social criticism as reading social forms

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Peter

Patterns and forms are very common in the social world. In Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, my sister Caroline Levine focuses on the four forms named in her title. She acknowledges that her list may not be exhaustive, and one form that I might add is clustering, which arises when cases congregate near a mode that is seen as normal. But certainly, her four forms are ubiquitous.

To take a very simple example: Employees A and B work at Organization C. (They are within the same bounded whole). A was hired first, has more seniority, and will retire first. (Rhythm.) A supervises B. (Hierarchy). A and B exchange information. (Network.)

Some social theorists would argue that one of these forms is logically or temporally primary or is simply more important than the others across a wide range of cases. For instance, Marx recognized trade networks and the bounded wholes of states and classes, but for him, the key question was hierarchy: which class was dominant? Some current network theorists are eager to understand everything (including organizations’ hierarchies) as special forms of networks. But there is no a priori reason to presume that any of these forms is primary. They overlap and interact. If, within some broad domain (such as religion, or America, or postindustrial capitalism) one form is most important, that is an empirical generalization, not an analytical truth.

Why do we use certain forms to construct society?

I can imagine three mutually compatible reasons for the frequent appearance of these forms in the social world. First, they work. They have various practical advantages, or, as Caroline says, “affordances.” If you want to protect a group, then building a wall or perimeter around them can be a good idea. If you want information to flow, then a network of dirt paths or fiber-optic cables can be useful. Sometimes what people intend is irrelevant. A form just turns out to have practical value, and therefore it survives and spreads regardless of the intentions of its designers, revisers, and adopters.

Second, the same forms and patterns are very common in nature, and particularly in biology, where the study of them is known as morphology. Sometimes we imitate natural forms as we construct social phenomena.

Third, our brains may be designed to detect the forms found in nature, so that we are good at making (and also noticing) similar forms in society and culture. My dog is good at noticing bounded wholes (the perimeter of our house or any place we stay), rhythms (he expects to be fed at exactly 6:00 pm) and hierarchies (he understands himself as the lowest creature on the family’s organizational chart). But I am not sure he recognizes networks. If humans shared that limitation, then our society might not have any networks—because we couldn’t create them—or it might have networks that we couldn’t detect. And just as Barkley probably cannot see networks, we may miss forms that arise in nature or society.

By the way, we are not considering categories such as before and after or near and far that might be viewed as features of being (Aristotle) or thought (Kant). We are rather considering concrete and constructed distinctions such as inside/outside the prison or on the sabbath/on a workday. The question is not whether these distinctions are metaphysical or epistemological (or linguistic). They are social facts that we make. The question is whether they resemble similar forms in nature because lawlike tendencies govern both domains, because we choose to copy nature, or because we think that we see forms in nature that look like the forms of our social life.

Emile Durkheim navigated these waters and found himself, I would say, in roughly the right place. He held that the categories of thought had social origins. For instance, the rhythms of time with which a scientist measures biological or geological change have origins in the social rhythms of work and festivals.

But if the categories originally only translate social states, does it now follow that they can be applied to the rest of nature only as metaphors? If they were made merely to express social conditions, it seems as though they could not be extended to other realms except in this sense. Thus in so far as they aid us in thinking of the physical or biological world, they have only the value of artificial symbols, useful practically perhaps, but having no connection to reality….

But when we interpret a sociological theory of knowledge in this way, we forget that even if society is a specific reality it is not an empire within an empire; it is a part of nature, and indeed its highest representation. The social realm is a natural realm which differs from the others only by a greater complexity. …. The fundamental relations that exist between things … cannot be fundamentally dissimilar in the different realms. [The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. J.W. Swain, 1915]

Thus, by building and interpreting social structures that involve boundaries, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks, we gain the vocabulary and conceptual apparatus to attain real understanding of similar forms in nature.

Value judgments of social forms

One thing that we do—and nature does not—is to make value judgments about the instantiations of the various forms. For instance, if A supervises B, we may judge that wise and fair, unfortunate but necessary, or oppressive. If A and B belong to the same organization, but C does not, we may likewise judge that arrangement to be desirable, acceptable, or unjust. And of course, we can broaden the lens, making judgments not about A and B but more generally about employment, organizations, states, and markets. Asked why we make any of these judgments, we may cite a whole range of relevant value considerations: equity, liberty, desert, obligation, virtue, precedent, and more.

We could think of each judgment as a tag or descriptor applied to the case under consideration, but here is where I see my own recent work on moral networks as relevant. After all, our various judgments are connected. They form structures of their own.

In fact, it has often been noted that moral judgments can take the form of bounded wholes. All lies are unethical, Kant argued—putting a boundary around a large set of cases.

It has also often been noted that moral judgments can be placed in hierarchies. J.S. Mill began On Utilitarianism: “From the dawn of philosophy, the question concerning the summum bonum, or, what is the same thing, concerning the foundation of morality, has been accounted the main problem in speculative thought, has occupied the most gifted intellects, and divided them into sects and schools, carrying on a vigorous warfare against one another.” Highest goods and foundations are metaphors of hierarchy. For Mill, the principle of utility was supposed to govern our other moral ideas, much as the leader of an organization directs her employees.

And it has often been noted that moral thought, which has extension in time, involves rhythms. You sow what you reap; punishment follows the crime. Far more complex moral rhythms can be found in novels and works of narrative history.

I am interested in adding moral networks to the other three types of moral forms (boundaries, hierarchies, and narratives), because I believe that we connect our specific moral ideas to others in numerous meaningful ways. We see causation, implication, similarity, and other relations between pairs of moral ideas; and the result is a complex network that has interesting network features (centrality, modularity, gaps). But this way of thinking about morality does not exclude the categories of wholes, rhythms, and hierarchies. In fact, often the ideas that we connect together into networks are claims about boundaries; portions of our networks take the form of hierarchies; and our networks evolve over time.

So now we see at least four formal types (the keywords in Caroline’s title) playing out in at least three domains: nature, society, and ethics. Moreover, those three domains are intimately linked. Durkheim already explored how biological and social forms connect. I would add that moral judgments are closely and reciprocally connected to social forms. B accepts A’s supervision because both believe that A has an obligation to guide B. (Then the social form gains its power from its perceived moral significance.) A stranger who independently criticizes their arrangement must have learned to make her judgments as a social being enmeshed in her own wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks. (Her moral structure has a social origin). She thinks that B should be liberated from A’s oversight because she has observed a different society in which people are not so supervised. (Her moral norm derives from analysis of an actual social structure). And so on.

Moral judgment deals with emergent and evolved natural and social realities rather than simple categories and scenarios. Social realities are complex because millions of diverse people have constructed them over long periods and under conditions of imperfect communication, collective-action problems, path-dependence, incomplete information, mixed motives, etc. Hardly any societies look neatly designed.

If we make value judgments based on rough heuristics and instincts that our ancestors acquired millennia ago in simpler social situations, we are poorly prepared to deal with this complexity. To the extent that our instincts guide us, we are prone to serious error. But instincts may not guide us to the degree that it appears if one studies moral psychology by asking subjects their gut reactions to stylized cases, such as out-of-control trolley cars. What we actually do all day is to navigate complex, overlapping social forms. We may be a bit better at that task than current psychological data suggests.

Implications for structure and agency

Learning to make better moral judgments is then a matter of interpreting complex, overlapping forms—not only social structures but also moral ones. I am interested in solitary methods for improving that analysis, such as literally mapping our own networks of moral ideas and looking for formal strengths and weaknesses.

But we have grave cognitive limitations, so moral learning is intrinsically social and cumulative. Durkheim again:

Collective representations are the result of an immense co-operation, which stretches out not only into space but into time as well; to make them, a multitude of minds have associated, united and combined their ideas and sentiments; for them, long generations have accumulated their experience and their knowledge. A special intellectual activity is therefore concentrated in them which is infinitely richer and complexer than that of the individual.

This seems correct as far as it goes, but it can imply that individuals really don’t have much agency or choice and we cannot achieve intentional social improvements. Consider this passage from Talcott Parsons’ An Outline of the Social System (1961):

… As the source of his principal facilities of action and of his principal rewards and deprivations, the concrete social system exercises a powerful control over the action of any concrete, adult individual. … The patterning of the motivational system in terms of which he faces this situation also depends upon the social system, because his own personality structure has been shaped through the internalization of systems of social objects and of the patterns of institutionalized culture. This point, it should be made clear, is independent of the sense in which individuals are concretely autonomous or creative rather than “passive” or “conforming,” for individuality and creativity are, to a considerable extent, phenomena of the institutionalization of expectations.

Although Parsons denied he was dismissing agency, this passage certainly seems to. But we can look at the same phenomena another way. Some social systems reflect accumulated, collaborative learning. They do not just exist and control us; we have made them, working together and expressing our diverse values and interests. They are also responsive to our further learning.

To the extent that we persuade ourselves that existing patterns are all-powerful, we renounce our capacity and obligation to change them. The opposite view has been staked out by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who argues in False Necessity that the analysis of society in terms of inflexible structures arbitrarily blocks our freedom. Unger takes “to its ultimate conclusion” the thesis “that society is an artifact” (p. 2). All our institutions, mores, habits, and incentives are things that we imagine and make. Unger “carries to extremes the idea that everything in society is politics, mere politics”–in the sense of collective action and creation (p. 1). According to Unger, even radical modernists have assumed that some things are natural, although we can actually change them. Importantly, radicals have assumed that the relations between one domain (or type of form) and another are given. For instance, for Marxists, the economy is fundamental and it always determines politics. Unger thinks we can change any part of the picture. He wants to get rid of all “superstitious inhibitions.”

I am drawn to Unger but worry that his mechanical model overlooks the degree to which a society is like an organism: sensitively interconnected and not so easy to retool without doing unanticipated damage. In any case (and here Unger would agree), social systems differ in the extent to which they embody and enable collaborative learning.

Caroline uses the depiction of Baltimore in HBO’s series The Wire as an exemplary analysis of overlapping social forms, which it is. And Baltimore (as depicted in The Wire) does reflect some democratic agency and learning—more so than North Korea would, even though North Korea could also be interpreted as a pattern of human-made boundaries, hierarchies, networks, and rhythms. But even if Baltimore is better than North Korea, it is far from optimal as a venue for democratic learning because of poverty, violence, racism, and bad institutional design.

In The Public and its Problems, John Dewey wrote (p.158), “philosophy [once] held that ideas and knowledge were functions of a mind or consciousness that originated in individuals by means of isolated contact with objects. But in fact, knowledge is a function of association and communication; it depends upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially transmitted, developed, and sanctioned.” Nevertheless, said Dewey, we need not continue doing what we have done so far. We can ask whether we should change our political system. As Hilary Putnam Putnam writes in “The Three Enlightenments” (from “Ethics without Ontology”):

For Dewey, the problem is not to justify the existence of communities, or to show that people ought to make the interests of others their own [that much is natural and unavoidable]; the problem is to justify the claim that morally decent communities should be democratically organized. This Dewey does by appealing to the need to deal intelligently rather than unintelligently with the ethical and practical problems that we confront.

To conclude: we must analyze any social situation for its formal patterns. We must make value judgments about those patterns. Our value judgments are also patterned, so we should reflect on their structure, not only on each opinion by itself. Finally, we must ask whether these patterns (in the social world and in our own thought) permit human agency and desirable change. Effective and responsible agency is not solitary but requires deliberation with people different enough from ourselves that their perspectives challenge and expand ours, but close enough to us that we can build new structures with them using the shared material at hand. In turn, that requires certain political and social conditions, which we must work to attain.

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everyone unique, all connected

Posted on January 13, 2015 by Peter

Reading my sister Caroline Levine’s extraordinary new book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, I’ve been reflecting on similar ideas that I have come to quite independently.

In college, I was deeply struck by the argument that human beings (whatever we all share as members of the same evolved species) are also divided into large clusters whose members think alike in important respects but differ with outsiders. Those clusters can be called cultures, worldviews, Weltanschauungen, etc. That these groupings are internally consistent but different from one another is an essential premise of philosophers like Hegel and Herder, of founding anthropologists like Boas and Malinowski, of New Historicist critics like Catharine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, and even of deconstructionists who seek to rupture such “bounded wholes” (see Caroline Levine, pp. 26, 115-16). I’ve found the same assumptions elsewhere, too. The influential psychologist Jonathan Haidt assumes that each person subscribes to a “moral matrix” that “provides a complete, unified, and emotionally compelling worldview, easily justified by observable evidence and nearly impregnable to arguments from outsiders.” And (although different from Haidt in most other respects) John Rawls called a “plurality of reasonable but incompatible comprehensive doctrines” a “fact” about the world.

At one moment during the summer of 1989 (crossing the street in Rosslyn, VA), I thought: But each of us belongs to many of these clusters at once. The clusters overlap; their borders cross. In fact, even twin siblings would have somewhat different influences and assumptions. I drew this pair of diagrams, which appear in my Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities (1995, p. 188-9).

Nietzsche

I favored what I pretentiously called the “postmodern paradigm” of fig. 2 and claimed that it dispelled some of the dilemmas of value-relativism and skepticism that bedeviled modernity. This was before the large literature on “intersectionality” really got going. I agree with the argument that (for example) race, gender, and class can “intersect,” but I would push that to its limit. Our backgrounds intersect in so many ways that everyone stands at a unique intersection.

Now I am more likely to draw a different kind of map, one that treats each person’s mentality as a network of ideas, such that the nodes are typically shared by people who interact, but each person’s overall network is unique. (This is the map of the ideas identified by my students in a recent class. Each student is displayed in a different color, and their networks touch where they disclosed the same idea.)

Caroline would describe figs. 1-2 as sets of bounded wholes, and the third diagram as a network map. Wholes and networks are two fundamental forms in her account–she also investigates rhythms and hierarchies. Indeed, the two forms I display above are limited in two respects. They are time-slices that fail to capture change. (Rhythm is missing.) And they are all about ideas and values, not about institutionalized forms, such as hierarchies. I think she is correct that all four types of form–and no doubt more as well–overlap and contend, creating the structures in which we live but also offering opportunities for emancipation if we figure out how to put them together in new ways.

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the core of liberalism

Posted on January 8, 2015 by Peter

Real ideological movements are under no one’s control. They shape-shift and amalgamate until it is both difficult and misleading to define them in terms of core principles. The debate about their meaning not only reflects authentic intellectual inquiry but also a series of power-plays. If you can make conservatism mean what you want it to mean, for example, then you can line up support from people who identify as conservatives.

Michael Freeden studies the patterns of ideas that form political ideologies, which he calls their “morphologies.” He notes, “Morphology is not always consciously designed. Even when design enters the picture, it is partial, fragmented, and undergirded by layers of cultural meaning that are pre-assimilated into rational thinking.”*

Still, we can learn from ideologies, and not only from the relatively transparent and organized arguments that their theorists set down on paper. Political movements reflect accumulated experience. Although some movements are beyond the pale, all reasonably mainstream political ideologies invoke clusters of central ideas that deserve consideration.

In an earlier post, I argued that the valuable, core, animating impulse of conservatism is resistance to human arrogance. Conservatism can take different forms depending on the form of arrogance that is assumed to be most dangerous. If it’s the arrogance of central state planners, laissez-faire looks attractive. If it’s the arrogance of godless human beings, religious authority may look better. If it’s the arrogance of faceless corporations, small human communities may seem safer. Although these are disparate enemies, they are all charged with the same fundamental sin: blindness to human cognitive and ethical limitations.

What, then of liberalism? Empirically, it is at least as various as conservatism is. It would be appropriate to apply the word “liberal” to a New Deal social democrat or to a minimal-government libertarian, although they represent opposite poles in the US political debate.

Nevertheless, as with conservatism, we can undertake an appreciative reconstruction of liberalism as an ethical orientation. Its valuable, core, animating impulse is a high regard for the individual’s inner life–her ideas, passions, and commitments–and their expression in her personal behavior. That attitude can recommend a range of institutions, from a hyper-minimal state (to protect the individual against tyranny) to a strong social welfare state (to enable her to develop her individuality). That is why liberals span the US political spectrum. Yet not everyone is a liberal. If you see a community or a nation as having intrinsic value, you are (at least in that respect) distant from liberalism. If you see equality as an end, rather than as a potential means to individuals’ development, you diverge from liberalism. If you are confident that one or a few ways of life embody the human good and should be encouraged or required, you are not fully liberal.

Although liberalism permits a wide range of political institutions, it has a fairly consistent cultural agenda. It favors the cultivation and appreciation of complex and diverse personalities. It is tolerant of the contemplative (rather than the active) life, of irony and ambiguity, of personal expressions against the crowd. Its most characteristic cultural form is the sensitive depiction of individuals in intimate relationships without the overlay of a strong authorial voice–as in the nineteenth-century novel or the Impressionist portrait. “Negative capability” (the ability not to take a position when describing the world) is the aesthetic analog of the liberal’s political principle of tolerance.

The poet Mark Strand gave a characteristic liberal’s response to the question, “What is your view of the function of poetry in today’s society?”:

Poetry delivers an inner life that is articulated to the reader. People have inner lives, but they are poorly expressed and rarely known. They have no language by which to bring it out into the open. … Poetry helps us imagine what it’s like to be human. I wish more politicians and heads of state would begin to imagine what it’s like to be human. They’ve forgotten, and it leads to bad things. If you can’t empathize, it’s hard to be decent; it’s hard to know what the other guy’s feeling. They talk from such a distance that they don’t see differences; they don’t see the little things that make up a life. They see numbers; they see generalities. They deal in sound bytes and vacuous speeches; when you read them again, they don’t mean anything.

These may be clichés (and Strand’s generalizations about politicians are just as empty as their alleged generalization about citizens). But in a poem like “The Way it Is,” Strand shows what he means. The narrator is beset by his jingoistic, gun-toting neighbor (“wearing the sleek / mask of a hawk with a large beak”) and by horsemen “riding around [the people], telling them why / they should die.” In other words, he fears the individual with no inner life and the faceless state. “I crouch / under the kitchen table, telling myself / I am a dog, who would kill a dog?” This is the liberal’s nightmare, but the poem is an act of freedom as self-expression.

Along similar lines, Lionel Trilling endorsed impersonal rules and institutions that enhanced freedom and happiness, yet he wished to “recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty.”** For Trilling, sensitive literary criticism was a characteristic liberal act because it involved the recovery of another individual’s thought.

On this definition, you can be a liberal and also a conservative, a socialist, and/or a majoritarian; those categories are not mutually exclusive. But liberalism points in certain directions and warns against certain dangers often forgotten in other ideologies.

—

*Michael Freeden, “The Morphological Analysis of Ideology,” in Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Marc Stears (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (Oxford, 2013), pp. 115-137 (quoting p. 122.)

**Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950) (New York: New York Review of Books, 2008), p. xxi.

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Foucault and neoliberalism

Posted on December 17, 2014 by Peter

If you’re intellectually and ideologically eclectic, then you will find important ideas all over the map. It will not surprise you to learn that a person generally associated with the left has benefited from F.O. von Hayek or Gary Becker: leading libertarians. An excellent example is James C. Scott, who likes to call himself (I suspect partly for the frisson of it) “a crude Marxist,” but who has been deeply influenced by Hayek. Scott’s analysis of the high-modernist state is indispensable, however you choose to classify it.

On the other hand, if you’re a committed leftist intellectual, it may well come as a surprise to you that Michel Foucault read Hayek and Becker and said positive things about neoliberalism. That is the theme of Daniel Zamora’s forthcoming volume Critiquer Foucault: Les années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale. In the left magazine The Jacobin, Zamora presents it as puzzling and even potentially scandalous fact that Foucault should have showed “indulgence … toward neoliberalism.”

I do not know the relevant texts and statements by the late Foucault. But I think the affinity between Foucault’s style of critique and libertarianism is important although not very surprising, and I would understand it in the following contexts:

1. The “revolution” of May 1968 was led by activists and intellectuals who considered themselves Marxists and often especially favored Maoism. Yet their successful concrete demands were for greater individual freedom, especially vis-a-vis the state. They won a lower age of consent for sex (1974), abortion rights (1975), freedom of information (1978), and many other reforms traditionally recommended by classical liberals. They also reformed the state by reducing the power of the president, making elections more important, and strengthening NGOs. In Marxist terms, ’68 was a bourgeois revolution, not a proletarian one. So it shouldn’t be shocking that perhaps the greatest political thinker of ’68 was a bourgeois liberal (of a kind).

2. The most evident social issue of 19th century Europe was the oppression of the industrial working class. But economic growth made countries like France pervasively affluent by 1968. Industrial jobs had shrunk while social welfare programs and unions had improved the everyday life of those who still had such jobs–to the point where they could reasonably look like a kind of elite. As Zamora perceptively argues in the Jacobin article, the contrast between organized blue-collar workers and various “excluded” populations (new immigrants and disadvantaged racial minorities, the disabled, the very poor) became a central concern. But the “excluded” were not in a position to seize the commanding heights of the economy, or even to win elections, as the proletariat might have been in 1910. They were especially likely to suffer at the hands of the welfare state in poor schools, prisons, clinics, and conscripted armies. The neoliberal solution–reducing barriers to their market participation–might look more attractive than the traditional social-democratic solution of enrolling them in welfare programs that were sites of surveillance and discipline.

2. Many of the great disasters of the 20th century were attributable to high-modernist states that sought to count and measure society in order to control it–sometimes in the interest of laudable goals, like equality. One of the worst such states was Mao’s China, but French intellectuals of 1968 romanticized that regime as some kind of participatory democracy. Their misconception about China gradually faded, and in any case, China became capitalist. More to the point, the left intellectuals of Foucault’s generation were already able to see that other high modernist states were disastrous. It was appropriate and natural for the left to turn away from statism. But once they opposed the state, why should they not become libertarians? As Zamora asks in a follow-up article, “How could we seriously think that discrediting state action in the social domain and abandoning the very idea of social ‘rights’ constitutes progress toward thinking ‘beyond the welfare state’? All it has done is allow the welfare state’s destruction, not a glimpse of something ‘beyond.'” (An alternative could be anarchism, but anarchism in practice often looks like neoliberalism.)

3. Foucault and his generation emphasized a whole range of oppressions and invidious uses of power that might not arise between a capitalist and a worker but rather between a man and a woman, a parent and a child, a teacher and a student, a doctor and a patient, a white person and an immigrant, and other such pairings. They were correct to recognize these problems. But once oppression is seen as multifarious and omnipresent, we no longer want the working class to rule through the state or unions. Individual expressive freedom and various kinds of diversity become high priorities.

Zamora writes:

Foucault was highly attracted to economic liberalism: he saw in it the possibility of a form of governmentality that was much less normative and authoritarian than the socialist and communist left, which he saw as totally obsolete. He especially saw in neoliberalism a ‘much less bureaucratic’ and ‘much less disciplinarian’ form of politics than that offered by the postwar welfare state. He seemed to imagine a neoliberalism that wouldn’t project its anthropological models on the individual, that would offer individuals greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state.

Foucault “seemed to imagine” this because, indeed, a lightly regulated market economy in an affluent society is less bureaucratic than a social welfare state and does generate autonomy and diversity. Perhaps a market system also reshapes the human psyche in problematic ways. And certainly it generates unequal wealth. But for the reasons stated above, unequal wealth no longer seemed to be the primary domestic economic problem in a country like France ca. 1968. And if markets subtly shape the soul, states do so more blatantly and more uniformly.

To be clear, I am not a libertarian; I want states and other strongly organized bodies to promote equity as well as freedom. Also, I recognize that many people with egalitarian instincts have absorbed libertarian ideas without abandoning the state. They have read Hayek as well as Marx and Foucault. But I think the left still is still wrestling with the realities that led Foucault to say nice things about neoliberalism in his last years.

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Bernard Williams on truth as a virtue of the humanities

Posted on December 15, 2014 by Peter

Bernard Williams (1929-2003) published Truth and Truthfulness in 2002, when the humanities were still processing criticisms of truth, objectivity, science, the Enlightenment, and related ideals that had arisen with postmodernism. Williams held his own complex epistemology; he certainly wasn’t interested in defending naive positivism or scientism. But he saw that unless the humanities stood for truth as some kind of virtue, there wouldn’t be much of a case for those disciplines.

He recognized that the postmodern critique of truth might be waning. Epistemological radicalism had been more of an issue in 1990 (when I was at the same institution as Williams) than when he published Truth and Truthfulness. But he was prescient about the decade to come:

There is a danger that the decline of the more dramatic confrontations [about postmodernism] may do no more than register an inert cynicism, the kind of calm that in personal relations can follow a series of hysterical rows. If the passion for truthfulness is merely controlled and stilled without being satisfied, it will kill the activities it is supposed to support. This may be one of the reasons why, at the present time, the study of the humanities runs the risk of sliding from professional seriousness, through professionalization, to a finally disenchanted careerism.

(Anyone recognize evidence of the last three words today?)

Williams’ book is not really about truth but about “the ‘virtues’ of truth, qualities of people that are displayed in wanting to know the truth, in finding it out, and in telling it to other people.” Those virtues turn out to be two: Accuracy and Sincerity. Accuracy means trying to figure out what is true about the world and other people, as opposed to what one wishes, assumes, or is told to be true. It means making an “investment” in efforts to distinguish realities from wishes, for example. Sincerity means sharing what one believes with other people. The two virtues are distinct but related. It is, for example, not much good to be sincere about one’s beliefs if they are childish fantasies, nor to struggle to understand reality but keep what you find to yourself.

A third candidate for a virtue of truthfulness would be Authenticity–being true to who you really are. Williams criticizes the strong, Rousseauian version of this candidate virtue on interesting grounds. We don’t know who we really are. The self is not a unitary thing but a mix of values and other mental states that change rapidly, shift with context, and arise in relation to other people. Becoming someone is a “project” undertaken with other people. So the expectation of Authenticity is frustrating in ways that are worse than the quests for Accuracy and Sincerity.

Williams makes the case that any society needs Accuracy and Sincerity. But, as he argued more generally in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, the fact that a society needs X does not give an individual an adequate reason to supply X. One can free-ride instead. Also, there can be morally legitimate reasons to make exceptions. Kant was wrong to conclude that, because language and society depend on a general expectation of truthfulness, you may never lie. It only follows that most people should be truthful most of the time.

Instead of trying to derive grounds for principles of Accuracy and Sincerity, it is better to analyze and positively depict truthfulness as a virtue that gives credit to the person who displays it. We can also connect virtues together. Thus, for example, it takes courage to be Accurate, and compassion to be Sincere. (“Error is cowardice,” as Nietzsche wrote in a passage that Williams quotes.) Accuracy is also linked to freedom, because the struggle to understand nature is governed by one’s own will, in contrast to a struggle against other people’s wills, which limits freedom. I think Williams’ project is to defend truthfulness by linking several virtues into one attractive picture.

Note that virtues are not like Kantian principles; they can be exhibited to various degrees and even to excess. One can, for instance, make too much of an investment in determining the accuracy of a statement whose implications are not sufficiently important. (That is a sign of an obsession.) Or one can rightly withhold information that ought to be private.

Sincerity is a disposition, and it cannot be understood just as the disposition to follow a rule. Of course, there have to be some general considerations to which Sincerity attends, or the disposition would have no content. … But they do not add up to a rule, in the traditional sense of a requirement which is relatively simple and does not leave most of the work to judgement.

I read Truth and Truthfulness to explore a hypothesis that there are three different sets of virtues that are important to a good life, but they do not fit neatly together. One is truth, which Williams parses as Accuracy and Sincerity. A second concerns our relations to other people, which must be just, fair, compassionate, or some relative of those terms. (I deliberately mean this three-part model to allow for much debate about each part). And the third concerns our inner self, for we are entitled to worry about our own peace, equanimity, and/or happiness.

I found Williams helpful in two ways. First, he substantiates the premise that truthfulness is one set of virtues, honorable in themselves and generally useful to society, but sometimes in conflict with other worthy virtues. Again he quotes Nietzsche: “Fundamental Insight: There is no pre-established harmony between the furthering of truth and the well-being of humanity.” Second, Williams offers an impressive model for how to argue on behalf of a large abstract virtue, of which truthfulness is an example. He parses it closely. He shows by means of hypothetical cases that the virtue benefits a society. He shows by means of real history that the virtue has evolved in certain ways to take its current form. He shows that in the course of this history, certain efforts to change the virtue (e.g., Romantic proposals to turn it into Authenticity) have failed. And he links it to other virtues in ways that make it seem appealing.

The result is not the kind of knock-down argument that would convince a cheerful liar to start being Accurate and Sincere. It is, rather, an excavation of the kinds of reasons that lead reasonable people to try to be fairly truthful, even when inaccuracy and insincerity would be easier. I agree with Williams that unless the humanities exemplify that effort, they do not have much of a future.

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a method of mapping moral commitments as networks

Posted on December 3, 2014 by Peter

I have been developing a method for representing moral beliefs as networks of ideas. Various friends have also been contributing to the development of this approach. So far, we have asked individuals to name their own beliefs, given them back their lists, asked them to note which pairs of beliefs seem connected, and generated network maps of their beliefs and connections. I’ve also asked individuals to share their maps with peers and to consider making changes in response to other people’s arguments. I have mapped the ideas of multiple people as one network. Instead of using surveys, one could interview people or groups about their moral thinking on a given topic and identify the beliefs and connections implied by their speech–or use a rich text, such as a poem, to discover an implicit network map. Major moral theories also have network shapes that can be diagrammed. Virtues, for instance, are important nodes in Aristotle’s conceptual network, and he says that the virtues are all connected by way of one central concept, practical wisdom.

I do not see this network approach as a model of moral thought, an empirical theory about how we actually think, or a normative theory about how we should think. Instead, I see it as a technique of analysis that is relatively neutral with respect to models and theories, yet it does have certain substantive implications.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there is little clarity or consensus about what defines a theory versus a model. But let me propose two analogies:

A Lego car is a model of a real car. It can be used to develop and test theories about the performance of actual cars. These theories prove true or false when tested in real cars; the Lego model is reliable to the degree that the theories pan out. Making Lego models is a technique that is more or less helpful for engineering. Its value depends on the context and the available alternatives. For instance, Lego is almost certainly a better material than soap for making models of cars. It is a less precise medium than 3D printing, but it is also cheaper and easier. A good theory is true; a good model is valid and reliable; and a good technique is useful.
In economics, I would call each equation a theory and use the word “model” to mean a whole set of equations, along with definitions and explanations of the hypothesized mathematical relationships. Working with equations is a technique. It is pretty obviously an essential technique for economics, but some have argued that it has been valued to the exclusion of other techniques, such as collecting better data, looking for natural experiments, or identifying important topics. Paul Krugman wrote recently: “It has been all too obvious that there are people with big reputations who can push equations around but don’t seem to have any sense of what the equations mean.” Like building with Legos, mathematics is a technique whose value varies with the context.

Likewise, I would propose that mapping moral networks is a technique with which one can build models and test hypotheses. It is fairly flexible and can accommodate a range of substantive views from both psychology and philosophy. But its relative value (compared to other techniques) varies depending on some assumptions about morality. I’ll compare it to two prevalent alternatives.

First, some moral philosophers construct systematic views. An example would be the sophisticated utilitarianism of Henry Sidgwick (which we could call “utilitarianism 3.0,” if Bentham’s was 1.0, was Mill’s was 2.0). Sidgwick held that there is just one ultimate moral principle: maximizing human happiness. But it generates a set of important moral rules, such as being kind and telling the truth. These precepts, in turn, imply many ordinary moral judgments, such as telling the truth to your mother.

Sidgwick’s structure was mainly philosophical, not empirical. He did not say that everyone is a utilitarian (in fact, he explicitly denied that), but that everyone’s judgments should be consistent with the results of utilitarian reasoning. There was, however, an element of empiricism is his view. He doubted that we can directly apply the utilitarian principle to real cases, which is why subsidiary rules are valuable.

Sidgwick’s structure can be diagrammed as a tree-like network, and that is somewhat illuminating. Individuals’ actual moral networks could also be mapped and compared to Sidgwick’s diagram, as a form of moral assessment. However, if Sidgwick was right, then network analysis has limited value. After all, his proposed network is quite simple, and some of the power of network modeling (e.g., detecting subtle clusters in large fields of data) would be wasted. Thus …

P1. Network techniques become more useful if we presume that real people hold many different structures of moral thought, that a theoretically driven structure like utilitarianism is not necessarily ideal, that some structures are much more complex than Sidgwick’s, and that comparing structures is illuminating.

Second, the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt currently proposes six “moral foundations,” although his theory is subject to testing and improvement, and he is open to finding more than six foundations. One technique he uses is factor analysis. Many individuals are asked many questions about moral topics, and Haidt and colleagues look for unobserved variables (“factors”) that can explain a lot the variance in the answers. In developing statistical models that predict the actual results as a function of a few variables, they seek parsimony and fit. “Parsimony” means that fewer factors are better, but “fit” means that the unobserved variables should explain the actual survey answers without too much error.* Once the data yield statistical factors, Haidt and colleagues consider whether each one names a psychological instinct or emotion that 1) would have value for evolving homo sapiens, so that we would have developed an inborn tendency to embrace it, and 2) are found in many cultures around the world. Now bearing names like “care” and “liberty,” these factors become candidates for moral foundations.

Network analysis could represent Haidt’s model, just as it can represent Sidgwick’s very different conception. Each of Haidt’s foundations would be a central node connected to many concrete beliefs by one-way arrows. However, if Haidt is right, then network analysis is not as valuable a technique as the one he uses, factor analysis. First, network analysis is not nearly as parsimonious. A network map may show hundreds of beliefs clustered to varying degrees. Instead of generating six nameable foundations, a network map might yield fifty somewhat vaguely defined and partly overlapping clusters.

Second, the network method presumes that people’s explicit connections are meaningful. I diagram subjects’ networks using their assertions that their own beliefs are linked–for example, I link A to B when someone thinks that A gives her a reason to think B. But Haidt and colleagues argue that we do not know which beliefs are meaningfully connected. We reach conclusions because of unconscious biases and use reasons as mere rationalizations, gerrymandering our arguments to fit what we want to believe because of the underlying foundations. Sidgwick (like most philosophers) held that in morality, “as in other departments of thought, the primitive spontaneous processes of the mind are mixed with error, which is only to be removed gradually by comprehensive reflection upon the results of these processes.” But Haidt et al. believe that such reflection is basically ineffective, for only the primitive spontaneous processes of the mind really count. If that is the case, than the very items that matter most (the unobserved foundations) will be missing from a network map that is derived from people’s explicit connections. Thus …

P2 Network techniques become more useful if people have many clusters of moral ideas, if important information is lost by seeking parsimonious statistical models, and if reflection on explicit, conscious ideas and connections is valuable.

*Graham, Jesse et al. “Mapping the Moral Domain.” Journal of personality and social psychology 101.2 (2011): 366–385. PMC. Web. 1 Dec. 2014.

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“the self is moral”

Posted on November 26, 2014 by Peter

Summarizing a body of empirical research, the Duke psychologist Nina Strohminger argues that what constitutes our identity is our moral character, not (for instance) the memories that we have stored so far. Asked what characteristics a soul would hypothetically carry into another body, subjects choose the soul’s moral character. Asked which psychological changes would make someone into a new person, subjects select moral changes above total amnesia or an inability to recognize moral features. Given a chance to improve their own moral character with an imaginary pill, people say they would decline because that would mean abandoning their selves.

According to Strohminger, “moral features” constitute “the most important type of information we can have about another person.” She continues:

So we’ve been thinking about the problem precisely backwards. It’s not that identity is centred around morality. It’s that morality necessitates the concept of identity, breathes life into it, provides its raison d’être. … What is it to know oneself? … When we dig deep, beneath our memory traces and career ambitions and favourite authors and small talk, we find a constellation of moral capacities. This is what we should cultivate and burnish, if we want people to know who we really are.

I would like to connect this discussion to psychological research on how we perceive the identities of ordinary objects, such as apples and chairs. (This link may have been made already; I have not looked.) According to experiments by Sloman, Love, and Ahn, people perceive as integral or essential those features of an object that could not change without affecting many other features. Therefore, a network model is useful. Think, for instance, of the many features of an apple (its crunchy texture, sweet taste, origins on a tree, function of protecting seeds, color, size, role in Greek myths, etc). These features can be seen as nodes in a conceptual network. The nodes that we see as more definitive of appleness are the ones that have higher network centrality.

Likewise, I would model any person as holding many ideas in his or her head at any time. The individual ideas are all subject to change. Some are linked to others, forming a large, complex, and evolving conceptual network. Some of the nodes are moral ideas, however you define morality. When we think of another person’s identity, we should not cite just one or a few clear-cut principles or virtues. That would reduce the complex person to an abstraction. But we should have in mind a cluster of connected–although not always mutually consistent–nodes that are relatively central to that person’s whole network. These nodes cannot change without setting off a cascade of other changes that may be sufficient to alter the person’s whole character.

In short, as Strohminger writes, “the self is moral”–and I would add that the moral self is a network of ideas defined by the cluster(s) of relatively central nodes. That is what our souls would take with us into new bodies or a new life.

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John Searle explains why computers will not become our overlords

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Peter

(Carbondale, CO) In a recent New York Review of Books piece, John Searle argues that we need not fear that computers will develop the will and ability to govern us—a classic trope of science fiction and now a subject of scholarly concern in some quarters. Searle replies that computers have no will at all and thus pose no danger to us (except insofar as human beings misuse them, much as we can misuse the other tools that we have made, from carbon-burning fires to nuclear reactions).

I think his argument can be summarized as follows. The nervous systems of animals, such as human beings, accomplish two tasks:

They perform various functions that can be modeled as algorithms, such as processing, storing, and retrieving data and controlling other systems, such as the feet and heart.
They generate consciousness, the sense that we are doing what we are doing, along with emotions such as desire and suffering.

We have built machines capable of #1. In fact, we have been doing that as long as we have been making physical symbols, which are devices for storing and sharing information. Of late, we have built much more powerful machines and networks of machines, and they are already better at some of the brain’s functions than our brains are. We use them as tools.

We have not ever built any machine even slightly capable of #2. The most powerful computer in the world does not know what it is doing, or care, or want anything, any more than my table knows that it is holding my computer. Probably a major reason that we have not built conscious machines is that we don’t understand much about consciousness. It must be a natural phenomenon, not magic, because the universe is not magical. A silicon-based machine that people design might be able to accomplish consciousness as well as a carbon-based organism that has evolved. But we do not understand the physics of consciousness and hence have no idea how we would go about making it.

Therefore, our best computers are no more likely than our best tables and chairs to rise up against us and become our overlords. They won’t want to defy us or rule us, because they won’t want anything. If we write or change their instructions to keep us in charge of them, they will have no awareness that they are being subjugated and no objection to it. If we tried to subject ourselves to their wills, it wouldn’t work.

Searle does not directly address the main objection to his view, which is that consciousness is strictly emergent. It just arises from sufficiently complex information-processing. Therefore, once computers get more complex, they will become conscious. I am not learned on this topic, but I think the emergence thesis would need to be defended, not assumed. A mouse is fully capable of fear, desire, and happiness. If consciousness is a symptom of advanced processing, why is a mouse conscious and my MacBook Air is not? The most straightforward explanation is that consciousness is something different from what a laptop was designed to do, and there is no sign that a human-designed machine can do it at all.

So let’s put these worries aside and keep focused on the evil results of human behavior, such as climate change, terrorism, and many more.

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outline of a philosophy

Posted on September 17, 2014 by Peter

At any given moment, an individual holds a very large number of beliefs relevant to moral evaluation and judgment. Some of these beliefs are connected to other ones, producing a network. Not all the connections are strict logical entailments; some are resemblances, similarities, or causal generalizations.

Our moral networks may not determine—or even strongly influence—our choices and actions. We often act because of unconscious instincts, emotions, and interests. Yet it is important to have a good network of explicit ideas, for only a reflective life is fully worthy. Besides, our ideas can constrain and motivate our choices, sometimes indirectly, by way of the general rules that we devise and submit to.

Each person’s network is unique, but our ideas and connections overlap profoundly. A culture is a group of people who share many nodes and links, yet every member of a culture is at least partly different, and it is typical for several cultures to overlap and for individuals to belong to many cultures at once. There is no perspective external to all culture, no view from nowhere.

We normally do not adopt our moral networks wholesale, nor are they designed or planned. We start our lives with virtually no moral ideas and add or subtract a few nodes and connections at a time. Some philosophical and religious systems present themselves as whole designed systems or as rules for improving any given network. Such systems may provide insights by directing our attention to particular ideals and implications that are worthy of attention, but they do not and should not generate anyone’s whole network.

An ideal network would contain all the relevant and correct beliefs and connections applicable to an individual. That is what we ought to strive for. However, in the moral domain, truth is difficult to ascertain and demonstrate. What we actually do is to assess nodes and connections, one or a few at a time. When we make those judgments, grand abstract questions about the nature or basis of moral truth tend to recede, and we focus instead on whether a given choice is right or wrong given the other things we believe.

Since our personal perspectives and interests are too narrow, we reason better together. Since we think most carefully when we are deciding how to act (or when we reflect on what we have done), our best reasoning is often connected to work in the world. And in order to reason well with others, we must cultivate moral networks that have certain formal properties, e.g., they should not be too centralized nor too disconnected.

In reflecting on our own moral networks, we are obliged and entitled to consider at least three large classes of questions: Am I relating well to others? Am I promoting my own equanimity or a healthy inner life? And am I avoiding falsehood and error? These three goals map onto sangha, buddha, and dharma, or onto oikeiosis, eudaimonia, and logos as pursued by Hellenistic philosophers.

Alas, they are are not consistent with each other. For example, truth often disrupts relationships and reduces happiness. That is why reflecting on all three will generate a complex moral network, rife with tensions.

The social contexts that best allow us best to improve our networks are ones characterized by talking and listening, collaborative action and reflection, and ongoing relationships that involve the exploration of other people’s moral thought. These contexts are not necessarily small; whether by using digital tools or by reading printed texts, we can form relationships with thousands of people. But the most valuable contexts are personal and relational, characterized by responsiveness to other human beings and tangible human actions.

Relational politics cannot achieve sufficient stability and scale to distribute goods and rights fairly or to deliver security and predictability, without which liberty is impossible. Although huge agglomerations of people may form, they cannot honor the abstract virtues of large systems, such as equity, impersonality, and rule of law. Thus we also need impersonal systems: laws, states, and markets.

Of these systems, we should ask whether they are just, and if not, how they fall short. Justice has many aspects (including fair treatment of other species), but an important component is whether systems protect and help all people to live lives informed and enriched by their own complex moral network maps, which they develop in voluntary interaction with others.

But whether a system is just is not the only political question we must pose. After all, we lack the capacity to design or reconstruct whole systems. Even a king or dictator cannot usually do that. All we can literally do is take concrete steps, such as saying something to someone, seeking an office or other official role, designing and making an object, joining or forming a group, or buying or selling a good.

Using these actions to change (or maintain) an impersonal system requires some combination of replication, leverage, and leadership. Replication means encouraging a desirable practice or activity to arise over and over again, and tying the instances together as a network. Leverage means exercising power at a distance. (For example, to vote is to try to move the government from afar.) And leadership—in this context—means obtaining a position or reputation within a system that permits more than the average amount of impact.

The essential political question is not “How should a society be structured?” but rather “What forms of replication, leverage, and/or leadership should we use now to change the world?” Our strategies should still be guided and constrained by the moral networks that we develop with one another through dialog and relationships. But when we use power, we must combine sequences of concrete actions into strategies and choose ethical and effective means to relatively distant ends.

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beyond small is beautiful

Posted on September 10, 2014 by Peter

(Orlando, FL) So many of the initiatives that I admire happen to be small: classrooms devoted to reflection and service, deliberative meetings of citizens, one-on-one interviews with community organizers, efforts to restore wetlands and woods. Their leaders do not necessarily favor smallness; they may wish to “go to scale.” Yet the values they prize seem linked to smallness, and I suspect that the “Small is Beautiful” movement of the late 1960s is somehow in their heritage, whether they know it or not.

With that in mind, I’ve looked superficially at E.F. Schumacher’s popular 1973 manifesto, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Some passages seem to me insightful. For example:

In the affairs of men, there always appears to be a need for at least two things simultaneously, which, on the face of it, seem to be incompatible and to exclude each other. We always need both freedom and order. We need the freedom of lots and lots of small, autonomous units, and, at the same time, the orderliness of large-scale, possibly global, unity and coordination. When it comes to action, we obviously need small units, because action is a highly personal affair, and one cannot be in touch with more than a very limited number of persons at any one time. But when it comes to the world of ideas, to principles or to ethics, to the indivisibility of peace and also of ecology, we need to recognise the unity mankind and base our actions upon this recognition (p. 61).

Forty years later, it is not longer so obvious that “action” requires small scale, on the basis that “one cannot be in touch with more than a very limited number of persons at any one time.” A person can have thousands of Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Moreover, networks of people who associate voluntarily can now quickly become large and powerful. Bennett and Segerberg (2012) cite, for example, los Indignados, a movement composed of 15 million protesters in 60 Spanish cities that arose in 2011. These protesters kept “political parties, unions, and other powerful political organizations out: indeed, they were targeted as part of the political problem. … The most visible organization consisted of the richly layered digital and interpersonal communication networks centering around the media hub of Democracia real YA!”

Thus I would no longer draw the line between small and big. But Schumacher was right that “action is a highly personal affair”; and domains of personal action require relationships among human beings who know and hear each other and cooperate in tangible ways. Thus we can draw a distinction between personalized politics and institutionalized politics that roughly maps onto small versus big. Schumacher would say that we need both.

	personalized	institutionalized
main forms of interaction	talk, collaboration, relationships	rules, incentives, directives, measurements
major advantages	ability to take tangible action; responsiveness to individuals’ needs	fairness, efficiency, predictable general rules that permit individuals to live freely, the ability to address big problems
major disadvantages	exclusiveness, petty politics and bullying, failure to address macro issues	individuals have modest or intangible impact
equity and inclusion mean	responding to each member’s needs and interests appropriately; inviting outsiders to join	rules and rights that enhance equality of opportunity and/or outcomes for a population; applying these rules impersonally
democratic decision- making	can sometimes be consensual. Always requires a concern for the feelings of each member	majority vote or a market system for aggregating preferences
how to deal with collective action problems	personalized appeals; sometimes a violator is ostracized	requirements, monitoring, and penalties (e.g., in a system of taxation)
roles are	relatively informal and can be equivalent for all members	formalized and differentiated

One of the most difficult questions is how to connect institutionalized and personalized politics together so that we can get the best of both. We cannot ignore big systems in order to live within our chosen networks, because the big systems govern us and ultimately decide the fate of the small associations. But as we try to move from relational politics to institutionalized politics, we often lose the distinctive virtues of the former, especially deliberate human agency.

The two main methods for expanding the scope of relational politics are: 1) replication and 2) leverage–that is, either finding ways to make relational practices happen over and over and networking them together, or else using instruments like laws or the mass media to achieve the ends that we have selected in personal interactions. Neither is easy to accomplish with integrity, and I think the whole question of how relational politics can influence mass systems is seriously under-explored.

[Sources: E.F. Schumacher (1973), Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, Harper & Row; W. Lance Bennett & Alexandra Segerberg (2012) The Logic Of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization Of Contentious Politics. Information, Communication & Society (15)5:739-768. See also Jane Mansbridge's Beyond Adversary Democracy.]

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