Easter and the Road to Fifth-Stage Christian Belief

It’s Easter weekend, the weekend Christians all over the world pause to remember the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. According to Christianity this was a unique, supernatural occurrence. A lot of intelligent people have had a problem with this. David Hume, the 18th century Scottish philosopher, made the doubts of his time concrete with his famous criticism ("On Miracles") of the idea that a special set of unique events called miracles could ever be the basis for belief. A major theme of Third Stage thinking (Auguste Comte’s 19th century “scientific and positive” proposals) is the movement away from the idea that supernaturalism of any sort is compatible with a rational view of the world. I’ve attempted to outline the aftermath (my suggestion of a Fourth Stage or condition: “postmodern and negative”). Where do we go from here? With Western civilization experiencing massive crises: economic and financial, political and geopolitical, moral, and spiritual, or just in terms of the increasing army of unemployed and underemployed people trying to survive, this—it seems to me—is one of the most urgent questions we can ask. It is a shame very few professional philosophers seem interested in it. Many of those that are, mouth the same old leftist canards about “capitalism” (which arguably hasn’t existed since 1913 and possibly ended before that).

I’ve argued elsewhere (in my book Worldviews, 2005), that Western thought supplies us with essentially two worldviews, with several variations on each. There is Christianity, and there is materialism. (There are, perhaps, a few lesser ones such as “Platonism” that have remained essentially without large scale influence outside tiny academic or other enclaves, or perhaps "New Age" beliefs of the pseudo-spiritualist crowd.) Christianity places a personal God at the center: morally, metaphysically, and in every other sense. God, according to Christianity, was/is the Creator, and all of physical nature depends upon Him for its existence. (There are, of course, different interpretations of this, but we need not get into those here.) According to materialism, the universe — physical nature — is self-existent and uncreated; it came into being — however this happened (physical cosmologists like Stephen Hawking have expended enormous amounts of time and energy trying to figure it out) — by an entirely natural process. Reality just is physical nature, the world of space, time and causality. All events have physical or material causes. There are no supernatural events if materialism is true. If materialism is true, there probably is no such thing as “free will” as we tend to characterize it (taking actions — somehow — outside the causal structure of our surroundings).

Eventually you have to decide: which is it? Regarding Christianity: belief or unbelief? Some prefer to “sit on the fence.” You can’t do this indefinitely. You have to make a decision. To be an agnostic is to opt for unbelief. A good part of your decision is whether to commit to the idea that something really stupendous occurred on a single weekend a little over 2,000 years ago — when God took the sins of the whole human race and placed them on a sinless Jesus Christ — who was then resurrected from the dead, again sin free! One very good book, Peter Walker’s The Weekend That Changed the World: The Mystery of Jerusalem’s Empty Tomb (London: Marshall-Pickering, 1999) goes well beyond Frank Morison’s classic Who Moved the Stone? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1958; orig. 1930). But neither of these is going to convince a really determined Third Stage materialist or Fourth Stage postmodernist. What will?

Let me approach this in a different way.

Part of what I do in political philosophy is study why our various attempts to organize ourselves as political beings have failed. Recently I had a lengthy debate via email with a gentleman attempting to persuade me with very thoughtful, carefully considered reasoning, that anarcho-capitalism, Hans Herman Hoppe style, held the solutions. Hoppe has written a number of quite original tracts building on earlier writings by Austrian school economist Murray N. Rothbard in particular. He argues extensively that social governance involving a state (an institution with a legal monopoly on the use of coercion) is hopeless if your intent is to secure and preserve liberty. His best known work is Democracy: The God That Failed (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000). Anarcho-capitalism holds, essentially, that free markets can solve every problem in civilization and do so better than any state mechanism, including establishing and maintaining institutions of governance (police to apprehend those who initiate coercion against others, courts for adjudication of disputes, etc.) however limited: a private law society, Hoppe calls it. The correspondence appears to have ended; apparently the gentleman decided I was hopeless. But as much as I wanted to — I have also attempted to argue that liberty is superior to anything else — I cannot accept anarcho-capitalism: Hoppe’s or anyone else’s?

The problem is sin. That is the Christian term. We are sinners. All of us (Romans 3:23). It is in our blood, and has been since the first humans chose to follow their own paths instead of God’s path. This is the Christian line of reasoning. As sinners we are separated from God. We can be redeemed through Jesus Christ who paid the price for our sins on the cross (Romans 6:23). Moreover, only through accepting Jesus Christ as one’s personal savior can one be redeemed and be assured of going to heaven in the afterlife (John 14:6, Acts 4:12). You can’t earn salvation (Ephesians 2: 8-9). But it is not difficult to obtain. All one must do is confess your sins and believe sincerely that Jesus Christ paid the price, invite Him prayerfully to come into your life as your personal savior, and you are saved (John 3:16, John 11:25-26, elsewhere). He waits, even now (Revelation 3:20). It is true that this calls for a decision made on faith. Faith, however, is not bad or evil. It is a necessary part of the Christian worldview (Hebrews 11).

Above I cited over a half dozen Scriptural passages. Why, in this day and age, should you believe Scripture? One answer is that when reading Scripture, you are reading the most analyzed, examined, and carefully preserved texts in all of human history. Nothing written by any of the ancient philosophers — Plato or Aristotle — has been as carefully analyzed or preserved as, e.g., the four Gospels. The earliest manuscripts we have of Plato’s and Aristotle’s works date to early medieval times. The earliest manuscripts we have for the Gospels date to the first century A.D., probably within the lifetimes of witnesses to events such as Jesus Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. Early Christians went willingly to their deaths at the hands of the Romans. Sometimes these deaths involved suffering on a level we probably can't imagine. (Just study crucifixion and its effects on the human body; it’s the very definition of torture!)

How does this point us toward a role for Christianity in a Fifth Stage thinking that is still indistinct and unformed, much as Fourth Stage thinking was in the late-19th century? The road to a prospective Fifth Stage Christian belief runs through two realizations.

First, does sin really exist? Of course it does. It is manifest in our lives as political beings, and hence in civilization. If asked to do so, and we are honest about it, we human beings could produce a catalog of all the attempts we’ve made to organize ourselves socially and politically and why they failed. Our explanation would be: human sin. Different brands of sinfulness have affected different people at different levels in society. For some, it’s the sin of greed. Money becomes the end-all, be-all of existence. For others, it’s the lust for power. Domination is their raison d’être. For others, it’s just the sin of pride. For others still, it’s slothfulness. Christians are not exceptions to this rule. Christian institutions are as prone to dysfunction, abuse, and failure as those of non-Christians. The Christian doesn’t cease to be a sinner. All he can say is that he’s been saved from the ultimate consequences of his sin (eternal damnation in hell). There’s no room for pride here.

Sin explains our failure to produce a political system that doesn’t coerce or allow physical harm to come to somebody. It explains, as I maintained consistently in my end of the correspondence, why (1) there is no reason at all to believe an anarcho-capitalist civilization could come into existence on a large scale, though small-scale communities bordering on such might be possible; and (2) even assuming (1) to be false, why such a civilization wouldn’t be sustainable: people motivated by the desire for advantage — or just power — would organize and if they did not recreate the state openly, would create a surrogate that would have a de facto monopoly on coercive authority. There is no evidence that the masses, as such, are willing to give up all the advantages that come with having a state, for which they pay in ways both large and small however much they might grouse (about, e.g., income taxes). For those who want genuine independence, small-scale communities — I know of several in various stages of development — are a fantastic idea and I support them wholeheartedly! But again a threat emerges: to the extent these become visible successful oases of liberty and prosperity, they could easily become the targets of those who want power, which typically incorporates rejecting the very idea of people living independent, sustainable lives ... or just sheer resentment at the successes of others.

What we are in a position to do is look back at history — at our efforts: over 2,000 years worth of them. History is a gold mine of information, however disturbing. It all points in one direction: we will never build Utopia, because sin will invariably get in the way. That goes for “capitalistic” as well as “socialistic” Utopias, and it goes for the small scale as well as the large even if relatively speaking, “small is better.” Catalog could be compiled on why “capitalism” is under attack in West despite magnificent results in increasing the standard of living everywhere it was allowed to take root. Ultimately, factors ranging from pride to self-indulgence and the general lack of vigilance to which comfort gives rise all get in the way, allowing encirclements of control to take root and gradually thwart freedom. Other factors come into play as well. Consider education: for liberty to take root at all and for free markets to continue to operate, a certain body of ideas must be in place and maintained (the masses need not obsess over them, of course, but the bulk of common people must be exposed to them as part of their educations and must internalize them and live them). If within a free market, these ideas are no longer marketable, free markets will eventually face a problem — especially given increasingly indifferent masses that either don’t really want freedom or are ignorant of what went into building it. In this way, a free market system is vulnerable to deterioration from within if its participants cannot maintain the marketability of its own foundational ideas and thinking. While there are a number of endeavors (the Mises Institute being the obvious one) that have not only survived but done quite well on their own terms, especially given the entertainment-saturated marketplace of Stage Four civilization, their influence has been limited. They can only do so much. They cannot, for example, open people’s skulls and internalize liberty ideas for them. That, of course, would be a form of coercion. Thus the U.S. federal government continues to increase its secular power even in the face of magnificent defense of liberty. Something is missing. What’s missing is that internalization of ideas of genuine liberty and the zest for independence, plus the energy to carry it forward, among the masses.

Second … and with this we return to some unfortunately difficult philosophical and theological notions (did we ever really leave them?) … is the realization that finite human reasoning will never be sufficient to decide between the two worldviews. I believe that however it develops — if it develops — Fifth Stage Christianity will be presuppositional, drawing upon a specific apologetic of the sort theologians such as Cornelius Van Til have supplied.

Let me cite the philosophers and theologians from the various past stages to support this thesis.

From medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas (Stage Two) we inherit the idea that a rational God — the foundational Logos (John 1:1) — created a rational universe, including ourselves, with a capacity for reason, and therefore both for knowledge that (episteme) and knowledge how to (techne): science and technology, neither of which would make rational sense otherwise. In other words, the idea of a rational God as Creator stands as the cornerstone of the very idea that physical nature is intelligible, and can be tamed through technology.

From the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (Stage Two) we inherit the idea that our reason is essentially limited to the world of space and time. Our “categories of the understanding” are simply not designed to address such questions as the existence of a supreme being or the beginning of space and time. It follows that we cannot, in principle, really understand supernatural events such as the Resurrection or states of affairs such as the Holy Trinity (God in Three Persons). Hence reason alone, whether all by its lonesome or acting on empirical information, unless founded on a presupposition or first premise to the contrary, is going to drift towards a de facto materialism because it while it can accept what it sees, smells, and touches, it finds discussion of a “realm” outside of space and time to be rationally unintelligible.

The first philosopher, I suspect, to grasp fully the impact of our limitations to the world of space, time, and human experience (including human suffering) was Søren Kierkegaard, the “melancholy Dane” (proto Stage Four). Part of his “subjective theory of religious truth” involved repudiating the idea that we could “reason” our way to God, as in, e.g., the teleological argument (or argument from design). Such arguments, he believed, would be more apt to provoke doubt than belief. In the end, there’s still no proof — not even a reason to believe the “laws of nature” won't change in the future and obliterate our convictions about them! (Maybe Kierkegaard had read Hume. Or maybe not.)

From Friedrich Nietzsche we inherit the full realization of where the philosophical rejection of God would take civilization: to a “revaluation of all values.” Nietzsche was a full-fledged Fourth Stage thinker in my sense. He warned of the “advent of nihilism” which the 20th century fully brought to fruition with its wars, the most destructive the world had ever seen; its acts of genocide; and the rise to dominance of the superelite whose ancestors had realized that the road to power over nations was through control over their monetary and financial systems. In 1913, this resulted in the U.S. Federal Reserve System. The rest, we might say, is history. In the 19th century, moral philosophers (especially the utilitarian school) had supported the idea of meliorism: science, technology and education will all make us better persons in the moral sense. They might even help us perfect ourselves! It seems to this writer that the 20th century has laid utter waste to this notion, although a few nutty transhumanists still appear to believe it!

Nietzsche, more than Kierkegaard, worked out both the ethical and some of the epistemological consequences of the rejection of a God who created a rational world order: there becomes no fundamental reason to see this world as rational or the events in it as explicable! First modern existentialism, especially in modern literature, and then postmodernism across many “academic disciplines” worked out many of the consequences of the idea that the world is not rational. For the latter, even those not obsessed with race-based or gender-based collective grievance, claims to knowledge or truth are easily “deconstructed” as power-motivations (which, sometimes, in a civilization bent in the direction of materialism, they are! The internalized philosophy becomes self-fulfilling!).

After Comte, professional philosophy largely fled the “big questions” in favor of analysis and has hid out ever since in academia. Theologians such as Cornelius Van Til bring us back in the only way possible: through the first premise, or presupposition, of a holy God who is perfect in every respect, is supernatural in transcending spatiotemporal physical nature (leaving aside the myriad debates over “transcendence” and “immanence”), is all-knowing in a manner we, as finite beings, are incapable of understanding with our reason and so must either embrace the first premise or not, and has revealed Himself to human beings in Scripture.

What helps us accept this first premise as a basis for a Fifth Stage Christianity? Perhaps, for those who have studied the history and examined the failures of political systems, just the realization that Western civilization has tried the contrary premise, either assuming that God does not exist or (what amounts to the same thing) dismissing the question as of no importance. We see the consequences all around us — as financial systems threaten to go down in flames and latent totalitarianism rears its ugly head in, of all places, the United States of America (the first nation to be founded explicitly on the principles of liberty and of Constitutionally limited government). We see, that is, the consequences of not having institutions or a population with a moral center, having internalized (however imperfectly) basic Christian principles. The modern world seems to be growing increasingly mean, and brutal — and we have to remind ourselves that a certain level of meanness and brutality has been part of the warp and woof of human life for all of history. Western civilization and its “capitalistic” institutions had begun to lead the way out of our likely “default” status; now, as these institutions crumble under the weight of secular materialism, our “default” status is increasingly coming back!

I submit in conclusion that materialism was a Third Stage (and, in its own way, a Fourth Stage) worldview and perspective. It will have no place in the Fifth Stage except as history — in the form of studies on what not to believe, and as a warning to those who will come after us. An attempt to continue it, as many intellectuals are wont to do, will ensure that there will be no Fifth Stage, which would be most unfortunate.

As we move into the future, let us celebrate Easter tomorrow in full and open realization that what we are celebrating is something truly miraculous — the supernatural resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. Let us embrace the Christian worldview that this both presupposes and supplies for our lives.

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On the Marketability (or Lack of) of Philosophy. Or: Philosophy As Worldview Oversight

[Note to those who have asked, “When are you going to post more about your life in Chile?” A promise: somewhere down the pike, perhaps on the weekend of my one-year anniversary in this place, I will post on what there is to like about Chile versus what I dislike—in light of the fact that any place one chooses is going to have definite plusses and definite minuses. It’s not Utopia here; although while I was away in the South I saw sights that could easily be taken for slices of Utopia! And I don't have to worry about a SWAT team or drone coming my way for having said politically incorrect things about the Obama regime’s latest caper or Homeland Security’s latest weapons purchase. Hopefully this will do for now—as a kind of teaser.]

Recently I was offered something I’d hoped and prayed for—a philosophy teaching job in Chile, with the bulk of the lecture to be offered in English (Spanish on PowerPoints), my first since arriving in Santiago slightly over eight months ago. Not to belabor this, but naturally I sent out an announcement to my network and chanced to include the salary—low, possibly due in part to the need to pay some new dues in a location where I am hardly a known quantity (yet)—but also possibly due just to philosophy’s not being a priority item at the institution (Universidad de Santiago de Chile—USACH) any more than it is at any major university in the U.S. Moreover, it’s just one course, suggesting that this is just a first step and not a final state of affairs (whatever that might turn out to be—full-time at a good-paying private institution would be the ideal, of course). At least one recipient of my announcement did a quick comparison between the CLP and the USD given the exchange rate of the day and offered the opinion that my pay was a slave wage not different from the adjunct wages I’d visibly walked away from in the States. The matter triggered a brief flurry of email exchanges, whose focus was on the marketability of philosophy—here or anywhere. Having some pressing business to attend to, I didn’t participate, but made a few mental notes. Those notes evolved into the present essay. My focus here: to what extent is the low pay awarded the professor of a philosophy course (as opposed to a course in, say, economics, or in chemistry, or in engineering) a reflection of the market, and to what extent does it reflect other matters—e.g., university politics, or the still larger cultural ambience of disdain for, or hostility to, philosophy, a discipline which among other things, ought to encourage critical thinking which often means distrust of the kind of authority that says, “X is true because I say so,” the subtext of quite a number of decisions by governments these days.

Is it a “bad thing” in some sense that philosophy pays less in universities than those other subjects? Wasn’t philosophy once at the core of a well-rounded education, and should this matter here, one of our concerns being the role philosophy ought to play in the civilization of the future—the Fifth Stage, if there is to be one?

Since this essay is long, let me state its envisioned role for philosophy at the outset. Philosophers consciously taking civilization towards its Fifth Stage, if it can be made to happen, will be worldview overseers; their enterprise, one of worldview oversight: identification, precise and clear formulation, development if necessary, and critical evaluation of worldviews as cultural artifacts within civilization, entities that will often be tacit (implicit, aside, possibly, from specific religious views or stated assumptions of science). A worldview, as explained in previous entries, is a comprehensive set of beliefs about what kind of world this is (what reality is like, fundamentally), how we as human beings fit in, and what kind of beings we are, at base. It provides a set of answers for what we should do based on its diagnosis of problems within our civilization and suggests remedies, themselves open to scrutiny and evaluation—including rejection if they turn out to be uninformed or misguided.

All of which implies that the philosopher should be more than an academic micro-specialist. He or she should know some science, some technology, some history, something of economics, something of business even (if a philosopher can by some chance learn to operate a business successfully, he is ahead in this endeavor!).

To be sure, this is not what philosophy is today. Today you will find a Stephen Hawking stating as he did recently in The Grand Design (2010) that “philosophy is dead.” If it is dead, it most assuredly cannot subsist at the core of education, traditional or otherwise. One thing should be clear, easily understood within our Stages of Civilization framework: the “queen of the sciences” has indeed abdicated her throne. In Auguste Comte’s Third Stage, philosophy is replaced by science, taking us to positions like Hawking’s. As we’ve noted previously, Comte could not have foreseen that Stage Three would be replaced by Stage Four (except, of course, for those remaining in the hard sciences like Hawking, or a few others working in, e.g., evolutionary biology such as Richard Dawkins). It was during Stage Three’s rise—amidst a triumphant Newtonian empire in physics, the emergence of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in biology, the appearance of such new areas as Freud’s psychoanalysis, etc.—that philosophy all-but-voluntarily stepped aside in favor of the idea that the sciences alone yield truth about the world. (This very statement is not a scientific claim, but never mind that just now.) With the fall of the Newtonian empire—at the hands of Einstein, the emergence of quantum-mechanical reality, and all that’s happened since—one would think that the door to philosophy’s comeback would be opened wide. The realization that a lot of what we thought represented edifices of “objective knowledge” or “universal truth” had failed to stand only provided source materials for hundreds of specialized doctoral dissertations and dust-gathering journal articles. Meanwhile, Stage Three was replaced—culturally, educationally, spiritually—by Stage Four: roughly speaking, the Postmodern Stage (key philosophical representatives: Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty; other useful names to drop include Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas S. Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Jean Baudrillard).

Stage Four, in other words, has retained philosophy’s abdication. Within the general strictures of postmodernism, philosophy remains an academic decoration—along with the rest of the humanities. It elucidates power relationships instead of the rationality of science or confused uses of language (the standby of the tradition that grew out of Wittgensteinian analysis). Its denizens use phrases like structures of domination. They emphasize history’s victims (usually women and minorities) as against victimizers (white men—never mind the fact that white men invented civilization in the first place). Stage Four postmodernist philosophy is clueless about real power. It never mentions the City of London or the Fabian Society or the Bank for International Settlements or the Federal Reserve System. What it does emphasize is the local, the particular, the specific, in all things; its major writers find such concepts as objectivity unintelligible; they warn against any attempts to elucidate the nature of, e.g., Truth with a capital T (Rorty offers a good case study in the massive introductory essay of his Consequences of Pragmatism, 1981). Stage Four epistemology—if one can call it that—eschews viewing commonplace truths (“snow is white,” “cruelty is wrong”) as amounting to more than cultural consensus, exemplars of solidarity instead of objectivity. This, of course, hardly seems worth serious pay—even in university settings—when there is real work to be done! Small wonder that philosophy is not marketable, if this is the best that it can produce! There are a few writers—I have known several—who would insist that philosophy can be marketable, because it has been. They would point to Ayn Rand, whose philosophical novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) certainly proved marketable; not just did they sell well (they continue to sell well), but now they’ve both been made into major film productions. Rand’s nonfiction essays have also been widely read—to an extent far greater than that of any academic philosopher. Every so often her ideas garner new attention—a few years ago, when Alan Greenspan discussed his supposed debt to her in his book The Age of Turbulence (2007), and most recently, when Paul Ryan—Mitt Romney’s choice for running-mate—cited her as an inspiration (I do not believe either one understood her). Articles both celebrating and bashing Rand appeared both in print media and online.

Most academic philosophers, of course, dismiss Rand out of hand—often with a sneering belligerence sufficiently out of proportion to her actual influence in American society (she’s hardly up there with Madonna, after all, or even Suzanne Somers!) that one suspects an envy for which she had no patience. Rand’s writings appealed to a certain segment of the population: realistic, business-focused, enjoying new technology, psychologically oriented towards independence and economic self-sufficiency, and intelligent enough to appreciate a need for a thoughtful and systematic justification for modern capitalism. Some of these people are intellectuals in any reasonable sense of this term; they just aren’t professional intellectuals in universities or “think tanks.” All of which has to lead a fair-minded person to suspect that the problem of the marketability of philosophy isn’t with philosophy as such but with the kind of philosophy that developed within Stage Three and became ensconced in the higher-educational bureaucracy: micro-specialized, esoteric, remote from “real world” problems and issues—and by its very nature unable to identify and challenge real power systems or structures of domination in the world (philosophers who do so openly will find themselves quickly weeded out in an academic search as “conspiracy nuts”!). Some will object that whatever else one says, Rand’s Objectivism as a systematic philosophy wasn’t very good, that it was simplistic and uninformed about its own historical antecedents including an unacknowledged debt to Nietzsche, that it wasn’t addressed to her fellow philosophers but to the public, and that it was strawmannish and occasionally juvenile in its dismissal of historically important thinkers (e.g., one of her essays characterizes Kant as the “first hippie”). This characterization isn’t entirely wrong, but it is exaggerated, and begs a question: should philosophy be written exclusively for specialists or an educated wide audience? This depends on what problems we view philosophy as needed to solve—what problems philosophy is uniquely able to formulate and address—and suggests that we need a different approach than the academic one whatever evaluation we accord Rand’s philosophy.

Please allow me to digress further. (Hopefully I can be forgiven for the complexity and unwieldiness here—but the problem we are grappling with really does have a lot of facets.) Those who know me really well, know I have a strong interest in the music, life, and thinking of Brian Eno: British musician, experimental composer, producer, visual artist, activist, and occasional essayist (author of “The Long Now” unfortunately only available online in a shortened version, from which the San Francisco-based Long Now Foundation took its name). Where does a British musician fit in here? In interviews given long ago—and as reported in David Sheppard’s biography On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno (2008)—Eno relates that formative experience that shaped him—well-intended criticism of his interest in art that came from someone he respected as a somewhat precocious teenager, wondering why someone with his intelligence want to waste it becoming an artist. Let’s look at it:

[The criticism] set a question going in my mind that has always stayed with me, and motivated a lot of what I’ve done: what does art do for people, why do people do it, why don’t we only do rational things, like design better engines? And because it came from someone I very much respected, that was the foundation of my intellectual life.

Many of Brian Eno’s “fans” will see him with the lens through which they would view any “rock musician”: a former member of the British art rock band Roxy Music who then went on to pen his own skewed tunes with names like “Baby’s On Fire.” Eno should not be regarded as an intellectual dilettante, however (in my humble opinion). He’s read his way through some weighty material—in systems theory applied to organizations (Stafford Beer’s Brain of the Firm, 1973,for example), a possible biological basis for the arts (e.g., Morse Peckham’s Man’s Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior and the Arts (1965), and a great deal of political theory in addition to his interactions with other recognized avant garde composers such as John Cage. His approach to music actually reflects a strong preoccupation with the use of systems to generate and maintain creativity—creating musical systems that will “run themselves” and develop without the composer’s continued interference. Many of his recordings, with names like Music for Airports (1979) and Generative Music 1 (1996)—available only as computer software since the tracks are intended to come out different with each play—reflect this preoccupation.

So what’s the big deal here? What does any of this have to do with philosophy, much less its marketability?

I encountered Eno in the mid-1970s as a university undergraduate as just another art-rock musician (I was a maniac record collector at the time); then I encountered his ideas through interviews in music magazines (late-1970s, early-1980s), and determined to remember quotes such as the above. They apply to philosophy no less than they do to art! Perhaps they apply even more! What does philosophy do for those of us who “like” it, who were drawn to it? What should it do for civilization that art and poetry can’t do? Why shouldn’t we apply the formal-logical and critical-thinking skills available in philosophy to practical problems such as writing useful software (“designing better machines”)? Does it have anything to contribute to an advanced civilization—a Secular City (to use Harvey Cox’s provocative term from his 1965 book)? In an advanced civilization, the dominant forms of life are technical / technological and specialized; many organizations will tend to be large, complex, and global in scope; hierarchy will be omnipresent; the “business of business will be business” as the breadwinning denizens of the expanding Secular City focus on earning their livings and supporting their families.

In this environment, ethics tends to be utilitarian in a broad, tacit sense (it is interesting that several leading Austrian school economists, e.g., Ludwig von Mises, were utilitarians, not Randian rational egoists). It should be no mystery why pragmatism (later: neo-pragmatism) became, and has remained, the distinctively American philosophy. For there is a sense in which pragmatism and neo-pragmatism are “nonphilosophies”: even more than logical positivism, they are expressions of the collective mentality of the Secular City which has set philosophy aside when there is “real work to be done.” In this light, again: is there any wonder why philosophy isn’t considered marketable, and why even in universities, philosophy teachers tend to be the lowest paid of all adjuncts (although strangely, English teachers tend to be paid even worse)? Thus for philosophers anyway—the role philosophy either does or should play in civilization is of some urgency. I hope to make the case that a role for philosophy in helping guide the civilization of the future is also of interest. If mainstream academic philosophers will not do this work, then others must.

For it is also clear: academic philosophy is aging and dying. The youngest academic philosopher of historical significance, Saul Kripke, is in his 70s. Without going into details that would extend this essay indefinitely, the majority of the “work” being done by younger generations holds out little hope for contributing to the future: I just don’t see efforts by radical feminists preoccupied with finding masculine domination over feminine nature in science as helping much in making the case for the value of philosophy (as opposed to being a queen-sized embarrassment!).

The hostile job market, mentioned briefly above, has surely also exacted effects here, effects that almost no one has examined. Very bright and potentially talented philosophers have doubtless looked at their own marketability as prospective Ph.D.s and gone elsewhere (into computer science, for example). The field has thus suffered from a “brain drain.” Most poorly paid adjuncts who stuck it out and received their Ph.D.s are too busy trying to survive to write good philosophy—with survival often meaning dissembling and pretending to be politically correct while seeing clearly the fundamental irrationalism of political correctness. Many eventually decide they can’t do it. They leave academia, furthering the “brain drain.”

These problems for the future of academic philosophy, however weighty in their own terms, do not quite get to the heart of an important matter. Academia itself—the environment that nurtured Stage Three logical positivism and philosophical analysis and then Stage Four postmodernism and political correctness—may come to be seen as increasingly outmoded, the product of an earlier age, as civilization moves forward. Higher education, including philosophy, is now more easily dispensed online for those inclined to do so (the results are sometimes awkward but I expect this will disappear as technology improves and brings more and more of the features of the traditional classroom into the virtual classroom, including people on different continents interacting in real time on Webinars, using Skype, etc., as if they were in the same room). New educational forms of life will emerge, and we can’t predict what they will do. They won’t play by the “rules” of older forms—preoccupied with curricula and degrees. Philosophy must move forward into this environment while looking at it—both as observer and as participant—if it is to contribute. Perhaps if God establishes His Kingdom on Earth, philosophy will not be necessary. But unless, or until, that happens, I believe civilization will suffer if the specific correctives and guidance philosophy can offer never develop. What correctives and guidance are we talking about? We come at last to our main thesis about philosophy as worldview overseer.

First, what conditions render philosophy both possible and useful, and what it has contributed when these conditions were satisfied? Philosophy needed—it is true—to separate itself from dogmatic religion, for no reason other than dogmatic religion is inherently authoritarian. Philosophy cannot really exist in a Stage One cultural environment. It can only develop and flourish when civilization has developed enough to support a plurality of opinions—which admittedly may mean nothing more than an inability of authorities to stamp out competing points of view. Such conditions existed amongst the ancient Greeks, which is why we had not just Plato and Aristotle but also Stoics, Epicureans, and others. Philosophers could ask, within their communities and generally for posterity, questions of better versus worse ethically, epistemically, politically, existentially. This brought into focus realizations that logical norms, evidential relations, ethical values, etc., existed in some sense independently of either individuals or priestly authorities or political ones. Philosophers were in a position to begin formulating and evaluating the prevailing worldviews in their surrounding civilizations. They could develop them, defend them (or criticize them) with arguments, apply them further, etc.—even if their methods were largely a priori. Thus arose Stage Two civilization. Its greatest achievements: the systems developed by St. Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and others without whom early modern science might never have developed—or might have developed centuries later. Science and technology do, after all, have a philosophical foundation and basis! They require their practitioners to begin with certain very general assumptions about the world we inhabit—that events in the world manifest order and not randomness however random they may seem! Absent those assumptions—which came about primarily in the West—there will be no motivation to do science, or develop new technologies! (Quantum indeterminacy might suggest counter-considerations, but these will have to wait for another time.)

We’ve previously seen how, under Stage Three, philosophy became a “handmaiden to the sciences” as the latter advanced. By the time Comte was writing, it made at least some sense to say that the natural sciences were the future intellectually, and that meliorism ought to be the guiding assumption of a utilitarian ethos. Philosophers would have to content themselves with the reduced role of analysts (or bad psychologists—the view most analysts had of existentialism, already jumping the gun on Stage Four). This modest, reduced role for philosophy fitted the enterprise nicely into the emerging bureaucratic structure of the modern university. This role led to its above-described abdication. Philosophy ceded its intellectual authority to science—which in turn, as historians and sociologists of science have shown in great detail—owed more to the authority of monied interests than its practitioners cared to see. (The cynical remark that cognitive science consists of six academic disciplines in search of grant money does, after all, have some basis in reality.)

Stage Four thinking turned philosophy from handmaiden to potential critic of the sciences, occasionally seeing them as one form of life among many and hardly deserving of dominance (Feyerabend). Unfortunately, with the collapse of the job market and the rise of political correctness, nothing of the sort happened. Philosophy became a handmaiden to the political agenda (“the personal is the political” is a mantra of radical feminists).

A few philosophers married the historicism of Kuhn and Feyerabend to positive science; captivated by new findings in neurophysiology, they theorized that perhaps our commonsense descriptions of ourselves as beings with beliefs, etc., have no more basis in reality than Ptolemaic astronomy, that they characterize a “folk psychology,” and that we should become eliminative materialists (see works such as Paul Churchland’s Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, 1979) and Patricia Smith Churchland’s Neurophilosophy, 1981, as definitive statements of these proposals; interestingly, both Feyerabend and Rorty defended versions of eliminative materialism in early papers). Worldviews as beliefs held tacitly within a cultural consensus would be, of course, utterly mysterious to an eliminativist—linguistic products of a “folk sociology,” one might call it. This notwithstanding, is it not clear to the most bleary-eyed that eliminative materialism is no less a worldview (or part of one) than any other form of materialism? Pointing out the logical paradox involved in stating the belief that beliefs, worldviews, etc., have no real existence—a staple of eliminative materialism—is something philosophy can certainly do that is very specific. In fairness, this issue has been raised several times in the literature—I know of one philosopher who took it seriously enough to try to refute it—but it refuses to go away.

What philosophy can do in its effort to serve as a corrective and a guide for the civilization of the future is what it has always done best: identify and formulate the prevailing worldview, and then subject it to rigorous testing: is it logically consistent or self-referentially inconsistent? Is it consistent with fact, to the best we can tell (and there is, of course, room for differences of opinion)? Perhaps most importantly: is it helping us or harming us? That is: is it bringing us increasingly into harmony with each other and with our surroundings, or is it damaging all our relationships? Is it helping us accept and further our lives as they are in the world as it is, distinguishing what we ought to change from what we must accept because of our nature and because of how reality works? These questions precede specific decisions about what kind of worldview we ought to embrace versus what we should reject. (While I believe we should reject materialism in all forms, this is a separate thesis I will not argue for here.)

Many writers—some of them academic philosophers—need to bash Ayn Rand. Some of the specifics raised by her critics may be valid—I’m not arguing that issue one way or the other here, either. The point I would make is that Rand’s philosophy did the above. It was comprehensive and systematic. It placed value on logical consistency. It is not self-refuting. Rand offered Objectivism as solving a problem of the first magnitude: a philosophical justification for capitalism that (she argues) capitalism did not have and without which it would be destroyed, taking civilization down with it (a major theme, obviously, of Atlas Shrugged). It laid out a worldview: a perspective incorporating a metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of government and of economics for how human beings could both compete and cooperate harmoniously, based on a set of premises about our nature as rational agents of volitional consciousness to the rest of a reality of objects with determinate natures of their own.

And Miss Rand’s philosophy turned out to be marketable! Is this a test of its truth? Of course not. But clearly it resonated within our particular civilization in the grip of Stage Three. It met a need. It solved problems, for those who perceived capitalism’s absence of a philosophical foundation as a problem (to my mind, Mises offers the best sense of what constitutes a problem: whatever prompts unease in a person and motivates the person to consider action to relieve the unease; cf. his discussion in Human Action, 1949). Conditions have changed considerably since Rand’s writings. But the problem of how to take civilization forward—how to get past the present terminal adolescence of perpetual war, empire building (economic as well as political), the destructive idea that central banks can print and governments can spend their way into sustainable prosperity, the problem of how to balance competing claims of personal freedom and sustainable liberty as a societal phenomenon, and what to do about claims that present-day civilization is out of harmony with the natural environment on which it ultimately depends (a core contention of anthropogenic climate change arguments).

These are all problems that cry out for the sort of work philosophers can do as worldview overseers. Could such philosophy be marketable? I don’t know. If enough people with educations were able to learn of it, and find that it solves problems in their lives, or in matters of public policy regarding war, government untruths, the environment, etc., all going beyond matters of mere economic sustenance—if it could be seen as guiding a lost world back towards genuine flourishing—than I could see philosophy as worldview oversight as marketable. At the very least, it seems worthwhile to make a sustained effort to find out!

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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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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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Chilean Holiday & History / Comte's Law of the Three Stages & Beyond

I. Back again. I am not sure whether you will see one post per Saturday or not; but as it so happens, I have a free afternoon. This coming week, Chile celebrates perhaps its most important national holiday: Chilean Independence Day, September 18. On this day, in 1810, Chile declared independence from Spain (although the official declaration of independence was not issued until February 12, 1818). What followed-predictably-was 16 years of violence until the last of the royalists surrendered in 1826. September 18 remains a day of festivities, and it so happens that the two surrounding days, the 17th and the 19th, are also caught up in the celebration, with businesses closed and streets and avenues open to parades, food, reenactments, music, and dance. It is a lively time to be in Santiago. The greatest hero of Chilean independence was Bernardo O'Higgins. The son of a former viceroy, O'Higgins took control of pro-independence forces in 1813 and became Chile's second Supreme Director in 1817. In an importance sense, as the first to hold that position after the issuing of Chile's declaration of independence, O'Higgins is Chile's George Washington. A major thoroughfare through downtown Santiago is named for him.

Chile has a history as remarkable (and as stormy) as U.S. history. Its more recent history is of much more interest, of course. On September 11, 1973, forces loyal to Augusto Pinochet stormed the palace then occupied by socialist Salvador Allende, in what is known here as El Golpe. Allende committed suicide rather than be captured. Pinochet assumed absolute power and presided over a military dictatorship until 1990. That year, he held an election, lost, stepped down, and turned the Chilean government back over to civilian rule. The entire era still troubles this nation: Pinochet was a dictator and does what dictators do, which is to rule by force, suppressing free speech and imprisoning and torturing political dissidents. Chileans do not forget the thousands who simply disappeared during the Pinochet years. But Pinochet also oversaw the rebuilding of Chile's economy via the "Chicago Boys," a small group of Chilean economists sent to the University of Chicago to study under Milton Friedman. They returned, armed with classical liberal ideas, and began Chile's transformation into the first world nation it is today.

Pinochet is thus praised by some who see him as having gotten rid of a communist threat and turning the country in a new direction. Chile today is as prosperous as any Latin American country-but its prosperity has come with a price! That era still hangs like a shadow over the aggregate psychology of this country. Perhaps it's just leftists, who are still around. But that might be too simple an explanation. There is a sense in which this has become a very business-oriented nation of workaholics, very risk-averse, who take breaks only on holidays like the one to be celebrated beginning Monday. My observations of the rising Chilean middle class remind me of William Whyte's The Organization Man, a disquieting study of the then-rising U.S. middle class published in the early 1960s. The Chilean middle class appears to consist of organization men in Whyte's sense, with relatively few entrepreneurs. As we now know, the rising of large organizations presages a more and more centralized society-with corporatism possibly the best name for the specific economic model. Under corporatism, corporations and government make policy together under the guise of democratic rule, with elections, etc. Corporations get rich; governments get power. Both are happy with the arrangement, but are the common people satisfied? Do they have many options?

What of spiritual concerns? While there is religiosity here-that of the prevailing Catholicism characteristic of Latin America-it is at least as superficial as much of the religiosity of mainstream Christian denominations in the U.S. Here I am reminded of Harvey Cox's The Secular City (1965) which charted the progressive secularization of the modern world and its "bypassing" of the great questions of theology. Is that the direction Chile is heading? I do not yet know. Chile has its share of large corporations; and globalism definitely has found a place here. David Rockefeller Sr. has come to Chile on numerous occasions. Chile is, of course, one of the partners in the infamous Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), forged over a two-year period behind closed doors by the elites of various nations including the U.S., Mexico, Peru, Australia and China. The TPP has been vehemently criticized as the NAFTA of the Pacific world, and a long term danger to any rising middle class, although Chile's tremendous natural resources offer it some protection from the kind of outsourcing that has decimated the middle class in the U.S. More meditations of this sort in future posts.

II. Last week I discussed three prospective works in progress. One of the key purposes of this blog is to get the central ideas of these works up in one place, lest circumstances beyond my control prevent their completion. I can only hope the ideas are important enough to justify the effort. Is thinking about the future important? Obviously it is! Can this blog contribute to a discussion of where we ought to go as a civilization, whether in Chile, the U.S., or wherever we happen to be? The jury is still out on that one.

A central theme of all this work will be what Auguste Comte (1798-1857) called the Law of the Three Stages, so I'll spend the remainder of my time here today discussing that, concluding with a theory about its present status. Comte is best known as the founder of the science of sociology and the originator of the philosophical ideology known as positivism. The Law of the Three Stages had emerged in his work in the 1830s, in his Course on Positive Philosophy. Although the Law of the Three Stages figures most prominently into the third of the projected series, it is also the lynchpin that holds everything together. So it would be best to begin with a discussion of it: its origins and postulates, its twentieth century fate, and the question of where we go from here.

What is the Law of the Three Stages? In Comte's hands, it defined the natural trajectory of a civilization, just as Newton's laws governed the trajectory of a falling body or thrown physical object. Comte didn’t invent the idea. One can find similar notions in Vico and Condorcet. But he gave it its clearest exposition. According to Comte, a civilization goes through three stages or conditions (he uses both terms--one could also speak of layers.

The first he calls the "religious or fictitious." The second is the "metaphysical or abstract." The third was the then-emerging "scientific or positive." It is important that these are not historical stages; all three both can and do coexist in Western civilization, albeit uneasily. The first, viewed through Comte's eyes, might be thought of as civilization's childhood; the second, as civilization's adolescence; the third, as its adulthood. Once civilization embraces the third stage, it finally has its feet firmly planted on the ground in this world, not some other, and can stride forward responsibly.

The first stage is the stage of: “God said it; I believe it; and that settles it.” While such sentiments might appeal to many Christians today, they allow little room for thoughtful discussion or discerning examination or philosophical inquiry. Stage One Thinking, as I will call it, is fearful of philosophy, as it might provoke doubt. It thus has little to offer those who are restless and dissatisfied with “mere belief,” but rather want some kind of understanding of what it is they are believing, and what the implications might be. Stage One purports to rely exclusively—or almost exclusively—on revelation from God Himself as its source of truth. Those who can claim to have received revelation, or to speak for past revelations in holy books such as the Bible, assume special prominence within society. Thus in practice Stage One Thinking, unhampered by later stages, easily gives rise to theocratic authority structures. It has as little tolerance for dissent as any dictatorship. The asking of the wrong questions may be handled through excommunication or exile or even execution (witness the fate of Giordano Bruno in response to his suggestion that God had created “other Earths” besides ours).

The second stage is the stage of high metaphysics and system building—philosophy in a grand sense. This stage produced the major classics of Western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle down through Aquinas, from Descartes and Hobbes down to Hume, Kant, and Hegel—and arguably, in the twentieth century, someone such as Whitehead. Stage Two Thinking is the first product of those who seek a comprehensive worldview, or theory of reality and everything in it, including whether or not God exists, who we are and how we came to be, what the moral life consists of in society, and so on. Stage Two Thinking gave rise to the classical arguments for God’s existence (the ontological, the cosmological and the teleological arguments), to the idea of natural rights of human beings, and of the idea of morality as something discoverable—perhaps a product of the relationship between the acting person and the rest of reality. Stage Two Thinking, however, does not treat God’s existence (for example) as a working premise or presupposition but rather as a proposition standing in need of proof. Many Stage Two Thinkers became agnostics or atheists in response to arguments for God’s existence falling short of their targets. They set the stage for the next development.

The third stage began with the scientific and technological revolutions. This was clearly the stage Comte believed was emerging in his lifetime. His vision was of a way of thought which rejected the ideas of either revelation or abstract reason as sources of knowledge or truth. Instead, what counted was empirical verification of our ideas, or their testability, and their success in practice at improving the human material condition. Positivism took its name because its approach to the human condition was optimistic—positive, not negative. Its philosophers had little patience with such notions as original sin, and not much more patience with what they considered to be the air-castle-building of their predecessors. With its feet firmly planted in this world, not some other, Stage Three Thinking looked to human happiness itself in this life for the greatest number as the ultimate good, and Utilitarianism came of age in the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (the latter clearly respected Comte’s work). Stage Three Thinking embraced meliorism, the idea in moral philosophy that human beings can improve themselves not just technologically but morally, through their own efforts, especially via education. It looked to science, technology and commerce as our salvation and path to the good life, which was to be lived in this world, in Cox's "secular city." Some would develop very mixed feelings about commercial capitalism, and seek to check or control what they believed to be its excesses: the British Fabians and American progressives come to mind. Stage Three has little respect for such notions as natural rights, which they see—without using this vocabulary—as a throwback to Stage Two (the phrase Bentham had used was “nonsense upon stilts”).

To make a long and complicated story short, Stage Three had begun to manifest its dark side not long after the start of the twentieth century. Comte had believed the third stage to be a path to Utopia. History has shown otherwise. Kierkegaard (arguing from within his own unique Christian perspective), Nietzsche, and the Existentialists took one kind of avoidance versus Stage Three. Philosophers such as Walter T. Stace (1886-1967) began to ponder a kind of darkness that falls across the philosophical landscape once a comprehensive naturalism is embraced. See his essay "Man Against Darkness" (1948), or its predecessor "A Free Man's Worship" by Stage Three thinker Bertrand Russell (1902).

A multitude of other circumstances served to throw cold water on the idea of Stage Three as the path to Utopia. To make a long story short: not only had we failed to transcend war with science, technology and commerce, but our wars became increasingly destructive; there was abundant evidence of our basic inhumanity to our fellows—the genocide of the Nazis and Stalinists surely bespoke a capacity for evil that flew in the face of the prevailing meliorism of Stage Three.

On the scholarly front, the positivist conception of science had broken down by mid-century. Thomas S. Kuhn completed the destruction of this view of science in his widely read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). The positivist conception of science had held that the empirical methods of science delivered Truth, and that no other methods delivered Truth. While this latter idea made—still makes—a great deal of sense within the various scientific disciplines, Kuhn showed that a mature science is always governed by a body of presuppositions that, for a time, are taken as above scientific scrutiny: he used the term paradigm for what he had in mind (Ludwig Wittgenstein had first used the term to speak of governing usages in language). More ominously, thinkers who examined science in Kuhn’s wake—sociologists of science, for example—drew attention to authority structures within scientific communities and began to analyze science from a perspective taking seriously the idea that power and domination structures can masquerade as claims to truth, rationality, and objectivity. We had arrived on the shores of postmodernity, inspired by increasing unease with modernity coming from multiple directions.

By the time we arrived at the postmodernist upheaval in the humanities, it should have become clear that Stage Three Thinking had run its course. It had been devastatingly criticized and eclipsed. If we entered Stage Three in the early to mid 1800s, we probably left it sometime during the mid-1900s. Thinkers ranging from Kuhn and his colleague Paul Feyerabend on our shores, the latter, with his provocative Against Method: Outlines of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (1975) to Continental philosophers such as Michel Foucault had subjected its assumptions to devastating criticism.

Moreover, in a much broader sense: the increasing societal uncertainty, anxiety, and escapism that began to characterize public life in advanced civilizations beginning around 1970 (possibly earlier) also indicated one of the weaknesses of Stage Three Thinking: in the last analysis, Utilitarianism fails as a theory of social ethics. We do not know how to pursue “the greatest good for the greatest number” without shafting or harming someone. Consider: the infamous Tuskegee Experiment is very much aligned with the utilitarian spirit. It illustrates very concretely the objection to Utilitarianism charging that the serving "the greatest good for the greatest number" is quite compatible with sacrificing the interests of some to better serve the rest.

More reason for thinking we had left Stage Three behind was the increasing flight into dangerous economic fantasies that began around this time. The belief that institutions in civilization from government to acting persons can live beyond their means indefinitely is an exemplar of an unrealism that had become firmly entrenched in public life by the time the twentieth century drew to a close.

I would argue that sometime around 1970—the exact date is not important—we entered a fourth stage, a Stage Four, that Comte couldn't have envisioned. If Stage Three was “scientific and positive”—optimistic—Stage Four is skeptical and negative. Stage Four Thinking purports to have exposed as illusory the pretenses of objectivity, rationality, and acquisition of Truth that characterized all the earlier stages: Stage Three as well as Stage Two.

Here is the question: what does Stage Four Thinking put in place of those notions its sees itself as having eliminated? The surprising answer: almost nothing. With Richard Rorty—having become the most visible and widely read Stage Four philosopher on U.S. soil—we have “social hope” to cling to. While cashing out what Rorty means by this is necessary down the road, I believe we will have to conclude that once we’ve embraced his criticisms of foundationalism—the idea that knowledge, morality, etc., have foundations which it is the special providence of philosophy to discover—“social hope” becomes whatever we make of it and there becomes little to choose from between what had been the U.S. vision of the “American dream” and that of the Nazis who saw Utopia at hand once they had eradicated the Jews.

There are thinkers who have made peace with Stage Four Thinking. They believe that there is no reason to formulate the problems in such stark or extreme terms. They see Stage Four as containing new possibilities, perhaps foreshadowed by Nietzsche’s vision of the “overman” as creating and standing on his own values instead of embracing those created by others in the past. They look to the possibility of experimentation within a world not based on rules taken as rooted in foundations, but rather tailored to fit situations and societal specifics and subject to change as circumstances change. Certain species of entrepreneurship might fit the bill as capable of thriving within a Stage Four environment—in which, e.g., a city embraces an ever-widening array of cultures and lifestyles, made manifest in music, art, food and drink, social gatherings, and in doubtless other forms: the Stage Four “secular city” is, in this sense, a quite different place than the Stage Three “secular city” in its openness and diversity, where the only “value” is a demand for universal tolerance of that which is different. One can find happiness in the Stage Four environment—if one avoids looking at the “big picture.”

Nietzsche warned about the “advent of nihilism” as a consequence of the “revaluation of all values” which saw them as human creations—inventions, and not discoveries or revelations. In an important sense, Stage Three was nihilistic. Ultimately, its vision of morality as a product exclusively of the human desire for happiness or pleasure left civilization morally at sea. Since Stage Four essentially agrees with Stage Three in seeing morality as a human creation, here is the $50,000 question: is Stage Four just as nihilistic? Where do we go from here?

This stage will be our civilization's undoing if we cannot transcend it: by moving to a fifth stage, or Stage Five. (I am assuming here that the movement through stages or levels is unidirectional. I don't believe we can go back, say, to Stage Two, or that we would want to.)

How to characterize this fifth stage is a huge problem. Let's say it will be Christian but not in the sense of Stage One; it will be metaphysical and encouraging of such notions as the rights of acting persons, but not necessarily in the sense of Stage Two; it will respect science as the most important achievement within its domain, but not see science & technology as capable of solving all human problems, as was common in Stage Three. It will likewise refuse also to see commerce or the marketplace as able to solve all human problems, although these activities can solve many human problems if allowed by governments (and corporations demanding special privileges) to function. Stage Five will attempt to find merit in the potential for creativity opened up by the rule-challenging stance available in in Stage Four (Brian Eno comes to mind), but must not lose itself in Stage Four's nihilism. It will draw on all of these, but be more than just a fusion of the best of the first four stages.

This characterization is, of course, very incomplete. This is purposeful; I do not want to specify too much in advance. We want here to specify just enough to have a productive conversation going in the right direction, in the spirit of the British cybernetics pioneer Stafford Beer, who wrote this phenomenal passage when distinguishing algorithms from heuristics and the reasons and circumstances when the latter need to be pursued. Algorithms have precise rules; heuristics do not. "To think in terms of heuristics," Beer wrote, "is at once a way of coping with proliferating variety. Instead of trying to organize it in full detail, you organize it only somewhat; you then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go" (Brain of the Firm, 1973, p. 53). Thus is the status of Stage Five Thinking at this time. (Note: I owe this quotation, and similar ones, to my having paid attention to experimental composer Brian Eno's remarks in interviews over the years going back to the 1970s. Credit where it is due.)

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