Why Liberalism Failed: Patrick Deneen's 5th Thesis

[This is the last part of a 5-part essay on Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed. Return to part 1.]

5. Liberalism justifies and promotes an unsustainable relation to nature (plus Conclusion)

If in the interests of radical individual autonomy liberalism hollows out actual cultures, spreading anticulture, so also in relation to the natural world liberalism theorizes and promotes a kind of anti-nature. And again, not surprisingly, this novel theorization of nature is justified because, it is claimed, it will further human autonomy.

In the early modern period, European thinkers abandoned the medieval understanding of nature that saw it as a vast, mysterious book in which humans could read the laws and intentions of the Creator, replacing it with a more antagonistic view of nature as a force set against man, one he was called upon to defeat. Francis Bacon (whom Hobbes served as secretary) was one of the seminal thinkers in this shift.

[Science and technology are] arguably the greatest source of our liberation [from natural limits] and simultaneously the reason for our imperiled environment, the deformations wrought by our own technologies on our personhood, and deep anxiety over our inability to control our own innovations. The modern scientific project of human liberation from the tyranny of nature has been framed as an effort to “master” or “control” nature, or as a “war” against nature in which its study would provide the tools for its subjugation at the hands of humans. Francis Bacon--who rejected the classical arguments that learning aimed at the virtues of wisdom, prudence, and justice, arguing instead that “knowledge is power”--compared nature to a prisoner who, under torture, might be compelled to reveal her long-withheld secrets.

… Yet nature seems not to have surrendered. As the farmer and author, Wendell Berry has written, if modern science and technology were conceived as a “war against nature,” then “it is a war in every sense--nature is fighting us as much as we are fighting it. And … it appears that we are losing.” Many elements of what we today call our environmental crisis--climate change, resource depletion, groundwater contamination and scarcity, species extinction--are signs of battles won but a war being lost.

For the medievals, man was part of nature, but with the early modern rejection of Aristotle and natural law philosophy a space was opened up, man was theoretically "liberated" from the natural world, and a new human freedom was championed--a freedom from both 1) the natural environment and 2) anything that might be claimed as man’s essence. Over the ensuing centuries, this dual directionality of man’s freedom grew ever starker: he neither had to submit to the natural world around him, nor even conform to any given nature as man. This process has nearly reached an end point. Even as our negative impact on ecosystems is becoming impossible to ignore, in our academies the notion of a human nature is widely denounced as an oppressive “ideology” or "essentialism". Those denouncing the idea of a human nature claim to be doing so in the interests of oppressed non-Western cultures or marginalized sexual minorities, but the repercussions of their revolt are much wider in scope. One almost suspects that underlying their philosophical stance against essentialism may be something quite other than any desire to liberate oppressed groups. (Please pardon my short coughing fit here.)

Deneen relates this liberal shift against nature to perverse developments like transhumanism, a movement gaining ever more adherents and which insists that our nature as humans can be “remade” or “improved” and death defeated. Of course this latter demonstrates the same view of nature as malleable material that we see in modern approaches to the environment, the only difference being that here it is human nature that is to be remade according to individual wishes. And again, the same view animates or underpins recent movements claiming that sex is not essentially related to reproduction (as with much contemporary feminism) or that “gender identity” is not related biological sex (the LGBTQwerty movement’s current battle front). To take yet another example Deneen doesn’t mention, one might mention our virtual epidemic of cosmetic surgery, a practice once hidden and cause for embarrassment, now increasingly normalized. "I had some work done. Like the result?" The previous century's stigma against using pseudo-medical technologies to modify one's own appearance has become passé.

Under advanced liberalism, then, the person is no longer grounded in 1) a natural environment, 2) a particular biological sex, or even 3) the givenness of his/her own body in terms of appearance or the phenomenon of aging. That dystopian science fiction repeatedly takes up all these forms of disconnect proves that although this revolt against nature is deep and widespread, there is nonetheless a culture-wide awareness of a lurking “revenge of the repressed” waiting in our near future.

Again, our more philosophical critics will trace most of these developments to the early modern revolt against Aristotle and natural law. Enlightenment thinkers adopted this anti-Aristotelian stance whole cloth and, combining it with a stress on free markets and capitalist development, liberalism weaponized it, creating the new understanding of science. For our modern West, worshipful of this science, nature is no longer a Book to be read in service to insight and wisdom; it is rather to be unveiled and exploited in service to the need for new technologies and products, which allow us to live in ever greater “comfort”, this term often meaning mostly: ever greater distance from the soil and natural processes. And if these technologies and products are harmful to local environments where they are produced, a solution is at hand. With the development of transportation and the new mobility, the rough interchangeability of place, liberal elites externalize destruction of natural environments by simply 1) moving place, or 2) ensuring that the worst destruction occurs in undeveloped nations, where populations must suffer what they must, unable to defend their forests, land, or water.

Given this historical/technological context, it is again no surprise that dystopian literary and film visions of our future depict a ruling elite that is at least part-artificial in body, mentally and ethically deranged, and always disconnected from any specific territory. Actual territories, meanwhile, are depicted as polluted and barely sustainable, the proletarian or rebel denizens stuck in them living out hardscrabble lives and facing impossible odds against their rulers. The very popularity of this science fiction, as Deneen recognizes, proves that most citizens living in advanced liberal societies are well aware that liberalism is a false ideological veil that threatens to tear asunder any decade now.

Many of these topics have been widely discussed going back decades. What is powerful in Deneen’s presentation is 1) his linking of this current looming crisis with the original gestures of liberal thought, as well as 2) his observation that our deformations both of wider nature and, more recently, of human nature (transhumanism, radical feminism, the trans craze, etc.) have origins traceable to one and the same liberal shift in the understanding of nature, a shift formulated centuries ago.

Conclusion

“The end of liberalism is in sight.”

This is Deneen’s prognosis, based on a many-faceted analysis of the liberal project’s fundamental grounds as they work themselves out in Western societies. In my own reading, if I were to put it in a nutshell, Deneen argues that liberalism will fall because it is ultimately incompatible with one of the key constituents of human flourishing: culture.

Of course Deneen is not the first to recognize the problems of "liberal culture" outlined above. One thinker he nowhere cites, but who wrote compellingly on many of the same issues in the decades leading up to World War II, was Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana. What makes Deneen's book new and, I would argue, essential, is his brilliant analysis of the stark paradoxes at the heart of liberal theory, and what these paradoxes have wrought in terms of outcome. In review, here are the main paradoxes he treats: 1) that liberalism's failure is a result of its too thorough success; 2) that the Hobbesian "state of nature", though mythical in terms of its depiction of the human past, is nonetheless becoming a perverse reality through liberal fiat; 3) that radical individualism necessarily gives rise to increasing statism; 4) that the early modern "liberation" from nature coincides with our increasing enslavement to new masters: Economy and Technology. In laying out these paradoxes, Deneen seems to stress that it is their very character as paradox that makes it hard for us to recognize their fatal weight.

If Deneen is right in his prognosis, that liberalism is coming to an end point, what does he propose we do?

Here we come to what I see as another of the special virtues of his approach. Deneen manages to combine deep diagnostic insight on the fallout of liberal ideology with an equally deep theoretical humility as to possible remedies. He offers no grand blueprint of what might come after liberalism, and in fact cautions that any attempt to draw up such a blueprint would be premature and almost certainly self-defeating.

There are two reasons. The first is that there is much in the liberal order that we don’t want to abandon. Yes, although Deneen is unsparing in his critique of the excesses brought on by liberal ideology, he maintains a keen appreciation for liberalism’s successes over the centuries, citing many of the things avid liberals would also cite. The second is that he recognizes the totalizing threat of political blueprints per se, especially in our post-Enlightenment period. He suspects that those who would draw up a new blueprint in theoretical rejection of liberalism would only be bringing yet more of the disaster we have suffered already from liberalism’s competing ideologies, Marxism and fascism. This threat of falling into one despotism or another is clear in his mind as he suggests alternative ways our present may play out.

This denouement might take one of two forms. In the first instance, one can envision the perpetuation of a political system called “liberalism” that, becoming fully itself, operates in forms opposite to its purported claims about liberty, equality, justice, and opportunity. Contemporary liberalism will increasingly resort to imposing the liberal order by fiat--especially in the form of an administrative state run by a small minority who increasingly disdain democracy. End runs around democratic and populist discontent have become the norm, and backstopping the liberal order is the ever more visible power of a massive “deep state,” with extensive powers of surveillance, legal mandate, police power, and administrative control. …

[A second possible denouement would be] the end of liberalism and its replacement by another regime. Most people envisioning such scenarios rightly warn of the likely viciousness of any successor regime, and close to hand are the examples of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism, and Russia’s brief flirtation with liberalism before the imposition of communism. While these brutal and failed examples suggest that such possibilities are unlikely to generate widespread enthusiasm even in a postliberal age, some form of populist nationalist authoritarianism or military autocracy seems altogether plausible as an answer to the anger and fear of a postliberal citizenry.

Faced with these two possible outcomes, Deneen suggests not a new grand blueprint, but rather undertaking “tentative first steps” to "seed the ground" for ways of living yet to come. He suggests three, which may be summed up as:

1) Acknowledge the achievements of liberalism; eschew any desire for an impossible “return” to some preliberal age. Build upon these liberal achievements while abandoning the foundational philosophical positions that allowed for liberal failure.

2) Outgrow the age of ideology. Deneen: “Instead of trying to conceive a replacement ideology (or returning to some updated version of an alternative, such as a renascent Marxism), we should focus on developing practices that foster new forms of culture, household economics, and polis life.”

3) Allow any new theory of politics to develop organically, based on the experiences of lived communities. From “the cauldron of such experience and practice, a better theory of politics and society might ultimately emerge,” one that retains the “rightful demands” liberalism itself makes, “particularly for justice and dignity.”

Deneen closes his magisterial Why Liberalism Failed with a consideration of the challenges faced by those who would take up these “tentative steps”. Chief among these challenges is the difficulties of fostering and defending new cultural models in the midst of our growing and every more dysfunctional “anticulture.” His vision of cultural viability going forward shares much with the projects of other critics and thinkers writing at present, such as the Benedict Option of Rod Dreher (whom he mentions), or the philosophical focus on practices and communities of practice of Alasdair MacIntyre.

Deneen’s book is a must read for those who want to get at the roots of what now ails the West. There is much, very much, in it that I haven’t mentioned. I only hope I have identified and roughly outlined the main theses.

Return to Why Liberalism Failed: Introduction and Part 1.

Order Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed at Amazon.

Have some deadpan with your coffee. Check out Idiocy, Ltd. Dryest humor in the west.

Dealing with New Atheist Bigotry: Some Basic Steps

Teacher and student? New Atheists’ non-stop bigotry toward religious people was bound to lead to no good: Richard Dawkins and Chapel Hill murder suspect Craig Hicks

“Christian moron”, “religitard”, “sky fairy”, “medieval superstition”, “imaginary sky friend”--these are just a few of the words that get spat in one’s direction these days if one acknowledges one is a Christian.

It didn’t use to be like this, back, say, before Sam Harris published The End of Faith in 2004 and effectively launched the New Atheist Movement. Harris, Richard Dawkins, a few other writers and a gaggle of comedians all soon joined up in gleeful support of insulting religious people. Educated citizens were no longer to be civil toward those who didn’t recognize the truth Harris and Dawkins spoke. The New Atheists’ policy of confrontation and insult supposedly had a good purpose besides: it would snap people of faith out of their “silly nonsense”.

A handful of popular books and a lot of TED talks later, the protocol has shifted between atheists and people of faith. Specifically: the former must go out of their way to demean the latter (there are a handful of useful terms and soundbites for doing this) and the latter are to retreat to the margins of society, eventually to disappear.

Though there are signs that the New Atheist dog has had its day, there is also contrary evidence that the movement and its methods continue to gain support among the partly educated. So while most professional philosophers, sociologists and scientists now reject Harris’ and Dawkins’ extremist cultural thinking outright, many “bookish” members of the public continue to take their cues from these New Atheists. And various entrenched New Atheist ideas--that religion is something society must “get over”, that people of faith are at fault for the world’s wars, that religious people are brainwashed and inherently reactionary--these continue to spread like wildfire over the Internet and in the “liberal” press at large.

Such rabid anti-religious proselytizing has its risks. If religion, as the New Atheist leaders have insisted, is at the root of most of our evils, then it won’t take long before many of the their followers start believing that religious people themselves are evil. And should be gotten rid of.

This has happened in history before of course, both during the French Revolution and later under many of the communist regimes. People of faith were persecuted, imprisoned and often executed because of a dominant ideology that claimed to serve Reason and Progress. To have faith, during these periods of political terror, was seen as something inherently “outdated”, part of a backward “past” that we were all “moving beyond”.

Sound familiar? As a Catholic who blogs frequently, I don’t know how many times I’ve been told in recent years that my thinking on this or that subject was “outdated”, that I should “grow up” or “get over it” because society is now “moving beyond that”.

I often have to point out in reply that at age 49 I’m pretty grown up, that I’ve spent a lifetime of study, living in different cultures, and that in fact I used to be an atheist--but learned better.

I said that anti-religious indoctrination of the New Atheist sort had its risks. Last week in North Carolina a man nearly my age, Craig Hicks, a militant New Atheist, murdered three Muslim neighbors he’d previously argued with over parking. The Muslim sisters he killed had told their father on previous occasions that their neighbor Hicks clearly hated them for who they were: Muslims. Hicks’ Facebook posts show a slightly more equal-opportunity hate: both Christians and Muslims in his mind were a serious social problem to be met head on.

Whether Hicks’ action was a hate crime or not is still being debated. Other neighbors have claimed he argued with them too over parking issues. But there’s the rub, no? He didn’t finally execute the other neighbors.

I believe that what the New Atheists have created is a hate movement. Under cover of science and “rationality”, they’ve managed to promote a virulent but socially sanctioned bigotry. I strongly suspect Hicks is an example of how this bigotry may build up in individuals until it finally leads where bigotry usually leads: criminal violence.

I don’t at all believe that atheists as such are inherently violent people. I do believe, however, very strongly, that those who support the New Atheism are largely motivated by a deep-seated personal hatred for people of faith. The New Atheism is different from simple atheism. All one needs do is look at the way New Atheist writers write and talk about religion. And their followers, generally less polished, are even more direct in their fury.

This is not the case with atheists in general. It certainly wasn't the case with those I knew back in the years before 2004. The atheists I knew then had personal or intellectual reasons they didn’t believe, but were not likely to see people who did believe as a menace to be gotten rid of.

Though I consider atheism a normal part of the modern West, I see the New Atheists, who are actually anti-theists, as a dangerous and almost cult-like movement motivated more by hate than by the rationality it claims to serve.

I am writing this post today for other believers. Because I think that we as people of faith need to learn to quickly identify, label and respond to the kinds of tag words New Atheists typically throw around. We need to condemn these terms as bigotry as soon as they appear. This is what I mean by labeling. We need to say aloud: “That is a bigoted term.” And as for responding, personally, I’ve come to believe that we must then swiftly cut off further discussion with those who use such language. We must literally walk away or refuse to respond further to them. Especially if they defend their language or double down on it.

Identify, then, is to recognize clearly when you are dealing with New Atheist-inspired ranting. Labeling is to open your mouth or start tapping at your keyboard to point out immediately that such language is bigotry. Responding is to indicate that one isn’t going to discuss such important issues with a bigot.

Among bigoted terms I include those I opened with: “imaginary sky friend”, “medieval superstition”, “Christian moron”, “religitard”. There are others of course--some used more often against Muslims or Jews or people of other traditions. But these are the ones I usually run up against.

I’ve spent a lot of time this past year debating my Catholicism online, arguing history and ethics with folks apparently hardwired with the idea that progress is by definition making people of faith like myself go away. This is usually rather ironic for me, because on other issues I often agree with my debate opponents. Typically, in economic and various other areas, I’m on the political left. But still, for them, certain of my social or historical ideas make me the Enemy.

Yes, such debates and online wrangles are often tiresome and circular. The sad fact is that my opponents usually know very little about the faith they’re trying to erase. And they refuse to recognize besides how the Judeo-Christian tradition is the historical root of their own precious notions of human rights. They are often historically shallow, as if world history began in the 18th century.

But although I get tired of these discussions, I also recognize them as a necessary part of living in the trenches of a cultural war the New Atheists started--a war we cannot avoid. So these little “debates” with friends and others are arguably important, because the war in general is important. But how best conduct ourselves?

In online or verbal debate the other person may strongly disagree, that goes without saying, they may even got rather hot under the collar, but once they start referring to people of faith as “morons” or “insane”, or once they start referring to God as “your imaginary friend”, they should be told that such language is bigoted, and if they continue with it the discussion should be cut short. Why? Because in the current social climate people of faith should no longer let such anti-religious bigotry slide by as a part of “normal debate”. It is not normal debate, no more than it would be normal to start referring to African Americans or immigrant groups with slurs during a discussion of relevant social issues. When others attack one’s dignity directly, trying to stress a lower (social or mental or cultural) status, that is bigotry, quite simple.

The New Atheism is doing everything it can to paint religious people as 1) stupid, 2) full of hate, 3) outdated. What would one call it if a group were seeking to paint, say, Asian immigrants as stupid, belligerent and outdated? One would call it bigotry. New Atheism practices a similar bigotry, in this case against a huge population of people spread over the world: religious people. An excellent brief post at Philosophy out of the Box sums up this bigotry well (the comments by Kevin Stern following the post are also very useful):

Atheism becomes bigotry when it makes prejudicial statements about religious people. Prejudice is prejudice and intolerance is intolerance, and both are irrational regardless of who commits it. Despite its scientific pretensions and its pronouncements of love for reason, many atheists offer arguments laden with logical fallacies[,] hasty generalization, strawman arguments, and most of all ad hominem attacks.

Aside from the ethical sewer that bigotry leads to if unchecked, there is the further issue of how historically inaccurate, how tendentiously selective, New Atheists’ depictions of religious people usually are. Just look at their dismissive treatment of Christians, who are supposedly uneducated, motivated by hate or living in the past. Negating such bigoted propaganda, Christians are not known for stupidity (only look over the role of Christians in intellectual history, even modern history), they’re among the world’s most active in helping those in need (i.e., sharing love rather than hate), and they are definitely not outdated (they happen to currently exist, in the modern world, in huge numbers).

In The God Delusion, one of the veritable scriptures of the New Atheist movement, Richard Dawkins makes the astonishing claim that he can find little evidence of Christians winning Nobel Prizes in science. This is important because, in physics or chemistry, winning the Nobel is proof positive of serious achievement. Communities with a high number of Nobel laureates are necessarily on the cutting edge. Dawkins’ guiding assumption in The God Delusion is that fellow scientists nearly all agree with him on religion. He writes: “The only website I could find that claimed to list 'Nobel Prize-winning Scientific Christians' came up with six, out of a total of several hundred scientific Nobelists.” (126) Here Dawkins demonstrates the kind of shoddy “research” New Atheists do to back up their flippant assertions. The “only website I could find”? The facts are otherwise, as Dawkins surely must know. One 2002 study, Baruch Shalev’s 100 Years of Nobel Prizes, finds that 73% of Nobel laureates in chemistry, 65% in physics, and 62% in medicine self-identified as Christians.

How many of Dawkins’ half-educated readers are led to believe Christianity and science are incompatible because of the Master’s unfounded claims? More Nobel winners in science have self-identified as religious than not, and most religious laureates have self-identified as Christian. Why is Dawkins allowed to get away with such unfounded claims? I suspect it is because the great majority of his readers pick up his book already deeply biased against religion. As the writer is a scientist, they are willing to believe any mud he cares to fling. Without checking.

Another obvious area the New Atheists are dead wrong is in their claim, which has been repeatedly disproved, that most of the wars over history have been caused by religion. But I’m not even going to bother addressing this here: the hypocrisy of it is almost nauseating when one puts it next to the death tolls officially atheist governments ran up in modern times. (A recent book on the problem by scholar Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, raises the pertinent questions and shows up the shallowness of the old atheist canard about war.)

In any case, historical facts carry little weight once a movement gains traction--especially if that movement is based on contempt for some cultural other. I recently see “imaginary sky friend”, to refer to God, appearing in interviews and articles not even related to atheism, as I see increasing references in public discourse to “insane Christians” (as if insanity was a defining characteristic of the group) or to Christians or other religious people “still living in the Stone Age”--as if we were not actually part of the modern world. Offhand insults like these need to be called out, and refuted.

Some might find that these terms or insults do not constitute actual bigotry. For one, I’ve been told that since Christians are supposedly the “dominant” group in America, they can’t be victims of bigotry because “they control things”. Uh-huh. Aside from the fact that Christians obviously do not in fact “control America”, this says nothing essential about the nature of bigotry. It is only a comment on the relative social position of different kinds of bigots.

Second, some might insist the term “imaginary sky friend” isn’t bigoted because, after all, the person using the term doesn’t believe God exists and so is right to refer to God as “imaginary”.

I strongly disagree.

When someone uses “sky fairy” or “imaginary friend” to refer to God, they are not doing so to show others they don’t believe. They are doing so as a way of insulting anyone who does believe. These terms are meant to insinuate that I as a believer am somehow childish compared to them: just like many children, I have my “imaginary friend” because I haven’t “grown up”. Whereas nonbelievers, in this register, are no longer stuck in the silly nonsense of childhood.

Repeatedly insinuating that some group of adults is inherently childish is a kind of bigotry. It was bigotry when men used to insist that women were inherently childish. It is likewise bigotry to insist that religious people are childish.

Referring to God as an “imaginary sky friend” is bigoted moreover because it is not commensurate with the subject at hand. It shows a lack of recognition for the important role belief in God has played in the long unfolding of our history as a culture--regardless of whether or not one believes oneself. As a term it is meant to demean all those who have taken the question of God seriously (virtually all philosophers in the Western tradition) even as it shows historical shallowness on the part of the person using it.

For these reasons I’m inclined to cut off discussion with someone using this slur in the same way as I’d leave a dinner table where people were using racial slurs. One shouldn’t dignify bigotry with one’s presence.

Am I maybe wrong here? In fact I’ve often hear from debate opponents that I shouldn’t be so sensitive about these insults--that imaginary sky friend or religitard or Christian idiot are “just words”.

Of course these are the same people who go ballistic when they hear someone using a racial or anti-homosexual slur. Then it is suddenly no longer “just words”. Then it is time for someone to lose their job.

Well, in my mind my left-leaning friends are right to stand strong against racial or anti-homosexual slurs. It’s just that slurs against religious people are also examples of bigotry. And the New Atheists have been coining and promoting such bigotry to the best of their ability for a decade now. And in general the liberal press has given them and their followers carte blanche to do so.

Anti-religious bigotry, like any form of socially sanctioned hatred, will feed on itself and only get worse until, as I’ve said, it leads where bigotry always leads: to violence and oppression. The momentum behind this vicious cycle will only be broken when people of faith loudly call out New Atheist bigotry for what it is and shun those who insist on using it.

Eric Mader
Taipei

Postscript
Many thanks to the Freedom from Atheism Foundation for bringing my attention to probably the sharpest response so far to the Craig Hicks case, “The Chapel Hill Murders Should Be a Wake-Up Call for Atheists”, by Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig. Learning of the murders, Richard Dawkins tweeted the following: “How could any decent person NOT condemn the vile murder of three young US Muslims in Chapel Hill?” Breunig brilliantly underlines how Dawkins’ very response reveals the shallowness of his understanding of culture. In a few sentences she makes clear just why the New Atheists are not to be trusted when they offer visions of a better social order based on atheism:

Dawkins takes the obviousness of his moral frame for granted; he doesn't feel the need to offer an earnest denouncement of these murders because he does not honestly believe any person could view them as an outgrowth of a system decent people like him are a part of. But this is a persistent problem with the New Atheist movement: Because it is more critical of religion than introspective about its own moral commitments, it assumes there is broad agreement about what constitutes decency, common sense, and reason. Yet in doing so, New Atheism tends to simply baptize the opinions of young, educated white men as the obviously rational approach to complicated socio-political problems. Thus prejudice in its own ranks goes unnoticed.

Exactly. Dawkins and Harris and their millions of secular fans do not understand culture well enough to realize just how constructed our social ideas are. Our modern Western sense of decency and common sense, as well as our concept of human rights, is the product of a very complex cultural history. It is not “natural”, and Dawkins, who has grown up and continues to live in a culture deeply shaped by its Christian background, is naive to assume that these common values will continue to prevail once one has aggressively turned one’s back on the tradition out of which they grew. There is good reason our modern concepts of human rights and individual liberty arose in Western Europe, i.e., in a Christian civilization, rather than elsewhere. Dawkins, in a very fundamental sense, is biting the hand that feeds him. While he benefits from his privileged social milieu, his angry followers, raised in less “decent” surroundings, may easily turn to less “decent” ways of expressing their anti-religious grudge--a smoldering and irrational grudge Dawkins and Harris glibly fan.

Do you know where your you is? The Mystery of Consciousness and the “Hard Problem”

1619 representation of consciousness, Robert Fludd

"But even if one were willing to accept the perplexing claim that a smartphone could be conscious, could you ever know that it was true? Surely only the smartphone itself could ever know that." --Oliver Burkeman

In recent decades philosophers and scientists have been engaged in an ongoing and often bitter agon over the nature of consciousness, and there is no end in sight. At issue are some of the most tantalizing and potentially fruitful intellectual conundrums we face: a complex of philosophical/scientific problems that some hope will eventually erase the borders between philosophy and science. I’m not among these latter, but wherever one stands in this debate it’s clear that it delineate the border between philosophy and science in fascinating ways.

Last week The Guardian published one of the best introductory articles I’ve seen on the subject (Oliver Burkeman: “Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?”). Without trying to summarize the ground Burkeman covers (go read the article yourself: it’s well worth it) I might minimally say that two rough positions taken up by recent contenders are: 1) We are in some way fundamentally different from robots or zombies (David Chalmers); 2) There is no fundamental difference between us and robots, only differences of degree or sort (Daniel Dennett).

I’m with Chalmers in this spat, though as yet there’s no scientific route to decide who is more likely right. Which is little surprise: there’s no scientific route to deciding many things.

One of the problems with Dennett’s position (and that of others) is that it establishes too low a threshold for what counts as consciousness. In my own lexicon (which I’m sure Chalmers would have problems with too) consciousness is not necessarily present with the mere feeling of pain (as is suggested in the article) but rather arises with the capability of knowing “I feel pain”--the I here being in part a product of my own pained being’s recognition that there are other beings in existence.

In other words, for myself the problem of consciousness immediately raises the thorny problem of I-ness, how we experience that I-ness which then in turn experiences what are called qualia. Qualia (singular quale) are basic irreducible perceptions like the color green, the taste of a certain chocolate, or the pain of a crushed finger. It is, after all, our experience of qualia that poses what Chalmers has famously called “the hard problem of consciousness”. The hard problem is hard because--and this is difficult to phrase clearly--although there “is something that it is like” to experience a particular color, or a particular chocolate, that consciousness experience, that somethingness, cannot be reduced to a mechanistic explanation. Or: Though neuroscience might be able to explain how the brain stores and accesses memories, and might be able to explain a host of other brain functions as well, there remain irreducible qualia that are not subject to such explanation, nor are they subject to comparison between conscious beings (there will never be any way of knowing if my red looks like your red).

Some scientists (Dennett again) insist that there is no hard problem of consciousness to begin with, or that if there are hard problems they are elsewhere--precisely where Chalmers sees the “easy problems”.

Without being able to elaborate much here, my own interest in this debate relates to the question of the degree to which consciousness entails subjectivity, and how consciousness itself, and qualia themselves, might be related to language or semiotics. I’d tentatively argue that full consciousness is only possible on a ground of something like an experience of selfhood.

Many have theorized that human selfhood, a person’s feeling of I-ness, arises initially through interaction with others (usually beginning with the recognition that one is a distinct being from one’s mother) and is then further established through the acquisition of language--that I-ness is, in large part, attendant on one’s learning and living within language. Your sense that you are you, then, that you are one being possessed of selfhood, arose not only via your physical singularity as an independent body, but also via a kind of dialectical back and forth with language. You are an individual physical Homo sapiens (a brain and body separate from others) that has been infected by language, which created means of a more complete parcelling out of the areas of your individual self as well as of your perceptions of the world. It is on this double ground that you slowly developed the innerness that characterizes full human consciousness.

One may grasp the crux of the issue of what I mean by “full human consciousness” by considering an experiment that should never be done. As follows: Were it possible for a Homo sapiens to be raised in an environment with no other humans or animals (fed and protected within such an artificially limited environment) we’ve really no way of knowing if full consciousness (or even what sort of consciousness) would develop. Certainly language would not develop. Would loneliness? Very likely not. Nonetheless, were the hand burnt on this same Homo sapiens, he/she would jerk it back in reaction. But such pulling back in pain would not, in my view at least, constitute full consciousness. The feeling of pain (or hunger, or satiation) is different from the experience of full consciousness.

This problem I pose here of full human consciousness is not exactly the same as the problem of consciousness per se, but it does at least clarify things by getting at what we humans experience as consciousness. It is this base state, after all, from which we always begin; it is from this ground that we always ask our questions, always approach more general problems in the field. And I’m convinced it is highly doubtful we will ever escape this base state to attain an objective perspective on the other problems of consciousness we might raise--such as, for instance, the question of animal consciousness. This is the kind of philosophical issue I believe the likes of Daniel Dennett don’t take seriously enough.

The problem of consciousness is important for a host of reasons. Many ethical problems are implicated in how one approaches it. For one: If our humanity lies in our conscious selfhood, our ability to experience I-ness, does this mean that those who have not yet attained consciousness (say, the unborn or the severely retarded) or those who have lost consciousness (say, those in coma) are not truly human? As a Catholic, I would insist that No, in fact these are all humans, because humans are in any case endowed with a soul. Of course I’m well aware that this Catholic position is not at present scientifically provable (although research of NDEs continues to provide “troubling” data supporting the possibility of an identity principle independent of the body), and so cannot be part of this particular scientific debate. But the Catholic position is worth raising here if only because it underlines the hard questions remaining for secular ethicists. Namely: If our humanity lies in our conscious selfhood, can those who lack consciousness have any rights? And on what grounds?

Posing the problem of consciousness also leads inevitably to speculation as to the consciousness of animals and machines--a realm of inquiry fraught with both a troubling history (speculations that animals are mere automata) and a troubling future (cf. the possible threat posed by artificial intelligence).

What sense of I-ness do animals have? It is hard to know, though everyone sees that animals can interact with others as others. Does such interaction imply consciousness? If so, to what degree or of what kind?

Apart from I-ness, what is it like to be, for instance, a bat? This is the question posed in a classic paper by philosopher Thomas Nagel. Part of the upshot of the question is that regardless of advances in science, we will never be able to know. No amount of neurological understanding of how a bat’s brain works will ever tell us what it is like to be one. And that problem, again, relates to Chalmers’ posing of the hard problem.

Most scientists now agree that many species of animals have consciousness. I would argue, again, that for animal consciousness to be real it must relate to a kind of self against which perceptions can be experienced. Insects, then, very likely lack consciousness because the insect brain is merely a neural center for managing response to different kinds of stimuli. Here already, however, I run into the challenge that certain thinkers would pose: “On what grounds do you say, Eric, that your human brain is not itself merely a neural center for managing response to stimuli?” Or again: “Is not your laptop likewise a kind of digital center for managing response to stimuli? On what grounds do you know your laptop isn’t conscious?”

My answer to both these questions would again relate to I-ness or selfhood. When Nagel asked what it was like to be a bat, that was a fruitful question, but I don’t think it would be fruitful to ask what it is like to be a butterfly or an iPhone 6. Because there is likely no consciousness present in a butterfly to experience being a butterfly, the question of what it is like to be one approaches the question of what it is like to be a mushroom. Neither the butterfly nor the mushroom has a self to experience its being, and the same goes for an iPhone.

Though many creatures doubtless attain rudimentary consciousness, there are myriad remarkably complex creature that very likely do not. The interesting question is why some creatures do have consciousness, and how they have it.

Will machines ever really attain consciousness? In fact, as my above remarks hint, some theorists in the field are trying to pre-empt the question by insisting that machines already do have consciousness--that your television, for instance, is conscious. I would say this claim (which I find ultimately flippant) merely erases the the problem of consciousness. Which is perhaps the point such thinkers are trying to make. They seek to invalidate the problem from the get-go. Indeed, some theorists insist that many of the “mysteries of consciousness” don’t constitute valid problems in any case (cf. again Dennett). I think they are wrong.

As to the questions of whether machines can think, we of course have the test Alan Turing proposed in a 1950 paper--what has come to be called the Turing test. This question as to whether machines “can think” is not quite the same as the question of whether machines may ever be conscious, but it is definitely strongly related.

One of the best answers to those who are existentially enthusiastic about AI (those who believe we are on the verge of having real and authentic one-to-one relations with machines) is still to be found in John Searle’s Chinese room challenge, where he clarified the difference between thinking machines, which merely simulate thinking, and real thinking. Searle’s general argument is that thought means being able to understand and experience, as a self, the meaning of what is being communicated. Again, for Searle, I-ness is the question, or: What is the nature of that entity that understands its responses (rather than merely computes “correct” responses)?

A being may claim consciousness, and mimic it quite convincingly, without actually possessing it, but any being that thinks it is conscious is necessarily so. The takeaway? Verifying consciousness from outside is well nigh impossible.

In general, the crux in these debates tends to reside in the contrasting definitions of consciousness being put forward. If there is a “problem” of consciousness or not, and where the hard and easy problems lie, largely depends on how consciousness is defined. Which is why the participants are so often speaking past each other. Whereas for me those who say my cell phone is conscious are merely ignoring the problem, for them I am talking about a problem that doesn’t properly exist.

There are no clear answers to many of these questions. I stick with my position that consciousness is grounded in an identity--or, more minimally, that some experience of selfhood must exist for anything like true consciousness (at whatever level, including the level of qualia) to be present. The fully conscious being is a being that knows itself as an I (with the attendant awareness of others this implies), experiences itself in an innerness which necessarily has access to an outerness (both the outerness of the world and that of other selves). Animals are very likely participants in consciousness, though I believe the human experience of self grounded in language is of a quite different order from that which animals experience. The question of whether computers may ever attain consciousness seems to me as yet entirely open, and it seems very possible that it will always remain open regardless of how artificial intelligence may advance.

A final question: If animals participate in some way in consciousness and we participate more fully in it, is it likely that an even fuller participation in consciousness is possible in the universe? As a Catholic, I believe the answer is Yes--and that the endpoint of full consciousness is God. In a scientific register, I believe the answer is also Yes: there seems no reason to assume that consciousness may not be deepened or enhanced, and of course consciousness may very well exist elsewhere in the universe, at whatever degree of complexity.

There are many issues I’ve left out here (I haven’t discussed philosophical zombies, for instance) and I’ve perhaps been amiss in not more directly addressing certain challenges that might be made to my assertions regarding how the consciousness debate relates to the different problems of I-ness or selfhood. Further, I’m aware my depiction of Chalmers especially is lacking or maybe misleading (for one, in recent years is not exactly a skeptic regarding the possibility of machine consciousness). But I’ve tried to keep things at a basic level, and so have had to leave out much.

Eric Mader
Taipei