Quotes & Commentary #22: Charlotte Brontë

Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when the body and the soul rise in mutiny against their rigor; stringent are they; inviolable they shall be.

—Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

This passage made a lasting impression on me the first time I read it.

In the story, Jane is at her lowest ebb. She just agreed to marry Rochester; and at the last moment it was revealed that he was already married. Rochester begs her to run away with him, to flee the hypocritical, pretentious morality of England and to have a happy life together. Jane is sorely tempted. She recognizes the injustice of the situation, and she is deeply in love with Rochester. But in the end, her principles overrule her passions, and she forces herself to leave him.

My feeling about this were mixed. On the one hand, it was clear to me, a modern, secular American, that the law preventing Rochester and Jane from marrying was idiotic and unjust. There was simply no logic behind it, just dumb prejudice and unthinking tradition. If I were Jane, I would have ran off with Rochester, and left all those dimwits to live within the narrow confines of their self-righteous morality. So I was a bit disappointed in Jane, normally a rebellious spirit, for being such a slave to custom.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t help admiring Jane for doing what she thought was right, even though it caused her so much pain. The second time I read the book, I found myself admiring her even more. What seemed at first to be obeisance to an old-fashioned prejudice looked now like loyalty to herself.

Jane knew that the negative opinion of eloping existed for a reason. Even though it was extremely tempting, she knew that running away with Rochester would ultimately be a betrayal of herself. It would be compromising on what she wanted and deserved: to be legally bound with someone she loved, in a union accepted and recognized by the community.

Remember that Jane was poor, and Rochester rich. Running away with him without the sanction of society would thus have put her fully and completely under his power. She would have no recourse if, one day, Rochester suddenly changed his mind and decided to leave her. She would have no claim on him. Thus her apparently unselfish act—to run away from Rochester—was really a more intelligent form of selfishness. (In my opinion, nobility normally consists, not in acting unselfishly, but in being more intelligently selfish.)

This quote and this story encapsulates why humans create moral rules. Most of the time, in daily life, our short-term and long-term desires are in harmony. We can satisfy our immediate desires without jeopardizing our future goals. In these situations, moral rules become rather irrelevant, or at the very least automatic, since the function of moral rules is, at base, to harmonize individual interests with group interests.

For example, no moral injunction is needed for me to go to work; nor is one needed for my employer to hire me. Both of us act selfishly, but in harmony, because each of our desires is satisfied by the other. I have something to gain from work (money), and my employer has something to gain from my work (English classes), so what need is there of any rule?

There are situations in life, however, when our short-term desires are so markedly out of harmony with our long-term goals that rules are needed to guide behavior. Jane Eyre’s situation was one such example; and in the end the choice turned out to be the right one.

The difficulty is that, sometimes, the temptations to have one’s cake and eat it too can be overwhelming. This especially applies in cases where, even if it is against the rules of society, an unethical act will most likely escape detection, and thus escape consequences. Every human has an interest in maintaining the rules of society as far as other people are concerned, and strategically breaking them in their own case. This is why E.O. Wilson, in his book about human nature, said: “It is exquisitely human to make spiritual commitments that are absolute to the very moment they are broken.”

But every breach of the moral code, however carefully concealed, carries a risk of detection. And even if you aren’t detected, the stress associated with concealing a secret can be punishment in itself. Epicurus made this point: “It is impossible for the person who secretly violates any article of the social compact to feel confident that he will remain undiscovered, even if he has already escaped ten thousand times; for right on to the end of his life he is never sure he will not be detected.”

Thus I think it is wise, as much as possible, to be consistent with your words and deeds, with the code you hold others to and the code you hold yourself to, and to act as though everything you do will one day be revealed. But, of course, all this is easier said than done.

Quotes & Commentary #21: Dostoyevsky

In fact, I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As part of my job as a professional American (being an English teacher in Spain is little more than being a professional American), I had to give a presentation on thanksgiving for my class.

Thanksgiving is really the quintessential American holiday. We watch American football—our defining sport, which involves taking land by force. We watch the Macy’s Parade—which consists of giant cartoons floating above our heads, a combination of our love of pop culture and excessive size. And finally we eat, and eat and eat. And then, the next day, we shop. No series of activities could more perfectly encapsulate the American identity.

The most conspicuous absence from this list of activities is being thankful. Theoretically, at least, we all know we’re supposed to be thankful; but we have no specific ritual of thanksgiving. In my classes, I tried to get my students to say one thing they’re thankful for. Some were very forthcoming, but most were extremely shy.

Why are people shy about thanking others? Being thankful is difficult because it requires vulnerability. To thank someone sincerely is to acknowledge a debt—not just a material but an emotional debt—a debt that perhaps cannot be repaid. To seriously communicate this gratitude requires that you let down your guard, something easier said than done.

For whatever reason, most of us go through life pretending that we are self-sufficient. We don’t like to think we owe anything to anybody. Instead, like Satan in Paradise Lost, we like to pretend that we are self-generated, self-sufficient, self-caused:

“I disdained subjection, and thought one step higher / Would set me highest, and in a moment quit / The debt immense of endless gratitude, / So burdensome still paying, still to owe; / Forgetful what from him I still received.”

Ingratitude is Satan’s principal sin. He does not want to live a life of gratitude, constantly and eternally singing a hosanna to God. He doesn’t want to acknowledge that he owes anything to anybody, not even the creator of the universe.

It must be admitted that owing a debt can be humiliating and crushing. Here I am reminded of the potlatch, a ritualized form of combat practiced by the natives of the Northwest Coast of Canada. During a potlatch, the headmen from competing groups would do symbolic battle by giving each other ostentatious gifts. The loser would be the man who received more than he could reciprocate.

This sounds bizarre, but consider: have you ever received a gift from somebody you’re not very fond of? I have, and I know that receiving gifts can engender bitterness as well as gratefulness. Being the recipient of a gift puts you under the giver’s power; and few people are grateful to be under somebody else’s power.

But is this necessarily true? Is gift giving necessarily aggressive? John Milton’s Satan goes on to say “And [I] understood not that a grateful mind / By owing owes not, but still pays, at once / Indebted and discharged.”

Here Satan realizes what many people forget. Being thankful is not a sign of weakness—although often appears so to the egotistical mind—but a sign of strength. It is a sign of strength because it requires sincerity, and being sincere always involved being vulnerable, letting your guard down. Being grateful means dispensing with the illusion that you’re self-caused and self-sufficient, and revealing your weaknesses to the world. Nothing requires more strength than showing weakness.

So I’d like to take this opportunity to personally thank the universe and everyone in it. I’m luckier than I could ever put into words.

Quotes & Commentary #20: Locke

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience: in that, all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself.

—John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding

This passage is one of the most famous formulation of the tabula rasa account of the human mind. Tabula rasa is Latin for “blank slate,” which is the traditional metaphor used to explain the theory. At birth, the mind is like a blank chalk board, devoid of writing; our experience is the hand that writes upon us; and our knowledge is the end result.

John Locke held that there was nothing in the mind that did not originate in the senses. Yes, we could have abstract ideas, like our notion of a triangle; but these ideas were simply generalizations from individual triangles that we have experienced through our eyes. Thus all knowledge, however general, abstract, or theoretical, was just a summary of our experience.

In Locke’s own lifetime, this idea was contested by Leibniz, who wrote an entire book-length response to Locke’s Essay, arguing that the mind needed certain innate principles in order to acquire knowledge. And this puzzle—the respective roles of experience, sense data, induction, deduction, and abstraction in our knowledge of the world—forms the basis of Kant’s magnificent Critique of Pure Reason.

Locke was a philosopher, and thus his Essay is largely concerned with epistemology—the nature, limit, and acquisition of knowledge. Yet this debate—empiricism versus rationalism, the “blank slate” versus “innate ideas”—is often reframed, in today’s world, as a scientific controversy.

The most famous example of this that I’m aware of is the controversy in linguistics. How much structure must we posit in the human brain in order to account for language acquisition? These classic answer to this question was given by Chomsky. He argued that, contrary to Locke, we can’t imagine the brain at birth as a blank slate, but must assume an enormous amount of complex machinery.

Several arguments led him to this conclusion, the most famous of which was the “poverty of input.” This is the observation that, without some kinds of basic assumptions guiding their derivation, children are not exposed to nearly enough examples of language in order to derive the correct grammatical form. For the human infant trying to guess the meaning of an unknown sentence, there are an enormous number of logical possibilities. If the language learner had to eliminate each one of these possibilities one by one, then it would take far too much time. Thus some in-built, innate schema must allow them to guess intelligently.

Not only that, but for the learner attempting to divine the deep structure from the surface structure, they must contend with the fact that the surface structure of a language is often misleading. Consider these two sentences: (A) “I expected the doctor to examine John,” and (B) “I persuaded the doctor to examine John.” Now let’s say we transform the first sentence into the passive voice: “I expected John to be examined by the doctor.” Notice that the meaning of this sentence is identical with the earlier sentence.

Suppose the learner, reasoning by analogy, transformed sentence (B) the same way, resulting in “I persuaded John to be examined by the doctor.” Now notice that the meaning of this new sentence is different from the first one. In the active voice the doctor is being persuaded, and in the passive voice John is. And this, despite undergoing what, superficially at least, appears to be the same transformation as sentence (A). Clearly, there is more to the grammar than meets the eye.

From all this, Chomsky concludes that there must be a “Universal Grammar,” which is a schema in the brain that determines which types of grammatical rules are permissible. Put more simply, Universal Grammar is something that allows learners to guess intelligently, rather than randomly, about the structure of language. Clearly such a schema would be a lot of information to be born with. In this, Chomsky resembles Leibniz and Kant far more than Locke and Hume.

But you don’t really need any of Chomsky’s arguments to realize that there must be some innate organization in our brains that allow us to learn language. After all, almost every person learns a language, while dogs and cats, who also have brains, and who are exposed to about as much language, never pull it off. Computers are better at many cognitive tasks than humans; and yet a few minutes with Google Translate is enough to convince anyone that computers haven’t quite gotten the hang of language. Clearly there is something special about the human brain that allows us to acquire language, while cats and computers struggle.

Thus we are left with several interesting questions. First, how much information and organization does the human brain possess at birth? How much of this information consists of general learning strategies, and how much is specific to language acquisition? And what exactly does this information consist of? Chomsky’s model of Universal Grammar, for example, was an attempt to answer this last question, by proposing a set of conditions that all languages must abide by. But his model has of late been criticized, first, for positing too much organization, and second, for failing to account for the structure of certain rare languages.

I am not a linguist, and thus I cannot hope to solve this controversy, or even make an interesting contribution to it. I only want to point out that this debate, although new in form, harks all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. Plato thought all knowledge was buried in the mind, and all philosophers had to do was uncover it; and Aristotle, like Locke, thought that knowledge derived from the senses. It is obvious to everyone by now that either extreme must be wrong. But apparently 2,500 years hasn’t been enough time for us to come to a conclusion.

Quotes & Commentary #19: King

This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do – not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad.

—Stephen King, On Writing Well

Stephen King’s book about writing is among a handful of books whose reading has permanently changed my day to day life. This is partly because, as Stephen King says, it is a book with admirably little bullshit in it.

In this quote, for example, King points out something that is commonly overlooked: being good at doing something is no guarantee of being good at teaching or analyzing it. This applies with special force to artists. Few things are more disappointing than hearing a great artist talk about his work.

I thought about this most recently while watching a movie inspired by Bob Dylan’s life, I’m Not There. In one scene, Dylan (played by Cate Blanchett) is questioned by an intellectual from the BBC. He is asked questions about social and political issues, to which Dylan gives characteristically curt and flippant responses. The intellectual gets angry and concludes that Dylan is a poser; and Dylan, in turn, gets frustrated because the intellectual is obviously missing the point.

The inability of artists to articulate the principles or ideas embodied in their works is just one example of the distinction, made famous by Gilbert Ryle, between knowing how (knowing a skill) and knowing that (possessing knowledge). The difference between knowing how to write a protest song about racism, and knowing about the mechanics of racist institutions, is not a difference of degree, but a difference of kind; and there is no contradiction, or even irony, in somebody being able to write good protest songs without being to explain how he does it, and without having a particularly deep knowledge of what he is protesting.

Stephen King, although certainly no philosopher, is well aware of the difference between knowing how and knowing that. Learning to write is learning a skill; the knowledge is embodied in practice. Thus good writing cannot be reduced to a set of rules, maxims, and principles. And even if such rules did exist, it would not be necessary for a novelist to be able to learn and articulate the rules in order to produce good art, in the same way that it isn’t necessary for children to learn a theory of bike riding to ride a bike.

It is true that, when teaching beginners in any skill, teachers often resort to providing rules. These rules are inevitably simplifications, meant to ease the pupil’s progress. But at a certain point the pupil becomes so adept at the task that it is unnecessary—not to mention impossible, for lack of time—to consciously consult these rules during practice. Not only that, but the pupil learns (largely unconsciously) when and how to interpret the rules (because all rules need interpretation), where to apply them (which does not depend on another rule), and when to break them (because all rules can be broken). This is what it means to be an expert.

Because of this strange ineffability of expert knowledge, at a certain point the learner must resort to observation and imitation. Rather than trying to articulate rules, the learner simply watches what experts do, and tries to recreate it. This is why, as Stephen King says, the only way to become a good writer is to read, read, read, and then write, write, write. No style guide will compensate; no set of rules will suffice; no magic formula exists. Writing, like baking, basketball, and playing the banjo, is an embodied skill, and thus must be learned through imitation.

This is why Stephen King emphasizes, again and again, that aspiring writers must write daily. He advises setting yourself a minimum word count, and then making sure you write that many words, come hell or high water. King’s word count is 2,000, but that’s quite high. For a while I forced myself to write 1,000 words a day. It was very hard at first—some days it was excruciating—but it gradually became easier. Nowadays I’m more lax; 500 is enough to satisfy me. But I will be forever grateful to King for dispensing with the bullshit, for forgetting about the rules, and for encouraging me to put pen to paper.

Quotes & Commentary #18: Shakespeare

The lamentable change is from the best, / The worst return to laughter.

—William Shakespeare, King Lear

This quote has been coming to my mind often, for the simple reason that, nowadays, it is a common joke to call something “the worst.” Saying this is inevitably ironic, if only because, as Shakespeare also pointed out in King Lear, “The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’”

As long as we have the presence of mind to call something “the worst,” chances are that things could get worse still. In the worst conceivable situation, I don’t think we would have the time, ability, or inclination to be wondering if things could go still more downhill.

All this sounds like a joke; but consider how often we give negative labels to things in our lives. As soon as you say, “I’ve had the worst day,” you begin, intentionally or not, to go through all the things that went wrong: the disappointments, the frustrations, the bad luck, and all the unpleasant moments.

To label something is to reduce a complex object to a supposedly essential quality. In the case of a negative label, whether it is an insult, a vulgarity, or “the worst,” we reduce a varied and textured experience to its most disagreeable elements, and use those elements to define the whole.

Even on the worst days, there are inevitably things that went well—things unnoticed, taken for granted, overlooked. Even in the worst situation you can find things to be thankful for. Nothing in the world is so simple as to be wholly bad or good; and even if there were such things, the badness or goodness would only be a result of our perspective, not inherent in the thing itself. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” What is terrible to one may be beautiful to another; and reminding ourselves of this subjectivity is an excellent way to transcend the egotism of judgmental labeling.

But even if all this were untrue, if we found ourselves in a wholly bad situation, bad essentially and objectively, Shakespeare gives us another reason to be optimistic: there is no direction from the bottom but up. All change from the worst is good change.

Right now I am reading Man’s Search for Meaning, by Erich Fromm. In that book the author relates how, once, while living in a concentration camp, he saw one of his fellow prisoners suffering from a terrible nightmare, writhing and moaning in his sleep. Fromm’s natural impulse was to wake the man; but then he reflected that any nightmare would be better than camp life. Thus there are even situations when a nightmare is a desirable change.

It is a story told and told again: about how someone “lost everything,” and after “they had nothing left to lose” they began to rebuild their lives. It is cliché nowadays, but clichés become clichéd for a reason. Most of the things we fear are associated with external things; we fear heartbreak, loneliness, failure, rejection, mediocrity, poverty, humiliation. All these, in one way or another, involve failing in the social world, economically, professionally, romantically, or otherwise.

But after all these external forms of validation are stripped away, you will find that you are no less a living, breathing person, a person of flesh and bone. And all those validations only have meaning in a certain social context, a context that is ultimately superficial and transitory. Thus you are reconnected with the basics of life; and in this state, because everything that could be done has been done to you, and you are nevertheless alive, there is nothing left to fear. Indeed, you may find yourself laughing. The values of society are rather amusing from the outside.

Quotes & Commentary #17: Spinoza

Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are conditioned. Their idea of freedom, therefore, is simply their ignorance of any cause of their actions. As for their saying that human action depends on the will, this is a mere phrase without any idea to correspond thereto. What the will is, and how it moves the body, none of them know; those who boast of such knowledge, and feign dwellings and habitations for the soul, are wont to provoke either laughter or disgust.

—Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

Few things can make you more skeptical about free will than studying anthropology. For me, this had three components.

The first was cultural. I read about the different customs, rituals, religions, arts, superstitions, and worldviews that have existed around the world. Many “facts” that I assumed were universal, obvious, or unquestionable were shown to be pure prejudice. And many behaviors that I assumed to be “natural” were shown to be products of the cultural environment.

It is unsettling, but nonetheless valuable, to consider all the things you do just because that’s what your neighbors, family, and friends do. These include not only superficial habits, but our most basic opinions and values. Our culture is not like a jacket that we put on when we go out into the world; culture is not a superficial layer on our deeper selves. Rather, culture penetrates to the very core of our beings, shaping our most intimate thoughts and sensations.

The next influence was primatology, the study of primate behavior. This came to me most memorably in the books of Jane Goodall, about the chimpanzees she studied. Chimpanzees are our closest relatives. They are recognizably animals and yet so strangely human. They get jealous, become infatuated, bicker, fight, make up, and joke around. They make tools and solve puzzles.

I remember the story of a small chimp who, while walking through the forest with his group, saw a banana out of the corner of his eye. The rest of his group didn’t notice it; and this chimp knew that the bigger ones would take the banana away if they saw him eating it. So he ran off in another direction, causing everyone to follow him, and then secretly snuck back to get the banana. If that’s not human, I don’t know what is.

Last was the study of human evolution. This also involves the study of archaeology: the material culture that hominins have left behind. I held reproductions of the skulls of human ancestors, and examples of the stone tools made by our smaller-brained predecessors. I saw how the tools became more advanced as the brain size increased. Crude choppers became the beautiful hand axes of the homo erectus, and these large axes became refined into serrated blades and arrow heads by later species. Finally our species began showing evidence of symbolic thinking: burying people, crafting statues, painting caves, carving flutes, and almost definitely using language.

After seeing the obvious influence of evolution on our capacities and tendencies, after learning about the striking similarities between us and our ape cousins, and after witnessing the pervasive effects of culture upon behavior, my belief in free will was in tatters. True, even if we take all these evolutionary and cultural factors into account, we can’t predict the exact moment when I’m going to scratch my nose. But neither can we predict where a fly will land, or which patch of skin a mosquito will bite. Nobody thinks flies or mosquitoes have free will, so why us?

I normally understand “free will” to mean the ability of an organism to fully determine its own actions. In other words, a free organism is one whose actions cannot be predicted or explained by pointing to anything outside, including genes or upbringing. Not DNA, nor culture, nor childhood experiences would be enough to fully explain a free individual’s behavior. A free action is, in principle, unpredictable; and thus the free agent is morally responsible for his actions.

I do not believe in this type of freedom, and I have not for a long time. For my part, I think Spinoza is exactly right: “free will” is just a name for our ignorance of the causes of our own behavior. If we knew these causes, our actions could be predicted like any other natural phenomenon, and “freedom” would disappear.

This ignorance is not difficult to explain. Human behavior is the product, first, of our environment, which is infinitely varied and constantly changing; and, second, of the human brain, one of the most complex things in the universe. Because of the amount and complexity of the data, along with our lack of understanding, we can’t even come close to making predictions on the scale of individual human actions, like scratching one’s nose. But we can’t conclude from our inability that our actions are thus “free,” anymore that we can conclude from our inability to predict where a fly will land that flies possess a mystical “freedom.”

Kurt Vonnegut made this point, with much more wit, in Slaughterhouse Five. His Tralfamadorians, who can see in the time dimension as well as space dimensions, already know everything that will happen. Thus they have no concept of freedom, and find it puzzling that humans do: “I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”

To me it seems manifest that the traditional definition of freedom has been thoroughly discredited by what we know about the natural and cultural world. Humans are made of matter obeying physical laws, shaped by evolution, subject to genetic influence, and responsive to the cultural environment. The mind is not a mysterious metaphysical substance, but a product of the human brain; thus the mind and its behavior, like the brain, can be understood scientifically, just like any other animal’s.

All this being said, there are nevertheless ways to redefine free will so that it is compatible with what we know about physics, biology, anthropology, and psychology.

Perhaps free will is simply the inability of a thinking organism to predict what it is about to do? Every person has, at one time or another, been surprised by their own actions. This is because, as the philosopher Gilbert Ryle explained, “A prediction of a deed or a thought is a higher order operation, the performance of which cannot be among the things considered in making the prediction.” That is to say that it is logically impossible to predict how the act of predicting an action will alter the action, because the prediction itself cannot factor into the prediction (you can try to predict how you will predict, but this leads to an infinite regress).

Or perhaps free will is a condition caused by our ignorance of the future? After all, difficult decisions are difficult because we can’t be sure what will happen or how we’ll react. Deciding between two job offers, for example, is only difficult because we can’t be sure which one we’ll like more. If we could be sure—and I mean absolutely sure—which job would make us happier, then there wouldn’t be a decision at all; we would simply take the better job without a dilemma even occurring to us. In this way, our freedom is as much a product of our ignorance of the future as it is our ignorance of the causes of our actions.

What sets humans apart from other animals is not our freedom per se, but our behavioral flexibility. Humans are able to continually adapt to new environments, and to learn new habits, techniques, and concepts throughout their lives. This ability to adapt and to learn, which serves us so well, is not freedom so much as slavery to a different master: our environment. Our genes do not instill in us a specific behavioral pattern, as in ants, but give us the capability to develop many different behavioral patterns in response to our cultural and climatic surroundings. But is it any more “noble” or “free” for our behavior to be determined by social and environmental pressure rather than from genetic predestination?

Probably the best practical definition of freedom I can come up with is this: Humans are free because we are able to alter our behavior based on anticipated consequences. This is what makes morality possible: we can influence people’s behavior by telling them what will happen if they don’t follow the rules. What is more, people can understand that they have more to gain by playing along and helping their neighbors than by acting impulsively and at the expense of their neighbors. Thus our intelligence, by allowing us to understand the consequences of our actions, gives us the ability to be more intelligently selfish: we can weigh long-term benefits with short-term pleasures.

Freedom is, of course, a fundamental concept in our political philosophy. So if we choose to stop believe in freedom as traditionally defined, how are we to proceed? Here is my answer.

The important distinction to be made in political philosophy, regarding freedom, is what separates freedom from coercion. The difference between freedom and coercion is not that one is self-caused and the other caused by the outside—since even the freest person imaginable has been profoundly shaped by their environment, and is making decisions in response to their environment. Rather, there are two important differences: coercion implies force (or the threat of force) while freedom doesn’t; and “free” actions usually benefit the acting individual, while “coerced” actions usually benefit an outside party at the expense of the acting individual.

The difference thus has nothing to do with freedom as such (freedom from environmental influences), but is determined by the type of environmental influence (violent or non-violent), and by the party (actor or not) that receives the benefits. (Even though an altruistic act benefits a party besides the actor, it is not a coerced act because, first, it’s not motivated by threat of violence, and, second, because altruistic acts usually benefit the actor in some way, either socially or psychologically.)

I find that some people become horrified when I tell them about my rejection of freedom. For my part, I find that my disbelief in freedom has made me more tolerant. When I consider that people are products of their environment and their genes, I stop judging and blaming them. I know that, ultimately, they are not responsible for who they are. In a profound sense, they can’t help it. We are each born with certain desires, and throughout our lives other desires are instilled into us. Our behavior is the end product of an internal battle of competing desires.

If you think that morality is impossible with this worldview, I beg you to read Spinoza’s Ethics. You will find that, not only is morality possible, but it is necessary, logical, and beautiful.

The Writing of Will Durant

In my several reviews of Will Durant’s Story of Civilization, I have consistently praised his writing. The more I read, the more I want to read; and the more I digest, the more impressed I become. For this reason, I wanted to collect some samples of Durant’s prose, both for my own benefit, to serve as models for my prose, and to show others why I recommend Durant so highly.

For me, Durant is a writer of rare caliber, capable of being clear, charming, and graceful through thousands of pages. In many ways, Durant epitomized the pedagogical approach William Zinsser suggests in his book, Writing to Learn. Through his writing, Durant explored nearly every subject and epoch. He wrote his way through metaphysics and mercantilism, through paintings and plagues, through English law and ancient engineering. So, without further preface, here is a sampling of Durant’s prose. And mind you that these excerpts are not atypical, but representative of his whole work.

Durant on Religion. He is giving an overview of the Catholic Church; from The Reformation (Volume VI):

Through a formative millennium, from Constantine to Dante, the Christian Church offered the gifts of religion to men and states. It molded the figure of Jesus into a divine embodiment of virtues by which rough barbarians might be shamed into civilization. It formulated a creed that made every man’s life a part, however modest, of a sublime cosmic drama; it bound each individual to in a momentous relation with a God Who had created him, Who had spoken to him in sacred Scripture, Who had descended from heaven to suffer ignominy and death in atonement for the sins of humanity, and Who had founded the church as the repository of His teaching and the earthly agents of His power. Year by year the magnificent drama grew; saints and martyrs died for the creed, and bequeathed their example and their merits to the faithful. A hundred forms—a hundred thousand works—of art interpreted the drama and made it vivid even for letterless minds.

Durant on Home Life. He is painting a portrait of the home in medieval Europe; from The Age of Faith (Volume IV):

There was not much comfort in the medieval home. Windows were few, and seldom glassed; wooden shutters closed them against glare or cold. Heating was by one or more fireplaces; drafts came in from a hundred cracks in the walls, and made high-backed chairs a boon. In winter it was common to wear warm hats and fur indoors. Furniture was scanty but well made. Chairs were few, and usually had no backs; but sometimes they were elegantly carved, engraved with armorial bearings, and inlaid with precious stones. Most seats were cut into the masonry walls, or built upon chests in alcoves. Carpets were unusual before the thirteenth century. Italy and Spain had them; and when Eleanor of Castile went to England in 1254 as the bride of the future Edward I, her servants covered the floor of her apartment at Westminster with carpets after the Spanish custom—which then spread through England. Ordinary floors were strewn with rushes or straw, making some houses so malodorous that the parish priest refused to visit them.

Durant on Visual Art. He is describing the Sistine Chapel; from The Renaissance (Volume V):

[Michelangelo] divided the convex vault into over a hundred panels by picturing columns and moldings between them; and he enhanced the tridimensional illusion with lusty, youthful figures upholding the cornices or seated on capitals. In the major panels, running along the crest of the ceiling, Angelo painted scenes from Genesis: the initial act of creation separates light from darkness; the sun, moon, and planets come into being at the command of the Creator—a majestic figure stern of face, powerful of body, with beard and robes flying in the air; the Almighty, even finer in form than in the previous panel, extends His right arm to create Adam, while with his left arm He holds a very pretty Angel—this panel is Michelangelo’s pictorial masterpiece; God, now a much older and patriarchal deity, evokes Eve from Adam’s rib; Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree, and are expelled from Eden; Noah and his sons prepare a sacrificial offering to God; the flood rises; Noah celebrates with too much wine. All in these panels is Old Testament, all is Hebraic; Michelangelo belongs to the prophets pronouncing doom, not to the evangelists expounding the gospel of love.

Durant on Architecture. He is evaluating the palace of Versailles; from The Age of Louis XIV (Volume VIII):

Architecturally, Versailles is too complex and haphazard to approach perfection. The chapel is brilliant, but such flaunting of decoration hardly accords with the humility of prayer. Parts of the palace are beautiful, and the stairways to the garden are majestic; but the compulsion laid upon the designers to leave the hunting lodge intact, merely adding wings and ornament, injured the appearance of the whole. Sometimes the proliferating pile leaves an impression of cold monotony and labyrinthine repetition—one room after another to the spread of 1,320 frontal feet. The internal arrangement seems to have ignored physiological convenience, and to have presumed upon remarkable retentive power in noble vesicles. Half a dozen rooms had to be traversed to reach the goal of desire; no wonder we hear of stairways and hallways serving in such emergencies.

Durant on Literature. He is discussing Shakespeare’s language; from The Age of Reason Begins (Volume VII):

The language is the richest in all of literature: fifteen thousand words, including the technical terms of heraldry, music, sports, and the professions, the dialect of the shires, the argot of the pavement, and a thousand hurried or lazy inventions—occulted, unkenneled, fumitory, burnet, spurring… He relished words and explored the nooks and crannies of the language; he loved words in general and poured them forth in frolicsome abandon; if he names a flower he must go on to name a dozen—the words themselves are fragrant. He makes simple characters mouth polysyllabic circumlocutions. He plays jolly havoc with the grammar: turns nouns, adjectives, even adverbs into verbs, and verbs, adjectives, even pronouns into nouns; gives a plural verb to a singular subject or a singular verb to a plural subject; but there were as yet no grammars of English usage. Shakespeare wrote in haste, and had no leisure to repent.

Durant on Engineering. He is summarizing the Roman techniques for constructing roads; from Caesar and Christ (Volume III):

The consular roads were among their simpler achievements. They were from sixteen to twenty-four feet wide, but near Rome part of this width was taken up by sidewalks (margines) paved with rectangular stone slabs. They went straight to their goal in brave sacrifice of initial economy to permanent savings; they overleaped countless streams with costly bridges, crossed marshes with long, arched viaducts of brick and stone, climbed up and down steep hills with no use of cut and fill, and crept along mountaintops or high embankments secured by powerful retaining walls. Their pavement varied with locally available material. Usually the bottom layer (pavimentum) was a four- to six-inch bed of sand, or one inch of mortar. Upon this were imposed four strata of masonry: the statumen, a foot deep, consisting of stones bound with cement or clay; the rudens, ten inches of rammed concrete; the nucleus, twelve to eighteen inches of successively laid and rolled layers of concrete; and the summa crusta of silex or lava polygonal slabs, one to three feet in diameter, eight to twelve inches thick. The upper surface of slabs was smoothed, and the joints so well fitted as to be hardly discernible.

Durant on Music. He is explaining the development of musical notation; from The Age of Faith (Volume IV):

We owe to our medieval forebears still another invention that made modern music possible. Tones could now be determined by dots placed on or in between the lines of the staff, but these signs gave no hint as to how long the note was to be held. Some system for measuring and denoting the duration of each note was indispensable to development of contrapuntal music—the simultaneous and harmonious procedure of two or more independent melodies. Perhaps some knowledge had seeped from Spain of Arab treatises by al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Avicenna, and other Moslems who had dealt with measured music or mensural notation. At some time in the eleventh century Franco of Cologne, a priest mathematician, wrote a treatise Ars cantus mesurabilis, in which he gathered up the suggestion of earlier theory and practice, and laid down essentially our present system for indicating the duration of musical notes. A square-headed virga or rod, formerly used as a neume, was chosen to represent a long note; another neume, the punctum or point, was enlarged into a lozenge to represent a short note; these signs were in time altered; tails were added; by trial and error, through a hundred absurdities, our simple mensural notation was evolved.

Durant on War. He is describing the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War; from The Age of Reason Begins (Volume VII):

The towns suffered only less than the villages. Many of them were reduced to half their former population. Great cities were in ruins—Magdeburg, Heidelberg, Wurzburg, Neustadt, Bayreuth. Industry declined for lack of producers, purchasers, and trade; commerce hid its head; once-wealthy merchants begged and robbed for bread. Communes, declaring themselves bankrupt, repudiated their debts. Financiers were loath to lend, fearing that loans would be gifts. Taxation impoverished everyone but generals, tax collectors, prelates, and kings. The air was poisonous with refuse and offal and carcasses rotting in the streets. Epidemics of typhus, typhoid, dysentery, and scurvy ran through the terrified population and from town to town…

Morals and morale alike collapsed. The fatalism of despair invited the cynicism of brutality. All the ideals of religion and patriotism disappeared after a generation of violence; simple men now fought for food or drink or hate, while their masters mobilized their passions in a competition for taxable lands and political power. Here and there some humane features showed: Jesuits gathering and feeding deserted children; preachers demanding of governments an end to bloodshed and destruction. “God send that there may be an end at last,” wrote a peasant in his daybook. “God send that there be peace again. God in heaven, send us peace.”

Durant on Science. Here he explains the consequences of Newton’s work on light; from The Age of Louis XIV (Volume VIII):

When [Newton] passed a small ray of sunlight through a transparent prism he found that the apparently monochrome light divided into all these colors of the rainbow; that each component color emerged from the prism at its own specific angle or degree or refraction; and that the colors arranged themselves in a row of bands, forming a continuous spectrum, with red at the one end and violet at the other. Later investigators showed that various substances, when made luminous by burning, give different spectra; by comparing these spectra with the one made by a given star, it became possible to analyze in some degree the star’s chemical constituents. Still more delicate observations of a star’s spectrum indicated its approximate motion toward or from earth; and from these calculations the distance of the star was theoretically deduced. Newton’s revelation of the composition of light, and its refraction in the spectrum, has therefore had almost cosmic consequences in astronomy.

Durant on Trade. Here he gives us a picture of Roman trade in the first century; from Caesar and Christ (Volume III):

The improvement of government and transport expanded Mediterranean trade to unprecedented amplitude. At one end of the busy process of exchange were peddlers hawking through the countryside everything from sulphur matches to costly imported silks; wandering auctioneers who served also as town criers and advertised lost goods and runaway slaves; daily markets and periodical fairs; shopkeepers haggling with customers, cheating with false or tipped scales, and keeping a tangential eye for the aedile’s inspectors of weights and measures.

Durant on Philosophy. Here he is summarizing Spinoza’s metaphysics; from The Age of Louis XIV (Volume VIII):

We may conclude that in Spinoza substance means the essential reality underlying all things. This reality is perceived by us in two forms: as extension or matter, and as thought or mind. These two are “attributes” of substance; not as qualities residing in it, but as the same reality perceived externally by our senses as matter, and internally by our consciousness as thought. Spinoza is a complete monist: these two aspects of reality—matter and thought—are not distinct and separate entities, they are two sides, the outside and the inside, of one reality; so are body and mind, so is physiological action and the corresponding mental state.

Quotes & Commentary #16: Claude Lévi-Strauss

The first thing we see as we travel around the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.

—Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss

Lévi-Strauss made this exclamation while he was describing the increasingly pervasive influence of Western culture on the rest of the world. It is worth quoting the preceding sentences:

Our great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at the cost of corresponding ills. The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe.

Lévi-Strauss wrote this in 1955, and it has only gotten more true. Of increasing concern is the damage we have done to the natural world. We have polluted the air, changed the climate, and succeeded in imperiling our own survival with our machines. We have hunted species to extinction, we have introduced other invasive species to wreak havoc, and we have disrupted whole ecosystems. Truly, it is impossible to exaggerate the extent to which we have altered the globe—all too often causing problems for other species.

When is the last time you went somewhere truly natural? Have you ever? I don’t mean a park, a nature reserve, or a forest. I mean places where you can’t see any signs of human tampering. The closest I have ever come to this has been in Canada, when I have paddled a row-boat to the side of a lake, and walked into the pine forest. But even there, without any humans around for miles, I could still hear jet skis and speed boats humming in the distance. And even if I couldn’t hear or see any signs of human activity, the very forest has been altered already by human activity. Both moose and bear are hunted in those parts.

Ironically enough, this environmental damage—damage that now poses a grave danger to us—has been caused by our miraculous technology, the same technology that allows us to lead such comfortable lives. Our addiction to convenience will someday cause us a very great inconvenience.

But Lévi-Strauss was not primarily interested in the environment. Rather, he was thinking about culture. He was bemoaning the emergence of a global culture, primarily Western in origin: a culture that would soon swallow up all the traditional cultures that anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss were interested in studying. To quote Lévi-Strauss once more: “Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass.”

To an enormous extent, this has already happened. I know this very well. Once, while I was studying in Turkana, a remote part of Kenya, I walked into a store. On the radio was Rihanna; on the shelves were products I recognized: Oreos, Pringles, Coca Cola.

Here in Spain, English is slowly taking over. There are English slogans in advertisements, there are hundreds and hundreds of English language academies, and more and more public schools are bilingual. And Spain is comparatively behind in this regard, partly because Spaniards already speak an international language. If you go to Portugal or Germany, for example, where American movies and shows are consumed in the original language, seemingly everyone can speak English, or at least understand it. Western culture is taking over the globe, and American culture is taking over the West.

It would be unreasonable to regard this is an unambiguously bad thing. At the very least, it has the potential to make the world more peaceful. When we become more similar; when we eat the same foods, watch the same shows, and wear the same clothes; when we speak the same language and have the same values; when, in short, we are all part of the same culture, it will be more difficult to persuade people to dress up in uniforms and kill each other. Well, I hope so at least. And besides, there’s nothing necessarily nefarious about this process. People have voted with their wallets, and voluntarily opted into this mass culture. Every time somebody watches an American show or wear Western clothes, they are reinforcing this process, regardless of their ideological beliefs.

Even so, I find something terribly sad about this growing uniformity of the world. There are no wild places anymore, and even foreign cultures are less foreign. Many people, myself included, are still afflicted with Wanderlust; but where can we wander to? Travel is cheaper than ever; for that reason, more people than ever are traveling; for that reason, traveling is no longer an escape. This is why I loved studying anthropology, and why I loved reading Lévi-Strauss, with his tales of adventure and hunter-gatherers in the rainforest. Such things promised a more substantial escape, at least in imagination.

To quote Lévi-Strauss once again, “I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the last twenty thousand years is irrevocable.”

Quotes & Commentary #15: Ecclesiastes

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

—Ecclesiastes 1:9

Today in my history class I showed my students a similar quote, this one by the medieval Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun: “The past resembles the future more than one drop of water resembles another.”

I asked my students to tell me what this quote means. Both the language and the philosophy were a bit advanced for them, yet one student hit upon the basic idea: people are always the same. We may change our world, and we can change our behavior, but we can’t change our nature.

True, in many ways the present is manifestly different from the past. Technology has advanced, science has expanded our knowledge, and political institutions have become more democratic and fair. Trade and industry have made us so wealthy that even modest citizens can afford pleasures considered a luxury a short time ago. We live longer, wealthier, and healthier lives than ever before; and we live in a society that, however imperfectly, is more tolerant of more different types of people—atheist, gay, black—than at any other time. In short, notwithstanding our endless limitations and our serious problems, progress is possible.

And yet every step forward is a victory over ourselves, a victory over our darker nature. Human history is an endless war of virtues against vices. Civilization is not the inevitable result of human intelligence, but a prize that countless generations have fought to achieve. Progress has been anything but linear. We have stagnated, and we have retrogressed. The same mistakes, follies, and brutalities have been repeated endlessly through time, over and over, each generation forgetting the lessons learned by the last one.

The philosopher George Santayana famously said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But as the historian Will Durant reminds us: “History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.”

I used to think that progress was natural and inevitable. I grew up believing that racism, at least in its more brutal variety, had been largely eradicated. The emancipation of the slaves, the enfranchisement of women, and the acceptance of homosexuality seemed in retrospect like the unavoidable result of progress. It was only natural that we had become more tolerant, and the future would be even more accepting than the present.

And now? Now I see clearly that all these accomplishments, all these victories of toleration over racism, sexism, and homophobia, were hardly inevitable. Rather, they were the hard-won fruit of a bitter battle, a battle that is far from over, which in fact will never be over. The future may be different from the past, and that which shall be may be different from that which has been, but only if we fight for it. If we are complacent, if we take things for granted, then truly there will be no new thing under the sun.

Quotes & Commentary #14: Aristotle

Anger seems to listen to argument to some extent, but to mishear it, as do hasty servants who run out before they have heard the whole of what one says, and then muddle the order, or as dogs bark if there is but a knock at the door, before looking to see if it is a friend; so anger by reason of the warmth and hastiness of its nature, though it hears, does not hear an order, and springs to take revenge.

—Aristotle, Nichomachaen Ethics

Just yesterday I had an interesting question posed to me. Of the seven deadly sins—gluttony, lust, envy, greed, wrath, sloth, pride—which one afflicts me the worst? I thought it about it for a while. Certainly I am afflicted by each deadly sin. I can be lazy, arrogant, selfish, and all the rest. But I think my outstanding challenge has always been my capacity for rage.

I used to be an angry person. Just ask my brother, or any of my old friends. The smallest things could set me off: a joke, a passing remark, a perceived slight. And when I got angry, I lost all control. Once I threw my cell phone at my oldest friend (thankfully, it hit the guitar he was playing instead of striking him) and snapped it in half. Another time, I kicked a good friend in the back, causing him to fall over in the street. And I can’t tell you how many times I beat up my brother when I was a kid.

It is revealing that, almost always, I can’t even recall what made me so angry in these situations. Usually it was something very trivial. Big things don’t provoke rage in me, but little things do. I become enraged when I’m hungry and I can’t find a place to eat. Or when I’m impatient and stuck somewhere. Or when somebody is being silly when I’m in a sour mood. My mood makes the crucial difference. When I’m hungry, tired, stressed, or otherwise irritable, my patience disappears and I have a tendency to snap at people. I lose my ability to empathize and become a selfish, egocentric man-child.

A big part of growing up, for me, has been learning to control my anger. To do this, I’ve had to recognize that anger is almost always illogical and unwise. Rage, indignation, and outrage are dangerous emotions, because they convince us that they are justified. Indeed, anger can feel extremely empowering. We are never so sure that we are right and others wrong than when we’re enraged. And yet, as Aristotle points out, it is when we’re angry, indignant, and outraged that we are most prone to being wrong, precisely because we feel unshakably sure that we’re right.

Anger is just a defense of the ego. When we feel that we are being undermined, or slighted, or treated unjustly, our anger is a way of preventing our ego from being damaged, of preserving our sense of self-worth, of reaffirming our own perspective. Yet by defending your ego, you acknowledge that it’s vulnerable; and even if you retaliate, you can’t undue the injury that’s been done to your pride.

It is one of the hardest things in the world, but also the most rewarding, to actually listen when you’re being criticized rather than to retaliate. I know from painful experience that the urge to fight back can be nearly overwhelming. Instead of understanding what the other person is saying, we immediately start thinking of how to refute them. But how can you refute someone when you haven’t heard what they’re saying? And how can you convince them when you don’t acknowledge the validity of their experience?

When something seems untrue, unjust, or unfair, then your whole body and mind can tense up in protest. But in these moments it is crucial to remember that what seems true to you may not seem true to somebody else, and what seems fair to you might seem unfair to a friend. Most of all it is important to fight the angry tendency to mishear what other people are saying. To do this, extra effort is necessary, the effort to listen and understand. Do not be like Aristotle’s dog and bark before you know who’s at the door.

Lotz in Translation

Saving the world—one long, pretentious blog post at a time.

Author: Roy Lotz