Catch 22

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Catch 22

I have been reading Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, published in 1961, a book I have long wanted to read. It is better than I expected, less time worn, more trenchant (and funny). As it happens, I once met Heller at a party in New York, sometime in the 1990s. He was a likeable man, jovial, twinkly. I had read his Something Happened recently, so we had a nice conversation about it—a very astute book. Now I am acquainted with Yossarian, Colonel Cathcart, Nately, Nately’s whore, chaplain Tappman, nurse Duckett, Colonel Scheisskopf (“Shit-head”), and many others. The book is certainly anti-war (how could it not be?), but it is also anti-American—or rather anti-Americans-in-charge. The high-ups are the worst: the heedless brutal generals and colonels sending men on endless combat missions, concerned only with burnishing their own reputations. Here’s a snatch of dialogue: “That’s a very serious crime you’ve committed, Father,” said the major. “What crime?” “We don’t know yet,” said the colonel. “But we’re going to find out. And we sure know it’s very serious.” (380). And it isn’t that only the armed forces that are run by such men; they are depicted as typically American. It reminded me of nothing so much as American universities, in which administrators seem to think of themselves as commanding officers keeping their underlings in line, punishing them as they see fit, not necessarily for anything. They are obsessed with image, headlines, personal rivalries. Justice comes a distant second. Politics rules.     

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America and Americans

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America and Americans

What do you get if you remove America (the idea) from America (the place]? What if you remove American values, enshrined in the Constitution, from American society? Equality, free speech, free belief, the rule of law—what if you take all that away? The obvious answer is Americans—those individual people. But what makes them Americans, establishes their identity as a unified people, not just as the inhabitants of a particular piece of land? Nothing. You destroy America as a distinct identifiable definable nation. That is what is happening now: the essence of America is being hollowed out, leaving nothing but free-ranging individuals. Do you think these deracinated people can form a coherent viable identity? I doubt it. We will have a kind of blind anarchy. Americans will no longer be Americans, but bleached-out wanderers, clueless, lost. What makes America America is the idea of America, but that idea is being undermined from within. The country will die. It will be true to say that America no longer exists.

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A Scary Thought

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A Scary Thought

A scary thought crept into my head yesterday: What if MS-13 had supported Trump all along? What if they had praised and flattered him, called him their leader, wore MAGA hats? What if they had joined forces with the rioters on January 6th? What would be his attitude now? I really don’t know—and that is the scary thought. Would they now be described as “good people” who “love our country”? What if they agreed that the 2020 election had been “stolen”? How would that affect current deportation policy? I can’t escape the feeling that there is a non-zero probability that things would be different. I wonder what other people think.

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Anger and Morality

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Anger and Morality

Anger is inseparable from morality: we are naturally angry at what is unjust, unfair, blameworthy, evil. Jesus was angry at the money lenders and pharisees. There is no point in denying it. Emotivism used to say that moral judgement is all about boo and hurrah, but it should have said that moral disapproval is anger and moral approval admiration. You boo a weak artistic performance not a heinous act. A moral person is an angry person, on the assumption of immorality in the world. Indeed, there are few things that make one angrier than unethical actions or people. Not all anger has moral content, to be sure, but most of it does (animals are seldom angry). Anger assigns blame. A person without anger is hardly a moral being at all, even if brimming with love. What does this tell us about the moral life? First, it tells us that morality is bound up with judgment: you have to judge what to be angry about. Some people have poor judgment—they are angry at the wrong things. Anger must be appropriately educated. As the ancients would say, right anger is a form of wisdom. Second, and more disturbing, anger is not a nice emotion to have: it is unpleasant, corrosive, and dangerous. It feels bad; it eats into the soul; and it can lead to violent acts. Anger is hard to handle, causing much immoral action. So, moral emotion, in the form of anger, itself has moral consequences, which can be worse than what it is anger about. The angry man might kill a man who disrespects him. This approaches paradox: morality requires anger, but anger is close to immorality. Anger at the wrongdoing of others can easily lead to further wrongdoing, sometimes serious. Mass murderers are often angry, justifiably, at the wrongdoing of others. Anger is a combustible emotion (perhaps this is partly why Kant distrusted emotion as part of moral psychology). Anger can motivate right action, but it can also trigger wrong action. It can be argued that we would be better off without it. But moral judgment without anger is a pale and insipid thing, and not psychologically realistic. Being serenely detached in the face of cruelty is not a virtue. Righteous anger is proper and correct. But it has to be properly regulated, wisely arrived at. Thus, there is a problem at the heart of our moral psychology: we need anger, but we must beware of its pitfalls. Good people are centers of anger, but the anger must be good anger. And it is also necessary that the anger not be too intense or preoccupying—or else it will corrode the soul. This is the problem of moral anger.

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1000 Essays

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1000 Essays

I was just re-reading Simon Blackburn’s intelligent and sympathetic review of my book Philosophical Provocations: 55 Short Essays (2017) in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2018). He praises the book highly, recommending it as a good text for a graduate class. The book contains essays written in the style of the essays published on this blog. In fact, I started publishing my essays on this blog because I was having difficulties publishing them in book form (you can guess the reason why). I was even told by the philosophy editor at Oxford University Press (UK) that a collection of them was unsuitable for publication because of their style—being neither introductory nor advanced (this despite recommendations to publish from the usual panel of referees). This objection was pure rubbish, of course, but the decision was final. I have published several books by OUP over a thirty-year period, some of them written in the same approachable style. In any case, the point I want to make here is that since writing that book, I have written many more such essays—I estimate over a thousand of them. A thousand—in pages, at least three thousand. That’s a lot of pages. Joyce’s Ulysses is just under 700 pages, Tolstoy’s War and Peace weighs in at around 1200 pages, as do the complete works of Jane Austen. This is equivalent to about ten substantial books. I arrive at this estimate based on the fact that I have been writing roughly two essays a week over the last ten or so years.[1] Let’s suppose Blackburn is right about the quality; that means that material of comparable quality (or higher) would compose those hypothetical books. Really, then, those books should exist; but they don’t, and won’t. At least they appear here, though without the organization and accoutrements of a standard book. I think it is not too much of a stretch to say I have published 10 books in the last 10 years (so I have published about 40 books altogether). I actually believe this later material represents my best philosophical work, because not written under pressure of time and with the maturity of a lifetime in philosophy. I wonder what history will have to say about all of this.

[1] Not all the essays published on this blog are philosophical essays; I am not counting those. In total it is more like 1,500.

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Counterfactual Music

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Counterfactual Music

I was discussing my musical history the other day and I reported that in my childhood I didn’t like any of the music I heard on the radio and watched on TV. In fact, I positively disliked it. This was the era of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Pat Boone, Vera Lynne, Shirley Bassey, and sundry others. I had no interest in music then (I never heard any classical music). But something happened in the 1950s that changed my mind completely: popular music changed dramatically. I knew nothing of why this was so or who was responsible; all I knew was that I liked what I was hearing (I was around 10 at the time). I was particularly struck by Sherry by the Four Seasons and Good Luck Charm by Elvis Presley. Suddenly music interested me—I wanted badly to hear it. This was before the Beatles and the Stones and the Who. Of course, I liked them. Music had come into my life. What I didn’t know, but do now, is the history behind this change in popular music—specifically the contribution of black artists. This is now an oft-told tale that needs no repeating, though it is good to acknowledge it: Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner, Arthur Alexander, James Brown, and many others. Now we take all this for granted, but it might not have been. In a close possible world Frank Sinatra and Perry Como still rule the musical roost: no rock and roll, no blues, no soul, no reggae. So, we have the counterfactual: if black musicians had never existed, we would still be listening to the kind of stuff I so disliked in my youth. Or not listening to it, because I would never have had a musical life under those conditions. I have never warmed to Sinatra and company and really can’t bear listening to it. I wonder how anyone could have liked it (but there’s no accounting for taste). We tend to forget that there was a musical revolution beginning in the fifties. Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Elvis Presley—they would never have been if it were not for this revolution. John Lennon hated the music he grew up with (especially Acker Bilk jazz) and created music out of other influences; so did I. Just listen to Bo Diddley’s Mona and compare it to some crooner’s sappy stuff: there’s no comparison. I realize that I have been lucky to be born when I was, musically speaking.

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Meetings

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Meetings

Larry David’s “My Dinner with Adolf” brings up an important point. Bill Maher met Donald Trump for dinner at the White House: was he wrong to do so? The meeting was justified by invoking the principle that it is a good idea to meet with people with whom you disagree. Surely, we should be able to talk to people with different opinions from our own—isn’t that a moral truism? The truism makes it sound as if people opposed to such a meeting are moral fools, narrow sectarians. And that is how Mr. Maher defended his meeting with Mr. Trump. But Larry David’s satire brings out the fact that it isn’t just a matter of meeting people we disagree with; it all depends on what those people are guilty of. It isn’t merely that Larry and Adolf have different views; Hitler was an evil man responsible for the worst atrocity in history. You don’t have a cozy dinner with a man like that. The question, then, is whether Trump is an evil man responsible for evil acts. That is the question Maher avoided in his justification for meeting with Trump. You don’t need to take a stand on that question in order to see its relevance—which Maher signally failed to do. Opponents of the meeting will point to the harm Trump has done to countless people, his lawless deportations, his vengeful cruelty. It isn’t disagreement of views; it’s actual behavior with serious consequences. Dinner with disagreement is fine, but not dinner with evil. The hard question is when disagreement tips into serious wrongdoing, about which people may have different opinions. On balance I think Maher was wrong to have that dinner and wrong to defend it in the way he did. He was wrong intellectually and morally. It is certainly disingenuous at best to argue that it was merely a case of dinner with someone you disagree with—as if Hitler is just someone with different opinions from yours. This has a particular meaning for me because I have been confronted with a similar situation in the past: I have refused to shake hands with, acknowledge, or even say hello to certain people because of my strong disapproval of the people in question (I won’t say who and why). This was no doubt perceived as rude and hostile—and I would agree that it was. But I am glad that I did it—it was the right thing to do. It was the only thing I could do in the situation in which I found myself. It sent the right message. Sometimes we should not meet with, or treat civilly, certain individuals, because of their actions. This is what is called having a backbone, instead of being nice. They say you sometimes have to be cruel to be kind, but you also have to be unkind to the cruel.

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Consciousness, Language, and Mystery

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Consciousness, Language, and Mystery

The human intellect is confronted by two great mysteries: the mystery of consciousness and the mystery of language.[1] I am not here concerned to argue for the mysterian position in either area, still less to try to remove the mystery; my aim is to compare the two mysteries. I am engaged in the taxonomic natural science of mysteries: I am in the business of comparing and contrasting, hoping to shed mutual light. What specifically is mysterious about consciousness and language? Their origin and brain implementation. We don’t know when and how consciousness arose in evolutionary history (it leaves no fossils), and we don’t know how the brain contrives to impel it into existence. Similarly, we don’t know when and how language arose in evolutionary history (it too leaves no fossils), and we don’t know how the brain contrives to impel it into existence. The essence of consciousness is subjectivity and we don’t know how subjectivity originated or how it comes to subsist in the brain. The essence of language is its unlimited combinatorial productivity and we don’t know how this originated or how the brain enables it.  So far then, the two problems can be stated analogously: they are origin-and-implementation problems. They aren’t existence problems—we aren’t unable to decide whether these things exist (like dark matter or some such). The two mysteries have the same general shape. We also know the nature of these things, or some of it; we aren’t ignorant of what makes them what they are. In fact, it is our knowledge of their nature that leads us to believe that they present mysteries—how could these things have arisen by mutation and natural selection, and how does the brain support them?

But at that point the similarity wanes. Certainly, the two are not identical or share a common essence; far from it. They could not be more dissimilar. For consider: consciousness (sentience) is extremely widespread in the animal world; it is a primitive adaptation; it is undoubtedly ancient; and it is biologically basic in the sense that it serves basic functions—eating, avoiding being eaten, mating, defecation, etc. But language is unique to humans; it is a sophisticated adaptation; it is of recent origin; and it does not serve basic biological functions. Language is the opposite of consciousness—like a spacecraft and a horse-drawn carriage. Language is “of the mind”, whereas consciousness is “of the body”. In particular, all species above an elementary level are endowed with consciousness, but only one species has true language. Consciousness is as common as dirt, while language is as rare as diamonds. Language is a form of intelligence, while consciousness requires none. Language makes humans special, but consciousness does not. One of the mysteries of language is why only humans have it, but there is no such mystery about consciousness. Consciousness is biology 101, but language is a much more advanced subject. If there were no humans, there would be no language, but plenty of consciousness. Language is exceptional and mysterious, while consciousness is unexceptional and mysterious. Language is impressive and spectacular, but consciousness is humble and humdrum; it belongs to the class of mundane mysteries (like gravity and electricity). This is hard to grasp because we are so far from understanding consciousness. We really ought to understand it, given its biological primitiveness, but we don’t. The mystery is rather mysterious. It has higher-order mystery.

I think this point is hard to get one’s mind around, so let me try to restate it. Primitive consciousness exists at a biologically elementary level, the same level as the correlated bodily traits: they co-evolved. For instance, it exists at the same level as true oxygen-carrying blood.[2] One would think, then, that the two ought to be equally comprehensible from an impartial point of view; but they are not. This is surprising, eyebrow-raising: consciousness and blood should be on an epistemic par. The mystery is unintelligible, contrary to reason. Surely a being with better cognitive faculties than ours could grasp consciousness as readily as blood. We seem to suffer from a cognitive bias, a blind spot. The case is quite unlike language: in this case the mystery seems explicable, because language is not biologically primitive, not a commonplace; it is special, highly advanced, intrinsically complex. Language isn’t correlated with basic biological functions; indeed, it seems biologically de trop, hardly necessary to survival at all. It is clearly something remarkable, involving an impressive creativity, dabbling in the infinite. It seems akin to the divine, a kind of natural miracle. Its mystery is thus perfectly intelligible—of course such a thing is difficult to comprehend! Language is not animalistic but sublime (as Galileo once remarked). We are amazed at language, but not at pain or sight or smell. It is a cut above, biologically speaking. Thus, it is an intelligible mystery—we can easily see why it’s a mystery. But we have to be brought to see that consciousness is a mystery—we have to be argued into it. This is why historically consciousness was not regarded as a mystery but language was. Consciousness comes to seem like a mystery only when mechanistic physicalism enters the scene, but language is obviously a mystery—the mystery is staring us in the face. Thus, we have two types of mystery: type 1, intelligible mystery; and type 2, unintelligible mystery. Language is type 1 mysterious and consciousness is type 2 mysterious. Nature contains both types of mystery, as a function of our cognitive powers (and probably the natural facts). Anyone would find language a mystery, but not so consciousness. Consciousness only strikes us as mysterious because it isn’t physically reducible, but language is mysterious independently of this, just considered in itself. How can finite means generate infinite potential? How could such a power evolve? Why are we its only possessor? Words are amazing things, but feelings are a dime a dozen (even mice have them). The linguistic lexicon is rightly deemed a mystery, but the “lexicon” of consciousness is not—the items composing it are not biologically oddities. The organism has a set of qualia that it brings to the table, each functionally justifiable (pain, seeing color and shape, smelling food). Humans alone bring a set of lexical items whose nature and origin are obscure—they are a biological anomaly. Both are mysterious, but the lexicon is evidently a mystery, while qualia are mysterious in a more theoretical way.

It has been said that human language shows that everyone is a genius, because language is such an impressive cognitive achievement. And genius is inherently mysterious. Other animals might marvel at our linguistic genius, if they were capable of marveling at anything. But mere sentience is not a mark of genius, any more than blood is: it is just part of our animal nature, as brute as brutes. There is nothing genius-like about it. Evolution made both, but they don’t belong together on the same scale. Language is a uniquely human achievement on a par with (genuine) morality, but consciousness is spread far and wide like hair and skin. The two mysteries differ in their ease of recognition and their general form. We appear to have made more progress with the language mystery than the consciousness mystery, though that may be deceptive. There are similarities between them, but there are also significant differences. Imagine inverting the distribution of the two, with language existing in most species and consciousness only in one and recently arrived: would that change our estimate of the two mysteries? I suspect it would.[3]

[1] I will be assuming a broadly Chomskian position on the mystery of language and my own position on the mystery of consciousness. I do not mean to suggest that these are the only two mysteries confronting us, but they do get a lot of attention.

[2] Creatures that lack true blood tend to be the most primitive of organisms—sponges, coral, jellyfish, flatworms, insects, etc. They don’t have consciousness.

[3] Our reactions would not be simple. Suppose you visited a planet on which language was widespread—almost all species speak. However, sentience was extremely rare, only one species being endowed with it. No doubt you would think that language is not so special and sentience rather precious (so the sentient species must have been favored by some powerful deity or other). But I don’t think you would change your estimate of the kind of mystery involved: language would still seem intelligibly mysterious, while consciousness would not lose its unintelligible mysteriousness. Language would still seem almost magical in its fecundity, while consciousness would still be tied mainly to primitive biological functions. This is a good thought experiment on which to test your intuitions.

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