A Review of Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, Part I

Patrick Deneen's new book, Why Liberalism Failed, has caused a bit of a stir, largely because it implicates thinking of those on both sides of the political spectrum on the problem of what is wrong with our culture. It won't make those who call themselves conservatives happy and it won't make those who call themselves liberals happy either. And the reason for this is that conservatism—at that strain of conservatism that fashions itself "libertarian"--shares the same basic assumption as the liberals.

The difference between liberals and libertarians—as I have said many times—is only three or four letters.

In fact the reason I'm blogging on it now, is my recent Twitter exchange with Andrew Walker, the former Baptist ELRC director who recently left that organization to return here to Kentucky to take a position with his alma mater, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Andrew and I worked together as lobbyists several years ago, and so we know each other well. I took the opportunity of yanking his chain about a tweet with an endorsement (and link) to Paul D. Miller's "Against 'Conservative Democracy'," an article which was remarkable largely for its lack of insightfulness. I see he has since redeemed himself by tweeting a link to the far more insightful thinker, the British philosopher Roger Scruton, even though what Scruton says and what Miller says are quite different, if not completely inconsistent.

Anyway, it prompted me to ahead and start on Deneen's book, which I will be reviewing in several posts over the next week or so.

Deneen takes an admittedly hard line against our twin liberalisms, one espoused by Democratic progressives and the other espoused by people who call themselves conservatives but whose thought bears little similarity to the thought of Edmund Burke and T. S. Eliot, the thinkers between whom Russell Kirk sandwiched the history of conservatism in what remains the greatest book about conservatism yet written: The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot. Most people who call themselves conservatives in the United States, in fact, are no different in their fundamental assumptions about politics--a prominent theme of Deneen's book. 

The central tenet of the book is that liberalism is immolating itself in the flame of "freedom" and more liberalism will just feed the fire. The problems with liberalism are inherent in its very nature, and cannot therefore be solved by anything within liberalism. "Liberalism," he says, "has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself." The "ruins it has produced are the signs of its very success."

The aspect of this book that I suspect will be most suspect—at least among conservatives—is the implications of his analysis for America itself. America "is the first nation founded by the explicit embrace of liberal philosophy, whose citizenry is shaped almost entirely by its commitment and vision."

According to Deneen, what we are seeing now in what all sides of the political spectrum recognize as, if not a crisis, at least a problem, is the breakdown of an ideology, and the kind of breakdown common to all ideologies:

Among the few iron laws of politics, few seem more unbreakable than the ultimate unsustainability of ideology in politics. Ideology fails for two reasons—first, because it is based on a falsehood about human nature, and hence can't help but fail; and second, because as those falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the live experience of human beings under its domain until the regime loses legitimacy.

Deneen argues that this is indeed what is happening: Liberalism is based on a false view of human nature and now in a crisis of confidence in politics, economics, education, and science and technology.

We'll talk about how in the next post.

Suffice it to say for now that the book is about not just the failure of liberalism and the inevitability of that failure, but also about the nature of true conservatism.

A Land Remembered, by Patrick Smith: Historical fiction at its best

This is another in a series of book reviews from books I have recently read.

I used to read a lot of historical fiction, but lost the taste for it a few years back. I still love Janice Holt Giles (40 Acres and Mule, The Believers, Hannah Fowler), not only because she is an excellent writer, but because she is a Kentucky writer. But the book that has gotten me interested once again in historical fiction is a book about the history of another state than my own.

Last August I was trying to figure out what short story I was going to use at St. John's Academy, a Florida school at which I do teacher training every year. Interestingly, every year, the discussion of a short story is what the teachers and staff enjoy the most. For several years, we have read stories from Kentucky authors that I like, but I decided I wanted to try to see about Florida writers and use something from a native author.

After a little literary detective work, it became clear to me that, in terms of litarary stature, Marjorie Kinan Rawlings ruled Florida's authorial roost. Her most famous book, of course, is The Yearling. I read several of her short stories, some very good, one particularly excellent. But the excellent one suffers from the vicissitudes of racial politics, and even though its point is entirely sympathetic to the plight of Blacks, its language is no longer acceptable. It's a shame.

I eventually went back to safe territory—to a short story from a Kentucky author that I knew well. But in the process of looking for Florida writers, I stumbled upon the book A Land Remembered, by Patrick Smith. The accolades were astounding. On Amazon, for example, it has an average four and a half star rating from almost 700 readers. I don't always trust popular reviews like this, but in this case, they were dead on.

My wife and I actually listed to the audio version of this book on a trip to the Midwest in 2013 read by George Guida, one of the best readers going. You don't have to even be interested in the history of Florida. I never was. This is just a great story.

The book tells the story of Tobias MacIvey and his wife, who arrive in Florida in 1858—and of the two generations that follow him. He is a "cracker" from Georgia who with his wife Emma, and through hard work and determination, strikes it rich in the cattle business. The story of the first generation is the most interesting part of the book, and you are swept into the hardscrabble lives of these people with a vengeance.

Good historical fiction is able to strike a balance between the story it tells and its historical relevance. It is easy for a story that clearly is intended to tell the story of a state to seem contrived by trying to be representative of the states people and their history. But this story never feels contrived. The hurricane scene and the mosquito scene that follows; the visit by the Confederate deserters; the cattle ruslters, and the mysterious Indian man, and the apply custard forest will stay with you forever. At every turn it is utterly convincing—even compelling. You forget that you are being told the story of a state, so involved are you in the story of the compelling characters.

The differences between the three generations of MacIveys tell a story of their own. There is a grit and fortitude in the character of the first generation that diminishes in the second, and that diminishes still further in the third, when we are left with Solomon MacIvey, a rich, unmarried and childless landholder whose corporate entities dot the modern Florida landscape, but who, in his old age and sickness is unmarried and childless, the last of the now sterile MacIvey line.

MacIvey is on his way to the original house his grandfather has built, there to die, but on the way, he stops in to see his Indian half-brother, who lives is a small village in the scrub, his people having been moved from their native home. They had grown up together, and Solomon has it in his mind that they can die together, but his half-brother must stay with his people.

Solomon's last act is a speech to a professional group that wants to honor him for his contributions to the state. But he knows now what his contributions to the state really are. He has betrayed his grandfather by helping to permanently destroy the very things that he had loved: the forests and the native people. He uses the occasion of his speech to bitterly criticize the assembled leaders for giving him their award—and for their own complicity in these crimes.

When I finished the story, it seemed to me that the characters of the first generation were more real than the later characters—and then I realized that that was part of the point. It wasn't a weakness by the author in telling the story that Tobias and Emma had a substance to them that his descendants did not: That's actually the way it was. The first generation of Floridians was more real: They had a substance to their characters that their children and grandchildren were in the process of losing as they discarded their pioneer virtues and made way for their roads and air conditioned beach houses.

Solomon has come to terms with his and his generation's greed, and he has put the land his father had bequeathed to him in trust so that it might be protected for future generations. And yet at the end of the story, as much as you cheer him on as he lectures his colleagues and as much as he has done what he could at the end of his life to make up for his own greed, there an abiding sense of sorrow at what has been irretrievably lost, a sorry Solomon himself shares.

It's a stunning and heartbreaking story everyone should read.

Tolstoy's War and Peace: A short review

This is the second in a series of book reviews of books I read this past year. The first was my review of Will Durant's Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage.

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace is the quintessential long book. When I was growing up and heard the book referred to as a "great book," I thought of its magnitude rather than its quality. Whenever I heard the book's title, what always came to mind was the 1971 movie "Cold Turkey," in which Rev. Clayton Brooks (played by Dick Van Dyke) leads a campaign in his town to give up smoking. Looking for something to divert his interest, he locks himself in his room for a week--to read War and Peace.

This is how we culturally illiterate Americans come to know great things--secondarily, and through some unremarkable artifact of popular culture. We'll never get it where we should get it--through our public schools, since they have largely given up on passing on the great things of the past.

But as I dug more deeply into Russian literature and the secondary literature about Russian writers, I realized that this is not the way people have always thought of it. This was a book that was considered great not just in the sense of being big.

War and Peace is a book that should be read by every literate Western person.

There are several things that strike me about Tolstoy after now having now read all his major works. The first is the sheer vitality of his stories. They are simply bursting with life. Seemingly without effort, he creates a world and peoples it with real people, people who, if they were any more real, would actually be real.

Only God creates characters more real than Tolstoy's.

Despite the vast canvas on which he paints, Tolstoy is able to draw you intimately into the life and thought of each character. Someone told me that when his wife had finished reading the book, she told him she would miss the characters. This was exactly my feeling.

Here I had just finished reading this thousand-page book and I just wanted it to go on. A part of my life ended when I had to leave Pierre and Natasha in the midst of theirs. I would have been only too happy to continue reading War and Peace for the rest of my life, if it only wouldn't end.

The second thing that strikes me about Tolstoy is his very explicit Christianity. It confirms once again something I have said before: An encounter with great Western literature is an encounter with Christianity. You wonder why our schools are engaged in the greatest cultural memory dump since the fall of Rome and rise of the Dark Ages? This may be one reason: The culture of the West is inextricably intertwined with religion—and one religion in particular.

Read Tolstoy. Read Dostoevsky. Read Flannery O'Connor--or, for that matter, Beowulf, the Canterbury Tales, and Shakespeare. In fact, even the authors who are not themselves Christian are reacting to Christianity and are incomprehensible if you don't understand it.

Teach Western culture and you teach Christianity. There is no way out of it.

The third striking thing about Tolstoy is his ability to create a real world. Sometimes I fall asleep while listening to a book on my mp3 player. But there are some books I can't do this with. I can't do it with a book that doesn't create a real world--one I would want to live in.

And the world I want to live in is this world.

I said this when I introduced Wendell Berry at a conference a couple of years ago: The authors who create a real world are the ones who don't create a different one from our own. They are authors who bring you, not into their own world, but into this one more deeply. Tolstoy is one of only a handful of authors who seem to be able to do this.

And of course one of the essential features of this world--the one Tolstoy recreates--is that it has a metaphysical and moral order: There is an moral "up" and an immoral "down." It is Homer's world; Vergil's world; and, in particular, Dante's world. It is everybody's world up until about the 18th century, when secularism hits high gear and begins to displace Christianity among the literary elite.

But this is the thing about Western secularism: It never can completely rid itself of its Christian origins. It would be like trying to create pure gold: It cannot exist unalloyed from religion--without, that is, turning to dust. It is--to vary the metaphor--like a branch cut off from a tree: it lives for a while and then withers and dies.

In all of Tolstoy's works there is space to morally breathe. And somehow he is able to do this (for the most part) without being preachy.

This is not the case with his his novel Resurrection, which I also read this year. This is Tolstoy's third and last major novel--after Anna Karenina and War and Peace--which he wrote after repudiating narrative fiction for several years while indulging his political and social enthusiasms. Tolstoy was a very heterodox Christian and had basically whittled his Christianity down to a sort of utopian freemasonry. He was perhaps the greatest purveyor of the social gospel in literature. It is certainly present in his other books, but doesn't seem to detrimentally affect them.

Here, it does.

Like all his works, he creates convincing characters and a believable world.  Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov, a young Russian noble and former soldier is called to jury duty where a young woman is charged with murder. At first he doesn't recognize her. She is a prostitute accused of poisoning a man. But Nekhludov realizes, in the midst of the trial, that the girl was a servant girl in his house as a young man. He had seduced her and, as he finds out, had born his child, which had died. The pregnancy he had helped to bring about had caused her to be cast out of their house, and she was forced into a life of prostitution.

The woman before him as a juror in her trial, was there because of what he himself had done.

It is a compelling and heart-wrenching story. Nekhlyodov is overcome with remorse and devotes the rest of his life to the girl, who is convicted and sent to Siberia, where he follows her. Unfortunately, Tolstoy creates a character in Nekhlyodov who is so idealistic as to be a bit of a boor. As a character, he ends up shouldering much of the pretentiousness latent in the characters of other novels, where they are always more than balanced by a certain concreteness and earthly vibrancy.

The down-to-earth Kitty in Anna Karenina has been replaced by the abstract and idyllic Nekhlyudov.

Unfortunately, this is Tolstoy at his preachiest and most Platonic. But the thing is, Tolstoy at his worst is better than most everyone else at their best. The ending is dissatisfying because of its pretentious high-mindedness, but it's still an engaging and enjoyable read.

Books I Read This Year: Durant's Our Oriental Heritage

This is the first of a series of reviews of books I completed in 2014 (along with a few I never reviewed from 2013).

The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage, by Will Durant. I imagine the professional historians would turn up their noses at a popular work like this, partly because it was written for an intelligent public which they have long ago forsaken, and partly because it is a bit dated, and history, which aspires like every other humanities discipline to be a science, can abide only the newest scholarship. It is a professional irony that historians value everyone else's past but their own. Let them dig up and re-bury their scholarly bones for obscure academic journals: As for me, I'll continue to read Durant for the great overview of history he gives and for the beautiful prose in which he presents it.

Durant was a generalist, writing in the more classical mode of Gibbon and Macauley—scholars of more than history—Durant does not get lost in the arcanae of chronology. He is always looking for (and finding) the significance of events—for their own time and ours. The only contemporary historian I know who writes history this big is Tom Holland.

Our Oriental Heritage is the first in the eleven-volume series Durant began in 1935 and finished (with the help of his wife Ariel) in 1975. A great overview of the history and culture of the East—a civilization we often ignore.

Durant, who received his doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University, apparently wrote these volumes in intentional defiance of professional historians who long ago gave up on the general reading public. Of course, the general reading public in the mid-20th century was far more sophisticated than it is now, but we have not changed so much that we cannot appreciate the lucidity of his prose.

Filled with colorful anecdotes and compelling insights, this book does much more than give us a chronology of events. Instead, it takes us on a tour of the literature, art, music, and politics of China, India, and Japan, helping us to understand the cultures as a whole.

The only shortcoming in Durant is his tendency to downplay the Christianity of the Christian West. As an admitted secularist, Durant views religion as quaint, mostly irrelevant—but the more Eastern is such spirituality, the more relevant he sees it. In this volume, Christianity is always portrayed as inferior to Eastern thought and religion. This is due, in part no doubt, to the fashionability of things Eastern at the time it was written. It is also a tendency you will find throughout his works.

Durant was like many thinkers even now who cling to the cultural wreckage of the old Christendom more tightly the more they repudiate the whole of which they were once a part. The two largest pieces of Christendom's remnants are materialist rationalism on the one hand and spiritualist mysticism on the other. Durant is a rationalist, but one who (like many), while rejecting the more integrated rationality of Western religion, is attracted to the arational mysticism of the East. There are books that could be written on why it is that materialists tend to become, in the end, so attracted to the misty religion of the East.

I'm thinking of Robert Blatchford and Arthur Conan Doyle here--not to mention the more contemporary Sam Harris.

But the occasional encounter with a bad judgment is a small price to pay for the sheer pleasure of reading Durant's great historic and cultural achievement.

The Medial Pre-Frontal Cortex Did It: A review of Free Will, by Sam Harris, Part I

This is the first part in a week-long series of posts on Sam Harris' recent book, Free Will:

In a recent article in Britain's New Statesman, Steven Poole lamented the glut of what he calls "neurotrash"--the attempt to explain every human thought and action in terms of neuroscience and cognitive psychology:

An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer. This is the plague of neuroscientism – aka neurobabble, neurobollocks, or neurotrash – and it’s everywhere.

Free Will, by Sam Harris, must now take its place in this plague of panegyrics to the pre-frontal cortex.

The first thing we must get clear is something that Harris himself, given his thesis, must certainly agree with: he had no choice in writing this book. But it has little to do with the neurological state of his brain. He operates under a necessity only a little less deterministic: the necessity that follows on the nature of his dogma.

As an atheistic materialist, Harris really has no choice but to champion the idea that free will is a delusion. The materialist, said Chesterton, "is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle." Materialists like Harris keep asking why we make the decisions we do, and what other explanation there could be than the physiological. The answer, of course, is the psychological, the philosophical, the whimsical, and about a thousand others.

But these violate the central tenets of his narrow atheistic dogma, and so have been dealt with severely by his materialistic philosophical Inquisition.

There is something ironic about the position of atheists like Harris on issues like this: they claim that their position is the result of the irresistible necessity of logic (in fact, they pride themselves on their logic). Their belief is the consequent, in a ground/consequent relation between their evidence and their conclusion. But their very stated position is that any mental state--including their position on this issue-- is the effect of a physical, not logical cause.

By their own logic, it isn't logic that demands their assent to the claim that free will is an illusion, but the prior chemical state of their brains. The only condition under which we could possibly find their argument convincing is if they are not true. The claim that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent which must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order.

And this is not only a mortal consequence for Harris as the one trying to prove his point, it is also problematic from the reader's perspective: If we are convinced by Harris's logic, we would have to consider this conviction as something determined not by the rational strength of his logic, but by the entirely irrational arrangement of the chemicals in our brains. They might, as Harris would have to say, coincide, but their relation would be completely arbitrary. If prior physical states are all that determine our beliefs, that any one physical state is no more rational than any other. It isn't rational or irrational, it just is.

If what Harris says is true, then our assent to what we view as the rational strength of his position may appear to us to involve our choice to assent or not to assent to his ostensibly rational argument, but (again, if it is true) in truth cannot be any such thing, since we do not have that choice--or any other.

Indeed, it is hard to see how, if free will is an illusion, we could ever know it.

But this complication does not appear to have occurred to Harris, so let us confine ourselves on those that have occurred to him and see what we can make of them.

To be continued in Part II

Lawrence Krauss Don't Know Nothing: A review of "A Universe from Nothing"

The philosopher Martin Heidegger has been often (and not entirely unjustly) ridiculed for having once said, "The Nothing nothings." Science, we have been told, is scrupulous in its avoidance of this kind of meaningless gibberish. Science is clear and precise. So it is ironic that Case Western Reserve cosmologist Krauss now comes to us with the equally inscrutible "The Nothing somethings."

Krauss' A Universe from Nothing is yet another in a series of New Athiest tracts that have come out in recent years, all attempting to make the case for the scientistic pretense that science has superseded philosophy and theology, and that the latter discipline is no longer necessary. And, like most other New Atheist books, it only ends up proving just how necessary these disciplines are--and how naive is the view that science is some sort of universal intellectual elixir that can carry the weight of both scientific and philosophical inquiry.

The book takes the reader on a tour of the universe, or rather, a tour of the contemporary cosmological view of the universe (scientist like Krauss have been known to confuse the two). It is, of course, an imaginary place, existing only in the minds of contemporary cosmologists, although, claims Krauss, we have every reason to believe it exists in reality--if only, by believing it, he doesn't have to believe all that business about God.

The ancient philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides disagreed over the nature of the universe, Heraclitus saying there was only change, and Parmenides that there was only permanence. The history of science has always had a noticeable likeness to a Heraclitean stream: you can never step into the same one twice. But while cosmology, like the state of what it purports to describe, is always in a state of flux, Krauss, like most other scientists before him, is convinced that his view is the permanent one.

Science is Heraclitean; scientists are Parmedian. Undoubtedly, the scientist who comes along next and overturns Krauss' view will be equally confident in the permanence of his position.

The cosmological tour Krauss gives us, which is sandwiched in between the preface and the latter part of the book which seem to contain the central argument of the book, is not only not particularly lucid in its own right, but seems to have little to do with his argument.

And what is the central argument?

Well, if one were to read the cover of the book, he would come away with the distinct impression that the book has something to do with answering the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" That impression is hard to shake when there, staring at you on the front cover is the subtitle, "Why there is something rather than nothing."

And this impression is given some weight when Krauss says, in the preface:

The purpose of this book is simple. I want to show how modern science, in various guises, can address and is addressing the question of why there is something rather than nothing: The answers that have been obtained ... all suggest that getting something from nothing is not a problem. Indeed, something from nothing may have been required for the universe to come into being. Moreover, all signs suggest that this is how our universe could have arisen.

It is rather curious for someone who claims to be manning the barricades of Reason in defiance of the irrational religious hordes to infer from the fact that his theory requires the universe come from nothing, that the universe therefore must do so (Would that simply having a theory about the universe ipso facto confered necessity on a theory's own assumptions about it).

In the somewhat embarrassing recent interview by Ross Anderson in The Atlantic, Krauss begins dissembling about this in the face of Anderson's questions about what, exactly, he's arguing in the book. When Anderson presses him on whether the book is actually trying to answer the question of whether something can come from nothing, Krauss backpedals, saying "Well, if that hook gets you into the book that's great. But in all seriousness, I never make that claim. In fact, in the preface I tried to be really clear that you can keep asking 'Why?' forever. At some level there might be ultimate questions that we can't answer, but if we can answer the 'How?' questions, we should, because those are the questions that matter."

"Never make that claim"? He not only makes the claim, he makes it in the very subtitle of the book.

In fact, the physics in the book is not half as head-spinning as the rhetorical contortions Krauss engages in about what exactly the book is for. I don't mind reading about quantum leaps, I just wish the author wouldn't engage in them in the course of his actual arguments.

Krauss' Redefinition of 'nothing'
First, Krauss simply takes the concept "nothing" and gives it a definition that conveniently avoids all the difficulties Krauss claims to be resolving in the book. Nothing, it turns out, is, for Krauss, not nothing. He blasts philosophers and theologians, who have the temerity to define "nothing" as, well, nothing.

[N]othing upsets philosophers and theologians who disagree with me more than the notion that I, as a scientist, do not truly understand "nothing" ... 

"Nothing," they insist, is not any of the things I discuss. Nothing is "nonbeing," in some vague and ill-defined sense ... 

But therein, in my opinion, lies the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy. For surely "nothing" is every bit as physical as "something," especially if it is to be defined as the "absence of something."

He really can't understand where anyone would get the crazy idea that "nothing" means "no thing." What were they thinking?

By nothing, I do not mean nothing, but rather nothing, in this case, the nothingness we normally call empty space.

Apparently there is something about italics that allows you to engage in equivocation with impunity. In fact, in Krauss' rhetorical shell game, the definition of "nothing" bears a striking resemblance to "something." And his discussion of the traditional philosophical and theological positions on nothingness is simply incoherent. He clearly has no familiarity with the philosophical or theological views on the subject, characterizing them in one way in one paragraph, and a different way in the next. It's kind of hard to dispute your opponent if you don't know what your opponents position actually is from one paragraph to another.

After criticizing philosophers and theologians for thinking that "nothing" means the lack of anything, he then digs himself in deeper by misportraying them too as having asserted that nothing is, in fact, something, namely, empty space:

A century ago, had one described "nothing" as referring to purely empty space, possessing no real material entity, this might have received little argument. But the results of the past century have taught us that empty space is in fact far from the inviolate nothingness that we presupposed before we learned more about how nature works.

Huh? Who is he talking about here? What philosopher describes nothing as simply "empty space"? And even if they exist (or existed), do they constitute the whole of the philosophical tradition?

In fact, Krauss is completely ignorant of any of the necessary philosophical distinctions philosophers and theologians have employed to make sense of a concept like "nothing." Although it's hard to make out exactly what he's criticizing (largely because he clearly does not know himself), every once in a while you can vaguely recognize the stray hints of what he at least thinks he's referring to. In one place he refers to what is apparently the Aristotelian view that anything that has any potentiality cannot be nothing! Would that he actually understood Aristotle or St. Thomas whose view he attempts to criticize (the distinction between potentiality and actuality). As it is he fails because he has absolutely no clue what he's talking about.

What he does instead is to mischaracterize all such views as invoking God when, in fact, they don't do that at all--that, and arguing that philosophers have "changed the playing field" on the issue of "the nature of nothingness." Science per se has never addressed the nature of nothingness for the simple reason that it is not a scientific question. But Krauss has it in his head that by simply being a scientist and redefining "nothing" as "something" (the one thing that it absolutely, positively can't be), he has magically brought the question into the realm of science. In the process he acts as if he represents some kind of scientific tradition that has come to terms with the issue, when in fact, there is no such thing. In fact, his whole account of nothingness, as philosopher of physics David Albert pointed out in the devastating New York Times review of the book, makes not sense at all.

Veni, vidi, halicinatus est: "He came, he saw, he rambled incoherently."

In short, Krauss is philosophically and theologically illiterate, a condition that ill-equips him to criticize philosophers and theologians, a problem compounded by the fact that he doesn't realize it and wouldn't think it mattered if he did. It is also one which causes him, in addition, to mischaracterize the limits of the science he does know something about because the question of what science is or isn't is not a scientific question, but a philosophical one.

Changing the Question
Second, he reformulates the very idea of explanation in a way that relieves him of the trouble of answering the very question he claims to be answering. After just repeating, in chapter 9, his statement that he is going to answer the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" He then rewrites the question in a way that changes its essence:

At the same time, in science we have to particularly cautious about "why" questions. When we ask, "Why?" we usually mean "How?" If we can answer the latter, that generally suffices for our purposes ... Why implicitly suggests purpose, and when we try to understand the solar system in scientific terms, we do not generally ascribe purpose to it.

So I am going to assume that what this question really means to ask is, "How is there something rather than nothing?" "How" questions are really the only ones we can provide definitive answer to by studying nature, but because this sentence sounds much stranger to the ear, I hope you will forgive me if I something fall into the trap of appearing to discuss the more standard formulation when I am really trying to respond to the more specific "how" questions.

Appearing to discuss the more standard formulation? Not only does he "appear" to discuss it, he says in plain English that that is exactly what he is doing. In fact the paragraph just before this reads: "I want to return to the question I described at the beginning of this book: Why is there something rather than nothing?"

When once the reader is told in unambiguous terms that Krauss is going to address this question, he discovers that Krauss doesn't actually do this. It's not just that Krauss says he's going to do it and then doesn't; it's that he says he's going to do it, and then says, just as firmly (in the same book), that he's not going to do it.

If Krauss doesn't want anyone to mistake him for asking a "why" question, then a useful expedient would be to avoid telling people in the first place that that's exactly what he's going to do.

What are we to say about a book that keeps repeating what it is about, only to find out on p. 143 that the author is not doing that at all? At that point in the book it is so clear he is making a mess of his whole stated project that he throws up his hands and basically says, "And now for something completely different."

It works for Monty Python, but it's kind of hard to justify it in a science book.

On p. 134, Krauss quotes Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek, who has likened the science of string theory to throwing a dart against a blank wall and then, only afterward, drawing a target around it.

What Krauss doesn't seem to realize is that his own argument that science explains how something can come from nothing is of the same nature. His argument, though designed to prove that science can explain even the most intractable philosophical mysteries, only serves as a testimony of the prejudicial nature of his case, a case which he states in a way that, at one and the sane time, serves to guarantee that he can accomplish his purpose and yet prevents him from actually doing so.

How Morality "Seems" to Sam Harris: A review of The Moral Landscape

Alisdair MacIntyre points out that the only rational choices when it comes to a philosophy of morality are Aristotle and Neitzsche. Sam Harris, the atheist author of Letters to a Christian Nation, instead chooses Pollyanna.

In his most recent book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Determines Human Values, Harris claims to offer an argument for his position that science can objectively ground morality. While his method of proof is long on earnestness, it is short on argument. In fact, he seems to think that he can establish many of his conclusions by simply willing them.

All throughout the book, we encounter expressions that assure us in the most sincere terms that what follows them is true: terms such as "are bound to," "in my experience," "there simply must be," "cannot be," "it seems inevitable," "surely," "the good life must relate," "will necessarily," "cannot be denied," "science should one day," "most of them are surely wrong," "we must first acknowledge" "change will necessarily depend," "values seem to arise," "it seems to me," "it seems clear," "there is every reason to think," "is bound to be," "of course," "I believe," "there is simply no question," "there must be," "the inescapable fact," "we already have good reason to believe," "I consider," "almost surely," "we can be reasonably confident," "could also," "it seems quite possible," "this certainly appears," "do not seem to," "there is probably," "it is widely believed," "we all know this," "it is only reasonable," "at the very least," "I have no doubt," "I am nearly as sure," "I strongly believe," "it is quite clear to me," "it seems possible," "it is easy to see," "it also seems," "I suspect," "be assured," "apparently," "it seems quite clear," "we can imagine," "we can see," "it now seems," "it is reasonable to wonder," "there is no reason to think," "there is a sense in which," "there can be no doubt," "I cannot conceive," "it is also conceivable," etc., etc., etc.

You get the idea.

Real logical expressions like "for," "since," "because," and "therefore" don't stand a chance against the avalanche of seemses and musts and surelys. In fact, Harris' argument is powered largely by adverbs.

Just several pages in I started to notice this tendency to presume upon the reader's presumption. Then I kept noticing it, and I saw it again, and again, and again. I just started circling them as I encountered them, page after page. There were key components to Harris's "argument" which were just "supposed" to be clear to me: to be "undoubtedly" true, to be "reasonable," to be "probably" be this way, or "inescapably" that.

It is a rhetoric that fits the photograph--a photograph that graces all his books and captures the look of the Randian hero: confident, determined, and free of all doubt.

I finally realized that Harris just thinks that the main steps in his case that science can establish morality are obvious. He wasn't arguing with me, his reader, that his assumptions about these things were true, he was expecting me to simply acquiesce to their self-evident truth on the mere grounds of his confidence in his own assertions.

When you're setting forth a position, it's reasonable to assume what you're readers actually do assume. But when you are overturning 2,500 years of thought on an issue (really only about 400 years worth, since he only really tries to counter Hume--the prior tradition he ignores), it's probably not a good idea to assume what your reader does not actually take for granted.

One of the admirable things about St. Thomas Aquinas is that he always tried to put his opponents' arguments into a rational form, sometimes stating them more logically than they did. Since Harris himself won't do it for us, let's try to cast his argument into some kind of logical form. If we did, his main argument would run something like this:

Questions about well being can be scientifically understood
Moral questions are questions about well being
Therefore moral questions can be scientifically understood

Harris's whole argument hangs on his middle term: "well-being." If it means the same in his major (or first) premise as it does in his minor (or second) premise, then the argument has some plausibility: he can reasonably claim to have connected together the two ideas in his conclusion--morality and science. But if it doesn't, then he has committed the fallacy of equivocation, and the argument falls apart.

And his concept of well-being will have to have more support than Harris's own assertions of "seems" or "appears" or "I strongly believe."

What Harris does--wittingly or unwittingly--is bank on our traditional moral conception of "well-being" in his minor premise and then go on happily defining "well-being" in an entirely scientific and non-ethical way for purposes of his major premise, so that, by the time he gets done, he has two entirely different middle terms on his hands that cease to be able to keep the subject and predicate of his conclusion together. He has, fact, constructed his whole argument on this equivocation--and the term "well-being," being sufficiently vague, suits his purpose nicely.

It's a good try. But no one should be fooled.

Harris starts out by observing what he considers to be the two main schools of moral philosophy: the religious school that considers that moral truth exists because "God has woven it into the very fabric of reality"; and the evolutionary school that believes that moral values are culturally constructed. These are two of the three standard schools of ethics: the first is duty ethics, and the second consequentialism. Both, he says, are mistaken.

But the real bogey throughout the book is David Hume's "fact/value"distinction, a distinction which, given certain presuppositions (one's which Harris and other New Atheists share) prevents you from going from one to the other. Facts are things that are; values are things that should be; and things that are and things that should be are two entirely different kinds of things. To confuse them is commit what philosophers call a "category mistake."

To say that science, the study of what is, can have something to say about what ought to be is like applying the standards of what constitutes good music to determine how to bake a cake, or saying that the standards of good accounting practice can be used to determine the quality of a piece of music.

This distinction is assumed by most advocates of both schools Harris mentions: protestants assume it as much as secular philosophers, although it is largely rejected in Catholic thought. Harris is clearly aware of this problem, and articulates it competently in the introduction. The problem is that, once it is acknowledged, the then proceeds as if he had never heard of it.

Catholics (at least those in the Aristotelian/Thomist tradition) largely form the third school of ethics--virtue ethics, in which you can get around the distinction because of the prior distinction between man as he is and man as he would be if he achieved his telos or purpose. Both of these things are facts--the way man is and the telos which is the fulfillment of his nature, and ethics is simply the best way from one to the other.

But Harris does not believe in an objective telos--or that man has a particular nature to which this telos would correspond. So how does he get around the fact/value distinction? And this leads us to the second main argument of the book.

Harris argues that if factual statements and ethical statements both derive from similar brain processes, then they are the same kind of belief. He doesn't argue for this view, he just asserts it. And he seems to think that his assertion can be transformed into an argument by simply piling on evidence that both derive from similar brain states. But the problem in bridging the gap between the fact that a particular brain process occurs for two different kinds of belief and the conclusion that brain state to kind of belief is no less daunting then bridging the gap between facts and values.

Once again, we are forced to do Harris' work for him. Here is the argument:

Any belief that is produced by a certain brain process is the same kind of belief as any other belief produced by the same brain process
Factual beliefs and moral beliefs are both produced by the same brain process
Therefore, factual beliefs and moral beliefs are the same kind of beliefs

Harris spends all his time proving his minor premise, and simply assumes his major premise. He never attempts to prove it, yet it is precisely the assertion at issue.

"[B]eliefs about facts and beliefs about values seem to arise from similar processes at the level of the brain," he says on p. 11. "The division between facts and values does not make much sense in terms of underlying brain function," he asserts on p. 121.

He has tracked his seemingly divergent quarry and, following the trail to hole in the ground he calls the "medial pre-frontal cortex" (which he invests with the authority of scientific mysticism by crowning it with an acronym: MPFC), he calms the hounds and declares he has proven the objects of his hunt to be the same.

But why should anyone believe that a particular process--or a particular geographical location of the brain--dictates or limits the kind of thought or belief that occurs in it? Why does the nature or meaning of a statement have anything to do with the fact that it derives from a certain "brain process"? It is as if someone were to tell you that beef and milk are essentially the same thing, since they both derive from a cow, or that fried chicken and eggs easy-over were essentially the same kind of food because they are both the product of a chicken.

The same brain produces different kind of beliefs. Why shouldn't the same gland produce them?
He doesn't say. It apparently "seems" that way to him and "no doubt" must "appear" that it is "only reasonable."

If a particular brain process can only produce the same kind of thing, does that mean that if two contradictory statements derive from the same brain process (a contingency not precluded in Harris' account) that truth and falsity are fundamentally the same? Again, it all hangs on whether we are assured by those comforting adverbs.

It is the same old scientific reductionism that we constantly hear being invoked, and seldom hear being rationally justified. It certainly isn't in this book.

And this brings us to our third point concerning Harris' book. The most publicized passage in it truly sums up the book:

Throughout this book I make reference to a hypothetical space that I call "the moral landscape"-- a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks correspond to the heights of potential well-being and whose valleys represent the deepest possible suffering. Different ways of thinking and behaving--different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc.--will translate into movements across this landscape and, therefore, into different degrees of human flourishing.

"Well-being" and "human flourishing" serve interchangeably as equivocal terms in Harris' argument. But this passage highlights another weakness in Harris' rhetoric: he employs metaphors that masquerade as arguments.

His rhetoric of "peaks" and "valleys" is an old weapon in the quiver of those who reject traditional morality, and the defense against it was articulated over 100 years ago. In his 1908 book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton describes the tactic as taking "refuge in material metaphors:

[I]n fact, is the chief mark of vague modern people. Not daring to define their doctrine of what is good, they use physical figures of speech without stint or shame, and, what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap analogies are exquisitely spiritual and superior to the old morality. Thus they think it intellectual to talk about things being "high." It is at least the reverse of intellectual; it is a mere phrase from a steeple or a weathercock. "Tommy was a good boy" is a pure
philosophical statement, worthy of Plato or Aquinas. "Tommy lived the higher life" is a gross metaphor from a ten-foot rule.

Chesterton points to the same tendency in Nietzsche:

Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers.

Harris' "peaks" and "valleys" serve the same role as Nietzshe's "higher" and "lower": they create the illusion of moral substance. He invokes them just like he invokes "well-being" and "human flourishing": as a sort of incantation he thinks will make the real problems with his argument go away. But we are never told exactly how it does this.

And so we are left with two different conceptions of well-being or flourishing, one a truly ethical conception which renders the minor premise of his first argument meaningful, and another a purely emotive or utilitarian conception which serves to establish his major premise. We are left devoid of any rationale for believing that the nature of a brain process dictates anything about the ontological or epistemological character of the judgments it produces.

And we are left with the feeling that, in the final analysis, his "moral landscape" with its "peaks" and "valleys" sounds attractive and plausible, but when you actually investigate it you find it doesn't show anything about how science determines human values, but is little more than the product of Harris' own imagination.

Finally, there is the whole issue of the legitimacy of Harris' project. What, if anything can science say about morality? How can a discipline devoted and designed only to tell us the how say anything the why or the whether? As Alastair MacIntyre has pointed out, the moral project of the Enlightenment has failed. Morality cannot be grounded in any of the things so many modern thinkers have thought it could be: the reason, the will, or the emotions. Kant, Kierkegaard, and Hume all come up short in their attempts to establish in on their respective bases. It defies any such analysis.

The only ethics worthy of the name was abandoned at the Renaissance: the classical conception which incorporates formal and final causality: that everything, including man, has a nature and a purpose, and that the approximation of that nature and the accomplishment of that purpose are what make him more truly what he really is. To say that a man is a "good man" is no fundamentally different than saying that dog is a "good dog" or a tree is a "good tree." Is it being what it really is and is it serving the purpose intrinsic to it? If it is, then it's good. If it's not, then it's not.

That's all you can say.

As to what the nature and purpose of human being is another matter, but it doesn't help in the task of determining these things to say that they don't exist. And those who say that they don't exist have the responsibility, if they want to cling to a notion of right and wrong, to provide an alternative account. So far, all such attempts have failed, and Harris' is not exactly one of the more impressive ones.

If you're going to be Hawking a theory of the origin on the universe, you better do it right

The New York Times reviews Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design:

The real news about “The Grand Design,” however, isn’t Mr. Hawking’s supposed jettisoning of God, information that will surprise no one who has followed his work closely. The real news about “The Grand Design” is how disappointingly tinny and inelegant it is. The spare and earnest voice that Mr. Hawking employed with such appeal in “A Brief History of Time” has been replaced here by one that is alternately condescending, as if he were Mr. Rogers explaining rain clouds to toddlers, and impenetrable.

Read the rest here.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Reality: Edward Feser's "The Last Superstition"

Where has Ed Feser been all my life? The exposition and defense of Aristotelianism in his new book The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism would have saved me years of hunting down old dusty out-of-print tomes by guys with "S. J." after their names that have been long forgotten and which many people would consider out-of-date and irrelevant.

Don't get me wrong, I like hunting down old dusty out-of-print tomes, no matter what letters the authors may have after their names. In fact, it's one of my favorite things to do. And, actually, had I not gone to the all the trouble, I may not have fully appreciated Feser's achievement.

Feser makes a bold statement in his book: "Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought." It is, as I say, a bold statement, and one that sets the bar at an altitude over which few philosophers could jump. Feser does it with ease. In fact, let me put it this way: The Last Superstition is not only the best refutation of the New Atheism yet penned, but is one of the most important books written in recent years, and is certainly the best book of Christian apologetics in recent memory. You can now take all those books trying to defend the "Christian worldview" and box them up now. Almost without exception, they miss the point altogether. Feser is one of the few who actually gets it.

And what is 'it'?

In preparation for a conference presentation I was giving this summer on the classical view of nature, I was doing a little reading. It was one of those times I am thankful that I have a large personal library from which to draw, and thankful also that I had a good excuse to read several books that had been sitting on my shelf that I had wanted to read for some time: E. A. Burtt's The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science; R. G. Collingwood's The Idea of Nature; Basil Willey's 17th Century Background and 18th Century Background; and, perhaps most notably, Alfred North Whitehead's The Origins of Modern Science.

As I went through them, a distinct theme began to emerge: the key change in the history of ideas underlying contemporary thought was the abandonment of Aristotelianism. Anyone having spent time reading about issues of philosophical metaphysics will have already concluded that the only Christian philosophy worth the name was that of St. Thomas Aquinas, a conclusion confirmed every time another book is published purporting to set such a thing forth. My own logic textbook, Material Logic, is mostly an explication of the Scholastic version of some key points of Aristotle's Metaphysics (which is essentially what most of material logic is).

In fact, it a strange thing: as I was reading my Google Reader (my chief and almost exclusive source for news these days), I pulled up one of Feser's blog posts in which he was recommending four books on the modern view of science. They were the very four books I had been reading--in the precise order in which I had read them. I commented on his blog, "Ed, this is almost creepy, I had read Burtt's book about a month ago, Willey's right after that, and I just finished Collingwood's today, and then I read your post." He responded, saying, "Martin, creepier still is that I see we both studied philosophy at UC Santa Barbara. I smell a conspiracy. Maybe they installed the same model computer chip in each of our brains...?"

It was this particular post, an excellent rundown of the role the rejection of Aristotelianism had on the development of science, which prompted me to read Feser's book in the first place, and I'm glad I did.

And they say there are no purposes in nature.

Feser mentions the same passage the implications of which I have been chewing on since I first read it years ago: Richard Weaver's remark in Ideas Have Consequences in which he points to William of Ockham "as the best representative of a change which came over man's conception of reality at this historic juncture":

It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence. His triumph tended to leave universal terms mere names serving our convenience. The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one's view of the nature and destiny of humankind. The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses. With this change in the affirmation of what is real, the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we are on the road to modern empiricism. (Ideas Have Consequences, p. 3)

Ockham's key role in the decline of Western thought and civilization (the real subject of Feser's book) is completely lost on most of those who spend their time analyzing it. In fact (as I have written elsewhere), the Protestants go-to man on this subject, Francis Schaeffer, was not only completely blind to it, but, in a bizarre irony, places the blame for the decline of the West on the man who managed its greatest intellectual achievement: St. Thomas Aquinas!

Ockham's move (or that of his overenthusiastic followers, depending on who you listen to) involved rejecting the idea that things have natures or essences. When you say, "Man is mortal," all the term 'man' really is is a label, a name (Lat: nomen) that you slap on to things that have a similar set of characteristics. It doesn't signify, as everyone thought before Ockham (or at least before Peter Abelard, who first broached any doubt on the subject), any such thing as a human nature or essence common to every man. Men are nothing more than those featherless bipeds that go around eating, drinking, building houses and office buildings, writing books, chattering to each other at restaurants, raising children and sending them to college, and saving for retirement. But they do not really share anything other than these, and a few other characteristics. There is nothing in their fundamental being that makes them men rather than something else.

This move by Ockham exemplifies the ontological problem with modern thought: the denial of formal cause. In his Physics and Metaphysics, Aristotle had laid out four "causes": four aspects of a thing that determined what a thing was. There were, he said, formal cause, material cause, efficient cause, and final cause. Formal cause was the ontological pattern of a thing: that aspect of a thing that makes the matter out of which a thing is made a man, or a horse, or a tree, or a piece of granite, and not something else. The material cause is simply that of which a thing is composed. The efficient cause is that which brings a thing about. And final cause is the purpose of a thing: what a thing is for.

But what Burtt and Collingwood and Willey and Whitehead also point out, and what is the other main point of Feser's book, is that, in addition to the rejection of formal cause by William of Ockham, modern thinkers also jettisoned final cause, leaving only material and efficient cause to keep each other company.

This second, or teleological move in modern thought--the rejection of final cause--was well-stated by Burtt:

Medieval philosophy, attempting to solve the ultimate why of events instead of their immediate how, and thus stressing the principle of final causality (for the answer to such a question could only be given in terms of purpose or use), had its appropriate conception of God. Here was the teleological hierarchy of the Aristotelian forms, all heading up in God or Pure Form, with man intermediate in reality and importance between him and the material world. The final why of events in the latter could be explained mainly in terms of their use to man; the final why of human activities in terms of the ultimate quest for union with God. Now, with the superstructure from man up banished from the primary realm, which for Galileo is identified with material atoms in their mathematical relations, the how of events being the sole objects of exact study, there had appeared no place for final causality whatsoever. The real world is simply a succession of atomic motions in mathematical continuity. Under these circumstances causality could only be intelligibly lodged in the motions of the atoms themselves, everything that happens being regarded as the effect solely of mathematical changes in these material elements. (The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, p. 98-99)

Final cause, requiescat in pace.

Someone might argue that Burtt is sympathetic the Aristotelian cause, as indeed are Willey, Collingwood, and Whitehead, although none were so bold as to come right out and say so--so tight has been the stranglehold of materialism on philosophy. But one of the most striking passages from Feser's book is a quote from W. T. Stace in an Atlantic Monthly article of 1948. Stace was one of the minor deities in philosophy when I was studying philosophy at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the early 1980s--a little earlier, I am guessing, than when Feser was there, a fact that makes what he says all the more powerful:

The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when the scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes" ... [belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century. ... They did this on the ground that inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the predication and control of events. ... The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated through the world. ... The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws. ... [But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money, fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence, the dissatisfied, restless, spirit of modern man. ... Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values. ... If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe--whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself--then they must be our own inventions. Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative. (quoted in The Last Superstition, pp. 225-226)

And Stace is not the only secular modern philosopher who understands the position materialism has placed modern man. Those with stronger dispositions might try reading Bertrand Russell's "A Free Man's Worship." Or try Nietzsche, Sartre, and a few other existentialists, who harbor none of the comforting illusions about the rational implications of the abandonment of the traditional Western metaphysics--unlike their more philosophically naive New Atheist brethren.

Feser's book not only contains a diagnosis--that modern thought labors mightily under the denial of formal and final causes, it also includes an excellent analysis of the symptoms brought about by this denial. In so doing, he provides a great illustration of Chesterton's assertion that a man must put the mysteries of reality, not what seem the obvious solutions, at the center of his philosophy.

In his book Orthodoxy, Chesterton maintained that modern thought displays all the characteristics of madness. And it resulted, as he explained in another book (St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox), precisely from his refusal to start his thinking from the plain truths of Aristotelianism:

The man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad; he begins to think at the wrong end. ... But we may ask, ... if this be what drives men mad, what is it that keeps them sane? ... Mysticism keeps men sane. ... The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. ... The Christian ... puts the seed of dogma in the central darkness.

...Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one create thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility.

To Chesterton, a Thomist, Christianity is necessarily Aristotelian.

Rejecting mystery altogether, modern thought begins at the wrong starting point. It demands that thought must begin with those things that can be proved, and finds that, once this has been accomplished, it cannot prove anything. Feser, employing an equally apt metaphor, describes the predicament of modern thought as one in which modern thinkers have positioned themselves out on a limb, and are enthusiastically sawing it off--all the while congratulating themselves on their cleverness in doing so.

If you go into your laboratory, boil reality over a low flame, check out the results under a microscope and conclude that because you cannot detect formal and final causes, they must not be real, and then go on to construct your view of the world on that basis, you may think you have made a great contribution to the world. But all you have done is undercut the basis for reasoning about anything at all. And not only have you done that, you have created for yourself a whole slough of problems for yourself--and made the problems with which you may already have been faced insoluble.

In one of the best chapters of his book, "The Descent of the Modernists," Feser explains the various problems the practitioners of what he calls the "Mechanical Philosophy" have created for themselves: the knowledge problem, the mind/body problem, the problem of induction, the problem of free will, the problem of morality, the problem of causation. These were not "problems" under the Aristotelian world view; they only became problems when it was rejected. In fact, Feser makes the ironic point that modern thinkers need God even more than their Aristotelian predecessors, since that is the only way they can hold their worldviews together at all.

Feser makes the important point that Aristotelianism was never discredited; it simply went out of intellectual fashion: "Far from being a discovery, the rejection of the four causes was a sheer stipulation, an act of pure intellectual willfulness." Or, as Willey put it, "What we need to remember, however, is that we have to do here with a transference of interests rather than with the mere "exantlation" of new truth or the rejection of error."

Feser's critics have charged that the the book's occasional polemical flourishes weaken the whole book. These passages don't bother me, but they have perhaps offered too inviting a target for those who have obvious trouble understanding his arguments. But I wonder if these critics have the same problem with atheists like P. Z. Myers, whose prose is five parts polemic and one part attempted rational discourse.

And there is the issue of whether some of his audience will understand some of the more involved passages of the book. It is obviously intended for the intelligent layman. On this score, I think Feser does about the best that can be done in explaining concepts that would otherwise be difficult to the philosophically uninitiated by writing is clear prose and avoiding the unnecessary jargon that plagues his profession. The reader of the book will obviously get more out of it the more familiar he already is with some of the issues he addresses. But this is a clarifying book, and its clarifications will be appreciated by those who have been pondering these issues and just need someone to help put their finger on the underlying problems with modern thought.

Aristotle has been threatening to make a comeback for the last hundred years. When Whitehead wrote Science and the Modern World in 1925, there were some who thought that the jig was up with modern materialism. How could it withstand Whitehead's--onslaught--which was based on his own peculiar modern formulation of what, at bottom, was Aristotelianism? In The Idea of Nature, Collingwood clearly believed that Whitehead had struck a mortal blow. But, alas, Collingwood's confidence in the cultural power of sound reasoning was in vain. Something had to give: reason or scientific materialism. It is unfortunate that the former was subordinated to the latter.

It would far surpass the recklessness of Collingwood's judgment to say that Feser's book will succeed where Whitehead failed. Whitehead's stature in the intellectual world of the early 20th century was, after all, unassailable: He had co-authored, with Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, the book that fired the philosophical shot heard round the world, and which gave birth to modern philosophy. No logician could pretend to that title without having at least a familiarity with the book's interminable symbolic formulas, all premised on the idea that meaningful language could be captured in a formal system--an assumption that still plays havoc on the subject through the continuing predominance of quantification theory in the field of logic.

I wonder if Feser studied under Francis Dauer at UCSB, as I did. Dauer was a student of Willard Van Orman Quine, by whose mischievous influence, which still haunts the study of logic in American universities, the Aristotelian assumptions of classical logic were simply ostracized from its study.

Professionally speaking, Feser is small potatoes compared with Whitehead, and given his explicit Aristotelian inclinations, he must necessarily occupy that outer darkness prepared by the academic establishment for Aristotle and his angels. But those of us who paint our faces and wander the outskirts of the intellectual world waiting for the Return of Reason can still take heart from a book like this.

Dr. Johnson, I presume?

It is the tercentenary of Samuel Johnson's birth this year (for you non Latinists, that's from 'tertius', meaning "third," and 'centus', meaning "a hundred." So that's the 300th anniversary). Johnson was a fascinating literary figure who dominated the 18th century English literary world. Here is a great review of two new books on Johnson from the New Criterion:

As time goes by, it generally softens asperities in the character of men and women from the past. We have quite a cuddly image of Ben Franklin, but to those who met him he could seem truculent and abrasive. Something rather different has happened in the case of Samuel Johnson. He used to be presented as a formidable figure—an overbearing literary potentate, if not a clubroom bore whose table you would avoid in the dining room. People thought him domineering and arrogant, qualities reflected in his nickname “the Great Cham.” Oldstyle British actors gave him a plummy upper-class bark, even though the evidence showed that he spoke with a strong Midlands accent, not too far from the nasal intonation you can hear on the streets of Birmingham today.

It has all changed dramatically in the last half-century. In fact, the shift has its roots even further back, in an essay by an outstanding scholar from Berkeley, first published in 1944. Bertrand Bronson’s study “Johnson Agonistes” set the agenda for much of what has come out in recent decades, together with work by other writers emphasizing the “perilous balance” that Samuel maintained in his psychic health. It is not surprising, then, that a sense of internal conflict pervades these new versions of Johnson’s life—the first two, but not the last, of a crop of biographies marking the tercentenary of his birth in this year.

Read the rest here.

What we read this year (with ratings)

Novels:
Shadows on the Hudson, Isaac Bashevis Singer
Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
Beowulf, trans., Joseph Spaeth
The Return of Jeeves, P. G. Wodehouse
Emma, Jane Austen
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
Hard Times, Charles Dickens (in progress)
Satan in Goray, Isaac Bashevis Singer (in progress)
That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis (in progress)

Short Stories*:
"The Whirligig of Life," O. Henry
"A Good Man is Hard to Find", Flannery O'Connor

Poetry*:
"Ash Wednesday," T. S. Eliot
"The Stolen Child," W. B. Yeats
"Fire & Ice," Robert Frost
From the Mountain, From the Valley: New and Collected Poems, James Still (in progress)

Plays:
Hamlet, William ShakespeareHenry VI, William Shakespeare
Richard III, William Shakespeare
The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare
The Comedy of Errors, Williams Shakespeare
Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, William Shakespeare

History, Literature, & Biography:
Einstein: His Life and Times, Walter Isaacson
The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, Elizabeth Kantor
Postmodernism, Glen Ward
Derrida in 90 Minutes, by Paul Strathern
Introducing Critical Theory, by Stuart Sim and Borin Van Loon
Poetic Diction, Owen Barfield
After Theory, Terry Eagleton
Introducing Postmodernism, Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt
Magic into Science: The Story of Paracelsus, Henry M. Pachter (in progress)
Lessons of the Masters, George Steiner (in progress)
Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff & Mark Johnson (in progress)
Ironies of Faith: The Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature, Anthony Esolen (in progress)
J. R. R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth, Brad Birzer (in progress)
The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World, Daniel J. Boorstin (in progress)
G. K. Chesterton's Collected Works, vol. XXX, The Illustrated London News, 1914-1916 (in progress)
God's Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization, by A. N. Wilson (in progress)

Philosophy & Science
The Illusion of Technique, William Barrett
The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche
The Philosophy of Science, Jeffrey Kasser
Nietszche in 90 Minutes, by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution, Sean B. Carroll (in progress)
The Night is Large: Collected Essays, 1938-1995, Martin Gardner (in progress)

Essays*:
"Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics," Martin Heidegger
"Diagnosing the Modern Malaise," Walker Percy
"Paul Elmer More," H. L. Mencken
"Superstrings," Martin Gardner
"The Man of Letters in the Modern World," Allen Tate
"Written to Last," Joseph Epstein (The New Criterion, vol. 25, no. 1)
"On the Essence of Truth," Martin Heidegger

Religion:
The Epistle of Jude** (from the Vulgate)
The Epistle to the Galatians** (from the Vulgate)
The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie
Socrates Meets Jesus, Peter Kreeft
The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins
History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen, Henri de Lubac (in progress)
The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, Leon Kass (in progress)

*Just the highlights
**We don't rate the Scriptures: they rate us.

Harold Bloom's critique of Harry Potter

I am working on a piece titled, "The Return of Real Danger: Why is Harry Potter so Popular?" In the process, I ran across this interesting critique by the great literary critic Harold Bloom in the Wall Street Journal. It's called, "Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes." After it ran, the editors called and told Bloom that they had never seen anything like it: they had received 400 negative response letters and only one positive one, and the latter they said they suspected he had written himself!

Meet the New Atheism, Same as the Old Atheism: A review of Richard Dawkin's "The God Delusion"

Richard Dawkins believes in the resurrection. He believes in it so much, that he is leading a crusade to convince others of it, and, like the revivalists of old, he has hit the circuit looking for converts. The resurrection Dawkins believes in is not the Resurrection (the one with a capital 'R'), but another kind altogether. His faith is not faith in God, but faith in science--or rather, Science. It is not the Resurrection of Christ he is preaching, but the resurrection of a movement.

With his new book, The God Delusion, Dawkins places himself at the head of what one journalist has called the "New Atheism." His book is one of several released over the last year that have attempted to reverse the rise of evangelical Christianity, and, to a lesser extent, fundamentalist Islam. He is the first person in the new atheist trinity, which includes Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, both of whom have written similar anti-religious tracts, and both of whom, like Dawkins, are filled with the spirit, and shouting their message from the street corners.

Before Dawkins begins the business of calling hellfire and brimstone down on the believers, however, he points his finger at those who pretend to be standing on the sidelines in the debate over the truth of religion and the existence of God. He first goes after the agnostics. With the earlier and more eloquent atheist George Bernard Shaw, Dawkins charges agnostics with the sin of being atheists without the courage of their convictions.

Well, most of them anyway. He makes a distinction between the kind of agnostic who temporarily suspends judgement until he has more evidence one way or another, and the kind of agnostic who believes that the question of God's existence is unanswerable. The first are the sheep, the second the goats. The first he can abide, but for the second he has little but disdain. It is this second school of thought that Dawkins refers to when he talks about the "poverty of agnosticism." It is here where Dawkins parts company with many of his allies in the scientific establishment, and it is here where Dawkins distinguishes himself from the great atheistic philosophies of the 20th century, returning instead to the 19th.

Although the title of "New" has been placed on his brand of atheism, Dawkins is an atheist of the old school. He is preachy, condescending, and a bit of a scold. Apparently impatient with philosophical subtleties, he seems to have shirked off the more sophisticated criticisms of early 2oth century philosophy. Beginning with Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, skeptical philosophers began to argue that religion was neither true nor false, but simply meaningless. This view received its most articulate treatment in A. J. Ayer's 1928 book, Language, Truth, and Logic. The first chapter of Ayer's book, "The End of Metaphysics," remains one of the few persuasive attacks on religious belief, although Ayer himself later gave up on much of the views expressed in the book. This view has dominated higher level discussions of religious truth questions ever since.

Dawkin's approach, however, harkens back to days of Robert Ingersoll, Joseph McCabe, and Joseph Lewis. He is not quite their equal in severity and lack of a sense of humor, but he rivals them in fervor. Like these stern atheists of old, Dawkins prefers to face religion head on, and his contempt for less direct approaches is transparent.

Dawkins first takes on Stephen Jay Gould, now conveniently dead (as are many of Dawkin's chosen opponents). Gould, a Harvard paleontologist and popular science writer, believed that religious questions such as the existence of God are simply not scientific questions, and that science cannot therefore adjudicate them. It is a version of the Two Truths doctrine of the medieval Arab philosopher Averroes, who held that there are truths of reason and truths of faith, and that truths in one sphere may be falsehoods in the other.

"[T]o cite old cliches," Dawkins quotes Gould as saying, "science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven." Dawkins will have none of it: "What are these ultimate questions," he asks, "in whose presence religion is an honored guest and science must respectfully slink away?" Dawkins denies that there can be two truths, one for science and one for religion: "... a universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific matter?"

In fact, Dawkins castigates the American scientific establishment for assuming this Two Truths doctrine in their debate with the Intelligent Design movement, denouncing the National Center for Science Education and their ilk as the "Neville Chamberlain School of Evolutionists." On this question, ironically, Dawkins is on the side of the Intelligent Design movement--and Christianity in general. Religious truth claims make a difference in the world, but while Christianity maintains the claims are true, Dawkins pronounces them false.

Dawkins summarizes the argument of his book this way:

Any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God...is a delusion; and, as later chapters show, a pernicious delusion.

There are several problems with his argument that ultimately make The God Delusion a great disappointment. The first is his tendency to avoid proving his own theses in favor of simply assuming them and hoping the reader will find the implications of them as attractive and self-evident as he does. The scientist in him wants to test the predictability of his theory, in this case with speculative theories of how things might have come about solely by virtue of material conditions. He uses this method in his discussion of the origin of religion and of morality, and it falls flat.

His entire discussion of the origin of religion requires you to have previously accepted his naturalistic world view. "Knowing that we are products of Darwinian evolution..." he begins, and then we are off to the races. "The proximate cause of religion might be hyperactivity in a particular node of the brain," he declares. But the ultimate cause, he thinks, lies in his theory that religion is "a byproduct of something else." He then launches into various theories of what religious belief may have been useful for, all of which are pure speculation.

Dawkin's whole discussion of the naturalistic explanation of religion assumes that such an explanation renders the beliefs thus explained illusory. But if a naturalistic explanation for a belief renders it illusory, and all beliefs can be explained naturalistically, then atheism too can be explained naturalistically, and is therefore illusory. He who lives by naturalistic explanations must die by them.

All of Dawkin's explanations seem stifled and contrived by his own ideological materialism. He uses his naturalistic world view as a Procrustean bed into which he tries to fit everything, however much he has to hack and stretch it to fit. And what a small bed it is.

The second problem with Dawkin's book is the condescending tone with which he dismisses the arguments of those with whom he disagrees. One religious argument is "amusing, if rather pathetic," another "a joke," another "silly," and another "a grotesque piece of reasoning." This glib attitude particularly plagues the section of the book dealing with the traditional arguments for Christianity.

St. Thomas's cosmological arguments for God's existence--that the universe requires an explanation--"are easily...exposed as vacuous." Anselm's ontological argument for God's existence is "infantile." And William Paley's design argument, he says, Charles Darwin "blows out of the water."

And where simple pejoratives won't do, and arguments actually employed, Dawkins fails to impress. In response to C. S. Lewis's trilemma--that Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or God Himself--Dawkins simply posits the possibility that Jesus was honestly mistaken, despite the fact that anyone familiar with the force of this argument knows that is certainly not a possibility. And besides, "historically it is complete nonsense." Dawkins asserts that there is no good historical evidence that Jesus thought he was divine, but his response to the wealth of evidence that he did is nowhere to be found. He questions the historical existence of Jesus, a belief that has few adherents outside its friendly home in liberal theological seminaries.

In the end, Dawkins admits that Jesus probably existed, but that the Biblical documents are unreliable, his only argument being that "reputable" Biblical scholars (undoubtedly defined as those with whom Dawkins agrees) question them.

Somehow it all seems too easy.

Even if you didn't recognize the lack of philosophical sophistication in Dawkin's attempted refutations, you notice immediately that Dawkins has trouble even conceiving how anyone could ever have been convinced by these arguments. This is not only an intellectual weakness in Dawkin's approach, but a rhetorical one. Somehow, you are more persuaded by the detractors of a position who appreciate the strength of their opponents positions than those, like Dawkins, who don't. You feel as if the person hasn't really confronted the power of the arguments against his own position, and you therefore wonder how it would affect his opinion if he did.

In too many cases in the book Dawkins is justified in his dismissiveness toward the arguments he takes on, but only because he has cherry picked the weakest arguments for theism. And this is the third great deficiency of the book.

Outside of a few places in the second section of the book, Dawkins boxes at shadows that seem a poor imitation of historic theism. A close inspection of the index reveals how little familiarity Dawkins has with modern Christian apologetics. He mentions only a small handful of great modern Christian thinkers. There is even a passing mention of G. K. Chesterton. But none of these are carefully considered.

He admits Lewis into his book briefly (and, as we said, dismissively), but where is J. Gresham Machan, Cornelius Van Til, and John Warwick Montgomery, or, more contemporaneously, Alvin Plantinga, J. P. Moreland, and Francis Beckwith? They are glaringly absent. Instead, Dawkins prefers to take on the likes of Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Jesse Helms, and Fred Phelps, the fundamentalist minister of Westboro Baptist Church who pickets funerals with signs saying that "fags" are "going to Hell". These names constitute a sort of religious bum-of-the-month club that allows Dawkins to avoid fighting the real contenders.

How convenient.

In his debate with the atheist philosopher C.E.M. Joad (who later became a Christian) in the first part of the 20th century, Catholic writer Arnold Lunn pointed out that a position must be judged on the basis of the strongest arguments for it, not the weakest ones you can find.

The God Delusion has received the usual plaudits from the expected sources. But criticism has come from places well outside the religious community. Two of the most stinging critiques have come from the philosopher Thomas Nagel, and literary critic Terry Eagleton. And indeed everything that Dawkin's attempts in The God Delusion has been done better in some other book. A reader interested in a naturalistic explanation of religion and a critical view of the historicity of Christianity will find it stated more convincingly in H. L. Mencken's Treatise on the Gods. Those who are looking for a philosophically sophisticated attack on theism would be better off with Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic. And, ironically, a much better argument against design in nature from an evolutionary perspective is Dawkin's own Blind Watchmaker.

And speaking of Mencken, atheism's last great popularizer, Dawkins seems clearly to be trying to emulate him, but to little affect. Mencken's attacks on religion were informed with a real wit that Dawkins sorely lacks. Mencken also had a poetic sense of the world that seems missing in Dawkins. Without the aesthetic appeal of Mencken, Dawkin's condescension sounds more akin to the more pedestrian likes of Madelaine Murray O'Hair. It wouldn't sound entirely out of place in this book to hear Dawkins utter an O'Hair line such as, "Jesus wasn't worthly to lick my boots."

Mencken was the last of the old school atheists, who openly declared their opinion that religion was absurd, and spared no effort in running it down. Mencken considered religious adherents to be boobs, largely because he considered most everyone to be boobs. Dawkins, however, is more selective in his disdain, choosing to scorn only the believers.

This refusal to take religious views seriously prevents Dawkins from convincingly dealing with them, and it is this consideration that prevents us from judging atheism on the basis of Dawkin's book. If we did, we would only be engaging in the very behavior that mars Dawkin's book itself: judging a position by something less than the best arguments for it.