How to speak truth (or a reasonable facsimile) to power

One of the earliest depictions of the human form, painted on the wall of a cave in the Iberian Peninsula, seems to show a man with his middle finger extended. The gesture is probably not in this instance the near-universal sign of contempt it has become, but it may nevertheless serve as a reminder that the urge to make our feelings known has a long history. Today, that urge expresses itself most fully in our need to tell our leaders when we think they are wrong, a practice commonly known as “speaking truth to power.”

But getting up the courage to do so is only half the battle. As our recent election cycle has shown, getting power to listen is a whole other matter. Leaders across the political spectrum tend to surround themselves with people who share their views, and the resulting echo chamber simply drowns out other voices.

So how does one do it? The Bible has a couple of examples.

In Genesis, the patriarch Abraham gets God to think twice before wiping out Sodom, the original Sin City. He does it by haggling. “Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city,” he asks. When God agrees to spare the city if fifty righteous individuals can be found, Abraham cautiously but firmly starts bringing the number down. What about only 45, he asks. Or 30? How about 20? 10? Each time, God agrees to the new number, and we are left to believe not a single righteous person could be found in that moral cesspool.

A more earthly example comes from the Second book of Samuel, where the prophet Nathan publicly shamed King David for wrongfully arranging the death of Uriah the Hittite so that he could take the voluptuous Bathsheba as his wife. Ostensibly seeking the king’s justice, Nathan shared a story about a rich landowner who nevertheless seized his neighbor’s only ewe for a feast. When David predictably exploded over this rampant injustice, Nathan sprang his trap, telling the king that this was what he had done when he lusted for Bathsheba. Even though Nathan had tricked and humiliated David, the king responded, “I have sinned against the Lord.”

Abraham and Nathan were special cases. As patriarch and prophet, respectively, they had acquired the right to exercise what Greek and Roman scholars called parrhesia, literally, “frankness,” or “freedom of speech.”

More ordinary folks had a problem, as the Greek philosopher Plato discovered when he travelled all the way from Athens to teach the ruler of Syracuse in Sicily how to become a philosopher-king. When Plato said that being a king or slave made no difference to a true philosopher, that ruler decided to try out the idea by selling Plato into slavery. (Legend has it that Plato used the money raised to pay his ransom to found the Academy.)

Under the Romans, public speaking became a primary skill, especially when it came to getting a favorable response from the emperor. As a result, a fairly large number of speeches, and handbooks on how to deliver a successful one, survive. Here are some simple rules that can be distilled from these works.

Do such rules matter in our postmodern age, when truth itself seems to be up for grabs? We are not as unique as we like to think. Two millennia ago, Pontius Pilate asked, “What is truth?” If a skilled speaker had been on hand, the subsequent course of history might have been very different indeed.

^{Featured image: ‘The School of Athens’ by Raffaello Sanzio, c.1509-1511, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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A thinker and her thought

Thinker statues form a fascinating, but little explored cultural theme. While we may be most familiar with Rodin’s thinker, thinker statues, both male and female, appear in many very diverse cultures. They include appearances in Roman art, the pensive bodhisattvas of Korea and China, the pensive Christ statues of Eastern Europe and Italy, the thinker statues of Kazakhstan and Africa, as well as the female thinkers of the pre-Columbian Tumaco-La Tolita culture. 

What is common among all the thinker statues despite their different cultural and religious background is that they incorporate a mental attitude, thinking. At the same time the thinker statues are themselves objects. Now these two notions, attitudes and objects, of course, compose the title of my book (which also includes the Korean bodhisattva on its cover). This title targets the two facets of the topic of the book, which addresses what sorts of objects are involved in the various mental attitudes—thinking, doubting, imagining, inferring, questioning, hypothesizing—as well as their manifestations in speech, asserting, suggesting, asking, answering, and demanding.

The objects involved crucially play the role of content bearers (representing situations) or as things that can be satisfied or violated (a command can be satisfied or violated, a question can be satisfied by an answer). The standard philosophical view about mental attitudes and their linguistic manifestations (speech acts) is that they are all relations to the same sort of object, a proposition. A proposition is just the sort of thing that is taken to make up the content of a that-clause, with which verbs describing mental attitudes or speech acts generally go along: The thinker thought that life is a mystery; the speaker said that life is a mystery.

Philosophers, starting with Bolzano and Frege in the nineteenth century, took the syntactic form of attitude reports and speech act reports to wear their logical form on their sleeves: attitude verbs like “think” and speech verbs like “say” take two arguments: an agent, and the thing that makes up the content of a that-clause, a proposition. Propositions, the putative objects of attitudes and contents of attitudes and speech acts, thus are considered the content bearers involved in attitudes and speech acts. However, as objects, propositions need to be abstract and mind-independent
since they are meanings of sentences and can be shared by different agents, and that raises lots of problems—how can an abstract object be grasped by the mind and why should an abstract object be able to be true or false or represent anything in the first place? Moreover, mental attitudes and speech acts just do not seem to be relations to mere content objects: we do not think or say propositions or any objects whatsoever.

This book takes a different approach. The objects involved in mental attitudes like thinking, imagining, and questioning are the things we refer to as thoughts, imaginations, and questions. Thinking thus means “engaging in a thought,” imagining means “engaging in an imagination,” etc. Since we make explicit reference to such attitudinal objects in natural language, we can let ourselves be guided by our linguistically manifest intuitions about such objects. All those objects have truth or satisfaction conditions: a belief can be true, a hypothesis correct, a command can be complied with or violated.

Different attitudinal objects, as one can quickly see, go along with different predicates of satisfaction and these can tell us a lot about what truth and representation consist in. For example, the selection of particular predicates of satisfaction indicates that truth is a norm some attitudinal objects come with (beliefs, assertions, hypotheses) and that actions are the sorts of things that other attitudinal objects may require for their satisfaction and may even qualify as “correct” (commands, suggestions). Lots of philosophically exciting views and options can be read off the linguistic manifestation of the ontology of attitudinal objects, as well as their more abstract kin, modal objects of the sort of obligations, permissions, needs, and options.

The thinker statue is an object and her thinking is an attitude that in turn involves an object, the bearer of truth. On the view developed in this book, that object is a thought, an object extremely well-reflected in natural language.

_{Featured image by Avery Evans via Unsplash.}

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Five inspiring biographies for Women’s History Month [reading list]

In honor of Women’s History Month, we are celebrating the lives and legacies of inspiring women that played path-breaking roles in shaping philosophy and literature. This reading list features five books that amplify the achievements of these women who were either overshadowed by men, or subject to hierarchical thinking. As we work to accelerate action for gender equality these five biographies show a defiance against systemic barriers and biases faced by women, both in personal and professional spheres. From the engrossing biographies of famous literary authors, to the eye-opening accounts of female thinkers who were silenced by the social norms of the times, these books are sure to inspire action, equality, and inclusion.

1. The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman by Andrew Janiak

Just as the Enlightenment was gaining momentum throughout Europe, philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Within a few short years, she became famous. This was not just remarkable because she was a woman, but because of the substance of her contributions. However due to the threat that she posed, the men who created the modern philosophy canon (primarily Voltaire and Kant) eventually wrote Du Châtelet out of their official histories – her ideas were suppressed, or attributed to the men around her, and for generations afterwards, she was forgotten.

Read more.

2. Bright Circle by Randall Fuller

Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Most accounts of it, however, trace its emergence to a group of young intellectuals (primarily Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau) dissatisfied with their religious, literary, and social culture. Yet there is a forgotten history of transcendentalism—a submerged counternarrative—that features a network of fiercely intelligent women who were central to the development of the movement even as they found themselves silenced by their culturally-assigned roles as women. Many ideas once considered original to Emerson and Thoreau are shown to have originated with women who had little opportunity of publicly expressing them.

Read more.

3. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Very Short Introduction by E.J. Clery

Mary Wollstonecraft is widely hailed as the mother of modern feminism. The book that made her famous, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a work of worldwide renown. Yet the range of her achievements as a thinker and writer reaches far beyond this text. She was a multi-faceted author, and although the condition of women was a constant preoccupation throughout her life, she wrote on a wide variety of topics and in a range of literary forms, some of which she created herself. This Very Short Introduction examines the conditions for Wollstonecraft’s emergence as a feminist, but also her status as an educator, a political thinker, and a romantic.

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4. Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse by Chi-ming Yang

The figure of the horse, at once earthly and transcendent, represented the contradictions of freedom and captivity that enabled young Octavia to develop her nuanced sense of voice and place. Drawing on previously unknown archival research, this volume illustrates how Butler’s development as a writer was tied to her extraordinary resourcefulness and self-awareness growing up as an awkward, bookish Black girl in segregated, Cold War Pasadena. She persistently re-visited and revised her early writings on teenage angst, Martians, Westerns, and racial politics. In one way or another, her supernatural characters defied the constraints of gender, race, and class with equine-inflected resilience.

Read more.

5. Marion Milner: On Creativity by David Russell

The British essayist, artist, and psychoanalyst Marion Milner thought deeply about how reading, drawing, and getting better related to each other. The guiding question of Milner’s life was of how people come to feel alive in, and feel creatively responsive to, their own lives. In pursuit of this, Milner explored fields as diverse as anthropology, folklore, education, literature, art, philosophy, mysticism, and psychology. She became one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary thinkers about creativity. Key to all her writing is her search for creative practices of attention and how the interplay of past and present selves, allows us to find new ways of looking at, and experiencing, the world.

Read more.

For more titles, you can also view our extended list on Bookshop:

• Bookshop UK
• Bookshop US

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We are mythmaking creatures

Many of us feel disconnected, from ourselves, from others, from nature. We feel fragmented. But where are we to find a cure to our fragmentation? And how can we satisfy our longing for wholeness? The German and British romantics had a surprising answer: through mythology.

The romantics believed that in modern times we’ve forgotten something essential about ourselves. We’ve forgotten that we are mythmaking creatures, that the weaving of stories and the creation of symbols lies deep in our nature.

Today, we view myths as vestiges of a bygone era; products of a time when humanity lived in a state of childlike ignorance, lacking science and technology and the powers of rational reflection. William Blake (1757–1827) rejected this bias against mythology, as did Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), and John Keats (1795–1821), among others. They claimed that the worldview we now inhabit is a mythology of its own.

Our challenge, the romantics argued, is not to liberate humanity from myths but to create new myths—new symbols and stories—that serve to awaken the human mind to its hidden potential. We are all mythmakers. We all use our powers of imagination to sustain the worldview we inhabit. Our task is to become aware of those powers, and with that awareness rewrite the narratives that have kept us trapped in feelings of separation from ourselves and the world at large.

The modern experience is one of alienation, incompleteness, and aloneness. We’ve fallen prey to the illusion that everything is divided. The new mythologies that the romantics set out to create turn on symbols and stories of a greater unity that connects all things. The romantics held that our path to wholeness lies in reawakening the imagination and experiencing the world poetically. They believed that myths can allow us to see ourselves as members of a larger family—a “world family”—that includes all living beings on Earth.

But how, you might ask, is this even possible? How can mythology serve a liberating function? Are myths not false and deceptive? And shouldn’t we try to escape myths entirely?

All good questions, and ones the romantics heard loudly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Here are four ways the romantics worked to address them:

1. Reinterpretation. Ancient myths are complex, even confusing, and their meaning is always open to interpretation and reworking.

Shelley’s play Prometheus Unbound is not a simple retelling of a classic myth. He reinvests the story with new meaning by positioning Prometheus as a symbol of humanity who struggles against Jupiter, a symbol of inhumanity. The old myth then acquires fresh significance; it becomes applicable to our modern yearning for community and connection with nature.

2. Reconciliation. The human mind abounds in dualities that can intensify feelings of separation; myths allow us to extend our minds beyond these dualities, thereby instilling feelings of unity.

Blake writes about how the mind creates contraries, such as “reason” and “feeling,” “man” and “woman,” “heaven” and “hell.” His literary and visual work afford us the opportunity to see that these oppositions are not absolute; they are two sides of a whole. A new poetic mythology can allow us to intuit this; it can open the “doors of perception” in ways that allow us to see the unity of the spiritual and the sensual.

3. Reflexivity. When we become aware of our mythmaking powers, we can fashion symbols and stories that position ourselves as the authors or artists of our lives.

In Heinrich von Ofterdingen by Hardenberg (known by his pen name Novalis), the protagonist discovers a book that reflects images from his own life. He has the uncanny realization that the book he is reading is a kind of mirror into his soul. The novel thereby displays a process of acquiring self-understanding through symbols, stories, images, and allegories—in short, through all the elements of mythology.

4. Participation. Because the romantics wanted to make us aware of our creative powers, the stories and symbols they fashion serve to invite us into the very process of mythmaking.

Schlegel’s novel Lucinde is a story about a young man who discovers his artistic potential by falling in love. The novel is itself an invitation for readers to turn inward and discover their own ability to make their lives into a work of art. The novel is meant to be a stimulus for self-inquiry for the reader, who is called upon to see herself through the lens of mythology.

What then makes any given mythology “new” is that it isn’t trying to mask its origin in the human imagination. All the mythologies of romanticism share this feature in common. They are ongoing works in progress, as alive today as they were over two centuries ago. The mythologies of romanticism are like paintings left deliberately unfinished by a painter, with the hope that we will feel inspired to pick up the brush and contribute our own complex patterns of color. 

_{Featured image by The Cleveland Museum of Art via Unsplash.}

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A look behind the curtain at the best books of 2024

Every year, Oxford University Press’s trade program publishes 70-100 new books written for the general reader. The vast audience for these trade books comprises everyone from history buffs, popular science nerds, and philosophy enthusiasts pursuing intellectual interests, as well as parents and caregivers seeking crucial advice or support—all readers browsing the aisles of their local bookstore (or the Amazon new releases) for literature that deepens their insight into the world around them.

Oxford editors from across our press submit books for catalog consideration; our sales team evaluates forecasts and sales patterns to determine the market for each title; and the trade marketing and publicity teams coordinate, plan, and pitch to get these titles in front of readers. Each year, when December rolls around, we excitedly wait to see which titles will be featured in the year end “Best Books” lists put out by the major media outlets including The Telegraph, The New Statesman, The Economist, The New Yorker, TLS, and more. Inclusion on these lists serves as yet another seal of approval, highlighting the quality of the content, wide appeal, accessibility, and novelty of the books we publish. Being featured in such reputable lists and selected by the top critics and thinkers reinforces the press’s reputation for publishing high-quality, impactful work.

This year’s list includes the first ever history of the transition from the Tudors to the Stuarts by a Professor at the University of Oxford; the final book by the prolific writer John L. Heilbron—the definitive account of the great Bohr-Einstein debate; a collection of nine tales of romance and wonder from early Irish literature; and a deep dive into the mysterious origins of words by arguably the greatest living English word-hunter.

As the world’s oldest and largest university press, OUP holds an important place in the publishing landscape. The press’s mission is an extension of the university’s—we strive for excellence in research, scholarship, and education through our global publishing program. A crucial aspect of the trade team’s role is making sure that the work of Oxford’s academics and scholars isn’t kept solely within the confines of academia, but instead is shared with the wider population. Through the use of accessible and engaging writing, OUP’s trade books share the expertise of highly qualified researchers with the general public, allowing new ideas to spread and reshape our knowledge of the world.

The ‘Best Books’ lists which numerous major media outlets share annually represent the capstone of yearly book coverage. All year, publicists submit books to hundreds of newspapers, magazines, radio stations and other outlets for review, excerpt, author interviews and news coverage. In the last 12 months, the New York Times (with its 153 million reported unique visitors per month) covered 18 of OUP’s titles—including a review of Making the Presidency which drew comparisons between John Adams and Kamala Harris’s legacy, and an Op-Ed by the authors of Wreckonomicswhich asked when liberals became so comfortable with war.

Beyond the Times, in the last year 11 books were featured or reviewed on the BBC, 19 in the Wall Street Journal, 15 in the Times Literary Supplement, 11 in the Financial Times, 8 in the London Review of Books, another 11 in Time Magazine, and to the delight of the author, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order was recommended on Oprah Daily. These reviews are truly just the tip of the iceberg in publicity campaigns that also include hundreds of podcasts, local media coverage, and events that bring authors directly into communities. The additional visibility a book receives when it is reviewed in major outlets often translates to significant boosts in sales and allows authors to extend the size of their audience and the reach of their message. This visibility is also many authors’ first exposure to OUP’s range of publishing and can be instrumental in attracting future authors that help the program grow and diversify.

Each year’s list of best book serves as a distillation of our collective questions and priorities as a society. Trade publishing must be more agile than traditional academic publishing because every title has to tap in to at least a certain portion of the zeitgeist. As a reflection of preoccupying questions, last year’s list was topped by Kirkus’s selection of Trans Children in Today’s Schools, as well as both Defectors and The Ruble from our Russian and Soviet history lists. This year, different trends have clearly risen to the top of readers’ consciousness. The New Statesman (in their seasonal lists released throughout the year) have selected not one but two Oxford books on AI. The AI Mirror by Shannon Vallor—a former AI ethicist at Google—offers advice on reclaiming our humanity in the approaching age of machine thinking. AI Morality edited by David Edmonds is a collection of essays from leading philosophers exploring some of the nearly endless questions about our changing relationship with AI.

Similarly, this year’s list includes two titles about China. The former prime minister of Australia Kevin Rudd’s book On Xi Jinping and Oriana Sklyar Mastro’s Upstart both provide informed perspectives on China’s role in the global world. When asked why she chose to write her second book for a general audience, Dr. Mastro points out that China’s power has impact far outside of academia and she wanted to make sure her work could reach readers in all walks of life.

The support that the trade marketing and publicity teams provides authors is crucial to strengthening their careers. Debut authors utilize our platform to both benefit their scholarly careers through the academic prestige the Oxford brand provides while simultaneously developing their presence as a noted subject matter expert in the media. This recognition grows in tandem with the author’s career, allowing the Oxford trade program to retain successful authors as well as attract well-established authors who haven’t previously published with us.

This year, COMBEE by Edda L. Fields-Black was selected as one of The New Yorker’s recommended titles and among The Civil War Monitor’s Best Civil War Books. Dr. Fields-Black is a direct descendent of one of the hundreds of formerly enslaved men who liberated themselves after the Battle of Port Royal and joined the 2^nd South Carolina Volunteers to fight in the Combahee River Raid along with Harriet Tubman. Only her second book, and her first written for a wide audience, it was essential to Dr. Fields-Black that she had an opportunity to share both her research and also her family’s story.

On the other end of the spectrum, the trade team works with many authors and scholars who are well-established in their careers and come to OUP with ample experience and high expectations of the publishing process. Our team was honored to have the opportunity to work with Noel Malcolm on his 12^th book Forbidden Desire which was named by both The Times Literary Supplement and History Today as one of the best books of 2024. Malcolm has published across academic and trade publishing houses during his long career, and it was important that we be able to provide him with the highest level of marketing and publicity possible.

All of the books published by Oxford are the culmination of years of work on the part of the authors, research assistants, editors, designers, marketers, and publicists. Each one is an accomplishment that has the potential to move knowledge forward. The books in our trade program—with their potential to speak to all readers—represent a unique opportunity to inform, illuminate, and entertain. Join us in celebrating the best books of 2024.

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Morality without metaphysics

Let’s talk about morality. There is stuff we think is okay to do and there is stuff we think is not okay to do. Human relationships work (when they do work) when we are all more or less on the same page about what stuff is and is not okay to do; as we often are. We all agree, for example, that it is not okay to beat people to death because you do not like the way they dress. We expect others to obey such rules and our relationships with them are shaped by whether or not they do so. We hold each other responsible for what we do in ways that inform how we distribute, on the one hand, our love and esteem and, on the other, our condemnation and resentment. 

This is the everyday world of moral common sense but there are always sceptical voices: perhaps it’s just nonsense. Can there really be truths, proper objective truths about what is and isn’t okay just the way there are objective truths about chemistry and geology? Some people argue that it makes no sense to suppose there are moral truths somehow baked into the constitution of the universe, radically independent of human beings and our moral experience, and so morality is nonsense.

I argue that while that rather grandiose metaphysical picture is indeed false, the best way of understanding our moral common sense presupposes nothing so fancy nor so fanciful. There need only be human beings jointly committed to a shared enterprise of living together in peaceful and orderly moral community regulated by norms of justice and civility that we can justify to each other in a shared currency of reasons shaped by and expressive of our passionate natures. It is not so complicated. For many good reasons, I don’t want to live in a world where we say it is okay to beat someone to death because you do not like the way they dress. Neither do you. So let’s not.

This enterprise is hard and many problems challenge it on every side. Moral consensus can be fragile and imperfect. (Shamefully, some people — the late Mahsa Amini comes to mind — have been beaten to death by people who did not like the way they dressed.) But it is nonetheless not an enterprise whose intelligibility and feasibility require our moral norms to be ratified by any such radically independent domain of moral reality. All the moral reality we need is something far more human, far closer to home, something that, if we get it right, can be as true and as objective as it needs to be. 

Responsibility is another headache. Here the most familiar problem concerns what is often called free will. Can I be responsible for what I do if I am not the author of what I do? It may seem obvious that ordinarily I am. Only a worry sets in. What I do is shaped and determined by me, my choices, my desires, my plans and my values. But I, along with my choices, desires, plans and values, was in turn shaped and determined by the social and natural forces that made me what I am — forces ultimately external to me that were already decisively in play long before I was born. Many are troubled by the pressure of such metaphysical reasoning that seems to rob us of the authorship of our own agency responsibility would seem to require.

I was shaped and determined by the ultimately remote social and natural forces that made me what I am. And yet, that may not always matter. I am no less, for that, the author of these words in these sense that they express what I believe and who I am and I am willing to sign my name to them, to own them, to accept that you act justly and properly in holding me responsible for framing them. 

I don’t, for many good reasons, want to live in a world where it is deemed okay to beat someone to death because you do not like the way they dress. And neither do you. We didn’t chose for our moral sensibilities to have the long causal histories that made them what they are. But we can nonetheless choose now to sign up to them and why wouldn’t we? Of course we don’t want that world. I am happy enough to be in a social contract with you where we undertake to refrain from such sartorial homicides and where I accept my liability to be held responsible should I ever break that undertaking. I didn’t choose to be the person that I am but the person that I am can choose to embrace such a norm, and he enjoys, in normal circumstances, sufficient self control for his choices to determine what he will do. (And the norms that govern responsibility make due allowances for abnormal circumstances.)

The enterprise of making a moral community is still hard. But the difficulties are practical, not metaphysical. The things that we do and say to each other are not arbitrary. We justify them inside the space of reasons. The space of reasons as a whole is expressive of the contingency of who we are and what we are like. Does that contingency entail a kind of ultimate arbitrariness without a strange domain of morality guaranteeing our cheques? Do we just happen to be the kind of animals to prefer justice and kindness to injustice and cruelty? I guess we do but it is a contingent thing we nonetheless cheerfully embrace and own. We did not ultimately choose to be this way, valuing these things, but, being as we are this way, we still sensibly chose to live in a community of responsibility which these values shape. We don’t stop loving the things we love just because it is ultimately contingent that we are the kind of creature that loves the kind of things we do.

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The idea of Europe

In the decades around 1800—when the European past was (as in the present) the topic of fierce discussion, contestation, and political (ab)use—ideas of Europe were dominated by the shocking events of the French Revolution and its violent aftermath in Europe and beyond. The European order as well as Europe’s place in the world, was destroyed, rebuilt, and redefined at this moment. Perhaps comparable to the memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust in the twentieth century, the French Revolution and in particular the Terror, acted as a ‘foundational past’ for inhabitants of the long nineteenth century until the First World War.

In the age of eighteenth-century revolutions—just as after the world wars of the twentieth century—contemporaries turned to history, that of their own lives as well as that of society, to make sense of a confusing and troubling world, where previously unimaginable possibilities as well as horrors had opened up. The European past and the idea of Europe as an essentially ‘historical continent’ was (re)invented by the critics of the French Revolution as part of their ideological struggle against the Revolution: an imagined ‘Europe’ was positioned against ‘the Revolution’.

For these ‘counter-revolutionaries’, the Revolution stood for a false idea of freedom and democratic sovereignty, which led to anarchy and despotism at the same time. In opposition to the new revolutionary world of universal principles, the counter-revolutionary publicists proclaimed the concept of a gradually developing European society and political order, founded on a set of historical and—ultimately divine—institutions that had guaranteed Europe’s unique freedom, moderation, diversity, and progress since the fall of the Roman Empire.

These counter-revolutionaries (ab)used and transformed an older historical narrative that had been developed in the preceding century by enlightened historians. Both the ‘Enlightenment’ and what is conventionally called the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, or more historically accurate ‘anti-philosophy’, were sources of this counter-revolutionary construction of the European past. The importance of the decades around 1800 lay in the fact that these older Enlightenment histories became politicized in response to the perceived threat of Revolution to this European society.

It is clear that the counter-revolutionary Europeanists of the revolutionary age differed markedly from their self-appointed successors in later centuries. Counter-revolutionaries around the turn of the century were certainly not ardent nationalists, who were as horrified by ‘cosmopolitanism’ as the new ‘national conservatives’ of the twenty-first century. On the contrary, they regarded unqualified expressions of ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism’ as excessive, immoderate, and fanatical. The counter-revolutionary authors strove for a new synthesis of ‘enlightened cosmopolitanism’ with loyalty to the patria, whether this was a country, a city, or an entity like the Holy Roman Empire.

Counter-revolutionary Europeanists, perhaps counter-intuitively, did not aim for a return to a primordial order of European civilisation, as the twenty-first century ‘conservatives’ often do. They regarded the Revolution instead as a threat to the gradual development and improvement of European institutions, whose reform they generally applauded. Often being migrants, refugees, and exiles themselves, they did not entertain an anti-immigration discourse. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these counter-revolutionary ideas of European history and civilisation were rediscovered and adapted to new political contexts, shaping in manifold ways our contested idea of European history and memory until today.

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How to escape from a maze

Assume you know nothing about the First World War, but had heard the name and wish to learn about it. Reasonably, you turn to the latest scholarship on the subject, only to find fundamental differences of view among professional historians. Some argue that the war had occurred in the early twentieth century; others, in the mid nineteenth. Some assert that important battles had been fought in northern France; others, in northern Spain. Some contend that Scotland was a participant, but that England had never been one; others, that England had indeed been a participant, indeed the first.

You might reasonably conclude that something was seriously amiss in the world of scholarship. In reality there are no such inconsistencies among military or diplomatic historians; but exactly such disparities of interpretation exist among historians of the Enlightenment. One historian says ‘the Enlightenment was this’; another replies ‘No! the Enlightenment was that’; a third trumps them: ‘No! No! The Enlightenment was the other.’ These incompatible interpretations show no signs of being reconciled in any new synthesis; instead, they proliferate.

Where did ‘the Enlightenment’ originate? Its parentage is still disputed. How did it end? Historians search the American Revolution in attempts to sight this phenomenon. Did it triumph in, or was it terminated by, the French Revolution? There are no intelligible answers, since these and others are questions mal posées.

Readers escape from this maze if they accept that the term ‘the Enlightenment’ lacked an eighteenth-century referent and was a much later coinage, projected backwards for much later polemical purposes. Without such a referent, present-day writers are free to make the term mean what they wish it to mean. On the contrary, the belatedly developing history of the concept is itself the only history of the subject that can be written. Many historians formerly took the category for granted, without defence or even an index entry; this assumption is now untenable.

These previous usages were idealistic attempts to identify with a single term some vision of human happiness and progress. I nowhere argue against peace and bread, or for any Counter-Enlightenment. But I contend that in the eighteenth-century there was not one interesting and important thing happening, but many (the spread of literacy and the print culture; communication; international exploration; scientific discovery; economic growth). Even ‘Europe’ was too loose a term to generate much sense of unity; instead, wars between European powers became ever more destructive.

Those many interesting and important things were not reinforced by being seen as aspects of a common cause, swept on by a vast international movement. Indeed the absence of any such unifying movement was a leading reason why reforming causes were so difficult to frame and to carry forward to success. No concept, no movement.

At the time it was known that the famous figures recently depicted as champions of a unified ‘Enlightenment’ often argued for very different things (for example, Locke and Hume); moreover, when they met they were often at each other’s throats (for example, Voltaire and Rousseau). Their cosmopolitanism or tolerance was usually a vain boast. Their mutual hostility is often traceable to those figures’ intolerant views on religion (specifically, Christianity) rather than to differences over forward-looking programmes of social reform.

The great Cambridge classicist Dr Richard Bentley once encountered England’s then most famous poet, Alexander Pope, who in 1715 had just published an acclaimed English verse translation of the Iliad. Pope fished for compliments. Bentley responded with the memorable put-down: ‘It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but you must not call it Homer.’ I adapt this as my courteous response to those who repeat the old orthodoxy: ‘It is a pretty story, Mr Historian; but you must not call it the Enlightenment’.

_{Feature image by Joshua Sortino via Unsplash.}

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What does democracy look like?

“This is what democracy looks like!” is a popular rallying cry of engaged democratic citizens across the globe. It refers to outbreaks of mass political action, episodes where large numbers of citizens gather in a public space to communicate a shared political message.

That we associate democracy with political demonstration is no surprise. After all, democracy is the rule of the people, and collective public action is a central way for citizens to make their voices heard. As it is often said, democracy happens “in the streets.”

Yet there’s more to democracy than meets the eye. Although democracy indeed involves collective action, it is also a matter of what goes on inside of us—the dispositions and values we bring to it.

To see what I mean, conduct an internet search of the phrase “this is what democracy looks like.” Select your favorite of the pictures. Now imagine discovering that the people in the photo are all paid actors who were given political signs, taught chants, and sent into a public space to enact a political demonstration. Suppose further that but for the pay, none of them would have shown up.

Notice how your attitude to the image shifts. The photo depicts citizens gathered in a public space to communicate a political message, yet something’s amiss. Democracy isn’t acting. Citizenship isn’t a paying gig. Astroturfed political engagement isn’t what democracy looks like.

From this, we might say that mass public action depicts democracy only when the participants are sincere about the message their group activity aims to communicate. They must be advocates who are engaged in the demonstration for the purpose of communicating that message.

Now consider another example. Return to the image you selected. But instead of imagining the participants to be actors motivated by a paycheck, suppose that they are fundamentally mistaken about the political message they are conveying. Let’s assume they’re carrying signs supporting a policy that they believe will make certain medications more affordable, but which actually proposes to make them more expensive.

Notice that according to democracy’s historical opponents, this is exactly what democracy looks like: mobilized but ignorant mobs demanding political results they do not comprehend. But one need not embrace this negative assessment of democracy to recognize that certain brazen forms of ignorance sully the democratic character of a demonstration. We might conclude, then, that mass public action manifests democracy only when citizens are informed (or at least not wildly misinformed).

Putting the two examples together, we can say that in order for an instance of mass public political action to depict democracy in any laudable sense, the participants must be both motivated by their message and adequately informed about what their message means. The notable feature of these two requirements is that neither can be captured in a picture. We can’t discern a person’s motives or degree of informedness simply by looking. Democracy can’t be depicted in a photograph. It has largely to do with the attitudes and habits that underlie our political activities.

This thought can be captured by saying that democracy is centrally a civic ethos. This ethos derives its content from the fundamental democratic ideal of self-government among equals. To be clear, this ideal identifies an aspiration. A democratic society is one that strives to become a self-governing society of equals. And that aspiration calls upon us as citizens to cultivate within ourselves the competencies that enable us both to advance justice and duly recognize the equality of our fellow citizens by attempting to understand their political values, priorities, and concerns.

Democracy’s civic ethos, then, invokes the need for citizens to be engaged participants who are also politically reflective. The dual aspect of democracy’s civic ethos gives rise to conflict. Engaged political participation exposes us to group dynamics that artificially escalate partisan animosity, intensify in-group conformity, and tether our political imagination to the categories and rivalries of our current political world. That is, in the ordinary course of meeting our civic duty to be democratic participants, we undermine our reflective capacities.

This conflict within the democratic ethos has become especially difficult to manage because our everyday social environments are saturated with triggers of our political reflexes. To reclaim the democratic aspiration, we need to critically reexamine our own political habits, and this reexamination calls for moments of solitary reflection on political ideas and circumstances that lie beyond the familiar landscape of contemporary democracy. Democracy indeed happens “in the streets” when citizens engage in collective political action. But democracy also happens in public libraries, parks, and museums—in spaces where citizens can be alone to refresh their political imaginations by contemplating unfamiliar and distant democratic possibilities.

_{Featured image by Colin Lloyd via Unsplash.}

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Is Boris Johnson like James Bond—or more like Homer Simpson? [long read]

The question may seem like an odd one, so let me approach it by sketching some context. 2024 has been a year of elections worldwide, with voters around the globe hitting the ballot boxes, from India (the most populous country in the world, with the largest electorate) to Venezuela to the UK. And needless to say, one of the most consequential of the 2024 elections looms on the horizon­—indeed, advance balloting via postal vote began as far back as September—with so much at stake in the US Presidential election, now just days away on November 5th.

At this point the political tactics and rhetorical strategies of the major candidates and parties are more than familiar to us: Kamala is a commie, Donald is weird; Harris can’t be trusted with the border or the budget, Trump will be a disaster for abortion rights, the environment, and democracy itself. And so on.

One particular rhetorical weapon available to political actors, to diminish their opponents or to aggrandize themselves or their allies, is to liken them to other agents—even, or perhaps especially, those fictional agents known as characters. The commentariat likes to play this game too. This takes us back to Boris Johnson. In the 2019 election campaign—which Johnson and the Tory party won with a landslide victory—Johnson was likened by one group of polled voters to James Bond, the suave Secret Service/MI6 agent born in the fictions of Ian Fleming and developed through the movie franchise beginning with the adaptation of Dr No (1962).

Embraced in some quarters, this rather unlikely analogy was met with derision and push-back in others, in particular via a counter-comparison made by another group of voters in the same poll. Johnson isn’t much like James Bond, so this response went; he’s rather more like Homer Simpson. Strip away the trappings of his upper-class background, and what you’re left with is a bumbling, unkempt, uncouth oaf, prone to gaffes, a ‘bit like a buffoon…in the power plant, thinking what do I press here? What do I do?’

History weighs rather heavily in favour of the Homer Simpson comparison. What, I shouldn’t have broken my own social distancing laws during covid? I’m not allowed to mislead parliament? I can’t manipulate parliamentary procedure to suit the interests of my party? D’oh! But all such analogies will be partial, highlighting some attributes of the object, downplaying others, and suggesting a kind of ‘gestalt’—an overall shape—to the character of the figure under scrutiny.

The Johnson episode is not an isolated one. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—mocked by Johnson himself with a lewd limerick—also became the target of a satirical comparison with a fictional character. Erdoğan has been likened to Gollum, the stunted, grasping, unreliable Hobbit from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Erdoğan didn’t take kindly to the unflattering analogy; at least three individuals were pursued in the courts for making the comparison (with varied outcomes). Erdoğan’s fellow autocrats, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, are similarly reported to be unamused at comparisons made between them and Winnie-the-Pooh, and Dobby the House Elf (from Harry Potter), respectively. In all three cases, the comparisons have a serendipitous, physical basis—all three political figures look sufficiently like the fictional characters to whom they are likened for the comparison to stick; the popular ‘separated at birth’ trope trades on the same phenomenon of physical resemblance between figures who in other respects contrast strongly with one another.

Note, however, that there is variation here in the way the negative comparisons work. Winnie and Dobby are benign, child-like figures, pointedly contrasting with and ironically undercutting the authoritarian, strong-man demeanours Xi and Putin seek to project. By contrast, Gollum is menacing, pointing directly to a negative trait in Erdoğan (though in an interesting twist, in one of the Erdoğan cases, the defence successfully maintained—with support from the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson—that the specific images from the film depicted the naïve but good-natured Sméagol rather than his demonic alter-ego Gollum, and so the comparison could not be held to be insulting). But in all three cases, the strategy is to drain the target figures of their symbolic standing by likening them to fictional characters—usually absurd, pathetic, or comic—drawn from children’s fictions (Gollum first appeared in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, written for children). And in all three cases, the fictions from which the characters hail are in wide international circulation, making the satirical force of the comparisons readily understood across communities, cultures, and nations.

We think of characters as creatures of the imagination, but as these examples show, they enter our actual lives in a multitude of ways. Satirical character comparisons in the political domain are but the tip of the iceberg; we routinely consort with fictional characters first by imagining them, and then by comparing them with those in our individual social worlds—not just public figures, but friends, family members, colleagues, and not least, ourselves. Characters arise from our fascination with the varieties of human personality and agency, and they act as vehicles for contemplating and comparing our own agency with that of other agents, possible and actual.

Possible and actual? Aren’t characters, in the sense discussed here, by definition fictional? They are indeed. But even non-fictional representations which purport to represent the actual world rather than project an imagined world—documentaries, news reports, political campaign materials—offer characterizations of the agents that they represent. Joe Biden really exists, but when Trump dubs him ‘Crooked Joe’, he reduces the multifaceted real agent into what the novelist E. M. Forster described as a ‘flat’ (one-dimensional) character, casting him as the villain in a political melodrama. The ‘baby Trump’ blimp seen floating above London on the occasion of his visit in 2019 did the same for the former president, characterizing him as a bloated infant. The latter trope is restaged, alongside Trump’s more recent ‘Sleepy Joe’ characterization of Biden, playing on Biden’s perceived infirmity, in a political cartoon by Steve Breen. Johnson’s limerick characterizes Erdoğan as a voracious zoophile (and is rather mild compared with the poem by German comedian Jan Böhmermann that preceded it).

Cartoons have long been a vehicle for such polemical characterizations. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Nast’s political cartoons established the iconography of Republicans as Elephants and Democrats as Donkeys; in our own era, Spitting Image carried the tradition of the political cartoon caricature into the world of television. Through these examples we see that the characterizations can be spare and abstract, drawing on types rather than individuals: Democrats are likened with the donkey as an animal type, not with any specific donkey (say, Winnie’s gloomy friend Eeyore); Republicans with the elephant as a type, not any specific elephant (say, Dumbo or Nellie).

All of this points to some important metaphysical features of characters. The first is that characters are real. That might seem like an oxymoron, if we hold that characters are imaginary, and imagined objects are just those things that aren’t real. But we need to recognise a more expansive conception of reality. Characters are real in the same way that novels, or scientific theories, are real; that is why we can refer to and make use of them in the workaday world, including the sphere of politics. As abstract artifacts—recipes for possible persons—the reality of characters is distinct from the reality of flesh-and-blood individuals, but they have a reality and a utility as palpable as physical artifacts, from hammers to Humvees. Characters are part of the furniture of the world.

So characters are imaginary but real entities. And in the cases at hand, we see how they can function as a vehicle of imaginative cognition: the forging of metaphors and analogies, in which one entity is thought of in terms of some other entity. Consider the classic case of Charles Philipon’s satirical depiction of Louis-Philippe, which allows us not only to see the King in the drawing, but to see him as a pear, and thus by inference as a fool (‘poire’ meaning ‘dupe’ or ‘fathead’ in the Parisian vernacular of the period). And once again, we see that the idea of a ‘poire’ as a type is all that is necessary: no specific pear, or fool, need be invoked for the charged characterization to pack its punch.

Our examples also point to the portability of characters. A character will be invented in a given fiction, but they can take on an existence beyond that literal ‘origin story’, reappearing in subsequent fictions created not only by the original author, but others too. The case of James Bond is a rich and instructive example, appearing first in Fleming’s novel Casino Royale (1953). By now Bond has featured in dozens of later films and novels authorized by Fleming’s estate, not to mention his countless appearances in fanfics. There is a sense in which each one of these versions of Bond is different—as different as Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Daniel Craig, and all the other actors who’ve incarnated Bond in the films, are from one another. But a thread of continuity runs through these different renderings of the character; and it is this continuity which allows us to refer coherently to ‘James Bond’, and to transport that character from one fictional world to another, and, as we have seen, from the zone of fiction to the real world.

So the traffic between the real world and the worlds of fiction runs in both directions. Moving in one direction, the very concept of character designates the fictional analogue of an actual human agent, and many specific characters are modelled on and inspired by actual persons. Moving in the other direction, fictional characters are a tool for thinking about real people and the world itself. A web search reveals the strategy in full swing, as one might expect with the Presidential election just around the corner. Chris Wallace likens Nixon and Trump to the Joker; Trump’s critical remarks about wind power earn him comparisons with Don Quixote, swinging at the enemies populating his political fantasy, as illusory as the windmills Quixote mistakes for giants. George R. R. Martin compares Trump with Joffrey Baratheon, while Stephen King points to two of his characters as Trump-types, and dozens of other commentators play the comparison game. And Trump himself can’t stop referring to Hannibal Lecter—a fictional serial killer modelled on a real one—though it isn’t always clear what the former President wants to say through these allusions, or even whether he thinks Lecter is a figure to love or to loathe. None of this means that the distinction between the actual world and the worlds of fiction has been swallowed by a post-truth vortex; indeed the force of these comparisons depends on our ability to keep the different status of the fictional figures and their real targets of comparison straight—a task that most of us manage effortlessly, all the time.

_{Featured image by Matt Davis via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0.}

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Iris Murdoch on how to lose yourself in nature

Anxiety is the most frequently diagnosed mental health problem in the world today. The handful of psychiatric treatments for anxiety that nowadays dominate the field are well known. But it’s worth remembering that philosophy also has a long and illustrious history as a form of anti-anxiety therapy. As I argue in my new book, philosophers from all over the world have been thinking and writing about anxiety since time immemorial, long before it was officially catalogued as a psychological disorder. From Stoicism and Epicureanism in Greece to Confucianism in China, from Hindu and Buddhist sources to the European existentialists, philosophers have had plenty of therapeutic wisdom to share with their readers.

One more recent example can be found in the work of Irish-born novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdoch, who provides an insight about the management of our attention and mental energy from which we anxious sufferers stand to benefit. In her 1970 book, The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch writes, “We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied… veil which partially conceals the world.” Instead of letting our attention be dictated by what she calls our “fat relentless ego”, Murdoch thinks that we can achieve a modicum of relief from anxiety and inner turmoil by turning our attention outward, away from the self. This is an activity she calls unselfing. Here is a key passage:

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.

Unselfing is the attempt to turn off auto-pilot, to redirect the self-centered flow of thought and attention. We’re trying to detach from what Murdoch calls the “greedy organism of the self” which gives us a false, distorted picture of reality and perceive and engage with the world as it really is.

It’s interesting that Murdoch’s description of unselfing draws on the experience of spotting a bird —a “hovering kestrel”—outside her window. My sister, a biologist and avid birder, has told me that part of what she finds so captivating about bird-watching is a soothing reminder (that virtually always accompanies the activity) about the existence of an ancient and intricate world (elusive songs and sounds, vibrant colors, migration routes many thousands of years old, a world quite literally of the dinosaurs) to which human beings are normally more or less oblivious, and that, by deliberate focus of attention (early in the morning, tramping through the woods, crisp air in the lungs, binoculars dangling around the neck) one can get a brief glimpse of this world and share, to some small extent, in its business and happenings. This is what unselfing is all about. Not inattentiveness or mere daydreaming, but attention deliberately steered away from the self. Immersion in Bird World allows us to temporarily “lose ourselves”, to achieve some distance from the anxious self. A calming forgetfulness of self is stimulated. We’re no longer focused on the anxiety that had us in its grip just a little while earlier.

Murdoch’s account of unselfing helps us see that anxiety is a fundamentally inward-facing mental state. Anxiety focusses its sights on the direction of the self, and the self is where anxiety lives and thrives. This helps explain why time spent in nature provides comfort and peace to so many anxious sufferers. Directing attention towards the beauty of a mountain landscape, the mesmeric sounds of birds or rushing water nearby, the fresh odors of trees, the moist, healthy soil, allows us to temporarily lose track of ourselves. In such moments we achieve some distance from the self and we feel less anxious as a result. The same idea applies to all of the activities we know to be helpful for diminishing anxiety (meditation, listening to music, a few miles of running, and so many more). Whenever we catch ourselves feeling more peaceful and less anxious, there’s a good chance that achieving some distance from the self, whether knowingly or inadvertently, played an important role in bringing that happier state about.

Treatment for anxiety is everywhere we look. Beyond the usual therapies and medications on offer, our society seems also to have built up a vast anti-anxiety infrastructure. Health food stores selling “mood boosting” vitamins and dietary supplements. Weighted blankets and meditation apps. Essential oils and online Mindfulness training seminars. Adult coloring books, salt lamps, stress-relief toys, emotional support animals. An endless stream of self-help books. A million things to help us fall and stay asleep: melatonin pills, therapeutic pillows, soothing teas infused with valerian, white noise machines, CBD oil. And the list goes on. Whatever one thinks of this vast infrastructure, it’s clear that the imperative at the heart of Murdoch’s doctrine of unselfing — to “give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care”—is one that we anxious sufferers would do well to take seriously.

Featured image by Sydney Sims via Unsplash

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Religious faith in contemporary society

The idea that religious beliefs claim truth is an unpopular position in Western societies. Any religion can sometimes be out of step with whatever the current secular consensus about moral priorities is. The claims of any faith can seem threatening when many wish to be autonomous and not be told what to think. They want to decide on their own identity.

Religious faith, on the other hand, often appears to make dogmatic assumptions about truth that apply to all people whether they believe it or not. It allegedly takes us towards an authoritarianism that challenges individual liberty. It is tempting instead to see faith as part of the identity of a person instead of a stance taken about the nature of the world—perhaps then faith is just a characteristic of some people and not of others. However, that does not do justice to the fact that any use of the word, whether in a religious context or not, must always specify who or what we have faith in. This then involves reason because we have to know what we believe and be able to specify it. Faith without content is not faith at all if it lacks all focus.

Once we talk of what we have faith in, the question must always arise whether we are justified and whether our views might be true. Religion needs reason if it is to appeal to an objective truth, and the two are not intrinsically opposed to each other. The issue should always be what any faith is directed at. Reason may be powerless without faith to guide it, but faith is arbitrary without the support of reason, and unable to appeal to others who do not at present share it. That is the case in secular cases of faith and is all the more so with the central issues of religious faith. Reason without faith lacks motivation. Faith without reason is blind.

Faith may seem an individual matter, but there is also a corporate side to it, such as when we refer to ‘the Christian faith’, the ‘faith’ of another religion, or even ‘faith leaders’. The word can be about a transmitted body of belief as well as an individual’s stance to the world. A casual reference to ‘communities of faith’ can produce a view of different bodies of faith, each with their own standards of belief and practice, which cannot then be criticised from an external standpoint. This may seem very tolerant, but it is an approach that involves a departure from the idea of a rationality which we all share. It can encourage the establishment of self-contained sectors within modern society, resentful of outside interference or scrutiny, let alone the application of a general, non-sectarian, set of laws. It encourages the breakdown of a cohesive society, with a shared concern for what may be the common good.

Why though does any form of religious faith matter? The temptation is to leave people alone with their personal beliefs and practices, or to respect the views of communities to which we do not belong on the grounds that they are of no concern to the rest of us. Religious faith, though, is never just a matter of private belief and practice but is manifested in actions that resonate in wider society. Our life at every level is always influenced by our understanding of the world and the place of humans in it. That applies to all of us whether we accept or reject a religion. Attitudes to the world and understandings of its nature and the place of humans in it, produce the morality that guides different people to see what is important. Any religion typically makes claims about how we should behave, and religions such as Christianity and Islam preach forms of morality that they claim have universal applicability. Such claims to truth by different forms of religious faith are too significant to be cast out of the public square. If true, they deserve acceptance by everyone, and if false, their influence must at least be controlled. If we do not know which, they deserve serious debate and examination.

Faith can never be just a personal property or the mere badge of a particular community because of the nature of its claims about who we humans are and why we should matter to each other. It can appear a disruptive component in society because, when it talks of God, it refers to an authority beyond this world and superior to those who have political power. That is a threat to those who hunger for power in any society, and it is not surprising that religious faith is typically outlawed by totalitarian regimes. Even so, just because it deals with what people think is most important for them in their lives, any religious faith can be a powerful motivation, harnessed for good as well as evil. This then brings us back to the issue of the place of rationality in the guidance of faith. Religious faith will typically demand its place in the public square and its voice in deliberations about the common good. It should not be swept aside and ‘privatized’ but should be able to contribute to democratic debate. Faith must never be afraid of the full searchlight of reason if it believes it is proclaiming a truth that is applicable to everyone whether they recognise it or not.

_{Featured Image by Jack Sharp via Unsplash [public domain]}

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Overconfidence about sentience is everywhere—and it’s dangerous

Years before I wrote about The Edge of Sentience, I remember looking at a crayfish in an aquarium and wondering: Does it feel like anything to be you? Do you have a subjective point of view on the world, as I do? Can you feel the joy of being alive? Can you suffer? Or are you more like a robot, a computer, a car, whirring with activity but with no feeling behind that activity? I am still not sure. None of us is in a position to be sure. There is no magic trick that will solve the problem of other minds.

Yet if I have no magic trick, and am self-aware enough to realize this, why have I written a book about the topic? Books about sentience or consciousness often promise marvels: you will be uncertain about the nature of sentience at the beginning, but worry not, for by the end a magnificent (if enormously speculative) theory will have answered all your questions. Reading these books, I feel like I’ve fallen for a bait-and-switch. Speculation is cheap and settles nothing: there are speculations on which crayfish are sentient and speculations on which they’re not.

The Edge of Sentience, rather than offering Houdini-like escapes from uncertainty, is all about how to make evidence-based decisions in the face of uncertainty. The trouble is that overconfidence about sentience is everywhere—and it’s dangerous. In researching the book, I encountered some shocking examples. Did you know that, until the 1980s, surgery on newborn babies was routinely performed without anaesthesia? Surgeons doubted newborns could feel pain, and they worried about the risks of using anaesthetics. But they were thinking about risk in a deeply flawed way. When researchers investigated the consequences of this practice, they discovered massive stress responses doing lasting developmental damage to the baby: operating with anaesthesia was far safer. A public outcry, together with the new evidence, changed clinical practice.

The case has a pattern of features that I’ve now seen many times: initial overconfidence about the absence of sentience, new evidence shaking that overconfidence, and a crucial role for the public in shattering the groupthink that sometimes grips cadres of experts. I’ve seen the same pattern with patients unresponsive after serious brain injury, often still described problematically as “vegetative”. Clinicians have long used diagnostic categories that starkly imply the absence of any sentience when, in reality, there is evidence that a fraction (and we don’t know the precise fraction) of these patients have residual conscious experiences. Overconfidence has, at times, led to horrific cases of patients presumed unconscious who were then able, later, to report that they had suffered terribly from routine procedures performed without any pain relief. Clinical practice, in the UK at least, has recently started to shift in the right direction.

We need to get serious about erring on the side of caution in all cases where sentience is a realistic possibility: those involving humans and those involving other animals. But it is not enough to just tell people to ‘err on the side of caution’ and leave it there. Almost any action, from outrageously costly precautions to the tiniest gesture, can be described as ‘erring on the side of caution’. We need ways of choosing among possible precautions: a precautionary framework. The crucial concept we need is proportionality: our precautions should be proportionate to the identified risks.

I do not think proportionality reduces to a cost-benefit calculation. It requires us to resolve deep value conflicts: conflicts that obstruct any attempt to quantify benefits and costs in an uncontroversial common currency. What sort of procedures can we use, in a democratic society, to assess proportionality? My proposals give a key role to citizens’ assemblies, which attempt to bring ordinary members of the public into the discussion in an informed way in order to reach recommendations that reflect our shared values.

Because I think these decisions should be made by democratic, inclusive processes—and not by any individual expert or group of experts—I think my own precautionary proposals about specific cases should be read as just that: proposals. They are not supposed to be the final word on any of these issues. I am not auditioning for the role of ‘sentience tsar’. But I have given a lot of thought to what actions are plausibly proportionate to the challenges we currently face, and I am publishing my proposals in the hope of provoking debates I see as urgently needed. If the book succeeds in stimulating discussion, I can dare to hope the discussion may lead to action. And I hope that, among those actions, will be steps to protect invertebrates like crayfish from the pain of being cooked alive—a particularly grotesque display of overconfidence.

_{Featured image by Jr Korpa via Unsplash. Public domain.}

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What’s the matter with moral fundamentalism?

Inspired by fellow philosopher Anthony Weston, I often ask my ethics students to create a diabolical toolkit of rules that would torpedo public dialogue. The idea here, I explain, is to spell out rules that would maximize the distance between “us” and “them,” ensuring that possibilities for cooperatively setting and achieving social goals—like peace, security, justice, public health, or sustainability—go forever unnoticed. For example, consider things like “prepare your comeback instead of listening” or “be angrier and talk louder than others.”

I divide students into groups and ask each group to develop five more rules. They invariably come up with an excellent toolkit for sabotaging debate. For example: “stereotype the other side,” “be uncharitable: always present your side at its best and the other at its worst,” “ignore context,” “be smug,” “trust your anger; it would never steer you wrong,” “inflate certainty,” “assume your interlocuter is clueless” “reject complexity,” “be visibly offended by any questioning of your conclusions,” “approach any debate as a winner-take-all game,” “widen the gulf that separates us,” “act as though your values and concerns invariably overrule theirs.”

Gradually some of the fun fades as we reflect on our diabolical toolkit. Many of my liberal-identified students interpret the activity as a sendup of conservatives. Their imagined toolkit-users sport “Make America Great Again” hats and threaten DEI advocates. Meanwhile, many of my conservative students interpret the activity as damning liberal wokeness, virtue signaling, and cancel culture.

“Do you ever follow these rules?” I ask. This is a stretch for some of them, but most of us end up recognizing ourselves. “Have we learned anything from doing this?” The sense of the class is that we purposefully drew up a malicious playbook for undermining democracy, and it mirrored business-as-usual.

In my own writings on moral philosophy, I’ve come to call this cluster of toolkit-like habits “moral fundamentalism.” I’ll very briefly explore four questions about it: (1) What is it? (2) Is it really such a bad thing? (3) Is it good for motivating public action? and (4) Are we stuck with it?

1. What is it?

More than a synonym for moral absolutism, a moral fundamentalist may be defined, minimally, as someone who acts as if they have access to: (1) the exclusively right way to diagnose moral or political problems and (2) the single approvable practical solution to any particular problem.

The word “fundamentalism” automatically calls to mind rigid religious dogmatism, which carries the idea that a select few have accessed ideals that should be heeded without public investigation, critique, and reformation. Like its religious counterpart, moral fundamentalism isn’t a promising resource for public dialogue, restoration of trust, or reconciliation. It’s a resource for reactionary oppression, rage, and fanaticism on all sides. We must find our diverse ways beyond the hell we inflict in the name of righteous certainty. 

2. Is it really such a bad thing?

For a moral fundamentalist, the main moral, social, or political problem is presumed to be that others don’t get the problem, as though events carry their own meanings. Or the main problem is presumed to be the failure of others to bow to our brilliant solutions—never mind aspects of the situation that may be obscured by our way of casting the problem or hidden by our principles. We too readily assume that, unlike their concerns, ours are value-neutral and free of interest-driven rationalizations and biases. We never doctor facts to predetermine results.

Moral fundamentalism is a drag on democracy. This drag is to be expected when people feel backed into a corner, or when their social position limits opportunities. But fundamentalism anywhere blocks communication and inquiry across differences. Whenever people suppose their reading of a problem is exhaustive, they autocratically predefine what’s relevant and they covertly prejudge alternatives. They assume, as a matter of course, that others are stubbornly refusing to accept the interpretation that is staring right out at them. 

When we disagree about problems, it’s one thing to reflectively conclude that others are willfully refusing to face conditions. It’s quite another thing to start with the default assumption that we alone are taking the wide view.

Despite these habits—not because of them—moral fundamentalists have historically done many good things through their dealings with opposing fundamentalisms. But what else have they done that might in future be minimized by delegitimizing moral fundamentalism? When we take up the one-way mentality, what happens to opportunities for learning our way toward a healthier, more just, and more sustainable future across the dynamic spectrum of values, beliefs, and concerns? 

3. Is moral fundamentalism good for motivating public action?

We’re used to assuming that a kind of fundamentalism is the irreplaceable steam that powers activism and advocacy, that resistance to injustice is unintelligible without it, and that the virtues of moral clarity and conviction somehow imply a my-way-or-the-highway approach. 

However, does activism actually require and benefit from moral fundamentalism? In order to motivate actions that restructure conditions and redress wrongs, must people harden their hearts and minds against the clamor of contradictory theories, both speaking and acting as if they’re governed by final truths?

This idea that incorrigibility is a virtue of activism and advocacy makes some dubious assumptions about the public. To some intellectuals, the international resurgence of gaslighting demagogues and self-seeking cronyism is incontrovertible proof that we can ultimately expect very little of the public. In that view, the public switch is permanently set to dim, and it’s up to intellectuals to take up the civilizing burden of enlightenment. If this requires us to proclaim finalities, then so be it. 

Disagreements about what we can reasonably expect of a democratic citizenry have a long history, from Plato’s Republic to the Federalist Papers. The clearest modern statement of alternatives was arguably the debate in the 1920s between American philosopher John Dewey and journalist Walter Lippmann. Dewey rejected what he took to be Lippmann’s coziness with paternalistic rule by elite experts who oversimplify problems so that citizens will accept the reality that is bureaucratically packaged for them. Nothing made Dewey’s democratic blood boil more than Lippmann’s idea that intellectuals must lift the burden of inquiry from the provincial and parochial little heads of the masses while conferring the “mandate of heaven” on certain ideas.

Does Lippmann’s enlighten-the-masses outlook reveal intellectuals at their best? People cling to the illusion of ironclad certainty, and Lippmann exploited that illusion. Dewey’s alternative, in contrast, was to free public intelligence to creatively direct change. Accordingly, he focused throughout his life on the educative capacity of human experience. He argued that prophecies of public incompetence are self-fulfilling. We’ve expected too little of the public, and these low expectations continue to exact a heavy price.

4. Aren’t we stuck with moral fundamentalism?

Yes, but its shape and extent are educable. Moral fundamentalism is at odds with the greatest educational need in any democracy. Drawing again from Dewey, that need is to improve “the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public.”

Moral fundamentalism is a vice because it obstructs communication, constricts deliberation about what’s possible, and underwrites bad decisions. Social inquiry is more honest, collaborative, rigorous, and productive when youths learn to be patient with the suspense of reflection, open to discomfort and dissent, resolute yet distrustful of tunnel-vision, aware of the fallibility and incompleteness of any decision or policy, practiced in listening, and imaginative in pursuing creative leads.

We should teach students to value friction, and we should help them become compassionate, active, and informed problem-solvers. Instead of teaching them to oppose others’ fundamentalism with more of the same, we need a more genuinely radical approach that is not Pollyannaish. We need democratic engagement and resistance without puritanical zealotry, courage in mediating troubles without certainty, bold action without fatalistic resignation or paralyzing guilt, and moral clarity without oversimplification.

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Goethe in shirt-sleeves

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is Germany’s greatest poet, then and now. At the age of thirty-seven he was on the way to being the centre of a national culture, and a European celebrity. But at the moment (in 1786), he is simply on his way to Italy, a journey that was nothing grand or official. He is escaping as a private individual under a cover-name—escaping, on one level, from a decade labouring to help administer Weimar (one of eighteenth-century Germany’s mini-states), and, on a more intimate level, from an emotional entanglement with Charlotte von Stein, a married lady nine years older who is a prominent member of Duchess Anna Amalia’s court.

Over his early time in Weimar, Charlotte had helped this rough-diamond bourgeois writer to find his feet in an unfamiliar aristocratic scene. His gratitude shaped a close relationship between them—a love affair even? The clerihew is well-known:

Charlotte von Stein
went to bed at nine.
If Goethe went too,
nobody knew.

But surely in that tightly enclosed society, everybody would have known? Everything we do know about Charlotte’s character and life experience makes this affair unlikely. Yet Goethe’s letters, almost two thousand of them, often informal notes punctuating the day, certainly speak of love. Hers haven’t survived; she demanded them back when the relationship soured, which began with this Italian journey. So, the picture remains incomplete.

Goethe has left Weimar and the court behind him, telling no-one where he’s going, not even Charlotte, to her great resentment. But he does stay residually in touch, slipping in assurances of his love with successive batches of his travel diary. So at least she does know where he is now, though she may have been left cool by his reports. His clear enthusiasm surely signalled that he was in every sense moving beyond her.

Those batches, thrown down almost daily over the eight weeks it took him to reach Rome are our text. Goethe never published it, didn’t think much of it, and many years later used it when writing the full formal account of the nearly two whole years he spent in Italy. It’s a surprise he didn’t then throw it away. That makes it the more precious, because it really is a work in itself: exuberant, charmingly informal, and spontaneous, shaped by a growing excitement as Rome comes tantalisingly closer.

And then—almost unbelievably, after years of longing and two missed opportunities—he is finally there. It feels like a destiny fulfilled, and his simple words “I am Goethe” when he meets his host in Rome, the painter Tischbein, convey the confidence in his restored free self. It is a happy return after the decade of frustrated creativity in which several works were begun but none finished.

Rather than finishing these works, he starts from the beginning, opening himself up to a world he knew from texts and images but is only now experiencing with all his senses and faculties. He sometimes feels overwhelmed by the realities pressing in on him from every side—landscape, climate, the cities on his route (Verona, Padua, Vicenza, Venice), ancient monuments, Renaissance art, Palladio’s architecture, history under every stone; and a new kind of people with an easy-going, out-of-doors, communal way of life. Among them he finds himself relaxing too, sloughing off the depression he had been suffering from under grey northern skies. He sums it up gratefully as a rebirth.

Material enough for a happy time—a happiness not of self-indulgence, but of a powerful mind fully and rewardingly engaged once more with the world—Italy was to remain a cherished memory, a pivotal moment in his life and career, and an inspiration for a new aesthetic in the years to come.

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Bounded rationality: Being rational while also being human

The middle of the twentieth century was an optimistic time in the study of human rationality. The newly rigorized science of economics proposed a unified decision-theoretic story of how humans ought to think and act and how humans actually think and act. For the first time, we had good scientific evidence that humans were by-and-large rational creatures.

In the 1970s-1980s, the story changed. A new wave of social scientists, led by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, proposed that humans decide how to think and act by using a simple toolbox of heuristic strategies. Heuristics are fast, frugal, and reasonably reliable, but they also have biases: systematic ways in which their outputs come apart from the requirements of leading decision-theoretic ideals. For example, we might judge that Linda is more likely to be a feminist bank teller than a bank teller, though that is clearly impossible, since all feminist bank tellers are bank tellers. Soon, hundreds of systematic biases in human cognition had been discovered and cataloged. As a result, many scholars came to believe that humans are not very rational after all.

In the past few decades, a new wave of scholars have urged that the 1970s and 1980s were too harsh in their judgment of humanity. Humans are, it is increasingly held, indeed fairly rational creatures. But this is not because we always do what mid-century decision theory says we should. It is instead because mid-century decision theory did not tell the full story about what it means to be rational, while also being human. Recent work has urged that traditional decision-theoretic standards of rationality leave out a number of relevant factors that rational humans should and do respond to, then wrongly treat humans as irrational when in fact we are responding correctly to factors that decision-theoretic standards have traditionally neglected.

In particular, theories of bounded rationality urge that humans are bounded agents. We are bounded by our internal structure, as agents with limited cognitive abilities and who must pay costs to exercise those abilities. We are also bounded by our external environment, which shapes the problems we are likely to face and the consequences that our actions will have on the world. Theories of bounded rationality aim to show how factors such as limited cognitive abilities, cognitive costs, and the structure of the environment shape how it is rational for humans to think and act. Bounded rationality theorists propose that what looks like irrationally biased cognition is often a rational response to cognitive and environmental bounds.

For example, suppose I ask you to estimate the date on which George Washington was first elected president of the United States. If you are like many people, you will answer this question by beginning with a relevant anchor value, such as 1776, the year in which the Declaration of Independence was signed. You will adjust your estimate upwards a few times to account for the length of the Revolutionary War and the interval between the Revolutionary War and the election of the first president. You may also adjust downwards to account for factors such as the need to quickly form a stable government. If you are like many people, you will arrive at an estimate in the low- or mid-1780s.

This process is called anchoring and adjustment: judgments begin by taking a relevant fact as an anchoring value, then iteratively adjusting the estimate upwards or downwards from the anchor to incorporate new items of information. In this case, anchoring and adjustment performs remarkably well: Washington was first elected in 1788. But anchoring and adjustment shows an anchoring bias: estimates tend to be skewed towards the anchor. In this case, they tend to be several years too low, because the anchor value of 1776 is lower than the true value of 1788. Classic theories of rationality would treat this as an irrational type of cognitive bias, but bounded rationality theorists are not so sure.

Anchoring bias happens because agents do not make enough adjustments to wash out the effect of the initial anchor. There is strong evidence that this happens because adjustments are effortful: we could, if we wished, wash out the anchor by making thousands of tiny adjustments, but this may not be worth the effort. That is, we face an accuracy-effort tradeoff between increased accuracy and increased effort from each additional adjustment. Bounded rationality theorists propose that in cases such as the above, humans make an optimal compromise between competing goals such as accuracy and effort. In this case, we choose a number of adjustments sufficient to yield a highly accurate estimate while keeping the number of effortful adjustments low. In this way, what looks like an irrational cognitive bias may actually be a rational response to our bounded human condition.

Not all human cognition is rational. For example, there is not much to be said for someone who prefers to draw from an urn containing 7/100 prizes instead of an urn containing 3/10 prizes, on the basis that 7 is larger than 3. But careful theorizing about bounded rationality aims to show that many cases which look as biased and irrational as this urn draw are in fact fully rational when viewed in the proper light.

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Age and experience: Early Modern women’s perspectives

It’s newsworthy, apparently, when the cover of Vogue magazine features a woman over 70 years old. The New York Times recently devoted an article to the photograph of Miuccia Prada on the March 2024 cover, breathlessly noting that Prada was wearing little if any makeup, did not appear to be “posed,” and remarkably was not gazing at the camera, “looking elsewhere, thinking of something else.” Ordinarily, one would not think it surprising to see images of a powerful, wealthy, highly-educated—and attractive—woman in the public sphere. But her age….

The scrutiny of women’s age is hardly new. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century French salon culture was said to be “a woman’s paradise” of elegance, wit, and mild flirtation. However, actual women intellectuals and salonnières (salon hostesses) were frustrated by society’s emphasis on their physical appearance and the restraints on their behavior.

Old age and the activities and attitudes appropriate for the late stage of life are key topics in moralist reflections, from Cicero and Seneca to Montaigne. Nevertheless, as Anne-Thérèse de Lambert wrote in the early decades of the eighteenth century, male writers “work on behalf of men, and women are left to their own devices.” Lambert’s treatise on old age translates traditional reflections in terms that reflect women’s lives. In her more pointed “Discourse on the sentiments of a Lady who believed that love was appropriate for women who were no longer young,” her narrator juxtaposes the opprobrium attached to older women in love with the exceptional qualities of mind and heart of her friend Ismène, who holds the contrary opinion. Although the narrator ostensibly accepts the status quo (“I take the world as it is, not as it should be”), her essay ends with a scathing denunciation of a world in which men dictate the terms of women’s conduct: “everything is for them and against us.”

As I was working with these texts with retirement on my horizon, many of these women’s observations hit close to home. In one of Madeleine de Scudéry’s philosophical Conversations, the older Chrysante is universally admired for her wisdom, but her offer of mentorship to the younger Célinte is politely declined, since to be like Chrysante, Célinte would need to confront the reality of ageing.

Lambert sees the bucolic retreat from the world recommended by Cicero as a possibility for women, but she herself did no such thing: she maintained her influential salon until her death at age 86. At the end of the century, another powerful society hostess, Suzanne Necker, coolly observes, “When one is no longer young, one has nothing but religion, morals, friendship, and one’s mind: one should therefore live in retreat and often in solitude, because these benefits can only be cultivated far from other people…” Necker, however, maintained her salon until the French Revolution forced her and her husband, the former finance minister, to flee to Switzerland.

A common thread in many of these writings is relief that although old age poses its own physical and emotional hardships, it also provides a welcome relief from the expectations and constraints that weigh on young women. For Necker, “One is oneself at the end of life.” Constance de Salm mocks the “resignation of old age” as “the first stage of the declining mind,” but she saw at least one advantage: “being able to speak freely about any number of things that one could never say when one was young.” Journalist and essayist Pauline de Meulan Guizot writes a satirical piece from the perspective of a young woman who looks forward to growing old: “At sixty, one should shrug off others’ approval, so that they do not shrug at you. I can hardly wait to be sixty.” The older woman’s “gaiety can be less circumspect, her manners freer, her generosity more personal, her feelings more expressive.” If only, she concludes, one could have all that and be young and pretty too…

One of the most moving explorations of old age can be found in the late manuscripts of Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville, written when she was in her 80s. In poor health and relatively reduced circumstances, mourning the deaths of friends and family members, she nevertheless found pleasure in writing, exploring ideas, and delighting in quirky language. Beginning an essay “On Commerce,” she digresses: “My old brain cannot seem to come up with anything to feed my pen, despite my unfortunate need, even if 82 years of existence should excuse me from the effort of splattering ink on paper. But my pen’s nature is to have a doglike appetite, so I am forced to throw it at least some bones to gnaw so that it will not die of starvation.”

Without sugar-coating the indignities of old age, these women delve into what it means to “be oneself” at last. As I discuss in Women Moralists in Early Modern France, they show similar originality in their treatments of other topics from the tradition: self-knowledge, friendship, happiness, the passions, marriage, and women’s nature. They reflect not only on their immediate social world, but also on the philosophical tradition that has excluded their voices. If their writings remind us that women’s present-day limitations and frustrations have a long history, their ability to confront their constraints provides a salutary counter-example.

_{Featured image by Rosalba Carriera via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.}

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Does Orwell still matter?

Does Orwell still matter? With Nineteen Eighty-Four celebrating its diamond jubilee, and the seventy-fifth anniversary of George Orwell’s untimely death quickly approaching, the question “Does Orwell still matter?” is timely. Familiar answers abound: he anticipated the surveillance technology that we struggle to restrain; the threats to freedom and democracy he identified remain at large; his ideal of windowpane-like political writing is still aspirational. But the familiar answers are also suspicious: our condition of continual surveillance was hardly imposed by the thought police given we freely embrace its technology; Orwell is hardly the only author to worry about the survival of Western values; the clear prose he admired has been exploited by nefarious actors. If Orwell still matters, he probably matters for different reasons. One reason is hinted at, not in his novels, but his reporting.

In “Why I Write,” Orwell affirmed that “Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” His 1937 The Road to Wigan Pier is part commentary on England’s industrial North, part critique of his fellow socialists: it included attacks on “cranks”—progressives that Orwell thought had lost touch with common humanity—and Marxists who seemed to have no idea how to talk to actual human beings. “The fact is that Socialism,” he wrote, “in the form in which it is now presented, appeals chiefly to unsatisfactory or even inhuman types.” He knew just how unappealingly it could be presented. Having been harangued by a militant Communist propagandist, Orwell replied “Look here, I’m a bourgeois, and my family are bourgeois,” adding “If you talk about them like that again I’ll punch your head.”

Orwell’s pugilistic response expresses understandable anger to having one’s family threatened, but it also reveals an important insight. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he repeatedly suggested that abandoning a core self-conception amounts to death: he explained that “to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself,” that he was being compelled to “alter myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognizable as the same person,” and that while “you have got to drop your snobbishness… it is fatal to pretend to drop it before you are really ready to do so.” Such talk might seem hyperbolic, but a legion of philosophers contend that radical disruption of psychological continuity disrupts personal identity. Orwell’s preferred, less hostile strategy appealed instead to native English patriotism to recruit potential allies, one that his first wife, Eileen, understood when she explained that his short book, The Lion and the Unicorn, was his attempt at “explaining how to be a Socialist though Tory.” It did not demand the seriously difficult task of abandoning one’s self-conception, but instead culled existing sentiments to overcome class differences.

If Orwell’s preferred strategy seems obvious, consider how bad the American Left sometimes seems at this sort of thing. Frequent appeals to the value of diversity and equity have produced furious contrary reactions. Talk of “building back better” is pragmatic but seems to have fallen flat. Consider too a 22 May 2023 statement from Class Unity, a caucus within the Democratic Socialists of America, titled “Class politics, not identity politics” which contends that:

Neoliberalism seeks to separate us into a vast number of groups according to factors such as race, gender, religion, and country or region of origin. Divided, we cannot advance our collective interests as working people. Liberal politics embraces this division and creates a political landscape where every group fights for “its” interests… A true socialist politics

allows working people to transcend this atomization and join with each other not on the basis of who we are, but of what we do. And what the working class does is work, because otherwise we starve. It is only by organizing around our shared class interests and strategically withdrawing our labor that we can challenge capitalism.

The call to transcend atomized self-conceptions might be sincere, but it is bound to feel divisive, like a demand to abolish part of oneself. Could appealing sincerely to American patriotism work better? What if jargon-filled statements of principles were dropped in favor of “We’re Better than This” or “Out of Many, One: For Real This Time”? What if the American Left created propaganda incorporating images of insurrectionists pulling down the American flag from the United States Capitol? Might that better engage working-class and middle-class voters?

Orwell’s strategy might seem odd given he is so often read as the honest champion of telling uncomfortable truths. But he spent “two wasted years” producing war-time propaganda for the BBC and he told his fellow socialists that “we need intelligent”—that is, better—“propaganda.” Orwell still matters because he showed us how to turn our political tribalism on its head, never quite losing faith in the decency of human beings.

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Kids, race and dangerous jokes

I wish that everything my children will hear about race at school will be salutary, but you and I know it won’t. Their peers will expose them to a panoply of false stereotypes and harmful ideas about race, and much of that misinformation will be shared in the guise of humor.

The New York Times recently asked teens about their experience of racist jokes in school. Kaylee, at Bentonville West High School, wrote that racist humor at her school is “as common as the amount of people with Stanley cups, they’re everywhere. You hear them directed at you, directed at others, directed towards teachers, toward your dog, toward your mom….” (Stanley cups are so trendy that people have camped out in parking lots to buy them.) Kaylee goes on to describe the jokes, and others laughing at them, as “diminishing.” Kaylee’s description is apt. Jokes like this convey negative ideas and stereotypes that play a role in maintaining unjust social hierarchies, thus belittling people by lowering them in power and status. Further, I believe that wholehearted laughter at racist jokes—as opposed to, say, an uncomfortable or involuntary giggle—welcomes belittling ideas into a conversation.

Another student who participated in the conversation with the Times, Caio from High Tech High, wrote, “School administration should require guilty students to attend a lesson that teaches in detail how making racist jokes perpetuates racism.” While I believe Caio is right that racist jokes perpetuate racism, I think that many of the cultural ideas that we hold about derogatory jokes—like the idea that it’s OK to tell derogatory jokes about one’s own social group—are mistaken. Given the ample evidence that our culture does not understand how derogatory joking works, there are very few people who could construct the lesson plan that Caio envisions.

Many teens, like many adults, don’t think that racist humor is always wrong; Abigail from New York told the Times that “depending on who you’re with or where you are, [racist or other hateful] jokes can be okay. If a person of that race is telling the joke, I feel it is fine. If someone is ever offended, then the joke should stop, but if it’s all fun and laughs, it’s fine. Maybe a place like school or work isn’t okay, because you never know who could take it the wrong way. If you’re just hanging out with friends, it should be fine.”

Abigail’s opinion that you can kid around about race with friends is widely shared among adolescents. Research tells us that even though teens think that joking about race or ethnicity with your friend group is harmless, in fact it has negative consequences. For example, Douglass et al. (2015) found that teens who are generally not anxious experienced more anxiety if they directed racial or ethnic humor towards themselves. For teens who already experience anxiety, the same humor from others that they dismiss as harmless—just their friends kidding around—raises their social anxiety not just on the day that it happens but on the following day. Over the course of three weeks, the teens in this study experienced an average of 3.49 incidents of racist or ethnic humor in their friend groups. Thus, socially anxious adolescents had an average of a little over two days of anxiety every week because of jokes that they deem harmless.

This study did not consider the effects of racial or ethnic humor on what teens believe about race or ethnicity, nor on how they act. But we can extrapolate from research with adults, which shows that exposure to derogatory humor affects adults who are already prejudiced against the derogated group. For example, for people who are prejudiced against Muslims, anti-Muslim jokes (not anti-Muslim statements) affect how they perceive an incident in which a manager sends a Muslim woman to work in the stockroom, rather than with customers, because she is wearing a burqa. The effect is limited to groups that the researchers characterize as groups of “shifting acceptability”—these are groups where social attitudes are in flux, moving from a time when prejudice was widespread to a time when prejudice against the group is less socially acceptable. So, for example, for people who are prejudiced against gay people, exposure to anti-gay jokes decreases how much money they are willing to allocate to an organization that promotes “the political and social advancement” of gay people; but for people who are prejudiced against racists, jokes about racists have no effect on how much money they are willing to allocate to a similar organization that promotes the advancement of White people. There’s no reason to think that adolescents are immune to these effects in a way that adults are not.

In adults, there is no evidence that exposure to racist jokes makes people more racist; rather, it seems to encourage the expression of pre-existing racism. However, adolescents are still mapping the social world in a way that many adults are not; while I was working on Dangerous Jokes, I read and heard anecdotes from adults who recall gleaning derogatory ideas and stereotypes about social groups from humor. I suspect that racist jokes spread and cultivate prejudice among young people by introducing negative stereotypes and ideas about race in a way that many adolescents consider socially acceptable.

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When health care professionals unintentionally do harm

The Hippocratic Oath, which is taken by physicians and implores them to ‘first, do no harm,’ is foundational in medicine (even if the nuances of the phrase are far more complex than meets the eye). Yet what happens when doctors bring about great harm to patients without even realizing it? In this article, we define microaggressions, illustrate how they can hinder the equitable delivery of healthcare, and discuss why the consequences of microaggressions are often anything but “micro”.

What are microaggressions?

Microaggressions can be defined as actions, gestures, or even environments that subtly and often unintentionally harm members of marginalized groups. Some examples include when a healthcare professional speaks slowly and loudly to an elderly patient (who is neither hard of hearing nor cognitively impaired) and when medical clinics don’t have hospital gowns or blood pressure cuffs that fit people with larger bodies (or furniture that they can comfortably use).

In response, you might think that in the first case, it’s just an honest mistake committed by a well-meaning individual; and in the second case, it’s not a big deal since it’s nobody’s fault—there’s not even a specific individual to hold responsible.

So how and why are each of these examples microaggressions? And what kind of harm do they cause?

The healthcare professional who speaks loudly and slowly to an elderly patient, based on assumptions and stereotypes about what elderly people are like, might be thinking that they are acting in a way that can benefit the patient. Their reasoning (conscious or not) might be something like this: “elderly patients tend to be hard of hearing and suffer from cognitive impairment and thus the louder and more slowly I speak, the more it will help the patient hear and understand what I’m saying.” However, this elderly patient is not hard of hearing or cognitively impaired. In fact, the loud, slow speaking lands quite differently from their perspective. It might make them feel as though the healthcare professional has not taken the time to get to know them. This can lead to the patient not feeling properly seen, heard, or understood. And this, in turn, can result in the patient not feeling comfortable around the healthcare professional and not trusting them.

With regards to medical clinics not having hospital gowns or blood pressure cuffs that fit patients with larger bodies, or furniture that can comfortably accommodate them, one might think that given the relatively small number of patients who might need to make use of these resources, the impact is relatively low. But the Hippocratic Oath and the imperative to “first, do no harm” applies to all patients—some patients should not be excluded from proper care simply because their bodies fall outside of a normative ideal of what bodies ought to look like. All patients deserve recognition, respect, and the means to receive comprehensive, high-quality care. To be denied this sends the message that one is abnormal, that they do not belong, or that they are not respected enough to be treated fairly in healthcare spaces.

How do microaggressions hinder the delivery of healthcare?

As we can see from these examples, the harms of microaggressions are only “micro” from the perspective of the one committing them. From the perspective of patients, the harms aren’t “micro” at all. Microaggressions can result in the immediate harms of feeling disrespected or invisible. But they can also contribute to long-term harms. For the elderly patient, even though the microaggression was committed with no ill intent, the healthcare professional failed to treat the patient as a dignified human being, worthy of respect. As a result, the patient’s sense of self is undermined and the stigma associated with being elderly in an ageist society is worsened.

The same is true with pervasive anti-fat bias both within and beyond medical contexts. People with larger bodies are disrespected, degraded, and pathologized. When they enter medical spaces only to find that their larger bodies literally cannot be contained by the furniture, that medical devices cannot be used on them, and that medical gowns cannot cover their bodies, their sense of self and self-worth is harmed. This can worsen anti-fat stigma and bias, making fat patients feel shame and hesitant to seek medical care at all.

The consequences of microaggressions are anything but “micro”

Trust is the cornerstone of high-quality medical care. Yet microaggressions can corrode the trust of patients: both their trust of individual providers but also their trust in the institution of medicine more broadly. Distrust in practitioners and institutions can contribute to delaying or foregoing medical treatment, missed or incorrect diagnoses, prolonged illness, and sometimes even unnecessary death.

The upshot is this: when one’s health, well-being, and in many cases one’s very life is at stake, it’s imperative for there to be a trusting, positive relationship with those in charge of the treatment and care. Experiencing microaggressions in medical contexts, however, can undermine this trust. Thus, we must bring attention to microaggressions that arise within medical contexts in order to work to diminish them as much as possible. Doing so can be one important step in building a more just and equitable healthcare system.

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Has Christian philosophy been having it too easy?

Over the last 50 years, Christian philosophy has ballooned into by far the largest interest area in the philosophy of religion. The Society of Christian Philosophers boasts more than a thousand members in the United States, and similar groups are dotted around the world. Following advice to Christian philosophers offered by Alvin Plantinga in 1984, most philosophers of religion today are taking belief in God for granted in their work, clarifying and defending classical Christian doctrine and developing its implications for a wide range of philosophical questions.

If you were to point out that there are more fundamental issues about religion than those that Christians are grappling with, a Christian philosopher might respond: “Well, don’t let me stop you from discussing them!” Fair enough. Were you to suggest that a critical discussion of Christian ideas ought to involve considering challenges to them, a Christian philosopher would turn to you in some perplexity, asking: “Haven’t we been doing that?” (Actually, I think most non-Christians in the field would share their perplexity.)

I want to respond to this question. Sure, there has been much discussion of certain general issues relevant to the standing of Christian theism, such as whether God exists or whether religious experiences can rationally justify Christian belief. And philosophers who stake out a negative position on these issues are indeed indirectly challenging such belief. But oddly—I almost said bizarrely—the past half century has seen no thorough discussion by analytical philosophers of arguments that directly oppose classical Christian ideas about the nature of reality: arguments against, say, Christian ideas about sin or salvation or the divinity of Jesus. And so Christian philosophy has been able to grow and grow and grow without ever encountering a serious challenge to the truth of the doctrine on which it relies.

Why have non-Christian philosophers avoided directly challenging the Christian worldview? I’m not sure, though I can speak for myself. As a philosopher of religion who is not a Christian (I last maintained a Christian commitment in early adulthood), I was provoked, when starting out, to consider what seemed to me to be the most fundamental religious questions. These include whether there is a God, whether traditional theism is true. They also include questions about whether human religion, and human thought about religion, might evolve and flourish in interesting ways even after setting traditional talk of God aside. Taking a negative line on issues of the former sort—whether there is a God—and recognizing its negative implications for Christian views, I long thought this was challenge enough. Discovering plenty to fascinate a philosopher in issues of the latter sort—the evolution of religion—I thought confessionally based Christian philosophy might be given pause if reminded of all one can see only by looking beyond Christianity.

I now think differently. I think that, along with others, I have been contributing to a situation in which Christian philosophy has found it rather too easy to grow and grow and grow. The social and psychological dynamics involved when one’s work is supported by a religious community and a tradition stretching back thousands of years and when one feels the camaraderie of many hundreds of likeminded philosophers—these things, I say, are going to make it at least tempting for Christian philosophers to bat aside the general objections as best they can and carry on with an intellectual project they see as divinely ordained. By leaving alone the classical Christian doctrines underlying the whole enterprise, we have made it far easier than it should be, in philosophy, to give in to the temptation.   

So it is time—maybe past time—to stir things up a bit. What’s needed is for people in the philosophy of religion to consider classical Christian ideas—the distinctive religious ideas feeding Christian philosophy—just like they would any other ideas with broad ramifications for human life, which means, among other things, developing and assessing arguments against such ideas to test them, to see whether they stand up to critical scrutiny. Having now followed my own advice, I predict that classical Christian doctrine will not survive such scrutiny. But this isn’t the end of the story. For as I have come to see since embarking on the inquiry, there are many interesting ways in which Christianity might evolve and flourish even after setting traditional Christian talk aside. There is much to discuss here, in this more generously delineated conceptual space, which will accommodate the work of any Christian philosophers of the future but also so much more. What shall we call it? I suggest a label that ought perhaps to have been obvious from the beginning: “the philosophy of Christianity.” 

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Philosophers don’t often write about the heart

The Heart and Its Attitudes illuminates interpersonal phenomena that are, on the one hand, as local and commonplace as heartfelt connections and their rupture between friends and lovers, or, on the other, as nationally or internationally significant as the emotional injuries of racial and gender oppression and war. It is a work of philosophy that aims for rigor and analytical depth, but one that is unusual in its relevance to so much of ordinary life.

Philosophers don’t often write about the heart. At least, analytical philosophers don’t. Why is this? Philosophers are said to live life “in their heads” rather than “from their hearts.” But even if philosophers tend to be head rather heart people, why don’t they think and write about the heart? It can hardly have escaped their attention that matters of the heart are central to what we human beings value most about our lives.

“Without friends,” Aristotle said, “no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.” Philosophers write a lot about friendship and love, but they tend to do so in terms that leave out the centrality of the heart and heartfelt connection. They speak rather of commitment to one another and each other’s well-being, or taking each other as ends, or sharing deliberative standpoints or living life together, or a whole host of other things, and much less about mutual emotional vulnerability and sharing and being in one another’s hearts.

Surely one explanation of philosophers’ reticence is that talk of “the heart” seems unavoidably metaphorical. Analytic philosophers look for cash to underwrite metaphorical promissory notes. It turns out to be easy enough, however, to cash the metaphor in if we just take “heart” to refer to a cluster of emotional susceptibilities that have an essentially reciprocal and reciprocating structure. The heart aims at heartfelt connection—at shared experience of joy and sorrow, hope and fear, and other emotions “of the heart.” We seek naturally to share these feelings with others and must suppress our natural tendencies if we wish to avoid doing so. Our heart’s wish is to be open to other hearts in the hope that they will be open to ours, and thereby us, in return.

Of course, we do not want the very same heartfelt connection with everyone. Rejection from some hurts us more than rejection from others; and likewise for heartfelt acceptance. Still, we are not completely indifferent to the indifference or coldness of even utter strangers, and we find it necessary to defend ourselves against it, for example, by humor or anger.

“Cold-hearted” and “warm-hearted” . . . more metaphors. But we know instantly what they mean. Someone is cold-hearted if they hold their emotional cards close to their vest and close themselves to emotional engagement. And they are warm-hearted if they are contrariwise disposed. They are cold-hearted if they act without regard to others’ emotional vulnerabilities, to what will hurt others’ feelings, and warm-hearted if they are considerate of and responsive to others’ feelings, putting them at ease emotionally.

Perhaps you can begin to see the topic opening before you. (Philosophical open-heart surgery?) When we talk about our feelings being hurt, we are not talking about bad sensations, like mere physical pain. “Hurt feelings” appears in P. F. Strawson’s catalogue of what he calls “reactive attitudes” in his justly famous and influential “Freedom and Resentment.” Strawson does not really define “reactive attitudes.” He gives some central characteristics (e.g., that they are felt from a “participant” or, as I put it, “second-person” standpoint), and his most influential examples, resentment, guilt, and blame—what he calls “indignation”—mediate mutual accountability. The Heart and Its Attitudes provides a systematic account, arguably the first, of reactive attitudes in general, both those involved in accountability and those that mediate heartfelt connection.

The Heart and Its Attitudes has several intended audiences. I write, in the first instances, for philosophers and students of philosophy, at whatever stage, to try to convince them that the heart and heartfelt phenomena are rich sources of philosophical investigation. I believe this is so intrinsically and also because such investigations can shed light on phenomena that have proven philosophically puzzling. But I also intend this book for the general public. It hopes to show that understanding the nature of heartfelt attitudes and their role in mediating personal and social relations, including in healing profound emotional injuries—wounds to the heart—can help us to see what might repair even terrible harms, such as those of war or chattel slavery and its legacy in the United States.

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Awkward? We’d better own it

We live in a golden age of awkwardness. Or so we’re told, by everyone from The Washington Post to Modern Dog Magazine. But we always have. A 1929 Life Magazine contributor writes, “These are awkward times, and I sympathize with the teashop waitress who approached a customer from behind and said brightly, ‘Anything more sir, I mean madam; I beg your pardon sir.’” What’s new isn’t awkwardness itself, but our upbeat attitude towards it; headlines tell us that post-Covid, “We’re all socially awkward now,” and public health campaigns urge us to “embrace the awkward” and talk openly about issues like mental health. But while reducing the stigma around mental health, addiction, and other issues is a good thing, we should be wary of our tendency to embrace awkwardness—or at least, we should be aware of the way in which we selectively celebrate awkwardness, and who gets left out of the embrace.

The idea that being socially awkward is a personality trait—and a sign of superior intelligence—has become a mainstay of writing about the (predominantly white and male) worlds of tech and finance. From Mark Zuckerberg to the recently disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried, the socially awkward genius is a familiar figure in the news these days. It’s found in fiction, too: Sherlock Holmes, even our beloved Mr Darcy. In these men, awkwardness is seen as not only excusable, but laudable—the true genius can’t be bothered with social niceties; he doesn’t notice such things. But this stereotype rests on a misconception about where awkwardness originates. In fact, people aren’t awkward—situations are. And one reason situations become awkward is because of individuals’ willingness to disregard others’ social cues, needs, and feelings. The myth of the awkward misfit is harmful when it’s used to license antisocial behavior, but it’s also used to exclude and stigmatize the neurodivergent, the disabled, and other marginalized groups.

That’s not to discount the fact that some people have more difficulty than others at detecting social cues; these individuals may feel, and be perceived as, awkward. But when we label people “awkward,” we attribute the problem to them, rather than to our failure to make social expectations clear. Programs like Rochester Institute of Technology’s Career Ready Bootcamp train autistic students in the so-called “soft skills” needed to succeed in job interviews and the workplace—skills such as where to look while talking (between the eyes, as a substitute for eye contact) and how to interpret and respond to open-ended questions (like “tell me something about yourself”). But this shouldn’t be a one-way process: employers can make interviews more accommodating, too, by asking more specific questions, or de-emphasizing the roles of small talk and considerations of whether a candidate will be a good “fit” in hiring decisions. 

Indeed, the emphasis on awkwardness as a personality trait disproportionately burdens people who don’t conform, for various reasons, to our social norms regarding speech patterns, eye contact, or body type. It’s no coincidence that the “geniuses” I mentioned above are all relatively affluent, successful white men. When we see awkwardness as a property of individuals, our choice about whether or not to accept or even celebrate it intersects with other forms of bias and prejudice.

Our cultural assumptions about awkwardness put women at a double disadvantage. Whether in the workplace or at home, women are disproportionately tasked with “emotion work” like facilitating social interactions, smoothing over social discomfort, and managing others’ feelings. When conversations get uncomfortable, it’s women’s work to repair them. On the other hand, we stigmatize conversations about salaries, periods, postpartum bodies, etc., and these conversations are bound to get uncomfortable. More problematically, we’re prone to see that awkwardness as caused by the person who brings them up, and not by the social norms or stigma around the issues themselves. Our fear of being perceived as awkward, or of being seen as “making things awkward,” can function as a form of silencing, suppressing conversations about important issues like salary gaps, menopause, and microaggressions.

I’m not saying that the desire to embrace awkwardness, and to celebrate self-proclaimed awkward people, is a bad thing. Our fear of awkwardness and our desire to avoid awkward encounters is real, and we would be better off, in many cases, if we got more comfortable with discomfort. But all too often, we treat powerful people as if they’re immune from social expectations, tolerating or even celebrating their disregard for social norms as a sign of intelligence. 

As long as we embrace or celebrate awkwardness as an individual trait, we risk embracing a solution that reproduces existing social biases and inequality. The intersection of awkwardness, gender, and status empowers some to disregard social conventions, while using those same conventions to keep others quiet. 

What’s the alternative? First, we should be aware that awkwardness is a product of all of our discomfort with certain topics. It’s not something individuals cause or have. It’s the result of insufficient or inadequate social guidance for how to handle an issue. Second, where we do feel uncomfortable talking about issues, we should take that as an indication and an opportunity to improve our social infrastructure, clunky and odd as that process may seem. For example, many professors now ask students to share their pronouns on the first day of class. For some older faculty, this process may feel awkward. Over time, it becomes less so. And often, avoiding awkwardness comes at the expense of someone else’s discomfort: for example, the students who faced the choice between being the only ones to share pronouns or being consistently misgendered. The work of discussing menopause or menstruation should be shared by everyone—not left to women. New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ recent press conference discussing menopause and women’s orgasms may have made many viewers (myself included) cringe, but it’s a step in the right direction. Making topics like sex, health, disability, and neurodiversity less awkward to discuss will take work, and that work shouldn’t selectively burden members of marginalized groups.

Finally, we should look for areas where our social cues may not be accessible to everyone, and make our expectations more explicit. And if, after all that, someone still seems to disregard others’ comfort and our social norms around workplace behavior? Maybe he’s not so awkward after all. Maybe he’s just a jerk.

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Beyond God and atheism

What are we doing here? What’s the point of existence?

Traditionally, the West has been dominated by two very different answers to these big questions. On the one hand, there is belief in the traditional God of the Abrahamic faiths, a supreme being who created the universe for a good purpose. On the other hand, there is the meaningless, purposeless universe of secular atheism. However, I’ve come to think both views are inadequate, as both have things they can’t explain about reality. In my view, the evidence we currently have points to the universe having purpose but one that exists in the absence of the traditional God.

The theistic worldview struggles to explain suffering, particularly in the natural world. Why would a loving, all-powerful God choose to create the North American long-tailed shrew that paralyses its prey and then slowly eats it alive over several days before it dies from its wounds? Theologians have tried to argue that there are certain good things that exist in our world that couldn’t exist in a world with less suffering, such as serious moral choices, or opportunities to show courage or compassion. But even if that’s right, it’s not clear that our creator has the right to kill and maim—by choosing to create hurricanes and disease, for example—in order, say, to provide the opportunity to show courage. A classic objection to crude forms of utilitarianism considers the possibility of a doctor who has the option of kidnapping and killing one healthy patient in order to save the lives of five other patients: giving the heart to one, the kidneys to another, and so on. Perhaps this doctor could increase the amount of well-being in the world through this action: saving five lives at the cost of one. Even so, many feel that the doctor doesn’t have the right to take the life of the healthy person, even for a good purpose. Likewise, I think it would be wrong for a cosmic creator to infringe on the right to life and security of so many by creating earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters.

Looking at the other side of the coin, the secular atheist belief in a meaningless, purposeless universe struggles to explain the fine-tuning of physics for life. This is the recent discovery that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall in a certain, very narrow range. If the strength of dark energy—the force that powers the expansion of the universe—had been a little bit stronger, no two particles would have ever met, meaning no stars, no planets, no structural complexity at all. If, on the other hand, it had been significantly weaker, it would not have counteracted gravity, and the universe would have collapsed back on itself a split second after the big bang. For life to be possible, the strength of dark energy had to be—like Goldilocks’ porridge—just right.

For a long time, I thought the multiverse was the best explanation of the fine-tuning of physics for life. If enough people play the lottery, it becomes likely that someone’s going to get the right numbers to win. Likewise, if there are enough universes, with enough variety in the numbers in their ‘local physics,’ then statistically it becomes highly probable that one of them is going to fluke the right numbers for life to exist.

However, I have been persuaded by philosophers of probability that the attempt to explain fine-tuning in terms of a multiverse violates a very important principle in probabilistic reasoning, known as the “Total Evidence Requirement.” This is the principle that you should always work with the most specific evidence you have. If the prosecution tells the jury that Jack always carries a knife around with him, when they know full well that he always carries a butter knife around with him, then they have misled to jury—not by lying, but by giving them less specific evidence than is available.

The multiverse theorist violates this principle by working with the evidence that a universe is fine-tuned, rather than the more specific evidence we have available, namely that this universe is fine-tuned. According to the standard account of the multiverse, the numbers in our physics were determined by probabilistic processes very early in its existence. These probabilistic processes make it highly unlikely that any particular universe will be fine-tuned, even though if there are enough universes one of them will probably end up fine-tuned. However, we are obliged by the Total Evidence Requirement to work with the evidence that this universe in particular is fine-tuned, and the multiverse theory fails to explain this data.

This is all a bit abstract, so let’s take a concrete example. Suppose you walk into a forest and happen upon a monkey typing in perfect English. This needs explaining. Maybe it’s a trained monkey. Maybe it’s a robot. Maybe you’re hallucinating. What would not explain the data is postulating millions of other monkeys on other planets elsewhere in the universe, who are mostly typing nonsense. Why not? Because, in line with the Requirement of Total Evidence, your evidence is not that some monkey is typing English but that this monkey is typing in English.

In my view, we face a stark choice. Either it is an incredible fluke that these numbers in our physics are just right for life, or these numbers are as they are because they are the right numbers for life, in other words, that there is some kind of “cosmic purpose” or goal-directedness towards life at the fundamental level of reality. The former option is too improbable to take seriously. The only rational option remaining is to embrace cosmic purpose.

Theism cannot explain suffering. Atheism cannot explain fine-tuning. Only cosmic purpose in the absence of God can accommodate both of these data-points.

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Flow of time: reality or illusion?

Real time of space-time is one of the dimensions on which we comprehend and describe reality. Time neither flows, nor flies, or drags on; it doesn’t run out and is not a commodity that can be wasted. But human feelings and sensations of the passage of time are diametrically different: human time flows, speeds up or slows down. We can also be short of it, or we can be called time-wasters. So, human time does not appear to be in the least like physicist’s time. And yet they are intimately related: the first emerged from the latter, together with humans, their consciousness, societies they built, and languages they speak.

But what exactly is this flow of time? And what do different languages tell us about the nature of human time? What theories can we plausibly put forward in philosophy, psychology, anthropology, or linguistics (to name a few) to explain this phenomenon? Does it even exist in the first place, or, perhaps, as many philosophers argue, the feeling of time passing is merely an illusion? Perhaps it is not a sensation of time flow but instead a sensation of something else, like the experienced change of events that we describe to ourselves erroneously as the flow of something we just call “time,” to give this big unknown a helpful label. Time becomes that thing that we (think we) experience, and an entrenched concept in our beliefs (say, that time passes quickly or slowly), knowledge (that death is inevitable), or fears (that I am going to be late).

Speaking about time

In order to understand human time, we have to ask not only how we think and speak about time but also what it is that makes us think and speak about it in a certain way. We have to look into the experience of time passing, the relation between time and emotions, or the role of time in understanding the evolving (and ageing) self. An important source of information is expressions we use for locating events in time. This can be done through grammar (grammatical tense, such as past, present or future), aspect (such as an activity being in progress or being completed), and modality (such as certainty or the mere possibility of an event); the repository of “time words” a language has (yesterday; in September; within six hours); and through the implied, suggested meanings where the sentence does not contain any of the above overt devices because the specification of the location in time would feel redundant, as in:

A: Shall we watch Netflix?

B: I’m doing my homework.

What languages reveal and hide

Languages do fascinating things with time. In some, like English, a sentence clearly indicates whether an event has already happened, is happening, or will happen. Other languages do no such thing: they have no grammatical tenses. And these are not just flukes of human invention—examples are ample: Yucatec Maya, Mandarin Chinese, Paraguayan Guaraní, Burmese (Sino-Tibetan), Dyirbal (Australian Aboriginal, Pama-Nyungan), West Greenlandic (Kalaallisut, Eskimo-Aleut), Hopi (Uto-Aztecan), or Hausa (Chadic, Afroasiatic), to name a few. Yet others, like Thai, use their tenses sparingly. This opens up the possibility to draw attention to different aspects of the same reality through different ways of speaking about it—perhaps focusing not on when, but on how exactly, to what extent; or whether what the speaker is saying is reliable or just hearsay. Or perhaps whether the event is desired or not.

The latter can be exemplified in Yucatec Maya. For example:

“DES” is a marker of desiderative aspect-mood. It shows that the grammar of Yucatec Maya foregrounds the fact that reading the newspaper is the speaker’s wish. This information takes precedence over information as to whether the object of the wish was, is, or will be the case, which remains unspecified. “INC” stands for a grammatical marker of the incomplete status of the activity of reading a newspaper, “1/3Sg” for the grammatical person and number (compare English “I” and “it”), and “DEF” for a marker of definiteness (compare English “the”).

Moreover, the human understanding of time can follow the “time stays we go” way or the “time flows” way, as in examples (1) and (2) respectively, both using the metaphorical schema of time as space.

1. We are approaching the New Year.
2. The New Year is approaching.

This can be done by viewing the future as lying ahead of us, as in English, or as being behind us, unknown, and as such still hidden from view, as in Māori. And yet, most linguists and philosophers agree that what lurks under the surface of this immense cross-linguistic variation is something universally human—something imposed on our conceptualization of reality by the very fact that we are human and share the human way of perceiving and processing reality; we are born and then endure through life, stringing along everything that happens as part of one story: a life story.

Once we have reached this level of understanding of human time—time as weaving life stories by humans, on the level of reality on which human consciousness emerged—we can go so much further. We can begin to understand that, ultimately, the universe may not have any “past” or “future” written into them; or it may not even have an “arrow of time,” but instead be symmetrical, directionless. And then we can go back and ask again: If the universe does not have flowing time, or even is directionless, then how is the experience of flowing time possible? Perhaps it itself is an illusion? And how can we get to the bottom of this feeling of time passing? At that point, possible answers are beginning to emerge.

Getting together

The sensation that we call the passage of time and the concept of time itself are still big unknowns. But chipping at human time from the direction of the nature of the universe on the one hand and human nature on the other has recently produced important dents in this unknown. For example, we are beginning to understand how free will can be reconciled with the tenet that it emerged from the universe where the past and the future might be equally determined in that the universe itself might be symmetrical. We are also beginning to understand how the immense diversity with which we express temporal thoughts in different languages and cultures is only a patina on something universal. We are also getting better at scientific accounts of the incorrect judgements of time intervals and their causes—that is, time “speeding up” or “slowing down,” say, under the influence of emotions. But all this takes dedicated, concerted, inter- and cross-disciplinary efforts to tackle this big unknown, to understand human time—serious conceptual and experimental work but generating lots of excitement and fun in the process!

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