Philosopher Presidents are Not for Us

Plato and Aristotle

A recent book by Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama, argues that the president is philosophically driven, coming from the tradition of American pragmatism. In other words, we have a philosopher president, the closest thing we can have in America to a philosopher king. Whether or not, he certainly does the royal aloofness thing well, and the I-can-run-your-life-better-than-you-can part of the job.

A couple of weeks back, I posted "Philosopher Kings and Our Republic" on Worldmag.com. I argue that the notion of a philosopher king, a person so outstanding in wisdom and moral virtue that he should simply have authority over everything, is fundamentally antithetical to republican government. "Because of his unparalleled wisdom and public-spiritedness, he would, of course, govern without the restraint of law."



Regardless of what Prof. Kloppenberg says in his book, it is remarkable what an emphasis President Obama has placed on the rule of science in his administration. (Modern science is the only form of philosophy that we recognize as having any legitimacy these days.) He first signaled this in his inaugural address:

“We’ll restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do.”

Then, just before the election, he looked with pity on the poor benighted and angry voters for being so hostile to science in their hostility to his administration:

“Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does [sic.] not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country’s scared.”

Then there are all those big initiatives by which he has tried to centralize large chunks of American life, viz. health care, home financing, college loans, the auto industry, the financial sector. Central administration is the mark of a scientific society.

I conclude that he has been working (albeit unwittingly) from the wrong model: Plato, instead of Aristotle.

"In The Politics, Aristotle holds that, for a free people, i.e., a law-abiding people who are capable of participating in government intelligently and responsibly, the best form of government combines a strong executive, a selection of the best citizens, and an active role for the people at large. Under those circumstances, the benevolent but autocratic rule of a philosopher king would be unjust because it would deny capable citizens the chance to govern themselves."

Gleanings from The Economist

I do not read The Economist from cover to cover. I start at the back with the book reviews, perhaps the obituary, proceed into the science and technology section, and maybe catch a political or business piece if I have time.

Here are some gleanings from the most recent issue I opened (May 1, 2010).

The Vatican becoming a bit more open with its "Secret Archives," and is publishing a lavishly illustrated book to publicize their liberality. "Past Papers: The Vatican Turns a Page--Slowly" tells us,

NO UMBERTO ECO fan should go near the Tower of Winds: it could bring on sensory overload. Up a seemingly endless winding staircase is a room whose frescoes are alive with symbolism. The floor is sprinkled with signs of the zodiac and bisected by a line of white marble onto which a sun ray falls each day at noon. The so-called Meridian Hall, created to verify the accuracy of the calendar Pope Gregory XIII promulgated in 1582, is in the Vatican Secret Archives, which hold some 10m documents stored by the papacy over the past 1,200 years. The name is a misleading anachronism that dates from when secret meant private (“secretary” has the same derivation).

From the review of Norman Stone's The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War:

"The word 'besides' appears with alarming frequency as a way of linking page-long paragraphs." The reviewer has other, more serious criticisms, but that one touched my heart.

From the review of Last Words of the Executed by Robert Elder. The book is a collection of just that.

The last words are remarkable for their remorse, humour, hatred, resignation, fear and bravado. “I wish you’d hurry up. I want to get to hell in time for dinner,” a 19th-century Wyoming murderer told his hangman. Some rambled; others were concise. Several blamed the drink; others reasserted innocence, or (especially in recent years) railed against the death penalty. Some accepted their fate. “If I was y’all, I would have killed me. You know?” said a Texan, who had murdered his son’s former girlfriend and her sister, as he readied himself for lethal injection. America’s diverse heritage is stamped even onto its killers’ final moments.

It seems that the celebrated Harvard biologist and octogenarian, E.O. Wilson, has written his first novel. This line in "It's a Bug's Life" stood out for me.

One part of “Anthill”, by the world’s leading myrmecologist, demonstrates that in Mr Wilson ants have found not only their Darwin but also their Homer.

From the science pages, I learn that the ancient role that men and women have played as hunters and gatherers, respectively, is rooted in our sexually distinct biologies, i.e. our natures and men and as women. This from "Hunters and Shoppers: Men and Women Navigate Differently."

The results, to be published in Evolution and Human Behaviour, show that the men and women collected on average about the same weight of mushrooms. But the men travelled farther, climbed higher and used a lot more energy—70% more than the women. The men did not move any faster, but they searched for spots with lots of mushrooms. The women made many more stops, apparently satisfied with, or perhaps better at finding, patches of fewer mushrooms.

Previous work has shown that men tend to navigate by creating mental maps of a territory and then imagining their position on the maps. Women are more likely to remember their routes using landmarks. The study lends support to the idea that male and female navigational skills were honed differently by evolution for different tasks. Modern-day hunter-gatherers divide labour, so that men tend to do more hunting and women more gathering. It seems likely that early humans did much the same thing.

The theory is that the male strategy is the most useful for hunting prey; chasing an antelope, say, would mean running a long way over a winding route. But having killed his prey, the hunter would want to make a beeline for home rather than retrace his steps exactly. Women, by contrast, would be better off remembering landmarks and retracing the paths to the most productive patches of plants.

And finally, in "The Hormones of Laddishness," I learned that through genetic modification, researchers have found a way of reducing, but not eliminating, aggressive and distinctly male behavior in mice. Of course, you know they're not interested in mice. Be on the lookout for government mandated (what shall we call it?) socialization therapy for in utero little boys. Progress is lovely.

Climate Science As One Would

There is a great need for more Francis Bacon (the philosopher, not the "artist") in the news coverage of our day, many have been saying (I bet).

I provide this in my recent WORLDmag.com post, "Political Climate Science."

The global warming scam has been pressed upon us with frantic alarm by everyone from Al Gore to the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia to virtually every teacher in the public school system. Life on the planet, we were told, is in mortal danger from climate change brought on by carbon emissions. The research was in, and there was a solid “consensus” in the scientific community. The only rational and morally defensible course was to empower governments everywhere to impose severe restrictions not only on manufacturing but also on every aspect of human life. Call it our own generation’s “fierce urgency of now,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it with far greater justification. Then we discovered that what we were assured was settled science as a basis for worldwide emergency measures was actually, as National Review’s Rich Lowry put it, just “global-warming advocacy rather than dispassionate inquiry.”

Read on to find Lord Bacon's explanation for this scandal, and my own reflection on the priests in white lab coats.

Norman Borlaug, 1914-2009

Norman Borlaug died on September 12 at the age of 95. He was one of the nation's great Iowans (and there have been many). When the neo-Malthusians were warning us about a "small planet" and "limits to growth," Borlaug was engineering what became the Green Revolution which unlocked the wealth of the Creator's provision that lay yet untapped within what people of smaller spirit saw as our irremediable collective poverty.

In his Reason.com obituary, Ronald Bailey provides us with the relevant quotations from Paul Ehrlich's 1968 prediction of impending global doom, The Population Bomb.

In the late 1960s, most experts were speaking of imminent global famines in which billions would perish. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich also said, "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." He insisted that "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."

Borlaug soon afterward proved him wrong, accomplishing precisely what Ehrlich said was impossible. Not only does the Lord provide, he has already provided more bountifully than we imagine or deserve.

The irony in the term "Green Revolution" is that the phrase has been re-embraced by the pusillanimous doom-and-gloomers who see the earth as a paltry and all too delicate resource, and human beings as the recklessly short-sighted and irresponsible tenants who will ruin and squander it if they are not soon placed under strict supervision. They act as though we live in a china teacup, when in fact God has placed us in a mansion which we find to be ever more sprawling with every new room and wing that we discover.

I don't know what Norman Borlaug thought of his creator, but I thank God for creating and cultivating this man who had such confidence in the goodness of God's earth and who set about so intelligently and industriously to unlock greater depths of its goodness. In his honor, I am re-posting what I wrote on October 26, 2007.

"No African Development Without Local Wisdom."

Everyone puzzles over Africa. Much of the world is enjoying runaway economic growth and increasingly widespread prosperity, but that huge and wealthy continent is left largely behind. It's a human tragedy. In today's Wall Street Journal, 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner, and one of the fathers of the 1960s Green Revolution in world food production, Norman Borlaug lays out what is required to save Africa from its chronic development crisis ("A Green Revolution for Africa"). He emphasizes science and agriculture, but the subtext is a political challenge to the African leaders themselves.

He compares the Green Revolution in Asia to that of Africa. He says that small-holder agricultural production in sub-Saharan Africa has been especially anemic. Unlike Asia which has a good road and rail network, "African farmlands are generally isolated from motorized transport systems." In addition, population growth "has resulted in progressive -- and now often dramatic -- degradation of the soil resource base, while fertilizer use has hardly increased at all, and is the lowest in the world." Whereas agricultural R&D in Asia has tripled over the last 20 years, in Africa is has grown by only 20%, and in half the countries it has actually declined. This is especially tragic given the "special production circumstances" that put Africa in particular need of research and development investment.

He recommends a "broad and more integrated perspective" that focuses on "transforming staple-food production" and giving greater attention to "post-production market linkages -- especially to grain markets and agro-industrial food processing that offer off-farm employment opportunities." Improvement also requires "[s]ubstantially greater investments in infrastructure -- roads, electrical power, water resources." Without this, "there is little hope for real progress in reversing the alarming food insecurity trends or in making agriculture an engine of economic growth."

Borlaug has been calling for an African Green Revolution for years (e.g. International Herald Tribune 1992; New York Times 2003). He did his great work in the 1960s. He is 93 and he is still beating the drum for this cause. So what's the hold up? There is a important political aspect to all this that Borlaug touches upon at several points, but does not emphasize. Perhaps he is being subtle. Perhaps he is leaving it to the multitude of political leaders, government and NGO officials, journalists and scholars to see the political point and make it explicit. Let me do my part.

These nations are governed by more or less sovereign governments. Implementing many of his recommendations presupposes governments that actually care about their people, i.e. that they are not tyrannies which sadly many of them are. In his opening paragraph, concerning Asia's Green Revolution and the global development agenda, Borlaug quietly underscores the critical role that wise political leadership must play: "Research and development, political courage, effective policies and good governance were the driving forces." African leaders are not known for their"political courage, effective policies and good governance."

One cannot help but wonder why "political courage" should be necessary, at least at the highest levels of power. Why shouldn't crass self-interest and naked ambition not suffice to bring the thug-tyrants of the African continent into line with this program? Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe comes first to mind. It is a marvel, especially in view of the enormous productive power that modern economic and political principles have made possible, that they see their personal security, prosperity, and glory in brutalizing their peoples whom they keep in heart-rending poverty, rather than in securing their peoples' property, enriching their nations' economies and establishing themselves as the fathers and protectors of these accomplishments.

John Locke argued this point, appealing to the shrewdness of every ruler, in his great Second Treatise on Civil Government (section 42):

This shews how much numbers of men are to be preferred to largeness of dominions; and that the increase of lands, and the right employing of them, is the great art of government: and that prince, who shall be so wise and godlike, as by established laws of liberty to secure protection and encouragement to the honest industry of mankind, against the oppression of power and narrowness of party, will quickly be too hard for his neighbours.

I am not an Africa specialist by any measure, but as a student of politics I find Africa a vivid illustration (all too often a sad one) of many political principles, and of course it draws my Christian concern. You might refer back to two of my previous posts on Africa.

Life Under the Regime of Science

Photo: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The conquest of nature, first proposed by Francis Bacon 400 years ago, has opened up marvelous possibilities. Here is what I gleaned from some recent breakfast reading.

From the Economist:

"The National Ignition Facility: On Target, Finally" (May 28, 2009) opens with the question, "What do you get when you focus 192 lasers onto a pellet [frozen hydrogen] the size of a match head and press the “fire” button?" The National Ignition Facility at the Livermore Labs "is designed to create conditions like those found in stars." For "three thousandths of a second...it has a power of 500 trillion watts, about 3,000 times the average electricity consumption of the whole of planet Earth."

Each laser pulse will begin as a weak infra-red beam. This is split into 48 daughter beams that are then fed into preamplifiers which increase their power 20 billion times. Each of the daughters is split further, into four, and passed repeatedly through the main amplifiers. These increase the beams’ power 15,000 times and push their wavelengths into the ultraviolet.

The pellet itself contains a sphere of deuterium (a heavy form of hydrogen, with nuclei consisting of a proton and a neutron) and tritium (even heavier hydrogen, with a proton and two neutrons) that is chilled to just a degree or so above absolute zero. The beams should compress the sphere so rapidly that it implodes, squeezing deuterium and tritium nuclei together until they overcome their mutual repulsion and fuse to form helium (two protons and two neutrons) together with a surplus neutron and a lot of heat. If enough heat is generated it will sustain the process of fusion without laser input, until most of the nuclear fuel has been used up.

From the conquest of nature "out there," the editors of the Economist turn to the conquest of nature "in here," that is, human nature, as though it's really just all the same thing.

"The Behavioural Effects of Video Games: Good Game?" is a report on two studies, one from Iowa State University and the other from Ludwig-Maximilian University in Germany, that examined the relationship between playing video games and either violent or helpful thoughts and behavior depending on whether the games were themselves violent or "pro-social." We are told, "There is a body of research suggesting that violent games can lead to aggressive thoughts, if not to violence itself." In one Iowa State experiment, "those who spent the longest playing games which involved helping others were most likely to help, share, co-operate and empathise with others. They also had lower scores in tests for hostile thoughts and the acceptance of violence as normal." In another experiment by the same researcher involving games with helping others as their theme, "three to four months later, those who played these types of games the most were also rated as more helpful to those around them in real life."

The idea behind these studies is that if you can get children to play socially cooperative games, they will grow up to be socially cooperative people. Well, yes, but there are broad limits. Human nature is not so malleable as these researchers may hope. But you don't need expensive university research to tell you that if you occupy most young people's attention with violent video games, especially if the games are realistic, and even moreso if they put the player in the place of a criminal as hero, you will inherit a generally more lawless and criminally violent society.

Once the science of manipulating children for political ends advances sufficiently, they can be used to help control their unreconstructed parents.

In The National Review, Jonah Goldberg draws attention to this MasterCard "Priceless" commercial in which a child tries to make his father "a better man" ("The Littlest Totalitarian," June 8, 2009--not available online; buy the magazine).



It presents the child as wiser than and morally superior to his father who is unshaven and looks rather thoughtless and irresponsible. Of course, as MasterCard presents it, human virtue consists in living in an environmentally responsible way and leaving as small a so-called carbon footprint as possible (or at least making fashionable gestures in that direction). If children are for the most part more virtuous than their parents, it is because they learn the cutting edge of enlightened morality from their public school teachers and their Saturday morning cartoons.

Goldberg's political warning is this:

The idea of enlisting children to the Cause is as fashionable today as it was under Robespierre. To crack the bunker walls of the family and seduce the children has always been a top priority of totalitarians, hard and soft. Progressives love to elevate the sagacity of children...because doing so gives children all the more authority when they parrot the talking points of the latest progressive fad.

Goldberg evokes unrehabilitated common sense in his closing remark: "If the man in the ad were a better father, he would have scolded his kid for the disrespect and demanded to know who was teaching him such crap."

That's not science, but it's full of wisdom nonetheless. Perhaps science has its limitations and "it's place."

The Rightful Place of Science

I'm swamped with grading for the next week, as I have been for the past week or so, and Harold must be similarly occupied with honest work, so posts have been less frequent these days.

Let me follow up again on the question the President raised concerning the place of science in government. We view science as the sovereign way of thinking. If you are not thinking scientifically, you are not really thinking. You are feeling, or imagining. (I am not saying that this is Mr. Obama's view.) But nobody lives that way. Indeed, nobody can live that way.

The conquest of nature through natural science that is oriented exclusively toward useful inventions--Francis Bacon's project which is modernity itself--requires viewing nature (i.e, the world and all that is in it) in a restricted way. It requires nature's "demystification," abstracting from all notions of moral value and aesthetic quality. As Lewis critically observes in The Abolition of Man, this view denies that the waterfall is sublime; it can only accept that it is so many metric tonnes of water passing over a precipice with predictable frothing and mist on and around the rocks below.

While this view of the world is terribly stunted and inadequate from the standpoint of understanding it fully as it is and of living life in the fullness of its image-bearing humanity, it is necessary from the standpoint of drawing out of the world the practical benefits that the world's Creator intended us to discover and enjoy.

"The Poo Song" from Scrubs nicely illustrates these two views of the world and how we can hold them both with appropriate attention to their separate settings. The song treats "poo" with utilitarian indifference to questions of dignity and disgust. At the same time, the humor presupposes our just recognition of those qualities in pooer and poo, respectively.



This view is good. It helpful to know whether what we're suffering is hemorrhoids or rectal cancer, and God in his creation has generously provided the means to discover this. It is nonetheless true, however, that poo is vile and pooing is undignified. Both views have their place in life for different purposes of life. What we call the scientific view on its own is insufficient for living a fully human life and for understanding the world in general. In fact, to live a consistently "rational" life by the standard of scientific reasoning would entail radical dehumanization, not only of oneself but also of others. Indeed, dehumanization is a two way street on which what goes one way inevitably goes the other as well.

Scientific observation is a limited way of observing the world for a specific end. The means are well suited to the end, but there's more to life than the conquest of nature.

Scientism and You

In his inaugural address, President Obama declared that his administration would "restore science to its rightful place." He then gave some very conventional practical applications of that intention, but, taken on its own, the statement raises the question of the relationship between science and government. How much of government decision-making can be relegated to men of science? If we were all simply scientific in our thinking, would we be more governable? Would our life together be harmonious?

Francis Bacon was not only the original exponent of modern science, he also gave careful thought to its political implications. He begins The New Organon, his explanation and defense of what we have come to call experimental science, with this little aphorism:

"Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of Nature. Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything."

His project was to re-establish all human knowledge, even moral and political knowledge, on the foundation of the new scientific method. In other words, he proposed, "The total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundations." When he says "all human knowledge," all means all.

This is what we may call not just science but "scientism," viz. the view that scientific reasoning is the only way of knowing.

According to these epistemological standards, judgments of moral right and wrong, the noble and the base, the beautiful and the ugly, become utterly subjective, i.e. mere expressions of personal sentiment. They do not correspond with any objective moral or aesthetic reality.

The moral world that this produces is insightfully summarized in Monty Python's "Merchant Banker Sketch."



Notice that he has no "inner life." Evidently, someone has accused him of this, perhaps his previous appointment, and so he is looking it up in a reference book, having no idea what it is. As a mere calculator of self-interest, and maximizer of material advantage, contemplating what is true and eternal has no role in his life. He doesn't even have a category for it in his thinking. Accordingly he has no idea of what a gift is, gratuitous giving out of love for another, out of recognition of another person's inherent worth, be it a friend or a stranger. "Tax dodge" is the closest he can come. He hasn't a friend in the world, and feels no need of one. Friendship as such has no rational basis in a scientisticly understood universe. If scientific reasoning is the only way of knowing and if what can be observed and measured by modern scientific methods is the only reality that we are justified in recognizing, then there is no human relationship that is not a form of economic exchange or domination of one person by another.

He is indifferent to whether or not he has a name. He forgets it, but what is important to him is that he is definitely a merchant banker. See what Harvey Mansfield says is the importance of having names in how we see our personal importance or inherent human worth ("How To Understand Politics"). In general, he questions the sufficiency of the natural and social sciences for understanding the human beings the purport to explain.

Political science ignores the question of importance because it has the ambition to be scientific in the manner of natural science, which is real science. Scientific truth is objective and is no respecter of persons; it regards the concern for importance as a source of bias, the enemy of truth. Individuals in science can claim prizes, nations can take pride in them, but this sort of recognition is outside science, which is in principle and fact a collective, anonymous enterprise. And so political science, which by studying politics ought to be sensitive to importance, to the importance of importance, aims to abstract from individual data with names in order to arrive at universal propositions.

Yet human beings and their associations always have names; this is how they maintain their individuality. Names mark off the differences between individuals and societies or other groups, and they do so because the differences are important to us. You can think your way to an abstract individual or society without a name, but you cannot be one or live in one. Science is indifferent to proper names and confines itself to common nouns, but all human life takes place in an atmosphere of proper nouns. “To make a name for yourself,” as we say, is to become important. “To lose your good name,” to suffer a stain on your reputation, is to live thinking less well of yourself, or among others who think less well of you.

Anyway, I used the Python sketch as an illustration in class today of how a life guided simply by calculations of self-interest might look, and I wanted to post it on the blog.

Time Stands Still

From NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day site, an impressive and evocative picture:


If every picture tells a story, this one might make a novel. The six month long exposure compresses the time from December 17, 2007 to June 21, 2008 into a single point of view. Dubbed a solargraph, the remarkable image was recorded with a simple pinhole camera made from a drink can lined with a piece of photographic paper. The Clifton Suspension Bridge over the Avon River Gorge in Bristol, UK emerges from the foreground, but rising and setting each day the Sun arcs overhead, tracing a glowing path through the sky. Cloud cover causes dark gaps in the daily Sun trails. In December, the Sun trails begin lower down and are short, corresponding to a time near the northern hemisphere's winter solstice date. They grow longer and climb higher in the sky as the June 21st summer solstice approaches.

Two things came immediately to mind when I saw this picture: the movie "Smoke", which includes the plot device of having a main character take a photograph every day from the same spot in front of his cigar store, creating a pictorial chronicle of the life of the city he lives in; and the Canadian rock band Rush's song Time Stands Still, a favorite of mine because of its melancholic, nostalgic, but ultimately redemptive view of life, friendship, and memory, themes the movie also moves among. Also, the background vocals of Amie Mann ('til Tuesday) are haunting.

A cigar, a glass of cognac or brandy, and an old friend in front of a fire...the kind of moments in time we wish we could hold on to--the moments that point us toward our eternal home, where we will be free from time's abuse, and time's loss. As we lean toward heaven, we ought to seize a few moments of worth for ourselves on a cold winter's night, both as comfort now, and as a reminder of the good things that await us.

The God-like Powers of Science

"MPs back creation of human-animal embryos" is the headline of today's UK TimesOnline
(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article3964693.ece). By an overwhelming margin, Britain's Parliament voted to rescind restrictions on this sort of Frankenstein experimentation, the benefits of which even its most ardent supporters admit is highly speculative and years, if not decades, away. (See Joe Carter's piece on Prime Minister Gordon Brown's naive boosterism here--http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=13246). The moral hazards are brushed away as simply the troglodyte recalcitrance of conservatives mired in humanity's religion-obsessed childhood. Time to grow up, and stop arguing with Science!

As I read the Times Online piece, I recalled a movie--"The Dark Crystal"-- about a world where strong creatures drain the "life force" out of small, helpless creatures in order to sustain their own immortality. I thought it prescient at the time, and now decades later we find ourselves on the doorstep of such a moral enormity staining our actual world. The pressure forcing us toward some dark dystopian future seems inexorable, where, as in Bladerunner (partly about the moral complexities of the different but related problem of creating artificial life), the rich and powerful live in the luxury begotten of science, far removed from the crime, misery, and short lives of the rest.

I recommend "The Dark Crystal" as a meditation on science, morality, and the value of life, despite the generally Eastern, mystical, new age kind of milieu.