e2philosophy

There are often a number of different levels of description, or explanation, at which we can look at any given problem. In many cases each level of explanation makes a lot more sense when you are aware of one or more of the more fundamental ways of describing a phenomenon. Hence the basic laws of chemistry follow very naturally from a physics-based description of atoms, molecules and so on; much of biology becomes comprehensible only when you start to understand the chemistry that it is based on; psychology starts to make more sense once you understand a bit about the biology of the brain; theories of economics that take into account realistic ideas about human psychology have started supplanting simpler theories that abstract people as rational self-interested actors, and so on.

One perspective on the relationship between different levels of explanation is reductionism - the idea that chemistry is really just applied physics, biology is just applied chemistry, and so on. It's a very powerful approach which has given scientists a great many fresh insights over the centuries.

In practice, however, each new layer of description tends to include approaches and concepts which don't seem to follow from the previous layer in any obvious way. It is true for example that the whole periodic table follows very naturally from quantum physics, but if you insisted on always looking at things from a strictly physics-based perspective, you would probably miss an awful lot of interesting chemistry, and make a great deal of extra work for yourself in the process. Part of the reason for this is emergence - the tendency for behaviour to manifest as a result of known laws which may well be deterministic in principle, but from which, in practice, nobody would have predicted that behaviour without exceedingly careful consideration.

Having a description of a phenomenon in terms of the more basic things that give rise to it is satisfying, and sometimes has great practical implications, but there is also a danger of being led astray by applying what is supposed to be a more fundamental level of description to things which are actually better explained at a higher level. It might be technically accurate, for instance, to say that a violent incident occurred thanks to an excess of adrenaline and cortisol in the assailant's brain, but it would probably be a lot more helpful to say that the fight occurred because the other guy was going out of his way to wind him up. Interestingly, it has been shown that people tend to rate an explanation of some observed behaviour as a great deal more convincing if it is accompanied by a bit of neuroscience, even if the neuroscience in question is completely irrelevant (link).

This difficulty in choosing the best level of explanation to work on has extremely important practical consequences, largely because your perspective on a problem constrains the sorts of strategies you are likely to consider for dealing with it. If you view depression as a 'chemical imbalance', the obvious thing to do is to try re-balancing the chemicals in someone's head. If you take a neurophysiological perspective, you might be more interested in what structures and systems within the brain might be leading to undesirable levels of those neurotransmitters occurring in the patient's brain on an ongoing basis. If you see it through the lens of psychology, you are likely to want to try looking for a psychological fix, perhaps trying to see if there are root causes in their life events or the attitudes they take to them that might be made better. A sociological perspective would look at the social relations between the person and those around them - perhaps they are unhappy because modern society lacks the structures that would fulfil their needs.

The different levels of description feed into each other, sometimes in very subtle ways, and it is not always easy or even desirable to pick them apart. Neither does the applicability of one level of explanation imply that solutions based on quite different perspectives will not also be helpful. Attacking symptoms can be very valuable, after all, and while aiming to fix things at root might be the best long-term solution in principle, it only works if you can both correctly identify and do something about the basic problem, so it is not always clear where our efforts are best spent.

The sheer quantity of learning available to modern science makes it very difficult for researchers to get a handle on every possible angle on a problem - there is an inevitable tension between specialisation and interdisciplinarity, closely related to the tension between reductionism and holism. We might like to see all of nature in terms of an overarching scheme or pattern of organisation, and historically many scientists and philosophers have been driven - sometimes fruitfully, sometimes misleadingly - by the urge to reveal such a scheme. However, while there are often lessons to learn and principles to apply when shifting between perspectives on the world, it now seems very unlikely that any detailed 'theory of everything' will manage to be a theory of music and economics as well as subatomic particles and things moving through space.

The availability of different levels of description has a tendency to lead people astray when it is not obvious how to marry up the different levels, which has notoriously been the case when it comes to the mind/body problem. We can describe the brain (at least somewhat) and we can describe the mind (as we experience it), and it's clear that they're connected in some way, but the specifics of how one might give rise to the other are really not at all obvious, leading some commentators to insist that they must be fundamentally different sorts of thing. In philosophical terms, this is confusing ontology with epistemology - drawing conclusions about what actually is from what we seem to be able to know. It's a seductive trap, that people fall into in all sorts of contexts - 'I can't imagine how this could possibly happen, therefore it can't possibly happen.' Science has repeatedly shown that the unimaginable can become plausible - and ultimately unavoidable - when new ways of looking at things present themselves. I believe that cognitive scientists and others are steadily closing this particular explanatory gap, but navigating the different levels of explanation available for mental/neurological phenomena will be a problem of practical as well as philosophical interest for many years to come.

Further reading: The best discussion of this that I've come across is in Douglas Hofstadter's 'I am a Strange Loop', mainly in chapter 2, although I hadn't seen that when I wrote this. Another few months later, I came across this paper by Uri Wilensky and Mitchel Resnick on the topic.

Dualism is the doctrine that there exist two fundamentally different sorts of thing in this universe, which we might call 'mind' and 'matter'. It is usually discussed in the context of the mind/body problem - the puzzling fact that experiences, thoughts and feelings appear to us quite different from the physical things that by and large seem to make up everything else in the universe, even though there is clearly some kind of intimate connection between the mind and the brain.

Nowadays most scientists take a materialist* attitude to the problem, in the sense of holding that everything is matter. That is, the stuff of the universe consistently obeys the laws of physics, and anything we ever experience must ultimately arise from those laws, however many layers of explanation might be required in between. This is a form of monism, the idea that everything consists of variations on kind of stuff; the other main form of monism is idealism, which holds that there is nothing but mind, and all seeming physical manifestations arise from that.

Descartes thought he had some knock-down arguments for why thoughts and feelings must be fundamentally independent from the physical world, and he speculated that maybe our spirits interact with our bodies through the medium of the pineal gland. Descartes was surely a genius of world-shaking proportions, but all the same he thought a lot of silly things. In retrospect his arguments for some of them were kind of deranged.

Daniel Dennett is also plainly a genius, and I'm very much enjoying reading Consciousness Explained at last, but it happens that what he thinks is a knock-down argument against dualism is also pretty weak. His argument rests on the idea that if something interacts with physical matter, it is by definition a form of physical matter itself. Hence there is no way something could interact with our world without being subject to its laws of physics. The whole thing falls down if you consider the form of our interaction with computer games - we control avatars which may or may not obey the same laws as the rest of the game, and we ourselves are totally unaffected by in-game physics. Higher-dimensional or pure-thought beings interacting with our four-dimensional universe might well be in a rather similar position.

Could the world be something like a giant computer game, then? Our minds might exist in some other universe - perhaps they even lead other existences outside of the game, temporarily forgotten while we play through this life. Can we rule out this possibility? No - but I think we can come pretty close.

The biggest problem with any conception of the universe including a mind or self which doesn't arise chiefly from the actions of the brain is that our thinking is quite clearly modified on a basic level by things happening to our brains. If something else is doing the thinking, that other thing is clearly transformed somehow by things like brain injuries and drugs. Our 'players' - or 'spirits' to use the more traditional term - lose or gain certain faculties as a result of the bodies they're controlling. It's not inconceivable, but if the mind is neither the brain, nor something produced by the brain, then why would it be changed so profoundly by what happens to the brain?

It's a lot for a dualist conception of the cosmos to accommodate. It starts to look as though things have been specially set up so that it looks as much as possible like minds are actually offshoots of brains. It's quite conceivable that they could have been set up that way, of course - maybe our players have drugs injected into their brains when we take drugs, or maybe it happens to be a magical feature of the body-spirit link that our spirits lose the ability to handle language when certain parts of the brain get damaged (in which case what should we expect to happen when the whole brain is damaged beyond repair?). It seems highly likely that a more straightforward explanation could be found which supposes that the profound link between minds and brains is there because it has to be - because one is the result of the other.

All of this leaves us, of course, with the very interesting question of how our subjective experiences can possibly arise out of physics, chemistry and biology. It also leaves untouched the related question of how much of cognition is specifically down to the brain; it may be that our sense of self is an emergent feature of our embodiment, and it may be that cognition takes place on a significantly larger scale, or that thought-like processes occur in other types of physical system, as animism and pandeism always maintained. Serious exploration of these sorts of questions is only possible with some understanding of how consciousness arises in the first place.

Maybe some will still think that explaining conscious experience in terms of physical processes is such a tall order that there must be some other explanation entirely. However, the difficulty of imagining something is not always a strong argument for its impossibility, and it is not clear that the arguments against materialist explanations for the mind amount to anything more than that. This natural incredulity may well be dispelled by further study - and either way, explaining the known facts about interactions between mind and brain any other way is a pretty tall order too.

* It's probably worth flagging up, in case it's not obvious, that the philosophical meanings of 'materialism' and 'idealism' have almost nothing to do with what they mean in popular use.

To really get to grips with Nietzsche's "God is dead", it is necessary to consider it in the context of some other relevant passages in his books. This phrase gets tossed around a lot and specifically associated with the idea of the Christian God, but if this were all he was saying it would hardly have been noteworthy: Hegel said that "God is dead" had become the "sentiment of modern religion" as early as 1802. Nietzsche's point is about much more than that: it is actually an attack on the whole tradition of metaphysics, which is the branch of philosophy which deals with what philosophers call Being. The realm of Being is supposedly a realm of ideas and concepts which is accessible to reason - "the eyes of the mind", rather than your actual eyes.

God, of course, would belong to this realm - but so would a boatload of concepts that earlier philosophers used, from the Ancient Greeks to Hegel. Plato, for instance, thought that there was a realm of forms - basically ideas - which was prior to the world of appearances (which are the "mere" things we see), and superior to it. And he thought that to contemplate this realm of forms was, like, totally awesome dude. This clearly is very similar to the Christian God, who exists on a superior plane to all these items you see swirling around you in the actual real world, and who you can relate to through mental activity. And in another place, Nietzsche says that the latter concept emerged out of the former.¹

Now Nietzsche, needless to say, didn't believe in God. And he wasn't going to buy what Plato was selling about "forms", either. What Nietzsche meant when he said that God was dead was that all these ideas of metaphysics which drew a distinction between the "real" world which was supposedly invisible to everyone apart from philosophers or the devoutly religious (who hadn't yet been able to actually tell us anything definite about it) and the "world of appearances" had been debunked. So on top of the obvious moral dimension to the death of God, there was also this dimension which the philosopher who translated my version of the book calls "epistemological-metaphysical", that is, concerning knowledge of Being.

The madman.— Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"— As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?— Thus they yelled and laughed.

This is how he introduces the "madman". In this first paragraph, we see him seeking God - and that is enough to label him mad. Even though it's a bright morning, he has lit a lantern because he is trying to illuminate things even further - to look behind "appearances" and see the "true nature" of the universe. But all these people laugh at him, because such ideas are now seen as fairy tales which are only fit for children, or those who want to escape the real world.

What killed God and metaphysics was the rise of doubt as the central concern of modern philosophy. There was the problem that whatever the philosophers said about this "real" world which apparently transcended the world we see, they'd never proved anything about it; and nor had they ever managed to themselves leave the normal world and cease being subject to it. And then Christianity had said that this "true world" couldn't be found anywhere in normal life, but awaited "the sinner who repents": so again it was beyond the realm of the provable. Nietzsche describes the next step like this, under the heading "How the 'true world' finally became a fable":

The true world — unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us?

(Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)²

What Nietzsche is basically saying is that with the death of all of these ideas of a transcendental realm above the actual realm that we humans see, we've been thrown back on what we perceive with our own senses. And with God dead, it means that we can escape all of these old theories that deny life and the things that sustain life - such as trusting our senses - and build a new system of values based on what sustains life. He delivers a devastating critique to philosophers -

About life, the wisest men of all ages have come to the same conclusion: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths — a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live — that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the Savior a rooster." Even Socrates was tired of life. What does that prove? What does it demonstrate? At one time, one would have said (and it has been said loud enough by our pessimists): "At least something must be true here! The consensus of the sages must show us the truth." Shall we still talk like that today? May we? "At least something must be sick here," we retort. These wisest men of all ages — they should first be scrutinized closely. Were they all perhaps shaky on their legs? tottery? decadent? late? Could it be that wisdom appears on earth as a raven, attracted by a little whiff of carrion?³

By a "little whiff of carrion", he means by the creation of values which deny and are destructive of life in the world of our senses for the sake of some higher "truth". "We deny God, we deny the responsibility that originates from God: and thereby we redeem the world."⁴ He wants the creation of new systems of values that aren't based on these transcendental ideas, but instead on what sustains and encourages life - and "the conditions of life might include error."⁵ He wanted to get rid of the morality of Christianity and the whole metaphysical way of looking at the world, of pretending there was something else above it, and to begin focusing on what was here and now, and how man could be creative and have his own dignity within this realm.

But the parable of the madman is only just beginning. The madman goes on to talk about the sheer enormity of the deed which has been carried out, this killing of God - he says that humanity is unchained from its guiding star, and all previous standards have been overturned and confused. He asks if it isn't possible that having killed God, man must now act like Gods to become worthy of the deed - meaning that if all our standards and morals came from God before, then we now need to replace them with something that we create ourselves; that is, these new values. Modern doubt left all previous systems of value without any theoretical underpinning, so we need new ones - this was a big part of Nietzsche's life project. But when the madman explains this to the people in the market, they "were silent and stared at him in astonishment."

"I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering — it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars — and yet they have done it themselves!"⁶

Man created God in the first place, says Nietzsche - and now that we've killed him, we need to create something to take his place. Something more life-affirming, not something which seeks to escape the actual world like the philosophers did. And he thought that after a period of time in which everyone realized that God and the old metaphysics was dead, eventually people would realize this and set about creating new values. The problem was that once you take away God and everything else with a claim to actually provide you with the truth about the right way to live your life, you're going to be left with a vast array of competing truth-claims; and hence, war.

Nietzsche was fully aware of this, and at one point he says that religious wars "signified the greatest progress of the masses hitherto; for it proves that the mass has begun to treat concepts with respect."⁷ There is no reason why a plurality of value-creating individuals - in his view, after all, no different from a plurality of God-creating men who arrive at different views of God - will not run into the same problem. And there is no guarantee that, once you plunge into the process of value-creation, what comes out the other side is going to be at all pleasant to behold for us. After all, our societies are still deeply run through with Judeo-Christian morality and all sorts of beliefs that are totally beyond the competence of science to say anything about. And because science can't say anything about them and we killed God and metaphysics, there's a yawning gap between our theory and our practice.

So the consequences of God being dead, so often touted triumphantly by those who associate religion with oppression and superstitution, are rather ambiguous. We now have political systems founded entirely on the basis of reason and science, but reason also tells us that every previous regime existed with the blessing of some higher power, whether you see it as real or imagined; and once the certainty of this higher power has been lost, what might emerge out the other side when we take on the onus of value-creation could just as easily be Nazism as liberal democracy. Nietzsche had no doubt that the outcome of this process would be war, not peace - but at least it would be war carried out with the dignity of man intact, not projected onto some imaginary force. The end of God and metaphysics means we are on our own. What we'll make of it remains to be seen. But how have we been doing so far?

1. Twilight of the Idols, "How the 'True World' finally became a fable", 1 - 2.
2. Ibid., 4.
3. Twilight of the Idols, "The Problem of Socrates", 1.
4. Twilight of the Idols, "The Four Great Errors", 8.
5. The Gay Science, Aph. 121.
6. The parable of the madman is in The Gay Science, Aph. 125.
7. Ibid., Aph. 144.

Introduction: doubt

You've probably heard of Rene Descartes' idea that cogito ergo sum; or, "I think therefore I am". Now, it has amused wise-asses for centuries to point out that this contains a logical fallacy, and that in fact all that is proven by the fact I'm thinking is that thinking exists, not me. This may be an important point, but it does not concern me here. Every great thinker's work contains contradictions and fallacies; this is why they continue to think. What I want to address here are the ramifications for the modern world of Descartes' method, de omnibus dubitandum est; or, "everything is to be doubted".

The writings of philosophers have never constituted a decisive historical event, and clearly the modern world is not as it is because of what issued from Descartes' pen. But it is indisputable that doubt of everything has become the cornerstone of modern thought and experience, and that this has been reflected in the subsequent development of modern philosophy, politics, and science. Doubt of everything - of data from the senses, of religious revelation, of rational thought - is the hallmark of the world we live in.

Doubt of the experience of the senses dates back primarily to the discovery of the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around, which is contrary to our experience of watching the Sun make its merry way across the sky every day. Indeed, the more sophisticated we become at measuring and observing reality through our instruments, the more alienated from the world we are: I know that this desk is made up of trillions of tiny little particles and so is my hand, but if I poke it then my felt experience is rather different. Clearly I cannot trust my senses to reveal reality to me if this is the case.

Doubt of rational thought is rather different. Ancient philosophers used to think that reason was a way of discerning the truth, so that by thinking about things I might be able to arrive at truth somehow. But how, Descartes said, could I be sure that my reason wasn't being deceived by an evil spirit? My reason isn't necessarily a tool which can be used to understand reality because I haven't got any proof that what I think I know about reality is the case - especially with this pesky problem concerning my senses. The only reason that Descartes felt he could be sure of was logical or mathematical reasoning of the kind that says that 2 + 2 = 4. But this isn't a truth about the outside world, only one about the human mind: this sort of logic makes sense in my head, but it doesn't signify anything about the reality of the outside world.

Doubt of religious revelation is, of course, the simplest form of doubt to understand; doubt is inherent in the fact it is faith, and not reason, which we ultimately have to resort to if we choose to seek God. The existence or non-existence of God cannot be proven through sense experience or rational thought and there has been doubt of revelation for as long as there has been revelation. And in fact Descartes had to eventually invoke God - whose existence he didn't doubt - to save the existence of reality. But for most of atheist modernity, this isn't an option.

Modern politics

The prevalence of doubt has meant a retreat in the realm in which man can be said to perceive the truth. This turns on its head the tradition of Judaism and Christianity, as well as secular philosophy; all were based on the idea that the truth about the nature of the universe and man was out there somewhere beyond our own minds, and that we could access it through religious revelation or, in Platonic philosophy, contemplation of higher truths which he called "forms". The concomitant retreat of claims to political and social knowledge can be seen in our political systems, now founded theoretically on Hobbes' simple injunction not to harm anyone, and we even tolerate intolerance because we no longer believe in our right to suppress it.¹

What is peculiar about modern philosophy is the extent to which it is based on introspection, on the experiences that an individual has within their own consciousness. I remember the first time I picked up Hobbes' Leviathan, expecting to dive straight into a discussion of his political philosophy; instead I discovered over one hundred pages 'On Man', and that was quite enough to discourage me for some years. But what I failed to realize during that first abortive reading was that Hobbes, and indeed most modern political philosophy, had been thrown back on a discussion of man by the Cartesian doubt. If all I can know is myself - because there's no revelation, sense data, or rational truth which I can trust - then I have nowhere else to look to investigate the truth about anything except within myself, including the truth about how to organize political life.

I have written about Hobbes elsewhere, but it is worth briefly recapping, because he was the most uncompromising advocate of ideas which have appeared again and again throughout the modern period.

Hobbes was a materialist, which meant he didn't believe in anything apart from matter - that meant no soul, no Platonic forms, and no immaterial God (he still believed in God, but his refusal to believe in the immaterial got him in all sorts of trouble which need not concern us here). And because he didn't believe in the soul or even in the mind as something immaterial, all he was really sure of was the passions. Passions - like my desire to eat or to learn - are things that emanate from within me without any stimulus, and drive me to go and make a sandwich or read a book: so I can be as sure they exist as I can my thought.

"Descartes proceeded by thinking all things out of existence and saw that when he tried to think thinking itself out of existence, he was still thinking."² Well, to put it in simple terms, Hobbes proceeded by thinking all things out of existence, and saw that he still wanted a sandwich. So he was sure that man had passions - desires - and that the strongest of these desires was the fear of death, which became the cornerstone of his philosophy. Everyone has the right to avoid violent death, and so they form a commonwealth where they all agree to give up the right to kill each other. The rule governing this commonwealth is "Do not unto others as you would not have done unto you", and it doesn't involve any other obligations beyond keeping one's agreements. After this commonwealth has been established, everyone goes about his merry business of acquiring property and following his passions.

This idea was founded by Hobbes entirely on an investigation into his own being. How alien this was to the history of western thought - from Plato's belief that politics should exist to make the quest for truth possible, to the Christian belief that politics served the ends of God - is shown in Hobbes' claim that the history of political philosophy "is no older than my own book De Cive". Prior philosophical enquiries into politics had considered much more than simply man's passions. And Hobbes is rightly seen - along with Machiavelli - in taking the study of politics in an entirely new direction. His ideas are essentially those which lay behind the theory of the small state which allows capitalism and private interests to run its course; and they came about because the Cartesian doubt eliminated everything but our own selfish passions, the existence of which we can be sure.

Morality

All this has rather strong implications for traditional notions of morality, be they religious or philosophical. If morality consists entirely of keeping my agreements with others and not killing anyone, then most of the tradition of moral thought needs to go out the window. If the Cartesian doubt has eliminated the possibility of me deriving morality from God or from natural law, then I really have nothing else on which to base it but my own selfish passions and the legitimate claim of the passions of others.

Of course, this did not happen: but this was merely a matter of inertia. Across western countries, traditions of morality continue. But what has changed is the loss of a theoretical basis for them - when challenged, they have no firm ground on which to hold off the assault. Asked why murder is wrong, people will respond "it just is"; well, I agree, but this truth-claim is no more persuasive than that of a terrorist who claims otherwise. What the Cartesian doubt has done is deny us moral truths and left us with "values", which are interchangable as no one value is inherently any truer than another. It's inherent in the word: the "value" someone places on something is clearly relative to the person doing the placing.

The declining applicability of the idea of "truth" to modern political and moral life is, I would suggest, the reason for the explosion of the "culture wars" in America in recent decades. Abortion is a case in point: as soon as it is no longer an accepted truth that each fetus bears the mark of a divine Creator and hence that abortion is wrong, the issue passes into the realm of values and opinions. And so on with the proliferation of all sorts of values and opinions which we no longer have any criteria for judging beyond our own prejudices, and whether the opinions affect public order. An individual might still believe in revealed or discovered truth, but the political system does not; and so his belief is no more valid than that of anyone else with an opinion.

So modern morality has left us in this situation where it is sheer life itself that we revel in and protect, and has really reduced the main thrust of our politics to the running of an economy which makes the experience of living as comfortable and easy as possible. And while life is comfortable and easy, little questioning of our notions of morality takes place. But what can happen when this breaks down has been seen in Nazi Germany, where the collapse of the Weimer Republic revealed that if a people under huge stress plunge freefall into the abyss of value relativism then what comes out the other side is not necessarily a shiny happy democracy.³ If there is no truth and all values are relative, then Nazism is as legitimate a response to this as anything else. In other words, if liberalism and Judeo-Christian morality are not truths, then their survival are an open question.

Conclusion

So the Cartesian doubt has led to value relativism, and the problems I have described. At this point, it is inevitable to invoke Friedrich Nietzsche, who pointed a way out of this trap. Nietzsche has been called a "life philosopher" because he gloried in man's creative capacity - again, after being thrown back on introspection by the ramifications of the Cartesian doubt. He admired men who had freely created systems of values through their wills. He once wrote in his notebook, "In that which moved Zarathrusta, Moses, Mohammed, Jesus, Plato, Brutus, Spinoza, Mirabeau - I live, too". And by this he meant that he had the courage to create new values by sheer force of will.

Men like Abraham, Buddha and Jesus created systems of value which were so strong and capable of reproducing themselves that they gave human meaning to the world. "It is not the truth of their thought that distinguished them, but its capacity to generate culture."⁴ These people were the founders of whole cultures which were based on the systems of values that they created - and it is this process that Nietzsche would like us to repeat, or thinks we will be forced to after too long tumbling into the abyss.

Until such a time as our political and social life undergoes such stress that we will be forced to come up with new values, utility is our God: sheer usefulness for comfortable living is the measure of most things, and peaceful economic growth the goal of politics. The Cartesian doubt and value relitavism are, in a way, luxuries we can engage in while life is easy; it is no coincidence that they have taken hold in the most prosperous societies mankind has ever known. But if we should ever go through an experience such as did the Weimar Republic - the failure of economic progress and massive civil violence - then we will find that the Cartesian doubt has destroyed many of the bases on which we might have crafted a humane and civilized response. What happens next will be truly unexpected.

Notes

1. There are of course laws against Nazism in Germany and Austria, and against advocating violence against religious or racial groups in other countries. But these are based on the need to preserve public security, not a general intolerance of intolerance. That these laws have emerged only after extreme violence in the former case and the reality of Islamist terrorism in the latter is proof of this.

2. Heinrich Blucher, Lecture on the Common Course: http://www.bard.edu/bluecher/lectures/com_crse_talk/talk_page4.htm

3. This truth is hidden by the widespread assumption that Nazi Germany was the result of an ominous extension of power by a stable state, and so hence this experience might be repeated in a place such as the United States by extending powers of surveillance, arrest, etc. In fact, the Nazi movement's triumph was not the result of a state which slowly acquired too many powers of internal security, but the utter breakdown of internal security; the United States would have to undergo total economic catastrophe and virtual civil war to recreate the experience of the Weimer period.

4. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Simon and Schuster ed. with a foreword by Saul Bellow), p. 201

Further reading

Four books I have read moulded this. Most importantly, Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, especially the sixth section. Then Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History; the book by his student Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind; and finally, because it is slightly off topic, Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism.

The realization that this statement is true constitutes the beginning of philosophy understood as the quest to discover what Being is, and in a political sense it is the starting point of the quest for natural law. The first man to realize this, whoever he was, was truly the first philosopher.

The factuality of this statement is inherent in the plurality of tribes and their different customs, which immediately demotes one's own customs from their privileged place so far as nature is concerned; anyone who is aware of this plurality cannot, in intellectual honesty, continue to believe that the customs of their tribe are laws of nature. Yet the customs of tribes have an important human role to play in binding a people together and ensuring their continuity throughout time: this is why the philosopher, in questioning the wisdom of the tribal elders, has always been seen as a threat. This was the basic reason for the execution of Socrates by the Athenians.

The Socratic method is based on enquiring into subjects by first establishing what the customs of various tribes say about something, and then comparing these customs and questioning their consistency so that something like truth might be approached. This was a sure guard against chauvinism, but also obviously a threat to the particular customs of the tribe which Socrates inhabited.

But what this enquiry into truth presupposes is the existence of customs which might be compared, as they are the starting point for analysis. It in fact thrives on the plurality of customs, something which the homogenizing effect of modernity has denied us in the modern age; the general decline of faith in our unique values may have destroyed our chauvinism, but it has not led us to truth, but rather to an intellectual abyss.

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