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A little while ago I received an email commenting on my writing ability. It contained phrases like: “you’d better pull your socks up”; “very, very disappointing”; and “you indulge in appalling syntax”. So it wasn’t exactly fan mail. But no big deal, if you put stuff out in the public domain, then you expect to get shot at.

Here’s another one, this time about one of the activities which are featured at TPM Online:

I find your questions biased, short-sighted and bigoted; and I find your test without merit or foundation… which makes you bass and without spiritual wisdom. Sad.

Okay, so that one’s a little odd, especially the bit about the freshwater fish, but there’s not much harm there. However, what about this little missive: 

…your litany of frauds and charlatans does not include a noble exception, the one modern philosopher who was neither a fraud nor a charlatan, but who exposed your own pretentious, social-climbing bullshit – Ayn Rand. So wallow in your pseudo-respectability and slash your wrists accordingly…You’re a pathetic wanker who deserves to perish from a surfeit of self-indulgent whim-worship. Do it, with my blessing, and that of any half-decent human thinker who miraculously remains alive on this earth in spite of your demeaning of philosophy and life.

This email was sent to me by the editor of an online journal promoting “freedom”, who was upset, as far as I can tell, by the failure of TPM to include any of the works of Ayn Rand in its shortlist of the greatest writings of Western philosophy. What makes it interesting is that it is indicative of a certain disregard for those we interact with on the internet. It is the disregard, evident to varying degrees in all the emails cited above, of treating people as though they don’t automatically warrant the respect which would nearly always be forthcoming in a non-virtual context. Consider, for example, that it is almost impossible to imagine saying the kinds of things contained in these emails to a stranger in a face-to-face situation. Yet probably many of us will be able to imagine including at least some of them in an email.

Part of the explanation for this difference has to do with some fairly obvious stuff about email communication. First, email is pretty much instantaneous. Therefore, it is just more likely with email that things will be said in haste which would not have been said had more time been taken for reflection. Second, the internet facilitates relatively anonymous communication. Consequently, in our virtual lives, we’re more likely to be interacting with people we’ve never met, we’re never going to meet, and whom we don’t know anything about. In such a situation, there is more chance that we will treat them as though they are not quite fully human subjects. And third, internet communication involves geographical distance, which removes many of the barriers to aggressive behaviour which exist in the non-virtual world. Not least, you’re not likely to get hit for sending someone an abusive email, whereas this is certainly a possible response to abuse in a face-to-face situation.

However, though these factors are all significant, they are only part of the story. What is also important is that the conventions which have grown up around email usage are much more loose than is the case with other forms of written communication. For example, when writing an email, many people think nothing of dispensing with: a salutation; capital letters; complete sentences; complimentary closing phrase; and even – though it is generally considered to be bad netiquette – correct spelling. The advantage of this informality is primarily speed, but it is an advantage often bought at the expense of a concern for the person who has to read the email.

The conventions of email are based on an assumption that what is important in communication is overwhelmingly the content of the message, not the perceptions and feelings of the person who receives it. This is very different from letter writing, for example, where many of the traditional stylistic conventions, some of which are still in common usage, are employed precisely to communicate a certain kind of, albeit ritualistic, regard for the recipient of the letter. To fail to include a salutation in a letter, for example, will, more often than not, be taken to indicate a lack of respect.

The claim here is not that people never show concern for each other when they exchange emails because clearly they do. It is rather that there is no requirement that they should show such concern; that day to day, in many of the short and perfunctory emails which people send, they do not show such concern; and that as a result there is a tendency for them to pay insufficient regard to how their emails are likely to be received when the content of their message suggests that such regard is required (as, for example, when they send a rude or abusive email). Or to put this another way, the informality and speed of email communication will in certain circumstances subvert what is arguably a moral requirement to treat those with whom we interact as fully human subjects.

Are philosophers immune to this tendency? Unfortunately not. Check out, for example, some of the emails about the Israel/Palestine conflict in the archive of philos-l (http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/philos-l.html), the premier mailing list for UK philosophers. You won’t learn anything much about the Middle East conflict, but you’ll find plenty of evidence of philosophers behaving badly in their virtual lives.

Other Examples

Louis Proyect, Unrepentent Marxist, calls me a “Neocon scumbag” and “Creepy Crawly” (the mind boggles!).

Daniel Davies calls me a liar (in effect) (not email, though).

In both these instances, Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels tells the story.

Over at Socialist Disunity, Andy Newman has posted George Galloway claiming almost 2000 people for his web cast to Toronto last night. Well, when I had a look, it didn’t seem anything like that number, and the Toronto Star is reporting ‘more than 600’. Hmmm!

There are a number of candidates for the single most powerful idea in the history of the sciences and humanities. Nicolaus Copernicus’s heliocentric view of the Earth’s place in the universe is certainly one, as is Einstein’s theory of relativity. However, for the breadth of its application, and the impact that it had on modern civilisation, it would be hard to beat Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

Until Darwin’s The Origin of the Species was published in 1859, it was hard to see how the natural world could have been anything other than designed. The significant point here is its complexity. As William Paley famously argued, it seems almost unimaginable that something as complex and highly wrought as the human eye could possibly have emerged purely by natural mechanisms. The eye just appears too precisely specified to be anything other than the creation of an intelligent entity (by which just about everybody means God). Darwin’s importance is that he showed exactly how this kind of “design” could have occurred without a designer.

Darwin was influenced by Thomas Malthus’s famous essay on population, in which Malthus argued that the capacity of a population to sustain itself tends not to keep up with its rate of growth. The lesson that Darwin took from this is that the living world is necessarily thoroughly competitive (“red in tooth and claw”, as one of his disciples later put it). Life is characterised by a struggle for existence – or, more exactly, for reproduction – since any species will tend to produce more individuals than can be sustained. It was this insight that led Darwin to his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Every species manifests some variation in the inherited traits of its members. Take foxes, for example: some foxes will be able to run faster than other foxes; some will have better eyesight, better hearing, sharper teeth, and better camouflage. Variations that give an individual a competitive advantage (e.g., sharper teeth and better eyesight) will tend to be passed on more often than variations that put an individual at a disadvantage (e.g., a birthmark that makes its bearer a sitting target). Therefore, given enough time, helpful variations will come to be much more numerous than less helpful variations. So long as there are always new variations for natural selection to operate upon, then evolution will carry on in this way indefinitely.

This is a hugely powerful idea. It answers Paley’s challenge to explain how the eye could have emerged naturalistically: by means of tiny, incremental steps, each one beneficial in its own right. In Darwin’s day, the mechanisms of inheritance, and the source of the variations upon which natural selection works, were not known. It was only at the turn of the twentieth century, with the rediscovery of the ideas of Gregor Mendel, that this became clearer. One hundred years later, we now know that genes are the units of inheritance; and that, every so often, they mutate to produce new characteristics in an organism, which are then subject to Darwinian selection.

Darwin’s importance simply cannot be overstated. He was the founder of modern biology; the person who, in Huxley’s phrase, put the world of life into the domain of natural law.

Benjamin Libet, eat your heart out.

Fluffy Bunny

Human beings are very good at believing things to be true just because they want them to be true. In some ways, this is a useful ability. For example, the belief that one will beat a normally deadly cancer is helpful if one is undergoing the painful chemotherapy required to give one any chance of survival at all. However, when it comes to our ability to discern the truth about the world, to assess evidence and argument according to the dictates of rational enquiry, our tendency to engage in wishful thinking is no help whatsoever.

Consider, for example, the part that it plays in the currently high profile debate over animal rights and vivisection. It is perfectly possible to object to animal experimentation on moral grounds: for example, one might hold that all life is sacred and that it should always be preserved. However, it is much more difficult to argue that animal experimentation is unnecessary because it has no scientific benefit. Colin Blakemore, one time head of the MRC (Medical Research Council), points out that:

Every drug, every form of advanced surgery, nearly every antibiotic, nearly every vaccine – the development of them all has at some stage involved animal testing… every pain killer; every treatment for heart disease, kidney disease and cancer; chemotherapy; radiotherapy; surgical techniques; bypass surgery; open heart surgery – you name it, animals were involved in the research.

Yet the line taken by many anti-vivisectionists is precisely that animal research has little, if any, medical benefit. For example, the section on “Bad Science” on the SPEAK web site is headed up with the claim that “Using primates kills people”. Further reading reveals that 70,000 people in England each year are killed or disabled by drugs that have been tested on animals.

It is easy enough to demolish this kind of argument: whilst it is true that whenever a drug is associated with a bad outcome, then animal testing will have been part of its development (because all drugs are tested on animals), it is also true: that we judge that the risks associated with powerful drugs are worth it; that we would be worse off in terms of deaths and injuries had there been no animal testing; and that we are overwhelmingly better off in general as a result of drugs that have been developed using vivisection.

Perhaps what is more interesting than the details of the (risible) arguments employed by anti-vivisectionists is the neat correspondence they set up between the wished-for and the real; that is, between the almost visceral desire for a world where there is no animal experimentation, and the claim that by happy coincidence our world does not reward animal experimentation. This kind of wishful thinking short-circuits the necessity to engage in messy and complicated arguments about morality and the relative value of human and animal life. It constitutes both intellectual and moral cowardice.

There is an interesting contrast here with the position of the vivisectionists. They too desire a world without animal experimentation, but recognise that it is not available unless we forego benefits to medical research. Here’s Blakemore again:

If there are alternatives [to animal research], let’s see them. We want them. I don’t know of a single person who uses animals in their research, who wouldn’t rather use an alternative.

It isn’t just anti-vivisectionists who engage in wishful thinking, of course. In fact, wishful thinking is ubiquitous, which is something we need to worry about if we are interested in finding out the truth about things. Consider, for example, that the recent history of the social sciences is replete with examples of an almost childish desire to reconstruct the world through the filter of political, ideological and moral commitments. Marxist theorists spent a large part of the twentieth century falling over each other trying to explain why revolution hadn’t occurred quite yet; sociologists, desperate to detach human behaviour from biology, spent their time jumping through hoops in order to explain away data that suggested that at least some human attributes and behaviour are inherited; and anthropologists, even today, in the name of resisting Western hegemony, happily grant epistemological privilege to local and situated “knowledges”.

Even people ostensibly committed to rational enquiry fall into the trap of wishful thinking. It ill behoves humanists, self-appointed defenders of reason par excellence, to sneer at the likes of Philip Gosse for supposing that the fossil record has been planted by God, whilst they remain committed to the view that it will be possible to reconcile the human-centred aspects of humanism with what science teaches us about the natural world and our place in it. The jury is still out on whether things such as free will, moral responsibility and the idea of human progress will survive the increases in knowledge that science brings. To suppose otherwise is to engage in wishful thinking. It might be more subtle than the kind engaged in by anti-vivisectionists or Philip Gosse style Biblical literalists, and perhaps it will be passed off as understandable optimism, but it no less wishful thinking for that. It is just another example of the way in which ideological, moral and political commitments tend to infect the judgements that we make about the world.

Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroes, is perhaps the most important of the Islamic philosophers who emerged during the golden era of intellectual flourishing that occurred in the Muslim world in the several hundred years around the turn of the first millennium. His life and work reflected tensions that were endemic in Islamic society at the time. Religious orthodoxy was highly valued, and often enforced at the pain of death. But the Muslim world also boasted a rich intellectual tradition, rooted mainly in a Neoplatonism that valued rational enquiry and free thought. It was in this context that Ibn Rushd fought the vigorous rearguard defence of philosophy against the accusation that it encouraged heresy and that it was un-Islamic that he is most noted for today.

Ibn Rushd was born in 1126CE in Cordova, Spain, into a well-connected family of jurists and theologians. His grandfather and father both held the office of chief judge (qadi) of Cordova under the then ruling Almoravids dynasty (a position which Averroes would later occupy). His education, though in a sense orthodox for a Muslim male, was by our standards eclectic: Qur’anic exegesis, the Hadith, jurisprudence (Fiqh), scholastic philosophy, mathematics and linguistics were all studied, and became part of his intellectual armory. Moreover, under the tutelage of Abu Jafar Harun, Ibn Rushd attained a proficiency in medicine, which eventually enabled him to become the royal physician to the Almohad caliphs Abu Yaqub Yusuf and Abu Yusuf Yaqub. Indeed, such were his abilities in this field that his book Generalities (Kulliyat) was perhaps the most significant general medical text in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic worlds for several hundred years after his death.

It was Ibn Rushd’s connections within the royal court that led him by happenstance to the most significant body of work of his life. He had been introduced to the caliph, Abu Yaqub, by his mentor Ibn Tufayl, who at that time was the court physician. The story has it that the caliph thoroughly unnerved the young philosopher by asking him whether the heavens were created or not. This seems an innocuous enough enquiry, but  it was the kind of question that could get a Muslim philosopher into trouble. The difficulty is that a negative response potentially places a limit on the power of God, whereas an affirmative response runs the danger of anthropomorphising him. The caliph, a keen philosopher himself, spared Ibn Rushd’s blushes by answering his own question, and then engaging in a long discussion of the issues surrounding it. Shortly afterwards, Ibn Rushd received word that the caliph believed the works of Aristotle to be disjointed, rather obscure, and therefore likely to confuse people. The solution was simple – Ibn Rushd should write commentaries on them.

Twenty-six years later, Ibn Rushd completed this task (as far as it was possible). Based on Arabic translations, the commentaries took three different forms. The shortest (Jami) were simple summaries, suitable for anybody who wanted just a flavour of the work. The intermediate commentaries (Talkhis) were appropriate for normal studies. And then there were the Tasfir – detailed analyses of Aristotle’s work, incorporating  Qur’anic concepts, which were suitable for advanced study. Ibn Rushd did not have access to Aristotle’s Politics, so instead he commented on Plato’s Republic, arguing that the original Islamic community was equivalent to Plato’s ideal state.

According to Oliver Leaman, a leading scholar of Islamic and Judaic philosophy, the most impressive aspect of these commentaries is that Ibn Rushd was able to resurrect Aristotle’s original arguments by ridding them of the Neoplatonist baggage they had gained over time. His technique was to approach the texts as though they were new, and then to reconstruct their arguments on authentically Aristotelian lines. Leaman argues that although Ibn Rushd was not always successful, and though he was not shy about adding his own comments to the text, his work on Aristotle remains impressive. Certainly his commentaries helped to spark a revival of interest in Aristotle in the Judeo-Christian world, where they retained their influence for several centuries after his death.

Although Ibn Rushd enjoyed the protection of royal patronage, he was not entirely able to avoid the unpleasantness that inevitably occurs when religious orthodoxy runs up against intellectual freedom. In 1195, at the age of seventy, with the Almohad caliph under pressure to do something about  the liberalising tendencies within Islamic society, he was formally exiled from Cordova, his writings were banned, and his books burned. Though quickly back in favour, and allowed to return home, he did not live much longer, and questions about his orthodoxy persisted. Indeed, his influence in the Muslim world quickly declined after his death, as Islam embarked on a path which all but extinguished the sort of intellectual life that bred philosophers as great as al-Farabi (Alpharabius), Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd himself.

The tension between philosophy and religion that characterised this era found perfect expression in the dispute that formed the basis of Ibn Rushd’s most important work of original philosophy, The Incoherence of Incoherence (Tuhafut al-Tuhafut). This is a defence of philosophical reason against its critics. Its specific target was the Islamic theologian and mystic al-Ghazali (Algazel), who had written The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-Falasifa), in which he attacked philosophy, and in particular the work of Ibn Sina, for being self-contradictory and un-Islamic.

Al-Ghazali’s attack was multidimensional – commentators have identified at least seventeen different points of contention – but perhaps the most interesting issues have to do with God as a freely acting agent able to intervene in the world in any way that he chooses. Consider, for example, the question that caliph Abu Yaqub posed to the young Ibn Rushd – are the heavens created? The Islamic philosophers who were the focus of al-Ghazali’s ire had tended to argue that they were not. Ibn Sina’s view, for instance, was “emanationist”: he claimed that the universe was not created ex nihilo at a particular moment in time, but rather that it exists out of necessity, emanating in manifold forms from God’s divine nature. Or to put this differently, God is the divine One, the pure intellect upon which all reality is founded, and to which it is connected by logical relations.

Obviously, this is a highly esoteric conception of God, and to the uninitiated likely it makes little sense, but certainly it didn’t please al-Ghazali. It is easy to see why – it seems to do away with God as a free agent. Al-Ghazali ‘s response to all this was to argue that the Qur’an is quite clear that the universe was created by God. If God is an agent, able to act according to his own will, then it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that he created the world ex nihilio, and that he could eliminate it again should he so choose. In effect, then, al-Ghazali defends a particular conception of divine agency: God is all-powerful, therefore, he can act to create and destroy worlds.

Ibn Rushd’s critique of al-Ghazali’s view of divine agency is exemplary in terms of the kinds of argumentative techniques that he employed. He argued that al-Ghazali goes wrong by mixing up the temporal and the eternal. It is quite reasonable to suppose that temporal beings (i.e., humans)  can decide to embark upon some course of action, then delay doing so, then begin, then stop, and then start again, but it doesn’t work that way for God. Consider, for example, what follows from God’s omniscience and omnipotence: God will always know the best arrangement for the universe, and he will always be able to instantiate it, so it doesn’t make sense to think that he might choose not to instantiate it at a particular moment in time. To put this another way, there is nothing internal nor external to his nature that might lead him to delay the moment of creation. Indeed, it isn’t clear that there will even be different moments in time for God, especially if one thinks that God is present across all times.

Similar kinds of difficulties afflict al-Ghazali’s position if one reflects upon God’s perfection. God is eternal and unchanging. This makes it problematic to suppose that he has desires that he might act upon in the same way that human beings have desires which they act upon. The idea of desire suggests some kind of perturbation in God’s nature, which is then annulled when the desire is fulfilled. But this makes no sense, since it implies a change in God’s nature – and as we have seen God’s nature is eternal and unchanging. It seems to follows then that God’s acts must simply be a manifestation of his nature, and that they are not willed in the same way that human beings will their acts.

It is easy to see why this kind of argument might get an Islamic philosopher into trouble. As al-Ghazali suggested, it does seem to do away with God’s agency – his freedom to choose. Although Ibn Rushd denied this particular criticism, he was aware that there was a general issue about the impact of philosophical arguments on less sophisticated believers. In his work Decisive Treatise (Fasl al-maqal), he argued that it is clear from the Qur’an that there is an obligation to attempt to understand the world through the study of philosophy:

That the Law summons to reflection on beings, and the pursuit of knowledge about them, by the intellect is clear from several verses of the Book of God, Blessed and Exalted, such as the saying of the Exalted, “Reflect, you have vision:” this is textual authority for the obligation to use intellectual reasoning, or a combination of intellectual and legal reasoning. Another example is His saying, “Have they not studied the kingdom of the heavens and the earth, and whatever things God has created?”: this is a text urging the study of the totality of beings.

However, Ibn Rushd did not think that the arguments of philosophers were suitable for general consumption. In particular, where philosophy leads to conclusions that conflict with the apparent meaning of scripture, then it should be kept from the ordinary masses. He was quite clear that there could be no real conflict between philosophical truth and scripture – any disagreement simply meant that an allegorical reading of scripture was required. This had long been accepted as a legitimate way of proceeding by the Muslim community, which meant that al-Ghazali, and the other critics of philosophy, were wrong to claim that philosophers were indulging in unbelief when they questioned doctrines such as the creation of the universe or bodily resurrection. Nevertheless, Ibn Rushd did believe that in order to serve the end of the collective well-being of the Muslim community, it was necessary for teachers to modify their arguments depending on the audience they were addressing. To attempt to teach the ordinary faithful about a higher interpretation of scripture when they do not have the conceptual apparatus to understand it almost inevitably harms their faith, and thereby affects the happiness of the community as a whole. Philosophical enquiry is sanctioned by God, but it requires the kinds of talent and rigorous training that necessarily means it will be suited only to a minority of people.

Ibn Rushd’s philosophical arguments on religious matters were not entirely defensive. He also developed a number of arguments in favour of the existence of God, contending that the fact that the world fits so neatly with the purposes of human beings, and the fact that all living things are clearly the work of a designer, is proof of God’s reality. And, as we have seen, he wrote influentially on non-religious matters. However, even if it ultimately failed, it is for his defence of philosophical reason, which he mounted in the face of considerable opposition, that he is rightly celebrated.

Edmund Burke is acclaimed today as one of the originators of modern political conservatism. In particular, his defence of the virtues of tradition and prejudice in Reflections on the Revolution in France is considered exemplary as a statement of conservative principles. However, there is more to Burke’s philosophy than a simple celebration of the established social order. Not least, it is suffused with a thoroughgoing scepticism about the character and capabilities of human beings, which led him to reject the Enlightenment view that reason can be readily employed to the betterment of mankind. In this sense, Burke’s ideas can be seen as a counterblast against the sort of Enlightenment thinking that was sweeping through Europe towards the end of the 18th century.

Burke was born to a Protestant father and Catholic mother in Ireland in 1729. Raised as a protestant, he excelled at school, passing entrance examinations to Trinity College, Dublin in 1746. After graduating, he moved to London, where he studied law at Temple’s Inn. However, he was more interested in the world of letters than the legal profession, and after the publication of his satirical A Vindication of Natural Society,  and then a year later a philosophical study of aesthetics titled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, he became thoroughly immersed in London literary life (which at that time boasted Samuel Johnson, David Garrick and Oliver Goldsmith amongst its numbers).

Burke’s specifically political career took off after he was elected to the House of Commons in 1765. It was during his nearly thirty years as a parliamentarian that he produced the work that is the bedrock of his reputation  As well as the Reflections, he wrote significant treatises on the American colonies, the India question, Catholic emancipation, the English constitution, and the threat to religion from the new atheism. However, his reputation amongst his contemporaries rested on more than just his written work. He was also a formidable orator and statesman – never quite making it to the top of the greasy pole, but still able to command the attention of the House of Commons right up until three years before his death in 1797.

His conservatism was rooted in a deeply ingrained suspicion of any radical politics that was based on abstract principles derived solely from the operations of reason; or as he put it, on an “insuperable reluctance to destroy any established system of government, upon a theory.” There is a basic idea here that is quite straightforward: Society is complex, and human nature unpredictable; therefore, it is not prudent to mess around with political and social arrangements that have stood the test of time. The reason why this became an issue during the 18th Century was that Enlightenment thinkers were arguing precisely that it was possible to reform society on the basis of a priori conceptions of natural rights, such as liberty and equality.

The Unitarian dissenting minister, Richard Price, for example, whose sermon “On the Love of Our Country” motivated Burke to write the Reflections, greeted the French revolution, which ostensibly instantiated Enlightenment principles, by declaring that he could now “depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.” For Price, salvation here meant “a progressive improvement in human affairs which will terminate in greater degrees of light and virtue and happiness than have yet been known” – the world, he thought, was “outgrowing its evils … anti-Christ falling and the millennium hastening.”

Burke had no truck with the unbounded optimism of this view of the situation in France. In the Reflections, he contrasted the French revolution with the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 where William of Orange marched on London unopposed to replace the Catholic James II. The situation in England required a revolution in order to return government to a condition that was in line with the traditions of which it was a part. The French revolution, in contrast, aimed simply to slough off the past. It was an attempt at a root and branch reconstruction of society on the basis of an abstract philosophy of natural rights. There was no recognition of the importance of tradition, custom and sentiment. It was, Burke argued, bound to end in bloody failure.

Part of Burke’s scepticism about the proposition that a priori rational reflection might successfully be articulated to the service of radical social reform has to do with the central and necessary importance of specific social and historical circumstances. Consider, for example, the claim that liberty is a good thing. On its own, it is almost meaningless:

Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect…Is it because liberty, in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate an highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? (Reflections on the Revolution in France)

Burke’s view was that it was simply too risky to allow natural rights to trump an established system of government. Moreover, the shared traditions, beliefs and habits of a nation, instantiated and passed on through extant institutions, function to secure the benefits that have been hard won by previous generations.

By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of providence, are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world… (Reflections)

Burke’s rejection of Enlightenment talk of natural rights, though, is fuelled by more than just a pragmatic, cautionary sensibility. It is also linked to a particular conception of human nature. The Enlightenment philosophers tended to think that human beings, certainly in the absence of the corrupting effect of modern society, are systematically capable of rationality, fellow-feeling and benevolence. Thus, for example, Rousseau argued that in a state of nature humans are “noble savages”, who live solitary and peaceful existences.

Burke’s view was radically different, having much more in common with Augustine and Hobbes than with the Philosophes. He believed that human beings are fallen, corrupt, and capable of great evil if the civilizing veneer of established institutions is removed. In the absence of the constraints imposed by tradition, prejudice and habit, humans are little more than the “shriveled, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.” Thus:

Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individual, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will be controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power outside of themselves. (Reflections)

Of course, the trouble is that it is all too easy to forfeit the hard won civilising effect of the state and civil society. It cannot be conjured up de novo, and then recreated time and again, simply by an appeal to abstract principles and talk of natural rights. The consequence of thinking that unfettered freedom is freedom in toto is precisely the kind of Jacobin excesses that occurred in the French revolution. In the Reflections, this idea finds its most famous expression in the passage dealing with an attack on Marie Antoinette:

…the queen was first startled by the voice of the sentinel at her door, who cried out to her to save herself by flight – that this was the last proof of fidelity he could give – that they were upon him, and he was dead. Instantly he was cut down. A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with a hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence the persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked… (Reflections)

It might be true then that the lives of men at the end of the 18th century were no longer “nasty, short and brutish”, but it was Burke’s view that one sure way to return them to that state was to tear down the structures of established government in the name of a reassertion of natural rights.

Not surprisingly, the reaction to the publication of Burkes’ Reflections was mixed. The Establishment, it hardly needs to be said, loved it. Radicals were not so keen. Its weakness is obvious: in defending established the status quo, it seems to justify the iniquities that are perpetrated in its name. As Mary Wollstonecraft pointed out, it’s a bit rich getting worked up about the fate of the Queen of France, if you don’t appear to care a jot for the multitude of mothers who cannot afford to feed their babies.

But there is something rather striking about the Reflections that is worth commenting upon: Burke largely got it right about the French revolution. As Conor Cruise O’Brien has pointed out, many people assume that he wrote his polemic after the Jacobin terror had accounted for the deaths of countless thousands of French people. But, in fact, Burke foresaw the “transmigrations, fire and blood”:

…the September Massacres, the Terror, the executions of the King and Queen – those events all lay in the future. And yet there is a sense in which those events are already present in the Reflections. They are present in the sense that the ferocious dynamic which Burke ascribes to the Revolution, even in 1790, became visible to the world through those events of 1792-94. (National Review, Dec 17, 1990)

It is important to remember that Burke was not an unsophisticated thinker. As we have seen, his conservatism was motivated by a distrust of abstract principles, and a belief that it is necessary to pay attention to history and circumstance. This means that his political views are much less predictable than a straightforward understanding of conservatism might suggest. For example, the position he took on the events leading up to the American revolution was a lot more nuanced than might be supposed. He did not think that Britain should adopt an aggressive policy towards the wayward colonists. Rather, in a feted parliamentary speech, he urged that Britain should make concessions in order to secure the loyalty of America. History and experience suggested that force wouldn’t work, so whatever might be felt about the right of Britain to levy unpopular taxes, for example, the only sensible course of action was compromise.

Edmund Burke was not a systematic philosopher (indeed some commentators go so far as to claim that he was not a philosopher at all). Rather, like his contemporary Thomas Paine, he was a political thinker who sought to influence the course of social and political events through his writing. Even if ultimately unsuccessful in this way, it is certainly the case that Burke’s ideas have informed the thoughts of successive generations of political theorists. His arguments against the French revolution now seem a little extreme; but the ideas that motivated them retain their significance, and form part of the armoury of many a conservative thinker.

This essay originally appeared in the Independent newspaper as part of their Great Philosophers series.

During the last week of August 1835, the New York Sun, an American newspaper, serialised an article on its front page, which it claimed had first been published in the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The article started as follows:

[W]e have the happiness of making known to the British public, and hence to the whole civilized world, recent discoveries in Astronomy which will build an imperishable monument to the age in which we live, and confer upon the present generation of the human race a proud distinction through all future time.

These recent discoveries were nothing as mundane as a new planet or star. Rather, the article began by describing the how Sir John Herschel, the eminent English mathematician and astronomer, had developed a new telescope by means of which he was able to see things as clearly in space as it is possible to see them on Earth. Lots of technical detail followed about its construction and deployment, and then came the bombshell: The Moon is teaming with life.

Not just vegetation, though there is plenty of that, including forests, dark red flowers, lichen, and the like. But also many species of animals and birds: bison; mountain-top unicorns; pelicans; white stags; miniature zebra; hut-dwelling, bipedal beavers; and the most spectacular discovery of all, a race of furry, winged men:

We counted three parties of these creatures, of twelve, nine, and fifteen in each, walking erect towards a small wood…They were like human beings, for their wings had now disappeared, and their attitude in walking was both erect and dignified…They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of their shoulders to the calves of their legs.

The New York Sun went on to reveal that Vespertilio-homo, as Herschel had named these creatures, were rational, good tempered, able to engage in conversation, and were capable of producing works of art. Unfortunately, further revelations about the moon and its inhabitants were ruled out after Herschel’s telescope suffered a sudden and terminal breakdown (after it was pointed towards the Sun).

All this was of course an elaborate hoax. It is generally accepted that it was the work of Richard Adams Locke, a reporter working for the Sun at the time, who had been educated at Cambridge University. However, perhaps not surprisingly, it seems that many people were taken in by the story. The Sun’s circulation increased rapidly from about 15,000 people on the morning of the first article to 19,000 on the day that the winged-men were announced (though it should be said that there is some dispute about this).

A journalist later reported that

Yale College was alive with staunch supporters. The literati…looked daily for the arrival of the New York mail with unexampled avidity and implicit faith. It was the absorbing topic of the day. Nobody expressed or entertained a doubt as to the truth of the story. (Cited at the Museum of Hoaxes)

Edgar Allen Poe, it is said, stopped working on a follow-up to his The Unparalleled Adventure Of One Hans Pfaall because he felt he could not match Herschel’s moon discoveries. And a missionary society from Springfield, Massachusetts decided to send a group of missionaries to the moon in order to bring Christianity and civilisation to the Vespertilio.

However, not everybody was so credulous. The New York Commercial Advertiser, for example, said of the hoax that it was ‘well done’, but that it was simply unbelievable that such a telescope could have been constructed, especially without anybody noticing or passing comment on it. And the New York Herald openly accused Locke as being the author of the hoax. The New York Sun, for its part, never publicly admitted that the story was false, saying only that it would have to check with English and Scottish newspapers before coming to that conclusion. Nevertheless, the whole event has gone down in history as the first, and perhaps greatest, American journalistic hoax.

Sir John Herschel, when he first heard of the story, was amused, declaring that his own observations were never that exciting. However, he eventually became irritated by the whole affair. It seems that people who continued to take the story seriously never stopped asking him about it.

We’re breeding a generation of narcissists.

The data produced by this research, though valuable, are not surprising.