On Television

Just as the American diet includes far more calories than the body can possibly assimilate, so our intellectual diet includes far more facts than the mind can possibly assimilate. We fill our idle time with news, cramming in today’s facts before we have understood yesterday’s. “The news we hear,” says Thoreau, “is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition.” Instead of a daily dose of news, Thoreau recommends a daily dose of Ossian. “I look down from my height on nations, and they become ashes before me.” We’re all concerned that television takes away time from study, work and family. But what’s far more dire is that television takes reverence from study, work and family. Our attention and reverence are no longer directed to great teachers and great books intent on making us better men and women. They’re now directed to celebrities intent on entertaining us.

I imagine the reason we find celebrities so interesting is that they lack intellectual and moral virtues, and yet nonetheless receive honors, adulation and rewards. This is precisely what we most crave. We want to be honored without being worthy of honor. We want to be important without being worthy of importance. Those honored for great achievements don’t interest us. Those honored despite their lack of such achievements fascinate us.

Hamlet requires more intellectual effort to understand. Therefore it is better. Television requires less intellectual effort. Therefore it is worse. “We know people don’t like to make an effort,” say Hollywood executives, “We wont force them. The last thing we want is to alienate our audience.”

The purpose of education is to elevate myself from a lower to a higher form of existence. Education presupposes that there is an order of rank, with the most difficult things at the top and things that require no effort at the bottom. Each active intellect moves in a different direction. Its progress can be assessed only in terms of its own standard of development, which it alone can decide. But no matter what direction my intellect is going, television is not helping it get there. It’s merely distracting and entertaining me.

It’s hard for me to imagine why people find television relaxing. The Hollywood assault on the hierarchy of values in the Western Intellectual Tradition is disturbing, not relaxing. The mind that seeks to develop itself seeks out challenge. When it’s tired, it looks for a different sort of challenge. Meditation transforms leisure from an opportunity to relax the mind to an opportunity to refine the mind. The best use of leisure is to cultivate a profound mental silence. This requires great effort to achieve, but, once achieved, is far more blissful than television.

Television brings a nonstop stream of enticing entertainment to the world. Unlike the entertainment offered by Tolstoy or Goethe, this new democratic form of entertainment is no longer accompanied by subtle enticements to moral and intellectual improvement. It scoffs at all efforts to improve the mind.

The popularity of television is no more evidence that it is good art than the popularity of new-age pseudoscience is evidence that it is good science. The path to enlightenment consists in overcoming and casting off prejudices our peers have imparted to us, taking reason alone as our guide, seeking the most rigorous exemplars of reason from present and past, and hearkening to them and them alone.

The doctrine of laissez-faire, which stipulates that the state may not interfere with consensual private activity, has been broadened in its application. Now we may no longer even criticize consensual private activity. We’re not even sure we should attempt to persuade anyone, even our own children, that books selected by our teachers to educate us are more worthy of attention than television programs contrived to distract, entertain and manipulate us.

The marketplace is exquisite at equalizing supply and demand. But it is indiscriminate in what it supplies and demands. The best we can hope for from the marketplace is the ability to ignore it. To a large extent, we have this ability. But what do we do? We turn on the television. We deliberately invite the primitive and false philosophy of the marketplace into our lives.

That uncomfortable feeling of idleness

Allowing myself to be ruled by duty to my customers and my constituents, I can never surpass them in virtue. Who knows whether that rebellious temptation to do what I will rather than what I'm told may conceal a path to greater virtue? That feeling of idle purposelessness which is so hateful to me may after all be my salvation. It's only by deliberately cultivating purposelessness, after all, that I can hope to find a higher purpose. Aimlessly browsing through books and music, I may accidentally find the poem or symphony that calls my soul to greater dedication to perfect itself, or to greater devotion to helping my fellow men.

Of course if I'm browsing in the wasteland of pop culture, my idleness will be worse than purposefulness. But if I eschew what is easy and comfortable and confine myself to what is difficult, the act of trying to grasp may help me reach new heights. Who knows how many have been called to abandon petty cares and dedicate their lives to virtue by a noble attempt to appreciate a great symphony or a great poem?

asceticism (n): the means by which those who are not aristocrats in fact become aristocrats in spirit.

Are we sure we want a classless society?

In a classless society we would all be in the same class as the greedy shopkeeper. I, for one, would rather resurrect a class society than surrender my entire soul to this class. There must be at least two classes—a lower class which seeks material rewards from work, and a higher class that works solely for philanthropic motives. The ascetic monk who seeks no rewards because his needs are little—the scion of inherited wealth who seeks no rewards because his needs are met—both of these are my equals. The grasping, greedy shopkeeper, whether novice or billionaire, is not.

Those who pursue material rewards become irate when we call attention to their petty avarice. But this should not stop us from calling attention to it. Work without reward is indeed a higher human activity than work with reward. And we should not dissimulate respect for the lower form of work merely to protect its practitioners from feelings of inferiority. Even when we can afford to come up into the pure air of aristocratic generosity, we fear offending avaricious men, we refuse to place ourselves above them, and our souls drown along with theirs in the sea of avarice.

I envision a new class of aristocratic professionals who receive no rewards from work, and advertise this proudly to the world. Those without inherited wealth would take up two professions, one a conventional paid profession (accounting, engineering, etc.) and a second philanthropic profession (medicine, philosophy, art, literature, religion, etc.). Thrift and asceticism would allow us to minimize the time and energy we must devote to the lower form of work. Those who are too consumed with paid work to take on a philanthropic profession would, of course, be pitied. But if they’re wearing designer clothes, perhaps the pity would be mingled with contempt.

We imagine that being paid for work makes it somehow more “professional,” more worthy of trust, dignity and respect. I say precisely the opposite. Of two doctors with the same education, the one who refuses all rewards is more worthy of trust, dignity and respect. She can achieve a degree of integrity not available to the one who must be paid.

The writer who is part of the new aristocratic class will proudly advertise on the cover of her books that all royalties will be used for philanthropic purposes. The professor who is part of the new aristocratic class will advertise at the beginning of her lectures that her salary will be used for philanthropic purposes. We must set ourselves apart from the avaricious class and make it clear that they are false role models, that something better is possible. Will we offend our colleagues? Probably. Are we wrong to be proud? No, I don’t think so. Being content with what we have, we are exalted by our humility. And we need not be humble about that. We must overcome our ridiculous fear of offending the avaricious, and show them the contempt they deserve. Our visible display of contempt is what allows us to teach impressionable young minds that excellent work is the mind’s highest calling, and rewards are only impediments to excellence.

Alienation and monotony

If every day is devoted to making money, the monotony of the goal inevitably makes work monotonous. If I devote each day wholeheartedly to the task immediately before me, and put all the intellectual energy I can summon into doing it well, now work suddenly blossoms with astonishing variety.

To the manager of the factory, all widgets are alike. Everything reduces to a single currency and a single goal. But to the woman making widgets, each individual widget represents a unique moment of life and a unique goal. The key to enjoying work is never to adopt the factory owner’s view toward work. As soon as you do, your days fall in a march to a single goal and your work becomes as monotonous as his.

Devotion to mammon makes our lives monotonous, because mammon is monotonous. Every dollar is the same as every other. Those who rule corporations are poor role models for workers. The best of them know this. They don’t pollute the worker’s ethic of excellent work with an ethic of mammon worship that would corrupt workers and make excellent work impossible.

Some thoughts on religion and mythology

In our everyday state of mind the mind inhabits the body, identifies itself with the body, and looks out upon the world from within the body. Certain Eastern religious texts, as I interpret them, offer an alternative state of mind. The mind takes a step back. It temporarily abandons the body and its cares. The mind’s eye looks at the body the way a disinterested scientific observer looks at specimens. This is the first step. Then, the mind takes a second step back. Now it looks at the mind itself the way a disinterested scientific observer looks at specimens. The mind divides itself into two components, an observing component and an observed component. The observing component strives to attain the highest degree of scientific objectivity in its observation.

The idea of objective scientific observation of the self is certainly not confined to Eastern thought. Descartes, for example, questions whether his senses might be deceiving him, whether the apparent world might be a grand illusion. The state of mind from which Descartes’ arguments are offered cannot be the ordinary one where the mind inhabits the body and looks out upon the world. The state of mind that can cultivate Cartesian doubt is one in which the mind looks upon itself as an object of study. This, I submit, differs little from the state of mind proposed by Buddhism.

Another exemplary attempt at scientific self-observation in the West can be found in Freud’s early writings on the psychopathology of everyday life. Although Freud would later focus his attention on his patients, he began his career with a rigorous scientific attempt to observe the self. This probing of one’s own mind to discover its psychological secrets, I submit, differs little from the probing of the mind suggested by Buddhism.

A scientific state of mind is a state in which we never accept a premise because it is comforting or convenient. In fact, comforting or convenient beliefs must be subjected to an even higher standard of scientific scrutiny, since we know the mind has an irrational tendency to favor them. All the world’s religions include a demand to sincerely strive to discover the truth and bear witness to the truth. This means that all the world’s religions contain within them the intent to demythologize themselves and become scientific.

Every working microprocessor is a tangible refutation of magic, mystery and miracles. Technology relies on a world that is consistent, knowable and predictable. Every time you turn on your computer, you testify to your belief in the invariance of physical laws . The science behind our technological marvels would not exist without a scrupulous intellectual conscience, a strict mental discipline that never allows itself any belief not supported by clear and compelling evidence. It is illogical, one might even say hypocritical, to believe in magic, mystery and miracles and at the same time rely on the technological universe we have created.

This doesn’t mean that we must abandon religion, but rather that we must strip it of its incorrect scientific claims, and leave only its moral core. It is far more difficult to love my neighbor as myself and bear witness to the truth than to believe in an outdated science. We can hardly be surprised that most practitioners of religion leave the hard things undone and focus on the easy things. The founders of the world’s great religions showed us how to demand something higher from ourselves. But instead of following their example, we put them into a heavenly realm apart from us. We revere them. And we completely disregard everything they have taught us.

A demythologized religion, on the other hand, presents its founders not as gods but as philosophers, and treats their philosophy not as an antiquarian artifact but as a serious contemporary contender in the question of how to live. The world’s great religions ask, for example, is it sufficient to obey the law, and allow myself to be as arrogant, selfish and spiteful as the law permits? Or does morality require cultivation of modesty, kindness and mercy as well? Shall I strive for gratification from material things, or by cultivating intellectual and moral virtues?

The world’s great religions provide clear answers to these questions and very compelling arguments for their answers. We do ourselves a grave disservice by failing to separate these compelling moral arguments from the outdated science that happened to prevail at the time they were propounded. Because religion’s demands for modesty, kindness and mercy are mixed in with flaky beliefs in magic, mystery and miracles, we suppose that modesty, kindness and mercy must somehow be flaky virtues. And we’re left believing that the only real, scientific virtues are hard-hearted prudence and cunning calculation.

Even if someone were to reinvent the virtues propounded by the world’s great religions and present them in terms utterly free of superstition, this wouldn’t be sufficient. Because of the contingencies of history, we will always associate these virtues with religion. Unless we confront the emotion-laden historical baggage they carry with them, we will never take them seriously, no matter how scientific the jargon in which they are expressed. If we want to rediscover modesty, kindness and mercy, it will not be by ignoring their history, but by studying their history more intelligently.

By dividing human thought into disciplines, what are we concealing from ourselves? The example I like to use is the case of psychiatry and religion. We are very confident that our society must simultaneously entertain numerous conflicting views on the health of the soul. But in regard to the health of the mind, we are confident that there is a privileged scientific view. The German word Geist can be translated as both mind and soul. If we call the distinction into doubt, we might begin to see questions that division of intellectual labor would otherwise conceal. When the health of the soul was established by a single state-sanctioned church, dissenters did not fare well. What happens to dissenters from our state-sanctioned scientific view of the health of the mind? My impression is, they fare no better.

The division of labor mantra

School children and students who love God should never say: “For my part I like mathematics”; “I like French”; “I like Greek.” They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.
Simone Weil

“We get more and more narrow in our work so that we can become more and more diversified in our consumption,” says British journalist Matt Ridley, as if this were something to be happy about. Concentrate on doing one thing well. As for everything else, sit back and watch someone more competent do the work. So runs the division of labor mantra, from Adam Smith to today. But there is one big problem with this approach to life. To really appreciate music, I have to study music, not just sit back and listen. Any faculty I forsake, stop educating, and leave dormant, makes my life less complete. No matter how hard I try to repair that incompleteness by sitting and watching other people perform, I never recover what I have lost. Don’t just listen to music. Start learning music. Don’t just watch stories. Start inventing stories. Don’t just read bibles. Start writing your own.

One sort of socialism redistributes income and thereby provides a disincentive to productivity. Another sort of socialism redistributes wealth and thereby provides a disincentive to thrift. What we have forgotten is the old and venerable form of socialism that allows wealth to remain in private hands but teaches the wealthy to use it wisely and charitably. How many nineteenth century aristocrats were actually made more liberal by liberal education? Perhaps not many. But now we have given up the attempt.

When the person who has enough capital to live says “I don’t care about material things,” he, in effect, says that in addition to being financially superior to the common herd, he is morally superior as well. The millionaire who’s still greedy for more doesn’t offend as much. At least he doesn’t put on airs of moral superiority.

The mission statement of the Comparative Literature Department:

Students who begin as admirers of beautiful language will have this sentiment quickly trained out of them. They will be force fed a diet of Fachsprache with no more aesthetic merit than that of mechanical engineering.

In the present era there is a tacit assumption that when I’m not compelled to do something worthwhile, I won’t do anything worthwhile. This assumption stems in part from the fact that the activities most readily available to me—television, pop music—are not worthwhile. But if I am drawn to intellectual challenge as the iron is drawn to the magnet, what need have I to fear I will choose an activity that isn’t worthwhile? What need have I for the regimented routine of workplace or university?

When I go to the library, I hope each time to find something completely new, something which all my prior experience would never have permitted me to imagine. When I go to work, I hope only to procure more of something very familiar. The cynical capitalist knows in advance how all the virtues are to be measured and assessed. The idea that there might be forms of virtue that represent entirely separate dimensions of human excellence is incomprehensible. Everything real can be measured in units of currency. Any delusions to the contrary, like those fostered by pretentious pedants in humanities departments, will be summarily deflated with a dose of caustic cynicism.

Pharmacotheology

Some Christians believe the soul is separate from the body. But many earlier religions did not. For these religions, psychopharmacology is as integral a part of religion as prayer and fasting. The existence of such religions raises a question. How intellectually coherent is the law when it insists upon freedom of religion and simultaneously insists upon its right to regulate psychopharmacology? Courts and legislators have occasionally recognized the connection between religious freedom and psychopharmacology. For example, Section 21.1307.31 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations concedes that “the listing of peyote as a controlled substance in Schedule I does not apply to the nondrug use of peyote in bona fide religious ceremonies of the Native American Church.” But why only the Native American Church? Doesn’t this amount in effect to an establishment of a state-sanctioned church within the category of peyote-using religions? Doesn’t it in effect prohibit the founding new churches? One would have hoped that the First Amendment would apply not just to the various strands of Abrahamic religion, but to non-Abrahamic religions as well. If we consider the archaeological evidence for the intimate connection between psychoactive plants and religion throughout history, the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs begins to look not so different from the Vatican Council. And dissenters who defy its edicts begin to look not so different from Luther and Calvin. If a drug produces significant risk of bodily harm, then medical doctors have every right to object to its use. But as far as effects on the mind are concerned, how can secular medicine provide authoritative answers when the religions of the world don't agree on what constitutes mental health?

On Analytic philosophy

In the twentieth century a small group of English and American philosophers proposed to overthrow the authority of the classic texts of philosophy. Although these new philosophers did not necessarily have any pretensions of elevating themselves into a new authority, they have clearly become a new authority to the present generation of philosophy students. The question every student of philosophy must ask, it seems to me, is this: If we accept the claim made by the present generation of teachers that Frege, Russell, Quine, Putnam and Davidson are authoritative texts whose content must be learned, how can we in good conscience reject the claim made by earlier teachers that Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes and Kant are authoritative texts whose content must be learned? If we accept the idea that authority is a legitimate factor in deciding what to read, why limit ourselves to the most recent authorities? Is there something about temporal proximity that legitimates authority?

The present generation of philosophers views the new analytic philosophy as a philosophical analog of the Copernican revolution. In the wake of this revolution, earlier philosophical texts, like earlier cosmological texts, have been reduced to antiquarian artifacts of merely historical interest. Are these pretensions justified? Copernicus clearly fulfills cosmology’s aim of describing the universe far better than his predecessors. Philosophy, however, offers not merely descriptive knowledge but also, perhaps even primarily, prescriptions and exhortations. How should I live? (ethics) How should I comport myself with regard to truth? (epistemology) And to beauty? (aesthetics) And to reverence? (theology) A prescriptive text that relies on incorrect facts or fallacious reasoning would be of no more interest today than obsolete cosmology. But few classic philosophical texts can be wholly dismissed on this basis. The Stoics present a certain way of life in the hopes that it will appear beautiful or noble. Plato presents a certain way of comporting ourselves to truth in the hopes that it will appear beautiful or noble. The authority of exhortatory or prescriptive texts is based on the fact that they have been successful in persuading many past readers to alter their behavior and comportment to truth. How could the authority of such texts ever be annulled by something analogous to a Copernican revolution? Texts that offer articulate and compelling aesthetic or moral arguments about the best way to live and to pursue truth never become obsolete in the way that cosmological truth claims sometimes do. Insofar as we accept the legitimacy of authority in philosophy at all, then, the opinions of past teachers about what texts are authoritative are no less relevant that the opinions of present teachers.

The aversion of present-day students to studying the authoritative texts of all times and places arises partly, of course, from mere indolence, but it also comes from a desire to avoid exhortations to ways of life and ways of pursuing truth different from the ones that are held in high esteem in the present. We are all afflicted to one degree or another with a “presentism” that leads us to think that the opinions of our generation are somehow superior merely because we happen to belong to it. This is analogous to, and hardly less objectionable than, the all too common racism that leads us to think that our race is superior merely because we happen to belong to it.

When an authoritative text must be superseded, the noble form of supersession is seldom merely to ignore the text in defiance of its authority, but rather an attempt to retain, and even augment, the exhortatory elements that make the text worthy of its authoritative status, while at the same time refuting false arguments and false cosmological claims. Three examples of this noble form of supersession seem worthy of mention. The first is Spinoza’s attempt, in his Theologico-Political Treatise, to reinterpret Biblical events in symbolic rather than historic or cosmological terms. The second is Kant’s attempt, in his Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, to reinterpret the New Testament as a call to transform statutory religion into a religion of pure reason. The third is Rudolf Bultmann’s attempt, in his New Testament and Mythology, to disentangle the New Testament proclamation from the “mythical world picture” in which it is embedded.

A far less noble, but unfortunately far more common, form of supersession is one that impudently raises its middle finger to the authoritative texts of the past, and seeks to obviate their authority in its entirety. The most flagrant example of this ignoble form of supersession is perhaps David Hume’s petulant demand that any book that contains no “reasoning concerning quantity or number” and no “experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact” should be summarily committed to the flames. Few analytic philosophers make their contempt for authority as explicit as this. But the dearth of references to classical literature and the flippant, philistine style of writing make the raised middle finger visible enough. In order to be rightfully acknowledged as an authority, it seems to me that a text must show respect and deference to prior authorities, even in the act of refuting them. John Rawls tells us that an intolerant sect has no right to complain of intolerance. And a generation of philosophers with no regard for the authority of earlier generations has no right to complain if later generations disregard its authority. It is laughable that the present generation of analytic philosophers, with their cacophonous, philistine style of writing and their willful refusal to acknowledge the aesthetic, moral and intellectual authority of the great works of the past, now consider themselves to be authorities worthy of emulation.

Today's philosophy teachers have given up the desire to cultivate genius. They seek rather to churn out philosophical proletarians who can diligently do their part in the division of labor economy. Brian Leiter says, “What distinguishes analytic philosophy ... is its adoption of the research paradigm common in the natural sciences, a paradigm in which numerous individual researchers make small contributions to the solution of a set of generally recognized problems.” For the collective good—i.e., advancement of knowledge—we are willing to sacrifice each particular student, make her merely an instrument useful in solving some specific problem, rather than a complete human being capable of appreciating the human condition to the utmost that her intellectual capacity allows. The study of philosophy, which might have consisted of the joyous and exhilarating activity of discovering great books that fan and fuel the quest for truth, is turned into a tedious exercise in learning to recite their doctrines.

The pedants have decided in advance that their students won’t be geniuses. “It is a bit silly,” says Professor Leiter, “to think that Philosophy Departments can train Nietzsches.” Genius, he hopes, will find its way in the world without philosophy departments. Perhaps Professor Leiter is right that he can’t create geniuses. But he certainly can destroy them. He can so overwhelm his students with the division of labor that no trace of desire for the perfection of the intellect remains. Then students, like their teachers, will seek to cramp, contort and distort the intellect until it fits into some insignificant nook in the intellectual biosphere, and then live there, like a sulfur breathing organism in a hydrothermal vent, never coming out to see the light. How much of the pedant’s cruelty to his students derives from a desire to avenge the intellectual cruelty inflicted upon him by his own teachers? I don’t know. But I cannot help but hope that it might be possible to stop the generational cycle of intellectual abuse, and return to cultivating genius rather than trying to make students into sacrificial lambs for the greater good.

Socrates is reputed to have viewed with indifference the attempts of his contemporaries to accumulate facts. What he professed was not a cold-hearted diligence in discovering facts, but a reverent, devoted pursuit of virtue and wisdom. A philo sophos, in the etymological sense of the word, is not a functionary in the global enterprise of accumulating facts. She is a lover of wisdom. This etymological meaning bears almost no resemblance to the activity practiced today in departments that bear its name. 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 in danger of extinction at every step. The genuine lover of truth would find 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.

Rhetoric

Because all the finest rhetorical techniques are used to sell toys to children, it is no longer possible to use rhetoric to teach any of the virtues, in particular the virtues that might allow children to recognize the superficiality and falseness of the values television has instilled in them. The problem, of course, is hardly new. Constantine managed to transform a philosophy hostile to all authority, in which all laws but the law to love one's neighbor as oneself were explicitly repudiated, into the state religion of his empire. Those who strive for worldly power use rhetoric just as adeptly as those who sincerely strive to help their fellow human beings, and this fact makes us rightly distrust rhetoric. What option does this leave open to those who would sincerely help our fellow human beings?

“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.

The servile soul

The 19th Century German poet Heinrich Heine describes the servility of his fellow Germans:

Servants that are without a master are not on that account free men: servility is in their soul. The German is like a slave who obeys his lord without chains or the lash, at mere command, aye, even at a sign. Slavery is in the man himself, in his soul. Spiritual is worse than material slavery. The Germans must be freed from within; from without there is no help for them.

What about Americans? What’s our highest aspiration? Our ideal of freedom? In my case, it was always to start my own business. In other words, to make myself servile to the marketplace directly, rather than at one remove through my employer. The idea of being master of myself, of creating what my genius and mine alone can create, with no regard for when or how the market will find a use for it—this is alien to Americans. Subservience to the marketplace has been so deeply encoded into our souls, it shows itself even in our daydreams of freedom.

The new humanities

Humanities departments, even as they wave the banner of a critical theory conceived by ardent critics of the division of labor, simultaneously deposit themselves into a convenient little niche created for them by the universities that fodder capitalist enterprises. Unlike earlier humanists who either squandered their families’ capital or martyred themselves for the cause of truth, today’s practical humanists understand that a sustainable bourgeois existence is more fundamental in the hierarchy of needs than the search for truth. While their theories laud freedom and autonomy and look askance at all heteronomous authority, in practice humanities PhD mills see their mission not so differently from departments churning out JDs and MBAs. The point is to make sure students can find a nice comfortable bourgeois job when they’re done.

When students derive pleasure or pride from the quest for truth itself, rather than its socially useful results, we can conclude such students are fueled by antisocial narcissism rather than a healthy desire to be team players in the existing social order. A passion for truth might admittedly serve as a powerful fuel to propel students in their studies. But if it propels them in a direction that isn’t useful in the present social order, what’s the point? No, on those rare occasions when this antisocial passion for truth arises, it must be summarily extinguished. A more conventional fuel, the desire for bourgeois respectability, must be put in its place. This fuel may not provide quite the same impetus, but at least it gets the students going in the right direction.

In the new humanities, where truth is defined a social construction (unlike the elitist truth of past humanities, which abhors aspiring after broad dissemination), it is in fact difficult to see how a passion for truth could be distinguished from a monomaniacal narcissism. In an era of democratic epistemology, the proper aspiration for the seeker of truth is to work to forge consensus, rather than solitarily seek a truth that appeals to him alone.

In this new, improved, tamed and domesticated humanities, the central question is, how to attract good students? If the purpose of humanities graduate programs is merely to prepare students for a productive role in the division of labor, why settle for such a small one? Why would a bright student opt to host ornamental sideshows in undergraduate education, and forego the more significant and lucrative roles her intelligence qualifies her for?

Wielding the power of the state

The libertarians are concerned that Keynesian economics "encourages politicians to wield the power of the state in ways that do enormous harm.” What the libertarians forget is that they too insist on “wielding the power of the state” to enforce the property rights of a tiny minority that owns virtually all the capital assets in society. This does enormous harm to all members of society other than this small minority.

Drapetomania

In 1851 psychiatrist Samuel Cartwright gave a name to the mental illness that caused slaves to attempt to escape from slavery: “drapetomania.” As a consequence of the progress of psychiatry we now have dozens of names for the mental illnesses that cause corporate slaves to attempt to escape their slavery: depression, bipolar disorder, attention deficit disorder, to name just a few.

David Hume vs. Wallace Stevens

“The ultimate ends of human action,” says David Hume, “can never be accounted for by reason.” For Hume, the ultimate ends of human action are to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. He has reduced man from a rational animal to an animal. Should we be surprised that he sees no reason in the aims of a being whom he has stripped in advance of his reason? A rational being strives to know and understand. He accepts pain. He does not fear it. He accepts death. He does not fear it. Hume’s life, like that of the typical bourgeois, is no more than a cowardly quest for comfort and convenience. All heroic sentiments, including the passion to learn and understand, have given way to the petty concern for material comfort.

For a genuine philosopher, the ultimate ends of human action are knowledge, wisdom, enlightenment, happiness and virtue. These are precisely the same ends that any rational being desires, the ends that reason itself desires, or, that God, the ens intelligens, the ultimate conception of reason, desires.

When the sincere philosopher asks himself why he hates pain, the question to him is a serious one, and he may decide there is no reason. When a limb is amputated, the patient often feels pain in the phantom limb for the rest of his life. He can learn to ignore the pain. It is, in fact, only biology that demands we hate pain. The mind is perfectly capable, as every ascetic and flagellant can attest, of overcoming its biological programming,. Hume pays no heed to ascetics and flagellants, perhaps because he perceives them as irrational. But aren’t they in fact more rational than he, having overcome the biological prejudice against pain and risen to a higher level of intellectual autonomy?

Hume admits that there is no rational reason for hating pain and loving pleasure, and yet he is unwilling to try to overcome these irrational biological prejudices. Here we see that in Hume’s world common sense prevails over reason, or, better put, common sense defines what it means to be reasonable. The idea that excellence is rare, and can therefore never accord with anything common, whether common beliefs or common tastes, is not one that Hume is willing to entertain.

The eternal philosopher, says Wallace Stevens, is the one who remains always on the road from self to God—or more precisely, since the number of ways from self to God is limitless, on one of the many roads. The poem that would be “unimpeachably divine,” Stevens says, is the poem that would allow us to leave behind the faults of animal life. The best philosophy is part of this unimpeachably divine poem. “The idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea.” Proto-pragmatist philosophers like Bacon, Locke and Hume want to traverse the road in the other direction, so that philosophy will return to its human limitations and rely on the humble evidence of “the teeth, the throat and the bowels” (Stevens’ expression), and not on the divine will to truth at any price.

Tell a man his desire for wealth and pleasure may be corrupting his reason so he can’t see clearly. He blinks. What’s reason for, if not for the pursuit of wealth and pleasure? In his mental life, reason occupies a very humble place. The teeth, the throat and the bowels occupy the places of honor in this kingdom, while reason drudges thanklessly under their whip and sleeps in the servant’s quarters.

Even those who are exceptionally clever in finding the means to wealth are seldom perplexed by the fact that the end goal to which all their intelligence is directed is precisely the same goal the least intelligent aim at.

Class warfare

I saw this on a bumper sticker the other day:

REDISTRIBUTE WEALTH OVER $5 MILLION
MAKE CAPITALISM WORK FOR EVERYONE

This raises an interesting question, which in my experience is seldom discussed. Suppose economists are right that property rights are essential to prosperity. We might still ask, are unlimited property rights essential to prosperity? Most good things are not good in excess. Could property rights be one of those things?

The specter of communism, which our rulers use to frighten us into submission, is a red herring. Confiscate the obscene wealth of plutocrats. Redistribute it. Then let capitalism loose again so it can work for everyone. Our rulers would prefer we don't talk about options like this. The debate is framed as a choice between an unjust system and an impractical one. And we drop to our knees and thank our leaders for leading us on the practical path.

Throughout history, rulers have claimed they rule us for our own good. Even when they imprison us, they claim this is for our own good. The inquisitors in the Middle Ages claimed they tortured heretics for their own good. When our rulers tell us the rules are for our own good, we should be demanding evidence for this claim, not accepting it on authority.

For the more than two thirds of Americans born with no property, how is the ruthless enforcement of unlimited property rights good?

How to outlaw a counterculture

In the 1660s, one out of every 100 Parisians was confined to an asylum. The leadership of Paris, according to Foucault, had “acquired an ethical power of segregation, which permitted it to eject, as into another world, all forms of social uselessness.” Today in the United States, as incarceration rates also rapidly approach the one percent mark, we might be inclined to look for parallels.

America’s dominant culture of unmitigated economic rapaciousness has always been accompanied by oppositional cultures, one of which we might call the leisure counterculture. This counterculture calls the dominant commerce-centered outlook into question, and is therefore a menace to economic productivity. The question is, how to get rid of it? Rulers have often encountered difficulty when they arbitrarily incarcerate citizens based on their ideology. But this turns out not to be so great an obstacle as it might seem. The solution is to criminalize the rituals of leisure, thereby making a large proportion of the leisure counterculture into criminals.