“Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism” by Larry Siedentop

Siedentop is a fellow at Kebble College, Oxford. In this book, he posits that it was Western Europe’s Christian roots that paved the way to the preeminence of the individual as the hallmark of the liberal tradition. He begins by contrasting modernity with the basis of society in Ancient Greece and Rome. “At its origin the ancient family was both the focus and the medium of religious belief. It was an instrument of immortality, at once a metaphysic and a cult…. A family was a group of persons whom religion permitted to invoke the same sacred fire, and to offer funeral repast to the same ancestors.” Family was very much the basis of separation and the most basic unit of society. French historian Fustel de Coulanges informs, “In the house of every Greek and Roman was an altar; on this altar there had always to be a small quantity of ashes, and a few lighted coals. It was a sacred obligation for the master of every house to keep the fire up night and day. Woe to the house where it was extinguished.” At the state level, Siedentop continues, “The successive worships into which the ancient citizen was initiated left no space for individual conscience or choice. These worships claimed authority over not just his actions but also his thoughts. Their rules governed his relations with himself as well as others. There was no sphere of life into which these rules could not enter—whether it was a matter of dress, deportment, marriage, sport, education, conversation or even ambition…. The king was hereditary high priest of that association of associations that was the ancient city. The king’s other functions, as magistrate and military leader, were simply the adjuncts of his religious authority…. Later, when kingship gave way to republican regimes, the chief magistrate of the city—the archon in Athens, the consul in Rome—remained a priest whose first duty was to offer sacrifices to the city’s gods…. Laws were the necessary consequences of religious belief. There was nothing like the modern notion of sovereignty, of a merely human agency with the authority to create new law. The priests jealously guarded the laws of the city, for the laws were understood to be the work of the gods.” Ancient liberty meant the liberty of the citizen to partake in the political process. It did not serve as a restraint against the State, the masses, or communal tradition. Fustel states, “If we wanted to give an exact definition of a citizen, we should say that it was a man who had the religion of the city.”

Siedentop makes the case that the advent of Christianity was a huge paradigm shift. “Through the story of Jesus, individual moral agency was raised up as providing a unique window into the nature of things, into the experience of grace rather than necessity, a glimpse of something transcending death. The individual replaced the family as the focus of immortality.” An important adjunct to the rise of Christianity was the democratization of reason. “Rationality loses its aristocratic connotations. It is associated not with status and pride but with humility which liberates. Paul’s conception of the Christ overturns the assumption on which ancient thinking had hitherto rested, the assumption of natural inequality. Instead, Paul wagers on human equality…. Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus amounted to the discovery of human freedom—of a moral agency potentially available to each and everyone, that is, to individuals.” Paul, himself, states, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Christianity broke down the hierarchy of the ancient family. “By transferring religious authority from the father to a separate priesthood, the Christian church removed the religious basis of the paterfamilias.” There was, therefore, an elevation of the woman into a role as an independent individual and not just a cog in the family machine. “By the third and fourth centuries this new role was confirmed in the role of the ‘dedicated virgin’, a role which did not make any sense unless it was assumed that the woman had a mind and will of her own…. Declarations of independence by women seem to have been especially frequent in upper-class families. It is as if the confidence engendered by the superior status of a family was appropriated by some women and put to a new use…. They became patronesses, disciples and travelers.” Christianity also began the long process of breaking down class distinctions, in word if not in deed. “In contrast to the segregated spaces of the ancient city, the Christian population of the cities began to share the same spaces, hearing the bishops’ ex cathedra words in the basilica or principle church, and taking part in the same rites, that is, baptism, the mass and funerals. Processions to the tombs of local martyrs were for everyone.”

The Holy Roman Empire was by no means liberal. However, Siedentop makes the argument that the Carolingians instituted some policies that further nudged the way towards the increased status of the individual. “Charlemagne’s call for a universal oath of allegiance led to the first serious impinging of Christian moral norms on social roles, a precarious attempt to distance the self (or ‘soul’) from inherited statuses, in order to give those statuses a sanction in consciences.” Bishop Theodulf of Orleans would admonish, “The rich get their riches because of the poor. But nature submits you to the same laws. In birth and death you are alike. The same holy water blesses you; you are anointed with the same oils; the flesh and blood of the lamb (the Christ) nourishes you all together.” Siedentop continues, “Charlemagne tried to combine two visions of the foundations of social order in his rule—lordship and ‘the care of souls’. In the course of pursuing the second vision he had created a far better educated and more cohesive higher clergy, a disciplined Christian elite. It was the elite that survived the decay of his empire…. It pursued that vision with determination, struggling against the consequences of increasingly hereditary local lordships, which were helping to destroy centralized government…. The solidarities of an ancient and urban Christianity were making way for a faith with an increasingly individualist bias.”

It was the Christian notion of the soul and a personal afterlife that gave precedence to the individual after death. “Scenes of the passion of Christ and his resurrection—testified that the immortal soul, rather than the immortal family, was the primary constituent of reality…. But it was not only emphasis on the day of judgement, the new notion of purgatory and wall paintings that drove home a message of hope. Largely illiterate congregations also heard tales of saints’ lives, stories which demonstrated that salvation did not depend upon social status…. The lives of the saints offered a kind of imagined mobility, a moral standing that could be achieved rather than inherited…. They democratized the ancient cult of the hero.”

Another aspect of Christian theism was the concept of natural law. In 1140 AD, Gratian wrote in his Decretum, “Natural law [jus] is what is contained in the Law and the Gospel by which each is to do to another what he wants done to himself and forbidden to do to another what he does not want done to himself.” It was a restating of the Golden Rule in the context of legalism. “By identifying natural law with biblical revelation and Christian morality, Gratian gave it an egalitarian bias—and a subversive potential—utterly foreign to the ancient world’s understanding of natural law as ‘everything in its place’…. An underlying moral equality was now deemed natural.” Pope Innocent III would expand, “But it may be said that kings are to be treated differently from others. We, however, know that it is written in the divine law, “You shall judge the great as well as the little and there shall be no difference in persons.””

Canon law began to assert itself on society at large and with that came greater rule of law and greater rights for the individual. “Canon law became, in that way, the original vehicle of modernity…. The development of canon law and a hierarchy of courts administering it—with the papacy at the apex—created a system that offered litigants coherence, relative predictability and other benefits. It was a system that stood in contrast to the secular courts, in which the application of customary and feudal law allowed recourse to Roman law only intermittently…. Roman law was distrustful of and, indeed, avoided abstractions…. The habitual turn of the canonist mind was different. It sought to identify the shared features of particular legal decisions and raise them to the level of a concept. Behind the rules it sought to identify principles…. Canon lawyers brought to bear not just legal techniques they acquired from the study of Roman law, but a ‘democratized’ interest in generalization and abstraction, an interest combining knowledge of Aristotelian logic with Christian moral intuitions…. The difference sprang from the new concern that law should be understood as applying to ‘all (souls) equally’. Hence it needed to be systematic.”

Another feature of Western modernity was the push towards urbanization. Initially formed as centers of trade, free cities eventually gained in wealth and autonomy. The urban bourgeoisie slowly asserted their rights against kingship, but, particularly, against local feudal lords. “Only later did townspeople relate their new liberty to the moral equality proclaimed by Christian beliefs. Yet that relationship emerged almost immediately in the language they adopted when ‘swearing the commune’ and defending its interests. It was language of brotherhood. Thus, a twelfth-century Flemish borough charter prescribed: ‘let each help the other like a brother’. This language of equality and reciprocity—of moral transparency—was not the language of the ancient polis, but rather of St. Paul…. Unlike in the ancient city, liberty was being claimed, not merely for the borough, but also for the individuals who lived and worked in it…. The first feature of the borough charters was to secure self-government by lodging final authority in the assembly of all citizens. Secularism introduced a formal equality of status for citizens, who had the right to take part in the assemblies. Popular assemblies had the right to legislate, levy taxes and make war…. Boroughs were usually exempt from feudal services and dues, as well as from royal taxes, except those that had been agreed in advance. Their independence emerges especially in the absence of obligation except by prior agreement.” In 1219, the citizens of Marseilles wrote in a joint proclamation, “It is to Jesus Christ that we owe the development of the laws and advantages of our city.”

Theologians and philosophers also played a large part in advancing the notion of individualism in Western society. “The Franciscans Duns Scotus and Ockham put into place the basic building blocks of modern secularism. In refining the idea of Christian liberty—separating the idea of freedom from that of justice and making both conditions of morality as well as distinguishing rights of ownership from a right to rule—they prepared a revolution in the understanding of the ‘proper’ ground of all authority.” Ockham and the Franciscans also fought with Aquinas and the Dominicans over fundamental matters of theology. “Was it plausible that a ‘sovereign’ God’s actions be subject to necessity? As we have seen, Ockham and his Franciscan followers thought not. For them, the core of Christian revelation was the ‘grace’ which the Christ offered to all equally. That grace held out the prospect of an individual relationship with divinity which transcended social relations and required a new understanding of the role of reason. It was this conviction that turned Ockham and his followers into harbingers of ‘modernity’…. They reconstructed the idea of justice and revised the test for scientific truth…. Taking the moral autonomy of individuals as their weapon, the nominalists broke through a set of assumptions which had confined the structure of society and the pursuit of knowledge within an hierarchical or corporate framework. Ockham replaced those assumptions with the assertion of individual rights (justifying a private sphere of choice) and the verification principle (which made knowledge of the external world always subject to disproof by further experience)…. The nominalists, in effect, began to separate ‘culture’ from ‘nature’—emphasizing the central role of reasons and intentions in the former, while driving explanations in terms of purpose from the latter…. Ockham’s emphasis on faith and freedom confronted Aquinas’ rationalist account of natural law…. First is Ockham’s emphasis on natural rights and liberty rather than on traditional natural law…. Second is his insistence on the difference between demonstrative reasoning and causal explanation, between ‘rational science’ and ‘experimental science’…. Ockham’s understanding of justice emerged as the claim for ‘equal liberty’. Freedom became a birthright, a right founded on the nature of human agency…. Thomists fail to understand what Ockham understood, that the theory of natural rights involves subjecting the ancient idea of natural law to a new distributive principle, the biblical golden rule, with its stipulation in favour of equality and reciprocity. Human autonomy is authorized ‘by God and nature’. The golden rule introduced a principle of justice which overthrew the assumption of natural inequality. And, in Ockham’s eyes, that move is at the heart of Christian revelation. It is God’s will…. Individuals cannot alienate their moral autonomy because it is God-given.”

A final piece of the modernization project was the usurpation of authority from feudal lords to the central monarch. For the individual at the bottom of the social order this was not necessarily a loss of rights. “‘Equal Subjection’ to a sovereign was perceived not as loss but as gain…. The church had projected the image of society as an association of individuals, an image which unleashed the centralizing process in Europe…. In the process of centralizing laws, manners and ideas—forging a single society out of what had been separate, parochial societies—the monarchs not only created states, but also the foundation for a ‘public’ or ‘national’ opinion…. If we look at the word ‘individual’ in historical dictionaries of the English or French languages, we will find that it first became current in the fifteenth century. The word ‘state’, with its stipulation of a sovereign authority, became current at about the same time.” The individual’s rise in autonomy was intimately intertwined with the rise of the modern nation-state. Siedentop concludes, “Secularism can be seen as Europe’s noblest achievement, the achievement which should be its primary contribution to the creation of a world order…. Secularism is Christianity’s gift to the world.”

“The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

Han was raised in South Korea, currently teaches philosophy and cultural studies at the University of Arts in Berlin, and writes his published works in German. This book is a study on the nature of time and how its conception has changed over the ages. He begins, “This regime change from God to human is not without its consequences. It de-stabilizes time because God is the authority which confers finality and the seal of eternal truth upon the prevailing order. God stands for a lasting present. With the regime change, time loses this hold…. Historical time can rush ahead because it does not rest in itself, because its centre of gravity is not in the present…. Time is meaningful insofar as it moves towards a goal…. Mythical time is restful, like a picture. Historical time, by contrast, has the form of a line which runs or rushes towards a goal. If this line loses its narrative or teleological tension, it disintegrates into points which whizz around without any sense of direction. The end of history atomizes time into point-time. Myth once gave way to history: the static picture turned into a progressive line. Now, history gives way to information. The latter does not possess any narrative width or breadth. It is neither centred, nor does it have a direction. Information falls down on us, so to speak…. Atomized time is a discontinuous time. There is nothing to bind events together and thus found a connection, a duration. The senses are therefore confronted with the unexpected and sudden, which, in turn, produces a diffuse feeling of anxiety.” From a static sense of ever-lasting religion to the Whig Theory of history marching ever forward to secular points floating about randomly in the universe, humanity’s relationship to the movement of time has defined our conscious embodiment of ourselves in space.

Han suggests that our perception of time’s progress has accelerated in modernity. “The feeling that time passes more quickly now than before is also due to the absence of a pronounced articulation of time. This feeling is intensified by the fact that events follow each other in quick succession without leaving lasting traces, without becoming experiences…. Nothing carries weight.” The dots no longer connect into a meaningful whole. Han starts by riffing on Heidegger, “Modernity is a time of de-factualization and freedom. It frees itself from the throwness whose thrower or projector is called God. De-factualization and secularization rest on the same premises. The human being elevates itself to become the subject of history, confronted by the world as an object that can be produced.” The arrow of time is a modern construct. Time used to move in a cyclical pattern, revolving with the seasons. “In pre-modern times… the human being followed a pre-given path, which, like orbits of the heavenly bodies, repeated itself eternally. The pre-modern human found things which he or she accepted or suffered, into which he or she was thrown: a human being characterized by facticity and repetition.… Modernity remains a narrative age, where the narrative is one of history as progress and development. This age, with its gaze turned towards the immanent world, expects a salvation that lies in the future.” Because God has been replaced with scientific progress, modern man is always in a rush to get where he is going. We cannot accelerate fast enough because the future is bound to be better than the past (and even the present age).

We are no longer content to linger in our experiences, but rush on to the next one. “The impression that time moves considerably faster than before also has its origin in the fact that today we are unable to linger, that the experience of duration has become so rare.” For Han, this is a tragedy. “Whoever tries to live faster, will ultimately die faster. It is not the total number of events, but the experience of duration which makes life more fulfilling. Where one event follows close on the heels of another, nothing enduring comes about. Fulfillment and meaning cannot be explained on quantitative grounds. A life that is lived quickly, without anything lasting long and without anything slow, a life that is characterized by quick, short-term and short-lived experiences is itself a short life, no matter how high the ‘rate of experience’ may be.” One sensation that slows you down is your sense of smell. “Scents cannot be presented in as fast a sequence as optical images. In contrast to the latter, they can also not be accelerated. A society dominated by scents would probably also not develop any inclinations towards change or acceleration. It would live off its recollections and its memory, off those things that are slow and long-lasting.” The joy of lingering has that same effect on the mind. “Contemplative lingering presupposes things which last. It is not possible to linger for long on events or images which quickly succeed one another.”

Modern man is dissatisfied because he is atomized. He is unconnected and unmoored. He is bored with his life because he is always acting, always working, and never at rest. He is always rushing about. He never pauses to reflect and absorb. “In the end, the responsibility for profound boredom lies with a life that is fully dominated by the determination to act. Profound boredom is the flip side of excessive activity, of a vita activa that lacks any form of contemplation. A compulsive activism keeps boredom alive.” Modern man has become infected by Weber’s Protestant ethic. He lives for work and does not know what to do without it. When not at work, he wants to be distracted, amused, and entertained. His leisure is mindless. Han contrasts the model of Aristotle where work “takes away freedom, because it is subject to the coercive force exerted by the necessities of life. As opposed to leisure, it does not rest in itself, because it must produce what is useful and necessary…. Aristotle also situated the beautiful and noble outside of what is useful and necessary, that is, outside of work. Only need forces work upon us…. The nature of human existence is not care, but leisure. Contemplative rest enjoys absolute priority…. Aristotle distinguishes three forms of life (bioi) of the free man: the life of striving for pleasure (hedone), that of producing the beautiful and noble deeds in the polis (bios politikos), and that which is dedicated to the contemplation of truth (bios theoretikos). All three of them form the needs and compulsions of life. The life dedicated to making money is set aside on account of its compulsive character. The bios politikos is not dedicated to the organization of communal life, because this would involve man in necessary and useful things. Rather, it strives for honour and virtue…. The highest form of happiness has its source in the contemplative lingering on beauty, the activity that used to be called theoria. Its temporal dimension is duration. It turns towards things that are imperishable and unchanging, the things that rest entirely in themselves. Only the contemplative devotion to truth, not virtue and not prudence, brings man close to the gods…. Thinking, as theorein, as the contemplative consideration of truth, is based on leisure.”

It is activity which holds man’s ambitions back. He is cut off from beauty because he never stops to pause and admire life. What he thinks of as leisure is mere recreation. What he thinks of as work is rushing towards death. Han concludes by contrasting two types of life—the life of the slave and the life of the freeman. “Life dominated by work is a vita activa which is entirely cut off from the vita contemplativa. If the human being loses all capacity for contemplation, it degenerates into an animal laborans.” Modern man has lost sight of the goal. He has become enchanted by consumption, by amassing the devil’s trinkets. “Consumption and duration contradict each other. Consumer goods do not last. They are marked by decay as their constitutive element…. The compulsion to consume is immanent to the system of production…. In the consumer society, one forgets to linger…. What lasts and is slow, however, evades being used up and consumed. It founds a duration. The vita contemplativa is a practice of duration.”

“The Concept of the Political” by Carl Schmitt (translated by George Schwab)

Like Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt was a German philosopher who became a prominent member of the Nazi Party. Because he was a political philosopher and jurist, in many ways, his academic views had much more practical import to the Third Reich. Today, Schmitt remains decidedly relevant as he is actively read and often cited by the Chinese Communist Party inteligencia. In this short book, Schmitt is concerned mainly with external politics—the politics between nations. His philosophy is political realism on steroids.

Schmitt begins by stating that society and the State are not synonymous. Neither is the State exactly politics. “The equation state=politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other.” For Schmitt, the State is always above society, “German political science originally maintained (under the impact of Hegel’s philosophy of state) that the state is qualitatively distinct from society and higher than it. A state standing above society could be called universal but not total,” necessarily.

The single idea that pervades all of Schmitt’s work is the friend versus enemy dichotomy. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy…. The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation…. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor…. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible…. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence…. The friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols.”

Politics, for Schmitt, stands above all other cultural standards and those other standards, in fact, cannot exist absent the political. “Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.” That is because the political unit, the State, holds the life and death of each of its subjects within its hands. This is the case no matter its form—monarchical, democratic, theocratic, or socialist. “By virtue of this power over the physical life of men, the political community transcends all other associations or societies.”

For Schmitt, it was the pessimistic political philosophers who were on the right track. “Political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and often Fichte presuppose with their pessimism only the reality or possibility of the distinction of friend and enemy. For Hobbes, a truly powerful and systematic political thinker, the pessimistic conception of man is the elementary presupposition of a specific system of political thought. He also recognized correctly that the conviction of each side that it possesses the truth, the good, and the just bring about the worst enmities, finally the war of all against all…. [Pessimist] realism can frighten men in need of security…. As long as man is well off or willing to put up with things, he prefers the illusion of an undisturbed calm and does not endure pessimists.” However, in the case of any emergency, man reverts to his beastly nature.

In Schmitt’s system, the political entity is opposed by the liberal individual. He stands for his own rights beyond and above the political fray. “The negation of the political, which is inherent in every consistent individualism, leads necessarily to a political practice of distrust toward all conceivable political forces and forms of state and government, but never produces on its own a positive theory of state, government, and politics…. [There exists] absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics. The systemic theory of liberalism concerns almost solely the internal struggle against the power of the state.” The demands of the State cannot help but be anathema to the true liberal for “the political entity must demand the sacrifice of life. Such a demand is in no way justifiable by the individualism of liberal thought.”

According to Schmitt, by way of its self-seeming neutrality the economic sphere has tried to encroach upon the demands of politics. “A domination of men based upon pure economics must appear a terrible deception if, by remaining nonpolitical, it thereby evades political responsibility and visibility.” However, it will not work when push comes to shove. “State and politics cannot be exterminated. The world will not be depoliticized with the aid of definitions and constructions, all of which circle the polarity of ethics and economics…. This allegedly nonpolitical and apparently even antipolitical system serves existing or newly emerging friend-and-enemy groupings and cannot escape the logic of the political.” In the end, pure economic relations merely put on a show, serve the interests of the ruling status quo powers, and sneak politics in through the backdoor.

“The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous” by Joseph Henrich

Henrich attempts nothing less than to trace the roots of cultural progress and how that evolution has shaped human psychology individually, as well as, more importantly, the structures and institutions that have molded modern societies. It is an ambitious project. First, WEIRD stands for western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Henrich makes the case that such people are the exceptions throughout human history, not the rule. To study their psychologies and generalize to all of human nature has been a huge mistake prevalent in academic research. Henrich breaks down his thesis in a nutshell, “The spread of a religious belief that every individual should read the Bible for themselves led to the diffusion of widespread literacy among both men and women, first in Europe and later across the globe. Broad-based literacy changed people’s brains and altered their cognitive abilities in domains related to memory, visual processing, facial recognition, numerical exactness, and problem-solving. It probably also indirectly altered family sizes, child health, and cognitive development, as mothers became increasingly literate and formally educated. These psychological and social changes may have fostered speedier innovation, new institutions, and—in the long run—greater economic prosperity.”

What makes WEIRD people weird? “We WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. We focus on ourselves—our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations—over our relationships and social roles. We aim to be “ourselves” across contexts and see inconsistencies in others as hypocrisy rather than flexibility…. We see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time…. We simplify complex phenomena by breaking them down into discreet constituents and assigning properties or abstract categories to these components…. We often miss the relationships between the parts or the similarities between phenomena that don’t fit nicely into our categories…. WEIRD people are also particularly patient and often hardworking. Through potent self-regulation, we can defer gratification—in financial rewards, pleasure, and security—well into the future in exchange for discomfort and uncertainty in the present…. WEIRD people tend to stick to impartial rules or principles and can be quite trusting, honest, fair, and cooperative towards strangers or anonymous others…. We WEIRD people show relatively less favoritism toward our friends, families, co-ethnics, and local communities than other populations do…. WEIRD people are often racked by guilt as they fail to live up to their culturally inspired, but largely self-imposed, standards and aspirations. In most non-WEIRD societies, shame—not guilt—dominates people’s lives…. Guilt depends on one’s own standards and self-evaluation, while shame depends on societal standards and public judgment.”

One trait that Henrich highlights is impersonal prosociality. “Impersonal trust is part of a psychological package called impersonal prosociality, which is associated with a set of social norms, expectations, and motivations for impartial fairness, probity, and cooperation with strangers, anonymous others, or even abstract institutions like the police or government. Impersonal prosociality includes the inclinations we feel toward a person who is not tied to our social network at all…. Impersonal prosociality also includes motivations, heuristics, and strategies for punishing those who break impartial norms…. [WEIRD people] are also more inclined to punish anyone who violates their impartial norms of fairness and honesty even if the violation isn’t directly against themselves…. Countries where people show more impersonal prosociality have greater national incomes (GDP per capita), greater economic productivity, more effective governments, less corruption, and faster rates of innovation.”

Another trait common among WEIRD societies is the emphasis on people’s intentions, rather than real world outcomes. “Intentions, beliefs, and personal dispositions are so central to WEIRD moral judgments that the idea that people in other societies judge others based mostly or entirely on what they did—the outcome—violates their strong intuition that mental states are primary. But, putting relatively little importance on mental states is probably how most people would have made moral judgements of strangers over most of the last 10 millennia.”

Humans are one of the only species who make use of a cultural toolkit. “Unlike other animals, we have evolved genetically to rely on learning from others to acquire an immense amount of behavioral information, including motivations, heuristics, and beliefs that are central to our survival and reproduction. This ability to learn from one another is so powerful compared to other species that we alone can accumulate increasingly complex bodies of cultural knowledge, related to everything from sophisticated projectile technologies and food-processing techniques to new grammatical tools and expanding packages of social norms.” Humans have also coevolved genetically and culturally, each building upon the other. “We have evolved genetically to learn adaptively in ways that calibrate our minds and behavior to the environments we encounter…. Our evolved capacities for cultural learning have been honed to figure out who to learn from, what to learn, and when to use cultural learning over other informational sources like individual experience or innate intuitions…. To figure out who to learn from, adults, children, and even infants integrate cues related to a potential role model’s skill, competence, reliability, success, prestige, health, age, sex, and ethnicity, among others. By preferentially attending to more successful or prestigious people, learners focus their attention and memory on those individuals most likely to possess useful information…. By combining cues like prestige and success with self-similarity cues like sex and ethnicity (e.g. speaking the same dialect), learners can target their attention on those who possess the skills, strategies, and attitudes most likely to be useful to them in their future roles or communities…. When problems are difficult, situations are ambiguous, or individual learning is costly, people should rely more heavily on learning from others…. The sharpening of our cultural learning abilities further fueled cumulative cultural evolution to generate an ever-broadening array of more complex adaptations, thereby generating autocatalytic feedback between genes and culture. As the importance, diversity, and complexity of cultural products ratcheted up, natural selection gradually strengthened our inclinations to rely on cultural learning over our instincts and individual experiences because the tools, protocols, and practices that we acquired from others became far superior to anything that any single individual could possibly figure out on their own…. Human societies, unlike those of other primates, are stitched together by culturally transmitted social norms that cluster into institutions.”

Within humanity’s great variation, different societies and cultures evolved over time, who then competed with each other evolutionarily at the group level. “Norms that favor success in competition with other groups tend to survive and spread. Such intergroup competition can occur through violent conflict…. But it can also occur when less successful groups copy the practices and beliefs of more successful groups or when more prosperous groups simply grow faster, through higher fertility, lower mortality, or greater net immigration.” The key innovation was agriculture, which allowed societies to scale up exponentially. “The potential for agriculture and herding—food production—created the conditions for fierce intergroup competition to drive up the scale and complexity of societies, generating a coevolutionary interaction between agriculture and societal complexity: the more societies relied on agriculture and herding, the more they needed to scale up…. As populations increasingly relied on farming, archaeological studies reveal that the less nutritious diets derived from cereals and other crops produced people who were shorter, sicker, and more likely to die young. However, the effects of sedentism and the productivity of unskilled (young) labor were such that farmers reproduced more quickly than did mobile hunter-gatherers…. Early farming spread not because rational individuals prefer to farm, but because farming communities with particular institutions beat mobile hunter-gatherer populations in intergroup competition.” 

Henrich makes the case that religion was a crucial aspect of cultural evolution. “Religions have fostered trade by increasing trust, legitimized political authority, and expanded people’s conceptions of their communities by shifting their focus from their own clans or tribes to larger imagined communities…. Cultural evolution, driven by intergroup competition, favored the emergence and spread of supernatural beliefs that increasingly endowed gods with concerns about human action and the power to punish and reward…. By roughly 200 BCE, universalizing religions included variants of three key features, which were psychological game changers. First contingent afterlives…. Second, free will…. Third, moral universalism.”

WEIRD societies have less strong kinship ties than traditional societies. These ties are both fewer and weaker. “Five of the kinship traits that characterize WEIRD societies [are] (1) bilateral descent, (2) little or no cousin marriage, (3) monogamous marriage only, (4) nuclear family households, and (5) neolocal residence.” The weakening of kinship bonds was a long process in the West. “First, between about 400 and 1200 CE, the intense kin-based institutions of many European tribal populations were slowly degraded, dismantled, and eventually demolished by the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church…. Then, from the ruins of their traditional social structures, people began to form new voluntary associations based on shared interests or beliefs rather than on kinship or tribal affiliations…. The dissolution of intensive kin-based institutions and the gradual creation of independent monogamous nuclear families represents the proverbial pebble that started the avalanche to the modern world in Europe.”

Henrich calls the set of marriage decrees by the Roman Catholic Church the “Marriage and Family Program.” Of most import, these rules prohibited marriage to blood relatives, prohibited marriage to affinal kin, prohibited polygynous marriage, prohibited marriage to non-Christians, created spiritual kinship, discouraged the adoption of children, required both the bride and groom to publicly consent to marriage, encouraged (and sometimes required) newly married couples to setup independent households—neolocal residence, and encouraged the individual ownership of property and inheritance by personal testament.

Why was breaking down kinship ties so important? These ties tended to foster conformity. “By embedding individuals within dense, interdependent, and inherited webs of social connections, intensive kinship norms regulate people’s behavior in subtle and and powerful ways. These norms motivate individuals to closely monitor themselves and members of their own group to make sure that everyone stays in line. They also endow elders with substantial authority over junior members. Successfully navigating these kinds of social environments favors conformity to peers, deference to traditional authorities, sensitivity to shame, and an orientation toward the collective (e.g. the clan) over oneself.” This was the opposite of what traits were selected for in proto-WEIRD societies. “Success in these individual-centered worlds favors the cultivation of greater independence, less deference to authority, more guilt, and more concern with personal achievement.”

The Roman Catholic Church, whether it was intentional or not, did effectively break down European kinship bonds over time. “National populations that collectively experienced longer durations under the Western Church tend to be (A) less tightly bound by norms, (B) less conformist, (C) less enamored with tradition, (D) more individualistic, (E) less distrustful of strangers, (F) stronger on universalistic morality, (G) more cooperative in new groups with strangers, (H) more responsive to third-party punishment…. (I) more inclined to voluntarily donate blood, (J) more impersonally honest (toward faceless institutions), (K) less inclined to accumulate parking tickets under diplomatic immunity, and (L) more analytically minded.” Henrich makes the convincing case that this has nothing to do with Christianity as a religion. “The difference between the Orthodox and Western Churches is important, because it shows that psychological variation, and later economic and political differences, aren’t due to something about exposure to Roman institutions or Christianity per se…. The long-term impact of the Western vs. Orthodox Churches lies in policies about, and implementation of, marriage and family practices, especially those related to incest taboos.”

One of the first downstream effects of proto-WEIRD societies was the gradual conception of the rule of law in society. “In assembling these new associations and organizations, the emerging proto-WEIRD psychology—analytic thinking, individualism, and a non-relational morality—would have favored the development of both impartial rules that granted privileges and obligations to individuals (not clans) and impersonal mechanisms for enforcing trust, such as accounting records, commercial laws, and written contracts.” In Europe, this went hand-in-hand with increased levels of individualization, the growth in the formation of voluntary networks, and the urbanization of the population. “The breakdown of intensive kin-based institutions opened the door to urbanization and the formation of free cities and charter towns, which began developing greater self-governance. Often dominated by merchants, urban growth generated rising levels of market integration and—we can infer—higher levels of impersonal trust, fairness, and cooperation. While these psychological and social changes were occurring, people began to ponder notions of individual rights, personal freedoms, the rule of law, and the protection of private property. These new ideas just fit people’s emerging cultural psychology.” In a Europe dominated culturally by the rules first laid down by the Catholic Church, kin-based institutions found it nearly impossible to stay powerful or even relevant. “The Church suppressed nearly all the basic tools of intensive kinship. Under these constraints, family businesses struggled to outcompete other organizational forms. At the same time, politically or economically powerful family lineages were simply more likely to die out without polygyny, customary inheritance, remarriage, and adoption.”

Canon law was another aspect of the Roman Catholic Church that helped shape WEIRD societies. “As analytical thinkers from a moralizing religion, the canonists went looking for universalizing principles…. Since analytical thinkers hate contradictions, much of the development of Western law has been about ferreting out and resolving the contradictions that emerge when one tries to isolate a set of principles and apply them more broadly…. In many [traditional] societies, law is about restoring harmony and maintaining the peace, not, as it is for more analytic thinkers, about defending individual rights or making sure that abstract principles of “justice” are served.”

Henrich concludes by reemphasizing the importance of the ratcheting effects of culture. “The larger the population of engaged minds, the faster the rate of cumulative cultural evolution. That is, the larger the network of people learning or doing something, the more opportunities there will be for individuals to produce improvements…. The greater the interconnectedness among individuals—among learners and their teachers over generations—the faster the rate of cumulative cultural evolution…. Innovation can emerge even in the absence of conscious invention…. Complex innovations almost always arise from the accumulation of small additions or modifications, so even the most important contributors make only incremental additions…. Most innovations are really just novel recombinations of existing ideas, techniques, or approaches…. Lucky mistakes, fortunate misunderstandings, and serendipitous insights play a central role in invention…. Necessity is certainly not the mother of invention. Over the course of human history, people often ignored life-saving inventions for years, sometimes only realizing how much they needed an invention long after its arrival…. Cumulative cultural evolution—including innovation—is fundamentally a social and cultural process that turns societies into collective brains. Human societies vary in their innovativeness due in large part to the differences in the fluidity with which information diffuses through a population of engaged minds and across generations as well as to how willing individuals are to try novel practices or adopt new beliefs, concepts, and tools.”

Henrich makes the case that the cultural evolution of western Europe was uniquely built on circumstances that started with the Roman Catholic Church’s marriage and family program, which then evolved from there to form today’s WIERD societies. Catholic marriage laws were just the first stone in the foundation, however. A unique culture built up from there. “Four voluntary associations—charter cities, monasteries, apprenticeships, and universities—all contributed to broadening the flow of knowledge and technology around Europe…. Breaking kin-groups down into nuclear families would have had complex effects on the collective brain…. Unconstrained by the bonds of kinship, learners can potentially select particularly knowledgeable or skilled teachers from this broader network…. There are many economic and geographic factors that matter too, but if there’s a secret ingredient in the recipe for Europe’s collective brain, it’s the psychological package of individualism, analytic orientation, positive-sum thinking, and impersonal prosociality that had been simmering for centuries…. People’s psychology is influenced not only by the communities they grew up in but also by the ghosts of past institutions—by the worlds faced by their ancestors around which rich systems of beliefs, customs, rituals, and identities were built.”

“The Mozi” by Mo Zi (translated by Ian Johnston)

This is the definitive English translation of the complete philosophical works of Mo Zi. Much of his original texts have been lost over the centuries and Johnston has done an excellent job of filling in the holes, as best he could, based on context and historical references from other writers, such as Mencius, Han Fei, and Mo Zi’s own followers. The book weighs in at just under 1000 pages, so I will attempt to just give a taste of Mo Zi’s philosophy, which stands in stark contrast to his Confucian and Legalist rivals.

Mo Zi begins on the ways of the gentleman, ““It isn’t that there is not a peaceful place to dwell, but that I am not at peace in my heart; it isn’t that there is not enough wealth, but that my heart is not enough.” This is why a gentleman is hard on himself but easy on others, whereas a common man is easy on himself but hard on others. When a gentleman takes office, he does not lose his ideals…. Even if he is mistaken for a common man, he never feels resentment because he has confidence in himself.”

Mo Zi gives advice for governing affairs of the household and of the State. Often, he compares and contrasts the two. “Even a compassionate father will not look kindly on a son without promise. For this reason, a man who occupies a position for which he is not competent is not the man for the position…. Men of great talent are difficult to direct, yet they can serve a ruler and be respected. Great rivers do not resent little streams that fill them because they are what can make them great.”

A theme Mo Zi returns to repeatedly is the need for moderation. “If there is restraint and moderation, then there is prosperity. If there is lack of restraint and moderation, then there is decay…. When there is moderation with regard to men and women, Heaven and earth are in harmony. When there is moderation in the winds and rains, the five grains ripen. When there is moderation in clothes and garments, skin and flesh are in harmony.”

Mo Zi defines virtue by example of the three sages of the past. “The three sages were cautious in their speech, careful in their actions, and meticulous in their planning, searching out the world’s hidden affairs and neglecting personal benefit in order to serve Heaven above, so Heaven took delight in their virtue.” There are three realms that were of import. “Exalting worthiness is of benefit to Heaven, to the ghosts, and to the common people as well as being the foundation of government and affairs.” Mo Zi expands on governance. “If those above and below do not have unity of principles, then rewards and praise are not enough to encourage goodness, and punishments and penalties are not enough to put a stop to evil…. If those above and below do not have unity of principles, then those the ruler rewards will be those the people condemn…. If above and below there is not unity of principles, then those the ruler punishes will be those the people praise…. If those who help his sight and hearing are many, then what he hears and sees is far distant. If those who help his speech are many, then the comfort given by his wise words is far-reaching. If those who help his plans are many, then his schemes and devices are swiftly accomplished. If those who help in his activities are many, then the matters he embarks upon will be swiftly brought to completion.”

Mo Zi probably lived in either the Spring and Autumn period or the time of the Warring States. In either case, the city-states of China were fighting nearly constantly, in an attempt to unify the country. Mo Zi was opposed to all offensive war, especially larger states trying to take advantage of the weaker. “The killing of one person is spoken of as unrighteous and certainly constitutes one capital offense. Reasoning on this basis, killing ten people is ten times as unrighteous, so certainly constitutes ten capital offenses…. But when it comes to what is a great lack of righteousness, that is, attacking states, then they do not know and condemn it. On the contrary, they praise it and call it righteous…. Now suppose there was someone who, when he saw a little bit of black, called it black, but when he saw a lot of black, called it white. We would certainly take this person to be someone who did not know the difference between white and black…. Now when something small is a crime, people know and condemn it. When something great is a crime, like attacking states, then they don’t know and condemn, but go along with it and praise it, calling it righteous…. Nowadays, when kings, dukes and great officers carry out government, with regard to someone killing another person, his own state will try to prevent this because everyone knows that to do this is not righteous. But they are able to kill large numbers of people in a neighboring state and take this to be great righteousness.” Even when ruling within a state, Mo Zi was opposed to aggression. “When there is compliance with Heaven’s intention, there is rule by righteousness. When there is opposition to Heaven’s intention, there is rule by force…. Therefore, the most abhorred name in the world is given to him and he is called a tyrannical king.”

A large part of Mo Zi’s philosophy is constructed in short dialectical dialogue, particularly his thoughts on language, logic, and science. For each pairing the ancient compilers of Mo Zi’s teachings composed a thought described as the canon, followed by a short explanation. Over the years, some have been lost or bastardized. Here is Mo Zi’s take on peace, “C: To be at peace is to know no desire or aversion. E: To be at peace: To be tranquil.” Some of his thoughts come across as aphorisms or little riddles. This is Mo Zi on the difference and absurdity of comparison, “C: Different classes are not comparable. The explanation lies in measurement. E: Difference: Of wood and night, which is longer? Of knowledge and grain, which is greater? Of the four things—rank, family, good conduct and price—which is the most valuable? Of the tailed deer and the crane, which is higher? Of the cicada and the zithern, which is the more mournful?”

Mo Zi often returns to both benevolence and righteousness. “C: To take benevolence as being internal and righteousness as being external is wrong. The explanation lies in matching the face. E: Benevolence: Benevolence equates with love; righteousness equates with benefit. Love and benefit relate to “this” (the self); what is loved and what is benefited relate to “that” (the other). Love and benefit are neither internal nor external; what is loved and what is benefited are neither external nor internal. To say that benevolence is internal and righteousness is external and to conflate love with what is benefited are examples of “wild raising”. It is like the left eye being external and the right eye being internal.”

On criticism, Mo Zi expounds, “C: Whether criticism is admissible or not does not depend on whether it is much or little. The explanation lies in being admissible to negate (deny). E: Criticism: In sorting out whether criticism is admissible or in admissible, if you take the principle as susceptible to criticism, then, even if the criticism is excessive, it is right. If its principle is not susceptible to criticism, even if the criticism is slight, it is wrong. Nowadays, it is said that what is much criticized is not admissible. This is like using the long to discuss the short.”

In the final sections of Mo Zi’s philosophy he returns to singular statements. Here he again discusses the ways of the sage, “The sage dreads disease and decay but does not dread danger and difficulty. He maintains the integrity of his body and the resolve of his heart. [He] desires the people’s benefit; he does not dislike the people’s love. The sage does not consider his own dwelling. The sage does not concern himself with the affairs of his son. The sage’s model (method) is to turn his mind from his parents on their death for the sake of the world.”

Mo Zi was not always modest. Here he praises his own wisdom, “My words are sufficient for use. One who casts aside my words and changes my ideas is like one who casts aside the harvest and picks up grains. To use one’s own words to negate my words is like throwing eggs against a rock. Even if one uses all the eggs in the world, the rock remains as it is and cannot be destroyed.” Mo Zi explains why his words are more important than others who provide more physical sustenance to the people. “I think nothing equals understanding the Way of former kings and seeking their concepts; understanding the words of the sages and examining their statements. Nothing equals spreading these words among kings, dukes and great officers above, and next among the ordinary people. If kings, dukes, and great officers make use of my words, countries will certainly be well ordered. If the ordinary people make use of my words, conduct certainly will be regulated. Therefore, I think that although I do not plough and provide food for the hungry, although I do not weave and provide clothes for the cold, nevertheless my achievement is more worthy than those who do plough and provide food and those who do weave and provide clothes.”

Mo Zi ends by returning to his advice on the basics for an ordered and righteous society, “Whenever one enters a country, one must pick out what is fundamental and devote one’s attention to it. If the country is disordered and confused, then one speaks about exalting worthiness and exalting unity. If the country is poor, then one speaks about moderation in use and moderation in funerals. If the country has a liking for music and depravity, then one speaks about condemnation of music and rejection of Fate. If the country has fallen into licentiousness and lacks propriety, then one speaks about honouring Heaven and serving ghosts. If the country is dedicated to invasion and oppression, then one speaks about universal love and condemning aggression. Therefore I say, pick out what is fundamental and devote one’s attention to it.”  Finally, Mo Zi suggests to concern oneself with what is within first, before concerning oneself with others’ opinions. “In the case of those who bring order to the spirit, the multitude do not know of their achievement.”

“The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro” by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

Pessoa said of his heteronym, Caeiro, “If there is a part of my work that bears the ‘stamp of sincerity,’ that part is the work of Caeiro.” Caeiro, himself, writes in one of his first poems, “I have no ambitions or desires./ Being a poet is not my ambition./ It’s my way of being alone.” Most of Caeiro’s poems dealt with the concreteness of nature. “But if God is the flowers and the trees/ And the hills and the sun and the moonlight,/ Then I do believe in him,/ I believe in him at all hours./ And my whole life is one long prayer and mass,/ And a communion with the eyes and ears.” He also wrote obliquely about the craft of poetry. “And I, if they come and ask me what I have done,/ Will say: I looked at things, nothing more.” Many of his poems deal with the peace associated with being in the moment and the futility of humanity. In a short poem, quoted in full, he states, “A carriage passed along the road, and was gone;/ And the road wasn’t anymore beautiful, or any uglier./ So it is with human actions in the world./ We take nothing away and we add nothing; we pass and we forget;/ And the sun is always the same sun every day.” In another poem, he claims, “Nature never remembers, which is why it’s beautiful.” He is a materialist, who doesn’t search in nature for metaphors or anthropomorphic qualities. “Because everyone loves flowers for being beautiful, but I’m different./ And everyone loves the trees for being green and giving shade, but/   I don’t./ I love the flowers for being flowers, that’s all./ I love the trees for being trees, without the addition of my thoughts.” Caeiro is decidedly apolitical. “I accept injustice as I accept a stone not being round,/ And a cork tree not having been born a pine or an oak./ I cut an orange in two, and the halves, of course, were unequal./ To which half was I being unjust—I, who will eat both, given that I am going to eat them both.”

Caeiro’s oeuvre comes complete with interviews with him, conducted by Alexander Search, a British polyglot, who translated many of Caeiro’s poems into English. Search was another one of Pessoa’s heteronym creations. Search introduces Caeiro, “The poet speaks of himself and his works with a sort of lofty religiosity which, in anyone with less right to speak in such a manner, would be frankly unbearable. Caeiro always speaks in succinct, dogmatic phrases, censuring or admiring (although it’s rare for him to admire) in such absolute, despotic terms, as if he were offering not a mere opinion, but rather stating an inviolable truth.” Caeiro later interjects, “To teach is to destroy. The only worthwhile thing in anyone is what he or she doesn’t know.” In one of his last poems, Caeiro states, “If, after I die, someone should choose to write my biography,/ nothing could be simpler./ There are only two dates—that of my birth and that of my death./ Between one and the other all the days were mine.”

“States and Social Revolutions” by Theda Skocpol

Skocpol compares and contrasts the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions to find what causal factors they held in common. She considers all three to be social as well as political revolutions. “What is unique to social revolution is that basic changes in social structure and in political structure occur together in mutually reinforcing fashion. And these changes occur through intense sociopolitical conflicts in which class struggles play a key role…. An adequate understanding of social revolutions requires that the analyst take a nonvoluntarist, structural perspective on their causes and processes…. Social revolutions cannot be explained without systematic reference to international structures and world-historical developments…. It is essential to conceive of states as administrative and coercive organizations.”

Skocpol stresses that while the State is often aligned with the dominant class, the two are not the same and in times of crisis, particularly, their interests do not always overlap. In France, by the end of the eighteenth century, she quotes Francois Furet, “Tied to the development of commercial production, hostile to local powers, promoter of national unity, the state was—along with money, at the same time as money, and more than money—the decisive source of social mobility. Progressively the state had undermined, encroached upon, and destroyed the vertical solidarity of the estates, especially the nobility…. By the eighteenth century, the new groups [of elites] make up the majority of the nobility. Culturally, the state had offered to the ruling groups of the kingdom, assembled henceforth under its aegis, another system of values than that of personal honor: the fatherland and the State… creating a parallel and contradictory social structure: an elite, a governing class.” This fits in with Turchin’s thesis that it is intra-elite competition, particularly from disaffected marginal elites, that is the impetus for cycles of revolution and turmoil. Skocpol explains, “The distinction between the First (ecclesiastical) and Second (Noble) Estates, on the one hand, and the Third Estate, on the other, was by the eighteenth century more a fluid zone of transition than a barrier.”

Skocpol next describes her view of the Qing Dynasty’s class structure right before its collapse. The dominant class was the landed gentry. “Was it fundamentally an Imperial state with a unique Confucian culture and educational system? Or was it fundamentally a class-stratified agrarian society? My view is that old-regime China was an inextricable amalgam of both of these. The dominant agrarian class depended upon the administrative/military backing of, and employment opportunities within, the Imperial state. And ruling dynasties depended upon local class dominants to extend controls over and appropriate resources from the huge, unwieldy agrarian expanse that was China.” The intra-elite struggle came about when the educated Han elite came to break with their Manchu imperial overlords. “Modern-educated students and military officers developed radical nationalist views that synthesized provincial loyalties with hostility to the “alien” Manchu dynasty…. Professionally trained officers had only the most tenuous loyalties to the Manchus and to the Imperial system…. The newly established representative assemblies were rapidly transformed by groups of local and provincial gentry and merchants into formal platforms from which to advocate a “Constitutionalist” program of liberal, politically decentralized reforms…. By 1910 many organized gentry groups were prepared ideologically and organizationally to assert their decentralizing program against the Manchus.” E.P. Young would claim, “The politicization of the gentry is perhaps the outstanding feature of [Chinese history in] the early twentieth century.”

In Russia, the elites had a subservient position to the Tsarist state apparatus. “Over a period of centuries the lands of independent nobles and princes were expropriated and passed out as rewards for official careers to a new class of service nobles. As this happened, the tsars took pains to ensure that no new groupings of independent landed aristocrats could arise. Service nobles were given rights to serf “souls” and to landed estates. Yet typically, their possessions were not concentrated in one locality or even one province, but were scattered over different regions of the empire…. Lifelong military or civil service careers [were] mandatory for every adult male noble…. During the eighteenth century Russian nobles were finally released from lifelong state service, and their private-property rights were fully and officially confirmed…. Russian nobles still gravitated toward state employments as the one sure site of opportunities to reside in the cities and to earn salaries and rewards to supplement the very meager incomes that most obtained from the serf estates.” Intra-elite competition again played a role in upsetting the balance of society. The change was spurred by the State’s goal of rapid industrialization, as Russia sought to catch up to the great powers of western Europe, especially after its defeat in the Crimean War. In turn, however, “the processes of financing rapid industrialization tied the Russian state and economy more closely to Western Europe.” Arthur Mendel contends, “Besides dangerously concentrating a proletariat, a professional class, and a rebellious student body in the centers of political power, industrialization infuriated both these new forces and the traditional rural classes.” The end was brought on by the crisis of World War I. “[Tsar] Nicholas would not sacrifice the autocratic principle: and so upper- and middle-class civilian and official disgust with him grew. Public criticism flourished especially because it could be couched in nationalistic terms…. Once the initial rebellion was underway, it spread irrepressibly from military unit to military unit, from factory workers to railway men, from the capital of Petrograd to Moscow and to the provincial cities.”

Skocpol contends, “In both ancien regime France and late Imperial China, relatively prosperous landed-commercial upper classes gained collective political leverage within and against the administrative machineries of monarchial autocracies…. Escalating international competition and humiliations particularly symbolized by unexpected defeats in wars (such as the Seven Years’ War and the Sino-Japanese War) inspired autocratic authorities to attempt reforms that they believed would facilitate the mobilization and coordination of national resources to meet the external exigencies…. [However,] the French privilegies and the Chinese gentry were attracted by the association between parliamentarism and national power in more modern foreign competitors…. Autocratic attempts at modernizing reforms from above in France and China—specifically, tax reform in France and railroad reorganization in China—triggered the concerned political resistance of well-organized dominant class forces…. And as dominant class groups based in various institutional and geographical locations (e.g., parlements, provinces, representative bodies, and municipalities in France; and provinces, armies, and assemblies in China) competed in endeavors to define new political arrangements, the monarchial administrations and armies were broken irretrievably apart.” She continues, “Revolutionary political crises emerged in all three Old Regimes because agrarian structures impinged upon autocratic and proto-bureaucratic state organizations in ways that blocked or fettered monarchial initiatives in coping with escalating international military competition in a world undergoing uneven transformation by capitalism…. The ultimate effect of the impediments to state-sponsored reforms was the downfall of monarchial autocracy and the disintegration of the centralized administrative and military organizations of the state.”

Skocpol makes the case that “peasant revolts against landlords were a necessary ingredient in all three Revolutions, whereas successful revolts by urban workers were not.” However, “peasants participated in these Revolutions without being converted to radical visions of a desired new national society, and without becoming a nationally organized class-for-themselves. Instead they struggled for concrete goals—typically involving access to more land, or freedom from claims on their surpluses.” There were differences in the three Old Regimes. “A peasant revolution against landlords did ultimately occur in China as in France and Russia, but the peasants of China lacked the kind of structurally preexisting solidarity and autonomy that allowed the agrarian revolutions in France and Russia to emerge quickly and relatively spontaneously in reaction to the breakdown of the central governments of the Old Regimes. In contrast, the Chinese agrarian revolution was more protracted…. The peasant contribution to the Chinese Revolution resembled much more a mobilized response to a revolutionary elite’s initiatives than did the peasant contributions in France and Russia.”

Skocpol next focuses on the similarities in State capacity building that consolidated the permanence of the three Revolutions. Franz Borkenau states, “Every great revolution has destroyed the State apparatus which it found. After much vacillation and experimentation, every revolution has set another apparatus in its place, in most cases of quite a different character from the one destroyed; for the changes in the state order which a revolution produces are no less important than the changes in the social order.” Skocpol contends that the new State structures were even more all-consuming and all-controlling than the monarchial regimes they replaced. “Autocratic and proto-bureaucratic monarchies gave way to bureaucratic and mass-incorporating national states…. Under the Old Regimes, the privileges and the institutional power bases of the landed upper classes had been impediments to full state bureaucratization and to direct mass political incorporation…. Political consolidation was possible in large part because revolutionary leaderships could mobilize lower-class groups formerly excluded from national politics, either urban workers or the peasantry…. The new state organizations forged during the Revolutions were more centralized and rationalized than those of the Old Regime.” Many of the marginal elites of old, who survived the turmoil and purges, could be coopted as technical experts to the new State machinery. Whereas, “all such agrarian states as France (after the consolidation of royal absolutism), Tsarist Russia, and Imperial China… more or less continuously generated surpluses of aspirants for participation in state employments”, the new revolutionary regimes could recruit all of the surplus-elites crafty and able enough to have stuck around.

Finally, it was not any particular ideology that made these three Revolutions successful. The impetus to success was more structural and impersonal. Skocpol states, “It cannot be argued… that the cognitive content of the ideologies in any sense provides a predictive key to either the outcomes of the Revolutions or the activities of the revolutionaries who built the state organizations…. The Jacobins accomplished instead more mundane tasks—of state building and revolutionary defense—indispensable to the success of the revolution that devoured them. In Russia, the Bolsheviks were pummeled by the exigencies of the attempt to take and hold state power in the name of Marxist socialism in an agrarian country shattered by defeat in total war. They found themselves forced to undertake tasks and measures that directly contradicted their ideology. In the end, triumphant Stalinism twisted and upended virtually every Marxist ideal and rudely contradicted Lenin’s vision in 1917 of destroying bureaucracies and standing armies. In China, the Communists set out in proper Marxist-Leninist fashion to take power through proletarian risings in the cities. Not until well after these were crushed and new and viable peasant-oriented movements had taken root in military base areas in the countryside did “Maoist” doctrine develop to sanctify and codify what had been done…. In short, ideologically oriented leaderships in revolutionary crises have been greatly limited by existing structural conditions and severely buffeted by the rapidly changing currents of revolutions.”

“The Murder of Professor Schlick” by David Edmonds

Edmonds has written a short, but detailed, group biography of the Vienna Circle, including its precursors, origin, heyday, and, eventually, where its members scattered to after the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938. Edmonds calls the Circle’s members logical-empiricists, although they are also commonly known as positivists. Ludwig Wittgenstein was never a member and never even attended a meeting as a guest. However, his legacy over the Circle looms large. His Tractatus-logico-philosophicus was studied sentence by sentence by the Circle every week, over a number of years (1925-27), to parse out its exact meaning.

On August 5, 1924, Moritz Schlick, the head of the Vienna Circle, wrote to a fellow German philosopher, Hans Reichenbach, about discovering the Tractatus, “The author lives close to Vienna, and is highly original, also as a human being; the more one studies his treatise, the more one is impressed by it. The English translator [Frank Ramsey], a mathematician from Cambridge, whom I met in the summer, is also a very intelligent and sophisticated mind.” (The Circle first read the book in its English translation because Wittgenstein could not find a German language publisher.) Edmonds continues, “Within the Circle the Tractatus acquired a status of almost biblical significance…. The Tractatus is a work impatient of explanation and skinned to the bone. It can be seen as a pursuit of an ornament-free language—in which every element expressed the logic of language and thereby of the world (unlike ordinary language, which obscures its structure with its many redundancies—or ornaments)…. Wittgenstein, in the tradition of Frege and Russell, held that the tools of modern logic could be used to dissect the nature of language. He thought that philosophy should be limited in ambition: the task of philosophy was the clarification of propositions…. The Circle also embraced Wittgenstein’s discussion of logical truths. Wittgenstein held that logical truths were tautologies; they are true, but not in the way that empirical propositions can be true…. [Logical truths] are the essential frame to permit propositions to picture the world. They are the limits of sense…. The Vienna Circle found what they regarded as the ultimate solution (to the problem of how mathematical knowledge is compatible with a strict empiricism) in their interpretation of the Tractatus…. The Circle believed the same line should be applied to mathematical truths: they too served as tautologies…. The reason we do not need to refer to the world to establish their veracity is because the meaning is built into the terms themselves.”

The beginning of the end of the Vienna Circle was actually when its leading members decided to publish a manifesto to honor Schlick, upon his return from a sabbatical at Stanford. Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and Herbert Feigl were the authors, but they purported to expound the philosophy of the Circle as a whole. It was actually in this document that the name Weiner Kreis appeared for the first time. “The Circle’s basic orientation was science free from metaphysics.” The manifesto stated, “The scientific world-conception knows no unsolvable riddle.” Furthermore, the Circle’s mission was “removing the metaphysical and theological debris of millennia.” The manifesto ended, “The scientific world conception serves life, and life receives it.” Phillip Frank, a physicist in Prague and frequent guest to Circle meetings, stated, “The whole original Viennese group was convinced that the elimination of metaphysics not only was a question of better logic but was of great relevance for the social and cultural life.” 

Schlick, himself, was not entirely pleased with his return gift. Edmonds explains, “Although he had now presided over the Circle for five years—and in a 1923 letter to Bertrand Russell he described the Circle as a working union of philosophers—he had become perturbed by the idea of philosophy as a team sport. He viewed the Circle as a set of like-minded philosophers meeting to thrash out problems but without losing their individuality…. He was the Circle’s most apolitical member, whilst the manifesto was a blatantly political document…. Until the publication of the manifesto, those who attended Circle discussions had no need to see themselves as belonging to a movement. But from that moment, fissures within the Circle began to deepen.”

However, Schlick was in no way opposed to the project of removing any trace of metaphysics from philosophy. He stated, “Philosophy is the activity by means of which the meaning of statements is clarified and defined.” Carnap had asked, “Can it be that so many men, of various times and nations, outstanding minds among them, have devoted so much effort, and indeed fervor, to metaphysics, when this consists in nothing more than words strung together without sense?” Metaphysics was about feelings, whereas philosophy was about science and truth. Neurath claimed, “Metaphysical terms divide, scientific terms unite.” Carnap felt it was the province of poets, not philosophers, to deal with metaphysics. He quipped, “Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability.” Edmonds states that Schlick felt, “Empiricists do not tell metaphysicians that they are wrong but rather that they assert nothing of any meaning. That is, they do not contradict the metaphysicians, rather, they simply fail to understand them.”

With the rise of the nationalist right in Austria after WWI, the positivists faced a growing backlash at home, even within academic walls. The University of Vienna itself was a bastion of reactionary conservatism. “Although there was nothing explicitly pro-democratic about logical empiricism, it was implicitly anti-elitist. The priestly caste claimed some special insight into God, while the metaphysician claimed some special understanding of the world beyond appearance…. Logical empiricism was also skeptical about the ontological status of the group: the base unit for explaining action was thought to be the individual.” The Circle’s espousal of methodological individualism and belief in the paramount truth of empirical facts ran foul of the fascistic currents of the day.

Edmonds goes into some detail about two philosophical problems that divided members of the Circle. The first was the issue of protocol sentences. “The logical positivist project can be seen as having two components. On the one hand, there was an investigation into the link between words and propositions…. But beyond the analysis of language, there is the link between language and the world…. There must be some way words get their meaning not from other words but from the world…. Words get their meaning in the context of a sentence or proposition and the way that proposition stands in relation to the world…. There was mostly agreement that the protocol sentences on which knowledge and meaningful language were to be constructed were fundamental observation statements…. [But] what was to count as a protocol sentence? Did protocol sentences really exist? Were they open to doubt? What was the relationship between protocol sentences and the empirical world?… Foundationalism means (roughly) that there are propositions that are true and certain, independently of other propositions…. Within the Circle there was a dispute about whether protocol sentences provided solid foundations…. The idea was that with valid inferences, we could move from these secure basic statements, these protocol sentences, to more complicated ones…. Carnap’s initial view was that protocol sentences captured immediate experiences and required no further justification or public confirmation. They were sense data—the things that are immediately present to the mind…. Neurath maintained that the observations had to be about the observable attributes of objects and the properties on which we could publicly agree…. [Eventually] Carnap was forced to acknowledge what Neurath had long asserted, namely that rock-bottom certainty was beyond reach. If protocol sentences were about the physical world (as opposed to sensations and impressions of that world), then it was always possible that they were mistaken.” Schlick did not concede to Neurath, like Carnap. He “insisted that protocol sentences had to be about how objects appeared to a particular person and take the form of here, now, this…. The advantage of the Schlickian framework is that it begins with statements that cannot be refuted and that require no further confirmation…. The drawback is that it is unclear how one can make the move from subjective statement about me and my experience to a statement to which we all can assent…. Schlick’s radical subjectivism, Neurath claimed, took protocol sentences down a cul-de-sac.” Neurath’s solution has come to be called Neurath’s Boat. Edmonds explains, “We have to presume existing knowledge…. We cannot overturn all our assumptions at once—that would be nonsensical. But neither can we assume that there are any rock-solid foundations. We can always jettison bits of “knowledge” as we progress.” Neurath, himself, stated, “We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials.”

The other major issue amongst members of the Circle was the verification problem. “If a statement was not analytic—true or false in virtue of its terms—then, according to the verification principle, it was only meaningful if verifiable…. It is what made many statements about ethics, aesthetics, and religion nonscientific and neither true nor false…. The Carnap version stated that whether a synthetic sentence was cognitively meaningful depends on whether there is criteria for verifying it. The Wittgenstein version [embraced by Schlick and Waismann] was that the meaning consists in the criteria…. A satisfactory account of the principle—which excludes ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysical assertions but includes scientific theories about nonobservable entities—continues to prove elusive. All attempts to tighten the principle have let in either too little or too much. It is also self undermining, for the principle itself seems neither analytically true nor verifiable.”

“Philosophical Papers” by Frank P. Ramsey (edited by D.H. Mellor)

This is a collection of Ramsey’s papers, written while a fellow at King’s College from 1925 until his death in 1930. The book begins with his essay “Philosophy” from 1929. Ramsey states, “Philosophy must be of some use and we must take it seriously; it must clear our thoughts and so our actions.” After this injunction, Ramsey gets a little cheeky, playfully contradicting his chief sparring partner, Ludwig Wittgenstein. “The chief proposition of philosophy is that philosophy is nonsense. And again we must then take seriously that it is nonsense, and not pretend, as Wittgenstein does, that it is important nonsense.” Ramsey continues in a more serious vein, “Essentially a philosophy is a system of definitions or, only too often, a system of descriptions of how definitions might be given…. We are driven to philosophize because we do not know clearly what we mean.” He concludes with a warning against scientism, “The chief danger to our philosophy, apart from laziness and wooliness, is scholasticism, the essence of which is treating what is vague as if it were precise and trying to fit it into an exact logical category.”

Ramsey continues his probing of philosophy and meaning in his essay “Universals”, which deals with particulars and universals in the world. Defining meaning, he states, “Now it seems to me as clear as anything can be in philosophy that the two sentences ‘Socrates is wise’, ‘Wisdom is a characteristic of Socrates’ assert the same fact and express the same proposition. They are not, of course, the same sentence, but they have the same meaning, just as two sentences in two different languages can have the same meaning.” Ramsey is not concerned with language games, but the underlying truth behind the words. “The whole theory of particulars and universals is due to mistaking for a fundamental characteristic of reality what is merely a characteristic of language.” Ramsey states that he is “interested not so much in sentences themselves, as in what they mean, from which we hope to discover the logical nature of reality.”

In his paper “Facts and Propositions”, Ramsey lays out his theory of beliefs. He begins, “I prefer to deal with those beliefs which are expressed in words, or possibly images or other symbols, consciously asserted or denied; for these beliefs, in my view, are the most proper subject for logical criticism…. The mental factors of such a belief I take to be words, spoken aloud or to oneself or merely imagined, connected together and accompanied by a feeling or feelings of belief or disbelief…. It is evident that the importance of beliefs and disbeliefs lies not in their intrinsic nature, but in their causal properties.” Ramsey concludes with an endorsement of Peirce’s pragmatism, “The essence of pragmatism I take to be this, that the meaning of a sentence is to be defined by reference to the actions to which asserting it would lead, or, more vaguely still, by its possible causes and effects. Of this I feel certain.”

Ramsey tries to dig into the idea of partial beliefs in his essay “Truth and Probability”. He claims “that we act in the way we think most likely to realize the objects of our desires, so that a person’s actions are completely determined by his desires and opinions.” Beliefs are manifest in actions. He continues, “The theory I propose to adopt is that we seek things which we want, which may be our own or other people’s pleasure, or anything else whatever, and our actions are such as we think most likely to realize these goods.” Ramsey next breaks down the differences in deductive and inductive reasoning. “Our opinions can be divided into those we hold immediately as a result of perception or memory, and those which we derive from the former by argument…. Logic as a science of argument and inference is traditionally and rightly divided into deductive and inductive…. A formal deduction does not increase our knowledge, but only brings out clearly what we already know in another form…. We are bound to accept its validity on pain of being inconsistent with ourselves. The logical relation which justifies the inference is that the sense or import of the conclusion is contained in that of the premisses…. We can divide arguments into two radically different kinds, which we can distinguish in the words of Peirce as (1) ‘explicative, analytic, or deductive’ and (2) ‘amplifiative, synthetic, or (loosely speaking) inductive’. Arguments of the second type are from an important point of view much closer to memories and perceptions than to deductive arguments. We can regard perception, memory and induction as the three fundamental ways of acquiring knowledge…. We have the lesser logic, which is the logic of consistency, or formal logic; and the larger logic, which is the logic of discovery, or inductive logic.” Following Peirce’s pragmatism, Ramsey explains why it makes sense to base our partial beliefs on inductive processes. “We are all convinced by inductive arguments, and our conviction is reasonable because the world is so constituted that inductive arguments lead on the whole to true opinions…. This is a kind of pragmatism: we judge mental habits by whether they work.”

Mellor chooses to conclude this collection with an “Epilogue”, which was actually a speech Ramsey prepared for the Apostles’ Club at Cambridge in 1925. Ramsey cheekily challenges the view that the debating club has anything to talk about anymore. Ramsey teases, “I do not wish to maintain that there never has been anything to discuss, but only that there is no longer; that we have really settled everything by realizing that there is nothing to know except science…. Science, history, and politics are not suited for discussion except by experts…. Then there is philosophy; this, too, has become too technical for the layman.” He can’t resist poking a little fun at Wittgenstein, who by 1925 had quit the Apostles in disgust at their flippant musings. Ramsey half-jokes, “The conclusion of the greatest modern philosopher is that there is no such subject as philosophy; that it is an activity, not a doctrine; and that, instead of answering questions, it aims merely at curing headaches.” Ramsey concludes in a much more serious vein, “Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does…. I apply my perspective not merely to space but also to time. In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me. But I have reason and you have none; you would only have reason for despising me if your feeling corresponded to the fact in a way mine didn’t. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you. On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one’s activities.”