A Causal World

There are two ways to think about causation: either it is something that exists in addition to an antecedent reality of objects and properties or it is constitutive of reality. According to the first way, if you removed causation from the world, you would be left with constant conjunction, a real world of recognizable things; according to the second way, you would be left with nothing, since causation is what reality fundamentally is. The first way is dominant in our intellectual tradition, which is why some people contemplate doing without causation in our conception of the world. Causation is mere icing on the cake (a dubious icing according to some). Reality is not fundamentally and inherently causal reality. After all, we don’t see causation, or if we do it is not ubiquitous, not omnipresent. Empiricism militates against causal foundationalism. Yet there have been voices that champion causation-based metaphysics: Schopenhauer and Shoemaker, in particular (with their similar-sounding names). True, Schopenhauer preferred to speak of Will, but his general conception is causal in thrust; Shoemaker just comes right out with it—properties are causal powers.[1] I will explore this idea further. The metaphor I like compares causation to fungi: fungi are everywhere, they are basic to life, but underappreciated because of their general invisibility. They largely live underground, only peeping above ground for purposes of reproduction. They were there before plants and animals and allowed these parvenu life-forms to come into existence (on land anyway). They are root causes, so to speak. The general idea of causal metaphysics is that everything in the physical and psychological world is a cause—an active, generative producer—and that is all that reality is. There is nothing more to things than causes. Reality reduces to causation (“causal reductionism”). That was Shoemaker’s radical message: he was a functionalist about properties in general—properties are defined by their causal roles. A property like shape is a causal power. It isn’t something separate and distinct (he is an identity theorist about properties). An object, then, is a bundle of powers—a congeries of causes. Causation is not a part of (concrete) reality; it is the whole of it. Reality is composed of causes. It isn’t that causation coexists with non-causal inactive components of reality; it constitutes all of reality. Shapes are causes, and so are colors (possibly mental causes, if you are a subjectivist about color). Forces are obviously causes, but so are the things that forces act on—planets, for example. Causes cause other causes. It’s causation all the way down—pan-causalism, nothing but causes. This view is apt to seem hyperbolic, if not patently false: for that is not how we see the world, how it seems to us. It might be noumenally constituted by causes, but it isn’t phenomenally purely causal. The world seems innocent of causation for long stretches and short ones: inactive, unchanging, inert, stable. How then can it be constituted by causal interactions? Sometimes nothing moves, nothing happens—isn’t that because there is nothing causal going on? We are not observing any effects, so causation is taking a break from its usual exertions. However, this view is deeply mistaken, as science has shown: we are subject to illusions of inactivity. We are simply not witnessing the ever-present fact of causal activity. Take the motion of the earth: it seems to us that the earth is not moving and not under the influence of a force, but it is—we just don’t experience it. The earth is caused to move by the sun’s gravitational force—at every second and for all of its existence. Likewise, when objects on the earth’s surface are stationary (relative to the earth) they are held there by earth’s gravitational field; they are caused to stay still by a force we don’t see. Most strikingly, the coherence of physical objects is not the result of zero causal activity but of counterbalancing forces at the atomic level—the positive and negative charges of protons and electrons, respectively. Objects are caused not to fly apart; they don’t remain stable spontaneously. We are thus victims of a widespread illusion, making us think that nothing causal is going on, when in fact the world is pulsing with non-stop causation. It’s as if we could only see beehives from a distance and formed the idea that nothing is going on inside them, whereas in fact they are centers of buzzing activity. True, we don’t perceive the ceaseless causality of the world, but it is there nonetheless, under the surface. In fact, it is doubtful that we ever really see causality (as Hume pointed out), but that doesn’t mean it isn’t the foundation of everything we do see (along with its characteristic type of necessity). We thus don’t appreciate the omnipresence of causality and miss its foundational status. But actually, as Shoemaker realized, it is impossible to sever the connection between properties and powers, no matter what the appearances may be. Causation is the fungus of the universe; its hidden driving force. Or better: all is fungus, when you get right down to it.[2] A.J. Ayer used to like to say that causation is just one damn thing after another; the truth is that things are just causation manifesting itself. The world is Will, Force, Activity, Necessary Connection, Influence, Push and Pull. Causation is in every nook and cranny.[3]

[1] See his Identity, Cause and Mind (1984).

[2] Of course, it is not true that all is fungus in botany, poetically apt as that might sound; but in metaphysics all might be causation (causal fungus). This is perfectly compatible with the Humean thesis that we don’t really know what causation ultimately consists in; in particular, we don’t know what causal necessity is (objectively, intrinsically).

[3] A few decades ago, it became fashionable to propose causal theories of many things: perception, knowledge, reference, action, memory. But no one ever proposed a causal theory of everything—the whole world. If causation is a notion in good order, however, it becomes attractive to consider the possibility that all properties, objects, and facts are causal in nature. Thus, causal metaphysics: causation is ontologically basic. (I’m not supposing ethical and mathematical facts are causal, if such there be; I’m discussing only concrete facts that enter into causal relations.) Hume described causation as the “cement of the universe”; according to causal metaphysics, it is the universe.

Political Evil and the Family

What is the psychology of political evil, including political violence? By “political evil” I mean evil directed towards groups, as opposed to specific individuals: races, nationalities, religions, party affiliation, educational attainment, style of dress, etc. This kind of evil has a distinctive intentionality: whereas individual-directed intentionality takes in a concrete individual, an object of perception, group-directed intentionality posits a generalized, abstract, stereotypical type, often an object of fantasy. It is a kind of reified meta-individual, created in the mind from disparate sources, seldom rooted in fact, cartoon-like. It is possible to entertain this curious object of thought without knowing any individual instance of its purported type. It is a sort of fiction, though masquerading as fact. It is depersonalized, dehumanized, a symbol more than an actual person (often animal imagery is invoked to accentuate it—pig, dog, rat, cockroach, etc.).[1] The nature of this intentionality allows people to perpetrate evil with less ambivalence, because it doesn’t present its object as a three-dimensional human being with specific characteristics. This may be the result of cognitive limitations: it is difficult for the human mind to represent a multitude of objects in all their specificity; it’s much easier to boil it all down to a few easily remembered features, especially if those features reflect prejudices and predilections. In any case, restraints on evil actions stemming from recognition of a common humanity are removed or reduced by such ways of thinking. This is the power of the stereotype, the meme, the caricature. Political evil thrives in such a psychological environment, especially when driven by external forces (fear-mongering, propaganda, indoctrination)). All this is familiar stuff, one aspect of evil’s notorious banalities; and it is sound psychology as far as it goes. But it doesn’t explain why people engage in evil to begin with: why this need (for that is what it appears to be) to select a group and persecute members of that group? What is the root cause of political evil? Why is the human psyche so prone to it? One naturally turns to the family: is there anything about family relations that could underlie the tendency towards political evil (animosity, violence, oppression)? Family dynamics often leave a mark on the adult psyche, scarring and shaping it—this is a platitude of developmental psychology. The first point to note—and I am not alone in observing it—is that the family is a proto-political system, a mini-society. It is a group of individuals, locked in a power structure, vying for dominance, or at least a piece of the pie. There is much rivalry and resentment, particularly in children. In some families, violence is the outcome, in others strict discipline, in others simple neglect. Families are not all harmony and light (surprise, surprise). There are asymmetries of power: parents beat children but not vice versa. There is a good deal of hatred swirling around the family unit (homicidal, according to Freud). But there is also love mingled with the bad stuff: you love the ones you also hate (resent, envy, dislike). This produces cognitive dissonance: the same object invites opposite feelings, thus giving rise to a sense of intolerable disharmony. The sufferer accordingly seeks dissonance reduction, possibly by denying the love or rejecting the hate, neither being easy. However, there is a third way: sublimation—direct the bad feelings elsewhere. At any rate, point some of the antipathy at someone else, as much as possible consistent with the reality principle. This could be a fantasy object—a bogeyman, a villain encountered in books or films or oral tradition, or some other tribe. Think of it as a negative-affect proxy-object—like a wall you hit when you can’t hit what you really want to. So: family dynamics, cognitive dissonance, sublimation, proxy objects. The psyche is searching for an object of resentment to substitute for the father (say) and it lights upon whatever serves that purpose; what better than an imaginary group that embodies features of the family hate-object? The group may symbolize power, strength, wealth, potency, authority, intellectual superiority, immovability—thus replicating the features of the father (or mother or older sibling). You can hate or attack this group as you cannot hate or attack your family members. The greater the oppression within your family the stronger will be your animosity towards the chosen group. So, it is not so much the broken family that fuels political evil as the intact family—not the dissolution of the family but its continuing stranglehold. When you can’t escape its clutches your need for a sublimated outlet will be at its strongest. Thus, we can predict that young people will be the most vulnerable to engaging in political evil, because they are the most enmeshed in family power dynamics; they are ripe for “radicalization”. And this will be accentuated according to the degree of control and oppression existing within the family. Hatred of out-groups will be higher in societies with oppressive family structures—in what we now think of as traditional families. For example, racism will be more prevalent (other things being equal) in societies that beat children for minor infringements (I’m thinking of eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain). The psychological mechanism is clear: family power dynamics, resentment, cognitive dissonance, sublimation, proxy objects, racism (or any -ism that comes to hand). The psyche will be only too happy to latch onto anything that will reduce the cognitive dissonance produced by the traditional family. But notice that there is no easy way out of this problem for the psyche, since families have to impose some sort of dominance hierarchy (just as in animal families). There is really no other way to bring children up; it’s built into the family unit. This explains the persistence of political evil: power asymmetry is a universal property of families, and cognitive dissonance is a psychological fact, so sublimation onto proxy objects will always be an attractive option (even a necessary one). Combine this with the depersonalizing peculiarities of group-directed intentionality and you get a potent psychological brew for breeding political animosity. People will readily hate the neighboring tribe as long as they have been subject to family oppression, but oppression within families comes with the territory (or at least felt oppression). Still, we can predict that minimizing the oppression, especially actual violence, will work to moderate political hatred, though it cannot eliminate it. Also, explaining the source of political hatred might help mitigate its hold over people, because it reveals its irrational roots; it isn’t that the hated group really warrants the hatred. Such hatred will be less contagious the better it is understood, because its true nature has been exposed.[2]

[1] Notice how common it is to describe the “enemy” as “animals”: this enables people to deny that they are targeting actual human beings. The tendency is well satirized by Monty Python in the Holy Grail film when John Cleese, as a Frenchman, taunts the British soldiers as “pig dogs”: this is puzzling to them because it has never occurred to them that they might be regarded as sub-human. The French meanwhile are regularly described by the English as “frogs”, because they actually eat such things! This is all grist for the manufacture of dehumanizing stereotypes, which are invaluable in licensing political evil. Such are the powers of human intentionality.

[2] This essay was prompted by recent events, but I have intentionally avoided discussing actual historical examples of political evil so as not to get distracted by complex and controversial factual and ethical questions. It should be obvious what kinds of events I have in mind. Of course, many factors enter into the causation of human actions situated in historical contexts; my purpose has been to identify the central psychological mechanisms. In a fuller account, behavioral contagion and other forms of conformity would also be added to the picture. It is undeniable that stereotypes spread with the greatest of ease. Why?

Accent Philosophy

I propose to open up a new field of philosophy: accent philosophy—the philosophy of accents.[1] This may sound like a dull subject, but in fact it sets the pulses racing: for accents penetrate to the heart of what we are as human beings–as living, breathing, speaking people. It is actually a deeply political subject, and hence controversial. Because I mean to raise a normative question: are some accents better than others? Yes, you read right: I intend to enter the territory of prescriptive pronunciation. Surely to condemn it! you expostulate. Actually, no, I intend to argue that accents are subject to normative assessment: some are better than others, objectively, absolutely, non-relatively. Orthodoxy denies this: accents can be described but not prescribed (or proscribed). Prescriptive grammar is bad, and so is prescriptive phonology (how the voice sounds when speaking). That is the politically correct non-elitist non-snobbish and obviously enlightened thing to say. But is it true? Tradition supposes otherwise: it used to be thought that some accents sound more intelligent, refined, mellifluous, and pleasant than others—which are variously characterized as coarse, crude, unintelligent, ugly, grating, annoying, unpleasant, and other such epithets. Surely, I am not proposing to go back to that! Well, not quite, but not so far distant from it: I do think that there are good and bad ways to speak accent-wise, so we can reasonably criticize a speaker for speaking one way rather than another. Moreover, whole regions—whole countries—can be criticized for how they pronounce words. So, as I say, accent philosophy, as I conceive it, is likely (certain) to raise hackles: it seems to go against everything we have been taught to believe about democracy, equality, tolerance, liberalism, and basic human decency. Am I really going to argue that Cockneys don’t speak proper and Geordies need elocution lessons and royals set the standard for correct pronunciation? Am I saying there is something wrong with people who don’t pronounce words in a certain way? Let’s wait and see. First, we need to establish some terminology in which to frame our accent philosophy; I have already introduced some of it. Thus, we have accent prescriptivism and accent descriptivism, and these can be more or less global: it might be thought that a particular accent is defective in one respect but not in others, so that it is only partially defective; or it may be riddled with bad sounds. We also have accent-quality relativism and absolutism: relativism says that accent evaluation may be acceptable within the group using it but there is no absolute standard of accent goodness; absolutism insists that there are objective community-independent criteria of accent evaluation, so that a whole community can be condemned for speaking badly. It may be that some individuals or groups rank lowest on a scale of accent goodness; and this may even be measurable. Accent subjectivism holds that accent quality can consist in nothing but subjective reaction—how it sounds to a particular hearer—while accent objectivism holds that accent quality is a matter of objective fact and may fly in the face of people’s subjective reactions. It might even turn out that Queen Elizabeth II had the worst accent of all! (Don’t worry, royalists, that isn’t going to happen.) In other words, the familiar philosophical categories can be carried over to accent philosophy. I will be defending a limited absolutist objectivist prescriptivist position—but you will be relieved to hear that I do not advocate corporal punishment for children who can’t talk right. No punishment for vowel deviance or consonant delinquency; this is a kind and gentle prescriptivism. Before I embark on this quixotic task, let me dispose of a common error about accents—the idea that there is nothing to the evaluation of accents than class distinctions. We call an accent good when an upper-class person uses it and we call an accent bad when a lower-class person uses it. Now I don’t want to say there is nothing to this point, but I don’t think it goes deep enough. Consider this thought experiment: a rich respected person speaks like a drunken sailor from Ipswich (I pick that town at random) while a lowly kitchen maid speaks like her majesty the Queen—do we really want to say that we would judge the former accent superior and the latter inferior? If not, why not? Isn’t there something internal to the speech of these two individuals that signals vocal merit or the lack thereof? Soon I will venture some suggestions about what this might be, but just intuitively doesn’t that sound wrong? Isn’t Lawrence Olivier’s accent intrinsically superior to that of the bloke in the pub mumbling and mewling and mangling his words? One reason for this is that certain features of speech impede communication: slurring words, omitting syllables, speaking too softly, or too quickly. Since the main purpose of speech is communication, these features will detract from the purpose of speech and therefore count as defects. So, there is an objective measure of vocal quality, viz. ease of communication. If an accent has features that impede communication, it is to that extent defective; those features ought to be removed or remedied. What might these be? I will start with some imaginary cases. What if someone developed the habit of pronouncing every vowel the same way? He might say, “I pied the piper to piper the rime” meaning to say “I paid the piper to paper the room”. Obviously, this would impede communication, since many distinct words would be pronounced in the same way, confusing the hearer. It would be necessary to appeal to context to disambiguate what is said. Call this “vowel merging”: then we can say that vowel merging is an accent defect because it makes communication more difficult. Or consider consonant-dropping: a speaker has the habit of dropping terminal t’s and d’s from words, saying things like “I apprecia- the suppor- from the crow- and the ban-” intending to say “I appreciate the support from the crowd and the band”. This is likely to cause confusion in hearers who don’t have this habit, especially when the word uttered sounds like a word which actually lacks a terminal t or d (“high” and height”, “cry” and “cried”). It is an accent that will impede communication. Now a real example: words like “fit” are pronounced like “feet”—the i-sound turning into an ee-sound. Clearly, this will lead to much confusion in hearers, because there are many pairs of distinct words in English that will end up being pronounced the same way (“it” and “eat”, “sit” and “seat”, etc.). This is an accent that speakers should strive to correct; it is a defective way to pronounce words—according to an objective criterion. It is also extremely common among people who speak English as a second language (especially native speakers of Spanish, Italian, and French). But it isn’t just foreigners who have bad accents that interfere with communication: native English speakers have much the same problem. In fact, I chose my imaginary examples to illustrate defective actual accents of the same general type: vowel-merging and consonant-dropping are common features of spoken English. To avoid tedium, I will be brief. Everyone knows the tendency among certain groups to pronounce “rain” as like “Rhine” and “line” as like “loin”, but recent British pronunciation has introduced an ee-sound into the oo-sound, so that “roof” sounds like “reef”. We also have the tendency in some regions (Essex?) to pronounce “know” like “Neigh”. It is very common in England to drop terminal t’s, so that “port” becomes “pour”. Put these together and you get “noy” for “night” and “toy” for “tight”, or something close to that. In some dialects the word “know” gets perilously close to “gnaw” (Geordie). In American English “hot” becomes “hat” (pronounced the English way) and “hat” becomes “het” (i.e., the e-sound is introduced into it); and t’s get transformed into d’s (“wetting” sounds like “wedding”). There is no o-sound, so that “ontology” sounds like “untulugy”. The result of all this is that there are fewer phonetic resources in American English than in British English, which makes reliance on context more imperative. This is not ideal, though in practice comprehension is not much affected, at least among native speakers. No doubt the reason these kinds of deviation from the ideal are not more extreme and frequent is that this would impede communication much more seriously, as in my imaginary cases. You can’t go around pronouncing all vowels the same way or making do with only two consonant sounds! All workable accents have to respect the needs of communication, which are that semantically distinct words generally have distinct pronunciations; ambiguity can only be tolerated so far. As a matter of principle, then, accents must abide by these rules and are defective to the extent that they don’t—objectively, absolutely, and prescriptively. There is such a thing as mispronunciation. And the larger your audience the more you have to obey these basic rules: you can’t expect your hearers to be fluent in the accent you grew up with. By all means stick with the accent you were inducted into, but bear in mind that vowel-merging and consonant-dropping are not good ways to proceed. You don’t have the right to speak in whatever way appeals to you. Expect to modify your accent as you move around the world (Geordies take note). I suggest developing accent virtue, obeying accent rules, and attending to accent consequences: it is virtuous to pronounce distinct vowels distinctly (Italians always do); you should obey the rule that proscribes consonant-dropping; and it is morally responsible to weigh up the communicative consequences of patterns of speech. In other words, cultivate good speech habits and avoid bad ones. This is an area of the normative, and prescription is sometimes advisable. A sound accent philosophy will be based around a principle of objective rightness in how we speak. So: keep your vowels pure and your consonants clear; and don’t think the accent you grew up with is sacrosanct.[2]

[1] The OED defines “accent” as “a particular way of pronouncing a language, associated with a country, area, or social class”. This covers a lot of ground; I will only deal with a limited aspect of the general phenomenon here. I leave aside purely aesthetic questions and focus on questions of efficiency. It is an interesting fact that most speakers of a given language deplore the way certain others speak it, though not usually the way they speak it. Is this just stupidity? Maybe they are right to be thus censorious. Accent philosophy (part of the philosophy of language) will address such questions.  

[2] I myself first spoke Geordie (up to age 3), then I spoke Kentish, then there was an infusion of Lancashire; now I speak in the way I think best (not a trace of American). I often see British correspondents, on American news shows, with excruciating British accents that Americans apparently don’t notice; I think, “Come on, surely you can do better than that!”. As for Queen Elizabeth’s accent, it strikes me as hilarious, though I don’t hate it (or love it)—at least it sounds like she is trying. Nice vowel purity and meticulous terminal t’s. Bit prissy, though—can she hear what she sounds like? Probably not.