The Anti Enlightenment Tradition - Week 7, MoFoPo
A short introduction to conservatism - I was quite surprised by how logical and human it all sounded.
We’re now covering the 7th Week of Moral Foundations of Politics, a Yale course by Professor Ian Shapiro. We first covered Enlightenment thinking, and now, we’ll look at the backlash the Enlightenment Tradition caused.
Enlightenment worshipped two things: science and individual rights. Anti-enlightenment was more or less born out of a hostility to science - and the arguments brought forth give a lot of room for thinking, at the very least. Individual rights wasn’t necessarily bad, as we’ll see, but it is rather dumb.
The course starts off with Edmund Burke. Science, according to him, distracts us from the most important thing: "to know how little we know - we're extremely muddled, we say something today and something else tomorrow". I found myself agreeing with the statement - Aristotle said something similar, and so does Yale University’s homepage. However, the conclusion is questionable: Yale puts it best, along with this humility we must cultivate an openness and deep desire to learn, and that’s what science is all about. Burke's view of the human condition is a person fumbling in the dark, or corks bobbing in the ocean. That might be true - I consider it to be true - but just because someone’s in the dark, that’s no reason for them not to fumble.
Burke did a lot of his work during the French Revolution, and was traumatized by it. He held that revolutions aren't always good: good things might turn out to be bad, and bad things might turn out to be good. "The science of government... is a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life... it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon..." That literally means never do anything, but even metaphorically, it means extremely slow change. A good politician should always make the most of what he has - combining "a disposition to preserve and the ability to improve" is tremendously useful. The folks who think they know how to remake society from scratch are the ones we should be most afraid of.
I found myself thinking: wait, this is conservatism? It seems like I agree with most of it. We would soon diverge, though.
Conservatives are not reactionaries, the Professor says - people who are literally opposed to all change. Rather cunningly, it seems to me, they want change only to preserve current practices. We can adapt, no problem, but let’s do it slowly while adhering to the tried-and-tested methods of the past. What about individual rights? Burke was far more concerned about individual duties - he thought of rights as the inherited rights of English men. Emphasis on both words. He also holds that we all have a right to be disciplined, to be restrained. Like, wow. We have a right to have our rights limited.
In a famous quotation, Burke says says “society is a contract... not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born". He thought that when you sweep away the foundations of society, like in the French or Soviet revolution, terror will come. He values caution to be the most important quality of a politician, and places tradition and individual duties to be at the center of everything.
We then move on to a few other conservative thinkers. In 1957, UK, The Wolfenden report recommended that homosexuality should be legalized. Lord Devlin is outraged by this: and he makes a beautiful but unconvincing argument. He says that Western civilization rests on the Christian idea of morality. This - Christian idea of morality - is not inherently correct, and other folks in other places can hold their own morality, but this is just how it is at this time and place. The house has been built and removing the foundations will cause the house to crash.
I disagree. This would be an extremely good position if Jesus Christ or Muhammad weren't supremely radical themselves. These men destroyed previous houses and built their own, so I don’t see much wrong with pulling down theirs’. Like these men, I hold that we have a duty to improve society, no matter the status quo. Another important question whenever the “X Religion” position on something enters the discussion is this: who decides the position of that religion? How can one person or group claim to be representative of religions as diverse as Islam or Christianity?
Devlin says: consider what the average person would be disgusted by, and derive law from there - therefore, ban homosexuality. The average person holds society together, so it's their views that count: not fancy political philosophers'. And indeed, the US Supreme Court said something similar about homosexuality in 1986 - but reversed itself in 2003. A big reason behind this is the average person view changed, which is actually a good point.
Again, the average person is really hard to decide upon. All this this doesn't sound good, admittedly - but it does illustrate a truly important point: legal changes are dangerous without societal approval.
The student rightly asks: how do you protect the rights of minorities before the majority agrees? No answer from Devlin. The most important takeaway up to now is this: however hard it is to justify individual rights, it's far harder to do without them.
We now get onto genuinely interesting stuff: emotivism. As I said previously, Stevenson proposed the "hurray-boo theory of morality" - the idea that morality has no scientific basis. Alasdair MacIntyre, who’s still alive, agrees - only he says that this is a modern problem. Previous philosophers like Nozick or Rawls, and many of us, like pluralism: we all hold different views, and no problem there. But MacIntyre finds this “separation of means and ends” quite disturbing. The symptoms of this culture include affirmative action, abortion, nuclear disarmament, Israel-Palestine conflict (read my opinion) - nobody accepts the other side's ideas, they just throw their own points. In any modern public debate, the Professor says, it would be almost impossible for one of the guys to stop and say: "wait, you're right".
MacIntyre brings up a terrifying question: why on earth would we argue at all, if there's no expectation of anybody convincing the other person? My first answer was “to sway public opinion”, which does happen occasionally. But again, most people don't use debates to evaluate their opinion. This is a great point: the people who're watching debates are live examples of yay-boo morality. If you support me, yay - else, boo.
We inherited this tradition of debating, but it is now dismembered. It's no longer coherent if we don't expect people to change at all. We do all this because we're uncomfortable with the yay-boo theory, so we try to give some semblance of rationality that doesn't exist.
In short, MacIntyre thought the Enlightenment Project had to fail - and that it indeed has failed. The Enlightenment tradition tried to derive ethics from a scientific point of view - but it failed. If you take human behavior and try to turn it into a principle - MacIntyre says whatever you get, it's going to be unsatisfying. Early philosophers never did this.
Burke and MacIntyre are similar in many ways, and they both derive a lot from Aristotelian thought. Unlike Burke, however, MacIntyre believes that traditions nourish change, via disagreement and internal criticism.
Anti-Enlightenment showed me some very good points - but as the Professor points out, there's a certain kind of naivety in this: even when folks did follow their practices and hold their values, they disagreed horribly. Also, how would we actually bring change in places where we should change? MacIntyre’s hopeless in conflict, and his prescriptions are kinda vapid.
All the same, the Professor says MacIntyre's view of human psychology is far more plausible than the Enlightenment's ideas.
A final takeaway: yes, we can't wring politics out of politics - but wringing science out of politics might be an even worse idea.