Sunday, December 30, 2012








On the other hand, they write:





Thursday, December 27, 2012

Roger Williams Was Right: The Biblical Basis of Legal Toleration

The secularization of politics through the liberal policy of legal toleration is largely a product of Christianity.  Liberal secularism has arisen as an unintended order of the cultural evolution of Christianity.

The crucial step in Christianity's secularization of politics was the move from the Old Testament to the New Testament.  The Mosaic political regime in the Old Testament became a theocracy that enforced its moral and religious law through persecution.  By contrast, the Christian churches in the New Testament were voluntary groups that enforced moral and religious conformity among their members without legal coercion.

After the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in 311, Christianity eventually became the exclusive religion of the empire, and this allowed the Christian Church to use legal coercion against pagans and heretics, which included the execution of heretics.  The Catholic Church developed a theory of persecution that prevailed in the Middle Ages.

As a consequence of the Protestant Reformation, Protestants argued against the Catholic persecution of Protestants as heretics.  But once the Protestants gained political power, they persecuted Catholics, and the different Protestant churches persecuted one another.  This conflict provoked a debate over the possibility of a legal toleration that would allow for the peaceful coexistence of the differing religious traditions.  Eventually, this led to the development of the modern liberal doctrine of religious liberty. 

More clearly than any other Christian author in the Reformation, Roger Williams saw that legal toleration to protect the liberty of conscience was a return to the original position of New Testament Christianity as opposed to the Mosaic regime of persecution in the Old Testament.  For, as he declared in The Bloody Tenant of Persecution in 1644, "Persecutors seldom plead Christ but Moses for their author" (BT, 58).

Williams was one of those very few people in the Reformation who argued against persecution not only when he was its victim, but also when he had the power to become a persecutor.  He was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for condemning the Puritan rule there as a Mosaic theocracy that was contrary to the New Testament, and for arguing that the American Puritan settlers should pay for the land that they had stolen from the American Indians.  He then settled in what would become Rhode Island, established amicable relations with the Indians there, and founded a political community that extended legal toleration to all religions, although Williams was vigorous in trying to persuade those he regarded as pagans, blasphemers, and heretics to correct their moral and theological errors.  The radical character of Williams's argument was widely recognized: shortly after its publication, The Bloody Tenant was burned by order of the British House of Commons.

Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration was published forty-five years after Williams's Bloody Tenent, and the range of Locke's toleration fell short of Williams's.  Williams argued for tolerating all pagans, Jews, Muslims, Protestants, and Catholics.  But Locke refused to extend toleration to Catholics and atheists.  Williams never says specifically that atheists are to be tolerated.  Some scholars assume that when Williams speaks of tolerating "Antichristians," this must mean atheists.  But clearly for Williams, "Antichristians" refers to Catholics or "papists"--those who are "false Christians" submitting to the Pope as the Antichrist (BT, 134, 179).  But it's significant that Williams never specifically states that atheists subvert social order, as Locke does.

Moreover, that Williams's legal toleration would protect atheists as well as believers is suggested by his radical separation--or what he called "wall of separation"--between church and state.  He interprets Romans 13 as teaching that the civil magistrates have authority only of a "civil nature" for "the good and peace of their civil state," while the Kingdom of Christ has authority of a "spiritual and of a Soul-nature" (BT, 108-109).  Civil magistrates have charge of "the bodies and goods of the subject," while the spiritual officers of Christ's church have charge of "their souls and soul safety" (BT, 127).  The "civil sword" for "defense of persons, estates, families, liberties of a city" does not extend to "spiritual and soul-causes" (BT, 160).  There are "diverse sorts of goodness," and "civil or moral goodness" is distinguished from "spiritual goodness" (BT, 245-46, 331-34). 

If government is restricted to securing "civil peace" or "a civil way of union," then every church can exist like any voluntary group that has no authority to use legal coercion (BT, 72-73).  Like any voluntary group, a church can follow the pattern of the churches in the New Testament that used excommunication as the ultimate punishment for those who departed from the orthodox beliefs and conduct of the church (see, for example, I Corinthians 5:13).  But "excommunication is not persecution" (BT, 91, 116, 192).

Williams argued that Constantine and the good Roman emperors did more harm to Christianity through their persecution of heretics and pagans than did Nero in his persecutions of the Christians (BT, 184).  In adopting legal toleration, Christians can return to the true teachings of Christ and the early Christians, who refused to imitate Moses in setting up a national church.

Although Locke's toleration is not a radical as Williams's, Locke does see as well as Williams the contrast between the Old Testament and the New Testament.  Like Williams, Locke relies on the New Testament to support his argument for toleration.  In his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke cites the Bible at least 18 times, and only 5 of these are references to the Old Testament.  He observes that while the Jewish commonwealth in the Old Testament was an "absolute theocracy," "there is no Christian commonwealth" in the New Testament (42, 189).

Williams and Locke were able to support their argument for toleration with a plausible reading of the New Testament.  By contrast, it's hard to support any argument for persecution as compatible with the New Testament. 

One example of this is the parable of the tares and the wheat (Matt. 13:24-30).  Jesus compares the kingdom of Heaven to a man who sows good seed in his field, but then his enemy sows tares (weeds) among the wheat.  When they sprout, the wheat and the weeds are mixed together, and the man's servants offer to pull up the weeds.  But the man says that this should not be done, because any rooting up of the weeds will likely root up some wheat as well.  So he allows the plants to grow together until the harvest, when the reapers will gather together the weeds to be burned, and gather the wheat into the barn. 

While the interpretation of parables is often difficult, the meaning here seems reasonably clear: in this life, it is hard to separate true Christians from those who are not, but at the day of judgment in the afterlife, the true Christians will be rewarded with eternal life, and the unsaved will be eternally punished in Hell.  This was the interpretation Williams used to support legal toleration:  the unbelievers and the false Christians must be left alone and not persecuted, because at the time of harvest at the Last Judgment, they will be recognized by God and condemned to eternal punishment (BT, 112-13).

Augustine, however, developed a twisted interpretation of this parable to support persecution.  When the weeds are clearly identifiable as different from the wheat, persecutors have a Christian duty to uproot the weeds without disturbing the wheat.  This perverse reading of the parable of the tares was adopted by the medieval Catholic Church to support its theory of persecution.

Notice that Williams's reading of the New Testament allows him to combine legal toleration and moral and theological absolutism.  Often the critics of toleration complain that it rests upon moral and theological relativism--that toleration assumes that there are no absolute standards of right and wrong.  But with Williams, this is not true.  He was morally and theologically intolerant, even as he argued for legal tolerance.  He was sure that the New Testament provided absolute standards of right and wrong rooted in divine truth, and he was sure that the errors of his opponents would be punished by God in the afterlife.  But while in this life, he would try to expose these errors through persuasion, he had no moral or religious right to use coercion to suppress the liberty of conscience of those who disagreed with him.  This must be so, because freedom of thought is the precondition for Christian virtue.  There is no moral or theological virtue in being coerced into a hypocritical profession of belief.

This indicates the classical liberal or libertarian character of New Testament Christianity as manifested in Williams's writings.  This line of reasoning is elaborated in a remarkable book by Andy Olree, The Choice Principle: The Biblical Case for Legal Toleration.  Olree writes primarily for evangelical Christians, trying to persuade them that Williams was right about the New Testament teaching toleration, and that such toleration really is compatible with a Christian belief in the absolute moral and theological truth of the New Testament, as long as one understands that the New Testament teaching about freedom of choice supplants the Old Testament teaching about theocracy and persecution.

In defending "legal toleration," Olree expands the argument for religious toleration into a general argument for the legal toleration of both religious and moral pluralism.  Thus, Olree argues against the "legal moralism" of many evangelicals and of Catholics like Robert George who assume that any good regime must legally coerce people into virtue, by outlawing immoral behavior, which Olree rejects because it cannot work, because it promotes a denial of human liberty, and because it contradicts the teaching of the New Testament.

In arguing for a combination of liberty and virtue--liberty as secured by government and virtue as cultivated in the natural and voluntary associations of civil society--Olree takes a position that is similar to the Christian libertarianism of Frank Meyer and the Aristotelian liberalism of Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl.  They all argue that, far from being contradictory, political liberty protects the freedom of choice that is the precondition for moral virtue.

A commonly cited New Testament passage to support persecution and legal moralism is the teaching of Romans 13 that rulers are God's servants "to execute wrath on the wrongdoer."  One of the best parts of Olree's book is his interpretation of this teaching (84-88, 106-10, 113-15, 120-24, 146-47).  The primary question here is the meaning of "wrongdoing."  Olree argues that both the historical context and the textual context suggest that the "wrongdoing" that is rightly punished by government refers only to actions of people that directly harm or victimize others.

First, the historical context for this scriptural passage is that Nero is the Roman Emperor.  During Nero's time, Roman law was used to support pagan worship, which was sinful to the Christians, and it allowed for sinful activities such as prostitution, homosexuality, and abortion.  So, clearly Paul was not interpreting "wrongdoing" as all conduct that would be sinful according to the Bible.

Second, the textual context is that immediately prior to Romans 13--at the end of Romans 12--Paul condemns vigilante vengeance ("Do not repay evil for evil," because vengeance belongs to God).  Thus, by implication, Olree concludes, the rulers seen as God's servants in punishing wrongdoers in Romans 13 are exercising collective vengeance as a legal substitute for individual vengeance, so that the "wrongdoing" being punished by government is any wrong that would so harm or victimize people that they would naturally want to take vengeance.  Such "wrongdoing" would be acts of force or fraud that victimize others rather than personal sins.

Olree applies this libertarian reading of the New Testament to the legal and moral debates over suicide, homosexuality, drug addiction, redistributive taxation, prostitution, and abortion.  In each case, he argues for the "choice principle"--that law rightly secures individual choice or autonomy except in those cases where individuals have imposed some direct harm--by force or fraud--on others.  In the case of abortion, he takes no clear position, except to argue that whether we should legally prohibit abortion as murder turns on the question of whether human life begins before birth, which he takes to be a question that the Bible does not answer.

The plausibility of this libertarian reading of the New Testament as supporting legal toleration and religious liberty was dramatically manifested in the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church, particularly in the Declaration of Religious Freedom approved in 1965.  Under the influence of liberal Catholics such as John Courtney Murray, the Vatican Council declared that "the human person has a right to religious freedom."  In section 12, the Council stated:
Is the Catholic Church confessing here that its earlier doctrine of persecution was contrary to the New Testament--"a way of acting that was hardly in accord with the spirit of the Gospel or even opposed to it"?  Does this concede that Roger Williams was right about the New Testament supporting toleration and liberty, while the medieval Church and the Protestants who supported persecution were wrong?

Do we see a continuation in this movement of the Catholic Church towards Christian libertarianism in that Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have asked forgiveness for the Church's history of supporting the violence of persecution?

Some of these points are elaborated in other posts herehere, here, here, and here.

John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, ed. Mark Goldie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010)

Andy G. Olree, The Choice Principle: The Biblical Case for Legal Toleration (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006)

Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, ed. Samuel L. Caldwell (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), vol. 3.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Why Do We Tolerate Atheists? Locke, Bayle, and Darwin

"For hundreds of years, Hell has been the most fearful place in the human imagination.  It is also the most absurd."

That's the opening of the cover article for the Christmas issue of The Economist. 

After ridiculing the traditional depictions of Hell, the author concludes the article: "Just as there can be no light without dark, and no sound without silence, so everlasting celestial joys depend on a contrast of everlasting horror.  Without Hell, you can't have Heaven."

So just as there is no Hell, there is no Heaven.

What I find most remarkable about this is that this article in a popular magazine will not provoke any outrage--at least not in most of the Western world.  I assume that this article will be banned in those countries where blasphemy is a crime--even a capital crime.  Not long ago, however, in Western history, anyone who denied the reality of Heaven and Hell would be subject to persecution and even execution.

For most of us in modern Western societies today, the idea of persecuting people for questioning the doctrines of orthodox Christianity--such as God's eternal judgment after death--is incomprehensible.  Even the most devout religious believers generally agree that we must tolerate not only differing religious beliefs but even open atheism as an exercise in freedom of thought.

For me, this raises two general questions.  First, what exactly is the philosophic or scientific reasoning behind this modern policy of liberal toleration?  Second, is there any Biblical basis for this liberal toleration?  I'll take up the first question here.  I'll take up the second question in my next post.

Probably, the single most influential statement of the case for toleration in early modern political thought is John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration (first published in 1689).  We might expect, therefore, that Locke would give us the rationale for tolerating atheists.  Surprisingly, he doesn't do that. 

Locke does argue for tolerating Protestants, Muslims, Jews, and Pagans (including the American Indians).  But he thinks there is no justification for tolerating either Catholics or atheists.  Catholics are intolerable because their submission to papal authority make them disloyal citizens.  Moreover, no religious group is to be tolerated if it teaches intolerance, and the Catholic Church officially endorses persecution of heretics, which includes all Protestants.

Here's what Locke says about atheists:
That atheists cannot reasonably claim protection under a policy of religious toleration seems clear enough.

But what about the other point--that denying the existence of God dissolves the bonds of social order by subverting the grounds of promises, agreements, and oaths?  Elsewhere, Locke says that believing in the existence of God is "the foundation of all morality" (132).  Apparently, for this reason, in the Constitutions of Carolina, which Locke coauthored with Shaftesbury, every freeman of the Carolina colony was required to acknowledge God and join a church, although diverse churches would be tolerated (146-47).

In The Reasonableness of Christianity, Locke argued that one of the great advantages of Christianity was that its teaching about Heaven and Hell provided the only solid ground for morality.  "Upon this foundation, and upon this only, morality stands firm and will defy all competition" (185).  In this respect, the moral teaching of the ancient philosophers was inferior because they "seldom set their rules on men's minds and practices by consideration of another life" (183).  Of course, the word "seldom" here might remind us that Plato was the first philosopher to elaborate a teaching about rewards and punishments in an afterlife, and, indeed, much of the Christian teaching about Heaven and Hell was shaped by the Platonic tradition.

That atheism was not tolerable because it corrupted morality, and therefore should be prohibited by law, was a common assumption of almost all the proponents of toleration.  Sebastian Castellio's Concerning Heretics (1554) was the first full statement of the argument for a tolerant Christian society, which was provoked by John Calvin's execution of Michael Servetus in Geneva for heresy.  And yet Castellio was clear that blasphemers who openly turn away from God should be punished, and even killed, because such atheism leads to criminal immorality.  Roger Williams's The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644) was the most sweeping justification of toleration up to that time--including even Catholics, whom Williams identified as "Antichristians"--but even so, Williams never explicitly said that atheists should be tolerated. 

As far as I can tell, the first writer to explicitly extend toleration to cover atheists was the English Leveller William Walwyn, in Toleration Justified and Persecution Condemned (published in 1646).  A man "whose mind is so misinformed as to deny a deity or the scriptures," Walwyn argued, has committed the "worst of errors," but this does not justify coercive punishment (20).  Rather, the best response to such error is to use reason and argument to expose the error. Yet this is only a brief comment by Walwyn without any elaboration. 

The first full explanation of how atheists could be safely tolerated comes from Pierre Bayle.  In his Philosophical Commentary on Jesus's parable of the marriage feast ("compel them to come in"), first published in 1686, Bayle defended religious toleration as embracing all believers, including Catholics.  But in one passage, he did allow for punishing obstinate atheists (242-43).  This is hard to understand because his earlier book--Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet (1682)--was the first writing in the history of philosophy and science to defend the possibility of a decent society of atheists.

What Bayle says about how morality depends on natural passions or sentiments rather than on religious doctrines lays out a moral psychology that was later deepened by David Hume and Adam Smith, given an evolutionary explanation by Charles Darwin, and provided more theoretical and empirical support by recent research in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience.  Bayle sees himself as reviving a tradition of "natural philosophy" that goes back to the ancient Greeks.  The modern natural science of Hume, Smith, and Darwin continues that tradition.

Considered purely as a general or abstract idea, it seems plausible that belief in a final judgment by God with eternal rewards and punishments in the afterlife would support virtue, and therefore that atheistic denial of this doctrine would subvert virtue.  If all human beings seek happiness, and if they believe that obeying God's moral law will bring them eternal happiness in Heaven, while disobeying that divine law will bring them eternal torment in Hell, then one might expect that those human beings with such beliefs would always be virtuous. 

Bayle's argument, however, is that this general idea is contrary to what we know by experience, because we can see that Christians who sincerely believe in this doctrine of Heaven and Hell are no more virtuous than those people who doubt or deny this doctrine.  The reason for this is that our conduct depends very little on our abstract ideas and much more on the dominant passions of our nature.  This allows Bayle to argue that insofar as atheists are moved by natural passions that lead to virtue, they are virtuous in their conduct.

Bayle's argument is an attack not only on orthodox Christianity but also on Platonic rationalism, because the Christian belief in Heaven and Hell as the necessary support for virtue continues the tradition of Plato's teaching (particularly in the Laws, the Republic, the Timaeus, and the Gorgias).  Now, I know that some scholars--particularly, the Straussians--would say that Plato's teaching about immortality of the soul with judgment in the afterlife is not Plato's true belief but only a noble lie for the many.  But then Bayle would argue that Plato was wrong to think that this is a noble lie, because popular belief in the lie does not really motivate good conduct.  (The one weakness in Robert Bartlett's Introduction to his translation of Bayle's Various Thoughts is that he does not recognize that Bayle's attack on Christianity is also an attack on Plato.)

Bayle writes:
"One sees by now how apparent it is that a society of atheists would perform civil and moral actions as much as other societies do, provided that it punish crimes severely and that it attach honor and infamy to certain things.  As the ignorance of a First Being, a Creator and Preserver of the world, would not prevent the members of this society from being sensitive to glory and scorn, to reward and punishment, and to all the passions seen in other men, and would not stifle all the lights of reason, people in good faith in commerce would be seen among them who would help the poor, oppose injustice, be faithful to their friends, scorn insults, renounce the pleasures of the body, and harm no one, either because the desire to be praised would prompt them to all these fine actions that could not fail to earn public approbation, or because the plan to gain friends and protectors for themselves in times of need would lead them to such actions.  Women would pride themselves on modesty because they would without fail gain love and the esteem of men thereby.  There would be crimes of all kinds, I do not doubt it; but there would not be more of them than in idolatrous societies because all that caused the pagans to act, either for good or for ill, would be found in a society of atheists, namely punishments and rewards, glory and ignominy, temperament and education.  For as regards that sanctifying grace that fills us with love of God and that leads us to triumph over our bad habits, pagans are as deprived of it as are atheists." (sec. 172)
That appeal to "sanctifying grace" in the last sentence is what some readers see as evidence that Bayle was not himself an atheist, but was rather a Calvinist who saw human depravity as so deep that Christian virtue could not arise from belief in Christian doctrines but only from grace as a supernatural gift from God.  It is not so clear, however, that this grace makes much difference as far as the regular conduct of human beings is concerned (secs. 92, 157).

What Bayle says here about the natural motivations for morality that do not depend on religious doctrines is very similar to what Darwin says in his Autobiography in a section explaining his gradual loss of religious belief, and how his evolved moral sense could stand without religious support:
"A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones.  A dog acts in this manner, but he does so blindly.  A man, on the other hand, looks forwards and backwards, and compares his various feelings, desires and recollections.  He then finds, in accordance with the verdict of the wisest men that the highest satisfaction is derived from following certain impulses, names the social instincts.  If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives; and this latter gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure on this earth.  By degrees it will become intolerable to him to obey his sensuous passions rather than his higher impulses, which when rendered habitual may be almost called instincts.  His reason may occasionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others, whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the solid satisfaction of knowing that he has followed his innermost guide or conscience.  As for myself I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science.  i feel no remorse from having committed any great sin." (94-95)
In affirming his devotion to a life of science, Darwin indicates that he belongs to that small group of human beings whom Bayle identifies as having a dominant passion for natural philosophy or science (secs. 171, 175, 181).  Although the natural human passions are universal to the human species, each individual shows a distinctive profile of passions in which some are stronger than others, which creates a diverse range of temperaments and thus a diverse range of goods for different human beings.  Liberal toleration secures the freedom that allows the fullest expression of this diversity of human goods, protecting the philosophic few as well as the nonphilosophic many.

Darwin is also like Bayle in that both of them reject "particular providence" in favor of "general providence."  It is worthier of the greatness of God to work through the general laws of nature than to have to intervene arbitrarily into the world through miracles.  Like Bayle, Darwin can allow God to work as a primary cause in determining the laws of nature, while allowing the secondary causes of nature (like natural evolution) to work out the natural history of the world (Bayle, secs. 172, 230, 234).

If moral order depended on believing in certain religious doctrines (like Heaven and Hell), then liberalism would be indefensible, because we would have to assume that for the sake of social order we must use the laws to compel people to believe those doctrines, and thus individual freedom of thought would have to be seen as dissolving all social bonds.  An evolutionary account of how moral order arises from natural human desires through voluntary associations in civil society, without any necessity for enforcing an established religion, supports the argument for liberalism.

Pierre Bayle, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, trans. Robert C. Bartlett (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000)

Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1958)


John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. George W. Ewing (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1965)

Andrew Sharp, ed., The English Levellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)

A few of the many posts on related themes can be found here, here, here., here.,, and here.

Some of my posts on explaining religious belief as an evolved instinct of the human mind can be found here, here,  here., and here.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

The Glory of Suicidal Mass Killings

Adam Lankford's op-ed article in The New York Times seems to me to be one of the best explanations for suicidal mass killers like Adam Lanza.  What most appeals to me in Lankford's explanation is his assumption that the aberrant and even monstrous behavior of such people can be explained as exaggerated or distorted expressions of the natural desires that we all share.

Lankford's main idea is that suicidal terrorists and rampage killers have a lot in common.  Specifically, Lankford sees them as sharing three factors.  First, they generally are suffering from mental disorders or acute mental stress that make then suicidal.  Second, they believe that their suffering has been unfairly inflicted on them by others, and they want to take vengeance through murdering them.  These two factors explain the murder-suicides that are more common than suicidal mass killings.  The third factor that is distinctive to these killings is the desire for fame and glory.

I would explain these three motivational factors as linked to my list of 20 natural desires.  First, the natural desire for a complete life is expressed as a desire for self-preservation.  But we are also willing to risk our lives for a good cause, like the Sandy Hook teachers who gave their lives in defense of their students.  In protecting young children, they were expressing a natural parental desire.  And a very few of us can find our lives to be so painful that we might seek suicide as an escape from our suffering.

Second, our natural desire for justice as reciprocity moves us to want vengeance against those who have victimized us.  Apparently, Adam Lanza expressed this as a murderous rage against his mother.

The third natural desire manifest here is the desire for social status--for social recognition or honor within the groups to which we belong.  Adam Lanza was so socially awkward and socially detached that he became almost invisible, hidden away in his mother's house.  We can speculate, as Lankford does, that Lanza could imagine that killing lots of elementary school children could make him world famous after his death.  There is a twisted truth to this in that he could enjoy the prospect of gaining social recognition from a monstrous crime that would be known to the whole world.

I am reminded of the killer at my university--Northern Illinois--who killed five students in a crowed lecture hall and then killed himself.  It was reported that in his last days he was reading Friedrich Nietzsche, and thus he perhaps imagined that he would become an ubermensch by committing a crime that would show him to be "beyond good and evil."

There is another factor here that is easily overlooked because it is so obvious:  these suicidal mass killers are almost always young men.  Such behavior is an extreme manifestation of destructive propensities in the minds of young men longing for fame and glory.

Some of my previous posts on the shootings at Virginia Tech and NIU can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty: A Mont Pelerin Society Meeting in the Galapagos

In June, the Mont Pelerin Society will be meeting in the Galapagos Islands for a conference on "Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty."  I will be joining a distinguished group of speakers in considering how evolutionary science applies to the debate over classical liberalism.  My lecture will be entitled "The Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism."

The Mont Pelerin Society was founded in 1947 to promote classical liberal thought under the leadership of Friedrich Hayek.  Since Hayek applied evolutionary thinking to his arguments for classical liberalism, it's not surprising that the Mont Pelerin Society has organized this special meeting on evolution in the Galapagos Islands where Darwin gathered some of the evidence that he would use in developing his theory.

If you go to the website for the conference, you will see that one of the suggested topics for the meeting is "to understand the cultural evolution of open societies as a means to escape from the tribal order."  This reflects an idea from Hayek that I will dispute.

Hayek sometimes spoke of "freedom as an artifact of civilization" that required the "repression" of the innate desires and emotions of human beings as shaped by genetic evolution for life in prehistoric hunting-gathering bands or tribes.  This is the "Freudianism" of Hayek that I find unpersuasive.

Like Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, Hayek thought that the civilization of a free or open society was contrary to human nature as adapted for life in small face-to-face primitive groups.  The freedom of a modern civilized society was a purely cultural construction that required the repression of the natural instincts of the human animal.

By contrast, I will argue, the freedom of a modern liberal society can be rightly understood as an extension of the evolved predispositions shaped for prehistoric foraging societies--particularly, the predisposition to resist exploitation by dominant individuals.  This evolutionary history of liberty is manifest in the historical anthropology of the early liberal thought of Locke, Hume, and Smith.  Recently, evolutionary theorists like Christopher Boehm have shown how new research in evolutionary anthropology confirms this line of argument in classical liberal thought.

So I will be developing some ideas laid out in various posts, some of which can be found here and here.

Sunday, December 09, 2012

John Locke and the "Appeal to Heaven" Flag

As I have suggested in some previous posts, John Locke's "appeal to Heaven" shows a natural inclination to violent resistance to exploitation that is fundamental for classical liberalism.  As a manifestation of Darwinian natural right, this can be explained as rooted in an evolved animal disposition to aggressive retaliation against attacks, which arises in human beings as a natural propensity to vengeance against injustice.  Human beings can use their unique capacities for language and conceptual reasoning to express this natural propensity through abstract principles of justice, but these abstract principles are ultimately rooted in this evolved animal tendency to self-protection.

Locke's "appeal to Heaven" is his answer to what he takes to be an ultimate question of politics--"Who shall be judge?"  This is the question when there is an irresolvable debate over whether political power has been rightly used or not.  Locke's answer comes from the Biblical story of Jeptha (in Judges, chapter 11).  In the conflict between the people of Israel and the Ammonites, Jeptha is selected by the people to be their chief and war leader.  He negotiates with the Ammonites.  But when this negotiation fails to reach an agreement, Jephtha declares, "Let Yahweh the Judge give judgment today."  That divine judgment will come through war.  That's what Locke means by the "appeal to Heaven" when there is no "appeal on Earth."  (See First Treatise, sec. 163;  and Second Treatise, secs. 21, 109, 155, 168, 176, 232, 240-43.)

As far as I can tell this phrase "appeal to Heaven" is Locke's.  It doesn't appear in the Bible. 

It's similar to the way Confucius speaks of the "mandate of Heaven," as I have indicated in a previous post on "Confucian Liberalism."   If there is any heavenly standard of judgment to settle moral and political disputes, it's ultimately expressed in the natural tendency of the people to rebel against unbearable oppression. 

This is what I mean in my previous post affirming the truth of might makes right:  the threat or use of violent vengeance is the ultimate natural restraint on injustice.

Notice also how Locke interprets the Bible--at least the Old Testament--as a work of historical anthropology.  He assumes that what is being described in the history of the judges is the earliest emergence of government in primitive societies, where the natural drive for dominance in a few individuals motivates them to become war leaders chosen by their people.  Notice also how Locke interprets this as showing government by the consent of the governed, in that these informal leaders like Jephtha depend on popular support for their authority.  Thus the Biblical history coincides with what Locke sees in the history of the American Indians as a record of how government arose among the earliest human ancestors.

The influence of this Lockean idea in the American Revolution was vividly displayed in the design of what apparently was the first flag of the American navy in 1775--perhaps commissioned by General Washington--which had an evergreen tree of liberty and the motto "Appeal to Heaven."  Some of the variations of this design can be found here and here.

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Might Makes Right
















Thursday, November 29, 2012

Incest in Ancient Egypt and Persia: A Westermarckian Response to Paul John Frandsen

Six years ago, I wrote a post entitled "So What's Wrong with Incest?"  Amazingly, every week since then, that post has been one of the top two or three posts in the number of pageviews at my blog.  Apparently, lots of people are troubled by incestuous thoughts, and they are Googling the Internet to find some help in understanding their feelings.  One can see that in some of the comments on my post.

I was disturbed to learn from one of my students that my post on incest can be found on a website for incest pornography, where it is presented as defending incest!

The purpose of my post was to summarize some of the reasoning of Edward Westermarck for explaining the Darwinian evolution of the incest taboo, which elaborates an idea briefly suggested by Darwin himself. 

I first began thinking about Westermarck and incest in 1998, when I lectured at a conference in Helsinki, Finland (Westermarck's homeland), on Westermarck's legacy.  There I first met Arthur Wolf, the leading defender of Westermarck's theory of incest, and other younger scholars like Debra Lieberman, who became a leader in the field.

Westermarck argued that if close inbreeding tends to increase the probability of producing offspring with inherited physical and mental defects that lower the chances of survival and reproduction, then we might expect that natural selection would favor adaptations for avoiding such inbreeding.  And one way of doing that would be to favor a mental propensity to feel disgust towards the thought of having sex with those among whom one has been reared from early childhood.  Typically, this would create a sexual aversion towards close family members.  This emotional disgust towards incest could then be generalized across a society as an incest taboo. 

Westermarck developed this as a Darwinian theory of the incest taboo that would illustrate a general Darwinian theory of morality as rooted in evolved moral emotions.  This Westermarckian theory has become one of the best examples of evolutionary moral psychology.

In my book chapter on "The Incest Taboo as Darwinian Natural Right," I explained why I think Westermarck's theory is persuasive, particularly when one considers the scientific evidence and arguments for it as summarized by Arthur Wolf in Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association: A Chinese Brief for Edward Westermarck.

There are lots of objections to Westermarck's theory, and I tried to answer them in my book chapter.  But I did not say enough about the objection that the incest taboo cannot be natural, because incest and incestuous marriages have been common in some societies, such as ancient Egypt and Persia.

The evidence for this objection has recently been surveyed in Paul John Frandsen's book Incestuous and Close-Kin Marriage in Ancient Egypt and Persia.  But while I find Frandsen's book fascinating, I am not persuaded by his general argument, because he has not shown that the evidence he presents refutes Westermarck's theory.

Although Frandsen mentions Westermarck and suggests that his book refutes Westermarck's theory, he shows no knowledge of the details of Westermarck's work and of how Wolf's research supports Westermarck.  Consequently, Frandsen fails to see how the evidence he presents is actually compatible with Westermarck's position (see Frandsen, 21-22, 25, 49, 73-74,  81-83, 85, 111, 115, 125-29, 136, 167).  In his 395 notes, Frandsen cites Westermarck three times and Wolf once (nn. 31, 33-34, 389).  But as far as I can tell, he hasn't actually read either Westermarck or Wolf.

Westermarck predicted that although the incest taboo is universal, the details of the taboo will vary across individuals and societies.  The taboo against sexual mating within the nuclear family (mating with one's parents, one's children, or one's siblings) will be universally strong, although some individuals will deviate from this either because of their temperament or their circumstances.  Although the Westermarck effect is a natural propensity, the fulfillment of that propensity requires social learning..  People will not necessarily show the Westermarck effect if they have not been reared from early infancy in close association with their nuclear family members.

Moreover, Westermarck's theory predicts that there will be great variation in the extension of the incest taboo beyond the nuclear family.  For example, whether the marriage of cousins, of uncles and nieces, and of in-laws is taboo varies according to the kinship systems and social circumstances of different societies.

Apparently, Frandsen's book challenges the core of Westermarck's theory by showing the wide acceptance of marriage between nuclear family relatives in ancient Egypt and Zoroastrian Persia.  He shows that while brother-sister marriages were extremely rare over the 3,000 years of Pharaonic Egypt, they became more common among the members of the Greek communities of Graeco-Roman Egypt (from around 300 BC).  He also shows that father-daughter, mother-son, and brother-sister marriages were justified as religious obligations for Zoroastrians during the Sasanian Period (224-651 AD) of Persia.

Frandsen fails to see, however, that all of the evidence he presents can be compatible with Westermarck's theory.  For example, he relies on the research of historian Keith Hopkins on the evidence for brother-sister marriages as being a common practice in Egypt (48-50).  But he does not notice that Arthur Wolf and Walter Scheider have shown that Hopkins' research fails to refute the Westermarck hypothesis.

The Westermarck effect arises when children are reared in their first few yeas with siblings and other family members.  Many of the sibling marriages in Hopkins' data are between siblings with considerable age differences, which suggests that they were not reared together in their earliest years, and consequently the inhibitions to sexual intercourse and reproduction would not have been acquired. 

Moreover, there is some evidence suggesting that some of the sibling marriages of people close in age were between people who could have been reared by wet nurses in their earliest years, and thus they might have imprinted on the body odor of their unrelated wet nurses, which would interfere with the Westermarck effect.

Another problem with the Hopkins data is that it does not give us any evidence of the success or failure of these sibling marriages.  Did such marriages produce high rates of divorce, adultery, and infertility?  If they did, then they would follow the pattern that Wolf saw with Chinese "minor" marriages--where parents adopted an infant girl, reared her with their son, and then forced the girl and boy to marry at puberty.

The same problems arise with the Persian evidence.  Frandsen gives us no evidence that these marriages of nuclear family members were successful.  In fact, he sometimes quotes remarks about such marriages being "difficult and hard" (73, 85).  But he doesn't reflect on what this means.  He also admits that there is little evidence as to how frequent these marriages were (81-82, 115).

Occasionally, Frandsen acknowledges Persian texts that seem to point to the many children of these marriages being born physically and mentally deformed.  But, again, he doesn't ponder the implications of this.

The evidence from ancient Egypt and Persian shows that a society can force brothers to marry their sisters, mothers to marry their sons, and fathers to marry their daughters.  But if these people have grown up in close association from an early age, Westermarck predicts that most of them will not be happy in their marriages.  And even if they are happy in their marriage, many of them will suffer the unhappy consequence of producing seriously deformed offspring.

This gives us the general pattern for an evolutionary moral psychology.  By nature, we are endowed with evolved propensities to learn certain moral emotions, like finding incest disgusting.  By custom, we learn the traditional norms of our society, but those social norms are constrained by our natural propensities.  By reason, we exercise individual judgment in deciding how best to live happy lives within the constraints of our natural desires and our customary traditions.

Larry Arnhart, "The Incest Taboo as Darwinian Natural Right," in Arthur Wolf and William Durham, eds., Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo: The State of Knowledge at the Turn of the Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 190-217.

Paul John Frandsen, Incestuous and Close-Kin Marriage in Ancient Egypt and Persia: An Examination of the Evidence (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009).

Walter Scheidel, "Ancient Egyptian Sibling Marriage and the Westermarck Effect," in Wolf and Durham, 93-108.

Arthur P. Wolf, Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association: A Chinese Brief for Edward Westermarck (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).

"Natural Right and Biology"--Ken Blanchard's New Blog

"Natural Right and Biology" is the title for Ken Blanchard's new blog.  He will be writing about topics related to what he sees as the intersection of classical political philosophy and Darwinian biology. 

Obviously, this is similar to what I do on this blog, although I can anticipate some interesting points of friendly disagreement as indicated by his post on Lincoln and Aristotle.

Both Ken and I were trained as scholars of the history of political philosophy, and we both decided some years ago that the evolutionary biology of human nature could illuminate our study of political philosophy.  In particular, it seemed to us that modern Darwinian science might support a revival of the ancient idea of "natural right."

In our thinking about classical natural right, Ken and I were influenced by the scholarship of Leo Strauss and his students.  But unlike most Straussians, we did not see modern natural science--and particularly Darwinian science--as the enemy of the classical tradition of natural right. 

A crucial influence guiding us down this path was Roger Masters of Dartmouth College.  Roger studied with Strauss at the University of Chicago where he wrote his dissertation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's political thought.  Roger became one of the leading Rousseau scholars.  Then in the 1970s, he began to consider how modern biology might help him to think about the history of political philosophy--particularly, in supporting the tradition of natural right.

In 1978, I read a conference paper by Roger on modern biology and classical natural right.  I was hooked.  And from that point, I began to work through the points of contact between biological science and political philosophy.

In the summer of 1996, Ken and I were together at a NEH/NSF summer institute on "Biology and Human Nature" directed by Roger at Dartmouth.  The thinking that we did that summer--stimulated by conversations with the many smart people at the institute--laid the groundwork for much of what we've done since then.

In 2009, Ken edited and contributed to Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question, which presented some of the debate over my argument for Darwinian conservatism.

Ken's new blog will continue our conversation.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Spielberg's "Lincoln": The Nobility of Politics and the "Appeal to Heaven"

"The movie portrays the nobility of politics in exactly the right way."  "The challenge of politics lies precisely in the marriage of high vision and low cunning."

That's the message that David Brooks--writing in The New York Times--sees in Steven Spielberg's movie "Lincoln."  The power of that message depends largely on the extraordinary acting of Daniel Day-Lewis, who may well have given us the best film portrayal of Lincoln that we will ever see.  (It also helps to have an Aaron-Copland-style musical score composed by John Williams and played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.) 

This movie reminds me of why I regard my course on Abraham Lincoln as one of the best courses I teach--because it helps students to understand the nobility of politics in combining "high vision" and "low cunning."

It is hard for students to understand the nobility of this combination, because many of them want to see one without the other, and thus they are caught between idealism and cynicism.  The idealists assume that nobility is found only in a pure moral vision uncontaminated by practical cunning.  The cynics assume that there is no nobility in politics because it's all a matter of Machiavellian cunning with no moral purpose.  Lincoln's moral realism shows that both the idealists and the cynics are wrong.

Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln is the basis for Spielberg's movie, and it's one of the best books for showing Lincoln's combination of moral purpose and prudential realism.  It's one of the books that I have used in my course.  Apparently, this book is now a bestseller because of the movie.  This is a tribute to American popular culture, in showing how a popular but serious movie can direct many people to an even more serious treatment of a topic in a good book.

Some of the best parts of this movie come from the thoughtful material in the book.  One example is Lincoln's explanation of his reasoning for his issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation as a constitutional exercise of his powers as a Commander in Chief in time of war, and why the constitutional limits of that power made it necessary to have a constitutional amendment to achieve a complete abolition of slavery, which could not be done by presidential decree.

Another thoughtful scene in the movie presented Lincoln explaining his fascination with Euclid's geometry.  One of Euclid's self-evident postulates--that two things equal to a third are equal to each other--captured the self-evident truth that slavery is wrong:  if two human beings are equally human, then they are equal to each other as members of the human species.

Appealing to such reasoning shows how persuasion can be used to resolve moral disagreements in politics like the debate over the justice of slavery.  But persuasion is not enough, because human beings are too imperfect in both their knowledge and their virtue to finally settle their disagreements by persuasion alone.  And when persuasion fails, and the urgency of the issue requires some final resolution of the debate, then often the debate must be settled by violence, as was the case in the American Civil War.

Modifying Brooks' conclusion, I would say that Spielberg's movie portrays Lincoln in a way that shows the nobility of politics in the marriage of high vision, low cunning, and brute violence.  Showing Lincoln riding his horse to Richmond with piles of bodies all around him reminds us of the brutality of the war.

The importance of war in settling moral debates in politics is also conveyed in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.  The movie gives us the last few lines of this speech.  But it does not convey what Brooks rightly identifies as the acknowledgement in the speech of the "moral ambiguity on both sides."  "Both sides," Lincoln observed, "read the same Bible, and pray to the same God.  And each invokes his aid against the other."  But God cannot answer the prayers of both sides.  And ultimately God speaks his will here through war.

Lincoln is implicitly, I think, pointing to the Biblical story of Jephtha asking God to judge between the people of Israel and the Ammonites.  He makes an appeal to Heaven for judgment, and he leads his army out to battle (Judges 11:27).  This appeal to Heaven is always risky, however.  Even the leader of the winning side in a war is exposed to vengeful retaliation, as in Lincoln's assasination. 

As Mark Noll has argued, the American Civil War was a theological crisis, because in a country where the Bible was the ultimate moral authority, the Bible was open to conflicting interpretations on the issue of slavery:  the explicit teaching of the Bible was to support slavery, but some of the Bible's general teachings--such as the Golden Rule--could be interpreted by abolitionists as condemning slavery.  This dispute over the interpretation of the Bible was finally settled, Noll observed, by Generals Grant and Sherman.

This "appeal to Heaven" principle is fundamental to John Locke's teaching in the Second Treatise of Civil Government (secs. 19-21, 155, 168, 175-96, 232, 240-43).  In a constitutional crisis, where there is a dispute over whether the government is exercising force without authority, the ultimate judge is the contest of battle.  Consequently, the moral history of politics--as in the debate over slavery--is military history.  This shows the ultimate ground for Locke's law of nature and his political liberalism in the natural inclination of human beings to violence in resisting exploitation.  "In all States and Conditions," Locke writes, "the true remedy of Force without Authority, is to oppose Force to it.  The use of force without Authority, always puts him that uses it into a state of War, as the Aggressor, and renders him liable to be treated accordingly" (sec. 155).

We should remember that Locke was suspected by Charles II of conspiring with other Whigs for insurrection and assassination.  We should also remember that Locke denied his authorship of the Two Treatises, for fear of facing execution for treason, as happened when Algernon Sidney published his attack on monarchy and defense of republicanism in his Discourses Concerning Government.

Charles Darwin saw the importance of political violence, because he saw that moral progress in evolutionary history often turned on group selection through warfare.  He was a fervent opponent of slavery, and he used his Descent of Man to support the Euclidean logic of the argument against slavery, because he showed that the human races were not separate species but merely varieties of the same species, and thus endowed with the same moral and intellectual faculties, including the natural propensity to violence in resisting exploitation.   (As I have indicated in a recent post, there is now some evidence that even ant slaves rebel against their enslavement.)  Darwin cheered when he read the news reports of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the passage of the 13th Amendment, and the military victory of the North over the South.

I have elaborated some of these points in a previous post.  I have also written some posts on the evolutionary decline in violence as part of Darwinian liberalism and on whether the idea of human rights requires Biblical religious beliefs.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

The Biological Naturalism of the Lockean Pursuit of Happiness






















Sunday, November 11, 2012

Locke's Evolutionary History of Politics







































