Fifth Stage of Civilization? Or a New Dark Age. The Choice is Ours -- Yours & Mine

It's true: I haven't posted here in quite some time. Some will say I've neglected this blog. I'd thought so myself, but then wondered: was I under an obligation to post on a schedule regardless of whether I had something useful to say that day? I think not. I've always been a quality-over-quantity person. Not sure if traffic dropped. I didn't check. It never was high (except, oddly, for the initial post). Getting ideas discussed seriously in the English-speaking world has always been like pulling teeth. But along with Albert Jay Nock & Isaiah, I'm satisfied that there is a Remnant out there. We intellectual bloggers don't know who they are for sure, or where they are, but if we deliver our best, we trust that they will find us.

We in the West need to further the conversation that will help us discover the Fifth Stage. One thing that means is exposing and then avoiding, as much as possible, the distractions mainstream media & mainstream politics are always throwing our way. What NaturalNews.com host Mike Adams (the Health Ranger) just called racial theater, its newest chapter opened by the outcome of the George Zimmerman trial, is a textbook case of a distraction. Helping further the distraction is the prevailing, politically correct mythology of racism in contemporary America. One need not deny that the U.S. has a racist past, or even that there are isolated incidents of racism in the present. But one of the prevailing premises of the currently reigning intelligentsia in the U.S. is that the U.S. is still fundamentally, systemically racist, because nowhere is to be found exact, politically-approved ratios of black-to-white, on corporate boards or in workplaces or in other centers of influence (which would include Congress). This leads to the further myth that blacks are systemically oppressed in America. What makes it clear, this is a myth? By the very fact of a black president in America (Barack Obama), a black attorney general (Eric Holder), black mayors all across the country, successful black entrepreneurs, wealthy black entertainers (think: Oprah Winfrey), black sports heroes (think Tiger Woods, although he partly self-destructed), etc.

Obama could not have been elected and then re-elected president without the willingness of the white majority to vote for him, whatever else one says about their judgment. Blacks only constitute a little over 12 percent of the population of the U.S., after all. That's not enough to elect a president. I tend to think Obama will go down as the worst president in U.S. history. For saying that I would be condemned as racist if anyone in the intelligentsia cared enough to spread the fact that I said it. My judgment, however, is based on his policies, not on his race (for whatever good it does to say this). He's furthered both the domestic and the foreign policies of his predecessor, protected the interests of the powerful and wealthy elite; his Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare) will arguably ruin whatever is left of health care in the U.S., but possibly not before being exported elsewhere in some "free trade" agreement to come down the pike. Do I know this last? Of course not, but who really knows what is in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (for example)? The agreement is not available online, and all discussions--which Obama is pushing--are being conducted behind very tightly closed doors!

Enough of racial theater; it stands exposed for what it is, a distraction from our world's real problems. These range from spreading unrest all across the developing world, a product of the realization that the desire of peoples to be free is quite real however manipulated, and on collision course with the tightening authoritarianism of the global elites, whose home bases range from the City of London, Basel Switzerland, Brussels Belgium, New York City and Washington, D.C. A real question is whether we will ever outgrow our tendency to solve our problems--economic, social, etc.--by resorting to domestic force and wars fought on foreign soil (which, if our ruling elites were honest they would admit was over control of the world's oil supply). In the U.S., meanwhile, over 47 million people receive food stamps. This is an all-time high--additional proof, for anyone interested, that the federal government / Federal Reserve complex cannot micromanage anything as complex as the U.S. economy. While of course there are some who are probably abusing the food stamp system, the majority either cannot find a job at all or cannot find a job that pays sufficient wages. Where else are they going to turn?

This, of course, is a problem affecting all: white, black, Hispanic, and so on. The "American Dream" of a middle class existence working for a corporation is effectively dead whatever your race or ethnicity (for all except for those fortunate enough to have very specific skills the corporations want). What has killed the "American Dream" is a combination of factors. Too much government is the obvious killer of all genuine prosperity: too many taxes, too much strangling regulation, too much interference in our lives generally. Globalization hasn't helped. It has been the scene of corporations--many of which are able to write the rules enabling them to control governments--moving operations to where labor is the cheapest, and that isn't the U.S. Another factor, however, is more mundane: changing technology, which enables even smaller companies to be more productive with progressively less labor, meaning there is less and less work for human beings to do. Of course, if human beings are earning less, they have a choice of spending less or going massively into debt (at present we see both). A few writers are describing this as a structural flaw in capitalism as it currently exists--although I prefer the term corporatism for the prevailing economic system of the dominant powers of the First World (Robert Locke's short essay remains the standout explanation of corporatism, offering good reasons for thinking outside the set of boxes Marx's thought supplied). Whatever we call it, however, the flaw is there and will have to be addressed at some point in the future. The alternative is a world with a very small and very wealthy minority ruling over utterly impoverished masses--a future looking so much like our feudalist past that I call it techno-feudalism.

Recent events in my life, including materials I've gathered on entrepreneurship to presentations I've recently attended about financial markets and sustainable systems, and more besides, have made it even more clear to me the role Philosophy needs to play in evaluating the present state of affairs in civilization and working towards taking it to the next level: the Fifth Stage. (My book manuscript What Should Philosophy Do? is up to 35,000 words.) I recently had a discussion over just the need for ethics and its role in creating and maintaining institutions that are sustainable: self-supporting, growing, helpful, in harmony with their surroundings; and not self-destructive and destructive of whatever they touch (like today's corporate leviathans of high finance, as well as most of the world's governments). We don't need to delve into theory here, or even go deep into the theology (although I think a review of what Jesus Christ actually says in the Sermon on the Mount and in his Parables couldn't hurt us at all!) to develop what I could call a common horse sense ethics.

A common horse sense ethical system would consist of the following beginning with the old-fashioned Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Or to paraphrase Hobbes from his Leviathan: Do not exercise more liberties against others than you would want others to exercise against you. To some, such prescriptions will sound naive. To the extent they do, is an index of where we stand in our materialist world today, part of it still in the Third Stage but much of the culture in the Fourth. There are other ethical rules that can be logically inferred. Respect life, especially if it has the capacity to suffer (for you can suffer). Honor your agreements with others (for you do not like promises to be made to you & then broken). Do not see yourself as the center of the Creation, but rather live with humility: none of us is at the center of Creation. Realize that most people do need leadership, motivation, encouragement ... and to be held accountable. Be prepared to supply it when needed. Note that to err is human: forgive others; and also forgive yourself. Avoid conflict and the use of force--if your ideas are any good, that Remnant I mentioned will embrace them voluntarily. But do be prepared to unleash your inner warrior to stand on principle and defend the innocent.

Recognize cause and effect, however we cash it out. Ideas and actions have consequences; they affect others. Recognize, too, that the consequences of our ideas and actions do not manifest themselves all at once, or even in a few days or even months. The really important ideas and actions manifest themselves over a lifetime. They can affect many others, for better or for worse. Finally: reality always gets the last word. Results do not lie. The results we see around us, wherever we are, are the sum total of our premises, our thoughts, our actions, and their consequences--in aggregate. The laws of nature including human nature are what they are, but they allow sufficient flexibility to make it fair to say: we have shaped our world. If that is true, then up to a point, we can reshape it. That brings us to the choice before us as a civilization: forward, to a Fifth Stage, or continuing on our present course. In earlier posts I've attempted to characterize what ascension to a Fifth Stage will amount to. I've tried to do this in a particular fashion: learning and employing what we can learn from the previous stages while keeping the concept sufficiently loose and indistinct that it can continue to shape itself, in terms of events and developments none of us can foresee. Part and parcel of Fifth Stage Thinking is what I think of as bottom-up sustainability: we rebuild the systems of civilization, through entrepreneurship of various sorts, from the bottom up instead of from the top down, and we keep in mind the need for the long view: long term goals, including those which will take years to bring about, designing short term objectives as we work toward those goals piecemeal. The idea is to have systems that will sustain themselves with less and less effort on our part, as we ride in the direction we want to go. The country--indeed, the English-speaking world as a whole; the West as a whole--needs a re-examination of its philosophical first premises (including the materialist view of the universe & of the human condition) as a condition for assuming some control over the changes embroiling us all. If we assume control, I would hold out some hope that we can carry civilization forward to its Fifth stage, able to further the genuine unity of an ethically grounded international community, liberate people from the chains of authoritarianism, and build real prosperity (not the debt-fueled pseudo-prosperity of the mass consumption culture. That's the choice. For a while now, we've been at this crossroads. If the English-speaking world in particular continues on its present path of materialism, centralization, poor education based on outdated models, short term thinking, and distractions such as the present racial theater, it can look forward to what will prove to be a very long and painful dark age, and its peoples will have only themselves to blame.

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The Fifth Stage of Civilization: Proposed Introduction 2013

Greetings from Santiago, Chile. This is the present draft of the Introduction to a work that I fully expect will occupy years, given the environment in which it will be researched and written (doing a small business, teaching, possibly looking after an elderly person although that remains to be seen at this point). Labors of love are like that. This is something more than a labor of love, however. It is not self-love, surely; nor it is simply the enjoyment of writing, although I do. It is with a sense of urgency that I write--a sense of urgency that the larger civilization of the West, with which I tend to identify, is gradually slipping away as the years pass. As I've often said, looking at the U.S., it is not the country I grew up in. I don't think Western civilization as a whole, with its aggregate uncertainty and anxiety, is the place it was 60 years ago during the post-war years--although there were storm clouds on the horizon then if you knew what to look for (the prevailing philosophy & especially the literature). We've seen the advent of nihilism Nietzsche warned about over a hundred years ago, but not any "new values" he urged be created. Professional philosophy, unfortunately, is barely aware that there is a problem.

There are some small scale signs of good things happening, however. There are people beginning from where we are now and forging ahead. A few institutions are either in the business of thinking creatively about the future (The Long Now Foundation comes to mind), or in creating new educational dynamics that bypass existing ones that are proving inadequate (I have been watching an enterprise due to launch here in Santiago in three months called Exosphere). And then there are TED talks, of course, always creative, colorful, and thought-provoking. So there is activity. Where this activity will lead is, of course, something none of us can know for sure. However, every large scale positive development began with a small scale venture, and today's small scale ventures have something their ancestors could never have imagined in their wildest dreams: the Internet. Yet we've a lot of inertia and negativity to overcome. Perhaps this is the nature of the sort of endeavor we have embarked upon: moving, however haltingly, from Stage Four, a stage characterized by skepticism and negativity, to Stage Five, characterized by-- Well, that's still a bit hard to describe in any detail at this point, but evidence is emerging, even here in Chile, that the dynamics of several systems are riding in essentially the right direction.

Introduction.

The purpose of this project is unabashedly to reach for a “big idea” about civilization and develop it.

Such an effort may seem at first glance quixotic and outlandish—even pretentious—but there is everything to gain from making the attempt.

Western civilization faces a crisis of major proportions. We can try to turn away, but the crisis is there. The crisis spans the global economy and is wreaking havoc within national economies, but is far more than merely economic. Our political systems appear to be broken. We are more divided than ever before, as our “leaders” answer not to their peoples but to corporations and pressure groups of various sorts, some of whose irresponsible activities were responsible for precipitating the crisis. Those who refuse to bow to these powerful interests, however, are consigned to oblivion. They may have followings, but no capacity to initiate the necessary fundamental changes. Our educational systems appear equally ineffective. There is, however, something to the allegation that our schools, from elementary up through university, were designed for another age. Charged with “educating” youth for the “jobs of the future” which change annually, even if we accept this vocational model of education we may be asking from them the impossible, at least given their current credentials-centered structure and tendency toward specialism. Our religious “leaders” appear unable to help; many, over the past several decades, have been exposed as charlatans. Perplexed and bewildered, many have turned aside. Philosophers, with rare exceptions, have retreated into invisibility in a culture and marketplace that sees little use for the “free play of ideas.”

Even confidence in the sciences has broken down, not just in their ability to bring about a better human world but in their capacity to deliver value-neutral truth at all. It is not just a cliché that we now inhabit a postmodern world—a world where all is in flux and nothing is stable. This kind of theme permeates the arts, literature, music, TV and film, fashion, cuisine, you-name-it. Media messages scream at us from all sides with the latest you-must-haves. In this world some cling to technology as savior (and employer!) while others see many of our technologies as having jeopardized the very ecosystems on which the sustainability of life itself depends. Fearing cataclysmic breakdown, some have become “preppers,” storing food, clean water, other goods, against a future that isn’t what it used to be! Most people, of course, are less apocalyptic in their outlooks, but nevertheless see the West as in decline and expect U.S. influence to wane in the future—as its people face ever greater struggles to secure the necessities of life.

Where do we go from here? This essay tries to wrestle with this question in a fresh and bold way—in the spirit that again, given the trouble we are in, we have everything to gain from the attempt!

What’s the plan? First, a multitude of writers—philosophers of history and sociology mainly, but also others—have tried to grasp and lay out sweeping “laws of history.” While the present writer sees this phrase as a misnomer, the idea is compelling. Auguste Comte developed the most visible effort with his Law of the Three Stages, which saw the ushering in of an age of science (and technology) as the path to a quasi-utopian order—or, at least, an order allowing a quality of human life vastly superior to all that had gone before. The Comtean vision, one might call it, envisioned a world of advancing science and technology and moral meliorism as we improved social, political and educational institutions with the thought that these could actually make us better human beings.

Today, in the wake of world wars, the breakdown of so-called democratic institutions, the fear of environmental calamity, and the sense that would-be dictators are just waiting to pick up the pieces of the looming fiscal holocaust, we are clearly in a position to see where this vision was wrong—the postmodern world has ushered in a “Fourth Stage,” we will come to call it. This stage is characterized by what some believe to be a devastating critique of all that went before, especially the Comtean vision. The present writer believes the West must get past Stage Four as a condition of civilization's long term survival—and reach a Fifth Stage of Civilization. Unfortunately, we are hardly able to do more than sketch where we should go, or what the Fifth Stage of Civilization will look like. Marx, of course, couldn’t describe Communism, so our position is hardly novel! And surely, given the past century, we can build in proscriptions that will prevent the Fifth Stage from becoming another example of the sort of dictatorship that rose to power during the twentieth century!

There has long been a consciousness of the role of systems in the world and in human life. This consciousness also goes well back into the twentieth century, and almost constitutes a parallel development. This project seeks to tap into this development, and thus “peer beyond” postmodernity into deep systematicity: both by examining how we got here (Auguste Comte’s Law of the Three Stages), considering how the cultures of science, technology and corporatism have broken our confidence in our institutions and in ourselves, and then inviting readers to envision a future which seeks to harness the best and avoiding the worst of what came before. What were best in what came before? Hope, principle, freedom of action, faith, courage, the willingness to innovate, and a devotion to humanly important truth. What were worst? Despair, expediency, slavery, cowardice, deceit, and the lust for power (and to live at the expense of others). Given the rich material recent history supplies, we should know what to promote and what to avoid. What we do not always know are the specifics. Human ingenuity has given us what is best in the present, however. Allowed to develop unhampered, perhaps human ingenuity will give us a future, however unpredictable.

Our paradox is that however unpredictable the future, it is up to us to create it: to learn to think really well about the kind of world we would prefer to leave to our children, and to their children—and what we are willing to do to build that world. If we do not, others will do it for us. Circumstances themselves might do it for us. I’ve said that we have everything to gain by making this attempt. I’ve not said, though I will now, that we have a lot to lose by doing nothing. That is, if as some claim, Western civilization itself hangs in the balance.

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Eve of 2013

We come toward the final hours of 2012, a year of vast changes for me personally (leaving a job that wasn't idea but was stable, moving to a new country, being immersed in a different culture, beginning to learn to speak a different language, and much more besides). Whether civilization moved forward is, of course, an entirely different matter. We could single out points of promising technological advance (3D printing comes to mind); but did civilization begin to move forward past its present amalgamation of Third and Fourth Stages, or is the West in a cul-de-sac that is destined to erode. As we said in the last post, despite Comte’s use of the word law for what he believed he’d observed in historical development, there is nothing inevitable in any advance forward. History is not “law governed” in that sense. It depends on what individuals do; it depends on thought leaders who emerge, if any, and what they are able to accomplish.

This past week has seen any number of predictions for 2013. These are hazardous, of course, if taken too seriously. None of us has a crystal ball. A few writers (e.g., here) have looked back on their predictions for 2012 and, to their credit, honestly noted their misses as well as the occasional direct hit. Anyone who predicted total economic collapse in 2012, however, missed it by a mile, obviously; such predictions reinforced my commitment to gradualism (the idea that if decline occurs, it will occur in slow stages, as was the case with the Roman Empire) as opposed to apocalypticism (the idea that we’ll see a relatively sudden and unstructured collapse, with cities in flames, riots in the streets, etc., etc.). My position: the latter is not impossible, of course; just not as likely as the former. The U.S.’s masses are, by and large, content as long as they have sports, reality television, hand-held gadgets, and the calming voices of mainstream media pseudo-pundits even when crises erupt.

So in that spirit, here are my predictions for 2013. Take them for what they are worth. I am not predicting revolution. My predictions are modest. I don’t consider them the product of genius. I consider them common horse sense.

(1) The standard of living in the U.S. has been dropping and will continue to drop. This both has had and will continue to have several causes. First, Ben Bernanke’s QE-to-infinity money creation machine will continue to undermine the value of the dollar; Congress will continue to approve whatever Helicopter Ben does. Only a small amount of the newly created money will enter the general economy, of course; most will go into the coffers of superelite-controlled banking leviathans. Otherwise we would already have seen waves of inflation beyond anything yet recorded. But prices of food, fuel, and other consumer goods in the U.S. have been rising steadily alongside QE’s 1 and 2, and will continue to rise. Taxes will also rise in 2013; this is a given.

(2) Real unemployment—that is, the actual figure (reported, to the best of my knowledge, only on ShadowStats.com)—will continue to rise, possibly surpassing 25%. This will be the case even if the “official” (U3) figure drops. The “official” figure, after all, counts a person as unemployed only if he is out of work and has sought work within the past four weeks. Otherwise he drops off the radar. I continue to be amazed that so many Americans are so hypnotized that they repeat the “official” figure mechanically and see the U.S. economy as improving, however slightly, when the “official” figure drops from 7.9% to 7.7%. Exacerbating both unemployment and underemployment (both part-timers who cannot find full-time work and those with college degrees who are working at jobs not requiring degrees, e.g., as bartenders, bouncers, etc., because those are the only jobs they could find) will be Obama-care as more of its provisions kick in starting in January. Were I making predictions past 2013 and further down the pike, I would say that eventually we will see shortages of doctors, as those who can do so will take early retirement to escape a system controlled by the federal government (operating through Medicare and Medicaid) and the insurance and pharmaceuticals industries. Young people smart enough to read the handwriting on the wall will not go into the medical professions.

(3) Assuming Obama and/or the liberals in Congress cannot get significant gun control legislation passed, I predict we will see at least one more massacre of the Aurora, Colo. and Newtown, Conn. level. It will be a false flag, as those very likely were—I call them false flags because of specifics regarding these cases (countless links to material online on my Facebook page) that do not add up, and in some cases do not make any rational sense however we look at them. (Look here and here.) A strong anti-gun contingent will emerge within the general population. Whether this contingent will effect actual gun control remains to be seen. I will not predict that it will, only that the stage will be set for a possible violent confrontation, because there are a lot of people scattered throughout the Southwest, in the Northwest, and elsewhere, who will refuse to give up their firearms. If pressed, some will organize and prepare to shoot back if that’s what it comes to. Decisions will have to be made on who will back down. I am not any too sure it will be private gun owners, who recognize that a disarmed citizenry is at the mercy of both its own criminal class and its own government (sometimes the two are difficult to distinguish!). Behind the scenes: there are powerful people who would like to see a totally disarmed U.S. citizenry. Their variation on my Fifth Stage is World Government, not World Liberty. They realize that World Government is impossible as long as a Constitution with a Second Amendment is in force, with people willing to use force to defend the ideals represented in those documents.

(4) Foreign wars will continue on scales small enough to remain manageable, as in Syria. We will see continued skirmishes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, and probably on the African continent with U.S. troops moving in down there now. All this continued ill-advised interventionism will cost money, of course, and will drive the U.S. national debt still higher. It will probably surpass $17 trillion by December 31, 2013. (Real indebtedness is, of course, much, much higher.) I am not going to predict a head-on confrontation with Iran, although an incident in the Strait of Hormuz that could precipitate such a confrontation is not impossible. I don’t think the global superelite wants such a confrontation; it’s simply too dangerous, given that Iran would likely have the backing of both Russia and China. The global superelite is not going to authorize any confrontation or event that could cause them to lose control over the situation, resulting in the sort of all-out war that could have them presiding over a radioactive wasteland!

(5) The Liberty Movement will still be around, but with Ron Paul’s retirement from Congress (his Farewell Address deserves to be listened to and read over and over again), it is ever in danger of being increasingly marginalized in 2013 if it does not develop some new strategies. The present ones have not been working. The libertarian wing within the GOP was ineffective against the brazen power-playing of the neocons—probably because they still believe that such decisions as who receives a presidential nomination are made rationally, in response to reasoned arguments, instead of based on lines of authority supported by habit and emotion. I wish I could predict that the Liberty Movement will learn to adopt a strategy not unlike that used successfully by the Fabians over 100 years ago: penetrate and permeate. I cannot. For starters, the Liberty Movement is fundamentally too honest for that, and in societies permeated by corruption, honesty works against you consistently. I do predict that some will take a cue from the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus who advised his followers to withdraw from politics as a condition of achieving a tranquil life. The number of Liberty supporters who are moving to Chile is definitely on the increase, little by little. I have met several, three of which have already moved here and an entire family considering making the move, in just this past month. One may bemoan the fact that Liberty minded people are abandoning the U.S. If more and more such people come here, that leaves fewer and fewer to fight the good fight back home. But these people are thinking of their families, and looking at a society that may not be perfect but is well behind the rest of the West on the curve, with the hope of beginning new and better lives—historically the reasons people have always emigrated to new lands. Many people, of course, cannot afford a relocation of that magnitude. Having realized long ago that government is not their friend at any level, they will withdraw into themselves and their enclave-like communities, dealing only with each other as much as possible and having as little to do with the larger society as possible.

Where does all this leave the idea of a Fifth Stage of Civilization? I obviously will not predict that the West will discover, all at once, any Fifth Stage in 2013. The Third and Fourth Stages will continue to prevail, as so many still locked into the relevant worldviews (materialism, for example) are yet unable to conceive of the possibilities of anything higher.

But in future writings both here and hopefully elsewhere we will continue to examine the possibility of moving forward (we cannot move back, at least not systematically): away from the scientistic materialism of Stage Three and the postmodernist skepticism of Stage Four to the perspective of what would be Stage Five, based on Global Liberty (not Global Government). What might this mean? Were such a society to come to fruition, it would be characterized by freedom for the individual who wants it, who is willing to work to achieve it, and who can assume the responsibilities, moral and economic, that go along with maintaining it. On a larger scale, such a society also recognizes the Creator of all of spatiotemporal physical reality as the real Power behind the scenes. Its people would urge peace instead of war, with problems solved through careful dissection, discussion, and ongoing cooperation instead of by force. Genuine community with any hope of lasting can only be based on such premises. The Fifth Stage of Civilization may involve both the highest and most advanced technology in some of its aspects, if 3D printing indeed catches on and begins to live up to its potential; and it should also involve the “low” technology of, e.g., industrial hemp farming (most recently defended here). Hemp, after all, is one of the most versatile crops ever cultivated, and can be used to make very durable clothing as well as fuel that is environment-friendly in the sense that it burns clean and should provide the sincerely environmentally conscious with all that they need.

To be sure, however and finally, what Christians call sin will probably ever stand in our way, which only means that the struggle to create and maintain the good life, within even the highest civilization, is never complete and never to be taken for granted. The struggle never ends, in other words. My final prediction is that it will continue in 2013. I dare say this one is impossible to get wrong! The struggle for Liberty must continue! Moreover, it must be as global as the struggle to impose Authority has been. After all, all peoples deserve a chance at freedom, not just those of us fortunate enough to have been born in the U.S. In defense of these goals, and the ideals motivating them, the last thing we should ever do is give up!

Philosophy: Its Second-Stage Rise and Third-Stage Retreat

Author & physicist Freeman Dyson has penned this review of a book entitled Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story (Liveright, 2012) by Jim Holt. Dysan examine's Holt's foray into the views of a handful of philosophy professors, based on interviews the author conducted, whom he divides conveniently into "materialists" who would give ontological priority to the physical universe discovered by science, and the "Platonists" who would give ontological priority to a realm of ideas (Plato's Forms being, of course, the earliest known exemplar of this kind of stance).

This kind of division is simplistic, of course, but I don't wish to dwell on that here. Holt sees Wittgenstein and Heidegger as the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Whether this is true I also won't get into, but I think we would have to include them in the top five. What makes Dyson's comments worth thinking about is his observation, late in the review, that philosophy basically disappeared from Western civilization as an efficacious endeavor, one might say, in the latter half of the 1800s. At this point Dyson enters the purview of these meditations. Major philosophers of the past (John Locke is an example--especially in Two Treatises of Government) spoke to major issues, and was read and taken seriously by those in the political establishment of the time. Locke moreover, saw a man such as Isaac Newton as a colleague with whom he could speak & work closely, and the feeling was mutual. In the late 1600s scientists characterized themselves as natural philosophers as the term scientist hadn't been coined. What we call science today was then considered as a branch of philosophy.

In the 1800s, however, everything changed. It wasn't the rise of the modern university, for philosophy had risen to prominence in the modern university by the time of Kant and Hegel; after this era, philosophy began its retreat into oblivion. By the middle of the 1900s, and continuing as we inch into the 2000s, there is an abundance of philosophy professors--perhaps more than ever before!--almost all without influence outside their immediate academic enclaves. They may know the names of leading scientists, but with very rare exceptions leading scientists don't know their names. Why and how philosophy lost its importance is itself an important topic--at least in this author's view. Dyson mentions William Whewell who finally coined the term scientist in 1833 as part of his struggle to free science from philosophy as having its own identity. Whewell was hardly laboring in isolation. He was one of the harbingers of the turning point.

This all ties in with why I find Auguste Comte's "Law of the Three Stages" so inviting--not, again, because I agree with Comte but because I see him as having touched on something very important about modern civilization. The historically important philosophers of the past--the Platos, the Aquinases, the John Lockes, the Adam Smiths, the Immanuel Kants, etc.--were Stage Two thinkers, in our terminology: "metaphysical and abstract." Once civilization begins to enter Stage Three--"scientific and positive"--it appears to have very little use for philosophy which is thereby consigned to the oblivion of academic microspecialization. The standard explanation for this is that the sciences obtain measurable, testable, reproducible results while philosophy does not. Science clearly advances in the sense that more recent theories are objectively superior to older ones; to question this is to invite some strange looks, at least in polite company.* Technology, moreover, increases convenience & makes the lives of everyone better via mastery over one's environment--come to think of it, what was life was like before the Internet?! Commerce (speaking very generally) produces & distributes the products of technologists along with myriad other goods people want and are willing to pay for. In the Secular City**, these aren't seen as needing "justification." The results speak for themselves. Thus a civilization based on science, technology & commerce has "outgrown" philosophy which thereby becomes the province of impractical dreamers. Could this be true? Few professional philosophers could run a business, of course (although the younger ones are reasonably tech savvy). Suffice it to say, characterizing a John Locke or an Adam Smith as an "impractical dreamer" would hardly be accurate or fair.

To be sure, there is a sense in which philosophy brought about its own near-disappearance via Comte's positivistic model & its close relatives who followed Whewell and physicists such as Ernst Mach who sought to eliminate the "metaphysical" elements from physics. The ideal of the "scientific philosopher" caught on within the discipline by the early 1900s, and it became assumed that acquiring knowledge about the world was the province of science alone; philosophy was just not suited to "compete" with the sciences in any way. (There were first rate philosophers such as Frederic B. Fitch and Brand Blanshard who disagreed and followed their own muses, but by and large the profession simply ignored their work.)

"Third Stage" civilization, however, has been characterized not just by the rise of science, technology & commerce but also of concentrations of power. While the Secular City has far more creature comforts than its ancestor villages, it has its underside. Elsewhere I (along with many others) have charted the rise of the Western power elite alongside science, technology and commerce, which they bent to suit their desires. These powers, emanating from (but hardly limited to) extremely wealthy cartels of private international bankers and financiers, also used their wealth to shape education, including universities, to produce a certain kind of work force in a certain kind of environment--one for which the term capitalism continued to be used despite the growing consonance of interests between big business and big government. To the extent the elite considered the matter at all (and I am not saying they did), they would have found very useful for their purposes a species of "philosophy" that confined itself to classrooms, academic offices and library cubicles. Positivistic philosophy (and its descendents in the "analytic" schools) fit very nicely into the kind of university the elite wanted.

Stage Three philosophy, after all, never addressed such questions as, What is the best form of government? or Should government be limited to a few easily delineated functions? Twentieth century logical positivism confined itself to the analysis of language and of scientific knowledge which it took for granted. Thus it would never get to the "big questions" taken on by its ancestor. Absent any anchor or grounding for doing so, it would never question or challenge the structures of power in any efficacious way--not even the powers shaping the universities. While there have been exceptions to this--there have been philosophers who tried to address the major problems of modern civilization (the quite different philosophers Peter Singer and Richard Rorty come to mind), by and large philosophy is moving into the twenty first century as an endeavor without influence.

Moreover--as discussed in earlier posts--Western civilization has moved from Stage Three to what I characterize as Stage Four, a stage not "scientific and positive" but in many (not all) respects as "postmodern and negative"--negative, that is, about the capabilities of the human mind to reach "objective truth" in some sense of that term. Think of Rorty again. Rorty began essentially in the linguistic school, began working out the dynamic of mid-twentieth century analytic philosophy in a new and highly original way, and ended up with a stance where "professional philosophy" has little left to do--except meditate on the futility of its past and how little it has to do in the present! I would argue that the relative disappearance of philosophy has left Western civilization philosophically adrift, unable to articulate much less defend Western core values, and thus vulnerable to those who would undermine those values. One of the core values John Locke clearly articulated and defended, for example, was private property rights. Today, private property rights are everywhere under attack. They are, one might say, conditional rather than given: conditional in the sense that the property owner retains his property if he pays the correct amount of taxes to his government. The average person, who never thinks about such things, takes this stage of affairs for granted unless caught up in a dialogue such as the following:

"Do you own your house?"

"Yes, of course."

"How do you know you own your house?"

"I have the deed right here."

"The deed says you own your house?"

[Impatiently] "Of course it does! It's a deed, and it has my name on it!"

"Do you pay property taxes?"

"Yes."

"What happens if you don't pay your property taxes."

[A tad more thoughtfully now] "The government will eventually come and take my house."

"In that case, who really owns your house?"

Unfortunately, absent philosophical reflection on any large scale, we have come to inhabit a world where those with enormous wealth and in power (they are frequently one and the same) simply assume that power gets the last word, and in the Secular City, it essentially does. Why, since the idea is so seldom articulated much less challenged, would the elites make any other assumption? And if the body of ideas that led up to and were incorporated into private property rights are no longer articulated, then how long can such an institution survive when it gets in the way of those who want to enlarge the scope of their wealth and power?

To bring the discussion completely down to Earth, does anyone really believe Barack Obama has read any recent works of philosophy (except perhaps Fabian socialist Saul Alinsky)? Does anyone think Mitt Romney has studied John Locke or Adam Smith?

Fourth Stage philosophy has, by and large (and unfortunately), continued with the errors of Third Stage philosophy--institutional as well as intellectual. As a discipline it continues the near-invisibility which fell across the field as Third Stage thinking and living came to dominate the Secular City. Particularly embarrassing are the so-called "tenured radicals" who see themselves as "speaking truth to power" because they are oh-so-politically correct in bringing about a more "diverse" campus & badmouthing George W. Bush. Their writings are more microspecialized and less readable than even logical positivism. Most "professional philosophers," of course, don't fall into this category but still take this state of affairs for granted as they teach their service courses, and for pay that even for tenured status is significantly less than what is afforded professors in, say, the department of management over in the business school. They resent it, but don't see themselves as in any position to do anything about it, so in the end they just accept it.

The only way I see to change this state of affairs is for philosophy to change itself from within. This is admittedly a tall order. Philosophy must recover that portion of Stage Two thinking that identified and evaluated worldviews within civilization: identifying the kinds of assumptions made in the contexts of science, technology and commerce that constitute a worldview, and then evaluating them by whether they are helpful or harmful either to civilization at large or some part of it. For example, whether human beings ought to live lives governed by hedonistic values ("the good is pleasure") or whether their lives should be governed by transcendent ones is surely an issue that could affect the course of affairs in commerce: a citizenry steeped in hedonism will choose to spend money on a rather different range of products than a more ascetic citizenry. A society of short-term thinkers will make different aggregate choices than a society of long-term thinkers. The former set of choices are more likely to be harmful in the long run than the latter set of choices; I would submit that this is open to direct observation and so is objectively knowable in any reasonable sense of that phrase.

Lest there be any doubt, the kind of work I am talking about is getting done, and sometimes it is getting done very well. Consider Niall Ferguson's new book Civilization (2012); or Jared Diamond's major works Guns, Germs and Steel (1999) and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail (2005), or Stewart Brand's Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (1999) or his more recent Whole Earth Discipline: An Eco-Pragmatist Manifesto (2009). Stephen Hawking's latest book The Grand Design (2010), moreover, surely addresses some of the major philosophical issues of the entirety of Western civilization with its pronouncement that modern theoretical physics can explain the origins and workings of the physical universe without referencing a Supreme Being.

The work, in other words, is getting done; just not by philosophers. Do philosophers wish to contribute to these dialogues, or don't they. (Will they be allowed by their circumstances to contribute? is a separate and no less interesting question.)

Perhaps a species of philosophy that embraces this kind of self-description--combined, of course, with what is necessary to bring forward from the earlier stages--will be a species of philosophy capable of advancing to consciousness of itself as Fifth Stage, and worthy of a position of influence in the Fifth Stage of Civilization. Perhaps we can one day have a post-Secular City!

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*The so-called social sciences might constitute exceptions, of course. Within disciplines from economics to psychology are multiple "schools" of thought (or, to use Kuhn's term, paradigms) whose adherents don't consider the adherents of the others to be doing "sound economics" or "scientific psychology."

**I hope it is obvious that by Secular City I am not referring to any particular city. The phrase's scope of reference is any or all of the major modern cities in the Western world that are essentially elite-managed, where such practices as "scientific management" prevail, and where the discussion of fundamental ideas is mostly relegated to classrooms and the coffeehouses prevalent in university districts. The phrase comes from Harvey Cox's 1966 book of that title.

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