“Do you believe in God?”

“Many of us use God to represent our highest aspirations—our aspiration to discover and bear witness to the truth, our aspiration to be kind, merciful, just and loving. This sort of God I also believe in and revere.”

“So God represents no more than the sum of our aspirations?”

“You might say love represents no more than the sum of feelings for children, spouses, parents, and siblings and fellow men and women. But I think this misses something important. When our hearts are filled with love, the feeling becomes something in its own right, independent of its object.”

“Do you mean that our aspirations to be truthful, kind, merciful, just and loving fill our hearts with God, and that feeling becomes something in its own right.”

“Yes, I would agree with that.”

“But isn’t this something very different from what most people think of as God?”

“When I ask people what God means to them, some of them say a Father in Heaven. But when I ask what this Father demands of them, I often find it’s very similar to what my God demands of me.”

“For you it seems that God isn’t in Heaven, but rather in the mind.”

“According to Luke’s account, when Jesus was asked when the Kingdom of God would come, he replied ‘The Kingdom of God is within you.’”

“Perhaps the Kingdom of God, but God Himself?”

“Insofar as I wholeheartedly devote myself to truth, kindness, mercy, justice and love, I realize the Kingdom of God within me.”

“But don’t you think the task is too great for an individual? Doesn’t the individual need divine grace to realize the Kingdom of God within him?”

“We can not, should not, and certainly need not attempt to go it alone. We need the help of other individuals. I don’t object if we want to call those who help us divine. In this sense, Emerson and Tolstoy are divinities for me. But I do object to those who seek to divinize a single person or a single book.”

“Haven’t some of your critics accused you of promoting narcissism?”

“There's a common conception, particularly here in the U. S., that a life of action is preferable to a life of contemplation. We imagine that even if the motives that inspire us to act are impure or unholy, the virtue of activity makes up for it. But I don't agree with this. I find that when I don’t carefully examine the motives that lead me to act, I often later find that my actions were unhelpful. I try to devote a greater portion of my time to contemplation, not, like Narcissus, because I admire myself, but rather because I would like to find and correct my flaws and errors.”

“What's the point of correcting all my flaws and errors, and making my soul perfect, when I'm going to die eventually? Isn’t it all just wasted effort?”

“I understand how you feel. It's certainly important to impart what we learn to the next generation. But I believe we must never stop striving to perfect the soul. As soon as we stop striving, as soon as we give up on ourselves, we commit intellectual suicide. This makes me think of Rilke, the German poet. The longer he lived, Rilke said, the more urgent it seemed to him to transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to the very end, because it just might be the very last sentence that contains that ‘tiny, inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will suddenly be transformed into magnificent sense.’”

Bildungstelevision?

The Bildungsroman combines an entertaining story with an education in philosophy. Could there be such a thing as Bildungs-television? Hardly. The purpose of television is to make us feel comfortable with our ignorance, so we will spend our time shopping, and then working to pay off our debts, rather than educating ourselves. A television program that evoked a passion for intellectual development would motivate us to go the library instead of the mall, precisely the opposite of the effect that is intended.

“Men believe they are free,” says Spinoza, “because they are conscious of their desires; yet concerning the causes that determine them to desire they do not think, nor even dream about.” In the society of universal commerce we believe we are free because we choose how we will earn and spend our income. Concerning the causes that determine us to desire comfort and convenience, and therefore compel us to work to earn the money to procure them, we do not think, nor even dream about. Like puppets, we dance about unwittingly, our every action determined by the marketplace. It is not accidental that great philosophers have often been ascetics. The foremost obstacles that stand in the way of dedicating ourselves to the pursuit of truth and virtue are the desires that come, not from nature, but from the marketplace.

The news is like an astronomy teacher who reports the daily motion of the planets instead of teaching us Newton's laws.

I sometimes imagine that an ethical system I don’t understand imposes no demands on me. But this is not right. It does impose, at the very least, the demand that I understand the system and determine if it makes any plausible claims.

Imaginary virtue

The noble hero who renounces profit in the pursuit of humanitarian aims, a common theme in movies and television programs, stands in stark contrast to a reality in which the producers and distributors of these very same programs are motivated entirely by the pursuit of profit. The theme of altruism is one technical apparatus among many used in an industry which, like every other industry, has profit as its raison d'être. Advocates of motives higher than accumulation of mammon are always met with nodding assent to their noble principles, followed immediately by a return to a reality in which they have no place. We have effectively contained and neutralized the threat morality poses to the hegemony of commerce, by bringing it to life in a fictional world, hermetically isolated from a real world in which pursuit of profit is universal.

"Spooky words"A letter to a reductionist

A friend has been heavily influenced by those reductionists who seem eager to rid our culture not only of superstition, but of all words that don't refer directly to a measurable, observable quantity. Whenever I use words like "truth," "virtue," "reason" and "God," he interrupts me and demands I desist from using such "spooky words." I thought my response might be of wider interest.

I assume what the idea of “spooky words” means to you is “words that don't refer to anything measurable and quantifiable, anything whose existence or nonexistence can be ascertained in a reproducible manner,” or something like that. The problem is, at least at the present state of technological development, there's no way to measure or quantify the mental state of another person. When someone reports to you that he is angry, anxious, ashamed, disgusted, depressed, frightened, guilty, happy, hopeful, frustrated, lonely, sad, bored, excited, etc., your response must be “I will have to ignore that spooky word you just said because I don’t have any evidence to back it up.”

Words like these are spooky because the qualities they describe are not measurable, and not even easily defined. But do you have a way of characterizing mental states that is more exact? Of course we should strive for the greatest level of precision we can achieve, but if we can't achieve perfect precision, should we give up the fight, and just remain completely mute about the mental aspects of human experience?

If the state of the physical world is all that matters to you, and the mental state of human beings is essentially irrelevant, then you would be perfectly justified in limiting yourself to a vocabulary that excludes any spooky words. If mental states are important to you, however, then, since they are difficult to describe to begin with, it seems to me you shouldn't rule out any of the resources available in describing them, no matter how metaphorical and inexact they are.

If I care about understanding someone's mental state, and he starts getting poetic, it seems to me I should still listen carefully to him, and use his words as evidence to try to understand his mental state. Since glimpsing the mental state of another is such a difficult thing, I should not discard any evidence, no matter how tenuous.

How well we get along with others depends in large part on how good we are at understanding them, which means building mental models of them. In some situations, where the interaction is not of profound importance, you will need only a simple model. But for important interactions, it is worth building a more sophisticated model. This model, to be adequate, surely has to include some aspects of personality that do not lend themselves to easy categorization and quantification, aspects that can probably only be described with spooky words. It also has to include a catalog of beliefs that we disagree with.

Even if you were to find a way to build a more quantitative model of human emotions, much of the data you use in developing your model will come from the vocabulary the other person uses to describe himself. If he uses spooky words, and you merely ignore them, you are sacrificing useful data that might have been used to improve your model.

In addition to the spooky words we use to describe our own mental states, there's another whole set of spooky words used to describe one person’s effect on another person’s mental state: amiable, impressive, offensive, rude, polite, intrusive, contentious, belligerent, and so forth. These we also ignore at our peril. How can we avoid being rude if we see “rude” as a spooky word, and disregard all the data about what aspects of our own behavior others perceive as rude?

When I hear someone talk about astrology, my first reaction is to launch into a lecture about confirmation bias and the advantages of Baconian science. This isn't always the best response, however. There are some circumstances where it makes more sense to try to understand what the person is trying to tell me, even though I disagree with him.

I would ask you: how do you propose to continue improving your skills in human interaction over the course of your lifetime, if the vocabulary used to express ideas about human interaction is off-limits to you on account of its lack of precision?

I can understand the desire for precision. But achieving greater precision often requires that we begin with whatever level of precision we have, and try to improve upon it. I suspect you use a lot of imprecise words to describe your social interactions, and I suspect you have a lot of skill in using these words. If you hold yourself back from using this vocabulary, isn’t this going to hold you back from developing greater skill and precision in using it? Einsteinian mechanics doesn't discard the vocabulary of Newtonian mechanics. It uses that vocabulary in a more precise way.

If precise thinking carries a very high weight in your own personal objective function, and the weight of social and commercial success is negligible, then it might make sense to just avoid all the imprecise reasoning about human interaction. But I doubt this is the case.

Human beings differ from other organisms in that, in addition to the message passed from generation to generation in nucleic acids, there's also a message passed from generation to generation in words. To understand the behavior of a human being, we need to understand this legacy of words—his “memome,” as it is often called—as well as his genome.

Just as, in order to understand the diversity of the genetic composition of different organisms, we must understand how these are related to one another, make conjectures about common ancestors, and look for these in the fossil record, so also, in order to understand the diversity of human beliefs, we must understand how these are related to one another, make conjectures about common ancestors, and look for these in historical texts, the fossil record of ideas.

The person who takes no interest in the origin and evolution of the ideas used by his society, or who would like to imagine their origins are different from what the evidence shows, is analogous to that sort of person—whom I know you dislike—who takes no interest in the biological origins of man, or imagines these origins are different from what the evidence shows.

The idea that the contemporary scientific view of man and nature is something entirely new, or has evolved from earlier views in a narrow path of continuous progress, is no more scientific than the idea that contemporary animal species all derive from a small subset of animals that was rescued on an ark. There was no flood that eliminated the other forms of culture and left only science.

We would like to imagine that, even if other ideas derive from a path of historical evolution, our own ideas are pure and pristine, deriving from a cold, dispassionate reason uncontaminated by the errors of the past. But the scientific project of understanding and manipulating nature has its historical origins just as much as religions do.

Those who are most eager in the pursuit of the scientific project have a tendency to treat those who don't share their goals as somehow less than human. It is almost as if they believe that, when we trace the memetic origins of the race of scientists, we will find it is pure and free of tainted blood, and the memetic origins of the other memetic races are tainted, and therefore inferior.

In my experience, an extended philosophical discussion with a superstitious person will almost always show that, insofar as he has a coherent philosophy at all, it doesn't include the requirement that his ideas correspond to reality. To ask him to make his ideas correspond to reality makes no more sense than to ask him to dye his hair blond so as to look like the master race. (Here it is a master memetic race in question rather than a master genetic race, but does that make it any better?) Of course, the superstitious person may say his ideas correspond to reality, but when you probe more deeply into what he means by “reality,” you will find he means “a reality that's comfortable to me,” not the same reality as that of the scientist.

The project of precisely predicting and controlling nature is one among many human projects. It is hard to imagine how we might say it is a “better” one. What the basis of comparison should be is precisely the issue in question. From the point of view of a poet or a novelist, the scientific project might be seen as merely a refuge for those with paltry imaginations.

My question is, if you're really committed to the scientific project, to seeking to understand rather than to judge, why aren't you applying this objectivity in the realm of human ideas as well as in other realms? Shouldn’t all your descriptions of other ideas and belief systems be morally neutral, just as your descriptions of nature are morally neutral? (For example, shouldn’t you say “not empirically based” rather than “spooky”?)

In many cases I can look at my fellow human beings as partners in the search for truth, partners in the quest for prosperity, or partners in any activity I deem important. In such cases, the other person becomes, in a sense, merely an extension of my own mind. We can “think together” to try to reach a solution to a problem, because we agree on the definition of the problem and what might count as a solution. But this isn't always the case. When someone has goals very different from my own, our relationship changes. He becomes an object to study scientifically, rather than a co-participant in the scientific project. Since no one shares precisely the same goals, people will be perpetually switching back and forth between these two categories. One of the marks of competence in social interaction is to manage these shifts between agreement and disagreement in a manner that doesn't get me agitated, and that doesn't get the other person agitated or offended.

I have a tendency to get angry when another person refuses to be a co-participant in whatever my project of the moment is, and to lash out at him, criticizing him, trying to get him to fall back into line. In my experience, this hasn't worked out very well.

Two people can have different views and not be a threat to one another. I think that in my particular case, growing up in an environment in which someone who had different views about the acceptability of homosexuality actually could be a serious threat to me, I developed to an unhealthy, overly defensive, way of handling disagreement. Now, when someone disagrees with me, as the very first step in dealing with disagreement, I try to assure myself that the disagreement is not a threat to me.

You said you see poetry and beauty in the sheer complexity and order of the natural universe. I wonder, do you also see poetry and beauty in the human universe, in the diversity of beliefs and goals that constitute our human world?

The estate of reason

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel.
Emerson

Emerson’s noble vision of a broad, open plain of reason, without walls, fences or borders contrasts sharply with the reason of our era. Today we can traverse only a minute distance in the estate of reason before we come upon one of many insuperable fortified walls erected between disciplines. The historian admits he has not studied physics, not ruing his timidity with a downcast eye, but proclaiming his provincialism with the haughty air of a Pharisee who proudly respects boundaries and follows rules. A free spirit like Emerson who imagines himself a freeman of the whole estate will today find himself contemptuously dismissed as a dilettante. In the estate of reason there are no longer freemen. Each mind is sold to one or another plantation, destined to a lifetime of servitude on its tiny plot.

A sublime excuse for procrastination

Everything, says Spinoza, endeavors to persist in its own being. Among things with a drive for persistence we must include the ephemeral collection of electrical impulses in the flesh enclosed in the skull, the software we accumulate as our hardware meanders around.

Just as most of us negligently omit to backup important files on our computers, we also make no effort to preserve the contents of the mind so that it will survive the demise of the fragile organism that sustains it. I know I’m procrastinating the difficult task of capturing the essence of my mind in art and writing. I’m busy making things that bear not my stamp, but only the stamp of the marketplace. I never preserve the foremost virtues of my mind for the future. Why does the fiction of an afterlife persist even though I know it’s scientifically implausible? Because I can’t bear the thought that my procrastination will be fatal, that the contents of my mind will be forever lost.

But the contents of my mind will indeed be lost if I remain too lazy and timid to attempt to capture them in a form more enduring than flesh. The fiction of an afterlife is fatal to intellectual life. It gives me a ready-made excuse for my procrastination. Imagining I have infinite time, I postpone the backup indefinitely. It never gets done. And everything in my mind that might have been worth preserving is irretrievably lost.

Shopping as a civic duty

Madison Avenue has persuaded us to make superfluous comforts and conveniences higher priorities than the basic needs of other human beings. Its success in manipulating us into irrational behavior is testified by the consumer’s neglect even of human beings closely related to him. In fact, he has learned even to neglect his future self. The channels of communication owned by capitalists are filled with their messages of prodigality and gluttony. In private we must counter them with messages of thrift and charity. We cannot silence those who would mislead us. But we can argue with them. Seductive marketers tell us money spent accelerates the economy, while money saved retards it. They attempt to transform prodigality and gluttony into civic virtues, and thrift and charity into antisocial vices. Their arguments are patently false. A dollar I spend to help the less fortunate goes into the economy just as surely as a dollar I spend on frivolous luxury. When I buy shares of agricultural enterprises, farmers spend it on tractors, warehouses, and other durable infrastructure of production. We are fond of ridiculing miserliness as a vice. But how it is a vice to spend money on productive assets, rather than assets with no purpose other than to display our wealth? The idea that there is a civic duty to consume rather than to save and give is merely a thin and flimsy rationalization for our prodigality and gluttony.

Two kinds of paperwork

In Anna Karenina, Oblonsky says “Paperwork is the soul of Russia.” But, Tolstoy tells us, the usual forms of paperwork are the wrong kind of paperwork. Tolstoy is intent on showing us a better kind. The problem is, the joy of artistic creation is not accessible to everyone. Most of us have to settle for bookkeeping. Tolstoy is opposed to privilege. But to set aside commerce and direct our attention to virtue and art—this privilege is reserved for aristocrats like him. Therein lies the paradox.

One possible resolution of Tolstoy’s paradox is asceticism. The ascetic, by learning how little he needs from others, is able to demand less of others. He gradually frees himself from the encumbrance of economic ties. He cultivates human ties. He concentrates on perfecting his behavior and his art.

Another possible resolution of Tolstoy’s paradox is to refuse to sunder virtue and art from the economic sphere. This means we work within the economic system, but we do not work for rewards. We work for the sake of work itself.

Two kinds of relativist

It might be helpful to distinguish two categories of relativist. The first says "All truth is relative to culture and social environment. We must accept that we are part of a certain culture and social environment. Things too foreign cannot be seriously entertained." A good example in this category is Richard Rorty. The second category of relativist says, "All truth is relative to culture and social environment. We must expose ourselves to a variety of cultures and social environments by reading books from a wide variety of times and places. Only this will allow us to correct for the bias we have for our own." A good example in this category is Nietzsche. The first kind of relativist accepts our limitation to our own time and place, even celebrates it. The second sort acknowledges relativism only to go on to combat it. Nietzsche advocates taking the questions posed by the great thinkers of history seriously, and not sanguinely supposing we have answered them. He is often classified as a relativist of the first category, when he is really of the second. Like all great thinkers, he aspires to be cosmopolitan and untimely, to transcend merely personal ties, to cultivate a pathos of distance from his own place and time in order to understand it. He never repudiates the philosopher’s passion to discover and bear witness to the truth, but rather turns the passion inward upon itself to discover its origins.

The courage to think

Aristotle distinguishes between vices of deficiency and vices of excess. Cowardice is a vice of deficiency. Rashness is a vice of excess. Homer tells the story of Odysseus, who ties himself to the mast as he listens to the Sirens. In the realm of thought, there can be no excess of courage. As long as I tie myself to the mast—as long as I do and say nothing—I can be courageous without limit. When we talk about the courage to think, there is no need to talk about limits. Shakespeare calls genius the ally of madness. What these allies share is their courage to think. What one has and the other lacks is the ability to tie oneself securely to the mast.

Monuments to virtue

When I was young I would gawk at the mansions of the wealthy, not because I wanted luxury and finery for myself, but because the palaces seemed to me monuments to virtue. In fact what the mansions monumentalize is not virtue. It is the impostor that, as we lower our expectations on what man is and might be, we have put in its place. Productivity ought to be a virtue. But if I squander what I produce on luxury and vanity rather than reserving it for philanthropy, it is at best half a virtue, a mere torso of virtue, from which love, the head of all virtue, has been expeditiously removed.

The economic activity of man now runs smoothly on the prosaic fuel of self-interest. Minds capable of sublimer motives—passion for truth, love for fellow men—must stand aside. We say we have merely lowered our expectations to a realistic level. But once the system has adapted itself to run smoothly with base motives, it begins to demand base motives, and ends up elevating them into the new virtues.

Some say that justice demands we give our fellow men freedom to trade, and let them keep the gains from their enterprise. Perhaps they are right. But it is certainly unjust to praise those who squander these gains building monuments to vanity. Those clever enough to produce more must also be clever enough to figure out how to consume less. My youthful admiration of mansions testifies to an intellectual defect, and, as I now see it, ought to be a source of shame.

The Gospel of Consumption

We laugh at the idea of salvation. But in practice we order our lives and our rituals precisely as if we believed in salvation by comfort and convenience. We don’t like to talk about our theology—no more than lay Christians like to talk about the Trinity. We leave this up to our religious experts, in Hollywood. The large flat panel screen before which we worship six hours each day shows us brilliantly crafted sermons to consumption. Our saints of consumption, role models for all our daily activities, consume resources and make high quality video recordings of the process.

Alternatives to the gospel of consumption have, in the course of time, been forgotten. The ideal of Socrates was to dedicate each day to thinking and questioning, sharing dialectical conversation with our fellow men. The ideal of Jesus was to dedicate each day to loving and sharing joy with our fellow men. Of course Hollywood pays homage to these forgotten ideals too. But it always treats them as musty relics from another era, to be included as supplements to the serious business of consumption, not, as they were originally intended, as alternatives.

“I think of my vocation as free climbing on the cliffs of the soul. I often fall. And the further I fall, the more it hurts. But this doesn’t stop me from wanting to keep climbing.”

Sex can be merely a mechanical quest for pleasure, or it can be an expression of love. Work can be merely a mechanical quest for wealth, or it can be an expression of love. And just as the pleasure from loveless sex never really satisfies, so also the wealth from loveless work never really satisfies.

A human mind, if it is to lead anything other than a stunted and crippled existence, must learn to express itself

In school I devoted myself to math and physics and avoided history and English as much as I could. What no one told me then—and I didn’t discover until much later in life—is that the vocabulary we learn in math and science, while well suited to describing the physical world, is entirely incapable of introspection. The mind needs routine maintenance to ward off triviality and error. And there is no way to perform that maintenance without tools. What are the tools we need? Words. In particular, words that describe mental existence.

Once upon a time our universities offered an aristocratic form of education, in which the mind of a young student was seen not merely as a means, but as a significant and important end in itself. Occasionally a lucky student still receives such an education as an undergraduate, but in graduate school that’s all over. Graduate school doesn’t see the mind as an end in itself, only as a useful organ to be sacrificed for the greater good. In master’s programs, the aim is to train the mind to make a contribution to commerce; in doctoral programs, a contribution to knowledge. Ample time was allotted in my graduate program to give my mind the vocabulary it needed to precisely describe and control the trajectory of electrons. No time was allotted to give my mind the vocabulary it needed to describe and control its own trajectory.

Some philosophies attribute to the mind a desire to understand and express itself, not for any external purpose, but for its own sake. In these philosophies, the human mind is not an instrument. It is as an end in itself. Aside from a few shining exceptions like Emerson and Thoreau, these philosophies have never been particularly influential in America. Unfortunately for the world, the Pax Americana is driving them into oblivion everywhere.

Humanists are fond of lamenting the anti-intellectual tendency in American life. This, in my opinion, is not a sufficiently precise description of the problem. The master isn't anti-slave. He's all in favor of slaves, so long as they never imagine they are free. It's not that Americans are opposed to mind. We just want to make sure it doesn’t put on airs and imagine it’s an end in itself. It must know its proper place.

A rich vocabulary is the soil in which the mind grows. To exile a mind into an arid specialized vocabulary incapable of self-reflection is cruel. Philosophy, psychology and poetry are the nutrients a mind needs to flourish. To withhold nourishment from a mind capable of assimilating it is cruel.

Just as cattle are herded heedlessly to their deaths so we can have our beef, young minds are herded into graduate schools where they suffer a slow, painful intellectual disfigurement so we can have magnetic resonance imaging machines and cellular phones. And just as the gleaming metal corral leads the cattle happily along to death, scholarships and stock options led me happily along to my intellectual disfigurement.

Occasionally one of the cows figures out where the corral leads. But, lacking the vocabulary to describe the slaughterhouse, she can’t incite a riot. When our leaders have their way, when technical education entirely supplants the humanities, humans will lose the vocabulary we need to tell one another about the intellectual slaughterhouse we’re all being led to. Or, even if the humanities aren't completely eliminated, they may end up being lobotomized with their own technical vocabulary, so they too lose the capacity for intellectual self-examination and self-expression.

If democratic sentiment inspires us to give every human mind an aristocratic education that treats it as an end in itself, it is admirable. If democratic sentiment inspires us to abandon aristocratic education because it is “impractical” to give to everyone, and therefore must be given to no one, it is contemptible. Can we treat every human mind as an end in itself rather than a sacrificial cow to be disfigured for the greater good? I don’t know. But I know I will not sacrifice myself. I know I will not lead anyone else to sacrifice. What is practical depends, after all, on what one wants to practice.

Truth is what sells

The unquestioned acceptance of the market value of commodities as the true value, the value by which ethical decisions must be made, is today’s most conspicuous form of self-imposed immaturity. I may adopt a ruler as ersatz parent. I may adopt a majority. Or I may adopt the market. No matter. All these forms of childish obedience are obstacles in the way of developing independent judgment in matters of conscience.

A leader intent upon advancing her career, rather than advancing the good, is unlikely to lead followers to noble actions. When I attach myself to a successful leader, I often forget to ask myself, does her success arise from virtue? Or does it arise from a ruthless determination to succeed?

Of course when my rulers ask me to do something blatantly immoral, I say no. But when they ask me to do something other than searching for the best way to express my love of my neighbor and my love of truth, I bow down and say yes. Why? Of course conscience demands that I avoid ignoble acts. But doesn't it also demand that I devote myself wholeheartedly to noble ones? To spend a day obeying my rulers, rather than obeying my conscience, is already ignoble.

When I wake up tomorrow, should I adopt the same role in the division of labor that I adopted today? Friends, family, colleagues, supervisors, all expect that I will honor my commitments and report to work. Are my commitments justified? Do they represent commitments to good or commitments to evil? I must ask the question each day. The answer may not be the same as yesterday.

We are uncomfortable in the presence of words like truth and virtue, and would like to declare them obsolete, or, better yet, list them on our index verborum prohibitorum. We have made ourselves servants of the marketplace and are uncomfortable with dimensions of value that make no reference to the marketplace. These other dimensions are illusory, we assure ourselves, relics of the childhood of humanity, to be abandoned along with foolish beliefs in Santa Claus and God.

But in fact we haven't abandoned the concept of truth. We have only redefined it. Truth is what sells. We haven't abandoned the concept of virtue. Virtue is whatever the market demands. Words like truth and virtue make us uncomfortable because they force us to admit these are the definitions we live by.

Bind thy heart to the love of truth

Much as I value sound logic in its proper place, I’m sure it is not the sole instrument needed to combat falsehood. Logic may detect error, but it cannot give so much as a glimpse of the glory of truth. It may refute fallacies, but it cannot bind the heart to the love of truth.

American philosophy departments don’t seek to impart or cultivate a passion for truth. In fact, the few students who have this passion will find it frustrated at every step. A passion for truth does not respect the artificial boundaries the academy erects between disciplines. It sees them only as obstacles in its way.

The philo sophos, the genuine lover of truth, finds poetry that expresses the passion to learn and bear witness to the truth at least as relevant as the rules of logic. Yet poetry is about as welcome in America’s philosophy departments as in its engineering departments. The faculty who teach in our philosophy departments are hardly less philistine than engineers.

Two sorts of students are often confused but are really quite opposite. The first has such a profound store of intellectual integrity that she must see for herself the arguments and evidence to support every claim. For her, books are guides to help her teach herself. She does not learn from books. She learns with the help of books. The second has such a paltry store of intellectual integrity that she wants to hold on to beliefs that are comforting and convenient to her. She is not prepared to call them into doubt. She mistrusts books not because she fears they may contain what is false, but because she fears they may frustrate her attempt to conceal her lack of intellectual integrity from herself.

George Ripley, a contemporary of Emerson and Thoreau, declares his opposition to book learning in an 1839 letter. He writes in reply to a correspondent’s claim that “extensive learning is usually requisite for those who would influence their fellow man on religious subjects”:

Jesus certainly did not take this into consideration in the selection of the twelve from the mass of the disciples; he committed the promulgation of his religion to 'unlearned and ignorant' men; the sublimest truths were entrusted to the most common minds. ... Christ saw that the parade of wisdom, which books impart, was nothing before 'the light that enlighteneth every human mind.'

This passage is typical in that it never seeks to resolve the ambiguity in question. What books impart is nothing compared to the light that enlightens every human mind. I agree. But why shouldn’t this light shine on books as well as other things? In other words, even if we accept that the individual human mind is always to be the arbiter of truth, does it follow that the individual mind may never examine the works of other human minds? If we accept that the individual mind must examine the works of nature or God directly, does it follow that it may never allow other minds to point it toward what they have seen?

Schopenhauer, a German contemporary of Ripley, expresses the objection to pedantry eloquently:

Truth that has been merely learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; at best, like a nose made out of another’s flesh; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thinking of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us. This is the fundamental difference between the thinker and the mere man of learning.

Just as in Schopenhauer and Ripley’s time, today’s academics are very often pedants. They do not try to kindle the light of understanding within the soul. They merely attach the waxen nose to each student and send her on her way.

What we need is neither more nor less book learning. We need a better kind of book learning. We need to use books to inspire our own thinking, not to replace it.

First paragraph is based loosely on Ripley's Letters on the Latest form of Infidelity (1839)

Moral monstrosities who choose to live in luxury while other human beings suffer would, one might imagine, be treated with revulsion and scorn by all intelligent men and women. But what we find is precisely the opposite. In business and politics it is precisely these moral monstrosities who command our respect and adulation. We report to their offices every day, eager to serve their every whim. We imagine that in obeying them we fulfill our moral duty, as if our duty were exhausted merely in obeying, and not in rightly choosing whom we obey. In cases of doubt in moral matters, the strictest course must always be followed. We must choose as our leaders kind, selfless men and women, not selfish monsters who live comfortably in mansions while other human beings suffer in the streets.

The futility of egotism

Tolstoy, toward the end of his life, became more and more embittered with the egotism of his class. I find myself with similar sentiments. When I despise myself for my egotism, it is easy to despise others with the same vice, focusing on the splinter rather than the beam. Many dismiss Tolstoy’s later views, supposing they are prompted by mental degeneration, or by the envy that comes with knowing the pleasures of egotistical life will soon come to an end.

With age comes an increasing awareness that egotism is futile, that each individual human being does not last long enough to be the sole source of value.

Ayn Rand’s egoistic philosophy had some appeal to me when I was younger, intent on developing all my faculties and defying naysayers who stood in the way. But as I get older I find that making a corporeal organism destined to die and decay the sole source of values is an exercise in futility.

At the beginning of life a focus on the self is justifiable. We cannot reach our full potential in helping others if we do not. Toward the end of life, however, the focus must shift to philanthropy. I often find myself frustrated with friends and colleagues who have passed the midpoint of life, whose egotism continues unabated.

In Economics 101 we learned the law of decreasing marginal utility. The first thousand dollars does far more than the hundredth. It is foolish to spend the hundredth on myself rather than someone for whom it would mean far more—a bright young student, for example, who can’t find the resources to attend college.

To show the world what we’ve accomplished, we use the rewards from our work to build monuments. But we can do better. We can give the world not just work, but also the rewards we get from work, keeping nothing for ourselves but the minimum we need to live. When I receive rewards, I receive along with them a responsibility to use them benevolently and wisely. If I imagine that vanity, luxury, and comfort are more important than the essentials of life for those less fortunate, it can only be because the distorting lens of egotism has warped my vision.

Atheism

I find it helpful to distinguish two conceptions of God. In the first, God is an entity that rules the universe. In the second, God is a concept that represents the highest aspirations of mankind. I am an atheist with respect to the first God, but not with respect to the second.

Splenetic philosophy

In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith observes that wealth and the elaborate artifices it procures are of trifling significance, and hardly worth the great personal sacrifices we make to obtain them. This gloomy observation, although true, is one we are apt to make only in times of sickness or low spirits. In our better moods we cast off this “splenetic philosophy” and recover a healthy admiration for wealth. And it is precisely this that “rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.”

As if the inherent futility of industry were not enough to make one splenetic, we now also have our concerns about environmental degradation. Unfortunately for the industry of mankind, a busy life of procreation, production and consumption, as it turns out, produces far too much carbon dioxide to be sustainable.

When I find myself overcome by the splenetic philosophy—tempted to slack off and settle for a simple, ascetic life of contemplation rather than striving for extravagant feats of production and consumption—my first reaction is to search my medicine chest for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. From Adam Smith to my friendly family medicine practitioner, everyone seems to agree that the splenetic philosophy, no matter how true, is unhealthy. We need a salutary illusion, a noble lie, to keep our gears turning. Somehow the medicines make the lie easier to swallow.

The boy who cried "socially constructed"

Skeptics who cry ‘socially constructed’ whenever they hear any truth claim are, it seems to me, very much like the shepherd boy who cries ‘wolf’ merely to amuse himself. First they claim the truths of mathematics are socially constructed. Then they claim the truths of physics are socially constructed. Finally, it's time to criticize psychiatry’s credulous labeling of homosexuality as a disease. By then, no one is listening.

What the liberal epistemologists miss is that, in the case of physics, capitalism has no motive for falsifying results. If physics was wrong, the machines wouldn’t work. In the case of psychiatry, however, it is hard not to be skeptical about the designation of socially stigmatized habits as illnesses.

Diabolical definitions

antidepressant (noun): a remedy for corporate drapetomania.

antipsychotic (noun): humane hemlock for those still mad enough to philosophize.

Experiments in virtue

In an 1893 essay, Francis Newton Thorpe worries that Benjamin Franklin’s frequent essays on money-getting have misled his readers to conclude Franklin's primary purpose in life was to accumulate wealth. According to Thorpe's alternative interpretation, Franklin advocates a life of industry and thrift not as an end in itself, but as a means to independence. Time we would have spent meeting our needs can now be dedicated to improving ourselves morally and intellectually, or as Thorpe puts it, to conducting “experiments in virtue.”

The reason critics imagine Franklin’s sole purpose was to accumulate wealth is, of course, that the essays on money-getting were the ones that influenced America, while the ones where he discusses the finitude of human needs never really captured our imagination. Year by year, luxuries turn into necessities. By the time we reach our goal, it is no longer enough. The time for self-improvement and experiments in virtue is deferred from decade to decade and ends up never coming at all.