The art of having something to say: Part 1

Instead of a mid-week post, 13 proverbs translated (mis-translated) from the German. Commentary to follow.

Wer sich zum Schaf macht, den fressen die Wölfe.

He who plays the sheep will be eaten by the wolves.

Wenn die Schafe blöken, fällt ihnen das Futter aus dem Maul.

When the sheep bleat, their fodder falls out of their mouths.

Ein dienstfertiger Dummkopf ist gefährlicher als ein Feind.

An officious idiot is more dangerous than an enemy.

(Or, more loosely: An officious political animal is more dangerous than the fiend.)

Gleiches muß durch Gleiches geheilt warden.

(Loosely: Like is healed by like, love by love, and life through death.)

Es irrt der Mensch solang er strebt.

Man errs as long as he stirs (strives).

Das Kind beim echten Namen nennen.

To call the child by its true name.

Im Trüben ist gut fischen.

No better fishing than in the murky waters.

Den Mond am Tage suchen.

To seek the moon in the midday sky.

Die Weiber haben das Weinen and Lachen in einem Säckel.

Women have laughter and tears in the bag.

Besser ein kleiner Herr also ein große Knecht.

Better a little master than a great slave.

Den Nackten kann man nicht ausziehen.

You can’t ask a nudist to do striptease.

Wenn der Kuchen schwätzt, sind die Krümmelchen ruhig.

When the cake makes speeches, the crumbs quieten down.

(Or: When the cake makes speeches, peace descends among the crumbs.)

Tue recht und scheue niemand.

Do the right thing and shun no man.

(Arrant mistranslation: Do the right thing and spare no one.)

Public Lecture: Science, Society and Democracy in the Era of Climate Change

Concluding Oration to “Images of Nature: Ethics and the Environment” – Part 1 of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy’s “Global Warming: Science, Politics, Ethics” series

Delivered at the Trades Hall, Carlton, July 22, 2008

I’ve talked often in the second half of the course about what I’ve called the three fundamental projects of modernity: science and technology (seen as one project), the capitalist economic system and liberal democracy. When I first talked about them I tried to show that the cultural drive that led to these three things becoming fundamental came from a peculiar ethical sphere, the sphere of Protestantism, with its work ethic and its essentially ascetic idea of duty.

[The moralistic drive of Calvinist Protestantism] was directed to the fulfilment of duty – not to live in the world, but to work in the world – for “the valuation of the fulfilment of duty in worldly affairs is the highest form which the moral activity of the individual can assume.” As Weber’s studies show, this resulted in the channelling of the full thrust of Christian moral motivation into inner-worldly activities that served as the driving force to implement the new developments of the modern world, particularly to capitalism, but also to science and technology and liberal politics. . . Redner, p. 176

To wind up I want to make some broad generalisations about the images of Nature that each of these fundamental projects of modernity imply. Given that each of the three fundamental projects is still with us, I want then to try to fulfil my promise from two weeks ago and say something about the particulars and perversities of the reactions taking place within each of the fundamental projects to the alarming environmental predicament we find ourselves in today.

My starting point for talking about all this is actually one of my endpoints from last week. We saw last week that for Redner culture is always technological, that technology for him goes part of the way to actually defining culture rather being external to culture or antagonistic to it, because culture, on Redner’s definition, is always made up of a technical, an ethical and a representational element. In a similar sense, I said last week, for me nature is always also culture. Nature and culture might in other words look like polar opposites, but the polarity, under close scrutiny, breaks down, in the same way the polar opposition between technique and culture breaks down. Our image of Nature is always a cultural image. There is no Nature which is strictly speaking or completely external to us (though of course there are physical systems that are more or less subject to human observation, understanding, influence and use. Nature is something that culture has always already gone to work on. That is, I understand, a vague slightly windy philosophical pronouncement. Let me give it now a more tangible meaning by saying roughly how the three keystones of modern culture, our societies’ fascination with science and technology, its economic system and its liberal democratic political system constitute or pre-form our image of Nature.

The claim that our image of Nature is always a cultural image is maybe most difficult to accept in the case of science. Science, according to a certain received picture, is the objective knowledge of Nature. And technology according to the same received picture is something like the objective mastery of Nature, based on the knowledge science provides us with.) But the received picture, I would argue, is distinctly one-sided. Nature in the case of science is already a cultural category in the sense that knowledge of nature and its physical laws is not only the object of scientific research, but also the object of society-wide expectations and meanings, expectations and meanings that get attached to the scientific enterprise of research into Nature from the beginning. The same is doubly true of technology, it is inseparable from the societal meanings and expectations it is imbued with, especially from the Industrial Revolution onwards, because technological innovation is the dynamo in many ways of the entire process of industrialisation and the industrial-scale domination of Nature. Industrialism, according to my thumbnail definition in Week 9, is best understood as technological innovation harnessed so as to enable the production of goods on a mass basis. Industrialism, in other words, is what supplies the field of expectations through which the projects of scientific representation of nature and technological manipulation of it are interpreted.

So can we speak of an overall image of Nature here? At the risk of overgeneralising you could say that the image of nature involved in the process of giving scientific representation a meaning through technical manipulation and industrial production is an image of nature as purely an object of domination. (You’d incur the risk of over-generalising of course because the image of nature as object of domination is hardly characteristic of science, technology or its industrial and economic applications in anything like the same way.) Another way of putting it would be to say that the image of nature involved in the process is thoroughly disenchanted. With scientific representation and technical manipulation as our main modes of relating to Nature, we have taken enormous strides away from the magical and mythical modes of relating to the nature which, in vastly different ways, enabled us to imagine ourselves as a part of it. This is not to say, however, that disenchantment, or an attitude of domineering instrumentalism, are in any way the inevitable or uniform products of scientific representations of Nature. If the disenchanted, rational, methodical investigation of the natural world which is both the cause and effect of modern science has on the one hand led to enormous possibilities of technological and economic use of Nature, it has, paradoxically, also led to an enormous expansion of our sensibility towards nature. It is through science that the variety, complexity and in a sense the depths of Nature are known in a new way. Science need not be the prelude to rampant instrumentalism. And anyone who looks at David Attenborough communing with tree ferns or canoodling with turtles and sees nothing but a prelude to the invasion of bulldozers and pharmaceutical companies; or who thinks Attenborough is just providing entertaining kitsch for stupefied cultural consumers should put down his social theory textbook and get a breath of fresh air. Scientific representation of Nature in this permutation has clearly made possible a sort of re-enchantment of Nature, a second secular enchantment that bears only a superficial resemblance to pre-modern mythic experiences of Nature, which themselves often bear only passing resemblance to each other.

Age Review of Damon Young's Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free

We live in an age not given to deep or extended reflection. The phenomenon of lifestyle philosophy is part of a sporadic and slightly tortured effort by philosophers to make themselves relevant to such an age. For better or worse, philosophy stopped being what it once was, the much vaunted queen of the sciences, several centuries ago. And the times are definitively over when a literary or philosophical education was seen as a necessary preparatory to life in the wider world. A fair portion of academic philosophy has coped with that by remaking itself in the image of a technical discipline, with its own sub-disciplines, journals and professional cadres. Lifestyle philosophy has struck out in the opposite direction. Its working assumption is that philosophy can be made as applicable to everyday life as the individual lifestyle philosopher dares to make it.

Damon Young's Distraction is very much in this vein. Subtitled A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free, it takes up the perennial theme of individual liberty and does something with it very much along the lines of Alain de Botton or John Armstrong. It shares the attractions and the pitfalls of Armstrong's work, which at its best can give readers a gentle introduction to a philosophical theme but at its worst reduces the history of ideas to something colourless and quaint, a sort of boutique blandness.

Young argues that distraction is the very opposite of freedom - it is what robs us of our authentic selves and radically narrows our ability to give shape to individual character. This all seems unambiguously true; we live in times that are rife with diversions of dubious value, a seemingly endless array of trivia. For Young, we can all be happier, healthier and wiser if we concentrate on what we truly value, and the lives and works of great philosophers and artists apparently show us how we can go about it - they're quintessentially edifying, or so the argument goes.

In seven chapters Young surveys the areas of contemporary life where distraction exercises its devilish and humdrum charms - in the world of work, in our dealings with technology, in war and politics. But he also takes us on a Cook's tour of Western cultural history in search of a cure. This is where the problems begin. The meanings of thousand-page novels, philosophical systems and their authors' lives are condensed into paragraphs or single sentences - the meaning of T.S.Eliot's life is that "hard work pays off", with Marx it's that "in the economy there's no such thing as a free lunch", while Plato's idealistic disaffection with the Greece of his day suggests to Young we shouldn't "flinch or close our eyes" when confronted with "the opportunity to live".

The potted versions of the lives seem slightly irrelevant to Young's theme and he often strains to derive much coherent, reflective meaning from them. Too often the result is stereotyped life-stances that Young plays off against one another. Thus too much romanticism in life is a consistent no-no. On the other hand, adhering too strictly to reason, order and principle underplays the importance of emotion and imagination. Yes, indeed. But can any of the great philosophers really have recommended a life of unadulterated romance or the reasoned eradication of passion? Young writes as if they might have, so he can guide us to the middle ground, from which freedom gently beckons.

The difficulty is not so much Young's style, which is at times lively and (maybe a touch predictably) amusing. It's a problem with his self-help-y point of view. The overall cast of Distraction isn't equal to the grand idea of a new book about freedom. Flattening writers' lives into a digestible series of underpsychologised set pieces isn't enough to make a compelling case about liberty or individuality in our times.And even if we'd like to think that the wisdom of past ages could be transferred into our personal philosophical bank accounts without further ado, the question remains whether the historical context of an Eliot or a Plato's life was so different from our own that the project of letting them speak to us directly is bound to fail.

Young is right that we live in distracting times. But is more freedom or self-realisation quite the solution? There are good reasons to think the opposite but they don't get a look in. Might not some of our ills - from stockmarket turmoil to climate change - be the byproducts of the very liberty Young advocates? To see that, the cruel problem of freedom needs to be grasped from a less comfortable point of view than that of Distraction.

A naturalist and a gentleman: ABR review of Tom Frame's Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin in Australia

‘The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore,’ says Max Weber, ‘wherever rational empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism.’ Darwinism, or so one version of the history of modern culture goes, is the culmination of the process of disenchantment, the last step in the transformation of the world into a causal mechanism.

Where the great minds of early modern science concur in thinking that scientific study of the creation acquaints human beings better with the majesty of the creator, Darwin’s theory of natural selection seems to dispose of the creator without further ado. The famous core of it is the hypothesis that undirected biological change acts as a creative force, generating new species and ensuring that those that are best adapted to their environments have the greatest reproductive success. As plain as it sounds, the implications are startling – species need no longer be thought of as immutable creations of divinity; man himself no longer appears minted in the image of God; the earth, as a whole, acquires a distinctively modern natural history that dispenses with all notion of divine provision for human needs and aspirations. ‘It is like confessing to murder,’ Darwin wrote in an 1844 letter to Joseph Dalton, as the new theory put him on an unavoidable collision course with the proponents of a one-off biblical creation.

Is Darwinism true but deadly to all forms of Christian belief, as it is sometimes claimed to be? Is the causal mechanism it invokes hostile to religious and ethical meaning per se? These are the questions which motivate Tom Frame in Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin and Australia. But as the title suggests, they are far from Frame’s sole preoccupation. The first half of the book gives us a highly readable history taking in the formation of Darwin’s mind, his visit to Australia and a range of Australian reactions to his ideas – from the elegant pro and contra of the colonial period to the arid productions of the Creation Science movement. While in the second half of the book Frame gives the social history of Darwinism a contemporary edge by referring it back to his 24-carat question of meaning – how radically has Darwinism changed what it means to be Christian – Evolution in the Antipodes is informative and consummately fair-minded in its dealings with both past and present.

Darwin’s visit to Australia on the Beagle in early 1836 provides Frame with his main historical point of orientation. The brief Australian sojourn was something of a working holiday, with Darwin’s time divided between social obligations, field trips and exchanges with local naturalists. His account of his experiences for The Voyage of the Beagle (1840) gives as good an indication as any of his general mindset. The Voyage contains a fair amount of amateur cultural anthropology, some of it with an ugly undertone belonging squarely to the Age of Empire. Aboriginal Australians Darwin unhesitatingly calls ‘men in their lowest and most savage state’. Missionary Christianity he thinks of as an unambiguous force for moral improvement in the Pacific. (Frame presents it all neutrally as the sort of cultural chauvinism typical of Darwin’s day.) On a different level, but equally of its time, is Darwin’s commendation of the life of the sea-going naturalist – a veritable hymn to wholesome Protestant activity:

In a moral point of view, the effect [of the sea-going naturalist’s life] ought to be, to teach [a man] good-humoured patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and of making the best of every occurrence.

Nothing Darwin observed in Australia, Frame tells us, made any special contribution to the theory of natural selection as it was to emerge after his return to Britain. Curiously, Darwin seems to have been unreceptive to his Australian surrounds – unwilling to imagine his way into the physical environment and repelled by its apparent lack of form. His notes about what he saw are a mixed bag – some useful grist for his evolutionary mill, some high-toned visions of a future Australian civilisation and some unconscious rehashings of his own Victorian present.

Frame’s chapter on Darwin’s own religious feeling is especially good. On the existence of God, Darwin was nothing less – though nothing more – than agnostic from his late-thirties onwards. Natural selection, however, led him to unreserved scepticism about the existence of hell, the notion that God reveals himself in nature, and especially the divine inspiration of the Bible. What is notable, though, is that, in spite of this, his personal morality remained well within the orbit of Christian teachings. Unlike some of his followers, Darwin never seems to have questioned whether altruism is the supreme ethical capacity of human beings (though he thought that it could be accounted for as an evolutionary extension of the social instincts of animals). The man himself was a naturalist and a gentleman, an orthodox Victorian one, or, as Frame puts it, an adherent of basic Christian principles, if not a Christian believer. Thinking through the consequences of his new theory for religious belief seems simply not to have been part of what he considered his scientific business. Frame demonstrates conclusively that Darwin’s shift away from his youthful Anglicanism was no lurch towards militant atheism. ‘The habit of looking for one kind of meaning [of the naturalistic variety] deadens the perception of another [religious meaning]’ – as Darwin himself joylessly puts it on mature reflection.

Anyone with a rough feel for the history of ideas will infer that Darwin’s doubts about conventional religious belief emerge from a standard background in Enlightenment philosophy and biblical criticism, mediated by one or two layers of polite English free-thinking. In the light of Frame’s account, treating Darwin himself as ‘the devil’s chaplain’, as some of his contemporaries did, seems ridiculous. But Darwin’s reticence about religion cuts both ways. Chapter nine of Evolution in the Antipodes shows just how unwilling he was to go out of his way to deprive others of their grounds for belief, something the militant Darwinians of our own era could learn from, if they agree that Darwin was something more than a supreme scientific mind. The vulgarity of many a neo-Darwinian criticism of vulgar superstition – kicking obsessively at everything that resembles a metaphysical crutch – is something Frame manages to quietly censor just by sketching more and less moderate possibilities of contemporary Darwinian thought.

Later in the book, Frame ventures into the dark realms of Creation Science and its neighbouring states of extremity, the lunar landscape of biblical literalism, multiplying religious factions and argumentative vicious circles. The debates Evolution in the Antipodes re-enacts between well-funded creationists and testy professors of biology bring out the best in no one. With the existence of God and His relationship with His creation at stake, the parties slug it out with all the paraphernalia of modern marketing at their disposal. The outcome – though Frame hesitates to say so himself – is not so much a nil-all draw but an unedifying game whose players all deserve red cards, a situation in which public discourse of the divine and the natural is cheapened.

So, if the universe was not created by God ex nihilo, and if human beings were not created in God’s image, do we still have reason to believe in God, especially in a Christian God who is loving and all-powerful? The answer suggested by Darwinism and insisted on by some Darwinians is in the negative. Frame’s point in Evolution in the Antipodes is that the negative answer can be taken for granted too easily. Yes, Christian belief is still possible, more than that it is still reasonable, he wants to say, but not without a reinterpretation of the nature and meaning of the deity and His relationship to His (supposed) creation. The trouble with where Frame winds up in the book is that the reinterpretation has not quite taken shape, though the landmarks in the Australian history of the reinterpretation have been generously surveyed. Frame, an Anglican bishop, is very much a believer in the reasoned road to God. Faith for him is an amalgam of observation, reflection and inspiration, a sort of affectively enriched empiricism. His God is one who enacts, or in some sense is, the continuous and ongoing process of creation, an immanent Being quite close to the God of pantheism.

It is a shame there isn’t space for Frame to give us his reflections on some alternatives – for instance that of drawing the dividing line between matters of fact and matters of faith more starkly (the path of a Kierkegaard, for whom faith totally transcends any scientific findings). Frame, in the end, is probably unwilling to take this turn because his is primarily an ethical religiosity, one inclined to appeal to rational knowledge, rather than make Christianity’s moral imperatives into inscrutable commandments of God.

That said, Evolution in the Antipodes remains a superb layman’s introduction, both to Darwin and to one side of Australian intellectual history. It pinpoints the way Darwin’s main ideas were influenced by the intellectual, social and scientific debates of his own day, the way those ideas acted on society and the way society continues to act on itself in the light of its understanding of them. Darwin himself, one feels, would have been bemused to see the mutation of natural selection from an approach to definite scientific problems to an all-purpose attitude, something more than a set of theoretical tools, but less than a philosophy.

Above all, Frame’s use of sources is second to none; Evolution in the Antipodes effortlessly assimilates an enormous array of materials into one coherent line of historical interpretation running from the late eighteenth century to the present. In its way, it is a model of a type of book we need more of in a world where science has its cultural meanings imposed on it by its social surrounds and where the sheer complexity of the scientific enterprise opens an ever wider field to arbitrary assertions of irrational meaning. All in all, this is a thoughtful work of popular science that puts the science in a broad cultural context while also allowing it to appear to one side of all cultural controversy.

Age review of John Armstrong's In Search of Civilisation

John Armstrong’s In Search of Civilisation runs two intersecting arguments. The first is that civilised culture comes into existence where material and spiritual prosperity mutually enhance each other. The second is that “any ambitious account of civilisation has to be an account of how we should live, individually and collectively.”

The emphasis there is on the “should”. Armstrong says at the outset that he is not much interested in civilisation as an historical or sociological phenomenon. What he’s after is the essence of civilisation and the essence of civilisation, he hopes, can function as a source of cultural idealism in a world in which such idealism feels like it is under permanent attack.

Out he comes and says it, with his characteristic directness: philosophy can and should be the basis of all civilised aspirations, the goal of philosophy being the realisation that the good, the beautiful and the true are one . . . Civilisation ought to make us wise, kind and tasteful. And the purpose of the economy is to promote exactly that.

Armstrong basically wants to define civilisation as whatever makes personal self-development possible. Within that limited compass, he has plenty to say. How you deal with the little things in life and how you enjoy yourself are under-recognised parts of what it is to be civilised. Healthy civilisations are those which imbue routine activities with the qualities of works of art. Civilised societies are those which help individuals develop a sense of sophistication and refinement. They support “good accumulation”, money-making with a sense of higher purpose. They even improve the quality of relationships.

As in his earlier Secret Power of Beauty, Armstrong’s strength is in condensing complicated thinking into the clearest simplest terms. In Search of Civilisation contains a topnotch 2 page summary of Freud’s case in “Civilisation and Its Discontents” and a mildly amusing modern adaptation of Aristotle’s ethics.

He’s also good at teasing out both sides of cultural conflicts that materialise partially in individual life. His chapters on “decadence” and “barbarism” genuinely do something with those over-wrought nineteenth century terms; if you thought you could do without your inner bogan or your inner dandy then according to Armstrong you mistake the way modern civilisation necessarily produces both.

Several of Armstrong’s observations have a sort of low-key reflective heft: the specialised world of art scholarship can be as culturally dispiriting as plastic statuettes of Michelangelo’s David; a bit of old-fashioned sublimation of desire is not just good but downright noble.

There are a couple of problems with tone. For one, Armstrong can sound sanctimounious when he speaks on behalf of his readers. When he assumes too easily that his own professed longing for civilisation resonates with “our” deepest needs and concerns, “our” humanity, he sounds like Tony Blair transported into a philosophy tutorial.

Though not exactly irrelevant to his theme, the grace, charm and material comfort of Armstrong’s own way of life are put on display with a mite too much self-satisfaction, gently suggesting that he himself embodies the civilised ideal his book sets out to explain.

One-dimensional expressions of ardour for civilised things are a second problem. Armstrong’s intention is clearly to avoid dry philosophical technicality. But surely he might have found other ways of doing so than avowing that he is “penetrated to the depths of his soul” by so many things? Sometimes the intrusions of authorial personality simply seem, well, a bit embarrassing. They make the book too much about Armstrong and not enough about civilisation.

“Perhaps we are inescapably marked – when it comes to ideas – by early life. . . My deepest fear is of loutish bullying and, close second, of appealing for help and being told the problem lies in me. Uncritical emphasis upon ideas like difference and equality is terrifying. . .”

There are also some broader failings related to the substance of Armstrong’s thinking about civilisation. Because he chooses not to engage with the problem of civilisation historically, he doesn’t acknowledge that the very concept might have changed radically under modern social conditions.

His stated aim is to re-make the “tarnished idea” of civilisation. But how is this possible without recognition that we live in an increasingly globalised world that has all but effaced former boundaries between cultures? How does it differ from nostalgia if it doesn’t face up to the paradoxes with which technology confronts the aesthetic and ethical ideals of old?

Because Armstrong doesn’t qualify his argument about the virtues of materialism, he overestimates the way economic success can be a neutral second pillar of civilisation alongside spiritual prosperity. The possibility he doesn’t consider is whether contemporary economic life in a high-tech globalised world has a radical potential to act as a sort of acid for dissolving the forms of culture and civility that ground the life of civilised communities.

The results are all around us. The “civilising” content of the cultural past is re-packaged as another sort of economic product. As that content is made available in relatively cheap standardised form to masses of people the world over, it is evacuated of a large part of its meaning. Nor is the high-minded re-assertion of the civilising mission of high culture likely to do any good under such conditions. High culture is well and truly catered for as a niche product within a mass market, which is ultimately where Armstrong’s work takes its place. - It is not just that the petunia in the onion patch is unlikely to convince the onions to become petunias. We’ve got to the bizarre point where the petunia’s attempts to convince the onions sow the seeds of more onions.

Armstrong’s sections on the contribution of material prosperity to civilisation represent the real weakpoint of his thought. Where the rest of his book is often psychologically canny, in the sections on culture’s relationship to money Armstrong wants to deal with a large-scale social conundrum without bothering with the detail of how societies work. His few nods in the direction of economics are unconvincing.

Nor does the book engage enough with the collective side of the enterprise of civilisation that on Armstrong’s account is supposed to be the complement to the individual side. The organisations and institutions of civilised life hardly make an appearance. But without them the book’s notion of civilisation looks more like a personal idyll than a coherent ideal.