Humility and Tyranny
In response to a guest speaker’s telling a gathering of my students that it would be up to them to “save the planet,” I later suggested to my students that such arrogance about the power of men either to destroy or to save the planet was itself likely to lead to the kinds of persecutions the speaker, a human rights advocate, would have us all deplore. (The speaker did not reveal either from what or for what the planet was to be saved, nor why the younger generation might be better equipped than previous ones to do the saving.)
At one point I said to my students, “Only humility protects humanity from tyranny.” My point was that only in arrogance (whether of race or religion or ideology—including ecological ideology—or of the lust for money or power) do men choose to tyrannize over others. By contrast, the anti-tyrannical American system of government—which is of laws rather than of men, which exists to secure the rights of the sovereign people from the tyranny of arrogant men (however well-meaning), and which has heretofore been the nation’s and the world’s best hedge against such tyranny—grew in part out of the Founding Fathers’ humble recognition of man’s (and hence their own) flawed nature.
My students asked me to post the statement on my blog, so here it is, for what it is worth: Only humility protects humanity from tyranny.
At one point I said to my students, “Only humility protects humanity from tyranny.” My point was that only in arrogance (whether of race or religion or ideology—including ecological ideology—or of the lust for money or power) do men choose to tyrannize over others. By contrast, the anti-tyrannical American system of government—which is of laws rather than of men, which exists to secure the rights of the sovereign people from the tyranny of arrogant men (however well-meaning), and which has heretofore been the nation’s and the world’s best hedge against such tyranny—grew in part out of the Founding Fathers’ humble recognition of man’s (and hence their own) flawed nature.
My students asked me to post the statement on my blog, so here it is, for what it is worth: Only humility protects humanity from tyranny.
posted by G.Rap | 10:06 PM
11 Comments:
Can I add this: humility keeps us each from being tyrannical
Ideology is a term we use to claim someone else has false beliefs.
Does humility in thought entail skepticism?
Humility in thought may entail skepticism, but not about fundamental absolutes. It may be right to be skeptical about whether a particular law is just, for example, but it is not right to be skeptical about whether justice is good. To be skeptical about fundamentals is to renounce the very grounds of all thought including skepticism. Humble skepticism is fine; skepticism about the value of humility is out of court.
But it seems to me that empirically your claim about the necessity of fundamentals to philosophy is not warranted. Philosophy is full of major figures who are skeptical about whether justice is good. Now you may believe that you can logically prove that fundamentals are necessary for thought, but you must also recognize that you and other thinkers who agree with you are also fallible. Thus, it seems to me, humility about what you actually know suggests you must be skeptical of your own faith in fundamentals. Otherwise you risk absolutizing mere belief.
My dear Anonymous, you can’t have it both ways. Either there are some things that you take to be fundamental, or you have no grounds for objecting to “absolutizing mere belief.” You seem to be making skepticism your own absolute value. What grounds are there for that, and why are you not equally skeptical about them?
Either we take as axiomatic that some things are absolute, or we must say that everything is relative, and then there can be no point to conversing about truth. Yes it has been the disposition of many modern philosophers to apply skepticism to everything. But they have neglected to notice that being skeptical about fundamental absolutes (like the value of truth or wisdom or justice) puts them out of a job that means anything to the rest of us. As C.S. Lewis has it in The Abolition of Man, “It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”
I certainly do confess to fallibility, and to humility about what I do or even can know. But to be skeptical about one’s faith in fundamentals is to exchange fallible knowing for complete and foolish ignorance.
There is a difference between being denying that there are fundamental absolutes, and being skeptical about whether one can be certain there are such absolutes and that you know what they are. In other words, one may not be able to help but rely on certain beliefs, such as one relies on reason when trying to practice philosophy, but that doesn't make them true, nor make one certain of them.
If you are not skeptical about your ability to know for certain absolute, then what you are advising is "be skeptical about all ideologies but my own." Certainly that is a motto all can agree on!
I deny that belief in fundamental absolutes is either my ideology or ideology at all. No ideology can exist except to promote some ultimate value that transcends it.
You write, “There is a difference between . . . denying that there are fundamental absolutes, and being skeptical about whether one can be certain there are such absolutes and that you know what they are.”
Such a difference is an illusion. One either holds an unquestioned faith in the reality of absolutes (however difficult they are to define and however limited is our ability to know how to apply them to particular situations) or one does not. If one does not, then all argument about value and truth are empty, and the promotion of skepticism itself is pointless.
Why SHOULD I be skeptical if it isn’t in some sense better to be so? And if it is better, what meaning could “better” have if it is not a characterization of what brings us closer to the unquestioned goods we call truth and rightness, justice and kindness, etc.?
Rely on beliefs as one relies on reason? But “rely” on beliefs or on reason to what end? For what purpose? If nothing is self-evidently good, as your unbounded skepticism would have us think, then any effort in any direction, whatever it relies on, is arbitrary, and all argument, including your argument for skepticism, falls apart. (If I ought to be skeptical of all beliefs, why not also about your belief in the value of skepticism, about which you are obviously not nearly skeptical enough!)
To promote skepticism makes sense only if you have an unquestioned belief that truth is good and error bad. If you don’t believe at least in those absolutes, then we can have no reason beyond arbitrary sensations for discussing anything.
“Why SHOULD I be skeptical if it isn’t in some sense better to be so? And if it is better, what meaning could ‘better’ have if it is not a characterization of what brings us closer to the unquestioned goods we call truth and rightness, justice and kindness, etc.?”
Because the practice of philosophy relies upon logic and reason. That doesn’t mean that there are fundamentals (or that they are the ones you name), it simply means that reason / logic is something we _initially assume_ for the purpose of doing philosophy. Further, we need to distinguish between attitudes and beliefs that one claims are established with philosophical certainty and ones that we accept or believe in or act upon in part for other reasons. (I can believe in the value or truth, for instance, without thinking that philosophy establishes its value for certain.)
But I want to avoid substantive philosophical debate of these issues because my very point is that we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that such debates firmly establishes fundamentals. And we shouldn’t think that because it is very clear that there is little grounds to think that philosophy has attained (or perhaps can even reach) definitive arguments substantiating such fundamentals. You and I both know that there are very ancient and enduring arguments about what reason and truth is, what questions it can justifiably answer, how it can be justly applied, whether it can establish anything at all, etc, etc. And we both know that there is no philosophical consensus on these issues, even if we privately prefer this or that philosopher or set of answers. So the extent that you are taking CS Lewis or some other thinker as the definitive word on these issues, I suggest you are yourself slipping into the realm of ideology since you are making intellectual commitments that you _must_ realize are not definitively established unless you believe yourself to be the judge of philosophy from some Archimedean standpoint. That you may take such logic as Lewis to be philosophically incorruptible is precisely, I think, evidence that you are violating your own rule of humility, for indeed, who are any of us to think that we have attained absolute certainty in such heady domains? (Certainly most ideologists, I think we can agree, have thought their own beliefs are certain, whether established by reason, or history, or divine revelation.) Philosophy remains an open battle ground, and though we should participate in that battle, we shouldn’t mistake ourselves for those who almost alone know the absolute.
Teaching a certain core of values, I think, is a wonderful thing to do in the right way and right context. But when we come to teach about philosophical thought, I think, the responsibility is to teach students reasoning skills as well as suspended judgment. It is too easy for them to take a simplistic attitude towards philosophy and what it establishes, too easy for them to rush to judgment. What we need to teach them is philosophy’s complex nature, the tangled web of ideas and arguments. That is, we need to teach intellectual humility to make sure we do not, deceiving ourselves into thinking we are above ideology on such issues, become an intellectual tyrant.
A quick clarification to make sure we are not talking past one another. I apologize for repeating some of what I said above:
“If nothing is self-evidently good, as your unbounded skepticism would have us think, then any effort in any direction, whatever it relies on, is arbitrary, and all argument, including your argument for skepticism, falls apart. (If I ought to be skeptical of all beliefs, why not also about your belief in the value of skepticism, about which you are obviously not nearly skeptical enough!)”
I am distinguishing between 1) skepticism as a practice necessary to intellectual education and endeavor which; skepticism, this is, which calls for suspended judgment on complex issues of thought, 2) a philosophical position of Skepticism (whether of ordinary objects, or the existence of the self, or of knowing anything at all). I am arguing for 1 and not 2. No fundamental beliefs are “self-evidently good,” if by that you mean self-evident because _clearly and definitively_ established by logic or reason. And my evidence for that is the empirical claim that what you claim as “self-evident” is not a proposition that commands anything approaching consensus in philosophy whether viewed across time or in the present. Thus, to pretend that it is self-evident is to fantasize that oneself is in a position to be the judge of absolute certainty despite the fact that knowledge of philosophy teaches us that that is an absurd belief, one akin to the ideologist’s certain of his own beliefs. I am thus not saying that one should be skeptical of all beliefs: I am saying one should be skeptical of beliefs we have _reason_ to be skeptical of. You don’t have reason to be skeptical of my claim about the state of philosophy _if_ it is empirically true. But I do have plenty of reason to be skeptical of arguments that claim that they have proved (it is self-evident, after all) fundamental absolutes. Our basic shared belief in humility compels us to be skeptical of our abilities as philosophers in proclaiming what fundamental beliefs are “self-evident.”
That doesn’t mean we cannot believe in truth and act upon it nonetheless, for instance, in practicing philosophy. It simply means we cannot be certain of that belief. And acting on uncertain beliefs is something we do all the time.
Google requires two posts to get the following all in.
A.
We are indeed writing at cross purposes because fundamentally we seem to agree. I am going to try one more time to show where we agree, and then I will close this string lest further repetition bore our readers.
When you say “reason / logic is something we initially assume for the purpose of doing philosophy,” you are doing exactly what I am saying we must do in relation to values. I have not argued that the fundamental absolutes are “established with philosophical certainty.” I am asserting that we must adopt them as axioms, unproven, undemonstrable, but essential if we are to reason about value at all, just as you take it as axiomatic that logic is essential if one is to reason about things philosophically.
When you say “I can believe in the value o[f] truth, for instance, without thinking that philosophy establishes its value for certain,” you are doing just what I am saying we must do. I never said philosophy establishes the absolutes for certain. It cannot do so. It can only reason from them as axioms As Lewis says, they are premises, not conclusions. Again, you say “we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that such debates firmly establish fundamentals.” And again I say I agree. The fundamentals are not firmly established by debate. They are axioms. They are accepted as givens, or they are not; they can never be proven.
In quoting C.S. Lewis I am not slipping into ideology because it is not based on his arguments or as a follower of his philosophy or ideology or whatever you want to call it that I am accepting the absolutes as fundamental axioms. He himself argues precisely that they cannot be demonstrated by argument, by philosophy, by logic, by proofs. So I am not doing what you are accusing me of doing.
I am saying the fundamental absolute values are givens and must be accepted as such. The only logical argument that follows is that if one does NOT accept them, then there can be no logical argument about the value of any secondary thing. Example: if two parties to a discussion do not both start with the shared assumption that justice is a fundamental good, then they can have no grounds for arguing either for or against a particular law. And the moment one asks another to prove that justice is a fundamental good, the argument is over. Since it cannot be done, the challenge ends the discussion. The absolute value we call “justice” cannot present its credentials to anyone who does not already take it as a self-evident good.
B.
When you write “But I do have plenty of reason to be skeptical of arguments that claim that they have proved (it is self-evident, after all) fundamental absolutes,” your parenthesis precisely misses the point. Self-evident does NOT mean proven. An axiom is not established by argument, and a premise is not a conclusion. One adopts an axiom because it seems true and because no reasoning on the subject is possible without it. In math one cannot prove that “If A = B and B = C then A = C.” One assumes it because it is self-evident and all the rest of mathematics depends on it. If you stop doing math until you prove that axiom, then there is no math. Similarly with matters of value. One either assumes the fundamental values and reasons from them, or one cannot reason about value at all and be rational.
To repeat yet again: I have never claimed that “fundamental beliefs are ‘self-evidently good’” because clearly and definitively established by logic or reason.” My whole point is that the fundamental, self-evident goods are the foundation of logical reasoning about values. They are established by reality, not by logic or reason or philosophy.
I of course agree about teaching students to think critically and logically and not to jump too quickly to conclusions. And about not becoming an intellectual tyrant. But if you don’t accept the fundamental values as fundamental, then you cannot show that being a tyrant of any kind is in any way bad.
In the end, our agreement that humility is indeed a value is far more important than any disagreement about which philosophies merit what degree of skepticism. Except where you have confused axioms and proofs, I think we are in agreement that we have to assume some things are true in order to reason about anything. And that being so, I think we can end this string.
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