Latest Read: Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

 I'm reading Leviathan by Hobbes. I previously read about Hobbes in Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God, and now I'm reading the original. I won't blog everything because it's a dense work. Surprisingly readable, but nonetheless dense, in that many points are made in a paragraph and then it moves on. With so many bases covered, there's no way I could blog the whole thing.

As Lilla said, Hobbes approaches problems of society in terms of human nature and what will work, rather than as an effort to discern the mind of the creator and impose those insights on society. So the first 100+ pages (in this edition) are all about human nature and behavior and words and knowledge and rhetoric and, um, well, everything. I obviously won't blog all of it, but I want to note a few points that stood out:

Chapter 2, section 2: He states the law of inertia a few decades before Newton. In terms of political philosophy the point here is that people change in response to either internal processes or external stimuli, i.e. there is always a cause for people's changes. This is important to his later arguments about how to control people.

But as a physicist, it's interesting that he was aware of this. I confess to knowing far less than I should about the origins of the Law of Inertia. Apparently it was known to philosophers decades before Newton's Principia, and already used for analogies.

Chapter 2, section 8: He says that he doesn't believe in witchcraft, but he thinks many witches believe that they have real powers, and they seek to cause mischief, so they deserve punishment. Also, if people were less superstitious and hence less fearful of witches and other potential supernatural threats in the community, they'd be more obedient to civil authority.

His approval of punishing witches for civil good is not terribly surprising from what I previously knew about him. His point about how less superstitious people would be more orderly is an interesting one, however. In general, people who have less fear of their neighbors are less prone to vigilantism, but are also less drawn to "law and order" figures. 

Chapter 8, section 1: Virtue requires inequality. "For if all things were equal in all men, nothing would be prized." I am unsure whether modern egalitarians fail to grasp this or grasp it perfectly.

Chapter 8, section 26: He makes the same point that Galileo made: The Scripture was written to teach us about morality and salvation, not to teach us about the motion of the heavens. He was a contemporary of Galileo, and according to a footnote actually met Galileo, so I should not be surprised here.

Chapter 9, section 48: "...honour consisteth only in the opinion of power. Therefore the ancient heathen did not think they dishonoured, but greatly honoured the Gods, when they introduced them in their poems, committing rapes, thefts, and other great, but unjust, or unclean acts." I've noted before that polytheistic divinities showcase human flaws rather than enjoying a monopoly on morality. Hobbes has a different take, arguing that even these polytheistic deities are honoured rather than seen as cautionary tales. I have to ponder that. It's certainly true that the Old Testament God acts in ways that would raise eyebrows if a human did it, but his moral monopoly grants Him license.

Chapter 11, section 25: Curiosity drives people to seek for causes and causes of causes, until eventually they postulate a deity as the ultimate cause. This is related to the point Lilla made, that religion in politics provides a sure foundation. God is the ultimate postulate. Take that away and people are adrift.

I think this might also explain why many ideologues of non-theistic sorts (e.g. Marxists, Critical Race Theorists, atheists who have gotten a little TOO excited about not having a lord and savior) behave in ways that often resemble religion: They have a foundation, something that scratches the same psychological itch, so they behave in a similar way.

Two quick notes

 First, a Texas legislator is trying to purge schools of books that address racial issues in ways that might make students "uncomfortable." He's coming at it from a right-wing perspective, but it is very much cancel culture, building on the exact same foundation of "We must drive from the public square anything that might hurt feelings."

Second, a Liberties article by Mark Lilla makes the point that Americans romanticize youth to a greater and longer extent than any other culture, and so we strive mightily to not disabuse people of the delusions that we (rightly) inculcate in youth. I think this helps explain some of the STEM Pipeline mania. Children need to believe that they can do anything if they try. Adults need to cut their losses and focus on what they can realistically do. We refuse to admit that some kids should try something else.

Stillborn God: Rest of chapter 5

 He spends some time discussing various liberal theologians, particularly in 19th century Germany. They were so sure that they'd come up with rational ways to reconcile modern society and religion and steer Europe away from the passions of the religious wars.

And then World War 1 happened. Oops. Even if WW2 had never happened, the first World War is more than enough to show that Christian Europe had not really sorted out its problems.

Near the end (page 248) Lilla gets at something that had been hinted at since the start of the book: Once you have a modern system of ideas that doesn't really require God, why have God?

Once the liberal theologians had succeeded, as they did, in portraying biblical faith as the highest expression of moral consciousness and the precondition of modern life, they were unable to explain why modern men and women should still consider themselves to be Christians and Jews rather than simply modern men and women.

Indeed. Religion was measured against its ability to help people express and live by modern values, not by its access to truth that would otherwise be unavailable.

I'm coming more and more to believe that everyone needs religion. Or, at least, they need religion when locked inside and fearing death, which has been the condition of our world since March 2020. From the confessional rites of penitent white liberals during the summer of 2020 to the idiots screaming about freedom while rampaging inside the US Capitol (and nearly rampaging inside the Michigan state capitol last year) everyone is invoking the sacred. Yes, many of the right-wingers are Christians, but I think the Christian faith of the hard right is over-estimated. Whether talking about the more libertarian-leaning elements of the right, or the definitely-not-religious Steve Bannon faction, not everyone on the right is high on Christianity. But that doesn't mean they aren't religious. I mean, they brought a shaman in furs to the Senate chamber with them.

Stillborn God, Chp. 4 and start of Chp. 5

 Chp. 4 spends a lot of time on Hegel. I don't feel like I can summarize his entire summary, I'll just quote one point (regarding Hegelian thought, not necessarily Lilla's own preferences) from near the end of the chapter (pages 206-207):

Now we know what it is to live in freedom: It is to live in modern bourgeois societies where we exercise control over the machinery of political life, hardly noticing its gentle hum. These societies will be complex, comprised [sic] of organically connected social spheres, in which we play different roles: citizen, producer, consumer, newspaper reader, club member, parent, friend. Those who are educated and cultured will have no trouble reconciling themselves to such a system, since they will understand its rationality and appreciate its freedom. Those less gifted may still need religion and patriotic symbols to win their loyalty and sacrifice, but these, too, can be provide within the ambit of the bourgeois state.

One could argue that Trumpism and the sacking of the Capitol show what happens when the less cultured (at least by the measures favored by people like Hegel, and me, apparently) feel like the system is run by people who don't actually share their beliefs in religion and patriotic symbols. That's hardly a complete diagnosis of what led to the current troubles, but it's a factor, and a way of pointing to a bigger cultural divide that fuels a lot of things. Lilla has summarized so many political philosophers as conceding a need for some sort of religion to control the worst in people and/or channel the best. If religion is not heartfelt worship then it is a noble lie, and noble lies only work when delivered convincingly. If they aren't even delivered then there's no solidarity. 

Not everyone on the right (even the hard right) is as religious as people think, but if they reject revealed religion they still adhere to a "civic religion" that reveres a particular vision of the Founders and the Constitution. It isn't theology in the sense that most of the political philosophers discussed by Lilla probably thought of it, but it is religion. It is a narrative that tries to explain the origins of the setting in which people live, and offer morality tales. It's mostly BS, if for no other reason than that the Founders disagreed with each other on so many things, so one can't ascribe a consistent belief system to them.

And it's disrespected. I just called it BS. I'm part of the disrespect. And they know it. They also know that the federal government rejects this originalist religion, as it does far more than the Constitutional Convention ever contemplated. We have a priestly caste of Supreme Court Justices who interpret the original texts and proclaim that the federal government's actions are consistent with their reading of the Constitution, but it is, on some level BS. I don't offer that as a revolutionary statement or a call to an uprising. It's just a fact that basically every modern society on earth has a government that does far more than our Constitutional Convention contemplated. It's how the modern world works. Which is arguably fine, but to have a priestly caste say that the sacred text authorizes this requires mental gymnastics.

On the other side of the culture war, inclusivity is the new religion. I've said plenty about that and don't need to rehash it.

So back to Lilla. He says that the religious wars of post-Reformation Europe led to a desire to separate church from state, or at least remove church authority from any possible meddling in the state, and leave at best an "opiate of the masses" that could be used to suppress the worst and/or bring out the best in people, in accordance with some plan. He's focusing on the debate between those two sides, but I'm left wondering how you get people to buy into either form of religion if they can tell that the elite classes supervising the delivery of this religion, like shadows on the wall of Plato's cave, very obviously don't believe it.

Anyway, he is focusing a lot on Germany part-way through chapter 5, noting that many Germans believed Protestantism should be an integral part of a modern state, while England and the US believed that religion would benefit from religious freedom. (I gather that by that time the UK had largely stopped persecuting Christians who eschewed the Church of England.) He even notes that many Jews in Germany thought that their values were sufficiently similar to those of Protestantism that they could be assimilated into this new Germany. (Lilla adds that we know how that worked out, in a moment of dry understatement.)

One other thing I notice at this point is that he focuses so much on Catholic-Protestant tensions and doesn't mention the Eastern Orthodox churches. I gather it's because he's talking about debates in Christian Europe, and most Eastern Orthodox Christians either lived under Ottoman rule or Russian rule.  Russia was/is, of course, Christian, but it's also on the geopolitical edge of Europe and poorer than most European Christian countries. And Christians under Ottoman rule couldn't really have religious politics.

One other thing about chapter 4: On page 189 he notes that Hegel found Greek religion interesting because their gods were so human. While it meant it would be hard for Greek gods to have final moral authority, he saw it as a window into Greek cultural appreciation of humanity as humanity. Christianity, at least in many forms, tells us to look to the next life, not to lust for this world, while the Greeks could appreciate human life as embodied life in this world that even the gods had gusto for. Lilla notes later that, for all of Catholicism's otherworldly pretensions, it became a very worldly power. The reaction was a Reformation that focused on individual faith rather than adherence to an institution, and somehow wound up producing a Protestant work ethic that led to great worldly prosperity while focusing minds on salvation.

Stillborn God, Chapters 1 and 2

 My previous post was about the short introduction to The Stillborn God. I've since read the first two chapters.

Chapter 1, "The Crisis" is largely about Christian political theology and its origins. I cannot comment on the accuracy of the history, but the insights provide some food for thought. He gets at the core issue pretty early, noting two things I've remarked on before. Page 22:

God's intentions themselves need no justification, since he is the last court of appeal. If we could justify him, we would not need him; we would only need the arguments validating his actions.

I'm not sure I completely agree with that, but I get the argument. I think there would be ways to say something about the importance of the final authority while hiding his rationales behind a veil of mystery. But maybe that argument just reduces to what I've said before about the need for a final authority so you don't have agonize over your postulates.

On pages 22-23, he makes an interesting comment about Greek political philosophy:

In ancient Greece, some imagined a first cause or "unmoved mover" without personality who embodied divine law, which philosophers could contemplate to understand the cosmic order and man's place within it. Other Greeks entertained thoughts about a panoply of deities with conflicting personalities but whose natures were still intelligible to human reason. Such gods were never thought by the Greeks to exercise revealed political authority because they created man and the cosmos--and perhaps that is why political philosophy was first able to develop in ancient Greece.

I've made the point before that pagan pantheons provide no moral authority because there is no power monopoly and no consistent behavior between the deities. There is instead strife, and most of the point of morality in society is to avoid or resolve strife.

He goes on to talk about the challenges facing Christianity, which has a 3-fold deity with very different roles in the world, and a history that started as a minority faith and then accidentally acquired an Empire. Christ was a hippie figure but his followers were running the Roman Empire. He over-simplifies when he occasionally contrasts with Judaism and Islam, but he isn't really writing about them. He's making the point that Christianity had a dilemma in constructing a political theology, but at least had a divinity with a monopoly on moral authority that could, in principle, provide the final axiom. I'm not sure that Christianity is as unique as he claims in having dilemmas around political theology, but he never pushes hard on the claim of uniqueness, so I guess I can let it slide. I'm sure that there are differences between Christianity's problems and other religions' problems. 

Chapter 2 dissects the history and struggles around that. I like the point on page 59 about how Christian cosmology is a rather strange thing:

The Christian conception of the cosmos was always a patchwork affair. It had been cobbled together in the Middle Ages from biblical sources, the speculations in Plato's dialogue Timaeus, the systematic scientific treatises of Aristotle (filtered through Muslim commentators), and the ancient astronomical works of Ptolemy. Why it was fashioned at all is something of a puzzle. The Hebrew Bible does not engage in systematic speculation about the structure of the cosmos; it assumes that nature was created good but has nothing fundamental to teach us about how to live. The Torah is complete. The Christian New Testament takes a similar approach to nature: it is there, it is good, but it is not grace.

In The Meaning of Creation, Conrad Hyers argued that Genesis sought to demystify the world, treating it not as the playground of disparate pagan deities but a place that one God made with one purpose, and it is good. And the explanation of God's creation involves a work week ending in rest, just as a righteous adherent of the faith would work all week and devote the 7th day to worship and rest. Trying to tie this to some sort of natural science was never the goal, and if the Church had grasped that point the Galileo Affair might not have been an issue.

Much of the chapter concerns Hobbes. I am taking a big risk by offering summary of a summary of Lilla's Hobbes and his work Leviathan, but how else will I recall anything if I don't write about what I read? Hobbes argued that human existence is at perpetual risk of a state of war, and for fear of death and loss they hand power to a sovereign who can guarantee peace. This is the basic argument that an effective government basically has a monopoly on the use of force within its territory. Worse, people who look into the depths of their own souls will see dark desires, project their desires onto others, and see a need for violence because whoever moves first has the advantage. In Lilla's read, Hobbes reduces the problem of evil to game theory: Conflict is a natural state and you have to be aggressive. Forget demons and original sin and all of that, there's a much simpler explanation of the darkness of human existence.

Lilla also argues that while the task of a king is to keep peace in his territory, churchmen cheat by speaking directly to the people and offering messages that don't necessarily fit into the sovereign's plan.

Lilla summarizes Hobbes' proposal as being not to abolish the fears that drive humans, but rather:

...focus it on one figure alone, the sovereign. If an absolute sovereign could ensure that his subjects feared no other sovereigns before him, human or divine, then peace might be possible.

At the root of all power is fear and force, and the hope is that absolute power will bring absolute peace. Well, um, yeah, we know how well that works. But then again, no state has ever been truly effective, especially back then, so I guess I see the temptation.

But to Lilla, the most important thing in Hobbes is not his case for an absolute sovereign but that he turns political questions into questions about human nature and how people see the world. Everything is driven by human fears and how they project their own flaws onto others, so perception is ultimately everything.

Interestingly, Lilla claims that while Hobbes was OK with a state religion to help ensure compliance, he was not too concerned with whether people honestly believed, only with whether they demonstrated obedience. He reads Hobbes as being interested in vanquishing the interplay of church and state because it led to churchmen bypassing kings, and in this way Lilla sees some continuity between Hobbes and much more liberal thinkers that came after. If they were interested in taking away the power of churchmen and finding a better way to enforce harmony then Lilla sees them as being in some sort of continuity with Hobbes.

What I find interesting in all of this is how the problem of perception is tied in with the problem of power. It ultimately comes down to who the armed men will listen to. What they perceive and fear determines what they respond to and how they respond. In this regard there's some overlap with Plato, whose book The Republic is concerned with governance but goes deep into the allegory of the cave: How can we know if what we see is reality or something put there to fool us? We only know what we perceive, and that will affect our conduct, including the conduct of those entrusted with power. Just 9 days ago we saw how this plays out: A mob stormed the Capitol because they perceive an election as rigged, and armed men defended it because, whatever they might personally think about the particulars of whatever allegations, they were loyal to the system that certified Biden. Mind you, I have every reason to believe that Biden's win was legitimate, but the facts of legitimacy are less important than the perceived facts. How do I honestly know that it was legit? How do they honestly know it wasn't? We have our preferences that determine whom we trust, and a critical mass of people in the right places put their trust in the system and hence fought back against the mob, while a disturbing number of people put their trust elsewhere and stormed the building.

The roots of power are dark and fundamental stuff, and what I'm hoping to learn is what Lilla sees as the fallout from removing God from that equation. He says that a lot of political philosophy in Europe arose from religious wars, bloody battles between people who all believed in the God of Abraham, the Bible, and Jesus, but were loyal to different clergy. Before reading this I assumed that the problem of mixing religion and state was solely about the passions for control that come from religion, and the excesses that those passions can lead to. Most kings wind up being practical, hoping that they can get some tax revenue, keep the place running, and keep themselves running it. How a peasant prays is rarely their biggest headache. But neighbors and local clergy can be terrible. The take I'm getting here is that it's not just about them, it's about the fact that they are a separate center of power. That's interesting to me, because my liberalism leads me to believe that a society needs many centers of power. I've said much about how bad it is for economies and "the good jobs" to be monocultures. I still think that's true, but there are obviously more angles here. Take away religion and you take away its problems, but you don't take away the needs it fulfilled, and yet you do take away a center of power, with all of its advantages and drawbacks.

Food for thought.

Next Read: The Stillborn God by Mark Lilla

The next book that I'll blog is The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. Lilla is examining what he calls political theology, i.e. politics rooted in religion. He doesn't necessarily mean strict theocracy like the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Puritan settlements of New England. He just means a society where people look to religion for guidance on social structure. From page 7:

Human beings everywhere think about the basic structure of reality and the right way to live, and many are led from those questions to speculate about the divine or to believe in revelations. Psychologically speaking, it is a very short step from holding such beliefs to being convinced that they are legitimate sources of political authority.

Indeed, as much as I value religious freedom and the religious neutrality of the public square, how can we expect people to not be influenced by their religion? I believe whole-heartedly that we can and should find secular rationales for public policy, but if that public policy touches on matters of morality, how could we expect a person to NOT be influenced by their religion? You can come up with secular rationales for all sorts of things that various religious denominations might approve of, and members of those denominations should appeal to those rationales so that they can coexist in the public square with people who aren't in their religion, but let's not kid ourselves about the role of their beliefs. I say that not to dismiss their secular arguments as pretextual, but rather to make a point about coexistence. I am a state employee, but I teach in part because of things instilled in me in Catholic school. That's not a priori a church/state violation.

He also makes an important point about the role of stories in human understanding and child psychology:

We are still like children when it comes to thinking about modern political life, whose experimental nature we prefer not to contemplate. Instead, we tell ourselves stories about how our big world came to be and why it is destined to persist. These are legends about the course of history, full of grand terms to describe the process supposedly at work--modernization, secularization, democratization, the "disenchantment of the world," "history as the story of liberty," and countless others. These are the fairy tales of our time. Whether they are recounted in epic mode by those satisfied with the present, or in tragic mode by those nostalgic for Eden, they serve the same function in our intellectual culture that tales of witches and wizards do in our children's imaginations: they make the world legible, they reassure us of its irrevocability, and they relive us of responsibility for maintaining it.

He goes on to say that his book is no fairy tale, because he will discuss the fragility of the modern world. He was writing in 2008, with 9/11 on his mind, but it applies today. Indeed, just 8 days ago barbarians entered the Capitol and chased away the representatives of the people. Their rationales were more complex than a single slogan about modernity and its critics or whatever, but many were in that vein.

In the introduction he argues that we secular westerners are the unusual ones, not necessarily because we don't live in a theocracy but because we don't live in a society where appeals to divine authority are common and accepted. I think about this a lot, and not just because I am religious. If you push hard enough on a chain of "Why?" questions you eventually reach your fundamental axioms, the bare assumptions that you can't derive from other assumptions. And then you say "But why those axioms?" and people kind of stall. You can appeal to personal desires and preferences, but besides the fact that those desires are almost by definition selfish, this world has many people desiring many different things. Why should you desire what you desire instead of something else? A king could provide an answer to that, but the leaders of a democratic society cannot (unless you subscribe to a very vulgar and illiberal majoritarianism). You could appeal to consequentialist arguments, and say that without these principles guiding a society you get chaos, but we have seen more than one type of society enjoy extended eras of peace (or at least internal peace). 

You soon reach a "Well, that's my opinion" stage, and the obvious modern/postmodern response is "But that's just your opinion, man!" We have no real base if you dig deep enough. One motive for religion is not merely fear of death but fear that all we have is each other and our equally idiosyncratic and arbitrary preferences. Wouldn't it be nice to have some authority to sort it out? Not just because humans are weak and sheep and all that, but because we've built up some pretty impressive things despite our ostensible weaknesses, and it's terrifying to think that they sit on sand. Surely we must have a rock under them! Surely there must be some foundation for prosperous, liberal, tolerant civilization. 

Perhaps part of why social justice and diversity talk gets so religious is because they want to just take the tolerance and diversity that we should preserve and put that itself on God's pedestal. It's a nice idea, except it eventually results in guilty liberals confessing sin in pointless training sessions while somebody tries to remove Shakespeare from the curriculum, and none of this stops barbarians from storming the Capitol. We thus get to the true root of power, which is force, and then we have to ask about the factors that make (hopefully most of) the men with guns loyal. Those factors rarely involve training sessions on implicit bias. If there is a God in our politics, it's whatever keeps the armed men at the base of the system from turning disloyal.

Anyway, let's see what he has to say about the loss of religion and its consequences.

"Indifference" and the restlessness

 An article by Mark Lilla in the new journal Liberties (only available in print, alas) solidified some of my thinking on the restlessness. He talks about the concept of "indifferent" acts in ethics and theology. Do all of our actions carry inevitable moral weight? Is it possible to engage in some small activity without being good or bad, or is even a small act of leisure a sin? What if that act of leisure promotes morality? We see this all the time in modern lefty discourse, with endless articles about how "problematic" something or other is. One needn't be amoral or nihilist to recognize that you'll go crazy if you agonize over the ethics of every small deed. But people do that nonetheless. Just a few hours ago I was scolded over some small joke, because even though the person I told it to totally got it, some outside observer might lack context and think I was doing something bad. Lilla goes through the history of indifference in theology and philosophy, and I won't attempt to rehash it here. But I will note that the modern scolds of political correctness are searching for sin everywhere, and the modern restless educators feel like we must keep trying to further purify everything.