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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
Published in General
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.
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.
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.
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.”
anonymous, 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.
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?
Dr. Rahe, please, please, please do not underestimate the influence you and your colleagues have at Hillsdale. We who support you and the College do so because Hillsdale is one of the last, best hopes of higher education, and the Republic of the USA. We all totally believe in what you, Dr. Arnn, and everyone at Hillsdale are doing, and teaching. Even we who do not have children embrace the respect for life and the origins of life that Hillsdale teaches. We need you all to be wholly in the moment, and engaged in the fight we all are in against all the forces of darkness. I am the same age as you are (and can’t get the Beatles’ song When I’m 64 out of my head), and I have just recently discovered what the really important things of life really are. We are with you, always.
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.
I don’t pretend to have a working hypothesis as to what was the first replicator, but I know a man who does. For a novel discussion, I would recommend Seven Clues to the Origin of Life by Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith.
Hi GCM. Okay, there’s at least one interested person, so I’ll take that as a signal to lay things out in coarse detail:
Penrose gives a detailed mathematical demonstration that the human mind is not a machine in a strict sense: its behavior cannot be mimicked by an algorithm (he shows this — the argument is very clever, piggybacking on the proof of Godel’s second Incompleteness theorem). Then he demonstrates that this means that both (current) quantum physics and General relativity theory are inadequate to explain consciousness.
Then, an Anthropic Principle: a theory of the universe is not complete unless it explains, in principle, human consciousness. So he inverts the question: what would a theory look like, that did so?
It must describe a universe embodying noncomputational processes (which neither quantum nor relativistic physics do).
As it happens, Penrose has an idea that will do just that. He focusses on how wave forms collapse in Quantum theory — so-called Reduction. He proposes that, contra the dominant view, Reduction is not a mathematical artifact, but a real phenomenon. And advances two types: time-like, and space-like, showing how to calculate with them. Space-like reduction is non-computational.
Thank you. Your summary has motivated me to re-read the Blackmore/Penrose interview in which he discusses this very item in detail.
I shouldn’t presume such men to hold final court in such matters (if that’s what you imply; forgive me if I misread you), as I think the whole problem is the fallacy of scientists privileging science to make philosophic or metaphysical claims.
But Rosenberg is indeed interesting: he’s fairly ruthlessly consistent. He sees the implications of scientism. He thus embraces eliminative materialism. His essay (you obviously know it; I refer to it here for others: “The Disenchanted Naturalist’s Guide to Reality”) was actually more ruthless/consistent than the book of which the essay was a prelude. In the essay he simply denies the existence of human desires.
But then any man who natters on about “nice nihilism” doesn’t have a clue about nihilism. Rosenberg, then, is the precise instantiation of Nietzsche’s jackass worshipper (Book IV, Zarathustra).
Rosenberg’s Duke colleague Michael Gillespie — a formidable scholar of German philosophy and a Straussian — wrote a fine little piece on Rosenberg, followed by discussion between Straussians and analytic philosophers (a rare combo): http://bit.ly/YcfA8b
I just want to thank you for a huge “Aha!” moment with this. I think you have explained why, under all of it, they’re so bloody hostile all the time.
Now back to the more high-minded discussion.
Rosenberg’s Duke colleague Michael Gillespie — a formidable scholar of German philosophy and a Straussian — wrote a fine little piece on Rosenberg, followed by discussion between Straussians and analytic philosophers (a rare combo): http://bit.ly/YcfA8b ·0 minutes ago
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Lux, thanks for this link. May I ask where it comes from? Was there a conference?
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 ?
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.
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. ·
That descent is already well underway. The barbarians and charlatans control the ivory tower and are looting it.
Rosenberg’s Duke colleague Michael Gillespie — a formidable scholar of German philosophy and a Straussian — wrote a fine little piece on Rosenberg, followed by discussion between Straussians and analytic philosophers (a rare combo): http://bit.ly/YcfA8b ·0 minutes ago
Lux, thanks for this link. May I ask where it comes from? Was there a conference?
It was an online conference held by On the Human, some outfit affiliated with Duke. I saved the discussion to my Google Docs, thinking its availability to the public might be ephemeral. Original here: http://onthehuman.org/2010/01/science-and-the-humanities/
Gillespie made an initial response, also well worth reading, in the combox discussion to Rosenberg’s original essay:
http://onthehuman.org/2009/11/the-disenchanted-naturalists-guide-to-reality/
Then, an Anthropic Principle: a theory of the universe is not complete unless it explains, in principle, human consciousness. So he inverts the question: what would a theory look like, that did so?
It must describe a universe embodying noncomputational processes.
As it happens, Penrose has an idea that will do just that. He focusses on how wave forms collapse in Quantum theory — so-called Reduction. He proposes that, contra the dominant view, Reduction is not a mathematical artifact, but a real phenomenon. And advances two types: time-like, and space-like, showing how to calculate with them. Space-like reduction is non-computational.
Fascinating. When I return from bobbing about here on the big blue wet thing, I’ll have to look more closely at Penrose’s work.
Here’s Lavaux’s 50-year history of the American university:
1. After WWII, the feds created a huge pool of money to finance higher education; attracting students with promises of lucrative jobs in return for vellum scraps provided universities access to this pool of cash.
2. Over the years the feds continued to grow the money pool; now it is an ocean.
3. Money attracts hucksters like excrement attracts flies, and there is no shortage of hucksters in American universities.
4. The Hucksters realized that they could swim in the federal money ocean by expanding the liberal arts menu with a new “perspective” on each traditional and new menu item, thus History became “Western Civilization from the Feminist Perspective”, which engendered “Feminist Studies”, etc.
5. The American university thus inflated burst the boundaries of Truth and real utility to the nation, cranking out worthless vellum scraps at $100 K a pop held by unemployable debtors guaranteed by a bankrupt government. Can you say “Bubble”?.
6. Realizing their golden age was ending, the Hucksters savagely attacked all who publicly declaimed their scam; they also bought politicians who promised to perpetuate them.
And that’s where we’re at now.
Regarding the history of the American universities, don’t overlook the multiple ways they were pushed to the left during the 1960s. In particular there was a period of six years in which enrollment in college could provide a draft deferment. This got a lot of guys into grad school who did not have any real vocation for their subject but who were primarily motivated by desire to avoid Vietnam. Once in grad school, if you are good at sucking up to your professors then you are halfway to a professorship and tenure, and to helping ruin the field you have chosen. (In the same way seminaries swelled with pastoral candidates who had no true call, which contributed to the mass wreckage in many parts of American Christendom.)
The universities were entirely happy to support these guys, since it increased their enrollment totals and kept the cash flowing and provided opportunities for many deans and department heads to build up their little Napoleonic fiefdoms.