Plato

I learned from my living teachers‑Jeff Wallin, Harry Jaffa, Bill Allen, Bill Rood, and Harry Neumann, among others.  The most important thing they taught me was how to read.  That made it possible to learn from other teachers‑Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, among others.  One of the reasons that I became enchanted with the biosocial sciences is that this branch of modern science deepened, enriched and confirmed all that I had learned from all of the above. 

Tonight, while reading about the early evolution of living organisms, I returned to thinking about Plato.  Unlike Aristotle, who has been largely recognized as the founder of biology, Plato is still usually regarded as a philosophical dead end.  Yes, his moral thought is interesting, but his metaphysics is a joke. 

I think that the dismissal of Plato is altogether wrong.  The argument about justice in the Republic presents for the first time the elements that make up the basis of modern sociobiology.  I won’t go into that here.  Instead I will focus on the most famous Platonic idea, the one that most responsible for his poor reputation.  I mean, of course, the theory of ideas. 

The textbook interpretation of the theory goes like this: Plato believed that there were ideas, or forms, laid up in heaven.  These ideas are perfect and eternal.  All visible objects are visible and comprehensible because they somehow “participate” in these ideas; that is to say, they are expressions of them.  That sounds pretty air-headed, and so it is usually dismissed as such. 

To so whether this judgment is just, we need to see how and why Plato (or Plato’s Socrates) developed this doctrine.  Consider the difference between a painter and a craftsman.  The painter looks at a three-dimensional object and produces a two-dimensional image.  The image may be altogether realistic; however, it is only the image of an image.  It shows us one perspective on the object but lacks the reality of the original. 

The craftsman, by contrast, looks at the object and produces another object that is real.  It is somehow connected to the original and yet it is another thing.  Philosophy and its offspring science cannot hope to reproduce all the objects that they are investigating; they can, however, attempt to gain the same understanding as the craftsman.  The philosopher wants to know not just what the object (a tree, justice, beauty, etc.) looks like but what it really is.  How do we understand the difference?

Consider what it is like to approach a tall tree from a distance.  At first, the tree looks very small.  You can cover it up by raising your hand.  So, the tree is smaller than your hand.  That is what your eyes are telling you.  Now walk towards the tree.  It grows in size as you approach it.  When you are near, it is very large and your hand can no longer conceal it.  The tree is much smaller than your hand.  That is what your eyes are now telling you.  Your eyes are confused, but your mind is not.  You recognize that the tree hasn’t really changed in size.  What has changed is your perspective.  From this, Plato’s Socrates concluded, we do not perceive actual objects with our eyes at all.  We perceive them with our minds.  This tree right here is not in fact visible to the eye. 

If we stipulate that individual, living, three-dimensional trees do in fact exist, then we have to agree with Plato.  We depend on extrasensory perception to be aware of them.  Now walk around the tree.  It looks different from each direction.  Yet these different images all are produced by a single object‑the one individual tree‑that is apprehended by the mind.  No one image is truer than another, yet all are true enough. 

Plato took a leap here.  If this is what happens when we perceive an individual tree, what happens when we recognize a second tree as in some sense the same thing?  Plato’s Socrates suggested that just as one individual tree exists behind the various images it casts as we approach it and walk around it, so the idea of the tree must exist behind all the individual trees that we encounter.  Just as our mind perceives the individual and so integrates our various images of it, so our mind perceives the idea of the tree and so allows us to recognize a general category.  Just as the individual tree changes in our perception of it, so trees come and go but the idea of tree remains the same. 

I say that Socrates “suggested” this because he is very careful in the dialogues.  He frequently says only that it is something like this.  He is also very uncertain as to what should be included in the realm of ideas.  Is it complex objects like trees or simpler concepts like mathematical forms?  There must be something more permanent and comprehensible than the objects we perceive if we can hope to understand anything.  Plato, of course, was right. 

Our ability to categorize species of plants and animals is imperfect.  That we can do it at all is possible because we can perceive something that is more enduring that the individual organisms.  We are perceiving, if only dimly, an object that extends across space and backward in time: the history of a species. 

I submit that biology is pregnant with Platonic forms.  Consider the difference between a jellyfish and a catfish.  The jellyfish has a top and a bottom, but not left and right or a back and front.  This is called radial symmetry.  A catfish has a top and a bottom, a back and a front, and a left and right.  These are Platonic forms. 

I am not sure whether the Platonic forms are laid up in heaven or not.  I am sure that these forms are real and preexist the creatures that participate in them.  You probably have to get bilaterians (creatures with a right and left) before you get mobile creatures and eyes.  There are only so many possible forms in organic design space. 

The first bilaterians probably crawled along dense, bacterial mats harvesting their food.  Eventually, some of them discovered that the decaying bodies of their kind were rich sources of the nutrients they sought.  Then some of them discovered that their living fellows were an even richer source.  This evolutionary trajectory, which made possible creatures such as ourselves, was the result of organized life exploring the avenues made possible by a Platonic design space. 

The Rational Content of Emotions

This morning I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts Invisibilia.  I was doing the dishes.  Put this one on.  It is brilliant.  The topic was emotions, one of two on that.  I haven’t listened to the second one yet. 

The podcast interviewed Lisa Feldman Barrett, a research psychologist who specializes in the study of emotions.  She has a book.  How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.  I walked up to the Northern library to check it out and… it is missing.  So I sought out several of her papers and read them this afternoon.  It was very interesting. 

I have long accepted a view that, according to Barrett, is misguided.  That view is what she calls the Natural Kinds View.  Human beings are born with a more or less fixed pallet of emotions (my term): anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and happiness, etc.  When something happens‑I am offended, threatened, disappointed, etc.‑the emotion is triggered more or less automatically.  The emotions are hardwired into the brain and produce all of our emotional experience in the way that a set of colored pixels in the screen produce all the colors of a cooking show. 

Barret says that decades of psychological research have failed to establish or clinically define any of these well-known emotions.  You will have to read her book to see why.  She argues (if I understand the paper) that there are only two fixed biological foundations for emotions: valence (I like or I like not) and arousal (I act or I act not). 

What makes for all the emotions that we think we experience and have names for?  She argues that, in any emotionally relevant context, we interpret the visceral experience according to our concepts.  If I don’t like what is happening, my brain has to supply a context that will tell me what to do or not do about it.  If my brain interprets the displeasure I feel as an offense (he took my fish!) then I interpret it as anger and that is what I feel.  If I interpret my arousal as “I am out of here!” then I run.  The character of the various emotions is largely supplied by the contest and my concepts. 

An analogy occurs to me, and it is mine not hers’s.  Our tongues have only a small number of sensations: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and I forget the other one.  Yet we experience a wide range of tastes: wine, beer, cheese, pan sauce poured over lamb shank, beer…  Our sense of smell provides all the wide range.  Likewise, our biological pallet is just valence and arousal.  Categorization provides all the nuance. 

As a biopolitical scientist, I like the idea of biologically fixed emotions.  As a student of Aristotle and Plato, I like the idea of a rational component to the emotions.  I am pretty sure that when I am angry I am angry about something, and that implies categorization and concepts.  This is worth keeping an eye on.  

Good News about Evolution and Classical Political Philosophy

I was a student of the late Harry V. Jaffa.  One of the seminal moments in my intellectual career took place over two days, when I read Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided.  Anyone who has read that amazing book will sympathize with my experience.  When I went to bed on the first night, I was convinced that Stephen Douglas was right in his argument with Lincoln.  When I finished the second half of the book the next day, I was persuaded that Lincoln was right: slavery is by nature always and everywhere unjust.  I have never revised that opinion, and I have been a natural right thinker ever since. 

Another seminal moment came many years later when I was reading a primer on evolutionary psychology.  It had occurred to me that, if we want to talk about natural right, we might want to know something about nature.  Sitting on my deck one grey afternoon, I realized that Darwinian evolution was not opposed to Aristotle and to the classical natural right that Jaffa championed.  On the contrary, evolutionary theory can provide powerful support for the thought of Aristotle.  I later concluded that the same was true for Plato. 

Most of those who take the writings of the classical philosophers seriously, not as mere historical artifacts but as guides to the truth about morality and politics, see evolutionary thought as utterly opposed to classical thought.  A good example of this is the first two paragraphs of a 2013 conference paper written by Steven Forde. 

As a political theorist by training, I avoided tackling the problem of Darwin for many years. I suspected that the theory of evolution would call into question the very enterprise of political theory, as traditionally understood. My fears have largely been borne out, as the following indicates. Yet it is impossible in this day and age to deny that evolution is the truth—that human beings, like all existing life forms, evolved out of prior, typically simpler life forms. Our organs, including our brains, are all descendants of organs found in earlier primates. Certain key intellectual capacities, such as the capacity for language, are “hard wired” into our neural makeup. Certain emotional responses appear to be so as well, including some closely tied to our sense of morality. These include such natural responses as empathy and indignation, emotions that have analogues in other primates today, and presumably in our evolutionary ancestors.

These facts, along with findings of neuropsychology concerning gratification received from cooperative and other putatively moral behavior, suggests that morality is hard wired into us. This is good news and bad news. The good news is that it seems we are destined to remain a moral, cooperative species regardless of intellectual or cultural trends. The bad news is that this morality has no grounding of the sort that ordinary human beings believe it does, and that traditional political philosophy sought. It is simply an artifact of our evolutionary heritage. This is the conclusion I dreaded all the years I avoided this topic of study.

This is an example of what I would call a pious dread.  It reminds one of the famous quote from the wife of the Bishop of Worcester who, when informed of Darwin’s theory, supposedly said:

My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.

The most significant passage in that quote is this one:

Morality has no grounding of the sort that ordinary human beings believe it does, and that traditional political philosophy sought. It is simply an artifact of our evolutionary heritage.

My question, which I do not think was addressed in Forde’s piece, is what kind of grounding do ordinary human beings think morality has?  What kind of grounding does traditional political philosophy seek?  Human beings, ordinary or otherwise, are moral animals.  We are endowed with moral emotions, including guilt, righteous indignation, and admiration.  Perhaps what we seek is an account of moral right that satisfies those emotions.  What sort of account might that be?

The most satisfying account is this: justice is what God demands and human beings must choose, or else.  Divine law provides powerful support for moral emotions; however, as such, it doesn’t provide much that the philosophically inclined can work with.  What does provide that material is the fact that a lot of moral rules seem to be socially functional.  Prohibitions against murder, theft, adultery, and incest, are all defensible by rational argument. 

The strongest defense of justice without direct appeal to divine law is found in Plato’s Republic.  In the first book Thrasymachus argues that justice is no more than a confidence game played by the strong in any political community in order to persuade the weak to accept their lot.  The weakness in that argument is that it can’t explain why the con job works.  If all of us want the same things, power, prosperity, revenge, why are moral admonitions useful to the strong? 

Socrates argues that even a gang of thieves must observe some rules of justice among themselves if they are to effectively exploit others.  In the second book, Glaucon and Adiemantus challenge that answer.  Glaucon presents a view of justice that he himself finds repulsive.  Most people would like to exploit everyone else but know that they are not powerful enough to do so.  Principles of justice are then a mere compromise: we agree not to exploit others so that others will not exploit us.  Adiemantus argues that people do genuinely value justice, but what they care about is not the thing itself but the reputation for it.  A man who appears just will attract good friends and arrange good marriages for his offspring. 

Why are the two brothers unsatisfied with their respective accounts of justice?  While these accounts provide objective grounds from justice, they are vulgar rather than noble or, what is the same thing, beautiful.  Apparently, only a beautiful account of justice will be genuinely satisfying. 

In the body of the Republic, Socrates presents an account of justice as an element in a well ordered soul.  In such a soul, intelligence rules the passions and the passions rule the appetites.  An ideal regime would reflect that order, with the philosopher (Socrates or someone like him) ruling, the exquisitely trained military class obeying his commands, and the producer class minding its own business by producing. 

This account provides a beautiful and coherent solution to the problem.  If an individual behaves unjustly, he feeds the worst part of himself and that means that he cannot have the kind of soul that makes for the best possible life.  The same is true of political communities.  Thucydides supplements this account.  Cities that behave unjustly toward other cities encouraged injustice among their own citizens, thus undermining the cooperation upon which their strength depends.  What is most beautiful is the human being who lives the most admirable life and the city that governs itself and its foreign policy in a way that makes for the most admirable civil life.  If justice contributes to that, then justice is indeed beautiful. 

Socrates takes the moral emotions of his interlocutors for granted.  He does not try to explain how we became such creatures for whom a beautifully ordered soul and a beautifully ordered regime might be possible.  He does suggest that the most natural political community is one that provides for the minimal physical needs of human animals with the least effort.  For justice to be genuinely beautiful, it has to provide for a life that includes more than that: noble deeds and, last but not least, the leisure for some to pursue philosophy. 

Evolutionary theory explains how we became the kind of animal that Socrates examines.  Our moral emotions were shaped by eons of natural selection.  They made it possible for us to cooperate on a level far beyond that of other animals.  At some point, they made it possible for us to satisfy our basic biological needs and then seek satisfactions beyond those needs.  The rise of civilization made it possible for some people (and eventually most people) to stop worrying about the next meal and look instead for something interesting to do. 

The best human lives are ones that are not merely physically and emotionally satisfying.  They are interesting.  What interests us is rooted in our evolutionary heritage but necessarily goes beyond that heritage.  We inherit preferences for color, symmetrical lines and objects, and landscapes including mountains and water.  That doesn’t mean we have genes for liking a J. M. W. Turner painting.  An appreciation for great art depends on evolved dispositions; however, it explores new existential space that cannot be reduced to those dispositions.  We inherit preferences for fat, sugar, texture, and color in foods.  That doesn’t mean that we have genes for liking a four star Michelin meal.  We inherit preferences for certain kinds of sounds and harmonies.  A William Parker jazz composition builds on those evolved dispositions to produce something that will not advance the interests of my genes but is simply beautiful. 

A house is an artificial product.  Houses do not grow as trees do.  It is nonetheless natural in so far as it satisfies natural inclinations for a safe, warm, and dry shelter.  Political communities are artificial.  As Aristotle recognized, we have to build them more or less deliberately.  They come to be, he said, for the sake of mere life.  That is Darwinian thinking.  Political communities emerged in a long history of human beings trying to survive in as comfortable a way as possible.  They exist, Aristotle said, for the sake of the good life.  Once a political community has achieved self-sufficiency, its citizens can turn to explore the benefits of existential freedom. 

This is the ground for morality that Forbes craves.  Cooperation based on reciprocity is central to every code of moral behavior.  It not only allows individual human beings to form communities that secure the most basic needs; it also allows for the production of surpluses that allow us to live beautiful lives.  His pious fear is unfounded.  

On the Beautiful and the Good 2

Intrepid reader and friend Miranda poses two good questions to my last post on the beautiful and the good. 

If the good is what is worth choosing, then couldn't something immoral be good? For instance, New Gingrich chose to cheat on his cancer stricken wife with his mistress. This benefited him in a number of ways. He gained a partner who he said understood him better and who was younger, more attractive and more energetic than his wife. He does not seem to have regretted his choice and, indeed, seems to have lived happily with his new partner ever since. His choice, then, seems relatively choice-worthy. But was it good?

I think that this question teases out the distinction between moral and non-moral goods.  If I choose to eat an apple rather than an orange, this is a non-moral choice.  If I choose to break a promise that turned out to be more costly than I anticipated, that is a moral choice.  What is the difference? 

I hold that the moral is a subset of the good.  Any time I am faced with a choice between something that seems better and something that seems worse, I am obviously exercising the capacity to distinguish between the two.  All living organisms have this capacity; animals, but not plants, can exercise it at the level of sentience. 

At least one animal (and probably a few more) can also distinguish between what looks good and what is good.  Whenever a human being is tempted to choose the first and not the second, the dimension of moral choice has opened up.  I think that even when such a choice is limited to pure self-interest it is still moral; otherwise, why do people often feel ashamed and guilty when they choose things (donuts and cigarettes) that they know aren’t good for them?  Why do they feel the same emotions when the doctor gives them the bad news? 

You explain well why the choice to dump one spouse and pick up another looked like a good choice.  To show that it was a bad one, you would have to show some set of criteria that is more authoritative or more comprehensive than the ones you mention.  Since I think that some grounds for divorce are legitimate (one of my relatives divorced a man who was abusing her sons) I would be hesitant to pass judgment without knowing more than I care to know about Newt Gingrich.  I would point out that any hope he had of appearing as a noble statesman (something I think he desperately graved) went out the window with his choice. 

Both Plato and Aristotle divided goods into three categories: those that are good in themselves (philosophy, for example); those that are good only in so far as they contribute to some other good (a visit to the dentist); and those that are both (noble actions on behalf of a republic).  Because we are talking about the good, we are always in the realm of calculation and action taken without full knowledge of the consequences.  This is why most moral choices involve judgment calls. 

Regarding beauty: If beauty is good, what do we call the quality we usually refer to as beauty when it describes something bad? Deadly storms or poison dart frogs come to mind.

Poison dart frogs are easy.  They are indeed good, to look at.  I have no trouble in calling them beautiful for that reason.  They are also beautiful, I expect, to a hunter who needs to whip up some poison darts to bring down a monkey from high up in the canopy. 

A harder question for my Socratic theory of the beautiful is why so much of our fiction (Shakespeare comes to mind) is about bad choices.  I am tempted to say that we sometimes acquire a taste for what is initially bad (bitterness comes to mind).  That is clearly insufficient.  It is better to say that the human soul is beautiful in its potential, at least, and such poetry reveals it to us better than anything else.  We become deeper by our witness.  In the best cases, it teaches us what choices not to make.  Lincoln said, I believed, that he learned about tyranny from Macbeth. 

As for storms, they are indeed beautiful from a distance and very ugly when you are in their path.  It is not hard to explain the latter.  As for the former, there is nothing so grand as the sight of a hurricane moving in with a clear sky behind it.  Light and towering force are a composition to be reckoned with.  If we want to get some good out of it beyond the awe of the view, it teaches us how small our powers are even in this shallow skin of air we call an atmosphere.  That is good to know. 

ISIS doesn't need Trump

For many years I blogged on politics at South Dakota Politics.  I put it away because it took too much time away from my research interests.  It was a wise decision.  In the interest of making biopolitics relevant to right now politics, I will begin offering a few more explicitly political posts here. 

I begin by saying that I am no supporter of Donald Trump.  I think that his nomination is the worst decision the Republican Party has made in my lifetime.  I think that his nomination (like the strong run of Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side) is a sign of the loss of confidence in traditional institutions that is evident on both sides of the Atlantic.  It is not hard to see why that loss occurred.  (I suppose I will have to put that paragraph at the head of every explicitly political post I make). 

David Ignatius begins his recent piece with this bit:

Even by Donald Trump's standards, his comments about the Orlando shooting have been reckless and self-serving. They are also dangerous for the country.

This is the exasperation of the political/media elite.  He can’t understand why all the villagers (instead of a very few of them) aren’t headed to Trump Towers with torches.  This is the way you think when you can’t understand how anyone could think any other way.  To see what a more reasonable approach looks like, try Meagan McArdle. 

Ignatius has some good news and some bad news.  Here’s the good news. 

Trump's polarizing rhetoric on this issue may be the best thing the Islamic State has going for it, according to some leading U.S. and foreign counterterrorism experts. The group's self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq is imploding. Its Syrian capital of Raqqah is surrounded and besieged; the gap in the Turkish-Syrian border that allowed the free flow of foreign fighters is finally being closed; Sunni tribal sheikhs who until recently had cooperated with the Islamic State are switching sides. The group's narrative is collapsing -- with one exception.

Maybe this good news is the real news; but if it is, is it really that the ISIS narrative is collapsing?  Isn’t the important thing that its battlefield position is collapsing? 

Here is the bad news:

The strongest remaining force that propels the Islamic State is the Islamophobia of Trump and his European counterparts, argue senior intelligence strategists for the U.S.-led coalition. Inflammatory, xenophobic statements about Muslims reinforce the jihadists' claims that they are Muslim knights fighting against an intolerant West. Trump unwittingly gives them precisely the role they dream about.

One wonders what evidence Ignatius has for the strength of this force, or how strongly “the Islamophobia of Trump and his European counterparts” really “propels” the Islamic state.  Is it really Trump that warms the heart of Muslim knights as they sing themselves to sleep?  Finally we get this:

Trump doesn't seem to understand that the real danger for the West is not the isolated acts of terror by disaffected youths, such as Mateen's massacre in Orlando. That's a threat to Americans, but one that can at least be mitigated some with better security and intelligence. The bigger nightmare happens if Muslims, as a whole, conclude that their community is under threat and respond as a group.

This is nonsense on stilts.  To see that, just apply the same reasoning to other animosities.  Do white people join the Klan because they think that Black people don’t like them?  No.  They join the Klan because they don’t like Black people.  Do anti-Semites because they think that the Jews really threaten them?  No.  They say that the Jews are a threat because they don’t like Jews.  Does ISIS rise and flourish because Muslims worldwide are deeply invested in the Republican primaries?  Ignatius gets it ass backwards. 

There is nothing that African Americans or Jews could do or not do that would satisfy their enemies.  To say otherwise is to buy into the race slander.  The position of the radical Islamists and their enemies (pretty much every living thing and a lot of non-living things like ancient statues) is exactly the same. 

The best analysis of prejudice is found in Plato’s Apology of Socrates.  On trial for his life, Socrates has to explain why so many people want him dead.  I interrogate them daily, he explains, and ask them about justice and truth and piety.  I expose them as ignorant about the most important things.  That is why they hate me.  But they can’t admit that, so they invent stories about me that aren’t true. 

I used to drive frequently through a little town in Arkansas.  On one side of the road was a well-tended graveyard.  On the other was a graveyard with overgrown grass hiding old stones.  Want to guess which was the White graveyard and which the Black?  What was the point of that?  The folks on one side lived and died believing that they could only keep what they had if they could keep the other side down.  That isn’t true, but it is what they thought.  So they make up stories about the other side: they are simple minded, they are just animals, etc.  That is how prejudice works, is Socrates’ time and ours. 

ISIS doesn’t depend on Trump or anyone else for their narrative.  They are capable of constructing it all by themselves.  Human political communities, from the earliest tribes, arose for purposes of offense and defense against other human beings.  As human cultures became more sophisticated, so did the narratives.  Our people are the people; our gods are the right gods.  As Nietzsche observed in The Genealogy of Morality, such narrative construction becomes much more problematic when your group is for a long time dominate by others.  The relative economic and political weakness of Islamic populations is one such problem.  ISIS is an attempt to build an empowering narrative under these conditions.  It is the underlying political and economic realities that drive the narrative, not the Donald. 

I close by noting that Ignatius view is just as insulting to Muslims, American and otherwise, as is Trump’s. 

The bigger nightmare happens if Muslims, as a whole, conclude that their community is under threat and respond as a group.

Why, exactly, should that be a nightmare?  American Jews have long had the sense threat their community is under threat and they have long responded as a group.  They organize, lobby, and vote accordingly.  The same is true of many other American communities, such as the Italians or my Irish ancestors.  The Chicago Irish may send a dollar to Sinn Fein now and then, but the only thing that gets bombed locally is the Chicago Irish.  Why does David Ignatius think that American Muslims are less civilized than that? 

The meaning of leadership

Some years ago, when I presented a paper at a meeting of the Association of Politics and Life Sciences in Lubbock, Texas, I submitted the following definition of leadership:

When one or more human beings take command of others, thus forming a human community capable of acting for the good of the whole, that is leadership. 

I like that definition because it ties together the various kinds of rule‑parent over child, captain over army, government over the governed, while incorporating Aristotle’s definition of good rule.  The father rules the family as the good king rules the city: for the common good. 

I would argue that “the common good” can be understood functionally in a way that is consistent with evolutionary theory but also extends beyond mere biological imperatives.  Aristotle states that the polis, or political community comes to be for the sake of mere life but exists for the sake of the good life.  “Mere life” means that the political community satisfied biological imperatives better than they could otherwise be satisfied.  “The good life” is an indirect rather than a direct product of evolutionary processes.  Human beings can be successful in a biological sense while being utterly miserable.  Very fortunately for us, our evolutionary history makes it possible for us to live satisfying lives, which is to say, that we can enjoy a life that is both beautiful and good. 

My definition was challenged on the grounds that a single definition of leadership is neither possible nor necessary.  Might we not mean a variety of things when we use the term “leadership”?  It is certain that we do give leadership awards to people merely because we admire them, without checking in with my definition. 

My instincts in these matters is platonic.  I like universal definitions.  I am, however, willing to allow an Aristotelian critique.  Aristotle pointed out that when we use the same word on more than one occasion, there are three possibilities.  One is that the word is a homonym.  We say “vampire bat” and “baseball bat”, the two uses of bat have only the letters and sounds in common. 

A second possibility is that we use the same word in different senses but that the different senses branch out from a single, complex phenomenon.  If I say that cardinals are red and that cardinals are birds and that there are cardinals, the “to be” verb means very different things.  The first states that cardinals present a certain visual aspect when I see them.  The second, that this observed creature falls into a species class.  The latter indicates that, unlike dragons, which may be said to have color and fall into a class of creatures, cardinals actually exist.  While these uses of the verb are distinct, they all represent distinct dimensions (or aspects if you prefer) of a single actual bird on my lawn. 

Finally, we may use a word to indicate something that is exactly the same thing even though it appears in a variety of contexts and colors.  When bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics and finches adapt to changes in weather by a change in the structure of their beaks, this is natural selection.  The term means exactly the same thing in both cases, despite the enormous difference between the organisms to which it is applied.  I won’t claim here that this is an example of a Platonic form.  Not yet. 

I will say that a word is useful in the third sense when it expresses our recognition of a fundamental phenomenon.  The genuine meaning of “heat” is the energy in the vibrations of molecules in a substance.  All other uses of the word, as for example hot peppers or a lot of uniformed policemen, are metaphors that derive their literary force from the original.  The genuine meaning of natural selection is the deferential reproductive success of distinct forms in a given environment. 

I think that my definition of leadership identifies a fundamental phenomenon.  I was brought back to this topic by a recent piece on capuchin monkeys.  When these primates forage, how do they decide which way to go?  The answer is that individuals break off in different directions.  As the pathbreaker moves away from the group, she looks behind her to see who is following.  If no one follows, she will give up and rejoin the group.  If her entourage includes two or three, or four or more… .  The more of her troop that follow, the more likely she is to persist in her chosen direction.  Likewise, the more that follow, the more likely the rest of the troop will follow suit.  That is leadership in a basically democratic community.  Individuals compete for the position of archon, and so the group can act as a unit working for the advantage of all. 

Something the same can be seen in the waggle dance of honey bees, where returning hunters make their case for this or that patch of flowers.  It can be seen also in the function of an animal mind.  How does the rabbit in my back yard decide what to do when I step off my deck?  Different mental schema compete.  One says “freeze”.  Another says “run like hell”.  As long as I am moving at a tangent and my course is not too close, the animal is a statue.  I have seen a cat walk right by a frozen rabbit.  If I stop and move toward the rabbit, the “run” schema takes command.  This is leadership. 

I am pretty sure that this is how the human mind works as well.  My consciousness is, at best, a prime minister managing various constitutencies.  My desire to lose weight addresses the ministry while my appetite screams from the gallery about chocolate eclairs.  Meanwhile my fellow Republicans seem about to nominate a chocolate éclair to run for president.  This leads me to thinking about my paper for the IPSA in Poland.  I will be there when the Republican convention is happening.  I may come back. 

Progress & Evolution

The International Political Science Association has picked Poznań, Poland as the site for this year’s conference, after pulling out from Istanbul.  While I dearly wished to visit Turkey, I think this will be a wonderful place to visit.  It is close, by rail, to Berlin. 

Meanwhile, I have been reading a very interesting book.  On the Origins of Autonomy: A New Look at the Major Transitions in Evolution documents the thinking of Bernd Rosslenbroich, whose essays I relied heavily on when I presented a paper on autonomy at the IPSA two years ago. 

Rosslenbroich addresses a problem at the center of my attention as a modern representative of Plato: understanding the forms of organisms.  Here is his point of departure.  Modern evolutionary biology models the history of life on earth as a steadily branching tree.  At the root of the tree are the simplest, UR organisms: the first living things successfully replicating their forms by communicating information to successive generations and adapting successfully to their environments.  To present the model as a two dimensional image, the vertical dimension represents time and the horizontal dimension represents diversity.  Thus the tree branches out as more and more diverse organic forms emerge in evolutionary history. 

The tree metaphor is misleading in one fundamental respect.  The growth of a real tree is teleological in the sense that the mature oak is already contained in the acorn and its growth is constantly corrected according to that organic program.  The sapling progresses toward the oak.  Evolution is rather a mechanical process.  As the lineage of life extends through time, it pushes into new environmental niches and thus produces increasingly diverse forms. 

Rosslenbroich’s central idea is that evolutionary history cannot be understood without the idea of progress.  Just because the forces of selection and adaptation are mechanical and hence not goal directed doesn’t mean that there is no progression from lower to higher forms.  He argues that evolutionary history cannot be understood without some notion of progress and that all attempts to purge such notions from the language of biology inevitably fail. 

Consider that the tree of life might, conceivably have produced an increasing diversity of prokaryotic cells, differing only in the traits by which they adapt to diverse environments.  Obviously that is not what happened.  Eukaryotic cells, with a defined nucleus emerge and then later multicellular creatures.  Eventually the plants, reptiles, and mammals appear.  To articulate the difference between the fanciful and the actual scenarios, we need some coherent account of progress from lower to higher forms. 

As usual, Aristotle was way ahead of us.  His account of organic progress was based on the idea of the incorporation of simpler forms of organic processes within more complex forms.  Plants have only nutritive soul.  They feed and produce waste; grow, flourish, and then wither and die.  Animals have these same capacities, but also the powers to perceive at a distance and move about.  Human beings enjoy all the organic powers of plants and animals, but add the power of logos.  We are aware of the difference between perception and reality, what looks good and what is good. 

Rosslenbroich looks to ground the idea of evolutionary progress in increasing autonomy.  The essence of the organic lies in the resistance to the external environment.  All organisms are organized so as to maintain their internal states in shifting environmental conditions by finding sources of materials and energy and, always, by building walls against the environment within which these processes can work.  Over time, progressively more effective means of resisting the environment emerge.  Eukaryotic cells sequester their DNA within a more protected nucleus.  Warm blooded mammals can maintain their body heat and so forage at night. 

I think that this is dead spot on.  When I first read the work of the great philosopher Hans Jonas, I have thought that increasing dimensions of freedom was the key to understanding evolution.  I am gratified to find this same language in Rosslenbroich.  As Aristotle argued, human beings are more than just animals but we are at least animals.  Even if a group of chimpanzees could produce a copy of Richard the Third by random typing, and they can, given impossibly vast resources and time, they still couldn’t appreciate the play. 

Those who are afraid of evolutionary explanations of the human origins fear that such explanations reduce us to mere animals or worse to mere matter in motion.  Rosslenbroich shows us that such reduction is unwarranted and in fact impossible.  I am going well beyond his purpose here, but I submit that the freedom of the human soul, on which all the beautiful and noble things depend, is supported rather than undermined by an evolutionary account of the human being. 

ps.  I would point out that I wrote this post sitting on my deck in my tent.  It was a bit too chilly to sit out uncovered and I wanted to smoke a cigar while I wrote.  I can't do so inside because I am married.  That is how organisms seek autonomy.

Justice is beautiful because it is good and good because it is beautiful

The following is the beginning of the essay I will present next week at the annual meeting of the Association of Politics and Life Sciences.  We are meeting in Madison, Wisconsin.  

In Book 1 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates silences the sophist Thrasymachus with his famous “honor among thieves” argument.  Thrasymachus argued that justice is merely the interest of the stronger, i.e., that right actions are what subordinates must do in the service of their superiors.  Socrates responded that the “stronger” are so because they are able to cooperate with one another in their drive toward dominion; and so, they must be just at least toward one another.  Justice is then superior injustice even if you accept the view that all human actions are motivated by selfish desire. 

At the beginning of Book 2, the spirited brothers Glaucon and Adiemantus announce their dissatisfaction with this argument and each issues a challenge to Socrates.  These challenges come in the form of claims about what “the many” believe about justice and injustice.  The former argues that, in the view of the many, justice is a mean between the greatest evil and the greatest good.  The greatest evil is to be exploited by someone else.  The greatest good is to be able to exploit others.  The many realize that without restraints on human behavior, they would be the victims rather than the perpetrators of injustice.  They value justice only as a lesser evil.  Glaucon wants Socrates to show him that this view of justice is not correct, that justice is something good in itself.

Adiemantus’ view is more sophisticated.  He grants that the many do speak and act as if justice really were something good in itself; however, what they genuinely desire is the appearance and not the substance of justice.  Justice is like paper money.  It is valuable only because it is valued.  Righteous men value their reputation because it wins them partnerships and good marriages for their children.  Were it not for such commerce, they would not bother about it.  Adiemantus too wants Socrates to show him that justice is something good in itself and not something that is merely instrumental to some selfish end. 

The remainder of the Republic is devoted to Socrates’ efforts to satisfy the two brothers.  I believe that Socrates’ account of justice is convincing.  Socrates argues that justice is in fact the order in a well-ordered soul.  When intelligence governs the passions and the passions govern the appetites, each part of the tripartite soul doing its own proper business, that is justice.  This account succeeds because it presents justice as something not merely good, but beautiful; or more precisely, it is good because it is beautiful.  That is what the brothers crave. 

In this paper I will be making something of a defense on his behalf; however, I will do so by focusing on the simple fact that Glaucon and Adiemantus make their challenges in the first place.  Were Socrates wrong, neither brother would bother to seek an argument in support of justice.  Were Socrates wrong, the popular explanations of justice that the brothers articulate would not make sense, even in their apparently diminished forms. 

This is important because modern political theory and philosophical ethics largely accepts the popular views of justice much as they are articulated by Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adiemantus.  Justice is indeed valuable in so far as it advances the interests of a population strong enough to defend it.  Even then, it is valued only as a token.  He who carries the token advertises himself as a good partner in cooperative ventures. 

This view has received important support in recent years from evolutionary accounts of morality.  In the work of Christopher Boehm, Michael Tomasello, and David Sloan Wilson, morality emerges in the history of human evolution because it protects the weaker members against the stronger, encourages mutual obligations, and thus allows small groups of humans to effectively compete with other, equally rapacious bands of brothers.  All of human history over the last twelve thousand years or so represents a innovation built out of evolutionary components.  When one group assimilated another rather than annihilating it, bending the assimilated group to its service, much as one organism occasionally assimilates and exploits another, civilization was born.  For this to work, the dominate group must effectively cooperate and to do that competitive behavior within the dominate group must be controlled.  We are back to honor among thieves. 

I will argue that the moral (or the just) could only have functioned in that way because human beings are naturally inclined to see it as beautiful.  The beautiful thing is good because it is noble, beautiful to behold.  In turn, Socrates argues on many occasions in both Plato’s works and the Socratic dialogues of Xenophon, that the good is beautiful.  Socrates admires a beautiful set of armor because he can see that it was exquisitely tailored to some individual other than himself.  It was good for the armorer’s client in so far as it fit him.  It was good for Socrates only in so far as it was beautiful.  Beauty transcends the good which gives it birth.

To take another example from evolutionary psychology, imagine a beautiful house.  Now imagine that there is a verdant forest just behind it, and beyond that a range of hills.  Large picture windows at the front give views of a plain dotted with trees.  Not too far in the distance is a river or lake.  That is a valuable piece of real estate.  Why?  Our ancestors needed access to water and to the occasional prey that gathered there.  They also had to fear predators and other human beings.  They liked to be able to see what was coming and to have somewhere to retreat to.  Our notion of what is a beautiful home was forged as our ancestors moved about and succeeded in finding places that allowed them to flourish and thus become our ancestors.  A Montana ranch house I once visited has all of these elements but none of them were necessary for survival.  It was good because it was beautiful. 

We like to tell stories in which the wicked are defeated and the just triumph.  These stories are beautiful to us because we have a taste for justice.  That taste was a product of evolution because it promoted the successful reproduction of our great great… grandmothers and grandfathers.  That the taste for justice was selected for in our evolution doesn’t change the fact that the object of the taste often has nothing to do with our own reproductive success.  We admire justice even when it has nothing to do with us just as we admire a beautiful painting of a beautiful house that we can never live in.  In that way the taste for the noble transcends the good from which it was born. 

In this essay I will show that inequity aversion, the human distaste for injustice in both two party exchanges and in observations of third party exchanges, show that Socrates was right.  

How Group Selection Works

To say that a human being must breathe, eat, and defecate, all on a regular basis, in order or write poetry, does not reduce poetry to respiration and digestion; it simply reminds us that poets are biological beings.  Biological processes such as these may rarely be relevant to the interpretation of poetry but they are constantly relevant to an historical interpretation of households and cities.  Caesar cannot recline and enjoy his feasts if food does not come in and poop go out and neither can Rome. 

If you want to understand the idea of justice, as Plato’s Socrates sets out to do in the Republic, you will sooner or later have to account for the existence of human souls and human communities and that cannot be accomplished without evolutionary theory.  My position (big surprise) is that the latter completes Socrates’ account. 

I have been reading David Sloan Wilson’s Does Altruism Exist?  It reminded me of a fairy tale I composed some time ago to illustrate group selection.  I offer it here. 

Consider a group of imaginary primates living and hunting in small groups in an area covered by tall grass.  I’ll call them puds.  Some of the primates in each group are taller than the grass.  Others are smaller than the grass. 

Now consider that this population of puds is subject to two selection pressures.  The puds are preyed upon by a large avian animal.  I’ll call it a dragon.  Dragons cannot spot a single tall pud but can easily spot more than a handful when the group is moving.  When a dragon descends on a pud group, however, it can feed on large and small with equal ease.  Groups with a lot of tall puds are at a disadvantage, so that is selection against those groups. 

Within each group, tall puds have an advantage.  They are stronger and can forcibly mate with more females than their shorter male pud compatriots.  So in any group with both tall and short males, the taller will proliferate over time.  So that is selection against small puds. 

If the groups remain isolated from one another, the species is on the road to extinction.  Every group will eventually have enough basketball stars to attract a dragon and so every group will be eaten and the dragons will go on disability.

What will save the puds is that some of them will survive a dragon attack.  The survivors will find other survivors and form new groups.  Groups with more short pud fellows will survive longer and grow larger, increasing the supply of small puds in the total population.  If, however, every group has at least a few tall guys, the cycle will continue. 

One thing that might alter the trajectory is if the puds are smart enough to figure this out.  A bunch of small puds might realize that the two tall puds who made it to the founding council are a problem and vote them off of the island.  This rule, whether a product of pud culture or a slowly evolving disposition, would tilt the playing field in favor of puds against dragons.  How bad it would be for the latter depends on how tall genes are distributed in the population. 

I thought this up before I knew a lot about the research into group selection.  I intended it only as a demonstration that group selection was logically possible.  D.S. Wilson’s book gave me an example that neatly matches my fairy tale.  Pond skaters (Gerridae) are insects that skate across water in search of prey.  The males come in two flavors: rapists and gentlemen.  The former force themselves on any female they meet.  The latter wait until a female approaches to mate. 

Within groups of skaters, the rapists have an advantage.  They mate more often and produce more offspring.  So their sons proliferate in the group.  However, their appalling behavior doesn’t leave the females with enough time to feed, so they lay far fewer eggs than they would if they were well fed.  The result is that groups with more gentleman grow faster than those with more rapists. 

What keeps the gentleman in business is that females have some choice.  When groups are forming, females are more likely to join a group with more gentlemen.  That simple, biologically trigger preference, rewards chivalry with the precious coin of reproductive success. 

This explains so much.  It explains why cooperation is so difficult and how it is possible.  It explains why rules of justice are necessary among human beings and other social organisms and how justice is possible. 

Something more important now occurs to me.  The balance between group selection and individual selection can tilt either way.  When it tilts toward the group, eventually you get the assimilation of individual organisms into a new whole, as when a multi-cellular animal emerges from a cooperation of cells.  When it tilts the other way, the community with its social interactions disintegrates into individual competitors. 

Human beings are social animals but we are also individuals.  The entire field of justice and morality emerges from this fact.  All human activity, including poetry and politics, is possible because within group selection and between group selection balanced out, over a long period of our life on this earth.  

Defending the Humanities

It is generally agreed that the humanities are in crisis.  James McWilliams sums up the evidence at The Hedgehog Review. 

Nationally, the number of students majoring in the humanities has fallen substantially since 1970.5 At Stanford, 45 percent of the faculty is trained in the humanities, but only 15 percent of students major in humanities fields.6 At Yale, between 1971 and 2013 the proportion of humanities majors dropped from 53 percent to 25 percent among women, and from 37 percent to 21 percent among men. Meanwhile, economics has skyrocketed as a preferred major, with the number of economics majors growing almost threefold at traditionally humanities-inclined institutions such as Brown University.7 The acronym STEM—science, technology, engineering, mathematics—is now part of every university’s lingua franca.

I have read a lot of pieces recently that defended the value of the humanities and found them all reasonably convincing to someone who values the humanities.  That was good enough over the last two or three centuries, during which time the universities did the work that was once done by the Church: deciding what was worthy thinking about.  The authority of universities has been eroded by a number of factors, but the most important is the pressure from two directions: outside support (donors and state legislatures) and the market for students. 

I am pretty sure I know how not to defend the humanities in this situation.  One should not argue, as McWilliams does, for the value of not knowing everything.  He is worried in particular about the value of not knowing how the brain produces consciousness.  If we did know, he supposes, the humanities would lose all purpose.  

Knowing that there are things we don’t know—and may never know—has a humbling effect on the human mind. Humility is a form of modesty that asks us to accept ambiguity. Ambiguity, in turn, is ultimately what brings us together to explore the mysteries of existence through the wonder-driven endeavors we lump under that broad umbrella known as the humanities. If we knew it all, if we understood what it was like to be a bat, probably even Logan Sander would not be a comparative literature major.

In a way, to catch consciousness, to close the mind-body gap, would be to eliminate that humility. It would be to answer most of the big questions—to collapse the umbrella and move into a post-human world. And that might sound great to logical positivists and atheists and neurobiologists. But as the essayist Charles D’Ambrosio reminds us, “Answers are the end of speech, not the beginning.”

I share McWilliams’ concern for humility; however, the “STEM” disciplines are quite capable of humiliating themselves.  All one has to do is consider the recent epidemic of scientific scandals and the never ending number of cases where some very well-known scientific fact (dietary cholesterol is bad) turn out to be blunders.  Science doesn’t need Shakespeare for that. 

If the humanities are to survive in a STEM heavy environment, it won’t be by building walls between the physical brain and consciousness.  It won’t be by teaching people to value dumbstruck awe more than the thrill of aha!  It will be by philosophers and other readers engaging with the best science available. 

Allow me to demonstrate.  In a marvelous piece at Aeon, “Last hominin standing,” Dan Falk opens with a fundamental question.

In the movie Sliding Doors (1998), a woman named Helen, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, rushes to catch a train on the London Underground, but just misses it, watching helplessly from the platform as the doors slide shut. The film explores two alternative universes, comparing the missed-train universe to a parallel reality in which she caught the train just in time. It wasn’t a cinematic masterpiece but it vividly confronts a question that many of us have asked at one time or another: if events had unfolded slightly differently, what would the world be like?

This question, applied to the history of life on our planet, has long beguiled thinkers of all stripes. Was the appearance of intelligent life an evolutionary fluke, or was it inevitable? This was one of the central themes in Stephen Jay Gould’s book, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989). If we re-played the tape of evolution, so to speak, would Homo sapiens – or something like it – arise once again, or was humanity’s emergence contingent on a highly improbable set of circumstances?

Falk, author of The Science of Shakespeare, begins with a bit of movie criticism and moves quickly to grand evolutionary theory.  Everyday human drama and the most profound questions about the earth and the kosmos are not found in separate realms; they are, as every Zen master will tell you, the same things. 

Falk pits Gould against Simon Conway Morris.  

To Gould, the late Harvard paleontologist, evolution was deeply contingent, an endless series of fluke events, the biological equivalent of just-caught and just-missed subway trains. By contrast, Conway Morris, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Cambridge, focused on convergence: evolution, he argued, is not random, but strongly constrained; where environmental niches exist, evolution finds a way to fill them, often with similar creatures.

If Gould is right, a vast number of accidents both large and small determine the forms of living organisms on planet earth.  If this asteroid that veered a bit or that tiny proto-mammal hadn’t made it across a short, shallow stretch of water, then someone other than us would be looking at an altogether different catalog of creatures.  Or no one would be looking at all, because the existence of intelligent lookers is one more sheer accident. 

If Conway Morris is right, run the algorithm back to the dinosaurs and hit play.  You will get a lot of the same organic forms as we have now.  That is because evolutionary pathways are highly constrained.  Eyes and wings are useful relatively easy to produce in the evolutionary history of many branches of life, so we have their independence emergence (called convergence in evolutionary theory) about four times.  Eyes emerged independently about 40 times that we know of.  Here is my favorite example. 

Everywhere Conway Morris looked, he saw convergence. He points, for example, to the appearance of tiger-like animals in both North and South America – animals that arose along separate evolutionary paths (the North American version was a placental mammal, the ancestors of today’s wild cats; in South America, they were marsupials)

What this means is that there was an evolutionary niche, a certain condition (meaning plentiful large and small prey) available for a certain type of predator (a cat to be specific). 

I am not at all sure that these two interpretations of evolution are all that much at odds.  I am sure that they recapitulate one of the original arguments in the history of philosophy.  Aristotle argued that these here animals have the forms that they have because they happened to descend from similar groups of animals.  Aristotle only toyed very briefly with the idea of evolution, but if you add natural selection and evolutionary history to his view, you get something like Gould’s view. 

Plato argued that the forms of actual things exist apart from those things and determine how those things come to be and what they are.  Human beings are intelligent because intelligence as an idea is always waiting to shape humans into being.  If we interpret evolutionary niches as Platonic forms, we get pretty much what Plato was talking about. 

Worrying about knowing everything is a very silly worry and an even sillier way to defend the humanities.  If you want to understand how such actual creatures as Shakespeare and such fictional creatures as Romeo and Juliet come to be, you have to read Shakespeare.  If you do, you will be able to tell evolutionary biologists something they will want to know.  That is the way to defend the humanities.