On Religion and Politics (I)

I’m getting more in the thick of the preparation of my new book, and as part of it I laid out the areas of social research I needed to strengthen, among which there is a deeper understanding of sociological action theory. I had already read Parsons’ The Social System some years ago, and it has heavily influenced my own take on the working of society (my construct of dominant reason is indeed a way of integrating voluntary individual action with the influence of the group, which specifically has to provide the arguments for the eventual justification of said action to others -and to self-, along contractualist lines), but knew I had to delve deeper. Before proceeding with the results of such delving, I have to say that Parsons has been, in my humble opinion, very unjustly neglected by later sociologists (he is not much quoted or acknowledged), and I cannot  avoid sympathizing with what I suspect is the real reason of his (relative) falling out of fashion. It has to do with a dazzling representative of the next generation of his craft, the charismatic Charles Wright Mills, devoting a good deal of one of his most known and influential books (The Sociological Imagination) to savagely criticizing the aforementioned Social System, because of its “unnecessary verbosity”.

Wright Mills presents a number of long, torturous and yes, somewhat convoluted paragraphs of Parsons’ book followed by a “translation” in much more direct and colloquial prose that purportedly contains the same information, thus giving the impression that the original work by Parsons is a pompous and ponderous accumulation of uninspired digressions, apt to be summarized and streamlined in a paper of 10-12 pages without substantial loss of accuracy (rather, what survived the process of pruning and eliminating redundant and uninformative verbiage would be a bunch of self-evident platitudes almost devoid of any scientific value). I may be exaggerating the extent of Wright Mills critique (there was, may be, a tinge of admiration and recognition for who was, after all, one of the giants of American sociology when the Sociological Imagination was published) but not much, as both figures were both characteriologically and ideologically worlds apart (Parsons was a paradigm of the scholarly establishment, and quite conservative and anti-communistic, couldn’t be seen without a flannel suit and tie, and had a staid and cautious personal life, whilst the rambunctious Wright Mills wore jeans and working boots, married four times -but only to three different women!, drove to class in a motorbike -but not an American Harley, but a German BMW, what a wuss!- and spent time in Cuba interviewing Fidel Castro). Unsurprisingly, in the late sixties and seventies students the world over identified with the latter, leaving the former’s theories aside (I myself like to keep my copies of the Sociological Imagination and the Social System side by side in my library as a little private joke). Which is a pity, because sparkling and passionate as Wright Mills’ work may be, Parsons’ is by far more interesting, more illuminating and much deeper…

All this long introduction (and no reader of this blog should be surprised that I sympathize and empathize with an author accused of having a writing style considered by some young gun to be too wordy, and too abundant in long paraphrases and circumlocutions) was just to say I recently finished reading The Structure of Social Action, the other major book by Talcott Parsons (in 2 scrumptious and eminently enjoyable volumes), and that (more specifically, its discussion of previous sociologist Émile Durkheim, which I have also extensively read, of course) got me thinking in some remarks by one of my teachers (Amelia Valcarcel, we will get to her in a subsequent post) in very illuminating ways. Let’s start with Parsons’ understanding of Durkheim first, and see if we can reach to Valcarcel’s considerations in due time…

What we are reminded at the beginning of the section of the Structure of Social Action devoted to the discussion of Durkheim’s ideas is that he was a strict positivist. As this feature will turn out to be of extraordinary importance for my argument, we will need to deviate for a moment from our exposition of Parsons’ considerations of Durkheim, and expound what we understand such position to entail. During the first third of the XX century, positivism (a position championed first and foremost by Auguste Comte, the avowed teacher and inspirator of Durkheim) coincided quite literally with what today we call (a bit deprecatingly) “scientism”, and was an evolution of the (much older) empiricist worldview. For empiricists (the basic psychological and ontological scaffolding was designed and built by Locke, but the real meat and potatoes of the complete and philosophically coherent system were developed by my old friend Davey Hume), only those things that we can directly perceive through our bodily senses can be said to “really” exist. Even what we would call “mental” realities (“abstract” ideas, emotions, feelings, anticipations, memories, complex theories, mathematical systems, flights of fancy in our imagination and whatnot) are, according to empiricists, but a residue (or a re-elaboration of residues) of impressions left by things that we have perceived a number of times through our senses. As science developed in the XIX century the strictly empiricist position became more and more difficult to sustain (Maxwell equations showed quite conclusively the existence of a number of stubbornly physical things, no hocus-pocus or fluffy fairy-dust here!, like electromagnetic fields, charged particles, and subtle interactions, that our feeble senses would never be able to perceive), and was thus replaced by the positivism we are talking about: “Science” (at least the part of it that had to deal with non-conscious elements of nature, also called “natural sciences”, Naturwissenschaften in German) could exhaust the description of what was real and, vice versa, only those elements of reality that could be described by said “science”, that could be measured, that could be shown to conform to universal, parsimonious rules, were deemed to be “really, truly, honest-to-God real”. All the rest (first and foremost religious dogmas, of course, but once you start wielding your positivistic axe, all of metaphysics, doesn’t matter how anticlerical it may turn out to be, has to be discarded too).

I won’t go into the evident self-contradiction that stares you in the face the moment you formulate either empiricism or positivism (the discarding of metaphysics is itself a metaphysical proposition, not empirically demonstrable, and not amenable to being formulated, falsated or verified through anything remotely resembling the scientific method), or dwell in the methodological quicksand it soon found itself mired into (what has been called the demarcation problem: we can all agree that physics is unimpeachably “scientific” and that astrology is not… unfortunately, when we try to isolate the actual ways of doing physics, or chemistry, or biology that should distinguish them and constitute the ultimate explanation of such unimpeachability, so we could replicate them in other disciplines, like psychology, or anthropology, or sociology to make them more “scientific”, we find that the original “hard sciences” share a lot of the quirks and biases and implicit and unfounded assumptions that plague the latter, and we end up accusing the former of not being so scientific after all -see the whole social constructivism line of thought). I’ll just point out that Durkheim thought that the universe was composed only of three types of facts (all of them observable, with the help of specific instruments that may magnify them, if needs be): the “brute” facts of nature, the “mental” facts within the individuals’ brains (which were, needless to say, reducible to the first, no Cartesian whims here!) and the “social” facts, which constituted a third category. Finally, we need to note that for him any proposition, to be true, had to have a referent, to point to some existing fact or another (what after Wittgenstein we would call a “denotative theory of language”).  

The next element that Parsons draws our attention to is that for Durkheim (contra most progressive thinkers of the era and previous eras, like most philosophes, and the German left Hegelians, Marx and Feuerbach first and foremost among them… but not necessarily his teacher Comte!) religious propositions, being a manifestation that could be found in all societies, in his own time and in the past, had to be “true” (or they would have been eliminated). Now, they could not be true in the sense of describing an element of reality not amenable to scientific knowledge (because, remember, for him there could simply NOT be such elements). So they had to describe something really existing, and the question is, what could that be? it could not be facts of inert matter, as most of the contents of religious dogmas were incompatible with what physics teaches of how matter behaves (starting with the creation of the universe out of nothing, or out of a primordial chaos, that is more or less shared by all religions and would contradict either the laws of conservation of matter and energy or the second principle of thermodynamics). It could not be mental facts either, as what we know of human psychology is similarly incompatible with the most salient aspects of most religions, from ancient totemism to more developed “revealed” ones (from magical effects to miracles, prophecy and other types of supernatural knowledge), which presuppose some capabilities at least in some persons (not only founders, which can be assumed to be of a divine origin, but in selected leaders of the church or chosen ones, be them shamans, priests, gurus, etc.) As Parsons summarizes it (in page 413 of Volume I of the Structure of Social Action):

At the outset of the book [Parsons is here discussing Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life] he remarks that so persistent and tenacious an element in human life as religion is inconceivable if the ideas associated with it are pure illusions, that is, do not “reflect any reality”. And so he starts with a critique of the schools of interpretation which have, on the one hand, made religious ideas the primary element of religion and, on the other, have sought to derive these ideas from men’s impressions of the empirical world. This will be recognized as the typical approach of the earlier scheme – the question what , from the point of view of the actor, is the “reality” reflected in the ideas, the “representations” in terms of which he acts.

You probably can already see where this is leading: for Durkheim (in Parsons telling, and I think Parsons got it right here) the propositions of religious dogma, since its earliest manifestations (in totemism, as could be observed between Australian aboriginal tribes as documented by mostly German anthropologists, so kind of a third-hand account, but enough for him to assume that was a valid blueprint for every religious expression and form that came afterwards) really referred to the social reality, a somehow fuzzy concept that he had been championing since his first writings as being a sui generis kind of entity, but with as much claim to real existence as any lump of matter. And, if religious expressions, religious feeling, even actions that could be construed as religious ritual, all made reference to society, which is undeniably real, they could safely be understood as being true, which is what he was really after.

Of course, a believer may see things quite differently. When the Australian aboriginal chooses not to eat his totemic animal, or refrains from having sex with someone from the wrong totem, he is not complying with those prescribed behaviors because he feels an irrational respect (and awe and veneration) for the enhanced powers of the social group. Or not only that (because, if that were all he had in mind, we would lack a non-circular explanation of his behavior, specially the part of it more detrimental to everyday survival). When the Dervish dances and reaches a mystical feeling of unity with the divine that created the universe he does not consider that he is just very attuned to the traditions and myths and (somewhat deluded) worldview of his fellow believers with which he constitutes a collective unit (society!) able to exert much more power over their shared environment than what he alone could. When a Christian of whatever denomination participates in communion he doesn’t think about the holy form as a symbol of the unity of the group (or at least he shouldn’t only think that; in our own very disenchanted age it is a valid question what exactly does an enlightened citizen thinks he is doing by eating the wafer, and I wouldn’t discard in most cases it is something closer to the Durkheimian affirmation of group belonging and respect for the group’s traditions than to the direct access to the numinous, to the “irreducibly, entirely other” in Karl Otto’s terms, that orthodox theology tells him).

Be it as it may, the key aspect that caught my attention in Parsons interpretation of Durkheim is how the former sees the latter as using religion to complement an understanding of human motivation that would make the stability of social groups almost impossible to explain in its absence. Durkheim’s positivism limits him to positing what Weber called “means-ends rationality” when explaining human action: a modern citizen could use his reason only to determine what were the most adequate means to achieve his ends, but those ends themselves could not be subjected to rational validation. Other way of saying the same thing is that reason (understood as the systematic application of the scientific method to root out superstition, bias, fraud and other ways of thinking that are considered by positivist to be non-rational and, what is essentially the same, unscientific) can tell us how to act to achieve certain ends, but not to decide what ends we should set for ourselves (or for others) in the first place. This creates a problem for complex group, as different individuals are wont to choose different ends, some of which are likely to be exclusionary (not amenable to being pursued simultaneously: like if I pursue maximum economic development, ready to sacrifice whatever it takes to reach it, and you aspire to a maximally clean and unpolluted environment… our ends would clash and we would have no way to adjudicate rationally between them). It is a great merit of Parsons to identify that any “merely” utilitarian system of values (and all positivist systems end up being utilitarian, as they are left trying to maximize each individual pleasure -or, alternatively, minimize each individual’s pain, which is the only thing that is empirical, non-metaphysical and, according to their understanding of what reality consist of, the only thing that is “real”, and thus the only valid source of “value”) tends to be unstable, as those “ultimate ends” are, as I’ve said elsewhere, incommensurable.

So far, so good, we already know that for utilitarian (and, in more general terms, for all positivistic) systems there is no place for such thing as “values”, and so it is very difficult to demonstrate there is something that ultimately matters (in a  Parfitian sense). Things are like they are, happen as they happen (Parsons also notes perceptively that the positivistic view entails both value neutrality, obviously enough, and determinism, something with which I also strongly agree), and there is not much we can do about ‘em, other than note dutifully how they proceed and, at most, show a pro or con attitude. On top of determinism such outlook ends up resolving itself in utter relativism: as there is no way to compare my preferred ends with yours, both being equally valid for each of us (which is the same as saying, both being equally invalid in the traditional moral sense, because of its quaint aspiration to universality and unconditionality), the maximum we can aspire to is a deflationary ethics of tolerance where we endure each other as best we can, living and letting live as they say, trying to at least respect a basic set of individual rights in the expectations that our own rights would be similarly respected. Such lack of common values and common sense of “what indeed matters” would make the coordination of social groups very difficult and translate into fragmented, ultra-individualistic societies beset by “anomie” (an original Durkheimian term). If not killing each other is the best we can hope for, better to renounce all possible dreams of making great things together (like ever going to Mars, cheap and plenty fusion energy, or simply maintaining a planet with a semi-stable climate), as we would be forever doomed to the suboptimal equilibria we now endure, because of everybody looking out only for himself, with all the free-riding and externalities we have come to know so well, and which absent an all-encompassing set of  commonly accepted “ultimate ends” we would be unable to overcome.

Which means that, according to Durkheim, religion is a necessary component of social cohesion, or at least to the minimal level of group collaboration required to guarantee a modicum of human flourishing. Because in the absence of religion, of a common set of ultimate values that can bind people together and move them towards sacrificing at least something for the greater good, all we would have is a disparate group of selfish utility maximizers (pursuing in a more or less enlightened way their own incommensurable ends, each not admitting of negotiation or compromising with anybody else’s), Interesting stuff, that contrasts with some other decidedly (and more vocally) antireligious thinkers which may have shared some of Durkheim’s outlook, but didn’t have a problem in denying that religion really needed to have a “real” referent, something really existing to point to (I’m thinking here on Freud, that similarly was inspired by anthropological descriptions of Australian totemism but both in Totem and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion didn’t have any problem deciding that, for all its potential uses as social agglutinator religion was, as the first title mentioned clearly implied, an “illusion”, and even worse than that, a symptom of collective neurosis -it has to be noted that Freud was a notoriously dissembling author, and his books on religion are specially heavy in unfounded deductive chains and thinly veiled flights of fancy). Of course, the moment you subtract the element of truth such practices and sets of beliefs may have you are much less inclined to attempt to preserve them, and are much more likely to minimize the losses of getting entirely rid of them.

But what really caught my attention in all this was its import to my theory of the organization (Organization I, Organization II, Organization III, Decadence of organizations, Organizations & DR), which is one of the backbones of the book I already mentioned I’m currently working on. if Durkheim’s understanding of religion (not that different from Freud’s, as I just highlighted) is correct, that would collapse what I was considering two distinct types of organization into one: if religion is but an effective way of identifying members of the group so they can better coordinate with each other, religious organizations (marked by what they believe is really existing out there, and the kind of attitude it calls for) and political organizations (marked by the sense of belonging to a common group, and acting to improve the material lot of that group against others) would ultimately be the same. There could be no viable political organization without a distinct and unique set of beliefs that purported to be about “what there really is” but ultimately were about “who we are and how we distinguish ourselves from others”.

After thinking hard and long about it, I don’t think Durkheim is right, and I still think it makes sense to keep both types separate, but I’ll need to explain why in another post, as this one has grown beyond my very lax standards already. Stay tuned.

What to believe III (after bashing relativism, what about revelation?)

In my previous posts within this series, I started by laying out three aspects of our reality (what in the old times used to be called “first principles”, if you wish) that seemed to me indisputable, namely:

·         The universe is designed (has been created by a mind).

·         There are minds in it (starting with our own) in the universe that are essentially similar to the one that created it.

·         Those minds can “understand” how the ordered universe (the “cosmos”) works by “reverse engineering” it. Reality is, at bottom, rational

Acknowledging that those are not, nowadays, the most widespread, universally accepted notions of ontology (to put it mildly, as I answered a commenter on the previous post, in what used to be called “the West” they have become downright unfashionable) or epistemology, I devoted some space to review (and discuss) the three main arguments against those overarching principles, namely:

·         The deepest thinkers within our tradition have conclusively “shown” that the universe is empathically NOT designed (summary of my answer: no, they haven’t)

·         The existence of minds, starting with our own, is a slick trick played by evolution and can be explained without resorting to any kind of purposeful designer (summary: we are more certain of our own mental experiences, we have a more “clear and distinct” access to it, than of the existence of an external reality outside it, as famously noted both by Descartes and Berkeley, so no amount of information purportedly deduced from the observation of such external reality can have enough force to convince us of the
inexistence of our mental processes PLUS the sheer improbability of the mechanism of evolution itself arising by hazard, given it requires a prodigiously finely tuned set of basic, fundamental constants regulating the interactions of matter and energy much before any biology can arise, is enough to make the most parsimonious explanation of such minds that they are the conscious intent of an intelligence endowed with volition and thus able to act purposefully)

·         Finally, the undeniable existence of evil in the world (of the three variants identified by Leibniz: physical, metaphysical and moral), the vast amount of senseless suffering and finitude and death pervading all nature is enough to question the avowed goodness of the designer. And if the designer is evil, all bets are off. Why suppose he has given us the gift of knowledge (or the potential for acquiring knowledge that most people stupendously and blatantly and lackadaisically waste during their lifetimes) out of love or sympathy or pity? He may as well have made us necessarily self-deluded and provided us with a very blunt capability of understanding, condemning us to pursue truth without having the real pre-conditions for ever achieving more than an infinitesimal part of it (not a benevolent God, but a deceitful spirit, resorting again to Descartes terminology)

Due to self-imposed space constraints, I only got to answer up to the second objection. Time, then, to turn our attention to the third one.

Part I (cont.) – Response to common objections (still tryin’, really exhaustively, to be even-handed here, man!)

Just to put things in perspective, the history of trying to reconcile the idea of a just, good and all-powerful designer with the everyday occurrence of bad things to good people (or to sentient beings entirely shorn of any moral consideration) is a long and illustrious one. Its most known and paradigmatic formulation comes directly from Epicurus (who lived between 241 and 270 BC), although we don’t find it in any of his (preciously few) surviving writings, but in a quote from Lactantius, that tells us that if God were supremely good and supremely powerful, he wouldn’t allow any evil in the world. But evil was undoubtedly present in it, so there is no such a creature as a traditionally understood supreme being, a being that is simultaneously infinitely good, infinitely powerful and interested in our well-being… or in the well-being of sentient creatures in general (as pain, suffering and finally death afflict not just the human species, but that of every sentient creature).

Powerful stuff, that has called from a number of eminent minds of a more theistic bend to try to counteract it by denying some of its implications (a good summary can be found in Problem of evil -I just donated again, what am I to do but recommend its usually superb content?-). In its most basic form, it can be construed as a trilemma, in which not all of the following statements can be true at the same time:

1.       There is an all-powerful and all-knowing being (let’s call him God). Logically, there can only be one (if there were more than one, their wills could clash, and give rise to every kind of logical inconsistencies and paradoxes)

2.       Such all-powerful being is perfectly good for us. He has volition, and wills what is best for the sentient creatures he has created (let’s leave aside for a moment how problematic that “us” may become… what if he wills the good only of a certain chosen few, at the expense of all the rest of creation? How does he decide if there are different goods to be attained in which different groups end up partaking in different proportions of the overall goodness?)

3.       There is “gratuitous” evil in the world, evil that serves no higher purpose, that doesn’t cause any good to come about that more than compensates the suffering that it imposes in some of the creatures capable of experiencing such suffering. The actual world we live in is NOT the best of all possible worlds (as a world in which such gratuitous evil didn’t occur would be obviously better than this one)

They cannot be true because 1&2 => !3 (one AND two necessarily imply NOT three). An all-powerful and all-knowing God who at the same time was good and cared for us is incompatible with the allowance of bad things happening for no reason, or, using another term, with a  “suboptimal” universe, as he would have used his infinite power and wisdom to create a better one (better suited at least for the sentient creatures that he would have populated it with).

Now, you don’t need to have been around for a long time to realize that there seems to be a stupendous amount of flat-out, non-redeemable (by serving a higher good) bad things happening all around us. As a theologian once put it to me, the problem is not “evil” per se, but “so, so much evil!”. That may be why some religious traditions have given different answers to such problem by jettisoning at least one of the three incompatible statements, the one they found more problematic, or less amenable to their previous epistemic commitments:

·         After the horrors of WWII and the Holocaust, a number of Protestant and reformed Jewish theologians concluded that God was probably not that powerful, after all. Maybe because he respected too much human freedom (so he was not capable of rescinding it even after it became obvious we were grossly abusing it beyond recognition), maybe because he was constrained by previous decisions, all he could do in the face of the horrors we humans were visiting on one another was empathize with our plight and cry with us and for us. I’ll only point here that I’ve always had trouble with this position, and with the moment of its historical emergence: The vastness of unnecessary (and, from our limited understanding, truly unintelligible) suffering even before we humans started developing modern means of killing each other is staggering enough to not being much amenable to influence by fifty million more of people being slaughtered in a little more than five years, even if a percentage of them were entirely innocent women and very small children. Similarly innocent women and children (of different races and even species, some of them almost as endowed with self-consciousness and ability to suffer as ourselves) have been dying horrific deaths for eons and eons without the Abrahamic faiths taking note and seeing much problem. Some of those deaths are narrated in the book they all consider sacred with a distinctive approval, as if the creator proved his omnipotence precisely by allowing and encouraging them… However, I can sympathize with believers who would rather give up the idea of a powerful figure that can protect them with guaranteed success than reject that of the caring, loving entity that, even if he cannot protect, at least shares their suffering and anguish and is always by their side, no matter what (and, one cannot avoid noting, no matter how materially ineffectual such loving presence may be).

·         As long as there have been religions, some of them have never been very strong on the caring side (to put it charitably). Battle gods, thunder gods, war gods, plague gods and the like were never famous for the care and understanding they showed towards their followers. Even outside polytheism, Eastern traditions tend to find alien the concept of a creating principle that is somehow analogous to our mind, with its volition and craving, willing and desiring, and tend to think of such principle in more impersonal terms (which exclude the whole emotional shtick, with its associated terms like “love”, “compassion”, “mercy”, “care”, “understanding”, “sympathy”, etc.) Within the West, Spinoza would be a fine example of a kind of pantheism that excludes God “caring” much for anything (as caring implies a striving, which in turn presupposes an absence, a lack of perfection, that for the Dutchman was incompatible with his concept of the Deity). We will see, when we deal with the implications of what our reason can impel us to believe as more likely than not, that indeed the statement about the “goodness” of the Deity is the one we can derive less consequences from, as such goodness is a most complicated, obscure and at times even contradictory concept, most easily manipulated and distorted. You cannot have anything remotely resembling the intuitive concept of God (designer/ creator of all of reality) that is not quite close to all-powerful (and probably all-knowing, as power and knowledge are but two aspects of the same reality), while you can very well have a God that is indifferent, even actively inimical, to human flourishing. Or, to put it more gently, you can have an all-powerful designer/ creator of the universe (which still deserves the appellation of God) that has an idea of what flourishing consists of very different from our own, and who thus guide us towards, or merely allows to happen, a number of occurrences that we find highly aggravating/ demeaning/ affronting and outright bad (that is, that allows for a lot of evil to happen in pursuance of his own goals, entirely unknown to and unshared by us).

·         Finally, a number of people don’t seem to have any problem accepting that this is, indeed, the best of all possible worlds, and that the evil we see is but a fleeting annoyance, a drop in an ocean of bliss and well-being. That position, within our tradition, is most famously and best exemplified by Leibniz (and savagely mocked by the witty Voltaire in the figure of the much maligned and derided Doctor Pangloss in his play Candide -as an aside, I can’t for the life of me understand why Voltaire, a most overrated author with very little deep or original to say, is universally acknowledged to have demolished a much more thoughtful and fruitful writer as Leibniz… those kinds of vagaries of fame make one indeed question if there is some good providence taking care of the developments of history after all, or we are all in the hands of some highly idiosyncratic “malin genie”), although I have to recognize that it was most forcefully presented to me by a Muslim cab driver in Chicago (why I was discussing Theodicy with a cab driver there and then would take me too far from the already tenuously followed thread of these posts, so I’ll leave that for another day), who answered my question about young kids being blown to smithereens being a credible basis to question the existence of an all-powerful, all-loving God with a shrug, and a retort: “who says dying young is bad for them or their families in any meaningful sense? They go to paradise earlier, where they can enjoy untroubled ‘til their parents, if they are rightful and just, will meet them and enjoy their company forever”.

What are we, then, to make of such positions? It seems to me that the response we can give has much to do (and reveals a lot about) how our own (personal, subjective, to a certain extent unique and impossible to completely share) life has gone. Because in the end, the problem Theodicy poses is not so much a Logical problem (we just can decide that there is no what I have termed “gratuitous” evil, that all the enormous amount of suffering we witness or guess truly serves a higher purpose and in the end all wrongs will be righted and all pain will be healed, and we will all be better off because of what we have suffered, regardless of how the suffering may have been unequally apportioned) as an evidential problem (how much more unlikely the vast amount of apparently senseless suffering makes the existence of that omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God?) And for answering that last question (what weighs more, the apparently senseless suffering or the purported, unseen, estimated omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence of the designer?) we have to resort to the very limited sample of what we have witnessed, and experienced, and read about. And I reckon that some people have a perspective of how the sum total of life looks like that makes the likelihood of such a benevolent and powerful God most unlikely, because from their personal vantage point there is just too much cruelty, too much pain, too much untimely and absurd death, too much wasted potential, too much unrequited love, too much anguish and despair and despondency and dejection to be somehow compensated in an uncertain moment in time, in an uncertain place.

And I deeply respect that, as I consider myself luckiest than most. Lucky in the first place not to have been touched and sullied by such pain and death and waste and lack of requital and anguish and despair and despondency and dejection. And it somehow sounds pretentious, and naïve, and even callous to tell to people affected by any of them that there is always hope… but there is always hope! And it is not me who says it, as again, from my privileged and easy standpoint being hopeful would be pretty inconsequential and effortless. It is just a pervasive trope of all great literature, of the works that better capture the human experience and the plight of man at its best and worst, to portray how in the darkest and most forlorn situations people manage to keep the flame of hope alive. Maybe just a glimmer. May be it is a devious device implanted in us by a blind evolutionary mechanism, as keeping that glimmer of hope helped those that (irrational as it may have been) held to it survive, and reproduce more than those of a more morose and pessimistic disposition. But I tend to find suspicious (and have denounced under the blanket term of “just-so stories”) most of those explanations.

So, from a position of great uncertainty, and of great humility, I’ll softly say that, as from the fine tuning of the most basic laws of nature, and the ability of our minds to understand those laws, I conclude the evidence is mostly in favor of there being a designer whose mind works entirely like ours, only on a vaster, grander scale, the existence of hope in the most desperate situation inclines me to say, much more tentatively, that such designer indeed has a benevolent disposition towards us.

Part II – so, what does all that have to do with how we should act?

Everything. A life where there is purpose, meaning and direction has nothing to do with one where we happen to be mindless pawns in a cold, uncaring universe, where things just happen to develop in a certain way without us being more than a spark of sensations and pre-ordained impressions that appeared by sheer coincidence, and will disappear without a trace. But let’s unpack what the prior triad of ideas about the ultimate nature of reality allow us to believe, in decreasing order of warrant (or of probability):

1.       There is a God (a mind that created the universe)

2.       There are such things as absolute truth and absolute beauty (the way those ideas are conceived in the mind of the original designer)

3.       Such God is positively inclined towards us (loves us). Which entails, amazing as it may sound, that this is the best possible universe of those that could be created

4.       God is “good” in the traditional understanding of the word: he cares about our happiness/ fulfillment, that’s why he put us in here with understanding and reason. Furthermore, there is also such thing as absolute goodness.

5.       We can gain knowledge of the basic ideas in the mind of God (and that knowledge would reveal the same truth, beauty and goodness for every single rational being, in every single moment of the universe’s history)

6.       Thus, gaining such knowledge is not just a possibility, but a moral, absolute obligation

7.       Thus the goal of our whole life, if we are to live well, should be to gain that knowledge, and practically apply it

I reckon that this hasty draft would require a more detailed exposition, and as any astute reader may have noticed, there is not much mention about the likelihood of the truth (or falsity) of the different and differing revelations which I advanced I would be criticizing in such threadbare consequences that our rational beliefs should have on our behavior. Alas! My wordiness again has taken the best of me and it is time to pack and leave the working of such detail for a future post.

What to believe II (still against relativism, and then some)

Guys, I recognize I left so many strands of argument open in my last post (which was some time ago, wasn’t it? Life is busy sometimes) that it is hard to try to re-weave them all in a coherent tapestry. I’ll try to recap so we are all in the same page as we move forward from the first ontological commitments I enumerated towards the practical consequences of having those beliefs (and remember I took a firm stand, and drew a clear line in the sand: those beliefs were the only rationally coherent, logically possible, most parsimonious ones about the ultimate nature of reality and our place in it: you choose not to have them, you place yourself outside of rational discourse, and I really don’t know what else to tell you). The three basic elements of reality are, condensed to the core:

·         The universe has been designed (by a mind outside it): it shows an underlying, intelligible structure that reveals it being the product of a conscious intent, thus we can assume it is endowed with a purpose

·         There are other minds in it (apart from our own and that of the designer/ creator)

·         Our minds are “attuned” to reality: they can discern the regularities and causal connections within reality and differentiate true from false (the universe is rational, our mind -and presumably other’s- is in some way similar to that of the designer in that it can identify the rules said designer applied when shaping matter, space and time into an ordered whole, a cosmos)

I now want to flesh out the consequences of holding such beliefs which, again, I consider evident enough, so much so that I cannot avoid thinking that not holding them amounts to a conscious decision of being irrational, and would require some explanation beyond what rationality entails (I strongly suspect in the end it is always something along the lines of “the consequences of such beliefs are too theistic, too redolent of admitting the existence of a ultimate reality above and beyond my own, and I, the potential believer, am too invested in the rejection of the idea of there being a supreme architect, or God, for me to give it a fair hearing, rationality be damned”). I intend to do it in two sections; in the first one I will review (as fairly and dispassionately as I can) some of the most common counterarguments to the three aforementioned beliefs; in a second one, I will develop what those basic beliefs entail (albeit with diminishing clarity), and thus what consequences we can deduce from them. Some of those consequences will have an immediately practical application, some less so.

Part I – Response to common objections (tryin’ to be even-handed here, man!)

Although I’ve been accused of being an arrogant asshole by so many people as to have lost count (and being of a cheery disposition, and not prone to hold grudges, I’d rather forget those accusations, based on some residual truth as they may be), some humility is called for in those weighty matters. I’ve just used strong words (“utterly irrational, and voluntarily so”) to describe the basic tenets of the worldview of intelligent, well-meaning people, people that have reached the top of their respective fields in academia and in the eyes of public opinion and that are universally reputed to be gentle, kind, humane and attentive to the needs of their fellow-beings. And they have done so, and lived apparently unimpeachable lives, while denying some of the basic statements I’ve presented as indubitable.

The people I’m thinking of have stated that either there is no designer at all, or if there is he is entirely absent from his creation, and pays no heed to its development (including the little worries and going about of such tiny and puny creatures as ourselves). To name but a few: Epicurus, Benedict Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, the Baron d’Holbach, Friedrich Nietzsche (I’m not so sure about the humaneness and kindness of that one, but he was at times, if not entirely clever, at least brilliant, albeit in a somewhat twisted and tortured way), Martin Heidegger (ditto), Bertrand Russell, Thomas Nagel, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker. Of course, we also have the most vocal defenders of atheism, new or otherwise, whose passionate denial of any organizing principle outside the blind forces inherent in the material universe seems to require them to attack similarly vocally any whiff of stablished religion (or vestigial theism), from my much-studied Sigmund Freud to the ones which most immediately come to mind when discussing these matters: the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Of late we probably can add Yuval Noah Harari. These last ones (ol’ Sigmund included) I consider neither especially clever nor markedly kind (and one at least I find morally repugnant, if I have to be candid, which in my own blog I should), so I will entirely ignore them from here on.

But regarding the first thinkers I listed, having read them extensively and recognizing their intelligence in many cases ranks above mine, a word of caution is called for. If they have pondered the ultimate nature of what exists, and reached conclusions diametrically opposed to my own, that should require a certain level of humility, and grants at least some doubts and some extra consideration about the soundness of the reasoning that has led me to my own conclusions. It is that spirit of doubt about my own reasoning powers and respect for theirs that I’ll try to summarize what I understand as the three main objections to what I expounded in my previous post that can be gleamed from those luminaries’ writings:

1.       The most brilliant and profound thinkers within philosophy (Spinoza, Hume, Kant) have substantially weakened the stronger argument for the existence of the traditional God (creator of the Universe) by refuting the argument from design: the short answer would be “Refuted, my foot!”. Let’s unpack such extended opinion to see what merit it may have.

o   For Spinoza the greatest good man could aspire to (and what he should orient his actions to achieve) was literally “amor dei intellectualis”, an intellectual “love of God” made equally of acceptance and knowledge. And yes, I know his concept of God was entirely equivalent to “the whole of nature, shorn of emotions, volitions or strivings” (all of which he understood as deficiencies), which to his contemporaries was as perfect an expression of atheism as could be thought of. I don’t really car of what his contemporaries, or his modern exegetes (like the uber-fawning Johnathan Israel, for whom the whole Enlightenment almost starts and stops with Spinoza), have made of his thought, it is clear as water that he deeply understood, and marveled at, the intelligibility of the ordered world, and extracted the conclusion of that intelligibility and order requiring a mind to both guide it and understand it. He just identified that mind with the whole of matter (immanent to the universe, not transcendent), and declared it complete and, for that reason, free of desires or impulses. Which is fair enough, and entirely understandable, although it leaves some aspects of the cosmos unexplained (it may reveal why there is a design, but not why we can identify/ discern it).

o   As for Hume, I’ll just quote verbatim what the cleverest, most sceptic character (Philo, most likely the one closer to Hume’s own ideas) has to say at the end of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (in Part XII, page 116 of the Oxford World’s Classics edition):

…[talking about himself] no one has a deeper sense of religion impressed on his mind, or pays more profound adoration to the divine Being, as he discovers himself to reason, in the inexplicable contrivance and artifice of nature. A purpose, an intention, a design strikes everywhere the most careless, the most stupid thinker; and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems as at all times to reject it.

“A purpose, an intention, a design”… copying those words from my much underlined and commented and worn out edition of Hume’s work makes me realize to what extent he has contributed to my own ideas, as it nicely summarizes what I find undeniable about the cosmos just by looking around myself… interestingly, Hume leaves open the possibility of being “so hardened in absurd systems” as to some times reject the purpose, intention and design so apparent when contemplated dispassionately, as he himself, as we will see, had seemed to reject them in other pieces of his writings

Indeed, the piece of Hume’s writing that is frequently adduced to undermine the design argument, is most clearly the one contained in Section XI of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (pages 131-148 of the Selby-Bigge edition), “on a particular providence and a future state”, where he declares the impossibility to judge the merits of the “good design” argument, as we do not know of other universe with which we could compare the actually obtaining one we see around us, further weakened by its obvious improvability (described, in somewhat nonchalant and difficult to take seriously terms, as the result of a not very experienced creator, or may be of a multiplicity of them acting not entirely in unison). I’ve analyzed that segment minutely in another place, and won’t repeat myself here. Suffice it to say that it is a) philosophically much less persuasive (playfulness being usually opposed to soundness in reasoning) and b) much less indicative of Hume’s deepest convictions (as betrayed by him resorting to the artifice of presenting it as “some arguments he heard from an skeptical friend”, a transparently dissembling move that reflects his internal uneasiness with the solidity of the arguments therein presented).

o   Finally, Kant, famously averse to any pretended irrefutable demonstration of the existence of God (and, according to some of his biographers, dismissive of the idea of there being one in the first place, and doubly dismissive of revealed religion in particular), who (again, supposedly) showed the essential unsoundness of the ontological argument (in a nutshell, by refuting that existence is something additional that can be enunciated of some entity over and above denoting it, thus making said entity more real -and thus better- than if it were not enunciated of it). Fine, I’ll give you he was no great fan of the ontological argument, but he had much less to say about the argument from design. We do know that given his inclination towards the physical science of his day (an inclination hampered by the very incomplete mathematical education he received in the Collegium Fredericianum, where his teachers were more worried in turning him into a good pietist than into a good scientist) he was keenly aware of the regularities and underlying simplicity of nature’s working (which allowed him to enunciate some wonderfully advanced -for his time- insights, like the probable origin in the geometry of space of the by then very mysterious gravitational attraction at a distance), but he resisted extracting the most immediate consequence from that simplicity and regularity (a designed cosmos) for a surprising reason: for Kant, distrustful of any consequentialist morality (of any attempt to justify how we should behave attending to the consequences of our actions), being certain of the existence of a supreme judge that would reward or punish us in the hereafter was incompatible with us being truly virtuous. And as one of his firmest beliefs was precisely the possibility of such virtue, he instinctively rejected any apparently irrefutable proof of the existence of God (the obvious design of the universe included). Because if the existence of God was certain, and we could then be certain of the consequences of our acts, and be sure of the eternal reward or punishment meted out by an incorruptible, all-knowing judge that admitted of no appeal to a higher instance, we would not be able to act right, because acting right requires us, nay, consists in, acting for the right reason (fear of punishment not being the right reason in any case).

Which is certainly well and good, and I’ll be the last one to contradict the important and meaningful insight of Kant on that area. But I think that the argument from design stops short enough of what the designing mind of the creator intended and willed as to leave almost entirely indeterminate how we should act in order to be properly rewarded/ to avoid the likely punishment. Which, in turn, means that we can accept the existence of a creator, even of a benevolent one, without risking the loss of the ultimate rule of what acting right consists in (i.e. acting for the right reason, which implies both respect of the law in the form of the categorical imperative and the recognition of our own freedom).

So we can safely conclude that the design argument, far from having been refuted, is still alive and kicking. A possible explanation for the popularity of the (misguided) assumption of its refutation has to do with its reduction to the realm of living beings. The most popular instances of design at the beginning of the XIX century was contained in William Paley’s Natural Theology, and the clearest examples he could provide of nature being designed by a benevolent creator came indeed from the natural world: the admirable adaptation of any living organism to its particular environment. Not many years after the edition of Paley’s tract came another book by a certain Charles Darwin (one of the few works of which it can be said without exaggeration that it would be difficult to overstate its importance), On the Origin of Species, that provided an alternative explanation for how organisms came to be so tightly fit to their peculiar ecosystems: natural selection had molded them by accentuating those random variations (random in their appearance, but able to be transmitted to their descendants) that gave them some differential advantage in their ability to reproduce themselves. With just that simplest of mechanisms, voila! You could have the appearance of design without a designer, and just get rid of the whole annoying argument that theists kept propounding to substantiate their outmoded superstitions!

Of course, the intricate regularities in our vast (and admirably ordered) cosmos are not exhausted by the wonderfully varied forms of living organisms in our tiny speck of blue. The minutely precise values the different constants of nature have to take (things like the gravitational attraction between lumps of mass, the electric charge of the proton and the electron, the average duration of the elementary particles, and so on and so forth) for a universe like ours to develop, and successive generations of stars to give rise to planetary systems endowed with complex enough atoms to form in turn the molecules required for the whole evolutionary process to be possible, are as difficult to explain without them being selected by some mind, without them being chosen for a purpose as the opposable thumbs of human beings (and of the Panda) were back in the day.

And, predictably, the same successful strategy that proved so fruitful back then in the XIX century is being used today to explain away such “design”: what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so maybe universes (in plural) also evolve. Maybe there is some mechanism that from one universe can produce “offspring” universes with little random variations, that are differentially successful in reproducing themselves in turn. That would give a valid explanation for the almost miraculous attunement of nature most basic constants towards the production of a universe with the precise balance of variation and uniformity as to allow the appearance of conscious (maybe even intelligent, but the jury is still out in that one) life.

But consider for a moment the price we pay if we accept such alternative explanation for what we may call the “evident (in the non-biological realm) design of the reality that surrounds us”, also known as the “fine tuning argument”: a multiplicity of universes (we don’t really know how many, or with what frequency they may appear, or through what mechanism -the singularity within black holes has been proposed, but it’s far from certain) that, given how precise the tuning is, must have been created in untold, incalculable numbers without us ever being able to notice them. Whose existence is, strictly speaking, indemonstrable and untestable. Sorry, but I’m too enamored of my ol’ razor (named after a medieval Franciscan friar you may have heard of: Bill of Ockham) to accept for a moment such possibility. If the alternative to believing in a designer is to embrace an almost infinity of universes beyond our senses and our ability to ever notice them, I’ll stick to my theism.

2.       OK, so the key to theism is recognizing that a universe existing all by itself shows clear signs of having been designed, planned, crafted, made with some purpose in mind (or, which is the same, created by a mind). But such signs (which point to a conscience that, absent any alternative possibility, we assume to be like our own one) may be an illusion, which has itself an evolutionary explanation. In what seem relatively recent (in evolutionary terms, we are talking tens of thousands of years, not hundreds of thousands, or even millions) a species of monkeys in this planet of ours found it advantageous (i.e. something that allowed them to have more descendants) to “tell stories”, to narrate events that had some sort of internal consistency (that seemed to have a special kind of connection between them, that of some being “causes” and other being “effects” of the former), regardless of them referring to things that had actually happened or not. Probably the sharing of those stories allowed them to coordinate better the actions of members of the same tribe and enhance their survival prospects in a changing environment, or whatnot (Ah! The unavoidable “just-so” character, in Stephen Jay Gould’s fortunate description, of this peculiar form of “explanation” of human behavior). From this ability to dissemble and rationalize “ex post” what we do and why we have developed a number of additional adaptations (exaptions), not necessarily advantageous per se, that we now call consciousness. It is that illusion of consciousness which lays at the foundation of that supposed appreciation of the wonderful regularities we (erroneously, as it happens) think we notice in the world around us. But there is, or so the proponents of this idea would have you believe, no such thing. Your own consciousness (let alone other people’s) is just an illusion.

To which I can only answer: “yep, sure, by the way, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’m willing to sell, wouldn’t you be interested?”. Look, I love just-so stories as much as the next guy, but I wouldn’t compromise my fair evaluation of probabilities of what is out there because I had found a “plausible” explanation of how something came to be that requires not one, or two, or three, but a gazillion bazillions of extraordinarily unlikely events millimetrically chained one after the other to produce the wonder that is my mental life, or yours. As Hume said regarding miracles, the evidence of them should be stronger the more unlikely they are. So, for us to consider that consciousness is “an illusion”, something that is not really “there”, we would need fairly overwhelming, irrefutable, undefeatable evidence. But such evidence amounts to little more than “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”, albeit stated by a very respectable philosopher that looks the part of avuncular sage to boot (that would be my much beloved Daniel Dennett, with whom I disagree in almost everything he has ever written, down to the commas and question marks, but whom I respect a lot nevertheless).

Because if there is one single thing we can be solidly certain about, one thing that we can use to construct our whole epistemical outlook, is the fact that we are conscious, and that such state is somehow different and distinct from the whereabouts of the lumps of matter that surround us. It may very well be also different and distinct from the lumps of matter that constitute us, a position quite out of fashion nowadays (see my For Dualism I and and II and finally and III (a bit of carried away in this one, folks, be patient)). But fashion and plausibility are entirely different matters, and  we don’t need to busy ourselves again with that abstruse discussion (as the one we are dealing with is certainly abstruse enough without having to complicate it with additional arguments). The fact that we can lose ourselves in our thoughts, and we recognize that as being radically and essentially different from losing ourselves in the narrow streets of our city, and that we can easily imagine somebody else in the latter situation, but in no way in the former (they can lose themselves in their own thoughts, sure, but they would not be the same, even if they managed to have the same generic “content”), which we denote by a number of terms like “preferential access” (the one I distinctly have to the contents of my own consciousness, so preferential indeed that it doesn’t matter with how much detail I try to convey it to others, I recognize I can only make them participate in a tiny fraction of what it was “being myself” during the time those same contents were being experienced by me) or “undefetability” of the reports I may make of those contents (if I declare, truthfully, that I’m sad, or in pain, or distressed, there is no piece of information about the world that anybody could give me that would make me reconsider the correctness of my original statement) that are not shared by any other aspect of reality.

To sum things up, there is no reason solid enough (and, given its prima facie implausibility, it would require, as per Hume, a massive dose of strong evidence) to consider we have no consciousness, and that other people have too. Only a commitment to monism (and a monism of a particular sort: materialist monism, as explained in the posted I linked before) that ends up going from a reasonable parsimoniousness to a pigheaded oversimplification can explain holding such idea. To put it more bluntly, may be resorting to a somewhat cartoonish expression, people that hold on to their monism in the face of its evident inability to account for what David Chalmers termed the “hard problem” sound to me like “well, the initial and simple set of ideas I started with to get rid of the hateful possibility of there being some essential aspect of reality that was not readily reducible to matter has somehow mutated in a convoluted rationalization that has painted me into a corner, having to assume that the most immediate evidence I have of my own mental life is somehow misleading and false… but if the alternative to holding those increasingly untenable beliefs is to accept some kind non-material essence on the same footing as matter (with the same claim of being “true”, “really existing” entities) I’m afraid that would justify, or validate, or make minimally reputable talking about souls and eternal beings and religion and in the end the Big Bearded Guy in the sky with all his hateful percepts that so evidently clash with all that Science has taught us. As I abhor and detest and despise all those ideas (from souls all the way to the BBG) I’ll just stick with my refusal to admit we have consciousness, and I’ll resolutely look the other way, saying there is not really anything to explain about the workings of our mind. Sorry, I of course meant of our brain”.

Of course, expressed in that (admittedly coarse and unsympathetic) way, such position doesn’t look very appealing. As I’ve already noted a thousand times, accepting a certain kind of dualism (that doesn’t go much further away than “dual aspect monism”) doesn’t commit us to accept immortal souls, a traditional deity or the tenets of any particular revealed religion. Whilst accepting materialist monism does commit us to accept that consciousness is indeed an illusion, and that the universe is just a fantastically unlikely succession of predetermined events, an enormous and senseless accumulation of “one damn thing after the other” with no purpose, no causes, no uncertainties, no values, no truth, no guilt and no merit, no freedom and no beauty, which we happen to (wrongfully) believe we take part in but in which, time being as much an illusion as free will (as in the Tralfamadorian metaphor of Kurt Vonnegut, it’s just a dimension we discover sequentially because of limitations of our cognitive and perceptual apparatus, as in a deterministic universe for all practical purpose “everything has already happened”, as there was only one way in which things could unfold, anyway, and any Laplacean demon worth his salt could have told you how everything would turn out from day one). Thankfully, consciousness is as real as it comes, and it is the monist outlook which we can discard as a fantastical but implausible fabrication.

3.       We have dealt already with the first two of the objections against the recognition of the universe as being designed (1. “there is no design, as the most brilliant philosophers were not swayed by it” and 2. “we cannot be conscious of a design because we are not conscious to begin with, both our consciousness and hence the design it perceives are fictions”). Time then, to turn our attention to the third objection, namely, what about all the innocent suffering? What’s the rationality of that?

But this post is already of a record length, well above 4,500 words, so I think the answer to that 

one, and the subsequent analysis of how all the three answers, and the justification of the basic beliefs they support, impinge on how we should act, will have to wait for my next post. But don’t suffer, oh patient readers! You will not have to wait for that one as much as you had to wait for this one, that I promise you…

What to believe (against relativism)

I’m well aware that an era of societal collapse and civilization’s decadence is not the best of times for strong assertions of belief and rigorous declarations of faith. Although it is difficult to disentangle what is a contributing cause and what is an unavoidable effect of the sorry state of modern society, the loss of legitimacy of our time’s dominant reason (for those new to this blog: aka desiderative reason, very bad!) contaminates any attempt to build a widely shared “grand narrative”, to articulate a set of guiding principles on how to live that a majority of people can give their assent to.

We are all jaded cynics nowadays, disenchanted empiricists, nihilistic spectators of the “death of God” and participants in the deconstruction mandated by post-modernism, well steeped in critical theory (the right, “alt-“ or vanilla, insists in calling it “cultural Marxism”, but we are not prone at this point to abet by that particular piece of tomfoolery), which means we are highly suspicious of any statement aspiring to be valid for “anybody” at “anytime”. Tools of oppression by the heteropatriarchy! We may cry on hearing them. Unsubtle attempts of the dominant groups to impose their value-system on the poor and the dispossessed. Indeed, the most cursory look at who formulated most of those tenets (we will look at them more closely in a moment) reveals the limited, unrepresentative nature of the group whose dominion they sought to validate: Western propertied white heterosexual men! (only Confucius and Lao Tzi were not Westerners, Diogenes of Sinope had no properties, Plato was not heterosexual, Augustine was -probably- not white and… well, you got me with the last one, to the best of my knowledge all the contributors to the canon I’m about to defend belonged to the male sex of the species, as Jack Lemmon famously said caught in a similar pickle, “nobody is perfect!”).

Which means that, given what we know of how History with a capital H has turned out (World Wars! Genocides of all classes, sizes and stripes, from the Armenians to the Jews to the Tutsis almost in our very own day! Environmental degradation! Totalitarian regimes mass murdering their own subjects! Global warming abetted by giant corporations and governments! Mass famines! Crushing poverty!) we can’t just look at the camera with a straight face and proclaim that there is a solid body of things we humans have learned that may differ a little itsy bitsy bit in the borders, but basically agree (meaning any reasonable person would be OK with something around 80-90% of it) on the fundamentals about how we should live, what we know and can know of “what there really is” (of what constitutes the world), and how we should treat each other.

Or can we?

Of course we can. Not only we can: we must. Because if we shirk our responsibility to state what we believe,  to announce what constitutes the foundation of our value system, so other people can know it, eventually discuss it, and be affected by it (be it for embracing part of it, for rejecting it wholesale or for refining it at the borders, in that comparatively minor areas where there can be some well-intentioned difference between reasonable people) we are implicitly accepting the sorry state of affairs I mentioned in my introduction to this post. Recognizing that such value system is just one between many, equally valid, or rather, equally invalid, equally unfounded, equally random and haphazard, an unjustifiable accretion of ideas that we got to have by circumstances we have no control over, like our birth, our environment, or the peculiar position of the stars in the moment of us forming them. Recognizing, thus, that embracing such values, living in accordance to them, is but an aesthetic option, not that different from choosing one outfit rather than another to go to a certain party, and not more amenable to rational justification or to reasoned defense of the choice (as such justification and defense can never go much further than “I just happen to like this particular combination of clothes” or “I just happen to find this set of colors, shapes and textures more pleasing than any other alternative”).

Which, on first sight, doesn’t seem such a bad thing. Very befitting of our super-individualistic (in Durkheimian words, super-anomic) social arrangement. You do your thing as long as nobody is harmed by it, and I do mine. Respect all options, live and let live and all that. Until you look around and start realizing the harm done by such individualism and relativism. Just a quick recap:

·         Inability to reach agreements that require sacrifices of a part of the population (even if it’s the part that is enormously better off), and forces us in suboptimal collective states as long as there is not some “Pareto-efficient” way out of them (i.e. one where nobody has to sacrifice anything for the common good, unfortunately we run out of such ways 40 years ago). Examples of such states are economies with ever-increasing degrees of inequality in the advanced West (to the point of the top 10% hoarding all the fruits of productivity increases to the exclusion of a growing percentage of impoverished left-behinds); impossibility to wean ourselves off fossil fuels (see the “yellow vests” revolts in France, or the growing emissions of greenhouse gasses in Germany: everybody is super-environmentally friendly until they have to pay more for their gas, or have to keep their nuclear power plants running); apparently insurmountable difficulties to address the growing demographic imbalances around Europe (African Sub-Saharan population ballooning and European one collapsing) and to accommodate the now incompatible demands of a group that wants to escape abject poverty and ecological collapse with those of another that wants to maintain their current racial and cultural homogeneity…

·         Not only are we failing as a collective to steer ourselves in the direction more conductive to our flourishing (which, again, would require us to distribute what we jointly produce more fairly, to take better care of our shared environment and to accommodate each other less confrontationally), we are note even able to conduct our own lives, not having “strong enough” motives for choosing one way of comporting ourselves rather than other, and thus choosing once and again the path of least resistance (those activities that give us more pleasure, without requiring too much sacrifice or effort from us). Unfortunately, choosing the easy path over the hard one once and again ends up painting ourselves in a corner, or boxing us inside a suboptimal version of ourselves. After you have exhausted the enjoyments and pleasures the material world has to offer (and your mileage may vary, but you reach that limit much sooner than you expect when you are young and feel both immortal and invincible) all there is left is to let yourself go entirely and die in a more or less self-destructive way (depending on how attached you have remained to other people whose feelings you may be loath to hurt). Need proof? Check the decrease in life expectancy in one of the most materially wealthier (and spiritually poorer) societies in the world today (you know who I’m talking about).

So only the very, very short-sighted may nonchalantly agree with the rosy diagnostic that everything is fine and dandy in our blissfully value-less societies. Things, really, are rotten and going to hell. Yup, China has lifted 800 million people from the abjectest poverty (yipeee! Good for them!) and that masks a lot of worldwide statistics, but once they finish playing catch-up (same applies for India, Latin America, SW Asia… only Africa so far remains a hopeless basket case which I cannot fathom how it may evolve) they will join us in our accelerating collapse, which translates into a steeper decline for the average person in disposable income, wealth, health, life expectancy and security (so the nations that have just barely joined the global middle class will feel as if the party they worked so hard and so long to join is abruptly winding down immediately after their arrival, just imagine the sort of angry populism that feeling may spawn!) . Which, again, is only meant to strengthen my contention that we need values, we need to proclaim them, we need to publicize them, we need to submit them to careful scrutiny, and we need to proselytize about them, trying to convince other people to adopt them and to live by them.

That proclamation, publicization, scrutinization and proselytizing is what I try to do in my ethics classes (but, alas! Preaching ethics to business school students many times feels like extolling the virtue of chastity in front of testosterone-laden 18 YO male athletes… they sometimes seem to get a fraction of it, but I’m afraid the mix of the environment and the strength of their own impulses end up overpowering most of them), plus, more through example than discourse, in my job and in every interaction with family and friends. Although describing those values in more detail (so the claim that the vast majority of what they consist in is shared by every well-intentioned, rational person, can be validated) may be a worthy use of this blog’s space, this is not what I will attempt in the remainder of this post, as I’ve many times found that previous to the exposition of any coherent system of values, some foundations have to be laid down. The necessary foundations (the precondition that have to be fulfilled before a certain value can be recognized and agreed upon by multiple individuals) that are required are some very basic constituents of the reality we inhabit. If we cannot first agree on the nature of what is really and factually “out there”, there is little chance we may agree on what we have sufficient reasons for doing (or for refraining to do). So bear with me for a moment whilst we review those basic constituents:

·         The universe is, without a hint of a doubt, “designed”. Let’s take the most famous metaphor to explain how we can so confidently assert such surprising fact (taken directly from William Paley’s Natural Theology): if we found a watch lying by the road we immediately apprehend that it is very different from the “productions” of the natural world, like a stone or a tree. Its parts (wheels, springs, hands) are intricately connected to each other and, even if we know nothing of its purpose and use (if, that is, we know nothing of time measurement), we can see that a minimal deviation of each of those parts (the misalignment of a wheel or the fracture of a spring, say) would cause the whole to stop functioning entirely. Similarly, it is a well-known fact that the most minute deviation from their currently observed values of each one of the fundamental constants of nature (those that determine the strength and evolution of the forces of nature -gravitational constant, electric charge, weak and strong nuclear force, average life of the different baryons, spin, etc.) would cause a universe not only radically different from our own, but one where complex conscious life could not evolve (the concatenation of conditions to have a first generation of stars explode creating the necessary concentration of heavy elements like carbon, oxygen, iron, calcium, etc. to gravitate around a second generation of stars to create planets at the right distance of them for amino acids -or any similarly complex molecules, amenable to an almost infinite number of recombinations from a basic repeatable pattern would simple not be possible, given any of those minutest of changes in the basic structure of how nature works). That’s the “fine tuning” argument for the universe being designed, and hard as I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to find a cogent argument against it.

Too bad in its original form it has been essentially discarded, as good ol’ Bill Paley applied it to the biological form of humans (thus for him, it was not the whole universe, but just the human body, which had been obviously designed by the superior intelligence of a designer), and his book happened to be printed just a few years before On the Origin of Species, by a certain Charles Darwin, which proposed an alternative explanation for how the apparently intentionally directed wondrous adaptation of man (or any other species of animal or plant, for what it’s worth) could be so admirably suited to its environment. That explanation was, of course, the theory of natural evolution through the survival of the fittest (or the most attractive to the opposite sex, in sexually reproducing species), which materialist philosophers extol mainly because it allows them to discard the need of an “intelligent designer” that a designed organism would otherwise call for. So the whole “argument from design” got a really bad rap, and has since then been seen with suspicion (if so inclined you can read the whole The Blind Watchmaker by the somewhat repetitious Richard Dawkins as a relentless and quite joyless exploration of such line of argument, although I would advise against it).

But of course, what applies to individual organism (or to whole species) and brilliantly explains their adaptation to an individual, concrete environment, is far from being applicable tout court to the whole of what there is. Not that some astute cosmologists have not tried, and indeed an “evolutionary theory of the cosmos” has been postulated, in which whole universes are being born (in the singularity conditions within black holes, maybe) in quick succession, with quantum fluctuation allowing for slight variations in the values of the fundamental constants. Some of those universes die almost instantly, others prosper for a little longer although they are uniformly dull and uninteresting, and others, finally are stable and varied enough for complex biological entities to evolve within them (and then, of course, it stops being surprising that we find ourselves in of those blessed by the right set of conditions for us to appear in it).

However, you cannot apply the same epistemic weight (call it "measure of epistemic success") to the theory of natural evolution and to the theory of multiple universes (necessarily of mind boggling number and variation). For the first one we have countless proofs and traces and confirmations (and we can even see it happening in real time in the evolution of short lived organisms, from lab mice to bacteria). For the second one we have nothing, and it is doubtful we could ever have something as tenuous as a vague indication, let alone conclusive proof. If there are all those universes with different constants, they are beyond our event horizon, there is no way we can reach them or have “real” information about their existence (involving the exchange of some force or matter).

But frankly, every time I tell someone “on the strength of the evidence, the most parsimonious, more efficient, more plausible working hypothesis is that the universe has been designed” I see their resistence coming from something that goes like “ooooh, I see you coming from a thousand miles! A designed universe requires a designer! The designer has to be a big guy with a long beard that condones the burning of heretics and the subordination of women! And I don’t want such a big guy to exist! I just don’t want there is a God! Hence, the universe cannot be designed! Hence almost infinite universes of whom there is nay a trace!”. I grant that from the first premise (designed universe) the second necessarily follows (there is a designer). But all the rest is not just unwarranted, but just a lot of baloney. Furthermore, you should realize that what you want or do not want there to be is of no importance for what there really is. We will get in a moment to what the acceptance of the design of reality entails (not a big bearded guy, for sure), I’ll just reiterate that for anybody with a basic understanding of language (that is, for anybody who understand what “being designed” means, and yes, that meaning surely also includes somebody with intention doing the design) there simply is no (honest) discussion that the universe is, as a matter of fact, designed. By something. Let’s call that something (the one that has done the design) “a mind”, and let’s concede that such mind has to be external to the universe itself.  

·         There are conscious beings in the universe, starting with us, humans, which exhibit that consciousness to a highest degree, but following with a plethora of other living things, some of which seem to be also conscious (we don’t need to concern ourselves now with just how similar or how different those other types of consciousness can be from our own). That is, there are “minds” within the universe. If we want to be fully rigorous, we can only have absolute certainty of one mind (namely, ours), and the extent to which we can be sure of the existence of other minds is a pretty thorny issue that has exercised (unsuccessfully) intelligences more brilliant than mine. For the purposes of this post I’ll let it be at the point where I ask my patient readers to take it on faith that there are indeed other minds mostly like his own, which, as a minimal introspection will show, are capable of forming intentions, having desires, notice impressions, recall past events, harbor feelings, formulate sentences, invent stories, imagine alternative states of affairs, consider hypothetical consequences of actions and whatnot.

So far, and regardless of what some neuroscientists enamored of not-too-subtle splotches of color purporting to represent how our brain works (aka fMRI, EEGs and the like) would like you to believe, the interaction between those minds and the material reality to which they are tethered is pretty mysterious. We know that minds require a very, very complex biological structure, called brains, and made by a grey gooey weighing around five pounds and sitting inside our skull, to be self-conscious. If the brain is damaged, or dissolves after death, as far as we know the brain stops being able to manifest itself. Not being able to measure its influence in the material world any more (regardless of legend, lore, and a sometimes flourishing psychic industry), we assume it is no more, although a massive number of traditions maintain it just goes to some other place. If we are honest with ourselves, we have no credible evidence whatsoever of such persistence, and for all practical purposes (regarding this material universe we are familiar with) the disappearance of the brain is necessarily and inexorably accompanied by the disappearance of the mind it supported (or, as naturalist would prefer to say, unwittingly drawing on a scholastic term, of the mind it “embodied”).

·         We, humans, can understand the “deep” structure of the world (identify the astounding regularities we call “laws of nature”, and which enable us to predict how things will be in the future in an amazing number of realms, with an amazing degree of precision). To put it another way, our “minds” cannot just identify patterns, and then patterns within those patterns in a seemingly unbounded recursivity, but can quantify those patterns, abstract them from the precise conditions we have so far observed and generalize them to other equivalent ones (to other places, or other times, be they in the future or in the past). And, in what may well be the most surprising aspect of this ability of ours, we have devised a whole method to test those regularities, recreating the precise combination of observed conditions and intended variation to ascertain if the model of how reality works does indeed correspond reliably with reality itself.

There is some legitimate discussion about how much of the structure of reality we really understand, and about the possibility of some day understanding all of it, and how such understanding would look like (what a “Grand Unified Theory” would be), but what few people deny is that we are indeed making progress, every passing century allows us to model and predict and tinker with new areas, in a sense confirming that the understanding we have gained so far is for real, is the reflection of a deeper alignment between our knowledge (a mental aspect) and what is “really out there”. I mention this because in the “social sciences” (an oxymoron, as I’m about to explain) since the beginning of the last century there has been this notion about the supposedly shaky status of the “natural sciences” (or even “hard sciences”), which has taken a number of forms (scientific paradigm theory, social constructivism, epistemic skepticism, Edimburgh School strong program) and basically maintains that the apparent success of physics, chemistry (a branch of physics), engineering and the like is just a mirage, born out of the power that technicians exert over how natural science is taught. So the progress of the sciences is not a reflection of our minds somehow getting closer to “truth” (a very tricky concept), or of us refining our understanding of how “the external world” really works (as there is no external world, or if there is, as Kant would have it, there is no way for us to know anything about it). It is just a matter of wily teachers duping their gullible pupils in some methodologies that conscientiously erase every alternative approach that came before, and brainwashes them in appreciating only the “newest” way of doing things. “Newest”, of course, is uncritically equated with “better”, or “truer”, but in reality it is not, everything is a social construct, hiding power relationships (thus the professor is more powerful than the pupil, the physicists are more powerful than the literary critic, and all of them are more powerful than the secretary that, through the practice of transcendental meditation, understands the true nature of reality better than any of them).

May be. May be, as Richard Rorty put it, geology is not really a science about rocks and mountains because there are no such things as “rocks and mountains” (there are only mental representations, and words that try to describe them whilst being very imperfect means of conveying meaning from one mind to the next). I can’t be sure of certain things like what would Rick Rorty think of this post (and of the kind of things that social sciences deal with in general). But I’m pretty sure of what the temperature of a nuclear power plant core will be a certain amount of time after scramming if the primary pumps do not keep recirculating the coolant. I’m pretty sure of the amount of weight a bridge can support before collapsing, or the amount of radiation at a certain point of the spent fuel pool given the level of burning such fuel has sustained. Even for non-deterministic events I can calculate with astounding precision the probability of finding certain electron (with a very finely measured energy level) in certain region of the space. And I know when a new theory to explain the behavior of the core of the NPP, of the bridge and of the electron is “better” or “truer” (when it gives me more precise predictions, applicable to a wider range of cases). So I’ll leave the discussion of the “real” existence of the core, the bridge and the electron to people trained in disciplines that obviously have not prepared them to distinguish in a similar way between good and bad theories, between those that describe nature more truly or less truly (maybe the objects their theories deal with are not amenable to such clear cut distinctions, I won't go into that here). I’ll just tell my readers bluntly that, in the realm of inanimate matter (that not involving minds, isn’t that curious?) we can confidently assert with Hegel that “all the real is rational, and all the rational is real”. We can assert, with an extraordinary level of certainty, that there is a material world independent from us and, what is more surprising, that our minds can, to a (so far) ever increasing degree understand that material world, construct inside them “mental models” that reflect such reality with ever increasing accuracy and elegance and perspicuity.

So, to recap, there are three extremely important things that, before forming our beliefs, we should consider, namely:

1.       The universe has been designed by a mind outside it

2.       There are other minds (other, that is, than our own) inside it

3.       Those minds can understand how the universe works (which can alternatively be stated as: "there is a homothecy between the mind that designed the universe and the minds that inhabit it")

Given how long it has taken me to argue for those three simple truths, I’ll leave the consequences we should extract from them (and maybe some further strengthening of the argument by considering the most common objections) to my next post.