Despots or Tyrants, Thought & Action; Laziness or Sanity

Contains my subject essay

Perhaps it’s a sign of advancing age, or perhaps it’s merely the continuation of a nearly life-long infatuation, but certain persons and events of the 1930s fascinate me. 

As a Baby Boomer, I became aware of the Second World War, and to a lesser extent the First World War, while in early grade school. Perhaps this exposure along with an innate desire to make sense of events and persons--at least their chronology--that I imagine first spurred my fascination with history in general. But as I grew older and more sophisticated in my historical understanding (even to a modest degree), the war as war--as a military struggle--held less interest for me than the events that led up to the war, the political decisions, cultural trends, and ideas that led to the great conflagrations of the twentieth century, the First and Second World Wars. How could (presumably) rational people get into such horrific situations? What accounts for all of this folly? Who can make sense of it? 

In addition to a fascination with the players and events leading up to the Second World War, I also find myself drawn to thinkers who wrote between the wars. A few of them have resonated deeply with me. Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” was written in 1919, at the close of the First World War (the installment of the Long War that ran hot and cold between 1914 and 1989). This essay became one touchstone of my thinking about politics. Among other topics, Weber wrote about the “ethic of moral conviction” and the “ethic of responsibility,” a fundamental and sometimes tragic contrast between two ways of approaching political decisions. One of Reinhold Niebuhr’s works from the 1930s, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) sets forth an Augustinian (Christian) political realism for the twentieth century by looking at the trends afoot in the world around him in the early 1930s. Niebuhr was at once a Christian and a hard-headed realist. Another compelling source from this era, although she didn’t publish her major works until after the war, is Hannah Arendt. Her earliest published book is The Origins of Totalitarianism (1950) and was written and published after the war. But its inception is grounded in the time leading up to the war. And my most recent “discovery,” R.G. Collingwood, the Oxford philosopher, published significant reflections on political and cultural developments in the waning years of his life (d. 1943). He increasingly turned his attention to political developments in the 1930s while continuing his formidable (non-political) philosophical writing. I've already posted extensively about another Collingwood essay from this period, "Man Goes Mad" (1936). (Part 1-13 of quotes with commentary).

It is to Collingwood again to whom I want to turn, to share his brief but suggestive essay about politics that he wrote sometime around 1941. Returning to my opening theme, Collingwood’s words are rooted in this pre-war and early war era, although, as he often does, he draws heavily upon Plato and the Greek tradition. But the most salient points of the quotes below drew my attention because these words strike me as eerily prescient as I write this in 2019. My nation and much of the world have rekindled a romance with the worst sort of leaders and politics. I believe we can all learn from reflecting on Collingwood’s essay. 

The essay I’m referring to is entitled “The Three Laws of Politics,” and it’s included in Essays in Political Philosophy by R.G. Collingwood, Edited with an Introduction by David Boucher (Clarendon Press, Oxford 2004), 207-223. Collingwood drafted the essay as his Hobhouse Lecture to the London School of Economics. Collingwood, because of his declining health, was unable to deliver the lecture in person. In addition, he adopted the lecture from the larger project he was working upon at the time, The New Leviathan (1943), the final book that he completed before his death in January 1943. (Chapter 25 of the New Leviathan is entitled “The Three Laws of Politics,” but it isn’t as comprehensive or persuasively written as the Essay.) Below is an extended set of quotations from near the end of the essay that struck me. After the quotes, I offer my reflections on Collingwood’s argument. 

Collingwood’s Words

Sec. 4 The Third Law of Politics
Whatever qualities are thus exhibited [by the ruler] in the course of ruling are exhibited as models for imitation. The ruler as pathfinder is the ruler as setter of examples.. . . . I think that nobody will deny that the position occupied by a ruler is such that the characteristics displayed by him in the course of his activity of ruling will in fact tend to be imitated by those over whom he rules; that the tendency will be stronger in proportion as the bond between ruler and subject is closer; and that the fact of this imitation, which in any case will to some extent occur even unconsciously, will be replaced in proportion as the ruler becomes master of his trade by his deliberately offering examples intended to be worth following.  

Sec. 7. The Third Law, continued. . . . 
What I suggest is that, whether or no this is recognized by the accepted or Greek theory of human intelligence, there are two kinds of unintelligence in the world, and these have different functions. There is what may be called negative unintelligence, which is the thing of which Plato says that its proper object is nothing at all; a person in this frame of mind, trying to grab something, grabs nothing; he comes away from all mental effort empty-handed. The other kind of unintelligence is a creative unintelligence, creative of chimeras and nightmares; unintelligence of this kind creates these things more profusely according to its own fecundity; this fecundity being a positive power in so far as it creates, but a mere absence of power in so far as what it creates is nothing at all. The world is in no sense the richer for all its creative efforts. And in this sense it is all one whether you talk about this positive unintelligence or that other negative unintelligence which I mentioned first; in either case there is nothing. 
The question with which we are dealing is this: how can a man, without being intelligent, acquire that mastery over men which the Greek theory of life ascribes to intelligence?
. . . . 
The answer is that there are two ways of being a fool: you may be foolish to stupidity, so that your mental hands grasp nothing of what they try to grasp; or you may be foolish to craziness, so that your mind creates illusions or hallucinations about the things of which you are trying to think. These two kinds of foolishness occur in practice much confused together. The stupid fool, in politics as elsewhere, creates nothing;  the crazy fool creates much although this much, being crazy, comes to nothing. 

But in the meantime, not having been weighed, the crazy fool presents us with the aspect of being a formidable producer. This is in general terms the explanation of things like Nero, of which Tacitus and the whole of Roman history had not a word to give by way of explanation. Small blame to Tacitus; even the greatest brain of Greece had not gone deeply enough into the theory of error to offer him the blueprint of a solution. Plato had an inkling of the truth; but not more than an inkling; Aristotle had not even that. 

The crazy type of fool can pretend to be wise the fertility of his diseased mind gives him an initiative, futile it is true, over his fellow men. He has just as much initiative as a man who is really intelligent; in one sense even more, for he has less to fear. The intelligent man offers himself to an equal wrestling bout of minds; he stands up to all comers, and faces criticism; he does not know from what side criticism is going to come, or that will not prove him to have made a mistake. The crazy type of fool with his psychological hold over his audience will easily convict him of being a fraud which, strange though it may appear, is rather a feather in his cap than a thing to be ashamed of. [Collingwood’s note: “A thing I noticed in Italy in 1939.]. . . . 

 

Sec. 8 The Platonic Tyrant
Plato, in the ninth book of the Republic, has given his readers and memorable description of what he calls a tyrant. By a  tyrant he does not mean what we call a despot, or ruler who rules for personal motives and with considerable display of cruelty, arrogance, and other qualities valuable to him chiefly in their enhancement of his personality. The despot, with all this emphasis on his personality, may have something to emphasize; the laws which he administers with cruelty may be wise and justly administered. There may be a barbaric swagger about him, but it may serve to lend eclat [French: glow] to a genuine political performance.  

The tyrant, on the other hand, puts up no political performance. He is merely so much jetsam, floating on the surface of the waves he pretends to control. His qualities, according to Plato’s scale of values, are not the qualities of a free man, let alone those which would enable him to be the ruler of free men, but the qualities of a slave. He is not the sort of man who can triumph over his own weaknesses; more like the sort of man who would yield to them on every occasion; his progress through the world is a rake's progress supported by burglary, pocket-picking, and other low forms of predatory activity, preparing the way, says Plato, for higher forms of thieving such as robbing temples; or, as we should say, confiscating deposits in banks. His rise to the position of tyrant is consequent on a class movement; it is concurrent with the rise of the lowest social class in the city to the position of gangsters patronized by himself; it is not his own strength or energy that lifts him to a position of tyrant but, so to speak, his low specific gravity. It is in his capacity as so much jetsam that he rides effortless over the waves of politics.

. . . .Sec. 9 The Reversed Action of the Third Law of Politics
The disease works by what I call a reversed action of the Third Law of Politics. Like every other political law, this one does not enforce itself automatically; men must take trouble to obey it. Its direct action begins with a body politic composed of what we call sane men; the result is that they accept the leadership of sane. Where, you may ask, does all this labour go to, all this running to keep in the same place? The answer is: it is the work done by the community in keeping itself sane. It is much easier for any kind of man known to me to doze off into daydreams which are the first and most seemingly innocent stage of craziness. If labour-saving  is what do you want, give up all this trouble about thinking: go mad and have done with it. That is what the tyrant has to offer mankind--an end to the intolerable weariness of sanity. 

The reversed action of the Third Law of Politics is precisely this cessation, on the part of the body politic, of the effort after sanity. The engine has slipped into reverse; and the whole thing, with delicious absence of exertion, is sliding downhill. It is much easier to speak and act and write crazily than to do it intelligently; you just let yourself go, and there you are. This is the first phase of the reverse action. The next phase is the resulting ‘democracy’ (as Plato and Hitler, strangely united for once, agree in calling it) creates leaders for itself, leaders from its own members, leaders of fashion in the temporary freaks of craziness, under whose tyranny the whole body politics lets itself go completely more than ever; for to shout with the mob (that is to obey the tyrant of the moment) is the easiest thing anybody can do. . . . . 
Our relation to the future is not that the future, while it is still future, is to be foreknown by us; the future can be known only when it has become the present; but that it has to be made by us, by the strength of our hands and the stoutness of our hearts. (223) 

Commentary

About whom may Collingwood have been writing? As one can discern from this essay and his other writings, Collingwood was a true classicist and a student of modern history as well (and, as he is best known, one of the foremost voices in the philosophy of history). But Collingwood addresses the political crisis at the time that he writes, so it’s no surprise that Hitler and “Italy” (Mussolini) received specific mention. But as I want to address the political crisis of my time. I could identify a growing number of figures on the current world stage that might fit Plato’s definition of a “tyrant” or that of a despot. But there is one figure who fills my mind because he’s the president of my nation, and he embodies the characteristics of a despot and a tyrant as described by Collingwood. In fact, the first order of consideration is whether we best describe Trump as a “despot” or a "tyrant". 

Collingwood distinguishes Plato’s “tyrant” from “what we call a despot.” Let me repeat Collingwood’s description of a “despot” as one who

rules for personal motives and with considerable display of cruelty, arrogance, and other qualities valuable to him chiefly in their enhancement of his personality. The despot, with all this emphasis on his personality, may have something to emphasize; the laws which he administers with cruelty may be wise and justly administered. There may be a barbaric swagger about him, but it may serve to lend eclat [French: glow] to a genuine political performance.

The application of this description doesn’t demand a subtle analysis. Trump entered the fray with little hope of winning the nomination, let alone the presidency. Given his history of attempting to buy and curry favor with candidates and officials from both parties, and his lack of any policy analysis or sophistication, to contend that his candidacy and presidency are foremost a vanity project is more than justified. To the extent he has carved out a policy legacy, it’s been in the area of immigration, judicial appointments, and tax cuts for the wealthy. As to immigration and migrants, Trump has promoted gratuitous cruelty within a context of what might otherwise be lawful (even if controversial) processes. But everything that is done within his administration that he can control is done with an overweening emphasis on his “personality.” And to contend that there is a “barbaric swagger” that Trump practices also seems beyond the need for proof here. To suggest that this adds a “glow” to his “political performance” provides an interesting turn of phrase to describe his sense of showmanship cultivated by his apprenticeship in the world of professional wrestling, beauty pageants, and “reality'' TV. But a glow--or radioactivity--he does have. Trump has certainly cultivated a cult of personality, which, combined with a well-earned reputation for intimidating, threatening, or smearing any critic or potential rival, makes him a unique figure in the history of the American presidency. So I’m inclined to say that he’s a “despot,” albeit one checked--at least to some degree so far--by the institutions and norms established by the Founders to check such figures and heretofore honored in the American republic. 

But doesn’t Trump fit Plato’s definition of a “tyrant” as Collingwood describes it? Let’s review Collingwood’s description before we move on: 

The tyrant . . . puts up no political performance. He is merely so much jetsam, floating on the surface of the waves he pretends to control.

I question Collingwood’s contention that a tyrant “puts on no political performance.” Is this possible? Even the most absolute and compelling tyrants of the twentieth century, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini didn’t forego elaborate shows of public pageantry (although I’m less sure of Stalin’s displays). But perhaps this makes them only despots. Perhaps a tyrant can act behind the scenes as a sort of wizard of Oz. I suppose that this may fit dictators in less-developed nations, where military officers and political insiders can climb to the top of the heap and then rule without much in the way of public acknowledgment. And, as Collingwood goes on to suggest, the tyrant doesn’t seriously attempt to manipulate political tides, although this contention, like the one about no political performance, seems counter-intuitive, at least if judged on an absolute scale. Even the most powerful dictator depends on some fellow elites, even if only a Praetorian Guard, to maintain office and life itself.  

But once we move beyond this element in the making of a tyrant, we see something that certainly rings true of Trump. 

His qualities, according to Plato’s scale of values, are not the qualities of a free man, let alone those which would enable him to be the ruler of free men, but the qualities of a slave. He is not the sort of man who can triumph over his own weaknesses; more like the sort of man who would yield to them on every occasion[.]

In this part of the description, the person who is a slave to one’s desires isn’t a “free man,” but is truly a slave. Given the outsized appetites that Trump exhibits, for sexual conquest, publicity, security, fealty, and food, he fits perfectly for this part of the description of a tyrant. Trump is a poster boy for uncontrolled desires, an embodied antithesis of the classical model. All humans suffer weaknesses, but most of us try to minimize or hide these weaknesses. Trump bares himself to the public, perhaps ingratiating himself to those who believe themselves overcome with such otherwise shameful failures. His very slavishness becomes a part of his public spectacle. 

The complement of the tyrant’s slavishness is the tyrant’s grasp for easy money. Collingwood describes the trait:

[H]is progress through the world is a rake's progress supported by burglary, pocket-picking, and other low forms of predatory activity, preparing the way, says Plato, for higher forms of thieving such as robbing temples; or, as we should say, confiscating deposits in banks.

Trump’s money-making ventures have been marked by bankruptcy, fraud, stiffing contractors, tax fraud, and most recently, stealing money from a charity that he controlled. The degree of continuing and unabated unscrupulousness of this man beggars belief. No one comparable had become a contender--and certainly not president--before his arrival on the political stage in 2015. Of course, Trump would not take money directly from the U.S. treasury because that would alienate the plutocratic elite upon which Trump (in part) depends, all of his faux-populism notwithstanding.  

Now Collingwood turns briefly to the political support that brings the tyrant to power: 

His rise to the position of tyrant is consequent on a class movement; it is concurrent with the rise of the lowest social class in the city to the position of gangsters patronized by himself; it is not his own strength or energy that lifts him to a position of tyrant but, so to speak, his low specific gravity. It is in his capacity as so much jetsam that he rides effortless over the waves of politics.

Trump certainly rose to power on a “class movement,” although Americans don’t like to think of “class.” And most Americans hold a suspicion of “movements” although popular movements play a huge role in American history (abolitionism, prohibition, women’s suffrage, union organizing, civil rights, gay rights--to name only a few). And while today America we have some of the most significant disparities of income and wealth in our history, the identity of the “class” that brought Trump to power cannot be delineated solely based on income, wealth, or job status. Geography (rural-small town vs. urban-suburban) and educational attainment (scaled from high school or less on up to the doctoral level) must be added to more traditional identities such as age, race, and traditional party loyalties when attempting to understand the current wide rift among American voters. These factors, in addition to the mix of motives and reasons held by each individual voter, provide most of the explanation for the success of Trump. His win (in the Electoral College) doesn't stem from his talents as a politician. (Scott Adams’s “master persuader” argument notwithstanding). In short, as Collingwood and Plato suggest, a tyrant is more a symptom than the disease, and so it is with Trump. Demagogues, would-be tyrants and despots, only flourish in a receptive climate, one where otherwise cautious voters with an innate tolerance for the status quo become willing to take exceptional risks in choosing leaders and office-holders. When conditions become bad enough on a relative scale, that is, a scale based on perceptions of social, political, or economic inequities (and not absolute deprivations), social upheaval becomes a reality wave that can carry someone like Trump into office (with help from a non-democratic electoral college). 

As you read near the beginning of his essay, Collingwood addressed what I will label the twin evils of “unintelligence” delineated as “negative unintelligence” (inability to grasp an idea; some measure of dumb) and “creative unintelligence,” which is the ability to spin-out ideas that have no foundation in reality. It is this latter description (creative unintelligence) that I want to explore more fully, for it seems the defining species of “unintelligence” in our time. To paraphrase the Gospels of Mark and Mathew, the mentally poor will be with us always; to wit, those who don’t have the time or capacity to think deeply about public affairs. Democracies will always need to contend with this shortcoming and seek to alleviate it as best they can. But those who spin fantasies, or who purvey what Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt has labeled “bullshit,” are those today who pose the greatest risk to democracy and sound policy. “Fake news” is a concept bandied about today as a weapon, but it’s just a successor to “disinformation campaign,” “dirty tricks,” and propaganda from days of yore. Yet, there is one problem with this “creative unintelligence”  designation that I don’t think that Collingwood addresses; that is, what if it’s an intentional form of thought and action. In other words, some may be misguided, but others are the (intentionally) misleading. 

My thoughts, I must admit, are prompted by watching members of Congress attempting to defend President Trump in regard to his actions concerning Ukraine and the resulting impeachment investigation. I venture into these thoughts (and this entire essay of mine)  with the knowledge that I’m biased against Trump, and for a long time. I see almost everything about him and his administration as confirmation of my earliest perceptions of his as a potential president. (Here, and yes, Plato gets in on it at the beginning.) So I’m at high risk for a bad case of confirmation bias. And with over four decades in the law, I know that sometimes you have to defend a position that doesn’t provide any attractive explanations and that tests the limits of creativity and reasonableness in attempting to defend a client. However, notwithstanding popular perceptions, most lawyers--myself included--follow the rules and don’t suborn perjury or make arguments that we cannot make in good faith. Everybody (should) have limits when arguing on behalf of a client. (Some don’t, and they are rightly prosecuted; e.g., Michael Cohen.) But with these warnings stated, I’m prepared to move forward.

Are Republicans deluding themselves that they have reasonable, colorable (under the law) arguments? As to the ultimate issue, as to whether impeachment is warranted, even if all the facts are as they seem to be that Trump attempted to shake down the Ukrainian government for an unjustified investigation to implicate his chief political rival (at present), I suppose one can make the argument (demur) that this does not merit impeachment. But as to a true subject of Trump’s requested “investigation” of the Bidens or Ukrainian involvement in the theft of Clinton or DNC emails, I can find no substantive basis. I can find no substantive grounds for the bullshit* defenses offered to date by Republican members of the House. The degree of bad faith, of intentional wrongdoing in the sense of promoting frivolous and misleading argument would, in most courts of law would draw a firm reprimand (or worse) from an impartial judge. In short, “crazy foolishness,” as Collingwood describes it, maybe crazy like a fox. The henhouse and not the truth is the object of the venture. And we should note that while none of this “unintelligence” (intentional or no) is either new or unique, it is no less reprehensible. 

Before we close, we should turn one last time to Collingwood’s discussion of the role of the body politic in promoting and tolerating a tyrant or despot. Collingwood attributes a break-down in political judgment to laziness. “Sanity” is an effort, “daydreams” are a breeze. If we don’t want to make the effort, we can take up the tyrant’s offer: “an end to the intolerable weariness of sanity.” Collingwood anticipates the post-war work of Hannah Arendt when he calls upon us to act to shape our future by thought and speech. 

In the throws of the early days of the war against Nazi Germany and after the fall of France, Collingwood offers his readers, his nation, and those who share the values that he promotes, a different path. Collingwood, the great philosopher of history, calls upon us to eschew Hegalian and Marxist fantasies of “scientific laws” that foretell our future. Instead, he calls upon us to be the actors and not mere props in the play of our future: 

Our relation to the future is not that the future, while it is still future, is to be foreknown by us; the future can be known only when it has become the present; but that it has to be made by us, by the strength of our hands and the stoutness of our hearts.

Better Know the Impeachment Process 11.16.19

The Senate “tries” all impeachments—it determines, on evidence presented, whether the charge in each Article of Impeachment is true, and whether, if the charge is true, the acts that are proven constitute an impeachable offense. Such an affirmative finding is called a “conviction” on the Article of Impeachment being voted upon. A two-thirds majority of the senators present is necessary for conviction. 

Black, Charles L., Jr. & Bobbitt, Phillip, Impeachment: A Handbook, New Edition (pp. 7-8). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Better Know the Impeachment Process 11.14.19

A fundamental guide

Strictly speaking, “impeachment” means “accusation” or “charge.” The House of Representatives has, under the Constitution, the “sole Power of Impeachment”—that is to say, the power to bring charges of the commission of one or more impeachable offenses. These charges are conventionally called “Articles of Impeachment.” The House “impeaches” by simple majority vote of those present.

Black, Charles L., Jr. & Phillip Bobbitt, ImpeachmentA Guide, New Edition. (p. 7). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Better Know the Impeachment Process 11.12.19

[W]e ought to try to take the same stance of principled political neutrality that we hope to see taken by the House and the Senate as they go about their work. This is not easy, particularly as to questions that have no certain answers; it is always tempting to resolve such questions in favor of the immediate political result that is palatable to us, for one never can definitely be proved wrong, and so one is free to allow one’s prejudices to assume the guise of reason. The best way to combat this tendency is to ask ourselves whether we would have answered the same question the same way if it came up with respect to a president toward whom we felt oppositely from the way we feel toward the president threatened with removal. One further point: it is the cardinal principle at least of American constitutional interpretation that the Constitution is to be interpreted so as to be workable and reasonable. . . . Applying it to doubtful questions regarding impeachment, in this book for the laity, I shall give chief emphasis to arguments of a practical cast.

Black, Charles L., Jr. Impeachment: A Handbook, New Edition (p. 5- 6). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

The Better Know the Impeachment Process Post 11.11.19: Black & Bobbitt

The Better Know the Impeachment Process Post 11.11.19

From Phillip Bobbitt's preface to the New Edition about the importance of Black's work:

Allowing Black’s book to gather dust on the library shelves would be far more than simply a loss for the literature on impeachment, which in any case would build on his insights. It would remove a foundation stone from the intellectual edifice that is perhaps the most important advance made in constitutional law during my lifetime: the development of what might be called the “standard model” that enables legislators, citizens, and journalists as well as judges to resolve constitutional questions when there is no authoritative judicial precedent, and to assess judicial opinions when there is a precedent. Black’s tour de force is as important to this development as Weinberg and Salam’s equations are to the Standard Model in physics.

Black, Charles L., Jr. & Bobbitt, Phillip Impeachment A Handbook, New Edition, Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

Better Know Your Impeachment Process: Black & Bobbitt, Pt. 1

Better know your impeachment process episode # . . . whatever.

Today I'm going to start sharing quotes from some of the outstanding legal scholars who have addressed the topic of impeachment. I'll start with "Impeachment: A Handbook, New Edition," by Charles Black (1974) & Phillip Bobbitt (2018). The late Charles Black was an outstanding constitutional scholar back when I was in law school. He wrote the original edition of this book in 1974, as Richard Nixon was nearing impeachment (he resigned before he was actually impeached). In 2018, constitutional scholar Phillip Bobbitt (Columbia) updated Black's work, keeping Black's original text intact but updating in light of the Clinton impeachment and other legal developments. I'll regularly share pertinent quotes from this & other works to allow readers to get an overview of the parameters of the impeachment process from some of the best minds who've written on the topic.

The following is a quote from Black's original 1974; thus, the "I" is Black and the president to whom he refers is Richard Nixon:

To countervail (as I hope) my lifelong political set against just about all of this president’s positions, I confess to a very strong sense of the dreadfulness of the step of removal, of the deep wounding such a step must inflict on the country, and thus approach it as one would approach high-risk major surgery, to be resorted to only when the rightness of diagnosis and treatment is sure.

Black, Charles L. Jr.. Impeachment (p. 4). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

Black next considers the role of we citizens in this process. Read & consider his words carefully:

This book is for the citizen. What part ought the citizen to play in the process of impeachment and removal? My own answer would be that, for the most part, our attitude as to any impeachment ought to be that of vigilant waiting. The impeachment process, whether “judicial,” “nonjudicial,” “criminal,” or “noncriminal,” resembles the judicial criminal procedure in that it is confided by the Constitution to responsible tribunals—the House of Representatives and the Senate—and in that these bodies are duty-bound to act on their own views of the law and the facts, as free as may be of partisan political motives and pressures. In this process, a snow of telegrams ought to play no part.

Id., p. 5.

The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained by Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal

2016 publication

This book addresses a topic that neither author can quite explain and don't claim to understand. If you're looking for sure answers or reassurance, this book won't provide it for you. If you're looking for debunkers, this book won't please you. But if you're looking for an honest and diligent inquiry into events that seem just too damned weird by two men who seem--at least on the written page--quite rational and sensible (some really weird stuff notwithstanding), then you might enjoy this book. I did.

This book consists of alternating chapters that create a virtual dialogue between Streiber, who has experienced some really weird stuff, and Kripal, a scholar of comparative religion. Streiber was a fiction writer who lived in the Hudson Valley with his wife Anne in the late 1980s when "beings" (for lack of a more exact term) began to appear in his presence and do things to him and around him. As I said, some really weird stuff. Strieber, in collaboration with his wife, began to write about these experiences. Once published (and he was an established writer already), Streiber and his wife learned  that they were not alone in having experienced visitations from beings that defy any normal classification or description. The most value-neutral term that seems to apply is that Strieber experienced the "paranormal." And I repeat: in this book (I've not read his others), Strieber does not seem "crazy," although he reports crazy stuff happening to him.

Now there are various hypothesizes that one could generate to explain the "true nature" of Whitley's claims: a simple hoax (he sells a lot of books with his fantastic tales); a brain lesion that causes hallucinations (he checked for that--negative); something in the local water; disturbed "spirits;" and so on. And here is where Kripal comes in. Kripal, a scholar of comparative religion at Rice University, now concentrates his focus on the paranormal. (For a more thorough consideration of Kripal's back story, read my review of his book Flip.) Kripal has known Streiber for several years before writing this book and finds Strieber (in my words) a credible witness. But a witness to what? And by the way, what has this to do with religion?

Stop and consider what religions around the world share. The Scriptures of the Jews and Christians, the Quaran, tales of Greek and Norse gods, American Indian stories, tales of Hindu gods and avatars, Tibetan Buddhism, or Taoist tales. All religions have fantastic accounts that defy our current ideas about how "reality" works. No doubt much of this is the religious equivalent of sales puffery or the size of the fish that got away. And these accounts draw upon ancient ideas about science and reality that no longer receive credence in contemporary popular culture. Probably the most charitable and persuasive interpretation of religious narratives is that they serve as myths and metaphors from which we can draw guidance for our lives, as in Joseph Campbell's description of the Hero's Journey or Jungian archetypes that transcend our individual minds, in addition to the accounts of established religions. And in my lifetime, we have the phenomena of UFO sightings and accounts of visitors from "outer space." A version of mass hysteria? An uptick in UFO mania coincided with the Cold War. (And since the end of the Cold War and a change in focus in our primal fears, we've seen an uptick in zombie lore and tales that seem to capture the popular imagination.) All of these possibilities undoubtedly have some merit and truth in them, but do they (or like theories) exhaust the possibilities? Can any single theory account for Streiber's bizarre tales? Is this all about Streiber and his individual brain and mind? Or is there some other reality that has impinged upon Streiber's mind? If so, is this reality governed by contemporary popular ideas about physics and reality? If these experiences are all "in his head," where do they come from? His personal, fevered imagination? He's a writer--an artist!--after all, and he's written horror and speculative fiction. Is this an elaborate guise? Or is he subject to some mass psychosis?

Kripal doesn't believe that any of the possibilities set forth above provide an adequate account of what's going on with Strieber. Like a lawyer building a case, Kripal takes his readers one (alternating) chapter at a time through his attempt to provide a coherent, rational way thinking about Strieber's experiences. This writing duette with its alternating chapters allows both authors to riff upon one another's way of approaching the issues. Also, it provides us with Strieber's accounts in small, tolerable doses; otherwise, I might have cast Strieber's account aside as so much gobbledygook early on. Kripal's methodical, rational investigation of the stories and how to we might understand them provided a needed imprimatur for me.

So where does this book come out? In fact, neither Strieber nor Kripal pretends to provide a definitive account of these (and other) bizarre events. While both men believe in the "reality" of the events that Strieber recounts, neither man conveys any sense of certainty about any conclusions. The only conclusion that I took away is that neither man believes these events "supernatural." Instead, as the title suggests, they believe these events are "super natural." That is, these events are uncommon and not easily understood, but neither are they manifestations of something from "another realm," at least not a realm of the "supernatural" as understood in popular religion. These (in some sense) miraculous events are not the result of divine intervention, but a part of the fabric of reality. And if you think that reality is only what we experience in our daily, hum-drum lives, go read a (reputable) book about quantum physics.

So what do I conclude? I'm not sure at all, but I intend to follow Kripal further down the rabbit hole. What we're perceiving in these accounts is a challenge to accept as credible, but even more so, how we understand these tales that we've been told is the challenging puzzle that intrigues me.

Finally, I must say that the words of a man who saw a ghost kept repeating in my head as I read this book:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

Perhaps Hamlet was right.

An Essay on Metaphysics by R.G. Collingwood

I wimped out in my review of Collingwood's An Essay on Philosophical Method, claiming that I could only "appreciate" it. I thought that this work would prove as intimidating, but I'm feeling more ambitious, so I'll call this a review, albeit an awed and tentative one. Let's dive in!

If the business of metaphysics is to reveal the absolute presuppositions that are involved in any given piece of thinking, the general class of study to which metaphysics belongs is clearly the study of thought. 

Collingwood, R. G.. An Essay on Metaphysics. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

Collingwood set forth a plan for writing about history, art, and metaphysics in the 1930s. His declining health (a series of strokes from uncontrolled high blood pressure) prevented him from completing his project, but he remained immensely productive to near the end of his life in 1943. He published the Essay in 1940, and it was his next-to-the-last publication before his death, with only his The New Leviathan to follow the Essay. The Essay (hereinafter EM) is composed of complex yet fluid and lucid prose. In it, Collingwood sets forth the need for metaphysics and it's history (which is an intimate relation). The account begins with Aristotle, addresses Kant, and does battle with the logical positivists of his day, who wanted (in essence) to abolish metaphysics.

What I have chiefly tried to do in it is neither to expound my own metaphysical ideas, nor to criticize the metaphysical ideas of other people; but to explain what metaphysics is, why it is necessary to the well-being and advancement of knowledge, and how it is to be pursued.

The most significant aspect of this work arises from his contention that metaphysics must always begin with "absolute presuppositions" and not "propositions." A proposition or relative presupposition may be either true or false, but not so an absolute presupposition, which is neither true nor false. (Collingwood distinguishes "relative presuppositions" from "absolute presuppositions" on this point.) An absolute presupposition is a starting point that is neither true nor false but is a given, somewhat like an axiom in geometry. Presuppositions are--like all knowledge--embedded in history. Thus, the presuppositions of Aristotle differ from those of Descartes because of changing attitudes and beliefs about natural science and mathematics in their respective cultural milieus. What Collingwood's ideas about "presuppositions" ground metaphysics in history and recognizes the impossibility of avoiding a sense of the given in constructing any metaphysics. Although he doesn't reference it, it strikes me that what Collingwood has done for metaphysics is like the role of Godel's theorem for math and logic; it "proves" that one must begin with a given, an arbitrary starting point. (N.B. Don't trust my understanding of Godel. I'm not qualified to judge his work, and I'm not sure that I have even an accurate layman's understanding, but what I've said here is the impression I've gotten over the years having encountered discussions of it here and there--such as in Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid that I read many years ago. Or make the same point via the popular fable "it's turtles all the way down."

Absolute presuppositions are not verifiable. This does not mean that we should like to verify them but are not able to; it means that the idea of verification is an idea which does not apply to them, because, as I have already said, to speak of verifying a presupposition involves supposing that it is a relative presupposition. If anybody says ‘Then they can’t be of much use in science’, the answer is that their use in science is their logical efficacy, and that the logical efficacy of a supposition does not depend on its being verifiable, because it does not depend on its being true: it depends only on its being supposed (prop. 3).


The logical efficacy of a supposition does not depend upon the truth of what is supposed, or even on its being thought true, but only on its being supposed.

Of course, all of this means that there will be--and have been--grounds for changing the presuppositions of metaphysics throughout history. Based on this, many analytic or logical positivist philosophers of Collingwood's day (Ayer, for instance) take the position that metaphysics is all poppycock because we can't prove its "absolute presuppositions" true or false. To the logical positivists, everything is a true-false test. Collingwood fights this simplistic attitude via a careful review of the history of metaphysics.

If anybody says that metaphysics, as the name of a science, means according to those who expound it simply ontology [the study of "pure being"], and that ontology, according to the view put forward in the preceding chapter, is a chimera; and if he goes on to infer that whatever is expounded under the name of metaphysics is erroneous or nonsensical, all he is doing is to demonstrate that he cannot or will not distinguish between what people are actually doing and what they think they are doing. This may be mere stupidity on his part; but it may also, like many sophistical arguments, involve a certain disingenuousness.

Collingwood also expounds what he calls (not as such in this work) his "logic of question and answer." Louis Mink, in his study of Collingwood, makes the important point that Collingwood is not propounding a new "logic" in any formal sense, but what might be better described as a mode of inquiry. The logic of question and answer is best known through Collingwood's works on history. For Collingwood, the logic of question and answer must guide what he calls "scientific history." He argues that the same principle applies to metaphysics and that any question must "suppose" an answer.

All metaphysical questions are historical questions, and all metaphysical propositions are historical propositions. Every metaphysical question either is simply the question what absolute presuppositions were made on a certain occasion, or is capable of being resolved into a number of such questions together with a further question or further questions arising out of these.

Metaphysics is about a certain class of historical facts, namely absolute presuppositions. The problems of metaphysics are historical problems; its methods are historical methods. We must have no more nonsense about its being meritorious to inhabit a fog.

But lest one think that Collingwood is one of those philosophers with his head in a cloud (a tiresome stereotype), he always brings metaphysics back to natural science. The point of metaphysics, as Collingwood describes it, is to provide a foundation upon which science can work. Collingwood argues at length that metaphysics is not a "deductive science" but a historical enterprise. And because history involves change, so too, the absolute presuppositions of metaphysics will change. Scientists, as he notes, don't always like this reality. Collingwood notes:

In my own experience I have found that when natural scientists express hatred of ‘metaphysics’ they are usually expressing this dislike of having their absolute presuppositions touched. I respect it, and admire them for it; though I do not expect scientists who give way to it to rise very high in the scientific world.

Collingwood turns his attention to "psychology," which he finds a pernicious influence upon metaphysics. Collingwood wants to draw a strict line between the thinking process involved in metaphysics and the claims made by psychology as an academic discipline. After setting forth a critique of metaphysics by an imaginary psychologist, Collingwood begins his reply with his typical aplomb:

If psychology is really the science which tells us how we think, it is beyond doubt that what I have called metaphysics falls within its province. And there I would gladly leave it if once I could satisfy myself that this phrase, even if not a complete account of psychology, is a correct one so far as it goes. But on this point I ask to be fully satisfied. The work of metaphysics is too important, too intimately bound up with the welfare of science and civilization (for civilization is only our name for systematic and orderly thinking about what are called ‘practical’ questions), to be handed over to any claimant on the strength of his own unsupported assertion that he is its rightful owner.

And then psychology takes a drubbing, at least to the extent that Collingwood perceives it as encroaching upon the activities of the mind as the thinking process. He starts by examining the history of psychology and psychological thinking. And as is his custom, he's prepared to go back to the ancient Greeks to ground his inquiry. Of them, he writes,

What they [the ancient Greeks] regarded as peculiar to mind was not having ends but being aware of this and having opinions, in some cases knowledge, as to what its own ends were. If a mind is something which has opinions as to what it is trying to do, its possession of these opinions will in certain ways complicate its behaviour. An organism unconsciously seeking its own preservation will simply on any given occasion either score another success or score for the first and last time a failure. A mind aiming at the discovery of a truth or the planning of a course of conduct will not only score a success or a failure, it will also think of itself as scoring a success or a failure; and since a thought may be either true or false its thought on this subject will not necessarily coincide with the facts. Any piece of thinking, theoretical or practical, includes as an integral part of itself the thought of a standard or criterion by reference to which it is judged a successful or unsuccessful piece of thinking. Unlike any kind of bodily or physiological physiological functioning, thought is a self-criticizing activity. The body passes no judgement upon itself. Judgement is passed upon it by its environment, which continues to support it and promote its well-being when it pursues its ends successfully and injures or destroys it when it pursues them otherwise. The mind judges itself, though not always justly. Not content with the simple pursuit of its ends, it also pursues the further end of discovering for itself whether it has pursued them successfully.

Thus distinguishing mind and body, Collingwood describes the norms which govern the operation of the mind. (N.B. No mention of "brain" here!) The criteria for judging the mind arise in ethics (governing actions) and logic (governing thought processes). Collingwood notes that these are often referred to as "normative" standards, but he prefers to label them as "criteriological." He goes on to observe that the rise of psychology in the sixteenth-century didn't arise from a dissatisfaction with logic or ethics, but instead it "arose from the recognition (characteristic of the sixteenth century) that what we call feeling is not a kind of thinking, not a self-critical activity, and therefore not the possible subject-matter of a criteriological science." EM. Collingwood continues:

The business of thinking includes the discovery and correction of its own errors. That is no part of the business of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, and experiencing the emotions associated with them. These activities were thus not activities of the ‘mind’, if that word refers to the self-critical activities called thinking. But neither were they activities of the ‘body’. To use a Greek word (for the Greeks had already made important contributions to this science of feeling) they were activities of the ‘psyche’, and no better word could have been devised for the study of them than psychology.

But Collingwood describes psychology as going off the rails in the seventeenth and eighteen-centuries by encroaching on what was previously the exclusive purview of logic and ethics. Collingwood describes the change:

In the theory of knowledge the same revolt [against the Aristotilian tradition] was at work. Here it took the form of maintaining that intellectual activities, or operations of thought, were nothing but aggregations and complexes of feelings and thus special cases of sensation and emotion. Theoretical reason or knowledge was only a pattern of sensations; practical reason or will, only a pattern of appetites. Just as the aim of materialistic biology was to wipe out the old biology with its guiding notion of purposive function, so the aim of what I will call ‘materialistic epistemology’ was to wipe out the old sciences of thought, logic and ethics, with their criteriological methods and their guiding notions of truth and error, good and evil. Just as materialistic biology hoped to study organisms by substituting for the old biological methods the modern methods of Newtonian physics, so materialistic epistemology hoped to study the processes of thought, theoretical and practical, by substituting for the old methods of logic and ethics the modern methods of psychology, the science of feeling.

But less one think that Collingwood is a metaphysical and science troglodyte, he continues this line of thought with a concession and a cutting metaphor:

This programme, as the more acute and painstaking thinkers of the eighteenth century especially in its later years were not slow to realize, was foredoomed to failure. It might very well be true that a revolt against the old logic and ethics had been desirable and had proved beneficial; for it might very well be true that people who professed those sciences had misunderstood their normative character, and had claimed a right of censorship over the thoughts and actions of other people; and for the sake of scientific progress such tyranny might very well have to be overthrown. When it is a case of overthrowing tyranny one should not be squeamish about the choice of weapons. But the tyrannicide’s dagger is not the best instrument for governing the people it has liberated. Epistemological materialism, in attacking the criteriological science of logic (for brevity’s sake I shall henceforth say nothing about ethics) and offering to replace it by psychology, deliberately proceeded on the assumption that thought did not possess that power of self-criticism which had in the past been rightly regarded as distinguishing it from feeling. If any one who thinks has before his mind a criterion, the double notion of truth and falsehood, by reference to which he judges his thought, any science of thought which repudiates the character of a criteriological science becomes thereby a pseudo-science of thought.

Collingwood has no tolerance for what he brands a "pseudo-science of thought." Collingwood continues with a brief critique of Freud and some contemporary academic psychology. After his discourse about certain psychologists, Collingwood devotes an entire chapter to "The Propaganda of Irrationalism." This chapter is in some ways out-of-place in the book because it deals with social and political attitudes, and it may give too much weight to what may be an academic (in the multiple senses of the word) dispute that has only limited relevance to the larger society. However, if one could only read one chapter from this book, I'd say read this one because of its contemporary significance. One of the reasons I've become fascinated by Collingwood's work arises from the fact that he was living and writing his most important work in the 1930s and early 1940s as totalitarianism (Soviet Communism and German National Socialism (Nazis)), fascism (Italy & Romania), and authoritarianism (Vichy France, Franco's Spain) were dominating the European landscape. Collingwood responded to these developments viscerally and with thought, and his passionate thought shines through in this chapter. Rather than quote it here, I'll devote a separate blog post to some extended quotations. Suffice it to say, what Collingwood says about the world in this chapter at the time that he wrote EM bears an uncanny and unnerving relevance to now.

I do not wish any reader of these pages to form an impression, or even a suspicion, that I value these achievements at a low rate. The study by psychologists of sensation and emotion, whether in the laboratory or in the consulting-room or in what other conditions soever they think it capable of being pursued, is a most important kind of research and a thing which every friend of science will encourage by every means at his command.

The following chapter (XIV) addresses positivism again, and Collingwood pays his respects before unleashing his criticisms. In short, Collingwood describes the positivists as attempting to have scientific theories without the benefit of history as a form of knowledge, and history as a form of knowledge establishes "facts" that positivism so values. Further, positivists want to believe that science has no need of "absolute presuppositions" (only "propositions"); ergo, no metaphysics upon which to ground the inquiries of science. Collingwood sums up the positivist position

It [positivism] has developed into the following syllogism. ‘Any proposition which cannot be verified by appeal to observed facts is a pseudo-proposition. Metaphysical propositions cannot be verified by appeal to observed facts. Therefore metaphysical propositions are pseudo-propositions, and therefore nonsense.’ The argument has been set forth with admirable conciseness and lucidity by Mr. A. J. Ayer in his book Language Truth and Logic (1936).

The final section of the book deals with three provocative issues in metaphysics: the existence of God, Kant, and causation. While God and Kant have their respective merits as topics, as a lawyer, I found the discussion of causation the most compelling. The concept of causation is crucial in the law, especially in criminal law and torts. In torts, no action, either intentional or negligent, can create liability arising from the person's action (or inaction) unless the act (or inaction) causes harm to another. Much legal ink has been spilled on this topic of causation in the law. Terms like “causation-in-fact,” “legal causation,” and "proximate cause” are among the most dissected concepts in the field of tort law. Civil jury instructions in tort cases instruct jurors to determine whether a defendant's action caused the plaintiff the harm claimed. In other words, the idea of causation is not only a matter of concern to lawyers or philosophers but also to laypeople called to serve on a jury. As an example of a causation instruction, the following is the Iowa Uniform Civil Jury Instruction that defines “causation” in a tort case:

700.3 Cause - Defined. The conduct of a party is a cause of damage when the damage would not have happened except for the conduct.)

To begin his consideration of causation, Collingwood identifies three different senses of the word "cause" in English. Collingwood explores the earliest sense of the word and then the later variations based upon that original sense. In other words, he performs a historical analysis of the uses of the word. (In this, he seems to be adopting a form of inquiry conducted at length by Owen Barfield in his 1926 book, History in English Words.) The original use of the term cause in English according to Collingwood is what he labels “Sense I”:

Sense I. Here that which is ‘caused’ is the free and deliberate act of a conscious and responsible agent, and ‘causing’ him to do it means affording him a motive for doing it.

This, too, is a familiar use of the word in the law. Lawyers speak of a client having a “cause of action;” for instance, in negligence or libel. In other words, a legal justification for bringing a lawsuit. Rounding out the senses of the term “cause,” are Collinwood’s descriptions of "sense II" and "sense III"

Sense II. Here that which is ‘caused’ is an event in nature, and its ‘cause’ is an event or state of things by producing or preventing which we can produce or prevent that whose cause it is said to be.

Sense III. Here that which is ‘caused’ is an event or state of things, and its ‘cause’ is another event or state of things standing to it in a one-one relation of causal priority: i.e. a relation of such a kind that (a) if the cause happens or exists the effect also must happen or exist, even if no further conditions are fulfilled, (b) the effect cannot happen or exist unless the cause happens or exists, (c) in some sense which remains to be defined, the cause is prior to the effect; for without such priority there would be no telling which is which. If C and E were connected merely by a one-one relation such as is described in the sentences (a) and (b) above, there would be no reason why C should be called the cause of E, and E the effect of C, rather than vice versa. But whether causal priority is temporal priority, or a special case of temporal priority, or priority of some other kind, is another question.

Sense III is the sense of cause that natural scientists adopted and that comes down to us today in many of the natural sciences. Needless to say, given the length of the description Collingwood must use to describe it, this last sense is the one that gives philosophers--and that should give scientists--pause. After laying out the three “senses” of the word “cause” in English (and Collingwood uses the word “senses”), Collingwood describes how the terms are used in the discipline of history. Collingwood writes

In sense I of the word ‘cause’ that which is caused is the free and deliberate act of a conscious and responsible agent, and ‘causing’ him to do it means affording him a motive for doing it. For ‘causing’ we may substitute ‘making’, ‘inducing’, ‘persuading’, ‘urging’, ‘forcing’, ‘compelling’, according to differences in the kind of motive in question.

Collingwood goes on to supplement this understanding:

A cause in sense I is made up of two elements, a causa quod or efficient cause and a causa ut or final cause. The causa quod is a situation or state of things existing; the causa ut is a purpose or state of things to be brought about. Neither of these could be a cause if the other were absent.

It is clear in these quotes (and the intervening text) that Collingwood is emphasizing the human element in “cause;” the fact that human thought responds to a trigger and formulates a purpose or intention for acting—one might say a pull as opposed to a push (i.e., a simple stimulus and response, like Pavlov’s dogs or Skinner’s pigeons). Collingwood some time exploring “sense II” of causation, which I will pass over here, and he moves into “sense III,” which, to start, involves the dispute between the empiricists and the rationalists of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. This long-established but divergent paths still provide a fertile source for thinking about causation. Collingwood also explores a work by Bertrand (“Earl”) Russell, which he admires and critiques. Out of this discourse, Collingwood observes

Causation in sense III is an anthropomorphic idea. Natural scientists have tried to use it as a weapon for attacking anthropomorphic conceptions of nature; but it has been a treacherous weapon. It has led them unawares to reaffirm the view they were attacking. And that may be why, in Earl Russell’s own words, ‘physics has ceased to look for causes’ (op. cit., p. 180).

He continues:

The idea of compulsion, as applied to events in nature, is derived from our experience of occasions on which we have compelled others to act in certain ways by placing them in situations (or calling their attention to the fact that they are in situations) of such a kind that only by so acting can they realize the intentions we know or rightly assume them to entertain: and conversely, occasions in which we have ourselves been thus compelled. Compulsion is an idea derived from our social experience, and applied in what is called a ‘metaphorical’ way not only to our relations with things in nature (sense II of the word ‘cause’) but also to the relations which these things have among themselves (sense III). Causal propositions in sense III are descriptions of relations between natural events in anthropomorphic terms.

History, the acts of humans, keeps creeping into efforts to abstract the human element from every conception of causation. Also, we have the unintentional but not less real fact that any current thinking comes loaded with conceptions received (or smuggled in) from the past. And "the past" has myriad ways of attempting to understand the world. Collingwood writes

The reason why we are in the habit of using these anthropomorphic terms is, of course, that they are traditional. Inquiry into the history of the tradition shows that it grew up in connexion with the same animistic theory of nature to which I referred in discussing sense II of the word ‘cause’, but that in this case the predominant factor was a theology of Neoplatonic inspiration.

Newton, according to Collingwood, adopts “cause” from this Western cultural heritage and seeks to make it fit with his newer ideas about “force” and “motion.” Then comes Kant, who attempts to gather and refine these existing senses of “cause;" i.e., those from empiricists, like Hume, and rationalists like Leibniz; and those of Bacon and Newton. Kant believed he had shaped these traditions into one coherent conception. But Collingwood argues that Kant wasn't successful. Collingwood sums up his criticism of Kant in this paragraph:

It does not follow that Kant was mistaken in thinking both statements [about logical necessity and temporal sequence] to be true. He was trying to state what people (himself included) meant when they spoke of causes. They meant to express a certain absolute presupposition [Collingwood’s term] which they habitually made in the course of their thinking about nature: the presupposition which is called the idea of causation. This presupposition was itself a constellation of presuppositions; and among the elements that went to compose it, if Kant is right, were these: that a cause and its effect are related by a necessary connexion, and that a cause and its effect are related by way of temporal sequence. The logical incompatibility of these two suppositions does not prove that they were not concurrently made; it only proves that, if they were concurrently made, the structure of the constellation that included them both was subject to severe strain, and that the entire fabric of the science based upon them was in a dangerously unstable condition.

This frame of thought continued through the nineteenth century and up to the time of Einstein. Yet, as Collingwood reveals in a representative sample of his contemporaries, many philosophers and natural scientists have not followed the lead of the physicists but have stuck with Kant’s problematic conception. Collingwood concludes his point

All these writers, it will be seen, attach themselves to some group or society of persons to whom they refer as ‘we’. I have ventured to italicize the word in my quotations. What is this group or society? It is the group or society of persons who accept the Kantian definition of the term ‘cause’. They are not, and do not include, contemporary natural scientists: for these, or at any rate those among them who are physicists, have abandoned the term. Nor do they include such philosophers as have, like Whitehead and Russell, understood and accepted the work which these physicists are doing. They are a group of neo-Kantians whose reverence for the master has induced them to accept not indeed all his doctrines but this particular doctrine. I say this because, the doctrine being a self-contradictory one, it can hardly have commended itself to them by its inherent reasonableness; nor can they have had for accepting it the same reason which I suppose Kant to have had, namely the fact that, self-contradictory or not, it was actually presupposed by contemporary physicists. It has somehow got itself fixed in their minds; presumably from their study of Kant. To quote the bitter words of Earl Russell: ‘The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm’ (op. cit., p. 180).

Russell, like Collingwood, often displayed a sharp tongue and a gift for metaphor. 

Let me conclude this tour (I now regret the phrase “review;” I’m still not qualified) of Collingwood’s Essay with his concluding words, which address not only the current states of metaphysics and natural science but politics as well.

This movement [to maintain Kant’s conceptions about causality] may impede the advancement of science (and the advancement of science and the existence of science, I repeat, are not two things but one) in two different ways. Politically, by creating in the body politic a demand that scientific thinking should be put down by force. There are places where this is already happening. Academically, by creating in the specialized organs through which society endeavours to further science and learning a feeling of hostility to that furtherance. This feeling of hostility to science as such may be ‘rationalized’ through an obscurantist philosophy which by sophistical arguments pretends to prove that the advances which are actually being made are in fact no advances. Sophistical, because reactionary: based on the assumption that the superseded views are true, and thence proceeding to argue that the views which have superseded them must be false because they do not agree with the views they have superseded. The partisans of such an obscurantist philosophy are traitors to their academic calling. Within the body of persons ostensibly devoted to the advancement of science and learning they are working, unconsciously perhaps but still working, to obstruct that advancement and weaken the resistance with which that body is bound in honour to confront the onslaughts of irrationalism. . . . . Since metaphysics is an indispensable condition of science an enemy to metaphysics is an enemy to science, and a reactionary anti-metaphysician is an enemy to whatever in science is progressive. Trying with a clumsy hand to put back the clock of scientific progress, he stops it. This is my reason for offering to the public what might seem essentially an academic essay, suitable only for readers who are already, like myself, committed to an interest in metaphysics. The fate of European science and European civilization is at stake. The gravity of the peril lies especially in the fact that so few recognize any peril to exist. When Rome was in danger, it was the cackling of the sacred geese that saved the Capitol. I am only a professorial goose, consecrated with a cap and gown and fed at a college table; but cackling is my job, and cackle I will.

And cackle he has.

Garry Wills on "Gun Rights"

If someone asks me who's my favorite author, I would look at them dumb-founded, like they'd asked me who's my favorite daughter--and I've only two of them! But if you gave me some leeway, say living authors and asked for an all-star team about the size of a football all-star team (offense and defense), I could probably comply. But even if the number of picks was kept lower, Garry Wills would make the team. Descriptive, elegant prose combined with erudition and wit mark Wills's writing. And because he's no youngster (now 85), he's all the more valuable. So sometimes I just want to check-in on him,  and here's what I've found of late.

This is a sample of what Wills recently wrote about the American obsession with "gun rights" [sic]:

"If a person were found to have shown up regularly in so many places where so many crimes had been committed by so many people, how could that person not be called to account for such suspicious behavior? He would clearly be investigated for being present with such persistence at crime scenes. Did he facilitate them, making them easier by his mere presence? What could induce any innocent person to be so energetically omnipresent at so many varied crime scenes? What excuse could relieve him from the charge of being an accessory? A person with such skill and dogged effort would be considered a national menace, no matter how many excuses he could concoct for such weird conduct.
But guns can do all of those things and profess an entire non-involvement. “Who, me?” says Gun, going on:
I never asked to be part of anyone’s wrongdoing. Why pick on me? You must have a gun-persecution disorder. You accusers are the ones who show up at every crime scene, trying to drag me into actions as if I’m an agent. I am totally passive. I never asked to be bought by a homicidal maniac. Go after the nutty people and leave me alone."

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/09/05/the-rights-of-guns/

NYBOOKS.COM

The Rights of Guns

“Gun rights,” as used by devotees of an absolutist Second Amendment, means their right to own guns. But in America today, it has come to mean more: the rights of guns. Guns themselves possess more rights than persons do. Guns’ exemption from common-sense legislation guarantees them not only ri...

A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism by Adam Gopnik

A single word can’t easily contain a complex concept, and a concept cannot easily (if ever) contain a reality. A linguistic referent (word), to supply any value, must include an essential aspect of the referred chunk of reality. So we can go on at length, and often fruitfully, about the most important concepts we live by: love, freedom, God, imagination—and liberalism. The list could continue at length. The discussion goes on indefinitely and yet fruitfully. Might one conclude that any concept that receives a definitive definition [sic] is little better than a tautology and of little value? 

That a word or concept has a history does not make it mean what it once meant. Trees have roots; human beings don’t. What they have instead are histories. Histories are ways of thinking about the past and the present, which allow us to imagine new futures.

Liberalism is as distinct a tradition as exists in political history, but it suffers from being a practice before it is an ideology, a temperament and a tone and a way of managing the world more than a fixed set of beliefs. (At least this means that poets and novelists and painters, a Trollope or a George Eliot or a Manet, can be better guides to its truths than political philosophers or pundits.) 

To return to the point, defining “liberalism” is a fraught task, one that can only prove one more iteration in a continuing effort. But so be it, and if one had to deal with only one book to delineate (contemporary) liberalism, I doubt that one could find a more compelling work than Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019).  Gopnik doesn’t approach this formidable topic as a political philosopher might, but as the skilled journalist that he is. (He’s been writing for the New Yorker since 1986.) Gopnik portrays liberalism primarily through its history, and its history primarily through its practitioners. And in doing so, he writes in almost aphoristic prose. Indeed, it’s a temptation to simply lay out a series of quotes from the book in lieu of a review. (I far exceeded my Kindle allotment of highlights.) Gopnik treats “liberalism” as he might the subject of one of his New Yorker profiles, bobbing in and out of personal vignettes and summary analysis.

Liberalism ends in the center not because that’s where liberals always think the sanity is, but because they recognize that there are so many selves in a society that must be accommodated that you can’t expect them to congregate in a single neighborhood at one end or another of the city. The meeting place, the piazza, in an Italian village, is placed in the center of the town because everyone can get there. The ancient Greeks thought of this meeting place as the “agora,” which meant the market but meant more broadly the place where citizens met for unplanned meetings. Tyrants of all kinds, Persian and Spartan, feared the agora in the most literal way, and tried to eliminate it from their cities. 

 . . . .

Humanism precedes liberalism. Connection comes before action. A readiness for self-inspection precedes an effort at self-improvement, and a confidence in our neighbors precedes faith in citizenship. Thinking about liberal order or the liberal future in terms of laws and legislatures is far too limiting. Park designers, sociologists, and beyond have more to tell us about building open societies.

Thus, the lead characters in this book are a pair of couples, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, and Mary Ann Evans (who wrote under the pseudonym “George Eliot”) and George Henry Lewes. We learn from the tale of these two couples that liberalism and feminism often go together. In addition, Gopnik delves into the liberalism of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who organized the great civil rights march of August 1962, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Bayard worked for liberal causes as a black, gay man, making the importance of liberation and dignity inherent in liberalism especially high values in his life. Another exemplar of liberalism in life and action is Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became one of the great Americans of the nineteenth century and whose oratory could match that of Lincoln for its power and persuasion (and whom Lincoln came to admire).  Another, surprising choice (to me anyway), is Charles De Gaulle, the leader of Free France during the Second World War and later president of the Republic. Gopnik notes that while De Gaulle had some very conservative-leaning beliefs and attitudes, his defense of liberalism—a very lively topic in France from before the Revolution (1789) to the present—proved crucial for France.

Modern liberalism—as distinct from earlier and more general meanings of the term as “generous” or “learned”—begins with a psychological principle, a human principle. Its foundation is fallibilism—the truth that we are usually wrong about everything and always divided within ourselves about anything we believe. Reform rather than revolution or repetition is essential because what we are doing now is likely to be based on a bad idea and because what we do next is likely to be bad in some other way too. Incremental cautious reform is likely to get more things right than any other kind. 

And while Gopnik does an excellent job of singing the praises of liberalism, neither does he ignore its critics. Here, too, he draws upon worthy exemplars, such as Samuel Johnson and G.K. Chesterton. And of more recent vintage, political thinker Patrick Deneen, whose Why Liberalism Failed (2018) became a bit of a sensation (well, among those who read such topics), receives a fair hearing. And, as Gopnik notes, liberalism always seems caught in the middle, so the Left criticizes liberalism also. While the conservative critique says, “too much, too soon, not sure I'll work” the left argues “too little, too late, gotta have a whole new plan.” On the left, Gopnik spotlights “Red Emma” Goldman, the native of Russia who emigrated to the U.S., was eventually deported, and then went on to the Soviet Union, where she, unlike so many others, saw through the façade of Lenin’s Potemkin Village. She supplied poignant critiques of her fellow leftists and liberals.

The right-wing critique of liberalism is largely an attack on its overreliance on reason; the left-wing one, mostly an attack on its false faith in reform. The right-wing assault also tends to focus on the evil that liberalism does internally to the traditional communities and nations it betrays; the left wing pays attention, as well, and sometimes more often, to the evil that liberalism does externally to its distant victims in the foreign countries it exploits. [N.B. Yes, too many critics conflate liberalism with capitalism, sloppy move. sng]

Gopnik reports that this work arose from musings with his teenage daughter when the results of the 2016 presidential election became clear. How? Why? What went wrong? What do good and wise people stand for? What do we aspire to? Without unduly disparaging respectable figures on the right or the left, Gopnik demonstrates more than argues that despite liberalism’s reputation for a bland, middle-of-the-road, melioristic attitude, it is a rich source for establishing a good life for individuals and their communities. In Gopnik’s liberalism, there is as much of Edmund Burke as there is of Adam Smith (a misunderstood liberal: "Smith believed not that markets make men free but that free men move toward markets. The difference is small but decisive; it is most of what we mean by humanism.") or of John Stuart Mill. In fact, the inability of liberalism to strictly define itself (or care to) is its power. (Compare liberalism to the endless Marxist battles around theorizing). Liberalism is protean, yet with the essential elements of liberty, dignity, and compassion, its many threads can be tied together into the beautiful and useful cloak under which we can best conduct our lives.

But let Gopnik have the last word:

What is liberalism, then? A hatred of cruelty. An instinct about human conduct rooted in a rueful admission of our own fallibility and of the inadequacy of our divided minds to be right frequently enough to act autocratically. A belief that the sympathy that binds human society together can disconnect us from our clannish and suspicious past. A program for permanent reform based on reason and an appeal to argument, aware of human fallibility and open to the lessons of experience. An understanding that small, open social institutions, if no larger than a café or more overtly political than a park, play an outsized role in creating free minds and securing public safety. A faith in rational debate, rather than inherited ritual, and in reform, rather than either revolution or reaction. A belief in radical change through practical measures. A readiness to act—nonviolently but visibly and sometimes in the face of threatened violence—on behalf of equality. A belief that life should be fair—or fairer, or as fair as seems fair: people’s lives should not be overdetermined by who their parents were or how much money they might have inherited or what shade of skin their genes have woven. A belief that the individual pursuit of eccentric happiness can be married to a common faith in fair procedure.