Reconciling Pluralism and Liberationism in Education

On December 29, 2015 By jsonbeckerIn EducationLeave a comment

As part of my writing project over a short holiday from work, Adam asked me to discuss a piece he wrote back in November on this site.
It’s helpful to return to Tamara’s piece where I think she best describes the tension Adam struggles with:

However, if part of a university’s responsibility is to reflect society as it should be, to not just boast diversity, but actively work to promote inclusivity, then it’s reasonable that students would expect their university to take measures to ensure all students feel welcome. This sentiment seems to be at the core of calls for trigger warnings, explicit racial quotas in admissions and employment, and other efforts to fulfill the university’s role as reflection of societal progress. Following this line of reasoning, college administrations have a duty to create a safe space for students, which either equals or exceeds its duty to cultivate an intellectual space. Looking at it this way, it’s less difficult see why some college campuses seem to be coming apart at the seams right now.

If I were to shorten Adam’s main points, they would be as follows:

When justified on the basis of discovery, there’s a natural link with the notion of pluralism in ideas as a tool for finding the best ideas. When justified on the basis of freedom, however, we get closer to the goal of greatest diversity in ideas and people as an end in itself. Pluralism in ideas, people, and governments for pluralism’s sake.

First, pluralism can be interpreted as similar to federalism, inasmuch as pluralism values diversity in itself in demography just like federalism values diversity in itself of political systems.

The tension that Tamara identifies in her piece is, I think, between federalists in the domain of ideas on the one hand, and liberationists in the domain of diversity on the other. For the latter, diversity in demography is a tool for liberating minorities from the chains of a white patriarchal normative system— but also for liberating whites of each sex from that very system, by exposing them to groups who have been marginalized by it.

Second, this interpretation of pluralism, which Adam finds particularly effecting, stands in contrast to other popular rationalizations of demographic diversity, namely a politics of liberation. Diversity should be enforced as a means of liberation itself for those who are oppressed.

Under this rationalization, the activity of introducing diversity in demographics is, itself, illiberal to pluralism of ideas because it is privileging a singular set of intellectual beliefs. Indeed, third, education itself, when conceptualized as a liberating activity:

[Precludes pluralism in education b]y imposing a single form of education on all, …forcing any tensions over competing visions into the scale of the nation, rather than the locality.

Ultimately, the problem lies with authority, without which a federalist/pluralist and liberationism are doomed. After all:

Pluralism of all stripes is often anti-authority, or at least an attempt to minimize the problem of authority. But the problem of authority is inescapable; even more so for those who take seriously the value of diversity. A serious understanding of such value must be connected to a serious understanding of its limits.

I would argue that diversity in the classroom is first and foremost a necessary condition for learning. In the ideal environment, students are provided with varying interpretations of the information they are being taught. More than that, students are asked to critically analyze the interpretations before them, and, eventually, to determine which is the most accurate or compelling. Fundamentally, this is what we expect learning (particularly in a higher education setting) to be. Each of these steps, providing multiple interpretations of information and critiquing these interpretations, is greatly dependent on diversity of both faculty and students.

What worth is inquiry in a classroom full of like-minded individuals? Without multiple views expressed, questions lose their power and purpose, and there can be no learning. We fail because students have arrived with one set of beliefs, and left with the same beliefs, unchallenged, no further developed, and given institutional approval without institutional critique.

Perhaps this argument is unconvincing. Why is diversity in demographics a requirement for diversity in ideas? Consider one of my favorite blog posts ever written, which succinctly describes privilege in the language of mathematics that I myself had always used to understand the meaning of privilege. In discussing say, income inequality, a homogeneous classroom filled with individuals who were raised with limitless opportunities could at best theoretically conceptualize alternative views to an argument that “equal opportunity for success exists in America.” Their entire life was surrounded with confirmatory evidence, where effort and caring were the only obvious prerequisites to success with high school academics and non-academic barriers to college attendance were non-existent. What occurs in a classroom like this is, at best, a sort of slum tourism without any real meaning.

We don’t need liberationism to justify diversity in education, we need diversity to ensure education.

I’ll get back to liberationism in a moment, but first it is important to recognize that this justification of diversity, that it ensures education, does not require a pluralism or federalism that values diversity in itself. Diversity is not a value based on freedom of ideas nor is it a value based on a mechanistic argument that suggests diversity is more likely to find the best ideas. Instead, diversity is of value because education as a process requires challenge and critique, whether they serve to change minds or deepen conviction (hopefully through further development). Whereas the pluralism/federalism Adam describes values diversity almost endlessly, the value of diversity to cause education is quite bounded. It is completely appropriate to discard views that are unable to pose serious intellectual threat. There is little value in considering say, conspiracy theories when discussing the Apollo missions.

That’s a loaded example. But there is also little value in teaching detailed theories that depend upon the existence of lumineforous aether, regardless of the fact that they represented cutting edge at one time.

Diversity of demographics, or even ideas, within institutional education can be justified on a far narrower set of beliefs that do not require the same anti-authoritarianism conflict of a broader pluralism.

So diversity is justified on a weak form of Adam’s pluralism/federalism case that does not rise to valuing diversity in itself, but instead values diversity that leads to a meaningful impact of conflicting view points that are necessities for learning. These views must be both experiential and intellectual for rich learning. In this weaker conceptualization, anti-authoritarianism is far less central. In fact, we have a highly individualized conception of knowledge construction that depends upon individual analysis and an individual determining which truth is the most compelling.†

Does this absolve the university setting from actively seeking diversity as part of a liberationism framework? Actually, not at all. We can satisfy the pluralist needs of the classroom without liberationism, but we can also satisfy these needs through liberation. Rather than understanding liberation as a central embedded component of pedagogy or the learning process, we should understand liberation as the result of being educated.

Without debating signaling versus human and/or social capital accumulation, it is clear that formalized education provides positional benefits in the labor market and in “social markets” such as forming partnerships and nuclear families. Even when education does not directly empower, it certainly can serve as an obstacle to accessing fully participation with a whole class of society. If we believe there is a moral imperative similar to say, equality of opportunity, it’s quite obvious we can imply that there is a strong requirement that universities accept diverse student bodies and a diverse teaching force since education is a mediator of opportunity.

I don’t think this implies, by the way, that universities are compelled to generate “safe spaces” beyond enabling learning to happen. The process of education as it exists generates opportunity through complex mechanisms that are not entirely separable. There could be aspects of confronting a culture of power and authority that is critical to educations “opportunity generation”. Importantly, if we accept the argument for diversity as a process required for education to occur, we have to be vigilant about discarding the very conflict that allows learning to happen.

The challenge facing education is not accepting the notion that not all ideas are created equal or are worthy. I have ceded that in this very post and definitions of academic freedom already largely acknowledge this fact as a prime distinction between academic freedom and freedom of speech. Instead, the challenge is the demand of the academic left that their ideas have already met a high burden of authority that necessitates the eradication of certain view points as worthy of consideration in the classroom.

The conflict is not between liberationism and federalism. It is not pluralism run amok. It is, in fact, a crisis of authority, but not in the existence of authority but instead of whether absolute authority belongs to the current strand of the academic left. They certainly seem to think so, but far from everyone is along for the ride.

† This may not satisfy Adam, who I think will read this conceptualization as falling pray to the same problems of authority. I disagree. The very insistence that views are critiqued and alternatives presented is a statement of authority on how we build knowledge and learn. We don’t have to remove individual involvement in identifying legitimate authority and authoritative claims by asserting authority. That’s too strong a form of this challenge much like his pluralism/federalism is too strong a conception of the value of diversity of thought. Some ideas *are* worth more than others, so much so that we can discard some from even being presented. That does not mean that authority implies a lack of conflict in the education process between people, ideas, experiences, etc. The existence of more than one conflicting authoritative claim practically defines areas of worthwhile study.

Author’s Note: It is rare that I can go back directly to a piece of writing I did for a weekly assignment for a college course from my sophomore year (almost a decade ago!) and find almost everything I want to say. So thank you to UC170 and the “weekly response” I wrote on Diversity on October 16, 2006.

When No Argument Can Save You

On December 29, 2015December 29, 2015 By Adam GurriIn DialogueLeave a comment

This week I had the pleasure of listening to my friend Noah appear on EconTalk to discuss the status of economics as science with my former professor in that discipline, Russ Roberts.

I would characterize neither of them as epistemologists or philosophers of science, but perennial practitioners. The chief difference between them, other than age or Noah’s ability to draw on a knowledge of physics as well as economics, is one of faith.

Noah himself brought this up: all science requires a leap of faith somewhere, as he put it. The example he used was Galileo’s experiment demonstrating that two balls of different mass will fall at the same rate. There’s only so far you can go to prove that this represents a universal law, or even a very general one. What if it only applies in our part of the universe? What if it only applies when there is a human observer?

Noah isn’t saying this makes us helpless or that we have to willfully ignore such thought experiments—nor should we.

The arc that Russ Roberts has gone through on this subject since I took his class during the crash in 2008 to the present can be characterized as a loss of faith—rather than the embrace of a given intellectual framework.

Russ has become unwilling to make that leap of faith when it comes to economic methods and arguments. But more importantly, he has lost faith in the sense of trust—trust in his fellow economists. Most importantly of all, he has lost faith in his own judgment.

The questions that he seems to come to again and again—why economists can’t agree on the effect of the 2009 stimulus, whether any study has ever completely won over people whose perspective was at odds with its conclusions—are attempts to establish, or prove once and for all the absence of, the credibility of economics as a field.

I’m not sure there’s an answer that could satisfy him. There’s a certain self-fulfillingness to losing trust in this way, much as widespread generosity in granting trust seems to perpetuate itself. How such trust can get established in the first place is a mystery, one that I’m certainly not going to get to the bottom of in a blog post.

How We Think: a Simple Model

On December 22, 2015December 22, 2015 By Adam GurriIn Hermeneutics1 Comment

Forgive the clumsy workings of a mind untutored in philosophy of mind. But it has always been my way to read, and think, and argue, and then try to pull the threads together and see what emerges. What I lack in training I will try to make up for with brevity.

Crucial for understanding anything is understanding the context. The context is what is meant when people speak of the whole truth as opposed to partial truths. However, context—the whole truth—is boundless, and so whenever we attempt to grasp it, we’re always projecting and simplifying.

A partial truth might be dropping something, and a projection of the whole truth would be classical physics.

We can make sense of the centuries long tug-of-war between Enlightenment rationalists and empiricists from this perspective. The rationalist argument boiled down to the idea that we can never make sense of observed truths, which are always partial, without working out the whole truth abstractly beforehand. Empiricists basically believed the opposite; you add up a lot of partial observations until you get the whole truth.

Philosophical hermeneutics for the past century has taken another path, saying, in essence, you need both at once.

As Jonathan Haidt points out, people don’t really have a rational model of morality in mind when they make in the moment ethical judgments. His observation could be extended to nearly any judgement; more of the whole gets left out than is brought in explicitly. But there is an important two-way relationship between part and whole here. So how does it work?

Crucially, we externalize most of the tools for our thinking; Andy Clark calls this “extended cognition.” Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson point out that the most important way individual knowledge is externalized is through the social environment; that is, through other people. In large part this is accomplished by trusting the people in our lives and the people we perceive to be authorities on a subject, and having faith that the apparent contradictions or limitations to what is known can either be worked out, or aren’t very important.

But neither the trust nor the faith are blind. When we are confronted by partial truths, or assertions by people we trust, that stand in conflict with the whole truth as we understand it, or as other people we trust have explained it—they are subject to reevaluation.

Essentially, what the typical person brings to the fore in confronting the partial truths in their daily life is not an actual model of the whole, but prejudices. Hans-George Gadamer speaks of prejudices in just this sense as “pre-judgements,” similar to how a judge will make provisional judgments that influence the decisions he makes throughout the trial, before actually rendering a final verdict.

These prejudices aren’t simply mindless assumptions or “givens”, nor is the process by which we come to them. They always point back towards some skeleton projection of a whole truth, which can be fleshed out and scrutinized. Haidt leans hard on the fact that people will cling to their prejudices even when unable to come up with any reasons to justify them. But the fact that I might not be able to remember how to solve a quadratic equation in the moment does not invalidate mathematical reasoning as the correct way to solve such an equation. Nor does it mean I should abandon my belief in mathematical reasoning!

Context matters, and part of specifically human context is the knowledge that we have largely externalized. Haidt and his researchers are presumably complete strangers to their subjects, and the subjects in question knew that they were inside of a psychology experiment. Would the subjects have treated the matter differently if they were in a setting they trusted to be private, discussing the questions with a priest, a teacher, or other trusted moral authority who challenged their prejudices and explained the reasoning for doing so?

The very best projections of the whole truth that humanity is capable of mustering can get incredibly complex, and take years of training to really understand. Physics, chemistry, advanced mathematics, computer science, but also moral systems, offer up huge, interconnected sets of theories. Connecting these systems to people’s prejudices is a matter of persuasion. Non-specialists must be persuaded that specialists have authority on a given subject, and specialists must also persuade one another on any given point of contention.

Persuasion isn’t a matter of cold, logical syllogisms, but of rhetoric. But that doesn’t mean it is irrational. It appeals to thought processes as they actually occur in people. Among specialists, of course, this will often involve a great deal of technical details. But technical details alone cannot tell the whole story of what we ought to believe or why we ought to change our point of view.

In every case, the one attempting to persuade will draw on narratives and metaphors and examples from life that make the subject, as well as what is at stake, concrete for the people he wants to persuade. They will employ a situated reason. But reason, none the less.

The Space Peoples

On December 22, 2015December 22, 2015 By Adam BlackstoneIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

In January of this year now coming to an end, I wrote about Rockets and how low-cost access to space will be a game changer. At that time there were no rockets that could fly to space and return safely to Earth, ready to fly again. Today, twelve months later, there are two.

The Blue Origin New Shepard and the SpaceX Falcon 9 are not really in the same league. The Falcon 9 is twice the size, ten times as powerful, flies in a parabolic arc flight path, and (most importantly) is capable of boosting its second stage to orbital velocities. The New Shepard cannot do any of that, and basically just flies straight up like a bottle rocket until it just barely kisses space, and then falls back down. But let’s just put that aside for a moment and think about the fact that two new entrants to the rocket business have in a decade finally done what half a century of Boeing and Lockheed Martin flying spec missions for NASA (and equivalent arrangements in Europe, Japan, and China) have not: advanced the art of what is possible.

To recap from my previous posts, reusability will reduce the cost to reach orbit on a per-unit-weight basis by a factor of 100. Rocket fuel is cheap, accounting for less than $200,000 of the current $60 million price tag, so amortizing the hardware and R&D over many flights will bring prices down a small multiple of that. This will in turn expand the market of space customers beyond the current crowd of military, NASA, and cable TV people. Use cases will expand, including mining asteroids for fuel and valuable resources, private space stations, and cheap satellite internet constellations. The size and frequency of our space missions will increase. NASA could end up have twenty times the number of scientific probes in action as they do today, with the same budget. Companies like Tethers Unlimited could self-fund (without waiting for NASA grants) their own in-space experiments on things like SpiderFab, which would in turn lead more quickly to extremely large space structures for science and communications. And course eventually it could lead to people living on Mars.

This may seem like a bit of a stretch at this time, but I feel we are at an important inflection point in human history. I am reminded of the civilizations that flourished around the Eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age, and then collapsed; of the Roman Empire that flourished and then collapsed; of the Islamic Golden Age that came and went; and of the rise of the British Empire and its continued global dominance through its successor state, NATO.

In each of the above cases, there was a time of bright flourishing that was ushered in by an expansion of trade and resources. The larger the network of trade, the more wealth that was produced even absent significant technological change. Basic task specialization and comparative advantage at work. But technological change followed too, from the greater number of people who were having ideas and discussing those ideas with like-minded people. Well space doesn’t have any people to discuss ideas with (yet), but it does have a great deal of resources. The Moon can be mined, and manufacturing operated there, without concern for Earth’s environment. The Sun’s solar power can be captured in space with greater efficiency, and in far greater amounts, than on Earth. (It may seem far fetched at this time, but Google and Facebook moving their server farms to orbit could solve a number of problems in one go.) Further in the future we could start building destinations for colonization, taking the population burden off Earth. And so forth.

When England expanded its resource base ten-fold by colonizing North America, its wealth and influence was permanently increased. What happens when all of Earth taps into the ten-thousand-fold greater resources of the Solar System? It’s of course impossible to know for sure, but I feel confident in predicting that it will be a genuinely good thing for both the entrepreneurs seeking opportunities and the regular folks who trade with them. Let’s hope this golden age doesn’t come to an end too soon.

Fantasy, Myth, Ritual

On December 21, 2015December 23, 2015 By Andrew FitzandrewIn Media, StorytellingLeave a comment

The Roman world, when the early Christians exploded onto the scene, was a world awash in myth and ritual. When Christians came proclaiming that they had one additional god to which they prayed, it was natural for the Romans at the time to ask exactly which one they had in mind. Jupiter perhaps, or Apollo, or one of the mystery cults like Dionysus, or some other God, like the God of the Persians or of the Egyptians. The Romans were entirely used to new myths coming along, or new sub-cults seeking to elevate one of the deities above the rest. The pagans dealt with this tension, these competing cosmologies, by separating truth from religion, from rituals. The philosophers, lovers of truth, wanted to encounter the divine through reason, and therefore rejected the myths, even as they demanded duty to the God their reason identified.

The paradox of ancient philosophy is that intellectually it destroyed myth, but also tried to legitimize it as religion, as ritual. If you could pay homage to the cult of the emperor it didn’t really matter whether you actually believed that the emperor was divine, and fulfilling your duty to Neptune demanded sacrifices, not anything so prosaic as intellectual assent to his creation myth. This uneasy balance was destroyed by the early Church, who insisted that the God they worshiped was not a God of myth, but Being itself, the God that the philosophers had begun to apprehend. That their God demanded, not sacrifice but belief. That true religion was not empty ritual, not merely a useful custom that must be performed for the sake of edification, but was actually true. As Tertuallian formulated it, “Christ called himself Truth, not Custom”.

This reconciliation between truth and myth was always fraught, as a faith that professed itself as Truth needed to carefully ensure that reason was never entirely unbounded by myth, and once myth could no longer constrain truth, to change the myth to fit the new truth. But there is only so many times that the myth can change, and only so quickly, only so many parts that can be hived off before the whole myth is called into question, and the ritual stands empty once more. A culture that was not prepared to entirely sacrifice the idea that myth and Truth should be at cross purposes created a new myth, which subsumed the old and imbued the traditional rituals with new meaning. The old God of the philosophers was replaced with a new telos, Reason, Liberty, Equality, Progress. But the new gods were as austere, only slightly more atheistic than the pagans found the Christian god. One can provide their assent to mystical Equality, but that mystical union that accompanies the dissolution of self and submersion into a larger whole must come from rituals that involve other personalities, and the God of Equality is not personified. Ritual union, if it is to occur, must be union with a community, not union with an ideal.

The new gods require new myths, but as the new gods are social gods, the new myths no longer need to be true. The new myths are created rather self-consciously to serve as myth, intially by Christians seeking to preserve what wisdom they could by implanting some of the old myths into the new, what JRR Tolkien called Mythopoeia, but the myths that survive are ones that serve the appropriate social function of bringing together a community to engage the ritual and propagate the myth. This can be political, like the myth of class solidarity or natural rights, or the apotheosis of founding fathers into paragons of virtue, like George Washington and the cherry tree, but just as often is not explicitly so. The most popular myths and rituals are cribbed from Germanic pagans, Christmas trees, Easter Eggs, the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus. Liberated from the need to be true, and from the need to appear true, the new myths are instead selected for their role in ritual, until the ritual and myth become entirely severed from any tether to any teleological end, a self-sustaining ritual cosmology, protected from collapse by the complete lack of any expectation of coherence.

One of the functions of ritual is to bridge the gap between the fact of continued inequality in an egalitarian age, and the yearning for unity, of the kind which can only be found amoung equals. It is in this context that the new myths thrive, by creating a world so alien to our experience, that they can be encountered without our baggage. The triumph of the new myths is to make the characters so archetypal, the story so uncomplicated, that a vast swath of people with widely varying backgrounds and experience can immediately identify and lose themselves inside the story unreflectively, providing a common experience that can be shared across lines of gender, class, occupation, generation or race otherwise unavailable. A world where lawyers, doctors and engineers cosplay cheek by jowl with installers and plumbers, retail workers and draughtswomen, lost together in a fantasy of power and triumph which transcends them.

Scott Weiland, RIP

On December 21, 2015December 21, 2015 By John David Duke JrIn AllegoryLeave a comment

I don’t have to accuse you of anything. You are already accusing yourselves all the time.

Scott Weiland (RIP December 3) was one of my personal favorites, coming up there in the heady days of grunge bathos, and I chose him over Blind Melon’s Shannon Hoon (RIP 1995) and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder (still alive). Of course, our generation’s Jim Morrison had already led the way, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain (RIP 1994).

Weiland’s wife, in her distress (I hope), wrote a note, which reads, in part, “Our hope for Scott has died…”

How can hope die? How can hope for a person die? Is this a possibility? From my perspective, there is always hope for Scott, even if there is very little hope, and even if he is already dead. Who knows what he met when his heart stopped?

His wife continues, “We are angry and sad about this loss, but we are most devastated that he chose to give up.”

That’s his wife.

Oh, wait. Ex-wife. Why is she commenting? I don’t know, but that’s harsh, bro, really harsh, the pinnacle of wifely arrogance and judgmentalism, that a drug addict could choose anything. She then instructs those who loved him, for whatever reason, to take a kid to a ballgame rather than memorialize their love for him.

It is curious to me, and I see it as a similarity, that Kurt Cobain would write a song, essentially declaring “Married = Buried,” then choose to use the muzzle end of a shotgun to eat a shotgun shell, whence his wife garnered some notoriety with her band, Hole.

Like I said, I don’t have to accuse you of anything. You already accuse yourselves all the time.

Forgive Me My Humean Trespasses

On December 20, 2015December 22, 2015 By Adam GurriIn Philosophy3 Comments

The gap between 25 and 30 is not very big in absolute terms, but it can certainly seem that way.

That is how I felt as I reread a post on morality that I wrote five years ago. Back then, I was pretty devoted to David Hume’s philosophy, and had been for some time. Part of it was due to many conversation with my father, for whom Hume loomed large as well. Part of it was that I’d actually read Hume, and not much else where philosophy was concerned. And in spite of that lack of familiarity with the alternatives (a shortcoming not shared by my father) I had an utter certainty in it.

This in spite of the fact that the very philosophy I was certain of had, as a cornerstone, the idea that reasoning was powerless to discover or demonstrate much of anything. This cornerstone eventually led me to conclude that there was no such thing as reason at all. Looking back, I want to ask that 25-year-old—how can you be so certain, when you are so unfamiliar with the arguments to the contrary and don’t even believe that certainty is ever warranted?

Martin Cothran made basically this argument, when he and his son Thomas engaged my father and I in discussion back at that time.

Against Unreason

One aspect of my framework of the time was the notion that utter inconsistency didn’t matter. In talking about the relationship between God and morality, I argued that there was no logical connection between the two, and also that logical connections don’t matter.

Responding to my piece, Martin Cothran made a move that has lately become familiar to me:

I’m not sure I understand exactly what he is saying here in regard to the role of reason in moral discourse. If logic is “irrelevant to whether or not I believe in either God or morality,” then why should anyone find his point that there is “no logical inconsistency in the fact that I don’t believe in a divinity but do believe in morality” persuasive? If logic is not operative in the discussion of the relation between God and morality, then why is the absence of logical inconsistency in a position on this relation commendable?

Though I had not read a word of Foucault at the time, I think this position was more in his court than Hume’s. I held onto this point about inconsistency for a very long time, but after our own Drew Summit began sending me works in Aristotelian and Thomist metaphysics, I began to see the absurdity of it. The last straw for me was Elliot Michael Milco’s fantastic thesis, “Michel Foucault and Thomas Aquinas in Dialogue on the Basis and Consummation of Intelligibility“.

As Martin pointed out, it’s rather hard to make any assertion at all with teeth if you don’t care about consistency. My argument about inconsistency undermined my argument about the logical connection between God and morality—if consistency doesn’t matter, then there could both be no logical connection between God and morality, and be a completely crucial logical relationship between God and morality—simultaneously. Productive analysis would prove impossible.

In discussing this point with my father, he argued that it doesn’t apply to human relations. His example was that it’s possible to both love and hate someone. But this isn’t a true inconsistency—no one would argue that love and hate are mutually exclusive. And if you do argue that, then you are committed to defending the idea that you can’t both love and hate someone at the same time, by definition.

Moreover, I very strongly believed that I had made a case for my Humean framework. I made what Joseph Heath identified as a typical non-cognitivist mistake; I used general-skeptic arguments and thought I only undermined my opponents’ position.

Aporia, the beginning of so many philosophical investigations, is precisely the discovery of seeming inconsistencies. Not everyone needs to be bothered with such things, to be sure. But the advance of our knowledge requires us to attempt to uncover whether inconsistencies are merely superficial, or whether some deeper revision in our framework is necessary.

Man Cannot Flourish On Moral Sentiments Alone

The most particularly Humean aspect of my framework at the time was what I later learned was called non-cognitivism. It’s the idea that we don’t think something is wrong because of judgment or beliefs, but because of feelings. As my father put it in his contribution to the discussion five years ago:

We don’t reason our way to condemnation of child abuse: we grow angry at the sight of it. Later, we may devise rational arguments to persuade others – sometimes ourselves – of the rightness of our opinions and actions. But I feel the wrongness of child abuse with a delicacy that, say, an ancient Spartan would have lacked.

As the Sparta example was intended to indicate, there is a strong cultural element involved in the shaping of our moral sentiments. In this way, morality is reduced to unthinking feeling combined with unreflective cultural practice (rather than theory). They combine to form a non-cognitive cocktail.

Among the evidence that he brings to the fore is Jonathan Haidt’s “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail,” in which Haidt points out that people jump to moral conclusions first and rationalize after the fact.

In response, Thomas Cothran argues that we mixed up moral psychology with moral philosophy.

This opposition is founded upon a category mistake. The question of why people believe in certain moral principles belongs do the discipline of moral psychology; the question whether those moral principles are true belongs to moral philosophy. Obviously people can believe in true things for false reasons: just because one’s belief that Caesar existed is predicated upon the belief that the television show “Rome” is a documentary does not make the historical arguments any less valid. Further, people often believe in true things on the basis of beliefs that don’t have much to do with the truth or falsity of the subject: people might believe in relativity theory because Stephan Hawking believes in it, but the fact that Hawking has an opinion on the subject doesn’t bear on the truth or falsity of relativity theory. The process of evaluating the truths of beliefs is distinct from the process of evaluating how different people come to their beliefs.

From our very different projections of the whole truth of morality, Jonathan Haidt’s study has commensurately different implications. For my father and I, it seemed to confirm the Humean processes at work. For Thomas, it seemed like an ad hominem attack on moral realism, because it attempted to discredit it by means of the psychology of particular people.

I have come around to Thomas’s point of view. The idea that Haidt’s study on moral reasoning discredits moral realism now seems to me akin to making the argument that Kahneman’s studies showing people are bad at statistical reasoning is evidence against the validity of statistics.

Moreover, I have come believe that all of non-cognitivism’s core premises are simply false. First, desires are not non-cognitive. As our own Sam Hammond put it:

It’s tempting to think of desires as following a linear chain down to some base foundational affect, implanted somewhat arbitrarily by evolution. But this is an elementary error.

While true that evolution has equipped us with certain somatic states (like hunger pangs), desire (like “I desire to eat”) contains propositional content. Like beliefs, desires are part of a holistic web that we draw from in the discursive game of giving or asking for reasons. In turn, desires like beliefs are capable of being updated based on rational argumentation and the demand for coherence.

This is actually quite close to what Aristotle believed.

Let’s take the child abuse example my father provided. We don’t just see a thing and unthinkingly get angry about it. In order to get angry, we have to have grasped what the situation is. The anger comes from the belief that child abuse is wrong and that it is occurring. This is crucial—in many cases of child abuse (or other wrongs), the thing is allowed to keep going on precisely because we don’t want to acknowledge that a loved one or an important person in the community is capable of doing such a thing. People go out of their way not to notice or acknowledge something going on right in front of them, because to notice would be to acknowledge a duty to act. How we construe a situation is not simply reflexive; we have a dual responsibility as audience of the situation as well as part-authors of our own.

The Spartan example points to how pliable even the belief that child abuse is bad can be. But culture, convention, and tradition are not simply unthinking practice. Like desire, they have a cognitive content, they have intentionality. As Adam Adatto Sandel puts:

Despite all appearance and without explicit “innovation and planning,” tradition is constantly in motion. What might seem to be blind perpetuation of the old, or mechanical habit, always has a “projective” dimension. Handing down tradition really means adapting it to the current circumstances, maintaining it in the face of other possibilities. And through such preservation, tradition is constantly being redefined: “affirmed, embraced, cultivated.” Although this process operates, for the most part, unconsciously, it is nevertheless critical. The distinction between tradition and reason is ultimately unfounded.

For an in depth treatment of this very subject, see this post. Suffice it to say that in as much as Martin and Thomas Cothran buy into Alasdair MacIntyre’s vision of tradition, I think they, too, fall into error.

But in an email, Thomas provided a picture of Aristotle’s method that strikes me as the correct one:

First, Aristotle doesn’t have a rigid system, his inquiry is responsive to the conditions of the everyday world. Second, Aristotle’s method does make room for cultural difference, but not in a way that precludes finding some ultimate truth. A culture may have good or bad practices and beliefs, but in any case they can neither be accepted uncritically or ignored in favor of some abstract rule. And finally, Aristotle’s method requires that we evaluate his arguments for ourselves — he never encourages his readers to accept things on his own say so, and his thinking is designed to be taken up critically.

In terms of “finding some ultimate truth,” I interpret him as saying that we can find moral truths that are not culturally relative. However, we do not have some logical foundation that puts such truths beyond doubt, and what knowledge we obtain—ultimate or otherwise—is fallible knowledge, just like human knowledge in any domain.

The Tragic Nature of the World

My father asserted:

Every morality is erected on ideals. Every ideal is an unattainable model of behavior. Every good person is inching toward an ideal vision of himself: that person-as-he-could-be.

To which Thomas responded:

[T]he assertion that “[e]very ideal is an unattainable model of behavior” is manifestly false: many ideals (such as the ideal that people ought not murder each other) are more attained than not.

I think this is a nit-pick, and that Thomas misses the tragic vision of the world behind my father’s statement. Human arrangements and ideals always have gaps in them that cannot be filled; an ideal that is “more attained than not” is often either undemanding, or—in the case of murder—is often attained at the expense of some other ideal. The police and prison apparatus that we built up in this country over the past couple of decades is rife with abuses of its own, some quite horrible. But I don’t want to quibble over particular points—the larger image of human beings as inherently imperfect and imperfectible, but also as striving and struggling towards betterment, is the right one.

It is because of this tragic nature, however, that authority is an ineradicable aspect of human life. Martin Cothran asked me how, in my framework at the time, “any moral statement can be considered authoritative over human behavior.” My father answered with a call to embrace contingency:

By embracing contingency, nothing is lost. No moral proposition can ever be “authoritative over human behavior” – Cothran’s phrase – in the absolute way that gravity has authority over bodies in space. An ideal must always be chosen, and always there will be those who refuse to do so: bad persons, weak persons, good persons in a weak moment.

I have come to think that authority—of ideals and of persons—is an ineradicable aspect of human life. But I wouldn’t call it authority “in the absolute way that gravity has authority of bodies in space.” At minimum, it is contingent on the existence of the human race. And a good Aristotelian would say that a great deal is indeed contingent on the circumstances—without ruling out the possibility of ultimate (but human) truths.

Who is the True Scotsman?

On December 13, 2015December 14, 2015 By Adam GurriIn Philosophy7 Comments

My highest ideal is an ordinary life. I do not think there can be anything more meaningful, more worthy, than being a good spouse, parent, neighbor, employee, and citizen. Those are among the chief ideals that I take to be characteristic of the ordinary life.

Other people look at the ordinary life through a rather different lens. They see, in its history and present, a smorgasbord of prejudice, superstition, ignorance, and domination.

Who is right? What is the whole truth about the ordinary life?

The Politics of Characterization

When looking into the history of the #NotAllMen hashtag, I came upon this post by a feminist. The line that jumped out at me:

It might not be your fault that things were systematically placed before you were even born, but it is your fault for not doing anything to change things now.

My question is—how systematically are we talking, and how much change?

There’s one line of feminism that sticks to the ordinary life, but seeks to renegotiate the terms. In the 19th century, common law in America essentially reduced the legal identity of wives to that of their husband—especially when it came to property ownership. This was one of the first major targets of first-wave feminism, along, of course, with suffrage. Today, husbands and wives are—at least legally—much more like equal partners in the eyes of the law, in terms of ownership and in terms of citizenship.

But the basic outline of the ordinary life persisted. It was not the target, not of feminism of this sort. From this perspective, there are still problems—the way girls and boys are raised to conform to certain gender-specific stereotypes and roles, the way top leadership in companies and government is still disproportionately made up of men and this biases the picking of future leaders—but we can strive to overcome those problems without radically revising our way of life. And in the meantime, women can vote and hold property even when married, they can prioritize having a career in a way that was once only a socially viable option for men, and in general they are able to set their own terms to a much greater degree.

There is another, more radical line of feminism which holds that the ordinary life itself is intrinsically patriarchal and oppressive. While this is more associated with second wave feminism, it has been there from the beginning—a minority of first wave feminists believed that the institution of marriage itself was little more than a tool of domination. Since then, there are plenty of feminists who believe that about all of the basic ingredients that go into the making and preserving of our way of life—how we conduct our commerce, the form of our government, our basic values. These backbones of our way of life must be implicated in the disproportionate wealth, influence, and power of men. We can only make real progress if we break, discard, and replace them.

We can think of these two approaches as beginning from similar pieces and projecting different visions of the whole. Many basic facts are agreed upon by each side as well as intellectual opponents of each—men make more money than women, on average. Moreover, when it comes to people who make very high income, the disproportion is much more pronounced. Congress is constituted of a big supermajority of men, and a woman has never been president. Company top executives and boards of directors look much like Congress.

One picture of the whole that can emerge from these facts is that the entire system is set up, brick by brick, to arrive at this outcome. And the only way to avoid that outcome, therefore, is to tear the whole system down and build it back up from the ground—the right way, this time.

The same set of facts can support a picture of a way of life that is, in the big view, the best we can hope for, but in which the details matter substantially. Within the basic frame of family, working to provide value for other people in order to make your living, and participatory citizenship, a huge range of specific outcomes are possible. Some terrible, some wondrous. Most somewhere between, with some truly wonderful things marred by real ugliness that is neither rare nor enough to render the way of life morally bankrupt.

The challenge of characterizing the ordinary life from a feminist perspective is similar to the challenge of characterizing contemporary feminism itself. Is it made up of reasonable intellectuals who criticize the ugliness in our lives, such as Elizabeth Anderson or Martha Nussbaum? Or is it made up predominantly of online shamers, bloggers who think all heterosexual intercourse is rape, or people like this programmer who wouldn’t use an open source license unless she could specify that men were not allowed to use her code? In absolute terms, the latter group is no doubt larger than the former. Of course, the largest part is likely a group of people living and seeking largely conventional lives who believe sexism is a huge problem but haven’t invested much energy in fleshing out a theoretical framework on the matter. That’s how it is with most groups, from modern secular ideologies to traditional religions.

So then how do we characterize the whole (way of life, group, institution) from its parts?

Let’s start with Paul’s take on the matter, which refers specifically to feminism:

Another way to look at ideologies is as a living conversation, with participants coming and going, leaving in their wake not only the contours of doctrinal tradition, but the imprints of strong personalities, canonical ideas and rhetoric, and a shared history of how the conversation has evolved in different times and places (certainly different issues are salient before and after universal suffrage is achieved, for example). The boundaries of what lies within and without the tradition become established by common understanding, but the boundaries are blurry and can move over time. A better guide to what or who belongs within a tradition is reference to central, cherished figures or works. Jezebel is certainly feminism, but how do the ideas found on those august pages relate to Wollstonecraft, de Beauvoir, Friedan, Butler, hooks, etc.

Feminism is thus characterized by a canon and a conversation “in dispute”. That is all well and good, but the act of choosing a canon is itself politically fraught for its very centrality to characterizing the whole, and this still does not help us much in our goal of characterizing contemporary feminism as a whole. Whatever the legacy of canonical feminists, if the state of feminism today is more likely to produce people committed to abolishing the family than Wollstonecrafts, wouldn’t we say that something had gone terribly wrong? On the other hand, if contemporary feminism results in reforms to the enforcement of sexual assault laws that make things drastically better for victims, that would be cause for celebration. So it seems to me that simply establishing a canon isn’t enough to answer the question about what the living conversation of feminism is, as a whole.

In some ways, this is just a reference class problem. Who you put in the canon, and who your representative true Scotsman is, largely determine the character of the whole. Are you a lumper or a splitter?

The legacy of a group largely depends upon which of its extremes ends up dragging the larger part its way. And those extremes can get very extreme. So even when everyone is acting in good faith, critics will tend to split off the good extremists and lump in the bad, while apologists will tend to do the opposite. Why else would they be criticizing or defending the whole in question? Consider libertarianism: if you think libertarianism is primarily characterized by thinkers like John Stuart Mill, it’s a pretty respectable tradition. He was an extremist for his time, but his ideas have become basically conventional.

Critics of libertarianism, however, largely think it’s misleading to include J. S. Mill in the libertarian canon at all. Mill’s place within 19th century liberalism puts him in a much older, broader movement than modern libertarianism. These critics go the other way, and make people like Murray Rothbard, who thought central banking was intrinsically fraudulent and that parents had the right to let their children starve, a chief representative of libertarianism as it exists today. Even less charitable critics put Hans-Hermann Hoppe, an utter retrograde, in that role.

This dynamic of critics who lump the bad extremists in and split off the good ones, and apologists who do the opposite, plays out in struggles to characterize just about every group. And it is not merely an academic or semantic matter. Consider that it is the exact dynamic that plays out when talking about the relationship of Islamic terrorists and repressive Islamic governments to Muslims in general—and Muslims immigrating to the US in particular. If you care about preventing attacks that have a lot of casualties, and the character of our polity, but also about people seeking to escape repression and poverty, then you cannot write these questions off as merely semantic. Our ability to answer them is important.

I don’t think there’s a formula or method that we have recourse to, here. I do think that we need to take the nature of the problem much more seriously than we currently do. Like any important topic of investigation, it requires judgment honed by experience, and a community of people investigating the same or related questions who you can trust. Which is a big part of the problem—this question is by its nature politically contentious, and tends to bring out the worst in everyone. Good faith is harder to find than usual.

I can’t offer any easy answers, but I can offer a few cases where I’m fairly confident in my characterization of the whole. These will only be brief treatments; I’m not going to pretend they are knock-down arguments or that I’m some sort of scholar on any of these groups. But I don’t want to just emphasize the difficulty of this task, I want to show that we can set about answering these questions.

GamerGate

My original inspiration for this piece came after the Charlie Hebdo shootings at the beginning of this year. At the time I noticed that the structure of the arguments made to distinguish the average Muslim from extremists like the shooters was very similar to the way in which people participating in GamerGate try to argue that the death and rape threatening, doxing, and generally harassing component of it doesn’t characterize the whole. I considered writing something on this at the time, thought about what that would entail, and chickened out.

These days, on the Muslim side of things, I think Alex Tabarrok has the right view. In general, we vastly underestimate how dangerous the extremes of our own population are, and exaggerate the danger from other groups. On the other hand, I think there’s a strong case to be made that violence from radicals in Islam has jumped dramatically recently, the same way that far-leftist violence jumped in Europe in the 70s and 80s. I also think that the really big catastrophes—the nuking of an American city, say—are of sufficiently small probability, that differences between the odds of any one group’s extremist committing them are miniscule compared to the magnitude of the event itself. In any event, I don’t feel I have much to contribute to this discussion beyond these observations.

But I am much more confident in my characterization of GamerGate. It is at best a worthless movement, and in reality promotes nothing but vitriol. We needn’t even pile up the countless examples of that vitriol to make this case—we need only ask what it was supposed to accomplish. The most charitable reading of their fixation on the gaming press is that they feel that:

Media critics influence what sorts of games are made
Media critics have moved in a direction GamerGaters don’t like, because of feminists who have hijacked the narrative.

The “ethics in video games journalism” refers to the fact that a feminist indie game developer was dating a member of the gaming press. The implication is that part of how feminists are hijacking the narrative is by sleeping with the press.

When you add it all up, even when it isn’t outright offensive, you just have to ask “so what?” I have never agreed with cultural critics when it comes to my sources of entertainment. Not once. I never turn to them for advice in picking movies, or music, or anything. It’s clear that the status conferred by such critics does cause more of some types of art to be made than otherwise would be. Yet there are plenty of movies, songs, novels, and comics made that I love. So again I ask: so what?

The best possible GamerGater is just someone who thinks that gaming journalism is a high stakes affair, and is willing to defend the character of his group despite the obvious tide of vitriol it has produced. The worst are the producers of that vitriol and their most direct enablers and apologists. The apologists will often point to bad faith behavior on the part of critics of GamerGate, but that is irrelevant to the characterization of GamerGate itself. GamerGate stands to offer nothing of value to the world, and it has largely been a vehicle for encouraging toxic behavior.

Communism

“Real communism has never been tried” as a defense of the philosophy is, at this point, a cliché. And the intellectual influence of Marx and Marxists, while diminished since the fall of the USSR, remains strong in certain corners of academia. A friend who has a great deal of experience in the humanities describes the current norm as “a superstructure of Marxism and identity politics”. In certain circles at least, Marxism is still in play.

This despite the death toll adding up to some 100 million from communist regimes in the 20th century. Almost as bad as the deaths—perhaps worse, from a certain point of view—was the way of life the citizens of those regimes were forced to endure. To me, there is no line in any movie or novel more terrifying than “the private life is dead in Russia.” Moreover, the machinery of the communist state systematically eliminated any potential rivals, hollowing out the institutions of civil society and leaving a huge void when the regimes crumbled.

Communism in the 20th century was, in short, an unmitigated catastrophe, perpetrated by highly educated people who had read their Marx and Engels. To continue to cling to it is frankly shameful, in light of the plentiful critiques of commerce and conquest from sources that did not inspire atrocities on a mass scale. Communism’s ledger is too far in the red to be salvaged by modern Marxists. People should be no less reticent to don its iconography in public or cite its thinkers in the academy than they would be for fascism.

Libertarianism

My feelings are more mixed about libertarianism, but then, I’m closer to it.

I think that libertarians have provided many admirable defenses of liberty throughout their history. And during the height of communism and heavy-handed paternalism, F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman and others were among the most visible figures pushing back on behalf freedom. And these figures, and many others, have shown a remarkable capacity for institutional entrepreneurship. In the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, they spawned a wide array of congregatios de propaganda fide to invest in the important work of persuasion.

But ultimately, I am with with Will Wilkinson; modern libertarianism does not appear to have a good model of how politics fits into our life. This is a pretty big hole, given that politics is one of the core pieces of the human experience.

I have what I believe is a fair and representative canon in mind. I would exclude Hoppe, but include Rothbard and Mises. But the character of the whole is I think most represented by Friedman, Hayek, Stigler, and Sowell. And while these are towering intellectual figures, their biggest weakness is a defense of liberty which rests on its neutrality. It is this path which led to libertarians being among the worst offenders in making what I have called the empty defense. Without a substantive defense of a particular way of life, this brand of libertarianism boils down to treating things like the family, religion, or norms as merely instrumentally useful. As I have written, this is a flimsy defense, unlikely to be decisive.

The part of libertarianism more characterized by thinkers like Rothbard tend to approach liberty axiomatically. These days, the larger body of them engage primarily in lobbing potshots aimed at eroding the legitimacy of existing institutions without pursuing any viable path to alternatives. Not that they’re alone; that is the characteristic activism (if it can even be called that) of our times.

That is the last example of an ideology I wish to characterize here. Before wrapping up, I’d like to return to the question we began with: the character of the ordinary life.

The Ordinary Life

I said at the start of this post that the ideals of the ordinary life include being a good spouse, parent, neighbor, employee, and citizen. Obviously there’s a great deal to be fleshed out from this simple statement! I haven’t the space to do a proper treatment in this post, which is already too long. But there are some excellent treatments of this at Vulgar Morality. See his posts on public-mindedness, self-reliance, self-rule, tolerance, and most of all the proper moral sphere. From the latter:

My moral sphere is a small world, a limited space. The necessary virtues aren’t complex: humility with my family, integrity at work, neighborliness in my community – add loyalty to friends, and one has the basic package.

The ideals of the ordinary life are precisely the morality of the small world. The ordinary life is the simple life, the life of family, work, home, community and nation.

There is ugliness in the ordinary life, but the mere presence of ugliness is not enough to indict it. It is a human ugliness, which humans will bring into any way of life to greater or lesser degrees. The key questions for characterizing a way of life is whether there is a degree and form of ugliness intrinsic to it. If so, what are they?

Most of the problems people associate with the ordinary life are in fact problems intrinsic to the nature of authority and the use of power. The anarchist and Marxist vision was of power and authority spread so widely that exploitation and abuse would be basically impossible. It should now be clear, I think, that that vision is impossible to realize. Every attempt to realize it has created power imbalances even more massive, with a commensurately larger presence of ugliness.

There are certainly power imbalances intrinsic to the ordinary life. There is a power imbalance between parents and children, but also between parents and anyone else who might be concerned for their children’s welfare. As the Marxist will point out, there’s a power imbalance between employer and employees. As the libertarian is quick to point out, there is a huge power imbalance between a cop and a regular citizen they decide is suspicious.

But the track record of communities and polities that attempted to do away with law enforcement, employment, or the family is—to put it mildly—not good. The abuses of power that resulted were far, far worse than what we see in the ordinary life—20th century communism being one of the most extreme examples.

Suffice to say that I believe critics who call the ordinary life intrinsically wicked or exploitative are wrong. We need to accept that there are always going to be gaps in human life that cannot be filled. Human life will always be organized by authority, power, and trust—and all three will inevitably be abused by some.

With this realistic baseline in mind, the ordinary life stands out as a strong, worthy ideal. One that stands in need of a vigorous defense, rather than being passively taken for granted or becoming the object of ideological hostility.

Martial Culture and Gun Culture, A Response to Tyler Cowen

On December 10, 2015 By Andrew FitzandrewIn Dialogue, Politics1 Comment

This morning Tyler Cowen proposed a link between martial culture and the rate of gun ownership in American society.

I don’t myself so often ask “should Americans have fewer guns?”, as that begs the question of how one might ever get there, which indeed has proven daunting by all accounts. But I do often ask myself “should America be a less martial country in in its ideological orientation?”

Note that the parts of the country with the most guns, namely the South, are especially prominent in the military and support for the military.

More importantly, if America is going to be the world’s policeman, on some scale or another, that has to be backed by a supportive culture among the citizenry. And that culture is not going to be “Hans Morgenthau’s foreign policy realism,” or “George Kennan’s Letter X,” or even Clausewitz’s treatise On War. Believe it or not, those are too intellectual for the American public. And so it must be backed by…a fairly martial culture amongst the American citizenry. And that probably will mean a fairly high level of gun ownership and a fairly high degree of skepticism about gun control.

If you think America can sustain its foreign policy interventionism, or threat of such, without a fairly martial culture at home, by all means make your case. But I am skeptical. I think it is far more likely that if you brought about gun control, and the cultural preconditions for successful gun control, America’s world role would fundamentally change and America’s would no longer play a global policeman role, for better or worse.

It seems to me a martial culture would be hard to measure (at least for the 0 dollars I plan to spend measuring it), however we have what seems like a decent proxy (one Tyler himself proposed) in military membership. This was intuitively plausible, Switzerland and Finland for example have both relatively large reserve forces and high civilian gun ownership rates, so I went and checked whether there was a link.

That’s pretty underwhelming. Now there are some differences in how different countries deal with paramilitary forces and reserves, so lets restrict it to active duty armed forces

That’s actually impressively uncorrelated. Just OECD countries this time

OECD active duty armed forces, for thoroughness

Colour me skeptical.

P.S. I would love to re-run this with veterans instead of the currently serving, so if you happen to know of a decent dataset feel free to pass it on, or do the work yourself and let us know

The Empty Defense

On December 6, 2015December 6, 2015 By Adam GurriIn Philosophy2 Comments

While searching for wisdom on the subject of trust, I turned to a book by that name by Francis Fukuyama. This is where he popularized the idea of “high trust” and “low trust” societies, characterized by the ability of huge numbers of strangers in that society to cooperate.

Fukuyama begins by saying that neo-classical economics is right on most things, but is missing something important—the way sociology shapes economic relationships. So far, so good. But his approach to this “non-economic” determinant of economic behavior is vulnerable to Deirdre McCloskey’s critique of the neo-institutionalists in economics (see Paul and my discussion of that critique).

For Fukuyama, trust is simply the thing we accumulate in order to build social capital. What is social capital, you ask? Why it’s just the thing that allows us to cooperate on a large scale rather than free-ride or otherwise defect.

It is basically a black box. Just like tradition, as understood by Burke, was just a black box, irrationality and prejudice that formed the basis of rational behavior. And indeed Fukuyama explicitly defends religion as an irrational basis for economically and socially rational behavior.

But tradition is rational, not irrational. And so is religion. Religion and tradition writ large have inner logic—or internal narratives—that are not separable from the so-called functional aspects or power relations (perhaps more properly, relations of authority). Instrumentalist analyses like Fukuyama’s give you a decent approximation of the machinery—Joseph Heath, to my mind, takes this about as far as it can go in his analysis of norms and choice. But ultimately this machinery is not content-neutral, and to call it machinery or functional or instrumental leaves out an important part of the picture. To my mind, the most important part.

If the only defenders of religion left were people like Fukuyama, who simply see something instrumentally useful, religion would be doomed to fade into oblivion. Once religion becomes nothing more than a club, a vehicle for community building, it is destined to lose to organizations that compete specifically on that margin. Or simply to the desire to not be bothered by other people at all; perhaps to sit at home writing blog posts instead!

I can hear my fellow nonbelievers giving a shout of approval—so be it! But this problem is not restricted to religious apologetics.

I believe that the basic ideals of our way of life in this country are rich, meaningful, and important. The particulars of this are, to me, the core answer to a number of very important questions: what is the point of America as a political entity? To protect our way of life. What value does “American” as common cultural identity hold? It connects together hundreds of millions of people who share a commitment to the same basic outline of a way of life, and fosters an ongoing conversation about the best particular ways to fill out that outline.

In short, politics, society, and commerce, all have value in the way they come together to form and preserve a way of life.

But the empty, instrumental pluralism that has become increasingly popular among intellectuals and elites will not suffice to preserve that way of life. In as much as such people continue to go to bat for our way of life, it is a fragile, tenuous defense. Their commitment is like a lapsed Catholic who continues to go to church because they like the people there. As I said above, once a church becomes entirely full of such people, it cannot last. Nor can our way of life persist, if these are our only defenders left.

Because people do have substantive beliefs about what a good life should look like. And many of them are quite hostile to ours. I’m not just talking about groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS, which constitute one answer to the modern world cosplaying as pre-modern. I’m also talking about others on the radical left and right who see our way of life as fundamentally and irreparably immoral. Whether because they reject the tragic nature of the world and so blame any ugliness that exists on the status quo, or because they just have different answers to important questions than our way of life allows, they are not going to be satisfied by aspirationally neutral functional arguments.

Because in truth those arguments aren’t neutral at all, but presuppose some notion of the good. And unless that notion is defended directly, it will not last.

Even then, there are no guarantees.