An Unwelcome Guest

The present day. A large town-house in Hampstead. In the lounge are seated four persons: Dr and Mrs Ashmarr, he, an academic, she a publisher; Mr Hipkins, a science-writer; and Miss Treadwell, a journalist. They await the arrival of Mr Charles Darwin, who has been brought back from the grave for the evening in celebration of his two hundredth birthday. [The reader is welcome to petition the writer for technical details on how this resurrection was effected, or why Mr Darwin would spend his brief time in such company. The writer regrets, however, that, owing to many pressing matters, he cannot guarantee that he will have the time to supply an answer.] The doorbell rings, and a Polish servant-girl goes to answer it. A few moments later, Mr Darwin enters the lounge at the sound of laughter.

Dr Ashmarr. Ah, my dear Mr Darwin, what a miracle it is that brings you here! Forgive us. You catch us in a nervous state. My wife was just amusing us with her impression of the Mayor of London. Please come in and let me introduce you. [He does so.]

Mr Darwin. You are all most kind. [He takes a seat, and so as to break the ice, begins somewhat nervously to speak.] As bearing on the subject of imitation, the strong tendency in our nearest allies, the monkeys, in microcephalous idiots, and in the barbarous races of mankind, to imitate whatever they hear deserves notice. [1]
Mrs Ashmarr. I beg you pardon?
Mr Darwin. Ah, madam, I beg yours! I did not mean to suggest . . .
Dr Ashmarr. Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, we are here to celebrate the two hundredth birthday of our honoured guest, Mr Charles Darwin, a genius, I hope you don’t mind my saying, and a man of whom this country can be justly proud. The whole world owes you a great debt.
Mr Hipkins. Indeed, you have brought great intellectual fulfilment to men such as I.
Miss Treadwell. Hear, hear!
Mrs Ashmarr. Bravo!
Mr Darwin. I thank you all for your kind words. I must say that everything has been most queer for me today. I can see that much has changed.
Mr Hipkins. It has, Mr Darwin, and you are impressed, no doubt, by the progress that has been made.
Mr Darwin. I am shocked, sir, though I dare say I have not seen the half of it. Tell me, how is our noble race faring on the whole?
Mr Hipkins. Our noble race?
Mr Darwin. The English. They are still a noble race, are they not? [2]
Dr Ashmarr. Ah, Mr Darwin, forgive me, but we do not speak of ourselves that way any more.
Mr Darwin. Then it is as I feared. ’Tis all too true that the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. [3] With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. [4]
Miss Treadwell. But that is frightful!
Dr Ashmarr. Mr Darwin, are you seriously suggesting that we remove our aid from those less fortunate from ourselves?
Mr Darwin. Not at all, sir. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. . . . Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage. [5]
Mr Hipkins. It is true that many now refrain from marriage.
Mr Darwin. Well, that is splendid! Then there is hope.
Mr Hipkins. Err . . . of course.
Dr Ashmarr. But of progress, Mr Darwin, there is still much to be done. The dreadful inequality that still blights this country is enough to shame us all.
Mr Darwin. But this is far from an unmixed evil; for without the accumulation of capital the arts could not progress; and it is chiefly through their power that the civilised races have extended, and are now everywhere extending, their range, so as to take the place of the lower races. [6]
Miss Treadwell. Mr Darwin, you forget yourself. This is the twenty-first century. We do not speak of savage and civilised peoples, let alone . . . Such terms are vague and inappropriate.
Mrs Ashmarr. Oh, Mr Darwin, we are shameful — we have not offered you a drink!
Mr Darwin. That is of no consequence, madam. A small sherry should suffice, if you don’t mind.
Mrs Ashmarr (to the servant-girl). Aniela, fetch Mr Darwin a small sherry, would you?
Mr Hipkins. We understand that you have been away a long time, Mr Darwin, but I must say to you that we no longer admit race as a valid concept.
Mr Darwin. There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other,—as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of structural difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatisation, and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual, faculties. [7]
Mr Hipkins. Not any more.
Mr Darwin. I . . .
Dr Ashmarr. We have progressed beyond all that, Mr Darwin.
Mr Hipkins. Naturally, ha-ha, we do not look to natural selection for the progress of civilisation.
Mr Darwin. I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilisation than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world. [8] I see how the Anglo-Saxon race will have spread and exterminated whole nations; and in consequence how much the human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank. [9]

[Mrs Ashmarr gives out a yelp. Miss Treadwell drops a glass. Mr Hipkins gapes in horror.]

Dr Ashmarr. But that is monstrous! That’s not what we mean by progress at all!
Mr Darwin. Oh dear, have I said something out of turn?
Miss Treadwell. You, Mr Darwin, are a savage.
Mr Darwin. You mean I am not civilised?
Miss Treadwell. I mean precisely that. Besides, you are quite wrong. We are becoming diverse, Mr Darwin, yes, vibrant and diverse! Things are changing, progress is being made. Europe will no longer be hideously white. Your beloved race will disappear. We shall make sure of it.
Dr Ashmarr. I think, Mr Darwin, that I speak for everyone here in declaring that you are no longer welcome.
Mr Darwin. But . . .
Dr Ashmarr. Aniela, show Mr Darwin to the door.

[Aniela leads the bewildered Mr Darwin out of the room.]

Mrs Ashmarr. Oh, what a frightful man! I had no idea! He’s not at all as he appears in the Sunday-supplements.


[1] [“As bearing . . . notice.”] C.R. Darwin, The Descent of Man; and Selection in Relation to Sex, Vol. I. (London: John Murray, 1871), pp.56-7.
[2] [“a noble race.”] C.R. Darwin, Letter to Syms Covington, 23rd November 1850, transcribed and published online for the Darwin Correspondence Project.
[3] [“the reckless . . . members.”] C.R. Darwin, The Descent of Man, p.174.
[4] [“With savages . . . to breed.”] C.R. Darwin, ibid., p.168.
[5] [“Nor could . . . from marriage.”] C.R. Darwin, ibid., pp.168-9.
[6] [“But this is far from . . . lower races.”] C.R. Darwin, ibid., p.169.
[7] [“There is . . . faculties.”] Charles Darwin, ibid., p.216.
[8] [“I could show . . . the world.”] C.R. Darwin, Letter to William Graham, 3rd July 1881, op.cit.
[9] [“how the Anglo-Saxon race . . . risen in rank.” ] to C.R. Darwin, Letter to Charles Kingsley, 6th February 1862, op.cit.; minor changes made to format.

Gleichschaltung

In that famous slogan that fell from the demagogic lips of Abraham Lincoln — “government of the people, by the people, for the people” [1] — the democratic ideal is best expressed. It appears to mean that government of the people should be held by the whole of that people solely in its own interests; but then not only is it an ideal not fulfilled, but one that is impossible to fulfil, at least as regards individual-sentient persons, to whom it is furthermore a great threat. So as to be fulfilled, firstly, the people must be an entity of one mind such that its interests are individual on all matters; and secondly, the whole of the people must constitute the government itself. Yet doubtless it is the case, that, firstly, even persons who are long subject to popular government have not yet all been brought to have the same thoughts or trained to have the same interests; and, secondly, that government is composed of very few persons in relation to those governed by it. If, however, the slogan were meant to express merely that government of the people is to be held by a few persons upon whose entry into government are placed no restrictions of birth, that is to say, that it is in principle open to any of the people, and that such government, though ostensibly performed in the public interest, is in fact performed for all manner of diverse interests, not least for the interests of those in government and of those who have the power to petition it, then it may very well be said that it describes our governments to some extent, but then it is not the democratic ideal — and surely that is not what anyone means by it. When the slogan is taken literally, without twisting the words to fit reality, it describes an ideal that one might call mystical, the perfect fulfilment of which is, as I say, impossible, though I make no such claim as to its near-fulfilment by technological means. It is the occultured ideal of pure and total democracy.
.....Popular government has taken the democratic ideal as the integral strength of its foundation, and, since all popular governors know that their power depends upon its spirit, they are little willing to weaken it. If they try to appease it, by praising it, so they encourage it, and its spirit becomes more a vital element of their governments: concessions and sacrifices must be made to it. Some governors earnestly reckon themselves true servants of this spirit, but naturally they cannot be entirely, at least not unless and insofar as they renounce their personhood to become passive media; for their very personhood and their status as governors of the people — all beliefs and deceptions of being servants thereof aside — means that their own personal and oligarchic interests are immediate. To strengthen their rule, to make it safe, whether or not by an earnest desire to make it safe for democracy, the governors must temper their oligarchy with the democratic spirit. So it is that they become more democratic.
.....For him who doubts the power of the spirit of this ideal, let him contemplate the ghastly aspect under which all political matters must appear; let him think of a political party that does not proclaim itself democratic. Whilst the democratic spirit predominates, oligarchy cannot stand without also being the herald of that opposing spirit.

To-day, all the factors of public life speak and struggle in the name of the people, of the community at large. The government and rebels against the government, kings and party-leaders, tyrants by the grace of God and usurpers, rabid idealists and calculating self-seekers, all are ‘the people’, and all declare that in their actions they merely fulfil the will of the nation. [2]

Under the jealous eye of a people spoiled by the ideal of democracy — a people, that is to say, made jealous of inequalities of power and antipathetic to authority — governors must become “ordinary” men, embodiments of an abstraction by which they might appear no different from the governed who are likewise becoming embodiments thereof. They’re just like you and me — if you and me happen to be just like them. This process — the governors and the governed each becoming like the other — is the process of democratisation. It is the melding-together of popular and governmental interests which occurs even as an oligarchic process against the ideal of democracy. The governors know that a tremour in the foundation can cast them down, they understand that their edifice is built also of other substances from that of its foundation, and they understand, even if only dimly, that democracy is ultimately the enemy of all such edifices, that it would shake everything to its foundation; and that is why, of course, the governors of the modern state seek to secure that foundation by a melding of the substances of edifice and foundation, a measure which, if perfectly realized, would make foundation and edifice one and the same. Thus the ideal of democracy can work itself out by means opposed to it, by the very means designed to stabilise and control it. In other words, the actions that secure the edifice from the instability of the foundations are the very actions that change the substantial character of both until they tend to become one. [3]
.....Purely and strictly conceived, democracy is not, never has been, and never will be a form of government, though we may loosely speak of such. [4] Insofar as it is expressed in government, it is one side of a relation between public opinion and government, the latter of which is oligarchic by its very nature. If, however, the essential ideal of pure democracy — total equality of political influence — were ever to be expressed utterly, democracy thus conceived would entail no government at all, as Marx rightly understood. It is nothing more than the commune.
.....The Marxist claims that, with the victory of his democratic-libertarian ideal [5], not only will the government of the state wither away, but democracy too. In this latter point, however, there is a misunderstanding which is part of the Marxist’s failure to envisage the democratic ideal in its purest form. [6] Under the condition of the ideal, democracy does not wither away; on the contrary, it stands as total fulfilment. Only the politicking and striving of democracy, along with the government of the state, become logically superfluous; for, in the total victory of pure democracy, each unit of the whole is exactly equal in influence to every other: there are no governors and governed, and no striving after equality, and thus no need for democratic politics. If this utopia is to be fulfilled for all time, and not just for five seconds, there must be no individual differences from which any advantage or domination can arise. There must be pure selflessness, and the whole must be of one mind. In other words, pure democracy is the death of the person. It strikes me, however, that in the very strictest sense, this ideal is not only nomologically impossible, according to the iron-law of oligarchy, but logically impossible too; for it seems that a world in which all individuals are exactly the same in political influence must be a world in which they are exactly the same in terms of spatial and causal relations too, which means that they cannot exist as separate, individual bodies at all. Still, the tendency thereto is most destructive.

.....The logical consequences of the pure democratic ideal were envisaged only dimly by Marx. One need not be a Marxist, however, to be a pure democrat. Marxism is but one historical means towards the ideal, a means that was once remarkably successful in gaining acceptance as the truest path, especially amongst intellectuals, even such that those who now speak against it often do so on its terms without realising it; but Marxism now bears a bad name, associated in most people’s minds with the opposite of democracy. As things stand, therefore, Marxism is an unpopular host for the ideal. Indeed it seems that empty heads are the best repository, wherein stands no clear vision of an end, but rather the thoughtless echo of the call for more democracy. A freer, less doctrinaire approach is now being taken in striving after the destruction of personhood.

[1] Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, 19th November 1863. (See the first chapter of W.H. Mallock, The Limits of Pure Democracy (London: Chapman & Hall, 1918) for a discussion of this and other democratic slogans.)

[2] Robert Michels, Political Parties, tr. E. & C. Paul (New York: Hearst’s International Library Co., 1915), p.15. (Professor Michels himself began as a social-democrat, then became a revolutionary socialist, and ended up a Fascist, which latter form he believed to be the most democratic.)

[3] The evolution of the idea that leadership is not oligarchic and therefore not at odds with democracy can be witnessed in the development of the various social-democratic parties and unions of Europe. It runs as follows: (i) leadership is oligarchic and undemocratic and we eschew it; (ii) leadership is necessary to effect democracy; (iii) it is ridiculous to suggest that leadership is undemocratic and that we should eschew it. (For more on such parties and their evolution, see Roberts Michels, ibid., and W.H. Mallock, op.cit.)

[4] “[A]ll current definitions of democracy err, even before they are stated, by reason of a false assumption which underlies the formulation of all of them. They all assume that democracy is a system of government of some kind. This is precisely what, except in primitive and minute communities, pure democracy is not, nor ever has been, nor ever can be. It is not and never can be a system of government of any kind. It is simply one principle out of two, the other being that of oligarchy, which two may indeed be combined in very various proportions, but neither of which alone will produce what is meant by a government”. W.H. Mallock, ibid.

[5] “The first problem of all democracy is to define ‘the people’ who are to be the sovereign body. Sooner or later, this always means some sort of purge of anti-social or non-national elements.” Lord Percy of Newcastle, The Heresy of Democracy (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1954), p.40. The Marxist defines the people as the proletarian class. The bourgeois class — which is a broad category in the Marxian scheme — is not of the people and is indeed the enemy thereof.

[6] For example: “Communism alone is capable of giving really complete democracy, and the more complete it is the more quickly will it become unnecessary and wither away of itself.” V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), p.107.

Unweighted

“Some Mens Heads are as easily blown away as their Hats.”

George Savile, First Marquis of Halifax, “Of Vanity”, A Character of King Charles the Second, and Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections (London: J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, 1750), p.144.

A List of Idiots

“They are idiots — intelligent people don’t do God”, [1] says some fellow, whose proposition has inspired me to compile an incomplete list of idiots in the West from ancient times to the present day: — Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, Jean Buridan, Nicolaus Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Giordano Bruno, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boyle, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, Giambattista Vico, Thomas Bayes, Carl Linnaeus, Leonhard Euler, Roger Joseph Boscovich, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Joseph Priestley, Immanuel Kant, Karl Friedrich Gauss, Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage, Adam Sedgwick, James Clerk Maxwell, Gregor Mendel, Asa Gray, Louis Pasteur, William Kelvin, Miguel de Unamuno, Charles Pierce, Albert Einstein, Alfred North Whitehead, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Eddington, Kurt Gödel, Georges Lemaitre, Frederick Copleston, Werner Heisenberg, Carl Weizsäcker, Henry Margenau, Fred Hoyle, John Eccles, Charles Hartshorne, Charles Townes, Stanley Jaki, Freeman Dyson, Edward O. Wilson, John Lucas, Michael Dummett, John Polkinghorne, Francis Collins, J.J. Haldane, John Barrow, Alvin Plantinga, Chistopher Isham, Saul Kripke, . . . — omitting of course such wavering, agnostic or mystical half-wits as Charles Darwin, Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Davies, etc. Yet there is something that makes me uncomfortable about this list. I cannot quite put my finger on it, but I have an uneasy feeling that at least some on this list are not idiots, or not when compared to anyone who would claim them to be such, which, if true, must lead me to affirm the falsity of the proposition that theists are idiots. I have even the inkling — the radical nature of which I almost dare not acknowledge — that anyone who believes that theists are idiots must be an idiot. But, as I say, it is only a feeling, and a somewhat unfashionable one too.

[1] “Yeoldetifosi”, commenting on Dave Hill, “Voice of Unreason”, Comment is Free (The Guardian’s weblog), 13th January 2009; original emphasis. (I have picked it as an example of the kind of pronouncement commonly made amongst the “new atheists” — i.e., those loud-mouthed ignoramuses and ideological crackpots led by a bog-standard scientist with the philosophical acumen of a standard bog who yet somehow appears to his followers as a fount of genius.)

Fewtril no.264

Scepticism is an important tool in the journalist’s toolbox. It looks fine and well-kept next to the space where the ratchet of public expectation occasionally rests.

A Note on Voltaire

I cannot say I am utterly at home with Voltaire’s works, though, being no great admirer, I confess I have little desire to change this state of affairs — but I must say that the characterisation quoted below rings somewhat false to me, at least as far as Voltaire’s opinions on the Turks are concerned:

Long before the late Eduard Said invented “Orientalism” to exalt Arab culture and Islamic society at the expense of the West, bien-pensants like Voltaire inclined to express their rebellion against the dwindling vestiges of Christendom by representing Europeans as bigots or clowns and raising up exotic foreigners — Voltaire himself wrote about Turks and Persians of the Muslim fold — to be the fonts of wisdom and models of refined life in their tracts and stories. [1]

I have been and still am under the impression — perhaps false after all — that Voltaire was a lifelong reviler of the Turks, expressing himself in a hostile manner thereto countless times in his long career. As he wrote in his twilight years:

I am seventy-nine, if you please, and upon the stroke of eighty. Thus shall I never see, what I have so passionately wished for, the destruction of those rogues, the Turks, who shut up the women, and do not cultivate the fine arts. [2]

Nor, whilst I am making note, can I rightly say that he was the anti-religionist of modern secularist fable, his being somewhat religious himself. It is nevertheless true to say that he was a gadfly and a trouble-maker, and, to a devout Roman Catholic such as Mozart, nothing more than a rogue. As the composer expressed it to his father at the time of Voltaire’s death: “I give you news which you will perhaps already know, namely, that the godless arch-scoundrel Voltaire has died wretchedly like a dog — like a brute.” [3] Naturally there are all sorts of fables about Mozart too. I have even heard it said that he was a political and social revolutionary in whom modern revolutionaries might take some comradely interest — said, that is, by modern revolutionaries who would have made Voltaire look to Mozart like a saint and a staunch conservative.

[1] Thomas F. Bertonneau, “The West’s Cultural Continuity: Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel”, The Brussels Journal, 5th January 2009.

[2] Voltaire, “Extract of a Letter from M. Voltaire to the King of Prussia”, Annual Register, Vol. XVII, December 1774, p.177, republished online at the Internet Library of Early Journals. (Another example: “How I should like to see those scoundrels hunted out of the country of Pericles and Plato: it is true, they are not persecutors, but they are brutes.” Letter to M. d’Alembert, 4th September 1769, in Voltaire in His Letters; Being a Selection from His Correspondence, tr. S.G. Tallentyre (London: John Murray, 1919), p.228.)
[3] [“Nun gebe ich Ihnen eine Nachricht, die Sie vielleicht schon wissen werden, daß nemlich der gottlose und Erz-Spitzbub Voltaire so zu sagen wie ein Hund — wie ein Vieh crepirt ist.”] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Letter to His Father (no.107), 3. Juli 1778, in Mozarts Briefe (Salzburg: Verlag der Mayrischen Buchhandlung, 1865), p.165.

McAhny

Readers will have noticed the decline of activity in this backwater of Blogland. I have been a little lazy and largely diffident in posting. I have run low on presumption, the grease by which the blogging-cogs run smoothly. Still, the new year may bring more. In the meantime, a very merry Christmas to you all.

Argumentum Insapiens

“Given that Homo sapiens originated in Africa it would be true to say that 100% of Britons have immigrant ancestors.” [1]

Not only would it not be true to say so, but it would be dumb to say so. It is impossible to have immigration into states and nations that do not exist. And I am quite sure that Britain as a state did not exist at the dawn of humanity; that England as an ethno-geographic territory did not exist when the Anglo-Saxons invaded these islands; and that Britain still did not exist when the Normans invaded England. The socio-political-territorial concept of immigration implies by its prefix migration into something, rather than just movement from one point in space to another, and that that something is not a mere stretch of matter, which has by itself no objectively-existing territorial borders. The stretch of matter that we name “Britain” attains no status as anything but matter except by a socio-political concept; and its division into national territories depended on the very nations that made them. The Anglo-Saxons were not immigrants to an England which somehow magically existed apart from them; they were its creators. Nor were they immigrants to a Britain that would not exist until long after they had arrived. Similarly, Scotland did not exist before the Scots invaded from Ireland, and China did not exist before there were people calling themselves Chinese, and so on. It is utter nonsense to speak of the English being immigrants to England, the Scots being immigrants to Scotland, the Welsh being immigrants to Wales, the Irish being immigrants to Ireland, the Indians being immigrants to India, and so on — all of which are not mere stretches of earth, but ethnic, social, or political territories. Mr Worstall, however, comes from the So-Long-As-It-Makes-Us-Richer School of Thought, which is to say that he’d gladly sell his ancestral homeland for a few pennies more a year, and, as it seems, wouldn’t baulk at using spurious arguments to do so. Or perhaps, as regards the latter point, he is just a twit.

.....

[1] Tim Worstall, “Twits”, Tim Worstall (weblog), 18th December 2008. (“Homo sapiens” changed from “Homo Sapiens”.)

Fewtril no.263

Knowledge is the means by which we deepen mystery. There is, I suppose, an end to it, but that would require either omniscience or shallowness.

Fewtril no.262

Falsification can begin anywhere, but it must begin if “explanation” continues where a fundament is reached.

The Dark Night of the Intellect

“If I concentrate hard enough on why I believe there is a tree in the Quad, I cease to assume that there is a tree in the Quad, and treat that statement instead as a proposition to be proved rather than a premise that is given. In having the question of whether there is a tree in the Quad or not brought to my notice I am being begged not to beg the question, and the courtesies of argument demand that I put in doubt what I normally know to be true. There is also what I might call the Yellow-Spot phenomenon in philosophy, namely, that if we focus our attention too hard on any matter for too long, we cease to see it straight. In the dark night of the intellect, which is the philosopher’s usual state of mind, it is wise for him occasionally to distract his thoughts and look away, that he may see what he is looking at the better; more especially when he is dealing with facts and certainty. For facts are essentially what is peripheral to the question under examination, what can be taken for granted on this occasion; and therefore by being asked sufficiently earnestly to consider any question sufficiently closely I can be cajoled into giving up fact-status for this occasion for almost any statement: courtesy compels. Only if I am making the minimum possible statement can I be pushed no further: only if I say that there is in my visual field at this moment a red rectangular patch on a cream background, am I safe from possible error: hence, if there are basic facts, only the simplest facts of sense-experience can fill the bill. By attempting to make rigid and absolute the flexible standard, which depends on the circumstances, of what the honest man cannot reasonably refuse to concede, we have ensnared ourselves in a reductionist spiral, demanding an ever lower standard of reasonableness until we reach the phenomenalist’s goal, the lowest common denominator of what must be conceded by every reasonable man in any circumstances whatever, that is, what must be conceded by a barely sentient being.

.....It is an interesting way of doing philosophy. We start by assuming that a fact is what a true statement states: from this it is a natural inference that since the conclusions of ethical debate and scientific theorising are not facts, they are not true either. By restricting our criterion of truth to that of agreed truth, we are able to eliminate all doubt and dubiety within the province of philosophy; nor can the opponent of this view fault the examples given of what is to be allowed as really true, for only those truths that cannot reasonably be contested are put forward as examples. One weakness alone attaches to the method: as there are few facts, if any, that we cannot in our metaphysical moments be uncertain of, our concept of truth is regressive; our criterion grows progressively and indefinitely more stringent. At first we exclude those propositions of morals, theology and metaphysics, whose elimination is welcome to many of the enlightened; but the more we think, the more nice we become as to what are unquestionable truths; and so the truths of logic, mathematics, and natural science, of common sense and everyday life, join the procession to the guillotine.”

J.R. Lucas, “On Not Worshipping Facts”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 8, 1958, pp.155-6, online at J.R. Lucas’s website.

Yoof

“Young people only appear in the media to receive the blame for breaking Britain, and as the subject of longwinded tracts that label us apathetic and materialistic” — says yet another youngster in the media bemoaning the “negative” image of youth, i.e., whichever image does not excuse or praise the vices and inanities thereof. “Most of us care”, says our young female scribbler, “but feel so disempowered by these stifling truisms.” [1] Apart from indulging in the usual pathetic exaggeration, is she telling us that these labels are stifling but self-evident truths, or is she too apathetic to pick up a dictionary? Or is my usage too old?
.....Often in the eyes of the liberal press, the young can do no wrong — “like a multitude of little popes with the power of infallibility” [2] — and almost every journalist-intellectual therein feels the urge to flatter them, and makes little effort to resist it, such that he can hardly get through a lengthy description of some particular youths without at some point having described them as “very bright” or “fiercely intelligent”, particularly if they are also utterly stupid, poor, and criminal. I suppose, given the strength of this urge, we ought to congratulate any journalist who manages to resist it.

[1] Lily Kember, “Lily savaged”, Comment is Free (The Guardian's weblog), 10th December 2008.
[2] Fyodor Dostoevsky, “One of Today’s Falsehoods”, 1873, in A Writer’s Diary, Vol.1 (1873-1876), tr. K. Lantz (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1994), p.282.

Wrongly Adduced

“We wrongly adduce the honour and beauty of an activity from its usefulness, and our conclusion is wrong if we reckon that all are bound to perform it, and that it is honourable for each to do so, provided it be useful.”

Michel de Montaigne, “On the Useful and the Honourable”, The Complete Essays, Bk.III:1, tr. & ed. M.A. Screech (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p.906.

.....

Inverted Filter

“A Government-office is like an inverted filter: you send in accounts clear and they come out muddy.”

Sir Charles Fox, as reported by Herbert Spencer, “The Sins of Legislators”, The Man versus the State (London and Oxford: Williams & Norgate, 1902), p.55.

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A More Fatal Act

“The French Revolution was a vast act of political destruction at the heart of previous society: let us fear lest it creates a more fatal act of destruction, let us fear moral destruction hand in hand with that Revolution’s evils.”

François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-tombe, tr. A.S. Kline, Bk.XLII:8:1, published online by A.S. Kline.

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Memento

It is said that a Roman dux was accompanied in his triumphal procession by a slave whose task was to remind him by a constant whispering in his ear that he was not a god but a man: hominem te memento, memento mori, hominem te memento, memento mori, and so on. The fantastical idea strikes me that our times could benefit from an office somewhat akin to that which is said to have accompanied the triumphator of the ancient world, but say, an office of the demagogue-whisperer, whose task would be to remind the popularly-elected governor of his true nature — oligarcham demagogicum te memento; non modo non est vox populi vox dei, sed etiam vox tua non est vox populi — lest out of egomania and veritable democratic piety there be concocted in the demagogue’s soul a volatile formula:

Vox populi vox dei est,
Vox mea vox populi est,
Ergo est vox mea vox dei.

Yet we live in enlightened times, or so I am told, and therefore something so strange as this office could not be taken seriously, not because it would stand against all the most sacred and cherished principles of these times; on the contrary, such an office might easily be instituted as a salaried one alongside that of every demagogic oligarch, each to be overseen by a committee of well-remunerated academicians, lawyers, bureaucrats, and popular journalists with felicitous connections that tend more towards the social than the neuronal. Rather it would discourage not just a condition for the existence of modern popular government, but also a condition for its growth. The extension of this power involves not just cynical manipulation and mendacity on the part of governors and other interested parties. Also greatly advantageous thereto is the genuine belief, or the delusive sop to conscience, on the part of governors and governed alike that this power is exercised and extended on behalf and for the good of all, such that any discouragement to this belief must be seen as a discouragement to progress.
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