers become boundaries, obstacles, or opportunities to facilitate the movement of people, goods and capital, while ignoring their much more complex life as eco-systems in a constant process of change. These static representations of rivers, so instrumental to human life and its “progress”, become protagonists of the historical conferences discussed in the book. These rivers are ideals of what a river can become when understood as precious, yet disposable, resource.
Rivers on maps are what humans have long attempted to tame, because, as Yao discusses, to exercise control over nature ultimately proves, and provides, human progress. It drives and tests advancement in technology whilst gratifying the assertion of moral superiority. Clearly, this perspective results from thinking “human” and “nature” as dramatically different whereby the former is always standing above the ‘Other’; and to tame the Other for the sake of progress. The history of global politics, as shown vividly in this book, can be framed as the history of taming rivers. This is also the history of human faith in science and technology as the desperate attempt to prove that rationality is what sets us above all other species. It is the history of “transform[ing] irrational nature and society into economically productive and morally progressive units of governance” (200).
2. To tame and to care
Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s metaphor of European modernity as the impulse to “weed the social garden”, which engenders modern imperialism, scientific racism, and the Holocaust (31), Yao draws parallels between the taming of rivers and the taming of nature in the garden (Bauman 1989). The gardener becomes the emblematic figure of modernity – the one who transforms the wild into the familiar through a process of weeding. Crucially, to tame nature in the garden means to organise space according to a specific aesthetic that builds order by planting, pruning, or extirpating plants. What drives the gardener is the desire to make plants work and to become more efficient and productive. Yet, as many of us would know from having gardens or houseplants, it is by tending plants that we discover what the garden is, and what makes a garden a garden: a space we cannot fully control but that can surprise and mesmerise us.
The activity of caring for plants enables us to develop intimate relationships that are easily understandable through love. This is a love for disorder. It is a love that grows by letting go of control and accepting that the making of a garden is a collective activity where plans are shared and built with the plants. The garden is a story of compromise, conflict and love. The garden shapes us as gardeners, as much as we shape the garden to reflect our inner desires.
So how does it relate to the river?
3. On Love
What happens when we care for the plants in the garden, and to the life in the river, is that we appreciate them differently because we develop intimate and affective forms of attachment to them, which transform these nonhuman beings from objects to interlocutors. And here, I wish to focus on the tensions that love generates – between the love for order that comes from domination and the acceptance of disorder spurred by another kind of love.
As Yao highlights in her introduction, “to tame nature has not been confined to rivers and forests but also extends to ‘untamed’ elements in human society – indeed, to civilize the savage beyond the pale has long been a central aim and justification for colonial and imperial practices” (7).
I wish to connect this point on taming as a matter of civilisation with another argument made by Carolyn Ureña (2020), for instance, about colonialism and love – the coloniser/ the missionary are bound by the love for the uncivilised and it is their love that moves them to re-shape Indigenous lives to become more modern/ more rational/ more right. Thus, she concludes, love needs to be decolonised for love to be freed from desires of control. If we understand love as an affect that shapes relationality, the revolutionary potential of love exists in the possibility of love to make us realise that we cannot be in control.
To appreciate the river could become an act of love only if we switched our goals towards observing, listening, and learning rather than projecting, assuming, and directing.
If the modern love for rivers reflected the love for progress and order, which translated into a desire to tame them, how can we love rivers otherwise? Or, what makes a river a river?
4. Who is the river?
If only we immersed ourselves in the river, if we entered the water, we could see the plants, the animals, the limestone, soil runoff, sediments, minerals, and algae that colour rivers, making them blue or green or yellow and brown. The river is always changing; it moves, it transforms, and it does so relationally to the multiple human and nonhuman beings that coexist within its eco-system. Thus, to tame rivers can but be a delusion. We can only tame rivers when they are deprived of their life on flat maps.
Immersed in the river, we can create new connections that are affective, visceral, and potentially transformative. What, then, does the international look like while immersed in the river? What if, instead of drawing on rationality and science to transform the river into the ideal river, which means to cure the river from “its uselessness, laziness, and waste” (207), we could engage with the river by listening to what the river can teach us.
The book has started answering this question by accounting for Indigenous populations living with the rivers who nurture different relationships with their non-human kins. For example, for Native Americans activists at Standing Rock, the river is a nonhuman relative, who cannot be sold (214). Yao warns us from the dangers of essentialising Indigenousness “unfairly making them the bearers of responsibility for saving the destructive modern world from itself” (215), yet re-valorising Indigenous knowledge allows for important interventions in policy making. For example, the rights given to nature in Ecuador and Bolivia or those granted to the Whanganui River in New Zealand or the Ganges and the Yamuna in India (215). Although granting rights did not, especially in the case of Ecuador and Bolivia, stop extractive practices (Valladares and Boelens 2017), it remains a space where to start a conversation about “unlearn[ing] the ideational legacies of colonialism” (216) and the challenges faced when encountering the state in the process.
Crucially, the desire to tame rivers went along with the process of subjugating communities that stood by and with rivers – the “unimagined communities” that stand “on the way to progress” (208) . As the examples of the Narmada project in India and the Aswan Dam in Egypt illustrate, altering rivers destroy places “of cultural and spiritual importance and [the] communities that depend on them” (208). Yet, these colonising projects also serve as platforms to nurture river-human solidarity for mutual survival. Thus, rivers can become allies in resisting the violence of colonialism.
5. Conclusion
The nature we wish to tame is also the nature we come to love and desire. To tame nature becomes one with our love for an idealised form of nature that we wish to preserve and care for as a matter of ethics, and which becomes urgent at a time of environmental crisis.
Lesley Head (2016) discusses this as the paradox of the human in the Anthropocene;
“a time period defined by the activities and impacts of the human […] [and yet] a period that is now out of human control”. And for Head, the issue of climate catastrophe is emotional as we grief “our modern self, our view of the future as containing unlimited positive potential. We grieve a stable and pristine past” (Ojala 2017)
Thus, the importance of this book is not only in bringing attention to the historical contingencies that shaped human desires to tame rivers as part of the making of global orders. As Yao writes in the conclusion, the “climate crisis has highlighted [..] the catastrophic disconnect between the dream of Western modernity and the nightmare of ecological collapse”, which has been long in the making (219). Thus, the book should also be appreciated as a cautionary tale for imagining our future on this planet at a time when our society has become “disenchanted with the politics of climate change precisely because we are losing faith in the [promise of the] Enlightenment” (221). If we live in a time of change, one that brings more focused attention on the relational modes of worldmaking, we are then tasked with reflecting on what it means to engage with rivers, and by extension nonhuman actors, as political agents.
I conclude with a question: can our reflection on the international order ever account for the river as the river – without objectifying it but rather embracing the vitality of the river, its visions, needs and life?
disorderedguests
Day four in the Disorder symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River, where we are joined by Dr Ida Danewid, who has visited with us before.
Ida is Lecturer in Gender and Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex. Her first monograph, Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Ida’s research interests are in anticolonial political thought, Marxism, and intellectual history. Her work has previously appeared in Third World Quarterly, Millennium, European Journal of International Relations, International Political Sociology, Security Dialogue and with the Black Mediterranean Collective.
Lake Kariba would soon become a river. The dam would become a waterfall. And miles away, the Lusaka plateau… would become an island.
In The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell writes about the history of colonialism in southern Africa and its global ripples in the present. Told as a story about three families (European, African, and Indian) and spanning three generations, the novel centers around the Zambezi river and the adjacent Kariba dam that transforms the currents of the river (its “drift”) into hydropower. Originally commissioned by the British controlled Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi) in the 1950s, the dam was built at a place well known to Dr. Livingstone and countless other colonial explorers. (As Serpell notes, “This is the story of a nation—not a kingdom or people—so it begins, of course, with a white man.”) Throughout the novel, Serpell cleverly uses the dam as a symbol of empire, enclosure, and extraction. When the book finally ends, the dam has burst and flooded its surroundings. As the great Zambezi flows freely again, Victoria Falls in more than one way.
I was reminded of Serpell’s novel when I read Joanne Yao’s breathtaking new book The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped International Order. Straddling historical sociology, international theory, and environmental politics, Yao explores the relationship between empire and the control of nature, or what some scholars have recently termed hydrocolonialism. Focusing on the 19th century projects to domesticate three different rivers—the Rhine, Danube, and Congo—Yao examines how the mastery of wilderness was central to the rise and development of the modern/colonial world system. The dream of the ideal river, it here turns out, drifts straight through the heart of empire.
Yao’s immediate focus is on how and why this desire to domesticate the wild became such a central tenet of the imperial standard of civilization. She frames this as a story about the Enlightenment and its commitment to ideas of linear progress, order, rationality, and science. By following the river upstream, she demonstrates how European empires saw the “failure” to conquer, improve, and control nature as a sign of “barbarism” and, thus, as “being too close to nature.” Colonialism, Yao explains, unfolded as a project of eliminating “the barbarity of swampy disuse.” Over time, this mission would come to engulf the globe, ranging from “the floodplains of the Arno River… to the wetlands of the Danube delta and the megadams of the Indian subcontinent and American West.” This desire to master nature has remained a central tenet of coloniality, despite the formal end of empire. In the mid mid-20th century, many newly independent states in the global South chose to showcase their rising power and status precisely through the control of rivers and construction of megadams. Today, the quest for green and renewable energy forms part of yet another attempt to plunder and domesticate the wild.
While The Ideal River is not a book about capitalism—the word is only mentioned a handful of times in the text—it can nonetheless be productively read alongside the growing black radical and anti-colonial Marxist literature on property and racial capitalism. Thinkers such as Brenna Bhandar, Rob Nichols, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson have shown how the rise and development of the capitalist world-system was premised on the racialized transformation of nature into inert objects that can be possessed, extracted, used, exploited, and sold for profit. The destruction of indigenous cosmologies and the violent imposition of private property relations were both central to this reorganization of land into extractable and tradeable objects. At the heart of this project was (and remains) a mode of possessive ownership—what Moreton-Robinson calls the “white possessive”—that renders both land and its inhabitants as disposable, extractable, and in need of improvement. Read alongside this body of scholarship, The Ideal River is perhaps first and foremost a story about how rivers were governed, enclosed, and turned into economic highways as part of the global extension of this “racial regime of ownership.” In the same way that “useless” deserts, savannahs, and forests were to be transformed into productive lands, so rivers were converted into frictionless highways that were to carry commerce, civilization, and Christianity to the world’s unpropertied peripheries.
The most compelling aspect of Yao’s book is perhaps that, through its emphasis on the river as a lifeform (tellingly, the book is dedicated to the Rhine, Danube, and Congo), it offers an instructive framework for thinking beyond such modes of possessive ownership. As Yao and Serpell both remind us, enclosure (be it by prisons, borders, dams, pipelines, or other types of violent infrastructure) produces slow death. Like humans, the river cannot breathe when it is confined. By drifting with the river, in and out of capital’s desire to master and subjugate, Yao thus pushes us to imagine alternative ways of relating to the world around us, beyond enclosures, extraction, and bourgeois property relations: what some scholars and organisers increasingly refer to as abolition ecology. Mujeres Creando, a mestiza and Aymara anarcho-feminist group based in Bolivia, give voice to this worldmaking project on one of the many graffiti walls with which they’ve covered the urban landscape of La Paz:
the land is not the property of masters
the land is not individual property;
nor collective property;
the land is mother to all living creatures
Elsewhere, Glen Coulthard invites us to think about these antipropertarian dreams as a struggle that is “oriented around the question of land… not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of relationships… ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way.” Another way to put this is to ask: What might it mean to become unpropertied and unownable? Perhaps the river can guide us here, because as Yao reminds us by reference to the water protectors at Standing Rock, water is kin: “She is alive. Nothing owns her.”
In her essay “Amniotechnics”, feminist Marxist Sophie Lewis makes a similar observation: all humans in history have been manufactured under water, in amniotic fluid. Pregnancy typically ends with the draining of water; and yet, even as we enter the unwet world where drowning remains an ever-present danger, humans remain overwhelmingly water. Lewis writes: water “is by far the greater part of us, yet with just the slightest change of proportion it will drown us; it is entirely dead, yet teeming with the life that can’t exist without it; it is far bigger than us and it is utterly inhuman.” In the messiness of life, where water is bound to flood, spill, and drift, amniotechnics emerges as a vision of radical kinship and communized care, for human and non-human life alike. “It is”, Lewis writes, “protecting water and protecting people from water”: a practice of immersion rather than mastery, and what we may usefully think of as abolition ecology. Water—or should we say the river—is life. Let the dam burst.
disorderedguests
In the wake of the killing of Jordan Neely on the New York City subway, a new meme has emerged on the right: the killer, Daniel Penny, was acting as a “Good Samaritan.” A more craven and blasphemous distortion of Jesus’s parable is hardly imaginable. In fact, I almost hesitate to dignify it with a response. Neely himself is so obviously the victimized party here, and if anything, his murder shows what happens when a “Good Samaritan” doesn’t show up. Moreover, the fact that the story a story that is so obviously about moral decency that crosses lines of ethnic enmity and distrust — the Jewish victim’s co-religionists pass him by, while a member of a hated, supposedly half-breed sect provides generous help — can be deployed to apply to a member of a privileged in-group using lethal violence against a multiply marginalized person displays the kind of willful, spiteful ignorance that only committed racists can pull off.
This isn’t the first time the story has been misunderstood. There are numerous accounts of preachers crafting a contemporary version of the parable where a priest and a deacon pass the victim by, while an atheist (or an illegal immigrant, or a trans person, or whoever else) generously helps. The punchline is always that the parishoners — who have presumably known this story all their lives — inevitably find this retelling offensive and insulting.
This misunderstanding is all the more puzzling given that Jesus clearly intends for the listener to identify with the victim. The interlocutor asks Jesus “who is my neighbor,” presumably to get out of the exhorbitant demands of Jesus’s teaching by applying them only to a limited in-group. Jesus tells the story and then asks essentially, “Okay, who was that guy’s neighbor?” The pride and presumption of the interlocutor, who wants to be able to pick and choose his neighbors, is undercut by a scenario in which he is radically vulnerable and is no position to turn away any neighborly assistance.
Except! Yes, that’s right, there is a catch, and it’s the fateful last exchange: “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’” Go and do likewise — suddenly the interlocutor is no longer identified with the victim, but with the hero. What’s more, this isn’t just any guy off the street, but a teacher of the law. There is nothing a teacher of the law knows better than how to get out of things, so we can imagine the gears turning: “Go and do likewise — but in what respect? Was it not the case that the Samaritan was helping my fellow Jew, filling in for the neglectful priest and Levite? Perhaps I, like the Samaritan, should help Jews in need so that they aren’t put in the embarrassing position of relying on the help of a Samaritan, who surely has his own Samaritan problems to attend to. And if I’m supposed to take away the message that Samaritans are worthy of respect, surely the best kind of respect is not to impose on them, right?” And so it goes.
There are other trap doors as well. Could we not see the scenario as precisely a failure of policing? Again, we wouldn’t have needed to bother the poor Samaritan if our Roman men in uniform had done their jobs! Better, perhaps, than cleaning up after someone is victimized would be to intervene before it gets to that point, right? In this interpretation — presupposing, of course, the racist premise that Neely was somehow primed for violence, which no empirical evidence supports — Penny was a true neighbor to everyone on that train, a kind of super-Samaritan! And the fact that he is being persecuted for his actions by the usual rogue’s gallery of liberals and reporters and various social jusice warriors shows that he must have done the right thing. Maybe he’s even a little bit like Jesus! In fact, I wonder if we can detect some Christ-like imagery in these dramatic photos portraying Penny between two subordinate figures, like Christ crucified between two thieves:
All these various plot holes and “outs” may be an indication that entrusting the moral formation of one’s society on a half-remembered story that may have been told by an apocalyptic preacher in first-century Palestine is a questionable move. This is not, I hasten to add, because those stories are garbled or incoherent. No, the reason this is a risky procedure is that they are designed as traps. At one point, the disciples ask Jesus why he preaches in parables. His answer is not that they are more memorable or easier to understand or anything we might expect on a common-sense level. Instead, he offers a more paradoxical answer:
He answered, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says:
“You will indeed listen, but never understand,
and you will indeed look, but never perceive.
For this people’s heart has grown dull,
and their ears are hard of hearing,
and they have shut their eyes;
so that they might not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and understand with their heart and turn—
and I would heal them.”
As my theology professor Craig Keen loved to paraphrase this passage, Jesus is saying, “I tell them parables rather than preaching straightforwardly because otherwise they might turn and be saved.”
A parable, in other words, is not a memorable tale or a moral lesson. It is a judgment — or better, it is a way to get people to pass judgment on themselves. We can try all we want to point out to these people identifying a cold-blooded murderer as a Good Samaritan how much they have misunderstood the text, but the text is doing what it is meant to do — it is giving them the opportunity to demonstrate that they are well and truly lost. What we do with that information is unclear, given that we do not expect the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God, but the information itself is unequivocal. Anyone who could bring themselves to utter such a blasphemous thing is beyond help, beyond hope. They are damned, and to live as they do is surely a living hell.
the-good-samaritan
akotsko
The invention of atomic energy posed a novel global challenge: could the technology be controlled to avoid destructive uses and an existentially dangerous arms race while permitting the broad sharing of its benefits? From 1944 onwards, scientists, policymakers, and other technical specialists began to confront this challenge and explored policy options for dealing with the impact of nuclear technology. We focus on the years 1944 to 1951 and review this period for lessons for the governance of powerful technologies, and find the following: Radical schemes for international control can get broad support when confronted by existentially dangerous technologies, but this support can be tenuous and cynical. Secrecy is likely to play an important, and perhaps harmful, role. The public sphere may be an important source of influence, both in general and in particular in favor of cooperation, but also one that is manipulable and poorly informed. Technical experts may play a critical role, but need to be politically savvy. Overall, policymaking may look more like “muddling through” than clear-eyed grand strategy. Cooperation may be risky, and there may be many obstacles to success.
That is by Waqar Zaidi and Allan Dafoe, at the Centre for Governance of AI, exactly the kind of work people should be doing.
The post Lessons from the Baruch Plan for Nuclear Weapons appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
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