The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
When I was an undergraduate at Cornell , then Yale and a graduate student at Oxford, then Yale once again, the American university was an exceedingly lively place in which students were encouraged to explore a diversity of perspectives. The people in charge were, by and large, New Deal liberals -- moderate in manner, open to argument, and distinguished first and foremost by their curiosity. They welcomed into the ranks of their colleagues both those to their left and those to their right -- for they did not regard the university as an instrument for transforming the world. They supposed, instead, that it was a space within which one could spend one's time trying to understand that world. Intellectual sparring partners were, in their opinion, a great boon.
Most of the New Deal liberals that I once knew have passed on. They have been replaced in positions of authority by a generation for whom everything is political. Its motto is "the personal is political and the political is personal." What this means in practice is that the members of this generation tend to regard those at odds with them not as merely wrong and perhaps intriguingly, interestingly wrong but as simply immoral. In the face of an argument or observation that does not sit comfortably with what they believe, they resort to denunciation. The dissenter is labeled a racist or a fascist or something worse, and he is read out of the human race. In this environment, conservatives are no longer welcome. No advertisement states that they need not apply for jobs at certain institutions, but that is nearly always the case.
The key to understanding what has happened is that the new generation has made of the university a political instrument. Its purpose, as they see it, is to help them transform the larger world. Those not on board with the program are interlopers to be demonized and driven out, and the quality of the scholarly work and the teaching they do has no weight. One can write and be widely read. One can be invited to conferences and to give lectures. But, if a job comes open at a major university, one will not even be interviewed. Trust me. I know from long experience.
Every once in a while, however, something happens that shakes things up, and then one sees that things are, in fact, far worse than one ever imagined. Take, for example, the recent furor regarding Thomas Nagel's book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.
Nagel is a distinguished professor of philosophy with an impeccable pedigree. He was born in 1937; did his BA at Cornell, did a B.Phil. at Corpus Christi College, Oxford; and completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1963 under the direction of John Rawls before going on to teach at Berkeley, Princeton, and New York University. He has in the intervening years published a host of books, all of them well-received, and he has won just about every honor reserved for members of his profession. On the 4th of July 2012, when he reached the ripe old age of 75, he was at the very top of the heap. But, thanks to his new book, he is rapidly becoming a pariah. The title is sufficient to explain why.
When Steven Pinker of Harvard turned to Twitter and denounced the book as “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker,” Leon Wieseltier, a throwback to the old days of New Deal liberalism who has been the literary editor of The New Republic for decades, responded:
Here was a signal to the Darwinist dittoheads that a mob needed to be formed. In an earlier book Nagel had dared to complain of “Darwinist imperialism,” though in his scrupulous way he added that “there is really no reason to assume that the only alternative to an evolutionary explanation of everything is a religious one.” He is not, God forbid, a theist. But he went on to warn that “this may not be comforting enough” for the materialist establishment, which may find it impossible to tolerate also “any cosmic order of which mind is an irreducible and non-accidental part.” For the bargain-basement atheism of our day, it is not enough that there be no God: there must be only matter. Now Nagel’s new book fulfills his old warning. A mob is indeed forming, a mob of materialists, of free-thinking inquisitors. “In the present climate of a dominant scientific naturalism, heavily dependent on speculative Darwinian explanations of practically everything, and armed to the teeth against religion,” Nagel calmly writes, “... I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in light of how little we really understand about the world.” This cannot be allowed! And so the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Secular Faith sprang into action. “If there were a philosophical Vatican,” Simon Blackburn declared in the New Statesman, “the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index.” . . .
I understand that nobody is going to burn Nagel’s book or ban it. These inquisitors are just more professors. But he is being denounced not merely for being wrong. He is being denounced also for being heretical. I thought heresy was heroic. I guess it is heroic only when it dissents from a doctrine with which I disagree. Actually, the defense of heresy has nothing to do with its content and everything to do with its right. Tolerance is not a refutation of heresy, but a retirement of the concept. I am not suggesting that there is anything outrageous about the criticism of Nagel’s theory of the explanatory limitations of Darwinism. He aimed to provoke and he provoked. His troublemaking book has sparked the most exciting disputation in many years, because no question is more primary than the question of whether materialism (which Nagel defines as “the view that only the physical world is irreducibly real”) is true or false.
In fact, the question raised by Nagel is a very old question. It accounts for the so-called Socratic turn. The Athenian Socrates began his philosophical career as a would-be scientist. But somewhere along the way he realized that the process physics of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and their successors could not make sense of the greatest mystery of all: the existence of the scientist. Put in simple terms, the reductionist science of the materialists is self-refuting -- for it eventuates in the reduction of the scientist himself to mere matter in motion. It eventuates in a theory that explains in materialist terms why the theory itself is being proposed and thereby subverts any claim it has to be true. Reduce the scientist to a biochemical reaction and you destroy the science.
Nagel has returned to this conundrum with a vengeance. In doing so, he has broken ranks, and he has been relegated to the class of apostates. It is a good thing that he is 75 and not 25. If he were just starting his career, this book would have ended it.
The most vigorous denunciations have come from the ranks of the scientists. Wieseltier reminds us, however, that Nagel's book is not a work of science. It is a work of philosophy. It is, he observes,
entirely typical of the scientistic tyranny in American intellectual life that scientists have been invited to do the work of philosophers. The problem of the limits of science is not a scientific problem. It is also pertinent to note that the history of science is a history of mistakes, and so the dogmatism of scientists is especially rich. A few of Nagel’s scientific critics have been respectful: in The New York Review of Books, H. Allen Orr has the decency to concede that it is not at all obvious how consciousness could have originated out of matter. But he then proceeds to an almost comic evasion. Finally, he says, we must suffice with “the mysteriousness of consciousness.” A Darwinii mysterium tremendum! He then cites Colin McGinn’s entirely unironic suggestion that our “cognitive limitations” may prevent us from grasping the evolution of mind from matter: “even if matter does give rise to mind, we might not be able to understand how.” Students of religion will recognize the dodge—it used to be called fideism, and atheists gleefully ridiculed it; and the expedient suspension of rational argument; and the double standard. What once vitiated godfulness now vindicates godlessness.
The thing that bothers Wieseltier the most, however, is another dimensiont of the attack on Nagel:
The most shabby aspect of the attack on Nagel’s heterodoxy has been its political motive. His book will be “an instrument of mischief,” it will “lend comfort (and sell a lot of copies) to the religious enemies of Darwinism,” and so on. It is bad for the left’s own culture war. Whose side is he on, anyway? Almost taunting the materialist left, which teaches skepticism but not self-skepticism, Nagel, who does not subscribe to intelligent design, describes some of its proponents as “iconoclasts” who “do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met.” I find this delicious, because it defies the prevailing regimentation of opinion and exemplifies a rebellious willingness to go wherever the reasoning mind leads. Cui bono? is not the first question that an intellectual should ask. The provenance of an idea reveals nothing about its veracity. “Accept the truth from whoever utters it,” said the rabbis, those poor benighted souls who had the misfortune to have lived so many centuries before Dennett and Dawkins.
I would like to think that Nagel's debunking of the scientistic orthodoxy now dominant in the academy would usher in a new age of sharp intellectual debate. But nothing that I see in the contemporary university suggests that such a dream is at all plausible. As long as the university is seen as a political instrument, there really are no grounds for hope.
Addendum: See also The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy, Part Two
- Comment (48)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (22)
Comments:
Oct '10
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher, but it seems to me this work brings into stark contrast what this humble engineer believes to be the central puzzle of our existence. Once you have a replicator, it is entirely plausible that it can explore the possibilities of its environment, even as it transforms it (for example, the change in the Earth's atmosphere from reducing to oxidizing due to biological organisms) through the process of variation and selection of evolution.
The central mystery is how that first replicator came to be. The more you know about chemistry, the less plausible it appears that it could have come about by chance. See No Free Lunch and Signature in the Cell for details of how improbable is the spontaneous generation of the first replicator from a primordial soup.
Edited on March 14, 2013 at 2:37amAug '10
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
Dr Rahe,
Lazily I scanned your post, but wanted to cut to the chase, and question why we shouldn't let the system implode ?
Understanding that your job depends on this system , I apologize. I still want to stake my position on the question of why not ? Is higher education irreparably compromised by these ponytails in tweed ?
Studies programs means what exactly ? Redundancy dilutes .
I have a 16 yr old and I am not convinced that college will do her any good. I have paid for the education of her two older siblings, their jobs are totally unrelated to their majors . One of them learned to read well and she benefits from sharpening her analytical skills. The other ,an extrovert, is a salesman in essence, therefore successful.
Whither college ? Aren't the threats of liberal inoculation with minimal promise of employment worse than any employment within the natural skills of the individual ?
Edited on March 14, 2013 at 2:52amJun '10
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
I have nothing to contribute on the substance of Professor Nagel's arguments other than this observation: when the professoriat becomes a lynch mob instead of a dispassionate seeker for truth, we're in bad shape.
Dec '10
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
But the punishment for apostasy isn't just limited to philosophers and intellectuals. It is everywhere the left has taken hold: the judiciary, the media (including news media and entertainment media), and the education establishment from K through post-doc. And for the same reason. The Left turns everything into a political cause.
Judges aren't just there as umpires. They envision their job as putting a thumb on the scale of justice to tip the outcome toward the Left's favored victim groups.
Journalists don't just report (the facts ma'am), they spin the news to favor the Left's position.
Entertainers aren't there to entertain and to reflect the values of the audience. Their mission is to move the audience to the ideological left.
And educators are dedicated to ideological conformity at every level.
I'm not disagreeing with your observations in this case. I'm just saying the totalitarian impulses of the Left appear wherever the Left dominates.
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
Western Chauvinist: But the punishment for apostasy isn't just limited to philosophers and intellectuals. It is everywhere the left has taken hold: the judiciary, the media (including news media and entertainment media), and the education establishment from K through post-doc. And for the same reason. The Left turnseverything into a political cause.
Judges aren't just there as umpires. They envision their job as putting a thumb on the scale of justice to tip the outcome toward the Left's favored victim groups.
Journalists don't just report (the facts ma'am), they spin the news to favor the Left's position.
Entertainers aren't there to entertain and to reflect the values of the audience. Their mission is to move the audience to the ideological left.
And educators are dedicated to ideological conformity at every level.
I'm not disagreeing with your observations in this case. I'm just saying the totalitarian impulses of the Left appear whereverthe Left dominates. · 28 minutes ago
All too true. Alas.
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
flownover: Dr Rahe,
Lazily I scanned your post, but wanted to cut to the chase, and question why we shouldn't let the system implode ?
Understanding that your job depends on this system , I apologize. I still want to stake my position on the question of why not ? Is higher education irreparably compromised by these ponytails in tweed ?
Edited 32 minutes ago
We are letting the system implode, and I am 64. So I no longer have a dog in the fight.
Hillsdale to be fair is in a time warp. I live in yesteryear.
Mar '12
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
"Nothing that I see in the contemporary university suggests that such a dream is at all plausible. As long as the university is seen as a political instrument, there really are no grounds for hope."
Perhaps. But orthodoxies tend to fail just when them seem to be invincible. The contradictions in the Progressive mind may very well be about to break it apart.
Mar '12
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
P.S. In Paris, John Adams recorded this bit of wisdom by Franklin: "Orthodoxy is my doxy. Heterodoxy is your doxy."
Feb '13
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
Paul A. Rahe
flownover: Dr Rahe,
Lazily I scanned your post, but wanted to cut to the chase, and question why we shouldn't let the system implode ?
Understanding that your job depends on this system , I apologize. I still want to stake my position on the question of why not ? Is higher education irreparably compromised by these ponytails in tweed ?
Edited 32 minutes ago
We are letting the system implode, and I am 64. So I no longer have a dog in the fight.
Hillsdale to be fair is in a time warp. I live in yesteryear. · 3 minutes ago
If all the embers go out, we risk descending into an age of barbarism -- an age where we never look up, an age where we admire nothing high, an age where self-satisfaction is mandatory. The system is surely imploding, but I was taken aback to read Professor Rahe's comment that he does not have a dog in this fight. We all have a dog in this fight. We can strive to keep the embers alive, however faint they may be.
Feb '11
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
This review: http://www.thenation.com/article/170334/do-you-only-have-brain-thomas-nagel?page=0,0
from the Nation was cited above as evidence that most of the criticism of Nagel is illegitimate in some way. The review is written by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg. The review makes a serious attempt to engage with and respond to the arguments Nagel puts forward. It doesn’t seem to me to be a review written by the enforcers of an ideology.
At the end, they do in fact use the phrase “an instrument of mischief.” But they are referring to the book’s subtitle. They think the book’s subtitle misrepresents its contents. Leiter and Weisberg seem to think that the subtitle of the book suggests (even if it doesn’t literally say) that Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection is false. And Nagel doesn’t even try to argue for that claim.
In general, I’m a big fan of teleological judgments, and even of situating more of our thought in a theological context. So maybe I should be outraged by the Nation review in question. But I’m having a hard time finding anything sinister.
Nov '12
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
I read Allen Orr's article in detail when it first appeared. It is, as Wieseltier suggests, a courteous analysis of Nagel's book by a scientist (Orr is a professor of biology at the University of Rochester) and I highly recommend it, although it is quite long. Wieseltier focuses on a small part of Orr's article and, in my opinion, misunderstands it. However, whatever one makes of Wieseltier's analysis, it's only in respect of a small part of one section of the article which runs to five parts. For me, the most interesting discussion is where Orr talks about Nagel's teleological arguments and earlier where he questions Nagel's analysis of modern evolutionary theory. Orr is the only scientist cited by Wieseltier, and all the other reviews that I have read were by philosophers. I have been unable to find any other reviews by biologists or biologist/philosophers such as Richard Dawkins, Massimo Pigliucci or Alex Rosenberg which suggests to me that biologists are either unaware of the book or are not sufficiently interested in it to write anything beyond a tweet or two.
Dec '10
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
One of the ironies of it all, the same 1960's radicals who have enslaved the modern college campuses are the students who started the free speech movement at Berkley ...
Nov '10
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
Steven Pinker and "shoddy reasoning." Hmm. Reminds me something:
The university as you experienced it, Dr. Rahe, seems to have been its golden age, or tail-end thereof. What is taught today is simply dogmatic skepticism. It is not skepticism proper. Liberals still cling to the belief that Progress is still somehow a meaningful category of human thought, i.e., that somehow History is teleological (the implicit sentiment of Pinker's Better Angels book). Conservatives have no reason to exist.
Just so happens I was watching Mansfield the other night on YouTube, hosting a talk last month by...Pinker.
Mansfield even puts a question to Pinker about thymos or honor -- essentially trying to get Pinker to see that his whole approach is simply instrumental reasoning -- but Mansfield didn't press things much further than. I wish he had.
(I would provide a link but hyperlinking seems not to work on Ricochet these days- very annoying!).
Nov '10
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
On the matter of how consciousness arises, none of the voices in this tale appear to acknowledge the existence of a very good -- though as yet unproven -- proposal for a framework: the Penrose-Hameroff proposal.
Hameroff is a mere researcher in anaesthesiology, seemingly obscure and, frankly, a little odd. Yet he is no slouch in the matter of the biological substrates of consciousness, and he has contributed significantly to what began as speculation on the part of Penrose, who had a bright idea but lacked the knowledge of cortical physiology to work out how it connects to the brain.
If there is interest I'll say a bit about the proposal, but you can also look it up. I suppose it's "good enough" for comment-field banter that Penrose' own pertinent credentials are impeccable, so I'll lay out a bit here.
Rouse-Ball professor of Mathematics at Oxford
Mentor of Stephen Hawking, with whom he shares the Wolf prize in physics
Author of numerous bestsellers and technical works in Mathematics, physics, cosmology and the science of consciousness
Pre-eminent in cosmology, and developer of a serious potential GUT: twistor theory.
May '10
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
.
Edited on March 14, 2013 at 3:53amFeb '11
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
When I was an undergraduate, roughly a decade ago, I took some philosophy courses from two philosophers, who are well-known for their defense of abortion. (Neither was Peter Singer.)
At the time, I did not know this. I wrote a paper for one of them with (effectively) a pro-life conclusion, and I got an A on that paper. I knew one of them was an atheist only because I was curious enough to look up some of his work online. Later, I learned about their more radical philosophical positions. Support for infanticide is not a position I have any respect for. But the very same people who published arguments for such views also taught me how to think clearly enough to articulate why.
Nov '12
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
This is a fascinating topic, and if anybody wants to read a primer (of sorts), I would recommend Susan Blackmore's "Conversations on Consciousness". The book consists of a set of 20 one-on-one interviews made over a period of several years by Blackmore with some of the leading lights in research into consciousness (philosophers, neuroscientists and others) including David Chalmers, Patricia and Paul Churchland, Francis Crick, Daniel Dennett, Stuart Hameroff, Christof Koch, Roger Penrose and John Searle. The book is now a little dated, but I found it to be a fascinating introduction to a rapidly growing field of research.
Nov '10
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
Paul A. Rahe
We are letting the system implode, and I am 64. So I no longer have a dog in the fight.
Hillsdale to be fair is in a time warp. I live in yesteryear. · 26 minutes ago
Paul you, Nagel, Penrose, Orlando Bloom, me, and an army of academics who have either moved on to the great tweed pasture or will one day soon, still have our minds and voices, and can at minimum leave the battle in a blaze of glory. You may believe you have no dog in the fight but I propose that, rather, you have nothing to lose. If you believe you won't be in the battle much longer (I know of your health issues, but who can say what the future holds?) then I urge you to consider blowing your wad in a glorious salvo upon the arrogators of academe. Aim true and send your missiles home; make it a good parting shot. I don't know what difference Bloom made directly with his book, but look at the younger soldiers he inspired. And now Nagel. I'll follow soon enough, and hope then to have ammo worth expending.
Mar '11
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
I'd forgotten how much I enjoy Wieseltier's writing. I can't decide which I like better: "He's not, God forbid, a theist"or "free-thinking inquisitors."
John Walker, your view matches my own. In order for the replicator to explore its environment, it not only needs to perceive it, but to collate those perceptions, and to detect the patterns therein. Then it needs to predict what further patterns it might find, and either find those patterns or be able to adjust its understanding to compensate for what is found.
I can conceive of random chance getting one from amoeba to australopithecus. Getting from australopithecus to astrophysicist is a far greater leap.
Nov '12
Re: The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy
R. Craigen:
Pre-eminent in cosmology, and developer of a serious potential GUT: twistor theory.
The first part of your sentence is certainly true. I had the privilege of hearing Penrose lecture when I was an undergraduate at Oxford. However, do you really think that twistor theory could lead to a GUT? The theory was developed in 1967 and, as I understand from reading some of its history, it initially made some good progress, describing part of existing physics but from an entirely different viewpoint. I thought then that for many years not much progress was made until 2003 when Ed Witten formed a connection to string theory. That whole program has been plodding on for a number of years, but where is it now in terms of producing a GUT?