Evolutionary Philosophy

Review of “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari (3/5)

10/15/2025

I’m back now for part three of my detailed review of Sapiens. As a reminder, the book is subdivided into these main sections:

Part One: The Cognitive Revolution
Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution
Part Three: The Unification of Humankind
Part Four: The Scientific Revolution
Afterword: The Animal that Became a God

I’m roughly following the shape of this outline for my review, so in my first post we started with the emergence of several hominid species appearing a couple of million years ago, and then traced the details of “the Cognitive Revolution” that started about 70,000 years ago, which brought Homo sapiens from a place of relative obscurity to the cusp of global dominance. In part two, I criticized Harari’s unnecessarily pessimistic view of “the Agricultural Revolution” that followed, which led to explosions in humanity’s population and global reach. (Note that the downslides that Harari pointed out about that revolution do unquestionably give us lessons that still need to be learned.) Now, in part three, Harari explores more of what he called “the single question” for understanding human history in the millennia following the Agricultural Revolution—“how did humans organize themselves in mass-cooperation networks?” He covers the seemingly inexorable trend toward unification in human societies and how the cultural phenomena of money, imperialism, and religion have enabled this. The last chapter in Part Three is basically a setup for Part Four and the role of the scientific revolution in this story, so I’ll leave that chapter for the next part of my review. Also, the chapter on religion is a doozy so I want to have plenty of space for that. As before, I’ll share quotes from the 2014 eBook and then react to each chapter along the way.

-------------------------
Part Three: The Unification of Humankind
Chapter 9 The Arrow of History

(p. 181) After the Agricultural Revolution, human societies grew ever larger and more complex, while the imagined constructs sustaining the social order also became more elaborate. Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture’.
(p. 181) During the first half of the twentieth century, scholars taught that every culture was complete and harmonious, possessing an unchanging essence that defined it for all time. … Today, most scholars of culture have concluded that the opposite is true.
(p. 184) does history have a direction? The answer is yes. Over the millennia, small, simple cultures gradually coalesce into bigger and more complex civilizations, so that the world contains fewer and fewer mega-cultures,
(p. 185) break-ups are temporary reversals in an inexorable trend towards unity.
(p. 191) The first millennium BC witnessed the appearance of three potentially universal orders, whose devotees could for the first time imagine the entire world and the entire human race as a single unit governed by a single set of laws. Everyone was ‘us’, at least potentially. There was no longer ‘them’. The first universal order to appear was economic: the monetary order. The second universal order was political: the imperial order. The third universal order was religious: the order of universal religions such as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Merchants, conquerors, and prophets were the first people who managed to transcend the binary evolutionary division, ‘us vs them’, and to foresee the potential unity of humankind.

-------------------------

This story of efforts towards unification are very much in line with evolutionary history. On the home page of my website, under the section “Why Evolutionary Philosophy Matters,” I wrote:

In 1995, John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry published a seminal book about The Major Transitions in Evolution. This book described the eight major transitions that have taken life from its simplest origins of replicating molecules all the way to its current biodiverse web of complex relations. The big takeaway from this book is that each of the 8 major transitions occurred when formerly separate and competitive biological elements figured out new ways to join up and cooperate with one another and thus begin to evolve together.

The most recent major transition was the one from primate societies to human societies via the origin of language. It stands to reason, therefore, that the next great transition will come when the multitude of conflicting and competitive human societies bond together around a single shared worldview.

There are no guarantees that we will make this next major transition. Countless other species have failed to do so. But it’s important to see this as a legitimate goal based on an urge dating back to the origin of life.

-------------------------
Chapter 10 The Scent of Money

(pp. 194-5) Hunter-gatherers had no money. … only a few rare items that could not be found locally – seashells, pigments, obsidian and the like – had to be obtained from strangers. This could usually be done by simple barter … Little of this changed with the onset of the Agricultural Revolution. Most people continued to live in small, intimate communities.
(p. 196) In a barter economy, every day the shoemaker and the apple grower will have to learn anew the relative prices of dozens of commodities. If 100 different commodities are traded in the market, then buyers and sellers will have to know 4,950 different exchange rates. And if 1,000 different commodities are traded, buyers and sellers must juggle 499,500 different exchange rates!
(p. 201) Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance, or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of colored paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted.
(p. 207) Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.
(p. 207) For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance.
(p. 207) Money is based on two universal principles: a. Universal convertibility: with money as an alchemist, you can turn land into loyalty, justice into health, and violence into knowledge. b. Universal trust: with money as a go-between, any two people can cooperate on any project.
(p. 208) When everything is convertible, and when trust depends on anonymous coins and cowry shells, it corrodes local traditions, intimate relations, and human values, replacing them with the cold laws of supply and demand. Human communities and families have always been based on belief in ‘priceless’ things, such as honor, loyalty, morality, and love. These things lie outside the domain of the market, and they shouldn’t be bought or sold for money.

-------------------------

Harari’s emphasis on fictions is again too strong here. It’s not that money-users “trust the figments of their collective imagination.” Rather, we all trust the laws, institutions, and behaviors that support the usage of currency. Those pieces of cooperation are very real and easy to believe in. But I do think it is extremely important to think about what is lost when Harari’s “priceless” items aren’t priced in to the regulation of markets. These externalities must be considered by societies and the governments they organize.

-------------------------
Chapter 11 Imperial Visions

(p. 214) empire has been the world’s most common form of political organization for the last 2,500 years. Most humans during these two and a half millennia have lived in empires. Empire is also a very stable form of government. Most empires have found it alarmingly easy to put down rebellions. In general, they have been toppled only by external invasion or by a split within the ruling elite.
(p. 218) Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘Us’ is people like you and me, who share our language, religion, and customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for ‘them’. We were always distinct from them, and owe them nothing.
(p. 220) Empires have played a decisive part in amalgamating many small cultures into fewer big cultures. Ideas, people, goods and technology spread more easily within the borders of an empire than in a politically fragmented region.
(p. 227) It is tempting to divide history neatly into good guys and bad guys, with all empires among the bad guys. For the vast majority of empires were founded on blood, and maintained their power through oppression and war. Yet most of today’s cultures are based on imperial legacies. If empires are by definition bad, what does that say about us?
(p. 231) 200 states increasingly share the same global problems. Intercontinental ballistic missiles and atom bombs recognize no borders, and no nation can prevent nuclear war by itself. Climate change too threatens the prosperity and survival of all humans, and no government can singlehandedly stop global warming. An even greater challenge is posed by new technologies such as bioengineering and artificial intelligence. As we shall see in the last chapter, these technologies could be used to reengineer not just our weapons and vehicles, but even our bodies and minds. Indeed, they could be used to create completely new types of life forms, and change the future course of evolution. Who will decide what to do with such divine powers of creation? It is unlikely that humankind can deal with these challenges without global cooperation. It remains to be seen how such cooperation could be secured. Perhaps global cooperation can only be secured through violent clashes and the imposition of a new conquering empire. Perhaps humans could find a more peaceful way to unite. For 2,500 years, since Cyrus the Great, numerous empires promised to build a universal political order for the benefit of all humans. They all lied, and they all failed. No empire was truly universal, and no empire really served the benefit of all humans. Will a future empire do better?

-------------------------

Let’s hope so! Our evolutionary urges are directed towards both competition AND cooperation, and the principles of cooperation exist and are now well known. It is up to us, however, to regulate human societies in a way to promote this rather than to allow the strong to dominate the weak to the detriment of all.

-------------------------
Chapter 12 The Law of Religion

(p. 234) Today religion is often considered a source of discrimination, disagreement, and disunion. Yet, in fact, religion has been the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires.
(p. 234) Religion can thus be defined as a system of human laws that is founded on a belief in superhuman laws. This involves two distinct criteria: 1. Religion is an entire system of laws, rather than an isolated custom or belief. … 2. To be considered a religion, the system of laws must claim to be based on superhuman laws rather than on human decisions.
(p. 235) a religion must possess two further qualities. First, it must espouse a universal superhuman order that is true always and everywhere. Second, it must insist on spreading this belief to everyone.
(p. 235) As far as we know, universal and missionary religions began to appear only in the first millennium BC. Their emergence was one of the most important revolutions in history, and made a vital contribution to the unification of humankind
(p. 236) How then to safeguard the fecundity of the flocks? A leading theory about the origin of the gods argues that gods gained importance because they offered a solution to this problem. Gods such as the fertility goddess, the sky god, and the god of medicine took center stage when plants and animals lost their ability to speak, and the gods’ main role was to mediate between humans and the mute plants and animals.
(p. 237) Animists thought that humans were just one of many creatures inhabiting the world. Polytheists, on the other hand, increasingly saw the world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and humans.
(p. 238) The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares, and worries of humans.
(p. 239) once you start dividing up the all-encompassing power of a supreme principle, you’ll inevitably end up with more than one deity. Hence the plurality of gods. The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance.
(p. 240) The only god that the Romans long refused to tolerate was the monotheistic and evangelizing god of the Christians.
(p. 240) In the 300 years from the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians. In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.
(p. 245) Polytheism gave birth not merely to monotheist religions, but also to dualistic ones. Dualistic religions espouse the existence of two opposing powers: good and evil.
(p. 246) monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe—and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.
(p. 249) During the first millennium BC, religions of an altogether new kind began to spread through Afro-Asia. The newcomers, such as Jainism and Buddhism in India, Daoism and Confucianism in China, and Stoicism, Cynicism and Epicureanism in the Mediterranean basin, were characterized by their disregard of gods.
(p. 250) [Siddhartha Gautama] spent six years meditating on the essence, causes, and cures for human anguish. In the end he came to the realization that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behavior patterns of one’s own mind. Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction.
(p. 250) even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify.
(p. 252) craving is replaced by a state of perfect contentment and serenity, known as nirvana (the literal meaning of which is ‘extinguishing the fire’).
(p. 252) This law, known as dharma or dhamma, is seen by Buddhists as a universal law of nature. That ‘suffering arises from craving’ is always and everywhere true, just as in modern physics E always equals mc2.
(p. 254) The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism, and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.
(p. 256) Humanist religions sanctify humanity, or more correctly, Homo sapiens. Humanism is a belief that Homo sapienshas a unique and sacred nature, which is fundamentally different from the nature of all other animals and of all other phenomena. Humanists believe that the unique nature of Homo sapiens is the most important thing in the world, and it determines the meaning of everything that happens in the universe. The supreme good is the good of Homo sapiens. The rest of the world and all other beings exist solely for the benefit of this species.
(p. 256) Humanism has split into three rival sects that fight over the exact definition of ‘humanity’
(p. 257) Today, the most important humanist sect is liberal humanism, which believes that ‘humanity’ is a quality of individual humans, and that the liberty of individuals is therefore sacrosanct.
(p. 257) If we encounter an ethical or political dilemma, we should look inside and listen to our inner voice – the voice of humanity. The chief commandments of liberal humanism are meant to protect the liberty of this inner voice against intrusion or harm. These commandments are collectively known as ‘human rights’.
(p. 257) Even though liberal humanism sanctifies humans, it does not deny the existence of God, and is, in fact, founded on monotheist beliefs. The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual is a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free and eternal individual souls.
(p. 258) Another important sect is socialist humanism. Socialists believe that ‘humanity’ is collective rather than individualistic. They hold as sacred not the inner voice of each individual, but the species Homo sapiens as a whole.
(p. 258) According to socialists, inequality is the worst blasphemy against the sanctity of humanity, because it privileges peripheral qualities of humans over their universal essence.
(p. 258) socialist humanism is built on monotheist foundations. The idea that all humans are equal is a revamped version of the monotheist conviction that all souls are equal before God.
(p. 258) The only humanist sect that has actually broken loose from traditional monotheism is evolutionary humanism, whose most famous representatives were the Nazis. What distinguished the Nazis from other humanist sects was a different definition of ‘humanity’, one deeply influenced by the theory of evolution. In contrast to other humanists, the Nazis believed that humankind is not something universal and eternal, but rather a mutable species that can evolve or degenerate. Man can evolve into superman, or degenerate into a subhuman.
(p. 261) following the logic of Darwinian evolution, they argued that natural selection must be allowed to weed out unfit individuals and leave only the fittest to survive and reproduce
(p. 261) the fittest humans would inevitably drown in a sea of unfit degenerates. Humankind would become less and less fit with each passing generation – which could lead to its extinction.
(p. 261) A 1942 German biology textbook explains in the chapter ‘The Laws of Nature and Mankind’ that the supreme law of nature is that all beings are locked in a remorseless struggle for survival. … the textbook concludes that “These natural laws are incontrovertible; living creatures demonstrate them by their very survival. They are unforgiving. Those who resist them will be wiped out. Biology not only tells us about animals and plants, but also shows us the laws we must follow in our lives, and steels our wills to live and fight according to these laws. The meaning of life is struggle. Woe to him who sins against these laws.”
(p. 262) Then follows a quotation from Mein Kampf: ‘The person who attempts to fight the iron logic of nature thereby fights the principles he must thank for his life as a human being. To fight against nature is to bring about one’s own destruction.’
(p. 263) At the dawn of the third millennium, the future of evolutionary humanism is unclear.

-------------------------

Wow, that stuff about humanism is atrocious and a lot has already been written about it. My philosopher friend and fellow Humanist Andy Norman published an exchange with Harari about this in Free Inquiry. And I commented further on it in my long post “In Defence of Humanism”, which I wrote while I was a trustee of North East Humanists. I will just add here that I think of evolutionary philosophy as a worldview rather than a religion, but I do hope it represents a much better alternative for the future of evolutionary humanism than Harari seems to think is possible.

As for the history of more traditional religions, Harari is right that they have certainly acted as unifying forces for large segments of the world population. However, due to their insistence on owning revealed truths, which also happen to be in conflict with one another, these religions are now intractable barriers to the further coming together of humans. (Unless, of course, one religion wipes out all the other ones in a genocide far worse than the latest attempt.) In evolutionary terms, this means the world’s major religions have become stranded on local peaks in a fitness landscape where there is actually a much higher possibility out there for Homo sapiens and the rest of life. To reach that peak, many will have to come down off their perches and make the trek to a truly unifying vision for the world. I’m not holding my breath for that to happen anytime soon, but I’ll keep working on building that new peak in the hopes that it will attract others eventually.

Next up, another great unifying force for the world—the scientific revolution. I’ll be back soon to cover that in part four of these reviews.

0 Comments

Review of “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari (2/5)

9/18/2025

0 Comments

Hello again. I’m back for part two of my detailed review of Sapiens. In part one, we started with the emergence of several hominid species appearing a couple of million years ago. That was then followed by “the Cognitive Revolution” about 70,000 years ago, which brought Homo sapiens from a place of relative obscurity to the cusp of global dominance. That dominance would be built off the back of “the Agricultural Revolution”, which started about 12,000 years ago and is the topic of part two of Sapiens. But what kind of revolution was this and was it a good thing? Let’s look at the four chapters in this section of the book to learn more. As before, I’ll share quotes from the 2014 eBook and then react to them along the way.

-------------------------
Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution
Chapter 5 History’s Biggest Fraud

(p. 87) For 2.5 million years humans fed themselves by gathering plants and hunting animals that lived and bred without their intervention.
(p. 87) All this changed about 10,000 years ago, when Sapiens began to devote almost all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of a few animal and plant species. From sunrise to sunset humans sowed seeds, watered plants, plucked weeds from the ground, and led sheep to prime pastures. This work, they thought, would provide them with more fruit, grain, and meat. It was a revolution in the way humans lived—the Agricultural Revolution.
(p. 90) The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.
(p. 90) The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice, and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.
(p. 91) Human spines, knees, necks, and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis, and hernias.
(p. 92) Farming societies have, until very recently, relied for the great bulk of their calorie intake on a small variety of domesticated plants. In many areas, they relied on just a single staple, such as wheat, potatoes, or rice. If the rains failed or clouds of locusts arrived or if a fungus infected that staple species, peasants died by the thousands and millions.
(p. 93) It offered nothing for people as individuals. Yet it did bestow something on Homo sapiens as a species. Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially.
(p. 94) The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. … This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
(p. 97) It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan. The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children.
(p. 98) One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally, they reach a point where they can’t live without it.
(p. 100) But there’s another possibility. Maybe it wasn’t the search for an easier life that brought about the transformation. Maybe Sapiens had other aspirations, and were consciously willing to make their lives harder in order to achieve them.
(p. 101) The only way to build Göbekli Tepe was for thousands of foragers belonging to different bands and tribes to cooperate over an extended period of time. Only a sophisticated religious or ideological system could sustain such efforts.
(p. 104) Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness. Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived.
(p. 109) This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.

-------------------------

Ouch. I’ve always found this denigration of the agricultural revolution (and lionization of hunter-gatherer life) to miss the point about everything great that modernity permits. But Harari backs up his judgment with lots of facts about diet, leisure time, and illnesses. For more on this, my friend and author Rob Swigart wrote a fascinating book called Mixed Harvest: Stories from the Human Past that explores this time in human history. It’s a groundbreaking mix of short stories interwoven with scientific facts that provided Rob with inspiration.

Still, I do have hope that all of the progress enabled by more food, more people, and more specialization will one day inarguably lead to better things. We’re in the middle of this living experiment right now and it’s not looking too good in the political landscape these days. Fermi’s paradox also makes us wonder if techno-civilizations can last. But I’m still a long-term optimist about this. Misery is not a necessity for progress. We can do better if we throw off the “elites” who don’t care about others’ misery. Nothing in evolution precludes that and “the arc of the moral universe is long.” We are not doomed to a repugnant conclusion. The wonderful book Small Giants profiled several businesses that “chose to be great instead of big”. Sapiens could do the same. My co-authored paper “Rebuilding the Harm Principle” addressed this in much more detail and is one example of how we could consciously design our society to achieve aspirations other than mere maximalization of profits and populations.

-------------------------
Chapter 6 Building Pyramids

(p. 110) Farming enabled populations to increase so radically and rapidly that no complex agricultural society could ever again sustain itself if it returned to hunting and gathering.
(ppp.113-4) The stress of farming had far-reaching consequences. It was the foundation of large-scale political and social systems. Sadly, the diligent peasants almost never achieved the future economic security they so craved through their hard work in the present. Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants’ surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence.
(p. 114) The mere fact that one can feed a thousand people in the same town or a million people in the same kingdom does not guarantee that they can agree how to divide the land and water, how to settle disputes and conflicts, and how to act in times of drought or war.
(p. 115) The problem at the root of such calamities is that humans evolved for millions of years in small bands of a few dozen individuals. The handful of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms, and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve.
(p. 115) Despite the lack of such biological instincts, during the foraging era, hundreds of people were able to cooperate thanks to their shared myths.
(p. 115) Stories about ancestral spirits and tribal totems were strong enough to enable 500 people to trade seashells, celebrate the odd festival, and join forces to wipe out a Neanderthal band, but no more than that. Mythology, the ancient sociologist would have thought, could not possibly enable millions of strangers to cooperate on a daily basis. But that turned out to be wrong. Myths, it transpired, are stronger than anyone could have imagined.
(p. 116) we mustn’t harbor rosy illusions about ‘mass cooperation networks’ operating in pharaonic Egypt or the Roman Empire. ‘Cooperation’ sounds very altruistic, but is not always voluntary and seldom egalitarian. Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards oppression and exploitation.
(p. 122) Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.
(p. 124) We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.
(p. 126) How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature.
(p. 126) You also educate people thoroughly. From the moment they are born, you constantly remind them of the principles of the imagined order, which are incorporated into anything and everything. They are incorporated into fairy tales, dramas, paintings, songs, etiquette, political propaganda, architecture, recipes, and fashions.
(p. 127) Three main factors prevent people from realizing that the order organizing their lives exists only in their imagination:
(p. 127) a. The imagined order is embedded in the material world.
(p. 127) b. The imagined order shapes our desires.
(p. 131) c. The imagined order is intersubjective.
(p. 132) imagined orders are intersubjective, so in order to change them we must simultaneously change the consciousness of billions of people, which is not easy. A change of such magnitude can be accomplished only with the help of a complex organization, such as a political party, an ideological movement, or a religious cult. However, in order to establish such complex organizations, it’s necessary to convince many strangers to cooperate with one another. And this will happen only if these strangers believe in some shared myths. It follows that in order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.

-------------------------

It may be a historical fact that “Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up”, but it is an evolutionary fact that mass cooperation beats selfish competition in the long run. We don’t need a genetic instinct for mass cooperation to evolve either. We just need special conditions, as identified in the book Prosocial. We Sapiens are already fully equipped to mentally create larger and larger tribes that we identify with and support. The rise in the blink of evolutionary time of cities, regions, nations, and international blocs for which people give their lives is clear evidence of this. We just have to continue this trend to its logical conclusion. Most human cooperation networks may have been geared towards oppression and exploitation, but that is only history, not fate. The principles of equality, fairness, and justice may not have objective validity. (Jeremy Bentham called these natural rights “nonsense on stilts”.) But it is a clearly observable fact that following these principles does improve the lives and well-being of communities who agree to follow them. This fact does not need to be hidden away from the masses via imagined stories. Instead, the worldview of evolutionary philosophy could provide a rational basis for exactly the kind of ideological movement that inspires worldwide, intersubjective agreements for cooperation. We need only to spread the meme that all of life is in this fight against death together. And we can do better collectively than we can in warring tribes.

-------------------------
Chapter 7 Memory Overload

(p. 134) puppies throughout the world have the rules for rough-and-tumble play hard-wired into their genes.
(p. 135) Bees don’t need lawyers, because there is no danger that they might forget or violate the hive constitution. The queen does not cheat the cleaner bees of their food, and they never go on strike demanding higher wages.
(p. 136) evolutionary pressures have adapted the human brain to store immense quantities of botanical, zoological, topographical, and social information.
(p. 138) Alas, the first texts of history contain no philosophical insights, no poetry, legends, laws, or even royal triumphs. They are humdrum economic documents, recording the payment of taxes, the accumulation of debts, and the ownership of property.
(p. 146) The most important impact of script on human history is precisely this: it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world. Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalization and bureaucracy.

-------------------------

Well, that is a sweeping generalization about the impact of human script. I highly doubt that free association and holistic thinking was better before the written word. I would argue that holistic thinking is actually much easier to generate after the invention of abstract terminology and the sweeping views that “immense quantities of information” can give us. Sure, compartmentalization does happen, but even that has driven immense gains in knowledge by providing dedicated areas of specialization to millions and millions of inquisitive researchers. And we can always strive for consilience across these disciplines once they are established.

As for bureaucracy, that gets a bad rap too. Without proper management and incentives, bureaucracies can of course become sclerotic. In fact, my first job after my MBA degree was “making government more efficient” in the FBI Special Advisor Program, which was entirely dedicated to improving bureaucracy. (Long before Elon Musk and DOGE made a mockery of that calling.) But as David Sloan Wilson has written:

“Cooperative social life requires regulation. Regulation comes naturally for small human groups but must be constructed for large human groups. Some forms of regulation will work well and others will work poorly. We can argue at length about smart vs. dumb regulation but the concept of no regulation should be forever laid to rest.”

-------------------------
Chapter 8 There Is No Justice in History

(p. 149) Understanding human history in the millennia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question: how did humans organize themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.
(p. 149) The imagined orders sustaining these networks were neither neutral nor fair. They divided people into make-believe groups, arranged in a hierarchy. The upper levels enjoyed privileges and power, while the lower ones suffered from discrimination and oppression.
(p. 150) it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.
(p. 152) Modern Westerners are taught to scoff at the idea of racial hierarchy. They are shocked by laws prohibiting blacks to live in white neighborhoods, or to study in white schools, or to be treated in white hospitals. But the hierarchy of rich and poor—which mandates that rich people live in separate and more luxurious neighborhoods, study in separate and more prestigious schools, and receive medical treatment in separate and better-equipped facilities—seems perfectly sensible to many Americans and Europeans.
(p. 154) All societies are based on imagined hierarchies, but not necessarily on the same hierarchies. What accounts for the differences?
(p. 158) Separation of the races was maintained by racist legislation and social custom. The result was a self-reinforcing cycle of cause and effect, a vicious circle.
(pp. 160-1) Such vicious circles can go on for centuries and even millennia, perpetuating an imagined hierarchy that sprang from a chance historical occurrence. Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time.
(p. 164) How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others.
(p. 164) A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesize, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other.
(p. 165) evolution has no purpose. Organs have not evolved with a purpose, and the way they are used is in constant flux. There is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago.
(p. 166) Biologically, humans are divided into males and females. A male Homo sapiens has one X chromosome and one Y chromosome; a female Homo sapiens has two Xs. But ‘man’ and ‘woman’ name social, not biological, categories. While in the great majority of cases in most human societies, men are males and women are females, the social terms carry a lot of baggage that has only a tenuous, if any, relationship to the biological terms.
(p. 170) Since most masculine and feminine qualities are cultural rather than biological, no society automatically crowns each male a man, or every female a woman. Nor are these titles laurels that can be rested on once they are acquired.
(p. 172) there is some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood. We do not know what this reason is. There are plenty of theories, none of them convincing.
(p. 177) How did it happen that in the one species whose success depends above all on cooperation, individuals who are supposedly less cooperative (men) control individuals who are supposedly more cooperative (women)? At present, we have no good answer.

-------------------------

These are very good examples to pay attention to, but evolutionary studies have even more to teach us about Harari’s “single question” here. (“How did humans organize themselves in mass-cooperation networks?”) I’ve already written at length about David Sloan Wilson’s organization called Prosocial that is working on answering this and improving such mass-cooperation. See Prosocial (In Theory) and Prosocial (In Practice) for more on that.

Overall, I found this second part of Sapiens to be unnecessarily pessimistic and a bit speculative and uninformed about the ways that cooperation has been achieved. But it did provide a powerful presentation of the dangers of ignoring these lessons (which we still need to learn!). Next time, part three will about the further “unification of humankind”. Since this is a key element of Why Evolutionary Philosophy Matters, I can hardly wait.

0 Comments

Review of “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari (1/5)

9/3/2025

0 Comments

In my last blog post reviewing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, I mentioned that I wanted to review two books that I had read during the research for my recently submitted epistemology paper. While the first one was directly related to that topic, this second book was just one that I have regularly received a lot of questions about and I absolutely had to read and digest. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by the historian Yuval Noah Harari was first published in English in 2014 and was soon a worldwide smash hit. Sapiens was on the NY Times bestseller list for 182 weeks and has been translated into 65 different languages. And it is exactly aligned with the motto on the top of every page of this website: “Contemplating the past. Choosing the destination.” The scholarly reception of Sapiens was not very positive (to say the least!), and I wasn’t really ready to contribute anything substantial to that when Sapiens first came out. But after 400+ blog posts, I have a lot more research behind me now so it’s finally time.

First off, Sapiens is almost 500 pages long and it really does deserve a close reading. There is no way I can cover all of that in one blog post, but luckily (for all of us) the book is divided into four parts, plus a brief afterward:

Part One: The Cognitive Revolution
Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution
Part Three: The Unification of Humankind
Part Four: The Scientific Revolution
Afterword: The Animal that Became a God

The first three parts are just 4 or 5 chapters each, so they will fit nicely into separate blog posts. The final part, however, is comprised of 7 chapters, and I took by far the most notes there. So, I’m going to split that part of Sapiens into two posts where I think there is actually a nice natural break in between two of the chapters. I’ll explain more about that when I get there. For now, I’ll follow my standard review procedure of noting important quotes (in this case from the 2014 eBook) and then reacting to them along the way. Here goes!

-------------------------
Part One: The Cognitive Revolution
Chapter 1 An Animal of No Significance

(p.3) About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history. Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different. This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms.
(p. 5) Our nearest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.
(p. 8) from about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species.
(p. 9) Humans have extraordinarily large brains compared to other animals. Mammals weighing sixty kilograms have an average brain size of 200 cubic centimeters. The earliest men and women, 2.5 million years ago, had brains of about 600 cubic centimeters. Modern Sapiens sport a brain averaging 1,200–1,400 cubic centimeters. Neanderthal brains were even bigger.
(p. 11) We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities, and complex social structures are huge advantages. It seems self-evident that these have made humankind the most powerful animal on earth. But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures.
(p. 12) Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to cooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana-republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.
(p. 17) If the Replacement Theory is correct, all living humans have roughly the same genetic baggage, and racial distinctions among them are negligible. But if the Interbreeding Theory is right, there might well be genetic differences between Africans, Europeans, and Asians that go back hundreds of thousands of years. This is political dynamite, which could provide material for explosive racial theories.
(p. 17) It turned out that 1–4 percent of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA. That’s not a huge amount, but it’s significant. A second shock came several months later, when DNA extracted from the fossilized finger from Denisova was mapped. The results proved that up to 6 percent of the unique human DNA of modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians is Denisovan DNA.
(pp. 20-21) What was the Sapiens’ secret of success? How did we manage to settle so rapidly in so many distant and ecologically different habitats? How did we push all other human species into oblivion? Why couldn’t even the strong, brainy, cold-proof Neanderthals survive our onslaught? The debate continues to rage. The most likely answer is the very thing that makes the debate possible: Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks above all to its unique language.

-------------------------

This first chapter is a very quick introduction for Homo sapiens to take the stage. The timeline of events is good to know. And it’s great to conceive of humans existing as a minor part of nature for so many millennia. The “political dynamite” for differences in the genes of different races of people, however, should really only be a concern for naïve racists. The world really needs to better understand the role that culture plays in our gene-culture coevolution. So, the fact that a few percentages of other hominids are in the genes this or that people (or the fact that “As much as 17% of the Denisovan genome from Denisova Cave represents DNA from the local Neanderthal population”) is actually of minor importance compared to the differences within groups and the differences of cultural and environmental influences. Tracing hominid DNA is an important tool for understanding the history of hominid settlements, but it should have no bearing on current social policies. I wish Harari had said more about that rather than just throwing some “dynamite” onto the stage and leaving it open for speculation.

I also think his claim that humans are unlike other “majestic top predators” and are “banana-republic dictators”, “full of fears and anxieties”, because our dominance came too quickly is highly speculative and most likely wrong. When I examined the logical appraisals behind the beliefs that cause our emotions, I found that anxiety came from not knowing what the future will hold. Due to epistemic limitations, this will be the case for any minds that can look into the far future. If “majestic” lions or orcas ever developed the cognitive abilities to make plans for decades into the future, I am quite sure they would develop anxieties about that future too.

-------------------------
Chapter 2 The Tree of Knowledge

(p. 23) The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? We’re not sure.
(p. 27) Most likely, both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are valid. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched, or smelled.
(p. 27) fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths … Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.
(p. 30) Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. People easily acknowledge that ‘primitive tribes’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take for example the world of business corporations. Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers.
(p. 36) The ability to create an imagined reality out of words enabled large numbers of strangers to cooperate effectively. But it also did something more. Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths – by telling different stories.
(p. 37) ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have been able to change their behavior quickly, transmitting new behaviors to future generations without any need of genetic or environmental change.
(p. 38) This was the key to Sapiens’ success. In a one-on-one brawl, a Neanderthal would probably have beaten a Sapiens. But in a conflict of hundreds, Neanderthals wouldn’t stand a chance. Neanderthals could share information about the whereabouts of lions, but they probably could not tell – and revise – stories about tribal spirits. Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers, nor could they adapt their social behavior to rapidly changing challenges.
(pp. 41-2) Once cultures appeared, they never ceased to change and develop, and these unstoppable alterations are what we call ‘history’. The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology. Until the Cognitive Revolution, the doings of all human species belonged to the realm of biology, or, if you so prefer, prehistory.
(p. 44) The next chapter takes a peek behind the curtain of the ages, examining what life was like in the millennia separating the Cognitive Revolution from the Agricultural Revolution.

-------------------------

For more on the development of language and cooperation during this time in human history, I highly recommend Robin Dunbar’s Human Evolution. Harari grazes the surface of this topic just fine, but then he goes a bit off the deep end with his theme about fictions and myth-making. These are of huge importance to Harari, as two later articles in the New York Timesmade clear to me. (See the op-ed by Harari in May 2019: “Why Fiction Trumps Truth”, and the interview in November 2021: “Yuval Noah Harari Believes This Simple Story Can Save the Planet”.) But there is a huge category error here! Harari says “our modern institutions” will “function on exactly the same basis” as “believing in ghosts and spirits”. This is nonsense. Ghosts and spirits have no actual effect on the world because they do not exist, whereas modern institutions have huge real-world effects because they are built from very real humans agreeing to very real cooperative actions. I like the point that Harari made about our “ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all”. This is exactly aligned with the fact that the highest tier in my hierarchy of consciousness is for “abstraction”. But these abstractions aren’t only for imaginary inventions. They can also be cognitive labels for categories of things and actions that are very real. Tribes, nations, virtue, and vice are all examples of this that are wholly different from gods and goblins. Abstractions are indeed vital to the way human minds work. And these can change must faster than genetic changes. But all abstractions are not the same. And insisting that they are will only make it harder to replace myths that have no evidence for them. Good leaders and change agents are not “powerful sorcerers”. They have just contemplated the past more deeply in order to better choose the destination.

-------------------------
Chapter 3 A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve

(p. 45) The flourishing field of evolutionary psychology argues that many of our present-day social and psychological characteristics were shaped during this long pre-agricultural era.
(p. 47) we need to learn something about the living conditions of our ancestors, to examine how Sapiens lived between the Cognitive Revolution of 70,000 years ago, and the start of the Agricultural Revolution about 12,000 years ago. Unfortunately, there are few certainties regarding the lives of our forager ancestors.
(p. 49) all forager societies that have survived into the modern era have been influenced by neighboring agricultural and industrial societies.
(p. 49) modern forager societies have survived mainly in areas with difficult climatic conditions and inhospitable terrain, ill-suited for agriculture.
(p. 49) the most notable characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies is how different they are one from the other.
(p. 51) The heated debates about Homo sapiens’ ‘natural way of life’ miss the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.
(p. 56) The hunter-gatherer way of life differed significantly from region to region and from season to season, but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds, laborers, and office clerks who followed in their footsteps.
(p. 58) The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies’.
(p. 62) Any attempt to describe the specifics of archaic spirituality is highly speculative, as there is next to no evidence to go by and the little evidence we have – a handful of artefacts and cave paintings – can be interpreted in myriad ways.
(p. 68) Just as foragers exhibited a wide array of religions and social structures, so, too, did they probably demonstrate a variety of violence rates.

-------------------------

I thought this was an excellent chapter, pointing out all the holes in our knowledge about hunter-gatherer societies as well as noting the diversity that is seen in what we do know. It is an excellent rebuttal to the “paleo” people who have greatly oversimplified the lives of our ancestors.

-------------------------
Chapter 4 The Flood

(p. 82) Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions.

-------------------------

And this chapter was chock full of examples where large populations of non-human animals were wiped out over and over, around the world, wherever Sapiens showed up. It should give pause to anyone championing “indigenous wisdom” as something that is worth more than wisdom earned the rational way. Just to be clear, it is absolutely wise to learn from indigenous ways. But then that is just modern, scientific, rational wisdom when we glean the best ideas from as many sources as possible. As Jonathan Rauch put it in Kindly Inquisitors, no one gets final say, and no one has personal authority over knowledge. Don’t listen to anyone claiming otherwise.

So, that will do it for this first installment of reviewing Sapiens. I have a lot going on in my personal life at the moment so I plan to release the rest of these reviews every couple of weeks. In the meantime, let me know if you’ve read Sapiens and what your impressions of it were. Or, maybe consider buying the book and reading it along with me so you can see if I missed anything and then take the chance to share your own thoughts. I look forward to hearing from you!

0 Comments

An Evolutionary Note about "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn

8/12/2025

6 Comments

Last week, I finally submitted an epistemology paper for publication that I’ve been working on for several years. It’s very ambitious and I can’t wait to share it when/if it gets accepted. But in the meantime, I have some thoughts to share on a couple of books that I read during the research on that project. The first is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Kuhn starts by saying he “is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential. His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time.” In it, Kuhn distinguished between “normal science”—which simply grows the dominant “paradigm” in its field—and “revolutionary science”—which upends paradigms so thoroughly that scientists on each side of the divide can no longer understand one another. This is Kuhn’s controversial “incommensurability thesis”, which posits that theories from differing periods suffer from deep failures of comparability.

Mountains of criticism have been written about this, which you can quickly see summarized in the SEP entry, as well as in Wikipedia. In a postscript written seven years after TSoSR was first published, Kuhn himself admits that his definition of paradigm is “intrinsically circular”. (“A paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share, and, conversely, a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm.”) But the most damning criticism to me was that “the philosophical reception was…hostile. For example, Dudley Shapere’s review (1964) emphasized the relativist implications of Kuhn’s ideas, and this set the context for much subsequent philosophical discussion. Since the following of rules (of logic, of scientific method, etc.) was regarded as the sine qua non of rationality, Kuhn’s claim that scientists do not employ rules in reaching their decisions appeared tantamount to the claim that science is irrational.”

Boooo! Yes, there are countless examples to share of scientists behaving badly and any good scholar can unearth them. But these are all failures of individual scientists, not a feature of the scientific method. The very reason Kuhn and other critics of science point them out is because they go against what science demands. The stories are certainly not held up as exemplars of what future scientists should do.

I also don’t honestly understand how Kuhn could have put forth a theory about the incommensurability of ideas pre- and post- a “scientific revolution” while at the same time explaining them in such detail that he and the reader can understand why the ideas changed so much. If he can write about all of this, then surely expert scientists can grasp the differences too! Wittgenstein already helped us decide that purely private language is not possible. So incommensurable scientific theories are out too.

And yet, despite these criticisms, much of TSoSR contains incredibly admirable scholarly work on the history of science. Kuhn profiled many major and minor theories that have been developed over the past several centuries. And for that, TSoSR is still worth the read. But I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing a post about this book except for the fact that Kuhn ended TSoSR with a comparison to evolution. And “in 1995 Kuhn argued that the Darwinian metaphor in the book should have been taken more seriously than it had been.” Well, that’s just begging for this blog to take a look and weigh in.

Here, then, are the main evolutionary points that Kuhn made. All quotations below are from the second edition of TSoSR.

p.171 “All the well-known pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories—those of Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, and the German Naturphilosophen—had taken evolution to be a goal-directed process.”
p.172 “For many men the abolition of that teleological kind of evolution was the most significant and least palatable of Darwin’s suggestions. The Origin of Species recognized no goal set either by God or nature.”
p.172 “The analogy that relates the evolution of organisms to the evolution of scientific ideas can easily be pushed too far. But with respect to the issues of this closing section it is very nearly perfect.”
pp.172-3 “the entire [scientific] process may have occurred, as we now suppose biological evolution did, without benefit of a set goal, a permanent fixed scientific truth, of which each stage in the development of scientific knowledge is a better exemplar.”
p.173 “Why should scientific communities be able to reach a firm consensus unattainable in other fields? Why should consensus endure across one paradigm change after another? And why should paradigm change invariably produce an instrument more perfect in any sense than those known before? …those questions…are as open as they were when this essay began. It is not only the scientific community that must be special. The world of which that community is a part must also possess quite special characteristics, and we are no closer than we were at the start to knowing what these must be. …it need not be answered in this place.”

Ugh! The evolution of organisms and the evolution of scientific ideas are extremely different things. They are not “very nearly perfect” for analogous analysis. Biological life has emerged and evolved into the vacuum of a non-living universe. Random mutations, scarce resources, and eons of natural selection have created “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful” (as Darwin famously described). Life has immense freedom to create survival mechanisms within this space of possibilities. But scientific ideas are not like this at all. They are highly constrained truth-seeking hypotheses that evolve via empirically-driven imaginations (not random mutations), which compete to be the best rationally-selected predictions. This is not at all like brute, unthinking, goalless, natural selection.

As I wrote in the epistemology paper that I recently finished (see a draft sketch here), there are plenty of skeptical arguments that have come down to us through the ages (e.g. Socrates, Pyrrho, Descartes, Hume, Gettier, Putnam, Bostrom), which show us why the evolution of scientific ideas never actually reach “a permanent fixed scientific truth.” But that is indeed the goal, despite what Kuhn would argue. The question of why scientific communities are able to reach consensus is easily answered when we posit that our universe (not multiverses) is an objective, knowable, thing that we keep trying to grasp through our subjective lenses. Only a very twisted view of science as a mere relativistic construction of ideas would see it otherwise. But that view doesn’t hang together at all and can therefore be dismissed.

One of the most cited academic books of all time? What a shame.

6 Comments

Draft of My Paper “On the Origin of Knowledge”

2/27/2025

12 Comments

Hi all! It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here but that’s because I’ve been hard at work on a major project. Over the last few years, I’ve been preparing my epistemology thoughts for a peer-reviewed publication. That process has gone through several starts and stops but I’m finally ready to share a rough draft. My proposals are quite ambitious (to say the least) so I’m starting by asking for feedback here before I proceed with the final submission. I have a journal lined up already (This View of Life), but if you have other suggestions for where this would be appropriate, I would very much appreciate it.

I literally have about 200 pages of quotes and citations ready for the final paper, but I won’t use most of that. In order to elicit feedback as painlessly as possible, I’ve compressed the arguments into a presentation deck accompanied by about 1300 words below. That’s obviously not in the form of an academic paper yet, but I trust this will be clear enough for you to be able to comment on any weak points or clarifications that you think need to be addressed for the final paper. Thank you in advance for any thoughts you can share! Here goes:

----------------------

On the Origin of Knowledge*

In 1900, the young artist Gustav Klimt presented the first of his three “Faculty Paintings”, which he had been commissioned to produce for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. It was a time of growing confidence in the Austrian-Hungarian empire, the sciences, and the power of reason. However,

“Rather than the anticipated glorifying works, Klimt created mysterious symbolic paintings that, instead of celebrating the triumph of human knowledge, exposed it as powerless. In ‘Philosophy’, a group of naked people drift through a nebulous starry sky, despairing at the reality of their untethered existence.” (Gustav Klimt, p.61)

This monumental painting, over 4x3 meters in size, was never installed and was later destroyed in a fire in May 1945. All we have left is a black and white photo of the original. But it is still powerful, and in fact captures the present situation of philosophy perfectly.

Why are we like this? The history of unsolved problems in epistemology makes it clear.

At the heart of this, is philosophy’s definition of “truth”, which has proven impossible to attain.

There are two ways that evolutionary thinking can help with this. First, is thinking in terms of gradualism rather than essentialism.

Second, is building from the bottom up, rather than using imaginary sky hooks to descend from the top down.

This gives us a starting point for knowledge as something like a pinpoint of light floating in the complete darkness of a universe that life was ignorant of.

Living beings slowly learned to navigate their environment using a process we now call cybernetics.

And so…

Over time, life develops two “species of thought” in this epistemological world. One is for the realm we can learn about. The other is for the realm where we are totally ignorant.

And so…

The field of evolutionary epistemology has identified mechanisms for how knowledge continued to evolve.

Note that the latest step in this evolution came with the invention of the scientific method. There are many ways this method can be depicted. Here is one example:

Reviewing the literature turns up at least 11 more ways that the scientific method has been depicted.

All of these are actually just extensions and refinements of the original cybernetics loop. Therefore, we could label all knowledge production (including the scientific method) as coming from an epistemological method.

Note that the 12 scientific methods identified earlier do map to this very easily. This is important because it helps us understand knowledge as existing along a continuum. So-called “scientific knowledge” or “philosophical knowledge” is related to simpler forms of knowledge.

With all this talk of methods and loops, it is important to see that we are not merely running in circles! Here is an AI-generated cartoon to help drive that point home.

As described in an earlier paper, we raise and lower the credence of our ideas as we discover more and more information about them.

Our new knowledge is connected to previously generated knowledge. It grows or shrinks with each new turn of the epistemological loop. This turns our 2-dimensional circles into 3-dimensional spirals.

There is a long history of different truth-seeking disciplines recognizing this and creating hierarchies for their evidence and knowledge.

Analyzing this history, we see the same pattern emerging over and over. The famous “Photo 51” helped Watson, Crick, and Wilkins win Nobel prizes for their roles in discovering the structure of DNA. That photo showed two crossbeams that determine the size and shape of the double helix. In a similar (though purely metaphorical) fashion, this paper posits that there are two crossbeams that push knowledge spirals outwards.

With each iteration of the epistemological loop, it is the quantity and diversity of observations that make for wider and sturdier spirals in our knowledge production.

This is because “intersubjective views from everywhere” are the closest we can ever get to the “objective view from nowhere” that would be required for full and certain philosophical truth.

So….

We start with an undifferentiated word cloud. (Do not actually read this.)

Then perform a “functional analysis” on this heap to help make sense of the emerging phenomena of knowledge as it evolves through different hierarchical stages.

Try to do all of this comprehensively. Tinbergen created his Four Questions for studies of biology, which are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive because they sit at the four quadrants of a 2x2 matrix where “ultimate vs. proximate” distinctions are located on one axis and “current vs. historical” timescales are on the other axis. Similarly, four questions can be created for studies of knowledge. These lie in the four quadrants made by “objective items vs subjective knowers” on one axis and “current vs. historical” timescales on the other. Answering all of these questions about a piece of knowledge will give you a comprehensive understanding of it.

After performing such a functional analysis on the word cloud for knowledge collected above, the following hierarchy for knowledge is proposed. Knowledge grows from fragile to robust as the epistemological loops that produce it increase in quantity and diversity. Each piece of knowledge has facts, knowers, processes, and credence associated with it. These progress across five columns based on the knowers — subsystems of an individual, an individual, small niche groups, larger established groups, and globally diverse groups. Each column can only progress so far. The knowledge produced by these groups could also be placed in a hierarchy of quality from A to F. But note there is an overlap between columns as the best knowledge production in small groups transitions to new knowledge production in larger groups.

Placing all of the terms from the word cloud above into this hierarchy gives us the details we need to more fully understand it and use it for further analysis. (Click here if you want to read the details of this table.)

There are many points of discussion to be considered from all of this.

First, some important disclaimers…

This hierarchy doesn’t apply directly to all forms of culture. However, It can be applied to “knowledge about” the utility of those other items.

There is an important paradox about power embedded in this view of epistemology.

This view may also help us understand experts and expertise better.

We can imagine disseminating this using simplified scorecards for knowledge.

It may also shed light on another paradox about the perceived quality of knowledge due to its stability or instability.

It could help with the issues of “fake news”.

In fact, this evolutionary view can help dissolve all of the knowledge problems of philosophy.

This brings us back to Klimt’s picture of philosophy. In recent years, researchers have used historical facts and AI analysis to colorize the painting as it may have been originally. The result does not change the meaning of the painting, where its subjects are still floating untethered, surrounded by a universe of ignorance. But it does make things in there more beautiful now. Hopefully, the view presented in this paper on the evolution of knowledge can do the same for us.

----------------------

*Now that you have read this post, you can see why I think it is ambitious. The full title of Darwin’s revolutionary book about biology was, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. As a playful ode to this, I’ve been considering the following title for my paper:

“On the Origin of Knowledge by Means of Rational Selection or the Survival of Justified Beliefs in the Struggle Towards Truth — How the Universal Acid of Evolutionary Thinking Can Dissolve the Great Epistemological Problems of Knowledge, Scepticism, Relativism, Demarcation, and Disinformation.”

That is way more than one mouthful, though, so let me know if you have a better title in mind.

12 Comments

Overview of Beyond Religion by the Dalai Lama (Part 2 of 2)

8/23/2024

1 Comment

(Photo by Ven Tenzin Jamphel on the Dalai Lama Facebook page)

Okay, I’m back for part 2 of the Dalai Lama’s book Beyond Religion. As I covered in my last post, part 1 of this fascinating book offered a vision for “secular ethics for a whole world”, which I was inspired to read because this goal matches ProSocial World's purpose statement as well as my own views on evolutionary ethics and why evolutionary philosophy matters. Each of these sources speaks similarly about how empirical data gives us overwhelming evidence to appreciate our deep interdependence and therefore we need to be compassionate towards all beings as we try to survive and flourish together in this world. Let’s do that!

Now, in part 2 of the book, the Dalai Lama tells us how he personally strengthens his mind to work towards these goals in the face of all the obstacles that are sure to come. This mostly amounts to descriptions and tips for various methods of meditation, which is not something I know a ton about. But the evidence shows it is so beneficial, and these tips are coming from perhaps the world’s premiere expert, so I wanted to share them as succinctly as I could, with the hope that it will inspire you (and me!) to take up more of this mental training. As before, the quoted passages below all come from the 2012 UK Kindle version.

Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World by His Holiness Dalai Lama

Part II — Educating the Heart Through Training the Mind

Introduction to Part II: Starting with Oneself

(p. 101) How are we to become more compassionate, kinder, more forgiving, and more discerning in our behaviour?
(p. 102) Educating the heart takes both time and sustained effort, though I have no doubt that with sincere motivation we can all learn kindheartedness, and we can all benefit from it.

We have so many options out there to improve our minds and bodies. Yet all of these are “slaves to our passions”. So, why don’t we spend more time working on our emotions?? This is deeply brilliant. I know Buddhists have practiced this for centuries, but I’m not sure it has been “sold” this way, or always focused towards the secular ethics that the Dalai Lama is now advocating for. Before we get to the actual training, some Buddhist context is helpful.

Chapter 8 — Ethical Mindfulness in Everyday Life

(p. 103) even the most sophisticated ethical understanding, if it is not applied in daily life, is somewhat pointless.
(p. 103) regarding the question of how to put ethics into practice in everyday life, it may be helpful to consider the process as having three aspects or levels
(p. 103) As outlined in some classical Buddhist texts, these are as follows: an ethic of restraint — deliberately refraining from doing actual or potential harm to others; an ethic of virtue — actively cultivating and enhancing our positive behaviour and inner values; and an ethic of altruism — dedicating our lives, genuinely and selflessly, to the welfare of others.
(p. 106) I personally find a list of six principles from a text by the second-century Indian thinker Nagarjuna to be helpful.
(p. 106) Avoid excessive use of intoxicants. Uphold the principle of right livelihood. Ensure that one’s body, speech, and mind are nonviolent. Treat others with respect. Honour those worthy of esteem, such as parents, teachers, and those who are kind. Be kind to others.
(p. 107) we require a basic toolkit to help us in our daily effort to live ethically. In Buddhist tradition this toolkit is described in terms of three interrelated factors known as heedfulness, mindfulness, and introspective awareness
(p. 107) heedfulness, refers to adopting an overall stance of caution.
(p. 109) mindfulness is the ability to gather oneself mentally and thereby recall one’s core values and motivation.
(p. 109) Awareness…means paying attention to our own behaviour. It means honestly observing our behaviour as it is going on, and thereby bringing it under control.

I don’t see anything wrong with any of that. This is more evidence fitting with my belief that “Buddha Will Survive”, as I wrote during my series of essays on the survival of the fittest philosophers. Buddha came in at number 7 out of 60 on that list. The Dalai Lama might take Buddhism even higher now.

Next up, are two chapters about our emotions.

Chapter 9 — Dealing with Destructive Emotions

(p. 113) the greatest impediments to our individual well-being and our ability to live a spiritually fulfilling life are our own persistent propensities toward destructive or afflictive emotions.
(p. 115) in contemporary psychology the main distinction is often drawn between emotional states which, on the one hand, are pleasurable or joyful and are described as positive, and those which, on the other hand, are unpleasant or painful and are described as negative. In classical Buddhist psychology, however, the distinction is rather different. Instead, the primary distinction is not between those states which are pleasurable and those that are painful, but between those that are beneficial and those that are harmful.
(p. 117) In the context of secular ethics, this distinction between those mental states which undermine well-being — our own and that of others — and those which promote survival and well-being can be very useful, since it is directly relevant to our pursuit of happiness and an ethically sound way of life.
(p. 124) Our inner development with regard to regulating our destructive emotions calls for a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, we must seek to reduce the impact of the destructive potentials that are inherent within us; on the other, we must seek to enhance the positive qualities that also naturally exist within us. This two-pronged approach to mental training is what I consider to be the heart of genuine spiritual practice.

Chapter 10 — Cultivating Key Inner Values

(p. 137) a few of the other key human values: patience or forbearance, contentment, self-discipline, and generosity.
(p. 138) There are three aspects of patience, or forbearance, to consider: forbearance toward those who harm us, acceptance of suffering, and acceptance of reality.

I really appreciate the difference between contemporary psychology and classical Buddhist psychology. And the focus on enhancing well-being (“our own and that of others”) is brilliant to see. I would just add that the distinction between “beneficial” and “harmful” is often a difficult one because of the uncertainty over short-term and long-term consequences as well as the benefit accruing to yourself or others (which ultimately may or may not benefit you). So, it’s very hard to simply place an emotion into any one category. The ultimate judgment of each one will be very dependent on context — sometimes beneficial, sometimes harmful. Rather than looking forward into the mists of this murky future, I found it easier, and very useful, to look to the past for my own taxonomy by asking “what’s causing these emotions?” These are quibbles about how to categorize emotions, though. There doesn’t seem to be any conflict between the goals of my system and the Dalai Lama’s.

Finally, in the last chapter, we arrive at the Dalai Lama’s advice for how to work on all of this.

Chapter 11 — Meditation as Mental Cultivation

(p. 155) I would like to say a few words about cultivating mental discipline. For myself, such cultivation is an indispensable part of daily life. On the one hand, it helps reinforce my determination always to act compassionately for the well-being of others. On the other, it helps me keep in check those afflictive thoughts and emotions by which we are all assailed from time to time, and to maintain a calm mind.
(p. 155) the Sanskrit term bhavana … [and the] Tibetan equivalent gom [are] often translated into English as meditation, [but they] refer to a whole range of mental practices and not just, as many suppose, to simple methods of relaxation. The original terms imply a process of cultivating familiarity with something, whether it is a habit, a way of seeing, or a way of being.
(p. 156) [There are] “three levels of understanding,” as found in the classical Buddhist theory of mental transformation. These levels are understanding derived through hearing (or learning), understanding derived through reflection, and understanding derived through contemplative experience.
(p. 156) this progression — from first hearing or learning, to deepening one’s understanding through critical reflection, to conviction — is quite usual.

This is great! It really expanded my naïve understanding of “meditation”.

(p. 158) I engage in two main types of mental cultivation practice — discursive or analytic meditation and absorptive meditation. The first is a kind of analytic process by means of which the meditator engages in a series of reflections, while the second involves concentrating on a specific object or objective and placing one’s mind upon it as if dwelling deeply on a conclusion. I find that combining the two techniques is most beneficial.
(p. 159) The first of these two approaches corresponds to the development of mental states that are more cognitively oriented, such as understanding, while the second develops more affect-oriented mental states, such as compassion. We might refer to these two processes as “educating our mind” and “educating our heart.”

Fascinating. And I would say from personal experience that writing philosophy might qualify as an “education of the mind” exercise then. Before we get to the details of how else to do this, the Dalai Lama offers a few practical tips, which makes him seem just as human as the rest of us.

(p. 159) Mental cultivation takes time and effort and involves hard work and sustained dedication.
(p. 160) As to the specifics of practice, early morning is generally the best time of day. … you need to have had a good night’s sleep beforehand.
(p. 161) the mind will tend to be sluggish if you have eaten a lot beforehand.
(p. 161) in the early stages even ten to fifteen minutes per session is quite adequate.
(p. 161) It is also helpful to plan to practice for a few minutes several times during the day in addition to the main session.
(p. 162) sit where we will not be disturbed by noise.
(p. 162) any position that is comfortable will do

Love it. Next up, the Dalai Lama gives us details of his different practices. He didn’t lay it out like a simple formula, but I see it starting by taking us progressively through these six steps: 1) Getting Settled; 2) Affirming the Practice; 3) Strengthening Your Focus; 4) Understanding What Focus Is; 5) Really Focusing on Emotions; and 6) Returning to Your Day.

So, let’s see these steps in action.

1) Getting Settled

(p. 163) take one inhalation and one exhalation while silently counting from one to five or seven, and then repeat the process a few times. The advantage of this silent counting is that, in giving our mind a task to perform, it makes it less likely to be swept away by extraneous thoughts.
(p. 163) it can be helpful to quietly say a few words over and over. A formula such as “I let go of my afflictive emotions”
(p. 163) you may find that a whole session is taken up with exercises to calm or still the mind.

2) Affirming the Practice

(p. 164) When you have succeeded in establishing a more settled state, perhaps a few minutes into your session, you can then begin the actual work of mental cultivation.
(p. 165) One very useful exercise at the beginning of a session is to consider the benefits of practice. An immediate benefit is that practice gives us a brief respite from the often obsessive worrying, calculating, and fantasizing with which our minds are habitually occupied. This by itself is a great boon.
(p. 165) One who never engages in this kind of work has very little chance of dealing effectively with the destructive thoughts and emotions which, when they take hold of us, destroy all hope of peace of mind.
(p. 165) we should find that the benefits far outweigh any arguments in favour of not practicing. We then rest the mind on this conclusion for a short time before moving on to the next stage of the session.

3) Strengthening Your Focus

(p. 165) A more formal meditation practice is the cultivation of sustained attention through single-pointed concentration.
(p.166) Having relaxed and settled your mind, try to maintain your focus on the object. Visualize it about four feet in front of you and at the level of your eyebrows. Imagine the object to be approximately two inches in height and radiating light, so that the image is bright and clear. Also try to conceive of it as being heavy. This heaviness has the effect of preventing excitement, while the object’s brightness prevents the onset of laxity.

4) Understanding What Focus Is

(p. 167) after many, many weeks or months of persistent practice — you now try to inspect the mind itself as it holds the object in view.
(p. 167) you can start to familiarize yourself with the sort of focus that in ordinary life you may only experience when attempting to solve a particularly challenging mental problem.

5) Really Focusing on Emotions

(p. 167) when you have learned to really focus the mind, then, … you can use the whole force of your mind to focus on qualities such as compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness.

6) Returning to Your Day

(p. 168) Finally, when we wish to end our session, we can do some deep breathing exercises once again so that we finish in a relaxed state of mind.

After a lifetime of working on this, the Dalai Lama next offers several pieces of advice.

(p. 168) Two qualities are essential in this kind of meditation: mental clarity and stability. Mental clarity assists you in maintaining your focus. Stability assists you in ensuring clarity by monitoring whether or not your attention remains vibrant.
(p. 168) It is through constant application of these two faculties that you can gradually learn to train your focus so that you become capable of sustaining your attention for a prolonged period of time.
(p. 168) set a forceful intention not to allow your mind to be swept away by thoughts of what might happen in the future or recollections of things that have happened in the past.
(p. 170) every now and then you will come to experience short intervals of what feels like an absence or a vacuum, when your mind has no particular content. Your first successes in this will only be fleeting. But with persistence over a long period, what begins as a glimpse can gradually be extended, and you can start to understand that the mind is like a mirror, or clear water, in which images appear and disappear without affecting the medium in which they appear.
(p. 170) Like a detached onlooker watching a spectacle, you will learn how to see your thoughts for what they are, namely constructs of your mind. So many of our problems arise because, in our naive untrained state, we confuse our thoughts with actual reality. We seize on the content of our thoughts as real and build our entire perception and response to reality on it.

As your practice gets more advanced, the Dalai Lama offers 4 more options for what you might work on. I see these as options for step 5 above, so I’ll label them that way. They are: 5a) Compassion and Loving-Kindness; 5b) Equanimity; 5c) More Equanimity; and 5d) Positive Imitation.

Again, let’s see these in action.

5a) Compassion and Loving-Kindness

(p. 170) Another very beneficial class of practices involves cultivating positive mental qualities, such as compassion and loving-kindness.
(p. 170) begin with a preliminary breathing exercise to relax and settle the mind.
(p. 171) when you are struggling with your attitude or feelings toward a person with whom you have difficulty. First, bring that person into your mind, conjuring up a vivid image so that you almost feel his or her presence. Next, start to contemplate the fact that he or she also has hopes and dreams, feels joy when things go well and feels sadness when they do not.
(p. 171) try to feel connected with the person and cultivate the wish that he or she achieve happiness.
(p. 171) saying something like “May you be free of suffering and its causes. May you attain happiness and peace.” Then rest your mind in this state of compassion.
(p. 171) this way of cultivating compassion primarily involves a discursive process, but every now and then it is also good to rest the mind in a state of absorption, somewhat in the fashion of bringing home a concluding point in the course of an argument.

5b) Equanimity

(p. 171) equanimity is a state of mind where one relates to others in a way that is free of prejudice rooted in the afflictions of excessive attraction or aversion.
(p. 172) begin by relaxing and settling the mind through a breathing exercise and then proceed as follows. Call up an image of a small group of people you like, such as some of your close friends and relatives. Establish this image in as much detail and with as much verisimilitude as you can. Then add an image next to it of a group of people toward whom you feel indifferent, such as people you see at work or out shopping but do not know well. Again, try to make this image as real and detailed as possible. Finally, call up a third image, this one of a group of people you dislike, or with whom you are in conflict, or whose views you strongly disagree with, and again establish it as clearly and in as much detail as you can. Having created images of these three groups of people in your mind, you then allow your normal reactions toward them to arise. Notice your thoughts and feelings toward each group in turn. You will find that your natural tendency is to feel attachment toward the first, indifference toward the second, and hostility toward the third. Recognizing this, you next turn to examining your own mind and considering how each of these three responses affects you. You will find that your feelings toward members of the first group are pleasurable, inspiring a certain confidence and strength coupled with a desire to alleviate or prevent their suffering. Toward the second group, you will notice that your feelings do not excite you or inspire any particular thoughts of concern at all. Toward the third group, however, the feelings you have will excite your mind in negative directions. The next step is to engage in contemplation, using your critical faculty. The people we consider our enemies today may not remain so, and this is also true of our friends. Furthermore, sometimes our feelings toward friends, such as attachment, can lead to problems for us, while sometimes our interactions with enemies can benefit us, perhaps by making us stronger and more alert. Contemplating such complexities can lead you to reflect on the futility of relating to others in an extreme manner
(p. 174) Over time, the aim is to be able to relate to others, not as friends or foes according to your divisive classification of them, but as fellow human beings whose fundamental equality with yourself you recognize.

5c) More Equanimity

(p. 174) for the second form of equanimity practice, … The key points are two simple truths: that just as I myself have an instinctive and legitimate desire to be happy and to avoid suffering, so do all other people; and that just as I have the right to fulfil these innate aspirations, so do they.
(p. 174) over the course of weeks, months, and even years, we will gradually find that we are able to generate true inner equanimity based on a profound recognition of humanity’s shared, innate aspiration to happiness and dislike of suffering.

5d) Positive Imitation

(p. 174) Another exercise which can be very helpful in cultivating beneficial states of mind is a discursive practice taking as its object the good example of a person we greatly admire.
(p. 175) the idea is to train ourselves to act, in our daily lives, as the person we admire would act
(p. 176) Having chosen which afflictive emotion or attitude you will address first, you begin as described earlier, relaxing the mind with a breathing exercise. Then you are ready to start the actual practice.
(p. 176) First, reflect on the destructive effects of the mental state you have selected.
(p. 176) This contemplation of the destructive nature of these mental states needs to be sufficiently deep that over time your basic stance toward such states becomes one of caution and vigilance.
(p. 177) Once you are convinced of the destructive nature of these afflictions, you then move on to the next stage of meditation. This involves developing a greater awareness of the mental states themselves, particularly of their onset.
(p. 177) The third stage of this mental cultivation practice for dealing with afflictive mental states is to apply the relevant antidotes to them: for example, forbearance to counter anger, loving-kindness to counter hatred, contemplation of an object’s imperfections to counter greed or craving for that object.
(p. 177) In all three stages of this practice it is important, as suggested earlier, to combine discursive, analytic processes with resting your mind in single-pointed absorption on the concluding points. This combination allows the effects of your practice to seep deeply into your mind so that it begins to have a real impact in your everyday life.

After giving all of these options for a deeper meditation practice, the Dalai Lama offers some more advice about dealing with things you may also encounter there.

(p. 178) there are two principal obstacles to good practice. One is distraction, while the other is laxity or what we can call “mental sinking.”
(p. 178) Sometimes it will be enough to recollect our purpose in undertaking this mental cultivation. At other times, we may have to leave off whatever we are trying to practice and move on to some other exercise. Or we may do a short breathing exercise, or repeat a few words suitable to the occasion. This may be as simple as saying, “I let go of my distraction,” slowly and deliberately a few times. But sometimes we may need to break off the session and walk around the room for a few minutes.
(p. 178) laxity or mental sinking, is what happens when the mind becomes too relaxed. We succeed in withdrawing from our habitual preoccupations and manage to free the mind from distractions, but then, because our energy is low or we are not alert enough, the mind sinks and we become, as it were, “spaced out.”
(p. 179) A short, brisk walk may be an effective remedy, or a few moments spent visualizing a bright light. For those with religious inclinations, briefly considering the surpassing qualities of some figure in their religious tradition may help. Another remedy is to imagine our consciousness springing up into space.

To finish up, the Dalai Lama offered some brief reflections on the value of all of this.

(p. 180) what we are talking about here is not suppressing negative thoughts and emotions. Instead, we must learn to recognize them for what they are and replace them with more positive states of mind. And we do this not only to achieve self-mastery but also because attaining this kind of control over our minds puts us in a much better position to compassionately benefit others.
(p. 182) What we want is a moderate, steady light which enables us to see the objects around us clearly. Thus when we develop some degree of control over our minds we are more able to take events, whether they are positive or negative, in our stride.
(p. 182) What good practice really requires is a constant stream of effort: a sustained, persistent approach based on long-term commitment. For this reason, practicing properly, even for a short period of time, is the best way.

Afterword

(p. 185) when each of us learns to appreciate the critical importance of ethics and makes inner values like compassion and patience an integral part of our basic outlook on life, the effects will be far-reaching.

So, to recap, meditation is great! Of all the books, podcasts, apps, and seminars about meditation that I have been exposed to, this one was by far the most helpful and far-reaching. It is much more than just the emptying of the mind or the building of focus that I have mostly learned about before. Yet it is simple! In its explanation, anyway. I’m sure the experience and effort will be more difficult. But I plan to work on these steps over the years ahead. 10 to 15 minutes at a time.

1) Getting Settled
2) Affirming the Practice
3) Strengthening Your Focus
4) Understanding What Focus Is
5) Really Focusing on Emotions
     5a) Compassion and Loving-Kindness
     5b) Equanimity
     5c) More Equanimity
     5d) Positive Imitation
6) Returning to Your Day

I hope you found this as interesting as I did and are inspired to work on this too. My post here shared a lot of quotes to get you going, but you should really buy the book to capture the full depth of the Dalai Lama’s thoughts and emotions here. I’ll just finish with this quote from the man who caddied for the 13th incarnation of the Dalai Lama.

"Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know." And he says, "Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness." So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.”

Nice indeed. Maybe we can all hope for that with some effort. 😁

1 Comment

Overview of Beyond Religion by the Dalai Lama (Part 1 of 2)

8/16/2024

1 Comment

(Photo by Ven Tenzin Jamphel on the Dalai Lama Facebook page)

Beyond Religion. Sounds like my kind of book! But even though it offers “A New Vision of Secular Ethics” (the title for Part 1 of the book), it was written by a man who goes by “his holiness.” The subtitle states it was written “for a whole world”, but the Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, an offshoot of one of the world’s major religions, practiced by a relatively small number of people in a mountainous enclave that has been in exile since the People’s Republic of China annexed it in 1951. Like a koan, this book appears to be a manifestation of “the identity of opposites.” In fact, I wish it had received the opposite title. Something like Before Religion or Up to Religion would have been more accurate in my opinion. But I’ll explain why at the end of this review.

I actually came across this book via my work with David Sloan Wilson and ProSocial World. On every page of ProSocial’s website, its “Purpose Statement” says it wants to “Consciously evolve a world that works for all.” I always liked this because it is deeply aligned with my view of Evolutionary Ethics and Why Evolutionary Philosophy Matters. But it turns out this is also highly aligned with the Dalai Lama’s message. And that is no accident! Beyond Religion was published in 2012. According to ProSocial’s 2022 Annual Report, their history “began in 2011 as an initiative of the Evolution Institute and spun off to become its own nonprofit organization in 2020.” And during that incubation time, on October 30th 2019, ProSocial co-founder David Sloan Wilson took part in a conversation with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India about this “whole world ethic.”

Part of this alignment comes from evolutionary thinkers arriving at the same conclusion from different locations. And part of this is me being deeply influenced by David Sloan Wilson’s work. But with the Dalai Lama too? That was unexpected so I wanted to dive into this book to see how strong the links really are. And what I found was so good I just had to share it here.

Beyond Religion is a short book — the Kindle version has only 189 pages. But it is split into two parts that are so distinct, yet equally important, that I thought my review should reflect this too. Part 2 is about the Dalai Lama’s meditation practice, which by itself is worth the price of the book (and much more!). So, I’ll write about that next. But Part 1 is all about secular ethics, so I’ll cover that first. As usual for these reviews of mine, I’ll share some important passages from the book and just comment on them as we go along. The quoted passages below all come from the 2012 UK Kindle version.

Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World by His Holiness Dalai Lama

Table of Contents: Cover; About the Book; About the Author; Title Page; Introduction; Part I A New Vision of Secular Ethics; 1. Rethinking Secularism; 2. Our Common Humanity; 3. The Quest for Happiness; 4. Compassion, the Foundation of Well-Being; 5. Compassion and the Question of Justice; 6. The Role of Discernment; 7. Ethics in Our Shared World; Part II Educating the Heart Through Training the Mind; Introduction: Starting with Oneself; 8. Ethical Mindfulness in Everyday Life; 9. Dealing with Destructive Emotions; 10. Cultivating Key Inner Values; 11. Meditation as Mental Cultivation; Afterword

About the Book

(p. 2) [It] may seem extraordinary to hear one of the world’s best-known spiritual leaders argue that we need to move beyond the dictates of faith, but in this ground-breaking book that is exactly what the Dalai Lama suggests.
(p. 2) the Dalai Lama contends that we will not change the world just by praying: we need to turn to ethics if we are to succeed in sustaining and improving human life on this planet.
(p. 2) the Dalai Lama is clear that faith without reason can be harmful, leading to fundamentalism.
(p. 2) His Holiness reveals that another way is possible: to meet the future, we must marry compassion with reason and create a system of secular ethics that can unite us, whatever our beliefs.

Amen and hallelujah! But I wonder how many people who have turned to Buddhism are receptive to this message. And I wonder how many secular thinkers know the Dalai Lama is saying this. This is an incredibly brave book, but I fear it could fall on deaf ears all around the world.

Introduction

(p. 2) what is it that we lack? The fundamental problem, I believe, is that at every level we are giving too much attention to the external, material aspects of life while neglecting moral ethics and inner values. By inner values I mean the qualities that we all appreciate in others, and toward which we all have a natural instinct, bequeathed by our biological nature as animals that survive and thrive only in an environment of concern, affection, and warmheartedness — or in a single word, compassion. The essence of compassion is a desire to alleviate the suffering of others and to promote their well-being. This is the spiritual principle from which all other positive inner values emerge.

This message about the virtue of compassion is central to the book and will be discussed later. Here, though, I would like to highlight the ultimate consequence that the Dalai Lama mentions in passing — “our biological nature as animals that survive and thrive.” Perhaps it is in the nature of a Buddhist to not focus on striving towards something, but science can give us all the guidance we need about this goal, if only we would all agree to it. And knowing this goal is essential to best “alleviate suffering and promote well-being” since avoiding all harm is impossible.

(p. 2) we will never solve our problems simply by instituting new laws and regulations. Ultimately, the source of our problems lies at the level of the individual. If people lack moral values and integrity, no system of laws and regulations will be adequate. So long as people give priority to material values, then injustice, corruption, inequity, intolerance, and greed — all the outward manifestations of neglect of inner values — will persist.

This is exactly why atheism alone won’t work. And why the Humanist movement’s shyness about developing an ideology or prescriptive worldview is a missed opportunity.

(p. 2) Science, for all the benefits it has brought to our external world, has not yet provided scientific grounding for the development of the foundations of personal integrity.

This is no longer the case. Just to take a few obvious examples, the shift in evolutionary studies from competition to cooperation as a driving force for the survival of life, and the focus on thriving in the fields of positive psychology and ecology could all provide necessary details about how personal integrity can lead life towards the ultimate goal mentioned above. We just need to spell this all out.

(p. 2) any religion-based answer to the problem of our neglect of inner values can never be universal, and so will be inadequate. What we need today is an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without: a secular ethics.

Agreed! And I still think our universally-shared evolutionary history is the best source for this approach to ethics.

(p. 2) I am of the firm opinion that we have within our grasp a way, and a means, to ground inner values without contradicting any religion and yet, crucially, without depending on religion.

So, this may be correct for the Buddhist’s emphasis on inner values. Highlighting compassion would not contradict any religion that I know of. But stating an end goal — is it surviving and thriving here on Earth or an afterlife of heavenly paradise? — does cause conflict. And I don’t believe you can fully express the inner values without having an end goal in mind.

(p. 2) I should make it clear that my intention is not to dictate moral values. Doing that would be of no benefit. To try to impose moral principles from outside, to impose them, as it were, by command, can never be effective. Instead, I call for each of us to come to our own understanding of the importance of inner values. For it is these inner values which are the source of both an ethically harmonious world and the individual peace of mind, confidence, and happiness we all seek.

Imposing moral rules doesn’t work. But clearly stating the moral guides and the reasons for them could work to gather cooperators together who agree with them. I’ve never seen how Buddhism’s great emphasis on inner values could be enough. To me, they are necessary (and we will develop them in Part 2), but not sufficient.

Part I — A New Vision of Secular Ethics
Chapter 1 — Rethinking Secularism

(p. 5) I am pleased by recent developments in scientific methodology in these areas, in which the traditional scientific principle of objective third-person verifiability is now being expanded to include the domain of subjective experience.

Yep. The cognitive revolution of the 1950’s is a great example of this happening during the Dalai Lama’s lifetime.

(p. 5) have also had a longstanding interest in what scientific basis might be found for understanding the effects of contemplative practice and the deliberate cultivation of qualities such as compassion, loving-kindness, attention, and a calm mind. I have always felt that if science could show such practices to be both possible and beneficial, then perhaps they could even be promoted through mainstream education.

Bringing mindfulness to schools is happening as we speak.

(p. 5) there is now a reasonably substantial body of evidence in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and other fields suggesting that, even from the most rigorous scientific perspective, unselfishness and concern for others are not only in our own interests but also, in a sense, innate to our biological nature.

Yes, but selfishness is also “innate to our biological nature.” The trick is to argue when and why to use each one. And that takes a goal to guide us.

(p. 6) for some people, in particular for some Christian and Muslim brothers and sisters, my use of the word “secular” raises difficulties. To some, the very word suggests a firm rejection of, or even hostility toward, religion. It may seem to them that, in using this word, I am advocating the exclusion of religion from ethical systems, or even from all areas of public life. This is not at all what I have in mind.
(p. 6) In Indian usage, “secular,” far from implying antagonism toward religion or toward people of faith, actually implies a profound respect for and tolerance toward all religions. It also implies an inclusive and impartial attitude which includes nonbelievers.

It would be great if everyone could adopt this inclusive and impartial attitude, but it just doesn’t seem attainable given the epistemological positions of many religions. More on this later.

(p. 9) dating from the reign of Emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE. One inscription contains the exhortation to “honour another’s religion, for doing so strengthens both one’s own and that of the other.”
(p. 11) Two of the most important ideas I share wherever I travel — the principles of nonviolence and interreligious harmony — are both drawn from ancient Indian heritage.

Once again, this is great, until disagreements about truths and goals occur. Nonviolence and harmony do not provide guides for answers to intractable disagreements.

(p. 12) I should acknowledge that there are some who, though sympathetic to my explanation of secularism in Indian terms, still question the viability of detaching ethics from religion in this way. The mistrust of attempts to separate the two is so strong among some followers of theistic traditions that I have been cautioned, on some occasions, not to use the word “secular” when speaking about ethics in public.
(p. 13) For those whose religious belief is so closely tied to ethical practice, it is hard to conceive of one without the other. For those who believe that truth requires God, God alone can make ethics binding.
(p. 13) I do not agree that ethics requires grounding in religious concepts or faith. Instead, I firmly believe that ethics can also emerge simply as a natural and rational response to our very humanity and our common human condition.

Wow. These passages could have been written by any of the “four horsemen of the non-apocalypse.”

(p. 14) The systems of belief with which the world’s religions ground and support inner values can, generally speaking, be grouped into two categories.
(p. 14) On the one hand are the theistic religions, which include Hinduism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In these traditions, ethics is ultimately grounded in some understanding of God — as a creator and as the absolute ground of all that is.
(p. 14) since God is infinite love or infinite compassion, loving others is part of loving and serving God.
(p. 14) there is the belief that after death we will face divine judgment, and this provides a further strong incentive for behaving with restraint and due caution
(p. 15) On the other hand, in the non-theistic religions, such as Buddhism, Jainism, and a branch of the ancient Indian Samkhya school, there is no belief in a divine creator. Instead, there is the core principle of causality, while the universe is regarded as beginningless.
(p. 15) [These] religions instead ground ethics in the idea of karma. The Sanskrit word karma simply means “action.” So when we talk about our karma, we are referring to all our intentional acts of body, speech, and mind, and when we talk about the fruits of our karma, we are talking about the consequences of these acts.
(p. 15) When combined with the idea of rebirth and successive lives, this understanding becomes a powerful basis for ethics and the cultivation of inner values.
(p. 15) All religions, therefore, to some extent, ground the cultivation of inner values and ethical awareness in some kind of metaphysical (that is, not empirically demonstrable) understanding of the world and of life after death.

Yes. And these metaphysical stances are blockades to universal agreement wherever they become hardened.

(p. 16) I do not think that religion is indispensable to the spiritual life.
(p. 16) Today, in a scientific age in which religion strikes many as meaningless, what basis for such values is left to us? How can we find a way of motivating ourselves ethically without recourse to traditional beliefs?
(p. 16) although humans can manage without religion, they cannot manage without inner values.
(p. 16) As I see it, spirituality has two dimensions. The first dimension, that of basic spiritual well-being — by which I mean inner mental and emotional strength and balance — does not depend on religion but comes from our innate human nature as beings with a natural disposition toward compassion, kindness, and caring for others. The second dimension is what may be considered religion-based spirituality, which is acquired from our upbringing and culture and is tied to particular beliefs and practices.
(p. 17) The difference between the two is something like the difference between water and tea. Ethics and inner values without religious content are like water, something we need every day for health and survival. Ethics and inner values based in a religious context are more like tea. The tea we drink is mostly composed of water, but it also contains some other ingredients — tea leaves, spices, perhaps some sugar or, at least in Tibet, salt — and this makes it more nutritious and sustaining and something we want every day. But however the tea is prepared, the primary ingredient is always water. While we can live without tea, we can’t live without water.

What an interesting metaphor! We non-religious types need to develop our tea.

(p. 18) there are some who believe, at one end of the spectrum, that we are by nature fundamentally violent, aggressive, and competitive; while others, at the other end, take the view that we are predominantly disposed toward gentleness and love.
(p. 18) if we view human nature as dominated by destructive tendencies, our ethics will most likely be grounded in something outside ourselves.
(p. 18) If, however, we view human nature as predominantly oriented toward kindness and the desire for a peaceful life, then we can consider ethics an entirely natural and rational means for pursuing our innate potential.

Yes. And we now know that humans are both of these. And for good reason. The signature adaptation of the human species may be cooperation. But the science around prosociality shows that cooperation requires special conditions, including regulation towards shared goals using graduated responses to both helpful AND harmful behaviors. In other words, we need to be kind. And sometimes we need to be cruel to be kind. And it takes wisdom to know the difference between these situations.

(p. 19) I believe that an inclusive approach to secular ethics, one with the potential to be universally accepted, requires recognition of only two basic principles.
(p. 19) The first principle is the recognition of our shared humanity and our shared aspiration to happiness and the avoidance of suffering; the second is the understanding of interdependence as a key feature of human reality, including our biological reality as social animals. From these two principles we can learn to appreciate the inextricable connection between our own well-being and that of others, and we can develop a genuine concern for others’ welfare. Together, I believe, they constitute an adequate basis for establishing ethical awareness and the cultivation of inner values.

That is an argument that is perfect in sync with evolutionary philosophy. And this continues in the next few chapters.

Chapter 2 — Our Common Humanity

(p. 21) in any attempt to develop a genuinely universal approach to ethics, [we have] to have a clear understanding of what unites us all, namely our common humanity.
(p. 26) Since we are social animals — that is, since our survival and flourishing depend on being part of a group or community — our capacity for empathy has profound implications for our pursuit of happiness and well-being.

This is almost word-for-word what Humanists UK says when they teach ethics.

Chapter 3 — The Quest for Happiness

(p. 31) A human being survives only with hope, and hope by definition implies the thought of something better. As I see it, our very survival depends on some idea of future happiness.
(p. 31) Happiness is a rather general term, so there is potential for misunderstanding. For example, it should be made clear that in this book’s secular context, we are not talking about religious conceptions of ultimate happiness, but rather the simple joy or happiness we all understand in an ordinary or everyday sense.
(p. 31) what are the sources of human happiness? Three factors immediately suggest themselves which, I think most people will agree, contribute significantly to human well-being, namely wealth or prosperity; health; and friendship or companionship.
(p. 40) there are also other crucial factors which greatly contribute to our level of genuine happiness and joy. Recent scientific research suggests that chief among these are a sense of purpose which transcends narrow self-interest and a feeling of being connected with others or of belonging to a community. The root of both of these, I believe, is compassion or warmheartedness

The positive psychology literature is overflowing with scientific books about this topic. (See here, here, here, or here.) I’ve read many of these and listened to podcasts with the authors of many, many more. Unfortunately, this short chapter by the Dalai Lama is completely lacking in actual references to this field, but it does help to see his simple, straightforward thinking as well as the link to compassion, which is the subject of the next two chapters.

Chapter 4 — Compassion, the Foundation of Well-Being

(p. 41) Without another’s loving care, none of us would have lived more than a few days. As a result of this intense need for others in our early development, a disposition toward affection is a part of our biology. This is a characteristic we share with many other mammals, and also birds
(p. 48) What is important is that when pursuing our own self-interest we should be “wise selfish” and not “foolish selfish.” Being foolish selfish means pursuing our own interests in a narrow, shortsighted way. Being wise selfish means taking a broader view and recognizing that our own long-term individual interest lies in the welfare of everyone.
(p. 50) While compassion at the biological level can be unconditional, like the mother’s love for her baby, it is also biased and limited in scope. Nevertheless, it is of the utmost importance, because it is the seed from which unbiased compassion can grow. We can take our innate capacity for warmheartedness and, using our intelligence and conviction, expand it.
(p. 52) universal compassion is not rooted in any self-regarding element, but rather in the simple awareness that all others are human beings who, just like oneself, aspire to happiness and shun suffering.
(p. 53) My old friend Professor Paul Ekman, a pioneer in the science of emotion, once told me that even Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory, believed that “the love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.”
(p. 55) since universal compassion involves gradually expanding one’s circle of concern until it finally embraces the whole of humanity, it needs constant cultivation.
(p. 56) religion is not necessary for cultivating compassion. In fact, secular techniques for compassion training are already in use, and their effectiveness has even been scientifically demonstrated.

It’s striking to me how much this mimics Peter Singer’s book The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress, which I tried to take to its logical ethical conclusion by considering the evolutionary story of all of the life that has ever been or ever will be. I’m really looking forward to spending some more time in Part 2 of Beyond Religion to learn about ways to cultivate this compassion. But first, are there limits to this compassion?

Chapter 5 — Compassion and the Question of Justice

(p. 57) For many, it seems, there is a conflict between the principle of compassion, which implies forgiveness, and the exercise of justice, which requires punishment for wrongdoing. As they see it, the principle of justice or fairness, rather than that of compassion, must underpin any humanistic approach to ethics.
(p. 58) compassion by no means implies surrender in the face of wrongdoing or injustice.
(p. 61) From a secular point of view, without such beliefs in punishment and reward in the afterlife, we must ask ourselves what punishment is really about. Is it about retribution and revenge — about making wrongdoers suffer as an end in itself? Or is it more about preventing further wrongdoing? To my mind, the purpose of punishment is not to exact suffering as an end in itself. Rather, the suffering inflicted by punishment should have a higher purpose, namely to discourage the wrongdoer from repeating the offense and to deter others from committing similar acts. Punishment is, therefore, not about retribution but about deterrence.

This is roughly the same conclusion reached by Dan Dennett and Greg Caruso in their book debating free will, determinism, and “just desert”. We’re aligned once again! But what about the final subject of Part 1 of Beyond Religion — ethics — which is covered in the next two chapters?

Chapter 6 — The Role of Discernment

(p. 73) While intention is the first and most important factor in guaranteeing that our behaviour is ethical, we also need discernment to ensure that the choices we make are realistic and that our good intentions do not go to waste.
(p. 74) For those occasions when we do not have time to work things out in detail, it is useful to have internalized general rules to guide our actions.
(p. 80) we will never know all the causes that have given rise to any situation. Nor can we foresee all the consequences of our actions. There is always bound to be some element of uncertainty. It is important to acknowledge this, but it should not worry us. Still less should it make us despair of the value of rational assessment. Instead it should temper our actions with proper humility and caution.
(p. 80) This uncertainty is another reason why ethics must be grounded at the level of motivation, as I have said, rather than purely on consideration of consequences.

In my paper on “Rebuilding the Harm Principle”, I say something similar about how to integrate consequentialism and virtue ethics. (I also add in the third of the three major camps of moral ethics, deontology.) Bravo!

Chapter 7 — Ethics in Our Shared World

(p. 84) people are making a convenient distinction between ethics on the personal level and ethics on the wider social level. To me, such attitudes are fundamentally flawed, as they overlook the interdependence of our world.
(p. 88) Disarmament is compassion in practice. What is required, therefore, is both inner disarmament, at the level of our individual hatred, prejudice, and intolerance, and outer disarmament, at the level of nations and states.
(p. 91) On the issue of economic inequality, I consider myself at least half Marxist. When it comes to creating wealth and thereby improving people’s material conditions, capitalism is without doubt very effective, but capitalism is clearly inadequate as any kind of social ideal, since it is only motivated by profit, without any ethical principle guiding it.
(p. 92) I told [a very wealthy couple], having made your money as capitalists, you should spend it as socialists!

This chapter actually consists of several short sections about technology, war, the environment, economics, science, education, and perseverance, but these four quotes are enough to show we’re basically aligned again. All of the points being made are simply a natural extension of the principle of flourishing in an interdependent world. The fact that this secular ethics is coming from the Dalai Lama rather than a typical atheist is completely remarkable. It’s a perfect example of what Cass Sunstein called a “surprising validator”. And it gives me great hope.

This marks the end of a fairly long overview of just the first half of this book, but I do hope it sparks an interest to read the whole thing and to share it widely with people who might be receptive to this message. As I said at the start, I only wish the title of this book had been flipped. Here’s why. In David Sloan Wilson’s autobiography, he wrote this about the Dalai Lama:

A quote of his is framed on my wall: “To defy the authority of empirical evidence is to disqualify oneself as someone worthy of critical debate in a dialogue.”

This is an enormously important statement about epistemology that wasn’t covered in Beyond Religion. I entirely agree with the authority of empiricism and with the empiricists’ arguments that all of our knowledge comes from this source. But we are also crucially inspired by our beliefs, hopes, imagination, hypotheses, or faith about what might be in the realm of the unknown. If life had only ever acted on what was empirically known, it would never have progressed at all. I will have more to say about this in an upcoming paper about the evolution of knowledge, but the important thing to say here is that perhaps this message about secular ethics would be easier to accept if it was advertised as being confined to the empirical world, as being confined to the evidence that we can all agree upon.

Beyond that realm, some of us may be inspired by various visions of earthly utopias. Some of us may be inspired by various visions of heavenly paradise. Trials and errors will show us which of these prove to be more accurate and/or effective. But, to put a spin on the Dalai Lama’s book title, these are “beyond secularism”. That doesn’t make them better or more important. Just literally out of reach. This isn’t the same thing as S.J. Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria since religions have typically tried to make claims about the empirical world. But if religions were prepared to retreat from any disproven ideas, then empirical secularism could become what we all agree to. Beyond that, you can believe what you want to believe, as long as it doesn’t “defy the authority of empirical evidence.” I’m sure that suggestion would still face pockets of fierce resistance, but maybe it would be a more comforting way to approach this attempt to create an ethics for the whole world. What do you think?

1 Comment

Review of Truth & Generosity by Weiner & Forsee

8/1/2024

5 Comments

I’m currently working on a big paper on the evolution of knowledge and during my research for that I came across an obscure but interesting little book that I wanted to share. It’s called Truth & Generosity: How Truth Makes Language Possible by Neal Weiner and Tina Lee Forsee. (T&G by W&F from here on out.) According to the Amazon description:

It doesn't matter whether you're conservative or liberal, religious or skeptical, the very fact you are able to understand the words you're reading right now—that we are all able to communicate with each other using language—means we must share a vast body of beliefs. While language may shape the way we think about the world to some small extent, it makes much more sense to say truth shapes language to a very large extent. That’s the central argument of this book:

Truth is the condition that makes language possible.

Tina was my way to finding this book. She’s the fascinating writer behind several projects that would definitely be of interest to anyone reading my site. In T&G, she is described as having “published her debut novel, A Footnote to Plato, in 2023 (Wipf and Stock). She is an Associate Acquisitions Editor at After Dinner Conversation, a magazine dedicated to philosophical short stories. tinaforsee.com.” Her website has links to a couple of Substack newsletters she runs, including her personal one Philosophy and Fiction (subjects I love!) where she recently posted about every chapter of T&G. After I finish my review here, I am definitely going to go engage in the conversations there about this book.

(Also, you should know that her book A Footnote to Plato is an excellent addition to the canon of campus novels. It’s like a mashup of Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen, and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Definitely check it out if that subject is of interest to you.)

While Tina’s solo works are great, T&G is a co-production that has an interesting origin story. This is best explained by quoting from the foreward that Tina wrote.

My husband wrote the first draft of this manuscript nearly twenty years ago while he was still teaching at Marlboro College. He retired shortly after, and I suppose at that time he was perfectly happy to stuff the manuscript in a drawer and get back to it someday. … I’ve always felt the book needed to be published, but I also knew how much work that would require. Back then, I didn’t even know where to begin. Time passed. Neal is now 81 years old. The last thing he wants to do is spend his retirement years going through the academic publishing process, so I offered to publish it for him.

I understand if you’re skeptical of such ventures, but I hope you’ll make an exception in this case. After all, Neal has paid his dues. He went to prestigious universities and taught philosophy at Marlboro College for nearly forty years. He has published academic works, but he has also seen commercial success and has even appeared on Good Morning America. There’s his ‘social proof’. Make of it what you will.

So, yeah, that’s why I called this an “obscure” book. But it’s only 113 pages, and since Neal and Tina’s styles are both very clear and jargon free it is an especially quick read that is easily worth your time. Before we dive in, I thought I should quickly share some of my own positions on the relevant subjects so you know where I am coming from.

On my website’s page for epistemology, I wrote, “In summary, Plato laid down the most influential definition of knowledge as ‘justified, true, belief.’ But this has proven to be untenable and I propose that it ought to be replaced with an understanding that knowledge can only ever be justified beliefs that are currently surviving our best tests.” Also on that page, I have links to my three most important essays on this subject so far — Knowledge Cannot be Justified True Belief; Evolving Our Trust in Science; and The Bayesian Balance — as well links to four other epistemology books that I have reviewed in this website — Kindly Inquisitors; Knowledge and Its Limits; How to Talk to a Science Denier; and Mental Immunity (Part 1 and Part 2).

Finally, I think an important concept for this discussion is the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Truth, which has these important descriptions for the term as it is often used in philosophy:

There are two commonly accepted constraints on truth and falsehood: 1) Every proposition is true or false. [Law of the Excluded Middle.]; and 2) No proposition is both true and false. [Law of Non-contradiction.] These constraints require that every proposition has exactly one truth-value. Although the point is controversial, most philosophers add the further constraint that a proposition never changes its truth-value in space or time.

Okay, with that (very) brief background on knowledge and truth out of the way, let’s dig into T&G. Rather than write a full review, I’ll just share some of the passages I highlighted and react to them along the way. All page numbers are from the 2023 Kindle edition.

Truth & Generosity: How Truth Makes Language Possible by Weiner & Forsee

Table of Contents
PART I: The Principle of Generosity
CHAPTER 1: The Principle of Generosity
CHAPTER 2: Violations of the Principle of Generosity
CHAPTER 3: The Poetry of Ordinary Language
CHAPTER 4: What Language is Not
CHAPTER 5: Etymology and Truth
CHAPTER 6: Social Influences on Semantic Change
PART II: Generosity and Shared Belief
CHAPTER 7: Politics and Relativism
CHAPTER 8: Trust and Doubt
CHAPTER 9: The Origin of Language
CHAPTER 10: Radical Interpretation
CHAPTER 11: How We Recognize Language as Language
PART III: Generosity and Truth
CHAPTER 12: The Body of Truth
CHAPTER 13: The Heart of Truth
CHAPTER 14: Generosity Beyond the Sentence
CHAPTER 15: The Interpretive Ideal
CHAPTER 16: Interpreting the World Through Generosity

This table of contents excited me! We begin with PART I: The Principle of Generosity.

(p.2) The very fact that we can communicate with each other and translate other languages into our own means there must be a vast body of belief we all share—a body of belief which, taken on the whole, must be true. To put it in a snappier way: Truth is the condition that makes language possible.

As I shared above, this is the central argument of the book. W&F introduce this right from the start, which I appreciate, but I could have used a bit more background. Although the word “truth” is in the title of the book, and it is used 101 times in 113 pages (according to my Kindle search), I didn’t find a clear philosophical definition of the way they are using the term. In the IEP entry for Truth that I mentioned above, there are sections for the correspondence theory, the semantic theory, the coherence theory, pragmatic theories, and deflationary theories of truth, each of which have several subsections. This is a highly discussed term in philosophy! And without a lot of agreement. So, it would have helped me to know where W&F stand. But let’s adopt this book’s other main term — generosity — and see if their language will eventually demonstrate what they mean over the course of the book.

(p.2) This is not to say every single opinion must be true; after all, surely some of the beliefs we hold contradict each other. And I certainly don’t mean we should blindly embrace the status quo either. What I mean is, ordinary opinion, on the whole, has things basically right, and a sensitive and careful distillation of what is presented there is the best approach to seeking truth.

This is a telling caveat to the declaration in the first quote (“a body of belief which, taken on the whole, must be true”). According to the three constraints on truth that I listed above — excluded middle, non-contradiction, and universality — the way philosophers use “truth” is very much as a black and white term. But by using and emphasizing words such as “on the whole” and “basically”, W&F seem to allow for a fuzzier, blurrier, folk usage of the word truth. “Must be true” has transformed into “basically right”. That’s not exactly what epistemologists have been fighting over, but it can still help the “approach to seeking truth.”

(p.2) Some of what I have to say will be drawn from Donald Davidson’s work, which stretches back to the early sixties and has won great respect in academic philosophy.
(p.25) [Davidson] argues that the truth of a sentence comes first and the meanings of its words are adjusted to make this truth possible.

Ok, what does that mean?

(p. 26) Suppose an auto mechanic from the rural south currently living in New England tells me that to deal with my car problem, I’ll need an auto holler. … I realize he is using the word-sound holler as I would use the word-sound hauler, and from that point on everything proceeds smoothly. … The initial confusion does not get straightened out by anyone’s explaining to me the conventions of the Southern dialect. Instead, I presupposed the truth of the mechanic’s speech—in other words, I assumed the mechanic was quite aware that yelling at my car would not solve a thing …The point is, the truth of the sentence came first, the word and its meaning came second. I can be sure then that for me, the word did not get its meaning by convention, but by generous interpretation of its usage in accordance with my beliefs about the world.

This is an extremely helpful example, demonstrating both truth and generosity in action. In other words, W&F are saying that in order to communicate at all we must begin by being generous and assume the good intentions of the mechanic to speak the truth. That’s great, but it doesn’t address the traditional problems of knowledge where skeptical arguments (e.g. evil demons, Gettier cases, or the Matrix) imply that these good intentions may not be enough. How can we ever know we are really talking about the same thing?

(p.27) meaning is plastic and takes its shape by conforming to the contours of a presumed shared reality.

This, to me, is a key move of the book that isn’t highlighted enough. In my own work, I’ve called this “presumed shared reality” our first assumption or our first hypothesis. Donald Campbell, who coined the term evolutionary epistemology, called this “hypothetical realism”. Once that stance is taken, all communication and knowledge-seeking can proceed as basically a test of this presumption. But how can we ever know if our meanings actually do conform to these contours?

(p.33) novel usage puts the word under a kind of truth stress so that it must change meaning to relieve that stress. If for whatever reason the untrue way of speaking becomes widespread and the process is allowed to reach its logical completion, then whatever is strictly speaking not true or not believable about the novel usage is eliminated by a shift in meaning. At this point, an ironic sort of miracle occurs: the meaning of the word adjusts on a grand scale to make the untruth true

This is a lovely demonstration of how knowledge and language evolve. But it does not show how we could ever hope to attain the very strict status of “truth” as laid out in the philosophical definitions above. Claiming we can become “on the whole” “basically right” is an important counter to nihilistic relativism, but that is not strictly “true”. I would happily just admit that as part of my own larger project of evolutionary epistemology. But for W&F, I think is too easy for skeptics to poke holes in their language.

(p.43) the principle of generosity underlies all communication whatsoever and thereby guarantees the unified, public character of anything worth calling a world.

After my review of Naomi Oreskes’ book Why Trust Science?, I’ve been using her term “consensus” to describe this “unified, public character” but I love how this principle of generosity describes an important aspect of the cooperation we rely upon to reach this consensus. Perhaps the other side of that would be a “principle of stinginess” to describe the competition that uses disagreements to whittle away at any differences in our consensus. But this ends the discussion of Part I: The Principle of Generosity, so the topic shifts now. On to PART II: Generosity and Shared Belief.

(p.44) It took a long time, roughly from 1776 to 1976, for political equality (equality of political rights) to turn into first social equality (equality of income or opportunity) and then epistemic equality (relativism), but it happened.
(p.45) There was and still is real oppression, both political and epistemological, but the blind worship of equality comes at the cost of the distinction between knowledge and opinion.
(p.45) Relativism speaks to the demand for an egalitarian society. The question is how to retain its democratic virtues without its nihilistic vice.
(p.52) Relativism makes the unity of being a mere appearance while preserving the diversity of opinion. What I propose is the reverse: to make diversity of opinion the appearance and preserve the unity of being.

This is a fascinating analysis of the spread of individualism from politics to economics to epistemology. I’ll leave the political-economic discussion for another day, but in epistemological relativism the control of knowledge, which has slid down from powerful groups and elites to the common individual, still has one more step to take. As I shared in my overview of Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch (a title that sounds like it also advocates for generosity), the liberal system of inquisition has two foundational principles — no one gets final say, and no one has personal authority. In other words, the power to decide what is accepted as knowledge drops not to any one individual, but it actually resides in zero people! Not with kings, queens, or aristocracies. Not with popes, ayatollahs, or religious councils. Not with professors, philosophers, scientists, or academic councils. Not with western white men, eastern gurus, or indigenous wisdom councils. And certainly not with billionaire tech bros. The best production of knowledge is now governed by an inanimate process — the scientific method, broadly construed — whose practices we can all continue to shape as well. I call it “the epistemological power paradox” that as the power of individuals to determine knowledge dropped to zero with the discovery of this method, the power of that knowledge actually grew to its highest point. That, to me, is how we retain knowledge’s democratic virtues without its nihilistic vice. That is how a diversity of opinions can actually be shaped into consensus about the (presumed) unity of being.

The next sections of the book take us through a bit of theorizing about the origins of language. At first, this feels like a sidetrack from the main theme of the book, but the link does quickly become apparent.

(p.54) Throughout the 19th century, debates on the origin of speech had become so contentious that, as contemporary writers are usually quick to point out, in 1866 and 1911, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned all papers on the subject.
(p.56) In our thought experiment we eliminate the possibility of misusing established meaning because there is no established meaning. In ur-sentences, there is absolutely nothing available to give meaning to words except the very objects described. In other words, our thought experiment takes us to the very bedrock of truth.

I would not put it that way and don’t really understand how W&F could make such a claim. These ur-sentences are still based on our perceptions and perceptions are fallible. To put it as Kant would say, there is still a difference between the phenomena and the noumena.

(p.56) The vast majority of those who have given the matter serious thought have favored the idea that the first utterance must have been a sentence rather than a word.
(p.57) the most persuasive reason is obvious and not technical at all: Words only function in sentences. They are good for declaring, commanding, promising, begging, asking, wishing, warning, and so on, but they can perform these roles only in sentences
(p.57) Sentences, at least as they are usually defined, are complete thoughts. The implication is that anything less than a sentence—a word, phrase, or syllable—is a fragment of a thought.
(p.58) In an inquiry into natural language’s origin and evolution, however, to suppose words could arise independent of sentences is rather like supposing bodily organs could arise apart from the body to which they belong.

But organs (sorta) did arise prior to bodies! Not the fully finished organs that we see today, but the discrete functional elements of protists (e.g. photosynthetic energy production, flagellate movement, parasitic consumption, stalked reproductive spores) evolved separately before combining in a Major Evolutionary Transition to create multicellular life. I think W&F’s argument here could be turned on its head. How could bodies have evolved without the organs being out there to comprise them? Evolution of complexity requires simple steps along the way that each give an evolutionary advantage. Turning back to the evolution of language, perhaps the definitions of “words” and “sentences” need to be thought of more flexibly so we can imagine their simplest protist versions way back at the beginning of their journey towards today’s linguistic complexity.

(p.61) It is surely not the case that language began with the naming of things followed by a synthesis of names into sentences, sentences which may or may not have been true. For reasons we have already discussed, it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine how language could have come about by such a process. It is even more difficult to imagine truth limping behind the first sentences; the first utterance could not have been false.
(p.61) Without established usage, there is simply no way to bespeak things other than they really are. In other words, in order for the first utterance to count as language, it had to be infallible.

Did you catch Dennett’s alarm bell for a weak argument there? (The use of “surely.”) I don’t see how “the first utterance” might not have been mistaken or illusory and therefore false. Again, I could really use W&F’s definition of true here because maybe they mean something different. Which theory of truth are they using? Does it need to be universally true? Because that would be far too high a bar to clear. Other animals have been observed shouting false warning calls so they can obtain the foods left behind by their fellow creatures after they run for cover. So that lying is an example of at least some false communication happening before human language even began.

(p.62) We are supposing this to be the birth of public language, so one way or another the semantics had to become shared by the entire community. This means that public language depends on the whole community taking these ur-sentences as true.
(p.62) Suppose FLABEH meant, Run! A mammoth is coming! Someone might have mistakenly screamed it after hearing a loud crashing noise on a very dark night. But that would be a case in which the bespoken object was absent, which absence is precisely what makes the falsehood possible. This sort of error could not have been normal. If it had been, the result would have been either semantic change or the destruction of referential usefulness for the incipient language.

So, not each and every utterance is true. But the generally accepted usages that arise must hone toward truth after many, many iterations. This is exactly the same process that is used today. But it does not start from some bedrock of truth. It starts with a guess and proceeds in a Bayesian fashion from there towards consensus.

(p.64) Only one conclusion is possible: We have not left the epistemic Eden; we are as infallible as our forbears. Within a certain limited range, we, too, cannot be wrong.
(p.64) But we can be wrong!—you may be thinking. If this conclusion seems shocking, let us not forget that the infallibility I am talking about applies only to the description of objects directly experienced, while they are experienced, and this should not be confused with other types of assertion.

Ah hah. So perhaps W&F are accepting the line of argument, leading from Descartes, about “self-knowledge” being especially secure. But this is easily refuted. Our “direct experience” is just not infallible.

That closes Part II about the origins of language giving us reasons to believe we speak truth. I found this section very unpersuasive, but let’s proceed to the conclusion of the book with PART III: Generosity and Truth.

(p.78) the shared beliefs we are talking about are not merely widespread agreement—they form an absolutely necessary agreement that is the condition for the possibility of recognizing language and intelligence as such. Such beliefs are not merely uncontested or not contradicted; they are not, as a mass, contradictable. Thus the indispensable body of belief may be undefined, but it is on the whole and for all practical purposes, infallible. Which is to say, to contradict them in their entirety and in their very possibility is to contradict oneself. And so for us, the undefined body of belief must be taken, on the whole, as true.
(p.80) What I wish to borrow from Quine is the general idea of a gradient of confidence and stability based on the degree of upset caused by the abandonment of a given belief. Quine's system measures beliefs by their logical connectedness to other beliefs, but ours measures them by how dispensable they are for interpretation.
(p.81) Thus it seems plausible to imagine a slowly evolving mass with some of its propositions stable enough as individuals to be candidates for eternity, others locked into groups that are either rigid or elastic, and still others that live alone, so to speak, and as individuals are relatively changeable. … To put it another way, you can sometimes change your mind about certain propositions, but you can’t change your mind about all contingent propositions, or even a great many of them, all at once.

I loved seeing this reference to “a slowly evolving mass.” That is the right process, and we do end up with a huge, interconnected network of stable propositions. We just don’t need to start with “truth” to arrive there. And the history of skeptical arguments show we shouldn’t ever expect to arrive at a finishing line either.

(p.82) when a belief cannot be dispensed with, what can we call it but true?

Looking at the thesaurus for synonyms of “correct” we can could call it right, accurate, veracious, unerring, faithful, faultless, flawless, or error-free. We could call it widely accepted, a proven fact, or a justified belief currently surviving our best rational tests. But according to the strict philosophical definition of truth set out above (passing the tests for excluded middle, non-contradiction, and universality), these indispensable beliefs are not known to be “true”. That powerful term should not be bandied about too casually. It cheapens the philosophical ideal. And calling something true sets us up to fail to see new information. I would much prefer to treat truth with the reverence it deserves. When I’m speaking and writing carefully, I try to only use the term “true” for the abstract philosophical concept of perfect knowledge that we can seemingly never actually achieve. True is a future goal. Not a currently reached destination or designation. That, to me, helps enormously for keeping our knowledge evolving in the right direction.

(p.82) Theories such as coherence and correspondence are like species of truth, but none can be a satisfactory definition of truth (or of being or goodness, for that matter). Reductionisms such as materialism, idealism, and hedonism make the same mistake. Definition must stop somewhere, and, logically, it must surrender at both the top and bottom of the conceptual mountain.

I honestly am not sure what this means, but it might explain why W&F don’t take the time to declare their preferred definition of truth. Maybe I would agree that definitions cannot capture everything, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to keep working on them. Definitions are like all knowledge in that way. I don’t think of them as having a solid bottom and top but rather as an ever-expanding light exploring the darkness of our ignorance that was once total and complete when life first arose.

(p.86) Meaning depends on context, and context is a series of ever-more-encompassing wholes. The word-sentence relationship is but one part of the series. Below it are the mere sounds—prefixes and suffixes, for example—which have the word they belong to as their context (consider: ing means different things in bring and chopping). Above this stretches a long sequence of ever-larger wholes in which the same sentence can have more or less plausible alternative meanings. First the paragraph, then the chapter, the section, the book, the author’s other works, the author’s life during that period, the totality of the author’s works, the totality of the author’s life, the library in which the works are stored, the culture of which the library is but a single institution, and the sweep of world history in which that culture is but a small part, not to mention the universe itself.

This is a great evolutionary view of knowledge along a continuous spectrum! I hope to publish more on this soon.

(p.88) The conclusion we can draw from this is that the assumed sense of an entire work adjudicates between alternative or competing meanings of its components,
(p.93) The truest interpretation is, all else being equal, the one that best fits the parts into a coherent whole. To the extent that we cannot make them fit, we cannot understand the work.

This has echoes of the famous Wilfred Sellars quote, “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” It is also reflected in my definition of knowledge as justified beliefs currently surviving our best rational tests.

(p.99) As a regulative principle, the principle of generosity amounts to a presupposition of what it means to make sense running alongside the principle of sufficient reason: things must be assumed to make sense. To put it another way, we cannot make an earnest attempt to interpret anything while at the same time assuming it makes no sense.
(p.106) Thus we arrive at the sheer, bare form of understanding from which all concrete belief depends. Perhaps it can only be called a kind of faith in the comprehensibility of the world.

Or, to avoid using religious terms, and instead preferring to draw on the scientific method as the best way yet discovered to gain knowledge, we could call this “comprehensibility of the world” our first hypothesis. And after all of the evidence that has rolled in to support this idea, it is no longer a leap of faith to believe in it.

Despite some qualms about the middle section of the book, and with its general usage of the word truth, I thoroughly enjoyed Truth and Generosity. Tina Lee Forsee should be commended for rescuing it from Neal Weiner’s archives and sharing it widely. I look froward to using some of its arguments in my own efforts to help us understand truth and knowledge better. And I’m sure I’ll need a plea for generosity when I do.

5 Comments

Deep Philosophical Confusions Among Artists and Critics

7/14/2024

0 Comments

Soon after I wrote my last post on “why I’m done with the publishing industry for my fiction”, I came across a perfect example of the mass confusion that resides in the world of the arts. I just had to share it and analyze it. It’s the essay, “Analyst or Moralist?” by James Jackson, which was published in Quillette in mid-May.

Firstly, so we can know where this is coming from, James Jackson’s bio for the article says he is “a writer and academic interested in culture, the arts, and politics. He is currently completing a monograph on the French poet, playwright, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau.”

Digging a little deeper, Cocteau “was one of the foremost artists of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements.” Where surrealism “is an art and cultural movement …in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas.” Avant-garde “identifies an experimental genre, or work of art, and the artist who created it; which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time.” And Dadaists “believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality.”

We are not off to a good start.

As for the outlet, Quillette was “created in 2015 to focus on scientific topics, but has come to focus on coverage of political and cultural issues concerning freedom of speech and identity politics. It has been described as libertarian-leaning, ‘the right wing's highly influential answer to Slate’, as well as an ‘anti-PC soapbox’.”

This isn’t a news source that I am willing to pay money to subscribe to, but I do monitor it to see another perspective on things, and I have occasionally found some good articles or ideas there.

Okay, now that we understand the messenger, what about the message? The one-sentence lede does a good job of summarizing the focus of the essay:

The increasingly political nature of cultural criticism does a disservice to the arts, to artists, and to criticism itself.

I could perhaps agree with this declaration if the emphasis were placed on the increasingly *poor* political nature of cultural criticism. But the article — which is itself a stridently political piece of cultural criticism — somehow manages to transgress its own prescriptions while mixing in lots of moral and aesthetic nonsense with a few interesting points. The author is clearly intelligent and speaking about the state of the artistic world with an informed intimacy that tells us something important about what is going on with artists, critics, and publishers / producers. And this gives us good evidence of the philosophically-tangled mess of beliefs that is driving all three of these vital populations. The entire article, therefore, deserves a close reading so that we may understand and solve many of the problems we observe in contemporary arts. As such, I’ll reproduce much of the article below, with my comments inserted along the way as a running critique. Off we go!

“There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book,” Oscar Wilde wrote in the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, “books are well written or badly written, that is all.” Wilde was correct. Moral considerations should be suspended when evaluating a work of art. A novel may contain unpleasant characters, but it does not follow that the novelist himself is immoral for creating those characters in the first place. The function of a flawed or immoral protagonist may be to remind us of our own corruptible natures, to introduce complexity to a story’s people and dilemmas, or simply to illuminate humanity in all its variety and peculiarity. A novel filled with moral goodness and clarity will not be not true to life.

Right off the bat, this is wrong and confused. Wilde had his reasons for saying what he said (which I’ll get to below), but you can all pick your own examples to illustrate that books can obviously be moral or immoral. But Jackson immediately contradicts this opening pronouncement anyway, by telling us the functions that immoral characters and storylines can serve. When they “remind us about our corruptible nature”, that is a moral lesson!

“All art,” Wilde also remarked, “is quite useless.” This pithy aphorism reminds us that art is intended for aesthetic pleasure not practical utility—it is an end in itself and not an instrument of moral instruction or politics. The very worst art, Wilde believed, is that which kowtows to rigid orthodoxies and sacrifices the autonomy of the artist in order to deliver a helpful message of some kind.

Ugh. Aesthetic pleasure is not so easily divorced from reality. It is either short-sighted, relativistic, or nihilistic to claim pleasure is an end in itself. And whichever way you go, this claim is a profoundly moral argument! So, to insist on art for art’s sake, and to revel in these kinds of amoral works, is actually the same type of moralizing messaging that Jackson denigrates. It’s just that his “useless” art conveys an unhelpful and destructive message. The fact that its hollowness is hidden behind a sweet-tasting veneer only makes it all the more pernicious. Kowtowing to rigid orthodoxies may be a more obvious wrong, but that is not the only alternative.

In Wilde’s time, moralistic objections to art usually emerged from the conservative and religious Right.

Yes. And Wilde’s trials and imprisonment show exactly why he *had* to say what he said about art being useless and amoral. He was trying not to be prosecuted for his! But Wilde did not really believe this. His works provided strong counterpoints to the dominant and dangerous culture of the day that was persecuting him. And Wilde literally wrote, "Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine." That is a description of a useful and moral art!

(By the way, I believe Wilde’s argument is wrong because it goes too far towards individualism. Multilevel selection now shows us the need for *aligned* individuals and groups. Individual invisible hands will not a good market make.)

In our own age, artists must contend with demands from the progressive Left that art bend the arc of history towards social justice. Activist critics insist upon purity of language and proportional representation of minority demographics in ways that undermine freedom of thought and expression. But the micromanagement of language and the misconception of life as a competition for recognition are not conducive to the creative process. How can the imagination flourish freely in such a climate?

Okay, so that is wrong. But two wrongs don’t make it right to say that artists and critics should therefore strive for *amorality* rather than a Left or Right morality. As I already said, amorality is a moral choice. It would be far better to do art that is beautiful *and* good. It is up to the artist and critic to make their cases for aesthetics and ethics together. Despite the siloed nature of these subjects in academia, they cannot actually be divorced from one another in reality. The levels of beauty and goodness in the world are always affected by our objects and actions.

Unfortunately, the people who seek to remake art in this way hold positions of power in precisely those institutions where creative freedom and the elevation of the individual voice ought to be abundant. The works of those who espouse an unambiguously progressive worldview are celebrated while an appreciation of our cultural inheritance is increasingly scarce or even scorned. This destructive ideology is radical, simplistic, and incoherent—a perversion of French Rationalism and German Idealism that attempts to impose a false teleology upon our shared culture. It overlooks the particular and the concrete in search of the abstract, which moves culture away from organic expression towards something closer to agitprop, unrooted in experience and the spontaneity of imagination. This development, well-meaning though it may be, misunderstands the true nature of artistic creation.

My experience is that the people in positions of power do hold these varieties of philosophies — either insisting on Dadaist amorality or individual tales of intersectional woes. (See Footnote 3 from my last post for evidence of this in the NYT 100 notable books of 2023.) I have yet to find people in artistic power who are open to the kind of evolutionary ethics I argue for, or the kind of art that I find to be both beautiful and good.

“Goethe’s garden,” George Steiner once noted, “is a few thousand yards from Buchenwald” and “Sartre regarded occupied Paris as perfect for literary and philosophic production.” To which he added, “When we invoke the ideals and practices of the humanities, there is no assurance that they humanize.” Kant, Euripides, and Chaucer do not necessarily make their readers better people, …

Is this to be celebrated? Or mourned? Can we not do better? What if the best artists were also wise philosophers? The separation of these aesthetic and ethical endeavors does not help anyone. Including the artists themselves…

…nor does involvement in artistic production make a person more virtuous. Caravaggio murdered a man in a brawl and G.K. Chesterton was an antisemite. Their behavior does not diminish the beauty and profundity of the work they produced. To appreciate their creative talents does not require an endorsement of their personal politics or conduct. Caravaggio’s startling use of light and Chesterton’s sharp and lucid prose draw us into their work regardless of the creators’ moral shortcomings.

Harold Bloom (who was Jewish) spoke of the ambivalence he felt reading Chesterton:

Chesterton goes on puzzling me, because I find his critical sensibility far more congenial to me than that of T.S. Eliot and yet his anti-Semitism is at least as ugly as Eliot’s.

Why settle for such cognitive ambivalence and puzzlement? Given these judgments, the behavior of an artist obviously does diminish the (so-called) beauty and profundity of their work.

While Bloom had personal reservations about the man, he understood his obligations as a critic. Works of culture may move us in complex ways but they should not be asked to transform moral character. It would be quixotic for an artist to believe that he can convert the reader to a particular point of view on a whim. A novel by Dickens or Tolstoy may persuade us of the plight of their characters but they do so without resorting to didacticism. That is not to say that didactic culture is without value or somehow inherently inferior, but those works without any merit beyond the social or political message they wish to convey don’t really qualify as culture at all.

So, which is it? Should the works not transform us or should they persuade us? Should they not resort to didacticism or should they provide valuable didactic culture? Jackson’s contradictory messages here are exactly the result of his confused philosophy.

The critic underwrites the imaginative power that an artist brings to bear on what it means to be human. Rather than resorting to grandiose theories and pseudoscientific methods, the critic’s job is to elucidate the work of the artist with care and sympathy. The task of the humanities, after all, is to transmit the achievements of humanity across generations. The critic should be a disinterested analyst, willing and able to suspend his own feelings, convictions, and beliefs when assessing art and culture.

Once again, grandiose theories and pseudoscientific methods are not the only possible tools for a critic or artist. Philosophy is part of the humanities too and no critic or artist should be disinterested in the best that that field has to offer. (Nor should they be disinterested in the sciences for that matter either!) It would take a hideous schizophrenia to carve out one’s “feelings, convictions, and beliefs” from one’s assessments of art and culture. I don’t actually think it’s even possible. And Jackson is clearly mixing his own beliefs and assessments here. He is just doing it poorly, illustrating how his beliefs in one area have crippled his ability to gain and express good beliefs in another. It would be far better to integrate all of what it means to be human into our humanities.

But today, critics are preoccupied with “problematizing” the back-catalogues of artists and scrutinizing a work’s social or political message. These priorities have in turn affected the kind of work that gets produced. Charlie Higson’s series of Young Bond novels seem to have been designed to repudiate the moral complexities of Ian Fleming’s brutal womanizing protagonist. One of the books contains this passage, clumsily inserted to reassure the reader of the author’s left-liberal bona fides:

Birkett was an ex-Tory MP, famous for promoting covid/vaccines/mask-wearing/5G conspiracy theories, which had spilled over into the usual anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-BBC, anti-MSM, anti-cultural Marxist, Climate Change Denial pronouncements.

The politics is heavy-handed, the syntax is convoluted, and the combination is only likely to be appreciated by someone who wants to have their own left-liberal sympathies flattered. The condescending and paternalistic language resembles an editorial written for the purposes of political education rather than a thoughtful exploration of the human condition.

That is on the way to being fair criticism of both the ethics of today’s critics as well as the aesthetics of Higson’s novels. Why deny that each are important? Lean in and discuss them both!

In Amazon Prime’s film Red, White, and Royal Blue, the message often suffocates the drama. The story deals with a homosexual romance between a spare to the British throne named Henry and Alex, the Hispanic son of the president of the United States. The two men love one another but their relationship is undermined by the stuffy conservatism of backward institutions. In addition to being gay, Henry and Alex both feel victimized in other ways. Henry feels like an outsider who can never play a full role in the institution into which he was born. Alex’s Hispanic surname and ethnicity, meanwhile, lead him to believe that he is unfairly treated by American society, the advantages of his social position notwithstanding. Alex complains that Henry will never understand his grievances because Henry is rich, white, and male. The scene is unedifying, subordinating the emotional drama to a contest of intersectional oneupmanship between two indisputably privileged people. This kind of sermonizing occurs throughout the film, including one character’s lofty description of the senior staff at Buckingham Palace as “wrinkled white men.”

How is this “unedifying”? These beliefs and conversations are clearly happening in the world today. Why can’t our fictional characters have them? Jackson’s usage of the words “victimized”, “intersectional”, and “privileged” are clearly dog-whistles to the Quillette readers who need their “anti-PC soapbox”. And so, Jackson is therefore engaging in exactly the kind of ethical judgment that he purports to be against. But why dodge this at all?? Just make the strong case (if you have one) that Red, White, and Royal Blue’s intended message is a poor one.

(By the way, I watched this movie after reading this and found it simply to be an awfully written and acted rom-com. The potentially sweet story of hidden gay and bi love was outlandishly unbelievable, bouncing back and forth between the White House AND Buckingham Palace. All the character development and meet-cute moments were rushed through in some kind of site location bingo montage. It felt like the product of an AI collage rather than a real and sensitive imagination. I found the politics, however, to be so minor (hardly “suffocating”) that it makes me think Jackson must just have allergic reactions to cameos by Rachel Maddow.)

Emerald Fennel’s film Saltburn, on the other hand, offers a more irreverent and complex indictment of class privilege that seems to have been inspired by a combination of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited and Pasolini’s 1968 film Theorem. It is not exactly apolitical, but nor does it lecture us with the instructive sanctimony that Red, White, and Royal Blue employs. The film’s message—that the rich are spoiled, vapid, arrogant, and vain—is subordinate to the amorality of the psychodrama and the demands of its twisty narrative. Fennel does not have to spell out the fact that the characters are morally inept—she just lets us watch how they behave.

Again, confusion reigns in Jackson’s arguments not matching his actions. He praises Saltburn’s supposedly ethical underlying message, while claiming its morally inept characters make the message more aesthetically pleasing by somehow hiding the didacticism. But this is not “irreverent and complex.” It is attention-seeking and deeply confused. I hated Saltburn because the indictment of class privilege was completely undermined by the glorification of the settings and the shocking depravity of the scenes that were chosen. My judgments were pretty much borne out by the fact that “'Ignorant' rich people use Saltburn TikTok trend to show off their huge houses.”

Much of the rest of Jackson’s article is a random mash-up of perspectives that ultimately amounts to intellectual name-dropping (e.g. Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School, F.R. Leavis, Marxism, Wordsworth, Cultural Studies, Terry Eagleton, Martin Scorsese, and Pierre Bourdieu) without any sort of coherent argument to tie them all together. He continually judges the judgments of other while failing to admit his own judgments are just unargued for judgments of a different flavor. You can skim the article to judge for yourself, but then it ends with this:

“Persons of genius,” John Stuart Mill argued, “are always likely to be a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.” Even for authors who produce work under tyranny and oppression, the best and most enduring art will be true to our shared condition and not consumed by the noise and folly of the moment. The sympathetic critic should recognize that while an artist lives and works within a particular social and political structure, this is not the same as destiny. It is his solemn task to understand and describe the relationship between the artist, the art, and the experience of being human.

Yes. But since ethics and aesthetics (and politics!) all affect that human experience, they must all be considered together. To argue otherwise is to advocate for the willful blindness of a blinkered suppression. Therefore, for Jackson’s headline question of “analyst of moralist?”, the answer should really be both.

0 Comments

Why I’m Done with the Publishing Industry for My Fiction

6/3/2024

7 Comments

It's time to focus on my craft.

Almost seven years ago, I started submitting my novel The Vitanauts to different literary agents and publishers. I’ve come painfully close to getting it published a few times, but it never actually happened for me. And after the latest near miss that took up a huge amount of time and energy, I’ve come to the realization that I need to stop waiting around for permission from others to get my ideas out there.

(For fellow writers who take solace or lessons from these trials, see Footnote 1 for a rundown of my efforts.)

Look, don’t get me wrong. The publishing industry exists for a reason. The people who work in it are well trained. They love books. They have great intentions. They know what has worked in the past and they know what the latest trends are that are working right now. When I quit my job to become a full-time writer, I dreamed of working with this industry and finding a team within it that could support me and help me become “a success”. But I have an MBA degree. I can read the prize-winners and the bestsellers to identify trends and analyze the market. And I can see that publishing houses are facing huge financial challenges that limit their choices and abilities to take risks. The problem, however, is that I *want* to be a risk.

Way back in 2012 when I started this website, I blogged my way through my book Evolutionary Philosophy and I wrote two main posts about aesthetics: “What is Beautiful is What is Good” and “The Purpose of (My) Art.” In these posts, I offered both a new definition of beauty and a new plan for how to create it. Talk about challenging the status quo! These ideas combined some of my peer-reviewed evolutionary ethics with a desire to produce what I now call “positive fiction”, which, like positive psychology, focuses on what can go right, rather than dwelling on what has gone wrong. I wrote statements about this such as:

Beauty is just a word we use to name a quality that we like, that moves us, that pleases us. If we've already defined good as "that which promotes the long-term survival of life," how can we really like something that is bad, that is against that?

The longstanding and pervasive view that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" seems to suggest that aesthetics is something different, that aesthetics is a subjective field filled with personal judgments from sensitive souls set inside an influencing landscape of cultural relativism. But the purpose of art is to inspire life. Making bad things known can inspire good living by telling us what to avoid. Showing good things provides aspirations by showing us what to do or strive for.

Tolstoy was wrong [when he said in Anna Karenina that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”] Every unhappy family is simply shortsighted in some way. Happy families have an infinite number of interesting and difficult ways to proceed with long and rich lives.

Art causes emotional responses so it often draws emotional people to it, but great art is created by rational processes, filled with knowledge, fueled by emotion, and executed with skill. Bad art is blind emotion that purports falsehoods for truth.

I thought these ideals would resonate with *someone* in the publishing industry. But see Footnote 2 for a recent example of the blind emotion that clearly dominates there. I just don’t know why writing can’t be more like sculpture, painting, or photography. Artists in those fields create something beautiful to contemplate. Novels rarely, if ever, do. These days, they simply give us heartbreakingly depicted tales of woe. They follow Tolstoy’s example and give us more and more intricate details of more and more intersectional struggles. See Footnote 3 where I’ve conservatively calculated that 86% of the works of fiction in the 2023 New York Times 100 Notable Books fit this description. Is this really the best that books can be?

Problems in life happen naturally with entropy. We don’t need more examples to know that this is how the universe grinds on. Life is the struggle to *overcome* these problems. And I believe we could use more inspiring examples to keep us going. Rather than exploring yet another variety of distress with great precision, I want to leave that reality behind and produce art that shows possibilities of strength, resilience, adaptation, and other evolutionary virtues. I believe that imagining this kind of beauty should be a major calling for artists. But after almost 7 years of painfully dealing with publishers, I have realized that this is not aligned with their goals. In order to stay alive, they must make money in the current environment. They must be assured of making a profit by replicating what has already been done. They must take the safe route of simply depicting the reality of our sadness rather than risking rejection by imagining something new and better.

Although I haven’t seen anyone diagnose the aesthetics of the industry in precisely this way, I have been noticing other artists struggling with this as well.

“I make myself feel better by saying you can’t both want to do things that nobody has ever seen before and then then be frustrated that nobody understands why it’s going to work or why you believe in it. This plagues me in my whole career.” —Director Patty Jenkins in Episode 5, Season 10 of Revisionist Historywith Malcolm Gladwell

“I’ve accumulated a vast reservoir of such rejections. Everyone I know is self-publishing. All that means is a somewhat smaller audience, but so what. Borges sold 34 copies of his first book and wanted to write thank you notes to each reader. Did Van Gogh sell any paintings? For me the pleasure is in the doing.” — Words of consolation and encouragement from an author friend.

“I had an actual epiphany…on a panel discussing science fiction in the age of President Trump. All these little bits of things that I've been taking in for the last several years all kind of hit me like a tidal wave. It was that we were great at dystopic fiction but we weren't telling the readers, who were now willing to fight, what to fight for! They had finished the battle. But now what?” — Author P.J. Manney in “Envisioning the Future Through Story”

And, of course, the evolutionary lens that I bring to this situation creates its own issues with the publishing populace as well. Alice Andrews — an author, psychotherapist, and former professor of psychology at SUNY New Paltz — has written about this with great perspicacity.

“[T]he traditional ﬁctiphiles are purists who seem to believe that once we become aware of a lesson or of information in the story—once the author starts “telling us” instead of “showing us”—it’s all over. The pleasure is gone, its power is gone, and subsequently, the story’s merit and value are gone. The romantic ﬁctiphiles believe the only good ﬁction is ﬁction shrouded in a kind of Dionysian mystery. … Hermione, in D. H. Lawrence’s, Women in Love characterizes the view quite well: ‘When we have knowledge, don’t we lose everything but knowledge?’ she asked pathetically.” — Alice Andrews in “A Mind for Evolutionary Fiction”

“Distant, enigmatic, and maybe even a little commitment-phobic, traditional ﬁction evokes desire and passion by ‘exploiting’ our evolved psychological mechanisms and preferences. … [But] I think there’s even more pleasure to be had than with the traditional pleasure of seductive ﬁction. And that pleasure, I think, can be found in the arrows of what I call ‘meta-seductive ﬁction’—traditional ﬁction’s sexy contender. Meta-seductive ﬁction seduces (if it’s successful) by countering the seductive ‘hiding’ strategy, with its openness—with hiding from hiding. Meta-seductive ﬁction ﬂirts with truth and intimacy by telling the reader what it’s doing and by expressing ideas openly, unafraid of logic’s potential to prevent feeling. It isn’t afraid of wanting to aﬀect (and having a relationship with) the reader.” — Alice Andrews in “A Mind for Evolutionary Fiction”

“Much has changed since Entelechy was first published, but it's been over 20 years and there still isn't a forum for the kind of fiction we want to read, publish (and write!). … What still seems to be true after two decades is that literary publications are politically uncomfortable with an evolutionary worldview and are aesthetically repelled by the integration of the sciences into fiction.” — Alice Andrews, considering the relaunch of her journal Entelechy

These 6 quotes from Alice and the other artists have helped me see the issues I’m facing with great clarity. But they are also part of a more general problem with innovation. The psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman illustrated this perfectly in these quotes from his recent essay “Talent is Underrated”:

“Research has shown that creative people do tend to have a greater inclination toward nonconformity, unconventionality, independence, openness to experience, ego strength, and risk taking.”

“Creators rarely receive helpful feedback. When creators put something novel out into the world, the reactions are typically either acclaim or rejection.”

“Critics often disagree amongst each other, making it difficult for the creator to know which feedback is really helpful and which stems from other factors, such as obtuseness, jealousy, or bitterness.”

“As Kuhn noted, the standards for artistic and scientific products are constantly changing. What may be considered a ‘revolutionary’ best-selling book at one moment in time, may be considered utter drivel by future generations.”

“Creative people are not just good at solving problems. They are also good at finding problems.”

So, yes, I think there is a problem here! The world needs a new direction. And artists could play a leading role in articulating the right kinds of change. But the commercialized and highly competitive publishing world has become stuck simply rewarding tales of the troubles we’re in. It’s too risky for them to try anything else. In evolutionary terms, the publishing world has competed for high ground on a spot that turned out to merely be a local maximum. Someone must come down from there to go and find greater heights elsewhere. And this is precisely what the trials and errors of innovators are for. Even if I end up not having the talent to overcome these issues, I now realize it’s my job to try.

This is why I am done with the publishing industry for my works of fiction. I have plans for several major works going forward and I’m no longer going to wait around for a money-making team to steer me. If you are interested in supporting this, keep following me for options on how to provide a bit of patronage. But from now on, my writing is going to be based on love for the future, rather than concern about what has made money in the past. I hope this meta-seductive fiction excites you as much as it does me.

Footnote 1
Here are the bullet points of just some of my efforts over the past 6+ years seeking publication.

I started sending query letters for my second novel in October 2017. I scoured books and online lists about the thousands of options out there and picked out several dozen that seemed like possible fits. I submit letters to these places in batches so I can tweak subsequent letters based on feedback and results.
In mid-2018 I found a local publisher who was interested in publishing philosophical works. They expressed great interest in my work. We met several times. I published some non-fiction essays with them. They said they were keen to publish my novel. But then in May 2019, after working with them for almost a year, they decided to change their publishing strategy and not publish any more books after struggling with their first efforts.
It took me a while to recover from this and get back on the horse of submissions. But then, the pandemic hit. No one knew what was going to happen and suddenly my book about the prospect of ending aging and living indefinitely seemed extremely out of touch with all of the death and despair that was happening in the world. I threw myself into my philosophical work, completing a book-length treatment on consciousness on October 2021.
In November of 2021, my wife and I lived in Oslo, Norway for her work. Then in January and February of 2022 we lived in Vienna, Austria for another project. These were busy times, during which I redesigned my entire website to get ready for another publishing push.
As it happened, I was contacted by David Sloan Wilson in February 2022 to ask if I would work with him on the launch of his non-profit venture ProSocial. He asked if I would help him create an evolutionary philosophy group, the likes of which would never happen at a single university. This was a wonderful chance to test and spread my ideas so I threw myself into that for the next 2+ years.
Meanwhile, in June 2022, a friend with an MFA, JD, and PhD in Criminology who teaches a class on speculative fictions heard about The Vitanauts and asked if he could read it. After I sent him a copy, he told me it was one of the best things he’s read. He told me:
- “In no uncertain terms, I loved your book. You have a real gift for taking the most exciting philosophical questions and presenting them in a clear, thought-provoking way, while still writing a "futuristic" or "sci fi" novel (neither seems like the right description) that is a page turner. Bravo! I'm also extremely impressed with the sheer amount of research that must have gone into this.”
In January 2023, this friend recommended my book to a small publishing house he had connections with. He wrote:
- “Ed Gibney is a writer/philosopher and author of The Vitanauts—one of the best books that I have read in the last few years. I'll let Ed describe the book to you, as well as his other work more generally, but in my opinion The Vitanauts ranks up there with works by J.G. Ballard, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Kim Stanley Robinson.”
After a month, this publisher wrote me back and suggested I go ahead and send them my full manuscript through the normal submissions process. Three months later, I got word that they weren’t interested and they didn’t give any feedback as to why.
Later that month, through my work with ProSocial, I met an acquisitions editor at another small publisher. She encouraged me to send her a query letter and manuscript. I did. After reading everything, she told me she was excited to pitch it to the president of the organization. In September, she told me the President of the company loved the concept and approach and would submit it to their Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) with the promise of a forthcoming developmental edit. I began looking for editors to work with.
Then, in February 2024, after hearing nothing for five months, I was told the EAB voted 3-2 against going forward with the novel. The feedback they sent bore no resemblance to the feedback I have gotten from other readers throughout this saga, which indicates this was probably never a good fit anyway.
After this latest setback, I’ve been struggling with how to move forward. Writing this mini-manifesto has been my way of sifting through the evidence for ideas about what I should do.

Footnote 2
In a story about Alice Munro story after her death, a writer wrote this in the New York Times: “But the art of hearing the voice of a fictional person or sensing a fictional world or working for years on some unfathomable creation is, in fact, the opposite of saying something with the opinionated and knowledgeable part of one’s mind. It is rather the humble craft of putting your opinions and ego aside and letting something be said through you.” Ugh! This is a clear and painful example of the kind of anti-rationalism that casually saturates the publishing world.

Footnote 3
Here are illustrative summaries from 50 works of fiction in the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2023. I have bolded the only stories that might NOT be works about struggles in small segments of society.

an alternate history of creativity at the turn of the 20th century, one that centers queer women artists, writers, and intellectuals who refused to accept society’s boundaries
about a Black sheriff in a rural Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures Black children
a once wealthy Irish family struggles with both the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and their own inner demons
a polarizing female performance artist who made her way from the South to New York City’s downtown art scene
a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper
explores what it means to be erased and how to persist after being wiped away
for the first time in fiction, Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy's much ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating the promise and perspicacity of his victims instead
prison inmates duel on TV for a chance at freedom
generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles
uses a crime story to illuminate a singular neighborhood at a tipping point
tracking a cadre of scientists and activists from the gathering storm of the Obama years to the super-typhoons of future decades
a young Russian soldier on a trans-Siberian train decides to desert and turns to a civilian passenger, a Frenchwoman, for help
the kind of folkloric fantasy that remembers the old, blood-ribboned source material about sacrifices and stolen children
a British Palestinian actor returns to her hometown in Israel to recover from a breakup and spend time with her family
the story of a married mother, Valeria, whose life is transformed when she begins keeping a secret diary
successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters
a svelte, intrepid foray into American racism
it explores the mundane and the horrific
to explore the town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history
a fresh spin on the classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their family
the story of an extended Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced again
a missing-persons case that unfolds into a tale of Dickensian proportions
one family’s reckoning after the patriarch dies in a fire, as his widow, a Nigerian immigrant, considers returning to her home country and the entire family re-examines the circumstances of their lives
new translation of the “Iliad”
sisters raised to protect a collection of magic books that allow their keepers to do incredible things
a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man
traces the migrations of a Sephardic Jewish girl from turn-of-the-20th-century Constantinople to Barcelona, Havana and, finally, Queens, N.Y.
a chef who’s hired to cook for an “elite research community” in the Italian Alps
a fresh start as a single Black woman in a sparsely populated state
the titular character, abandoned by her mother as a child, endures a life of calamities before resolving to learn about her origins
a Senegalese writer brought low by a plagiarism scandal
a young Black couple, mourning the loss of their newborn daughter and disillusioned with the world, start a utopian society — but tensions both internal and external soon threaten their dreams
the occupants of a single house in Massachusetts over several centuries
An ex-conquistador in Spanish-ruled, 16th-century Mexico is asked to hunt down an Indigenous prophet
a new mother falling apart within the four walls of her apartment
mediums who can summon “the Darkness” for a secret society of wealthy occultists seeking to preserve consciousness after death
an upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family
an incisive examination of the lingering traumas of racism and a gripping, ghost-filled horror novel
Trained to kill by his mother and able to see demons
acerbic, comedic and lyrical odyssey into Korean history and American paranoia
the complex relationship between a young woman and her former stepmother
the true story of a devastating 1912 eviction in Maine that displaced an entire mixed-race fishing community
three sisters and their mother reflect on love and regret
a young mother trying to create a home for herself and her son in 1980s Philadelphia, and her mother, who is trying to save their Alabama hometown from white supremacists
the long life of Pampa Kampana, who creates an empire from magic seeds in 14th-century India. Her world is one of peace, where men and women are equal and all faiths welcome
queer midcentury romance that lingers on small, everyday acts
an 11-year-old Jain girl in London who has just lost her mother turns her attention to the game of squash
Set in Brooklyn, and featuring animal rescue workers, florists, volunteers, ghosts and UPS workers
a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul
a white woman who achieves tremendous literary success by stealing a manuscript from a recently deceased Asian friend and passing it off as her own

7 Comments

<<Previous

Review of “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari (3/5)

Review of “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari (2/5)

Review of “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari (1/5)

An Evolutionary Note about "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn

Draft of My Paper “On the Origin of Knowledge”

On the Origin of Knowledge*

Overview of Beyond Religion by the Dalai Lama (Part 2 of 2)

Overview of Beyond Religion by the Dalai Lama (Part 1 of 2)

Review of Truth & Generosity by Weiner & Forsee

Deep Philosophical Confusions Among Artists and Critics

Why I’m Done with the Publishing Industry for My Fiction

Subscribe to Help Shape This Evolution

Blog Philosophy

Archives