It galls me to agree with the proposition that Western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato, but it is at least fair to admit that Western intellectual thought exists in dialogue with him and his thinking. But the spare and arrogant idealism which Plato and his followers promoted is not entirely alien to the landscape of human cognition. It is not purely invention, but has a basis in intuition. A tendency to abstract, and confuse the abstract with reality, seems hard-wired into our mental architecture. As Paul Bloom would say, we are natural born essentialists (and dualists).
One implication of Platonic idealism seems to be that striving for the perfect form of truth bleeds over into a conceited belief that one’s understanding of the truth is Truth itself. I do not believe that Christianity is necessarily understood only in the light of the mental universe which Plato and his detractors created, but it is hard to deny the Platonic tincture of much of early Christian thought as it diffused throughout the ancient world and began to make converts among the elites. Christian thinking may hinge upon divine revelation, but its theistic illuminations gained rigor and steel via philosophical certitudes.
St. Ambrose was a man of such steel. A scion of the West Roman elite he matured in an era when the heights of society were still religiously pluralistic, with the most eminent and ancient families and men of renown, such as Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, exhibiting clear pagan sympathies. Or perhaps they might characterize it as a fondness for the customary gods of Rome.
In 382 there was a dispute in Rome over the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Roman Senate. Symmachus entered into the record an apologia for the restoration of the statue. He makes a plea:
We ask, then, for peace for the gods of our fathers and of our country. It is just that all worship should be considered as one. We look on the same stars, the sky is common, the same world surrounds us. What difference does it make by what pains each seeks the truth? We cannot attain to so great a secret by one road; but this discussion is rather for persons at ease, we offer now prayers, not conflict.
St. Ambrose, whose faith was on the march, and the future, did not mince words:
But if you deny Christ to be God, because you believe not that He died (for you are ignorant that death was of the body not of the Godhead, which has brought it to pass that now no one of those who believe dies), what is more thoughtless than you who honour with insult, and disparage with honour, for you consider a piece of wood to be your god. O worship full of insult! You believe not that Christ could die, O perversity founded on respect!
Symmachus asked for tolerance, because that was all his kind could ask for. St. Ambrose and the other militants saw no gain to such tolerance, because they had truth before them, and denying the truth was an insult to all. Tolerance of idolatry and superstition was no tolerance.
In 1965 Herbert Marcuse wrote Repressive Tolerance. He begins:
THIS essay examines the idea of tolerance in our advanced industrial society. The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed. In other words, today tolerance appears again as what it was in its origins, at the beginning of the modern period–a partisan goal, a subversive liberating notion and practice. Conversely, what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.
These ideas find relevance today, where one descendent of Critical Theory has transformed dissent and offense into violence, and so justifies suppression of disagreeable thought. St. Ambrose would have used different logic because of a differing metaphysical basis, but I believe the psychological impulses are not so different. Tolerance of error is problematic when that error leads to injustice, impiety, and diminishes the “good society,” however it is imagined.
There are those who believe that they know the Truth. Plato and his acolytes had their conceit as philosopher kings. St. Ambrose and his fellow believers had divine revelation, and were seeking to bring all those in the darkness who disagreed with their views to the light. Following St. Augustine the pre-modern Catholic Church asserted that “error has no rights”.
The latest flare up of this sentiment among particular cultural elites, sometimes termed the “regressive Left” (somewhat of a contradiction clearly), is but latest incarnation of this viewpoint. They believe that the time for tolerance is over, as tolerance gives sanction and space to error and impiety (these are called “oppression” now). The liberal “end of history” seems to be evading us, the old battles reoccur with a regularity that hints at an eternal recurrence. Every few generations the battle with Tiamat must be joined, as monsters issue from the darkness of our cultural Id.
As a descriptive matter it strikes me that some have now denied that words as a tool of discussion, dialogue, and dispute, have utility to discover truth. Those who object with words are engaged in a likely futile exercise, just as pleas for the tolerance of the old religion were futile. A new world was upon them, they simply lacked our hindsight to see the dawning of the age of the One True God. Perhaps in a different universe history took a different course. In those universes I doubt the old gods survived through persuading the believers of the new Lord with words.
The age of words is over. If words become violence, then violence becomes the tool of ultimate persuasion, compulsion. If truth is all about power, then power is all there is. In a Whiggish telling we as a species came out of the blood and darkness, the struggle for power and zero-sum contests for collective domination. But perhaps we are destined to become what we were, creatures forged in blood and power, unable to resist the temptations of coercion and compulsion.
The 2016 Coen Brothers movie, Hail, Ceasar, is an absolutely hilarious satire of some of Hollywood’s sacred cows. One of the plot threads concerns a Communist cell. The intellectual in the cell is Professor Marcuse.
I thought is was strange that the ideological KGB of Hollywood missed that the movie skewered Communists and homosexuals. But, no one ever accused them of being very smart.
Hey Razib, I found this post through Facebook. The front page for gnxp. nofe.me doesn’t seem to work any longer.
Anyway, your point reminded me of this article I read from Vox this morning. The article is on a slightly different topic – the question of how the press should react to the Trump Administration’s blatant falsehood. Should it stick to its traditional role of presenting itself as a neutral reporter of the news, or more actively work to oppose a presidency which is working to undermine the credibility of the mainstream press as an institution?
However, it gets at the same broader theme you are touching on here. Just as one element of the left has embraced illiberalism in the academy, elements of the right have worked to systematically delegitimize and disassemble common American institutions. The result is that while institutional left-liberalism attempts to operate within the old social norms (where politics has mutually agreed upon boundaries and works under mutually agreed-upon priors) while the right is slowly inching towards total war.
The author has no conclusion on what is to be done. But one logical conclusion which can be reached is that if the “other side” refuses to (either in perception or actuality) refuse to behave according to existing political norms which limit the scope of conflict, than to act in a liberal (small l) manner is coming to a gun fight unarmed. This is the exact logic behind antifa – those involved are of course not liberals in any sense of the word, but they recognize that attempts to fight nazis within the liberal framework have failed in the past, so why not use open violence?
Regarding the academy in particular, again, it is of course a manifestation of tribalism. To a large degree, I think that the academic left is reacting as it is because their only “turf” has been threatened in an existential sense for over a generation now. I maintain that one of the best results for the ruling class in the U.S. was the “domestication” of the New Left by the shunting of them into the academy, given would-be revolutionaries cushy jobs in the humanities and social sciences where they didn’t have to work too hard, be insulated from viewpoints from outside of their immediate circle, and delude themselves into thinking they were doing something worthwhile for social justice. But the rise of adjunct faculty has ended the financial security of an academic lifestyle for this social grouping, with living standards falling by as much as 75% in some cases. Just as the decimation of manufacturing jobs in the rust belt has had a social reaction, so has the decimation of academic jobs in the “college belt.” Neither immigrants nor people with “incorrect viewpoints” are the proximate cause of economic and existential insecurity, but they are helpful scapegoats when a tribe feels under siege.
PROCTOR: I say—I say—God is dead!
A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud—God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!
You are pulling Heaven down and raising up a whore!
i propose that there’s a reason you start with Whitehead paraphrase: “Western philosophy = footnotes to Plato.”
It’s because Whitehead, as the Late-Enlightenment avatar of Maximally Intelligent Reasonable Observer, is often inescapable when it comes to wrestling bedrock questions into simple English-language terms.
Whitehead could beat everyone here at the subtlest of Maths with nine fingers tied behind his back. Yet he could render a deeply trenchant wake-up assertion in common tongue, (as in your opening paraphrase), or as in the following germane dead-simple take:
“There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.” — Alfred North Whitehead
My opinion? I think the problem with which you agonize here is caused by that we stoopit monkeys can’t conceptually hold two opposing/related half-truths in consciousness for more than a few split-seconds before the particular excited-dedicated cerebral axon zones that are ‘holding forth’ the concepts lose their potassium-recharge potentiality-moment, causing these “pure reason” concepts to collapse, and the whole proposition then slumps downward in a simplified bolus, as a crude unsettled signal, into the amygdala, where ambiguity is read as alarum, and, (as the amygdala is the alarum-stimulus processor feeding instruction into the soma), the whole is thus then instantly dispensed with as a unified hormonal Manichean imperative. “Yay or Nay? Are you widd’us or aggin’us? Aarghh!”
So, yes, agreed, beasts we be at root. That’s one half-truth.
The way out of our present quandary? Another half-truth may be as Whitehead proposes, see link you may find worth a passing read: Civilization [coordinated monkeys] needs a Great [monkey] Hero with a Great [monkey] Idea to unify into fruitful desirable action — vs. Trump vs. Maddow vs. Hannity sure ain’t fillin’ those Civilizational Hero shoes right now.
Ah! The reductions needed when besmirching our thinking down in the muds of real-time politics! But the link examines that/how we did manage to almost entirely rid ourselves of chattel slavery quite recently.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.hsu.edu/academicforum/2001-2002/2001-2AFWHITEHEAD.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwjp3JXd0uvSAhXprlQKHa-_BSQQFggaMAA&usg=AFQjCNEV7KSH2-egYOiCTfiyvby4FttXDQ
Let me know if link works. I’m working with an unfamiliar new platform.
Karl Zimmerman,
Regarding your point on why left-wing, humanities academics have gone so radical, a similar socioeconomic analysis can be made for young undergrad SJWs. Those youth are also predominantly humanities/social science majors, of merely moderately high intelligence, who have perceived correctly the job market will never value them as much as it values STEM majors/high g personalities while their loans weigh more every year, and that they face a best an anxious, uncertain economic future once they graduate. Thus they lash out in proxy ways against the corrupt establishment via the SJW handbook to improve their self esteem.
I agree to an extent, although with the exception of certain areas like “trigger warnings” I think that the more knowledgeable professors and graduate students basically set the tone and agenda for undergrads. I came up from an undergraduate experience like this too, and the way it typically works for this group is they have no plans for adulthood until senior year, then freak out and apply for graduate school because they know they’re “good” at school (meaning they’re handed A’s for the majority of their work no matter the quality). Then they get stuck in the sunk cost fallacy mindset, which if taken to it’s logical conclusion usually results in impoverished academic workers on adjunct faculty salaries.
I do think you’re wrong about STEM-envy though. In my experience the root of this trap is not a perceived lack of ability, but a lack of desire. Most undergrads who go this route absolutely do not want to “sell out” – meaning get some random corporate job as a career once they graduate. They’ll take regular jobs to bide time, but the idea of being part of the capitalist structure as their permanent “adult job” is abhorrent – either due to their politics, or due to a simple dislike of the idea of following in their parents footsteps and making compromises. I’m not too keenly aware of how it works in other countries, but I can’t help but feel this dysfunction wouldn’t be as great in cultures where self-worth and identity aren’t so tightly bound to what you do for a living.
we will bury you.