Our technical limits are human

In a comment on the nuclear calamity in Fukushima, Japan, the German philosopher Rüdiger Safranski states that this event shows that we have reached the limits of what we can make. After Harrisburg and Chernobyl, we see that nuclear power cannot be controlled. We behave like the sorcerer’s apprentice who did not know how to stop the forces that he had evoked. This means that we have to learn what we can and what we cannot do, so Safranski (http://www.videowired.com/video/3979556601/).

On the face of it, it seems that not much needs to be added to this comment and that it clearly words what went wrong and how we can prevent such mistakes in future. Safranski says that the Fukushima calamity and other catastrophes of this kind show that the human capacity to discover and control the secrets of nature has its limits. Therefore it is better to stop with this kind of energy production and to look for other approaches. In my words: we can never grasp and control the technique of nuclear energy production.

I think that Safranski is right; there is a fundamental technical problem here. However, I think that the problem of controlling nuclear energy would also happen when we would be able to build a 100% safe nuclear power plant. For in my opinion the actual problem is not in our technical possibilities but it is elsewhere: the real problem is intrinsically human. This becomes clear, for instance, when we look at the history of the Fukushima power plant. As it has come out, this major calamity has been preceded through the years by some 200 minor calamities and technical problems. Most of them have been kept secret for a long time, and, what is important here, most of them have been caused because the safety rules had not been observed. So, the real cause of calamities of the Fukushima type is not that we do not know our technical limits but that we do not know our human limits. Men are not like robots: you program them and they do what you want them to do. Instead men are individuals who have their own reasons to act and not to follow safety rules. Men are also beings who continuously unintentionally fail to follow safety rules simply by human mistakes. In this sense man is not a reliable being. Moreover, human problems do not exist only on this individual level, but they are also social. As social beings men cooperate with other men, but within this cooperation process they develop their personal interests, which not always correspond with the common interest, whatever this may be. Or there are conflicting common interests and there is not enough money and man power or technical capacity to solve them all. A choice has to be made or the fulfilment of some interests has to be temporarily postponed. In case of lack of money it can be decided, for instance, to postpone the maintenance of a nuclear power plant, for is it really necessary that it needs to take place now and not next year? In short, our most fundamental problem in this nuclear age is not that we need to know our technical limits, but it is that we need to realize that man is a human and that we are as human as humans are. Our most fundamental limits are human and as long as we do not bear this in mind, calamities of the Fukushima type will happen.

How to enjoy my bike rides

Last week I made my first bike tour after the winter. The winter had been long and also the week before the ride had been quite cold. But in the end the temperature rose, the night frosts went away, and the weather forecast promised nice weather for the days to come. So time to start a new bike season. On my first ride I was relaxed, I did not overstrain myself on the hills, and back home after a bit more than an hour, I could be satisfied with my average speed, thanks to my winter training on my bike trainer and by running in the wood. The average speed is always important for me and when it fits with how I felt during the ride, it is even better. By why should it be so important for me?

The Belgian philosopher Marc Van den Bossche has recently published a book about sport as a way of living. Van den Bossche is an academic philosopher and also a very active sportsman. Like me he is a runner and a cyclist, his distances are often double of what I do, if not more, and it is not exceptional that he trains twice a day, which I never do. Just as for me, times and records are important for him. However, somewhere in his book he writes: “I’d stake a few pints that after having run a half or a whole marathon or after having climbed the entire Mont Ventoux [on your bike], you’ll get this question: ‘In what time did you do it?’ It will be very exceptional when someone will ask you in a first reaction what your subjective experiences were, a question you could answer by saying: ‘Man, I have enjoyed it sooo much. It wasn’t sex but you can compare it with it”. What Van den Bossche questions here is whether times for a sportsman not training for competition (so one like me) are really important. Why needs our joy to have a measure? Isn’t our subjective feeling by far more important than an objective measure? So Van den Bossche says, although he likes to improve his results as much as I do.

When reading Van den Bossche’s arguments and explanations, in my heart I feel he is right. What’s the worth of all this competing with yourself, when you know that the real reason that you do sports is different? That you do sports simply because you want to run or make a ride, that it is a way for you to be in the wood, and that as such it is a pleasure to feel fit? That you would do it despite the measurable results? That at your age you run behind the facts, because you have passed your top already long ago and that fundamentally every next run and ride will be a bit slower than the last one, just because at a certain age you can only go backwards? Yes, Van den Bossche is right! I must stop measuring and I must enjoy my efforts as they are. It is not that it is not pleasant to measure my results, but for me it has no sense to make a fetish of them.

Actually, I had decided already to practice this new way of enjoying my runs and rides before I read the book. And yet, when I’ll take my bike tomorrow, I know that I’ll check my bike computer when I am back home, and I’ll be satisfied if my average speed was a good one.

The hero in your mind

More than two years ago I wrote a blog titled “The devil in your mind”. I explained there that Hannah Arendt attributed the evil done by people like Eichmann to their thoughtlessness and not to a diabolic attitude within them. This is in keeping with studies by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo insofar as they have shown that in most cases behaviour that causes harm to other people (which can go as far as torture) is not the consequence of a certain evil trait in the perpetrator but that basically everybody is able to do it. Most people are simply lucky that the devil doesn’t come out. But what is it then that makes that the devil comes out?

Some fifty years ago Zimbardo organized a prison experiment for which he selected about twenty test subjects. All of them had the same background characteristics. Zimbardo assigned them at random to two groups, one group being the prisoners, the other group being the prison warders. Although there was no initial fundamental difference between the test subjects in both groups, after one-two days both the prisoners and the prison warders acted very differently in a way that went beyond their particular roles. After already such a short time the warders begun to torture the prisoners, psychologically as well as physically (within limits, for outright physical violence was not allowed). For this reason Zimbardo had to break off the experiment after six days, although it had been planned to last two weeks. Since the differences between the test subjects were negligible and since all of them were psychologically healthy, Zimbardo concluded after a thorough analysis that it are not psychological dispositions that make people behave in an evil way but that it is the situation that brings people that far. Only very few people are able to resist the pressure of the situation that “leads” them into a certain direction and also only very few display evil behaviour because of a disposition.

However, Zimbardo’s conclusion has two sides, for it is not only true for the evil we do. In the same degree it is true for the good we do as well. Most people do good because, by way of speaking, the situation they happen to be in “forces” them to do so. There is not only a “banality of evil” (Arendt) but also a “banality of heroism” (Zimbardo). People are not inherently, genetically, bad or good (with the exception of the few who are apparently mental ill). Most people can do well and can do bad, and what they’ll do depends on the situation they are in and on the pressure exerted there on them that makes that they cannot stay passive but have to act (here I have paraphrased Zimbardo; see his The Lucifer Effect ch. 16). Admittedly, it is not only the circumstances that make who you are and what you do. Zimbardo doesn’t say that, but at least they have an important influence on how you think and act. They can make you both a devil and a hero. And isn’t it this what we see now in the Middle East where so many people have behaved and behave like heroes despite themselves? Who of them would have thought before that s/he had a hero in the mind?

Ethics and nonviolence

There are a lot of surprising developments taking place in the Middle East these days. People rise and protest against their suppression and dictators cannot sit down safely in their seats any longer. Several rulers have already fallen or are about to fall, others try to secure their position by doing concessions, but whether that will be enough is not sure. Who would have predicted that only two months ago?

These uprisings look spontaneous. What many people do not know is that there is much organization and thinking behind them, at least in a number of cases. Already for several years Egyptian activists had been preparing nonviolent action against Mubarak. They used Facebook and Twitter but also the handbooks by Gene Sharp, an American researcher of nonviolence. Moreover they asked advice from Otpor, the Serbian student movement that toppled president Milosevic in 2000.

Since already more than 30 years Gene Sharp is one of my favourite authors. He is famous for his list of 198 nonviolent action methods and he wrote also a guide with directions how to bring down a dictator. He wrote quite a bit of other books and articles as well. In all his work he has an important point of departure: all action and resistance must be nonviolent. When hearing the word “nonviolence” many people think of something soft, vague and not very practical. Or they think of high moral principles that are actually far-away from reality. Sharp’s idea of nonviolence has nothing to do with that. Sharp talks never about ethics but only about application. His idea is: conflicts cannot be avoided but in order to prevent that they are solved in a violent way, one has to look for nonviolent alternatives with the same functions as violence. And that’s what he has done during his whole life: Looking for alternatives for violence and looking for ways to put them into practice. And he found them by analyzing historical and contemporary cases, by making use of sociological theories and by employing organizational principles. What he did not incorporate in his work were ethical and moral principles. Sharp does have his reasons for advocating nonviolence, but you do not find them back in his writings. Only the practical applicability of nonviolence counts there, not moral reasons why it has to applied, as long as it works. And it does work. Insiders know that already since many years. They have seen the fall of Milosevic, as said; the people’s movements in Georgia (2003) and in the Ukraine (2004); and they have seen lots of other cases, often successful and, indeed, sometimes also not successful. Now it works also in the Middle East and the world has discovered it, for since a recent interview with Gene Sharp in the New York Times, he doesn’t have a quiet moment any longer. For thanks to him the world knows that nonviolence works also when it is not fundamentally based on ethical and moral principles but simply on well-thought-out practice and organization.

Superstitious like a pigeon

Suppose you are a runner and tomorrow you will take part in the cross country championship of your province. You have a good chance to win but you are not the only possible winner. You have done everything that is reasonable to be in good shape, so you cannot do more. Or rather there is still one thing you can do: Do not forget to put the necklace on that you always take with you when you have a race. Always? Two weeks ago you forgot it and you had a bad race.

We know all such kinds of behaviour, which are actually a kind of rituals. In order to improve the chance to win a lottery, one has a favourite number. One does not want to have room number 13 in a hotel in order to avoid accidents. One keeps one’s fingers crossed during the exam of a friend. And so on. The essence of all this behaviour is that there is no direct relation between the ritual and its purpose (although you may think there is).

Burrhus F. Skinner, who is known for his research of behaviour, put a hungry pigeon in a so-called Skinner box, a simple box with a food dispenser and a response lever structured that way that, if the pigeon presses the lever, food may come from the dispenser (whether this really happens depends on the research plan). Then food was presented at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird’s behaviour, so whether the pigeon pressed the lever or didn’t made no difference (I follow the description by Chris Frith, Making up the mind, p. 91; but it is easy to find other descriptions of the experiment on the Internet). After a short time the pigeons were seen repeatedly performing arbitrary actions, like making two or three turns clockwise between the appearances of the food, thrusting the head into one of the upper corners of the box, and the like. Each pigeon developed its own typical pattern of behaviour. The pigeons had learned to repeat whatever action they happened to be performing just before the food appeared. Skinner called this behaviour “superstitious” because the pigeons acted as if they believed that their behaviour caused the food to appear when this was not the case. He suggested, so Frith, that human superstitious behaviour can arise in the same way. Men are used to look for causes of the effects they see but in doing so they are often not smarter than pigeons.

Running with my mind

G.H. Yue and K.J. Cole took eight volunteers and asked them to exercise the muscle that controls the little finger of the left hand for four weeks, five sessions a week. They asked eight other volunteers to do the same but now only in their mind, so by imagining that they were training the muscle. A control group of eight volunteers had to do nothing. In the first group the average force of the muscle increased with 30%, in the second group with 22% and in the control group with a trivial 3.7%. The results were substantiated by other research, also for other muscles. The upshot is that we can train muscles by imagining the training in our mind.

Physical exercise is important for many people, also for me. I like to run in the wood behind my house or to go for a bike ride. But I like also a lot of other things and, actually, sometimes working out takes me too much time. For it does not only involve the exercise itself, but there are also many things around it that belong to it. I have to put my training clothes on; I have to take extra showers; I have to maintain my bike; and so there’s a lot more. In the end, a workout takes twice as much time as the exercise itself. But now I discovered a time-saving alternative: take a comfortable chair and start dreaming. Then I have simply to visualize how I move my legs, think how I jump over a tree fallen on my path, imagine how I climb a hill on my bike, simulate how I pass other joggers or do a little sprint now and then. I can train as I like it and I do not have to look for the right hill, the right flat track, or how I want to have it, for it comes to me. And I’ll not be stiff with my last training, for I need simply to imagine how smooth my legs move. And when I have finished my mental training, I can immediately go on with the other things that are waiting for me, like writing this blog, without taking off my training clothes, taking a shower, and so on. Maybe the training effect is a bit smaller than by training physically, but it is still big enough and its advantages are legion.

But shall I not miss the birds singing in the wood, the roes crossing my path, the tailwind that makes me ride faster? Will mental exercise be as relaxing as moving through real fields and through a real wood? I am afraid that I am going to miss it when I would switch from a physical to a mental training of my muscles. And I’ll still see my books around me when training in my chair and it will be difficult to distance myself from my other mental activities. Maybe it is not as relaxing as real running and riding a real bike. Maybe it will be better to keep it for special occasions; for when I am busy; for – let it not happen – when I am injured and cannot go; or for the days that the rain is pouring down. But in case this happens, I have an alternative now: running or riding with my mind.

Writing scientifically

“Writing scientific papers is rather like writing in an ancient verse form. Everything you want to say has to be forced into predetermined sections: introduction, method, results, discussion. You must never say “I,” and the passive tense is preferred. Inevitable all interesting things get left out.” Chris Frith, Making up the mind, p. 74.

At school I had to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. These works have been written in a strict verse form that is characteristic for epic prose: the dactylic hexameter. Each line of this prose has six foots: five dactyls (– u u) and then a spondee (–  –) (“–” means a long syllable and “u” a short one). Although some stylistic variation was possible, generally the author had not much freedom. Dutch Renaissance authors tried to copy the style but the dactylic hexameter is not very suitable for the Dutch language. It makes Dutch poems written with these verse form sound rather stiff and unnatural. Therefore it is used only in translations of ancient epic prose nowadays.

When Descartes wrote his Regulae ad directionem ingenii [Rules for the direction of the mind; published posthumously in 1684] he laid the foundation of modern scientific method. Only research that applied these rules or their improved versions could bear the name “scientific” since then. This did not only have its reflection on research as such but also in the way it was presented. Despite Feyerabend’s famous statement in 1975 that “anything goes” in methodology, implying that not so much the form of research is important but its results, scientists have stuck to their rules, at least in word. In order to show that their methods and results have to be taken seriously the strict presentation of scientific research did not change either, despite Feyerabend’s analysis. This makes that everything that influenced the results in an important way but that is not strictly “scientific” is left out in the presentation, even if the results would not have come about without these influences. The changing moods of the researcher; that she thought out the basic idea when taking a shower; that she had no budget to buy just those apparatuses she needed most; that a machine broke down and had to be repaired so that she had some time for extra theoretical study; and so on. All these things are omitted in the final report. Frith mentions the case that a test subject had got a clip in her brain in an operation. It took him much time to find out what metal it was made of in order to know whether it was safe to use his scanner. Although such facts are relevant for the outcome, they are supposed to be ignored in a scientific article. Even the researcher is absent: The “I” who did the research and wrote the article is left out as well in the text. The article is strictly limited to method, results, relation to other research and why the results are important; all this in a strict order: introduction, method, results, discussion. It is even better, if the sections are numbered and if as much mathematics as possible is used. Deviations of form are frowned on and reduce the chance of being published unless they are corrected, as if the writer is a mediocre ancient poet who does not know well how to apply the dactylic hexameter.

“All things have their season”

On the table here in front of me I have a copy of Montaigne’s Essays. It’s a thick book. My Dutch edition has 1321 pages. I bought it nine years ago and I have read all 107 essays since then. I did it in random order and also at random places. I read them in my study, in the train, on holiday, and so on, until I had read all essays. Montaigne makes you think, tells you about his life and time. He tells you about the past, too, for often he uses examples from classical antiquity. I read also a lot about Montaigne and his book and I visited the castle in France where he once lived. One could fill a lifetime with studying the man and his book, which I’ll not do, however, for my priorities are elsewhere. Nevertheless, I found the essays intriguing and interesting enough to reread them, now in the order presented in the book.

When I wanted to write my blog today, I had not yet a theme, and as a warming up for my brain and mind I took the Essays in order to read the next one, number XXVIII of Book II, titled “All things have their season”. What a coincidence. Hardly any of the essays could apply better to what is happening in the world at the moment. Here Montaigne explains that things have to be done at the right time, even good ones. Some things can better be done when you are young, other things when you are old: “Our studies and desires should sometime be sensible of age; yet we have one foot in the grave and still our appetites and pursuits spring every day anew within us”. For Montaigne himself this had the implication that “the only comfort I find in my old age, [is] that it mortifies in me several cares and desires wherewith my life has been disturbed; the care how the world goes, the care of riches, of grandeur, of knowledge, of health, of myself.” How different it often is for many of us, not only for the average citizen, who may stick to his or her habits, but also for the person on the top, whom we might have thought to be wiser. But as Montaigne quoted Terentius (II, II): “Humani a se nihil alienum putet” [Let him not think that anything that is human is alien to him]. So it is also for dictators, whether they are called Ben Ali, Mubarak or what their name is. They stick to their place and do not leave until they are forced to, by the people or by the army. As we say in Dutch, “There is a time of coming and there is a time of going”. But power is addictive and so many dictators forget this essential lesson of life. Montaigne did not. So he left his job as a judge in Bordeaux already quite young. He did not strive for high positions, and when he was appointed as mayor of Bordeaux, he accepted it à contre coeur, and it was not his choice that he got a second term (a great honour, for it rarely happened) but of the people around him. Montaigne knew the lessons of life, not only this one, so a wise dictator, and not only he, should read the Essays of Montaigne. But isn’t it a contradiction in terms: a wise dictator?

Human maps

Damasio’s book Self comes to mind that I mentioned in my last blog is interesting in many respects. It gives a good idea of the way the mind works and how it produces consciousness and self. Unlike neuroscientists like Swaab or Lamme, discussed here in my blogs before, he does not simply reduce the mind to the biology of the brain. Maybe we can explain by such a reduction that I write a blog and why I do, but I do not see how, saying it plainly, my hormones can explain why I write this blog with this exact content and these wordings. Even more questionable is that the biological approach might explain the phenomenon of culture, which is, indeed, a product of man, but which is an interhuman and suprahuman phenomenon that exists independent of its individual contributors.

One of the most interesting contributions in Damasio’s book to the discussion how the mind works is his idea of maps. The idea is interesting not only because it is useful for explaining consciousness and self and other creations of the brain but also because it can be related to insights of other branches of knowledge. Maps in the brain are, so Damasio, patterns of neurons formed for representing what happens in the body and in the world around us. Like geographic maps they are used to inform the brain how things look like and for planning actions. These maps are continuously adapted according to new information that reaches the brain. One could say that the brain works like a land registry office that constantly receives information from its surveyors and that delivers information to other authorities that use it in their planning.

Seen this way, the idea of maps made me think of the cognitive schema theory developed in psychology some 40 years ago by Schank, Abelson and others. This theory says that we have a scheme in our head that organizes the way we see the world and that we use for interpreting the world. It is a kind of abstract knowledge structure that helps to explain what we perceive and that guides our actions. But it made me also think of the idea of theory as developed in methodology: a structure of concepts and sentences about how a certain part of the world looks like. Isn’t it so that such a theory is a kind of abstract representation that is adapted continuously on the base of further research and that can serve as a guide for policy just like a map?

I think that this analogy between what we do on the methodological level, the theoretical level of a science of man and on the biological level of the brain is not accidental. It says something about how man is structured. It says also that actually there is not one level of analysis that basically can explain everything we do by reducing all phenomena to its basic phenomena, but that there are different levels of explanation that all treat different aspects of what man does in its own irreducible way without saying that one level has priority.

Nonviolence and power

It is very relevant these days: the relation between nonviolent action and resistance and power processes. See what is happening in Tunisia and Egypt and in other countries in the Middle East. By chance I have just finished an article on this theme. It is different from most of the philosophical blogs that I usually publish here, but for the interested readers of my blog, here is a summary. You can find the full text on http://home.kpn.nl/wegweeda/Nonviolence%20and%20Power.html

Nonviolence and Power. A study about the importance of power relations for nonviolent action and resistance: Summary

When a repressive regime is challenged by a nonviolent opponent, power relations play a central part. In this article I analyse how they are important for the choice of nonviolent methods.

In the classical Weberian view power is the possibility to impose one’s will. This is called “power over”. Against this Arendt put her idea of power as concerted action for pursuing a common aim: “power to”. It is the idea that underlies nonviolent action and resistance. However, these concepts of power give only a partial understanding of the dynamics between a repressive regime and nonviolent resisters. Moreover, they give hardly any insight when to choose which nonviolent methods and why.  What we need is a concept of power that distinguishes between different political situations in order to understand better which nonviolent methods are most effective. Such a concept has been developed by Lukes.

The approaches just mentioned, so Lukes, describe only the overt dimension of power, namely power as it is exercised openly. Following Bachrach and Baratz, he explains that many people are excluded from the arena where the power play takes place so that they cannot legally defend their interests. Then power is used in order to deny others entrance to the power arena: the covert dimension. Moreover, as Lukes shows, power has also a third dimension. Many people just do not see that they have interests that they might defend in the power arena. They are culturally and linguistically manipulated in the way that they consider their powerless position as normal. So power is also the possibility to manipulate culture, language and other relevant factors that way that people do not realize that they ever might have entrance to the power arena. This is the latent dimension of power.

Returning to the possibility of nonviolent resistance, I explain that the way power is exercised is important for the way a regime has to be opposed. A democratic regime that exercises power overtly has to be approached differently than a regime that excludes people openly from defending their interests and that excludes people fundamentally from power positions, not to speak of a regime that keeps people unconscious of their rights. In the last part of my article I give a first analysis of what kind of nonviolent methods are to be used against different regime types.

Full text on http://home.kpn.nl/wegweeda/Nonviolence%20and%20Power.html

Culture and the person we are

In these blogs I have defended the view that our personal identity is not only in our psychological characteristics but also in what we physically are. It is both in our mind and in our body. This is in line with the idea that mind and body are not two separate entities but that they are integrated. But are psychological and physical components all that makes up our identity? As a sociologist by education I should have had the idea that there is more before. However, I needed the newest book by Antonio Damasio, Self comes to mind, to see that there really is. In this book Damasio presents an original idea of how self, mind and consciousness result from the physical processes in our brain. They are not epiphenomena, so Damasio, but play an important part in guiding what we do. Some products of what we do are shared with other people (a phenomenon that does not happen in that degree in the animal world) and survive our death. This has become the origin of what we call culture. Unlike our self, mind and consciousness, culture does not die when one of its bearers dies. On the contrary, it continues to exist despite the death of its individual bearers and remains to exist as long as there are bearers who share it and take it up when they come new into this world. As Damasio says in a recent interview in the Dutch Filosofie Magazine: “… through the cooperation of many brains [there is] a network that goes beyond our individual biological origin. We are born in a culture that has already been made by others before our birth. And while we grow up, we learn to integrate that culture into our own body ... All our moral values and our knowledge of literature, music, film, law or economics come from outside our brain, from the social space in which we are born. And at the same time, this knowledge has first to go into our brain, before we can do something with it, so that it can exist for us. That knowledge has adapted our brain and has formed it culturally.” This integration of culture in our body can probably go as far that cultural developments lead to changes in the human genome.

In this way culture constitutes us insofar as we absorb it and we form it insofar as we take part in it; just like our psychological characteristics, but also our physical characteristics, develop, at least for a part, in exchange with the world around us. Is it then too bold to think that not only our psychological (so individual) characteristics and our bodily characteristics but also our cultural (so social) characteristics make up what we are as a person? Think of the phenomenon of a culture shock, for instance. Just this is outstanding example how integrated culture and person are.

Ethics as a neuroscience

Last week I argued that the field of philosophy has shrunk a lot through the ages. Themes once studied by philosophers are now the subject of another branch of knowledge. How far will this shrinking go? Will philosophy as a special discipline disappear or will something be left of it? I guess that there’ll always remain purely philosophical questions. But let’s take ethics, for instance. Nothing seems further from a scientific intrusion than the study of what is morally right and wrong in our actions; the study of what we can and cannot do in our relationships with other people and society as a whole. Just here we see a variety of approaches, clustered in and also within cultures. However, when reading about the brain, one gets the impression that much of what we consider good and bad is based on the working of neurones and hormones. Neuroscientists can point out the places in the brain where you find moral conscience and even some of our moral feelings, and they can explain how the brain brings about moral behaviour. If one studies the brain long enough, in the end it will be possible to show the sites of our ethical principles, one might think then.

I am the last one to deny the truth of scientific results (unless I have scientific reasons for doing so). It is clear to me that much of what we morally do has a foundation in the physical structure of the brain and that defects of this structure can lead to amoral behaviour (psychopaths are a case in point). So, if brain research makes progress, this may have serious consequences for the status of ethics. Will it make ethics to no more than a comment on the workings of our brain or a practical explanation of it at most? Will it not happen that ethics can do no more than applying what we have to do in view of what is programmed in our brain to the situation in which we are, resulting in rules of moral behaviour? If so, ethics would change from a branch of philosophy into a natural science of moral prescriptions.

Maybe this thought is too pessimistic, if this word still has meaning in a merely physically conceived world (for in such a world pessimism is no longer a point of view that can be substantiated but merely a physically based feeling that something goes in the wrong direction). However, I think that there are good reasons that the relation between ideas and matter, and actually between mind and brain, is not that simple. What is wrong here is the idea is that science and thinking about what science means for us are actually the same. It is something what Ryle called a category mistake or what I, interpreting Habermas, called a distinction between level 1 and level 0 (see my blog dated Dec. 13, 2010). The same idea was expressed by Wittgenstein when he wrote at the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (6.54): “He [the reader] must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.” Or in other words: One has to distance oneself from science, for only then one can see it in the right way. That is, one has to philosophize. This does not imply, of course, that philosophy has nothing to do with what our brain physically does.

The Ivory Tower of philosophy

I think that the world is greatly indebted to philosophy. I do not say that because I am a philosopher, for originally I am a sociologist and I turned to philosophy, just because it gave me important insights. But I think that the world would be different without philosophy, for the worse and for the better. This is not such an arrogant remark as one might think, if one realizes that philosophy developed together with the world and that what was called philosophy many centuries ago is not exactly the same as what is called philosophy today. Man’s political views of the world, ethics, mathematics, theology, astrology, science, and much more: all this was headed together under the name of philosophy. However, through the ages, one after another split off and became independent ways to approach the world or a part of it, until what remained is what we call philosophy today: a wordly way of thinking about themes that are not empirical.

When the philosophical field shrunk its character changed, too. Philosophy developed into a service organization for the sciences, for instance, and into a way to interpret scientific results. One of the tasks of philosophy today is thinking about what science is and about its methodological rules. By doing so, philosophy founds what science is and how it is done. But once science has done its work and presents its results, it is not so that these results have an unequivocal meaning. Far from that. As such scientific facts do not exist, for they are dependent on the type of instruments used to discover them and on presuppositions that are basic for these instruments. Facts are also dependent on the theories in which they are framed and these theories are continuously changing and being improved. In other words, scientific results are interpretations. To make clear what this implies is a philosophical task. Actually, this explanatory task is a continuation of the methodological task of philosophy before practical scientific work starts.

Moreover, scientific results are embedded in a social world, they have a meaning for this world and they have consequences for this world. Just think of the effects of medical discoveries on the way we live and the way we think about death and life. Scientific results can influence and change what we find important and what we value.

In view of this narrow relation between philosophy and science I am a bit surprised how often it happens that philosophers ignore scientific results. For instance, in the discussions on personal identity, one of my fields of interest as the readers of these blogs will know, it is often as if we still are in the days that Locke introduced the subject, more than 300 years ago. As if, since then, research of our body and mind hasn’t made clear that they are inextricably interwoven, which makes that our psychological identity cannot be separated from what we are physically are. Or taking another example that is not a hobbyhorse of mine, I was really amazed to see a recent publication that still took naïve realism seriously (happily it was an argument against it). This conception of the way we perceive the world says that we perceive things directly and in an unmediated way, as they “really” are, although it is clear from neurological and psychological research that it is a naïve view indeed that only is worth to be discussed in philosophical history books. When reading such stuff, it is as if philosophy has missed the developments elsewhere in the world and thinks that it can live in an Ivory Tower.

The experience of whiteness

Recently we had very much snow in the Netherlands, which does not happen often. Years can pass by with hardly any snow at all. But now it had fallen in big quantities. Moreover, also a bit unusual, a few days later it was still there on the roads and the trees as if it had just snowed.

One thing I like to do then is making an endurance run in the wood behind my house. There is hardly anything that I like to do more, but in most winters I can do it only once or twice. So I took my running shoes, put on my jogging suit and closed the door. Two minutes later I was in the wood. I was overwhelmed: So much whiteness around me, so much beauty. I was like wrapped in a white blanket. It was more beautiful than in any winter before.

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When talking about the free will, we always think of things we can do. Swaab, Mele and others who discuss the problem see the essence of free will in the possibility to decide or choose related to action: whether we can act freely or not. For instance, the debate about the experiment by Libet that showed that an action precedes our conscious decision to perform it with a fraction of a second is about that: about our freedom to act; about whether we take the factual decision or whether our zombie does.

Although I do not want to deny that acting is fundamental for us, isn’t there more that makes up our freedom (or its absence)? For example, how about our experiences? Experiences are given to us. Our senses are selective, indeed, and they, too, influence what we see, feel, and so on. Nevertheless, we cannot help that the world is around us and that we have to experience it. But what determines how these experiences are for us? To a certain extent we can be trained to perceive better and to perceive more details and even what we consider beautiful. We can learn to enjoy symphonic music or opera, for instance. On the other hand, training can also make us lose the feeling for integral beauty, as I once heard about professional musicians. However, everybody enjoys music in some way. So, here, too, the question may apply: Are we free to enjoy the beautifulness of music? Are we free to enjoy beautifulness as such? Does the problem of freedom of decision apply also to how something is like for us, to what we like and in what way we like? Was the overwhelming beauty of the snow covered wood something I had freely decided to enjoy or was it something that just happened to me (“decided” not in the sense that I freely went to the wood but that I freely experienced its beauty)?

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Maybe I would rather skip these words and simply write “Wow!”

Our future piggish identity

aIn his We are our brain the Dutch brain researcher Dick Swaab makes us think not only about the free will (see my blog two weeks ago), but also about our personal identity. His discussion of the subject is especially relevant for the question whether this identity is determined by psychological factors, by bodily factors or by both. One of the weak points of the pure psychological approach is that it denies that our personal identity is at least partially dependent on our physical constitution. Its adherents reject not only the importance of our bodily characteristics for our identity but they ignore also the way psychological characteristics are fixed in our body. They do accept that our psychological characteristics are physically fixed in our body in some way, indeed, for what sense would a brain swap have, if it weren’t? But they do not see that many psychological characteristics are not fixed to our body like a painting on a canvass (which makes that we can replace the canvass and keep the painting, albeit with much effort), but that they are inextricably tied to our material structure and are dependent on the individual features of our brain and in the end on the structure of our DNA.

The foregoing is not a pure philosophical problem. It may get a practical meaning as soon as it will become possible to transplant brain tissue from a foetus for repairing defects in another brain, as Swaab explains. For since “many of our characteristics, including our character, are determined in the structure of our brain during our foetal development … which characteristics could you get then from your donor?”, Swaab asks. These characteristics are dependent on what part of the foetus brain is used for the transplantation and where it will be placed in the donor’s brain. When this technique can be realized, especially in the higher brain structure, “it is to be wondered to what extent a new person is being composed, and how much transplanted tissue makes that the receiver should actually use the name of the donor as his second family name”. The issue of personal identity will become even more interesting, Swaab adds, when we are going to use tissues from other creatures for our brain transplantations. Until now these operations were hardly successful, “[b]ut if such xenotransplantations should ever become effective, would these transplants provide man then [for instance] with a bit of the friendliness and intelligence of the pigs?” If that is so, maybe it would not be a bad idea to improve our identity as a person in this way. (See Swaab, Wij zijn ons brein, pp. 170-1, also for the quotations).

The irremovable difference between presence and absence

Sometimes I think that I am a stupid philosopher. One who is too simple-minded to see the value of complicated thoughts and the truth of certain philosophical statements which are clear for many of my confrères. I faced this fact again when I started to read an article about Heidegger, or rather about his philosophical method, in a journal I am subscribed to. I knew that reading it would be quite an effort for me because of Heidegger’s obscure style. And many comments on his texts are not much better. Indeed, I had only just read one page when there was talk of “a thorough and irremovable difference between presence and absence” that formed the background of a long-lasting philosophical debate. I was baffled. I must admit that I had missed the debate, to which, according to the author of the article, outstanding philosophers like Heidegger (you guess it), Levinas and Derrida had contributed. But, of course, it is no wonder that I had missed it, for just such statements make me drop out. For what does this quotation mean when I look at it with a down-to-earth mind, forgetting for a moment that I am a philosopher? Or maybe when I look at it from the viewpoint of an analytical philosopher? Frankly speaking, it is nonsense. For the thoroughness and irremovability of the difference between presence and absence is already in the meaning of the words. It is analytical. It is as if you say: “If I am here I am not there”. Nothing is clearer and more analytical than this. Of course, it is thorough and irremovable, so what are we talking about then?

I continued reading the article but you’ll not be surprised that I put it aside after a few sentences. Actually I was a bit disappointed that I did not have the perseverance to read it to its end, since it is obvious now that I’ll never become a great thinker. For, so Heidegger, all great thinkers think the same because they all know themselves being bound by the question of Being. But it’s Heidegger’s Being and that’s not mine. For me this Being is nothing, and as Heidegger told us, the nothing nothings. Oh, help, let me stop here, before I do become a Heideggerian philosopher.

P.S. I know that this is a caricature but sometimes a caricature tells the truth better than telling the truth. In Heideggerian terms, it unhides the hidden better, than the unhidden itself.

Do my hormones make my choices?

In We are our brain the Dutch brain researcher Dick Swaab, defends the thesis that in the end everything we do is determined by the biology of our brain. Our brain steers our development, mainly with the help of hormones. Sexuality, juvenile behaviour, depressions, aggression, psychological diseases … This is just a random choice of our hormone guided behaviour. Therefore it is no surprise that Swaab concludes that there is no “complete ‘Free Will’ ”.

If one sees the free will as the possibility to take decisions independent of internal or external limitations, so Swaab, our present neurobiological knowledge makes clear that there can be no complete freedom. Conceived this way, I think there’ll be hardly any person who thinks that there is. The limits of our body, but also of our social and cultural environment, are widely accepted as the limits of our freedom. However, Swaab does not make clear what our freedom then is, but I guess that he doesn’t see much space for the free will.

Yet, despite himself, he gives a hint where our freedom has to be sought. One of our characteristics determined by hormones during our prenatal development is the meaning of eye contact. In Western cultures, so Swaab, women use eye contact in order to understand other women better, and they enjoy it. For Western men, however, eye contact means testing their place in the hierarchy, which can be very menacing. In business negotiations, eye contact between women leads to more creative solutions, while eye contact between men has a negative effect on the results. “You can take advantage of this practical tip”, so Swaab concludes.

I think that just this remark says a lot about the limits of the determinism of our brain. In order to explain this I want to refer to a distinction by Jürgen Habermas between two levels of meaning, level 1 and level 0. The former is the level all sciences are faced with when they theoretically interpret their objects of research. The latter level is typical of those sciences that have to deal with objects that have been given meaning by the investigated people themselves. This made me distinguish two kinds of meaning: meaning 1 and meaning 0 (see here). The former is the kind of meaning used on the first level. It is the meaning a scientist gives to an object, either physical or social in character; it is the scientist’s theoretical interpretation of reality. Meaning 0 is the concept of meaning for the underlying level 0. It is the meaning people who make up social reality give to this social reality or to parts of it themselves; it is their interpretation of their own lived reality.

When we return to Swaab’s description of the meaning of eye contact and his conclusion, we can apply the distinction of two levels of meaning here, too. When a researcher studies the effects of hormones on the meaning of eye contact, she is on level 1. When Swaab says, however, “You can take advantage of this practical tip”, he is no longer on the level of the biological mechanism.  In fact, he says then what this mechanism can mean for us, the appliers of the eye contact, and also that the mechanism needs no longer be an automatism but that we can use it for the benefit of ourselves. By interpreting the biological mechanism this way we have arrived at level 0. It is the level where we can reflect on our biological constitution and where we can take advantage of it, if we are conscious of it. Just this conclusion by Swaab shows that our determinism has its limits. Therefore I think that there is room for a free will on level 0. Swaab gives also another hint that points in this direction, when he describes the meaning eye contacts have for Western women and men. For doesn’t this refer to the idea that our biological functioning can have another interpretation in another culture and so lead to other choices in other cultures?

“I cannot hand over the eyes”

Look at this: “It’s pitch dark. I can not hand over the eyes. Do you view please?” What would it mean? I think that you cannot make any sense of it. I have translated it from Dutch with a translation tool from the Internet. If I would translate it myself it would be something like “It is pitch-dark here. I can’t see anything at all (verbally: I cannot see a hand before my eyes; it’s a Dutch expression). Do you put the light on?” It’s a simple situation. The sentences are simple. Nothing special. The Dutch expression that I used for “I cannot see anything at all” is common. Nevertheless the translation tool made a mess of it. Moreover, it didn’t translate the word “here” in the first sentence of the example.

Or take this: “Do you have fits”? In this case I had translated the English sentence “Do you have matches?” (implying that I wanted to light a cigarette) into Dutch with the same language tool. Then I retranslated it myself into English, as verbally as possible, in order to show also what a mess you can get when you translate in the other direction.

I have the impression that Internet translation tools are increasingly used. It seems so easy: You want to translate something into another language, for instance because you want to send a message to another person and you do not share a common language with her. So, take a translation tool and translate it. What many people do not realize (and let’s hope that the constructors of the translation tools do realize it) is that translating is more than simply replacing words by other words plus the application of the right rules of grammar. For using a language takes place in a context, and words get their meanings only in a context. This is already important when a word or a sentence has apparently only a single meaning. “He took the knife and made a cut in the body” implies something very different whether it is done by a murderer or by a surgeon. Context becomes even more important when words have several unrelated meanings, like “match”, which can have such different meanings as an organized game, a small wooden stick for producing fire, making the same or equal, and many more. We have seen this in the scene where I wanted to light a cigarette and asked someone for matches. The translation tool misses the context and thinks of the verb “to match” instead of the small wooden sticks I need (it could also have mistakenly thought that I asked for games). This, combined with the problem that translation tools tend to take words verbally (see the first example where it did not take “I cannot see a hand before my eyes” as a Dutch expression), makes that translation tools are still an unreliable means for transferring meanings from one language to another. And one can wonder whether they’ll ever become reliable in future. For a language is not simply an instrument of communication, a language expresses also a way of life. And when you doubt about what I have written here, just pick a translation tool from the Internet and render this blog in another language.

What are we voting for?

Dutch national symbols

Some blogs ago I discussed that much of what I do is not steered by my conscious I but by my unconscious part, so by my zombie. My conscious I is often not more than an interpreter in my brain that tells me what the zombie has decided and my zombie is the actual steersman. But who steers my zombie? Or is it so that my zombie steers itself by an unconscious process of deliberation and reasoning that in the end decides what “I” want to do, actually not different from the way I would do it, when I would perform the process consciously?

Some distressing light on this question has been shed by experiments concerning political thought and behaviour by a group of Israeli researchers. The normative perspective suggests, they say, “that one’s political agenda should be driven by two factors: one’s ideology and the facts of the matter. These should form the input for an intentional reasoning process, wherein the goal is carefully thought-through political activity.” And indeed, psychological research has substantiated that one’s ideology and current events do influence political behaviour and thought, but in view of recent developments in cognitive psychology it is to be expected that unconscious processes play an important part as well. In order to investigate this the researchers tried to find out in a series of experiments whether subliminal presentation of national symbols influences one’s stance on political opinions and political behaviour. In these experiments the participants were confronted with several political issues. However, just before the presentation of the issues a national flag (which stood for the national symbol) was shown for such a short time that the participants were not aware of it. Both before and after the experiments the participants were asked their opinions on certain political themes. In one experiment the voting intention in coming elections was asked and then after the elections what they had really voted. All experiments showed the same result: On the average the participants had before the experiments more extreme views than after them. Therefore the researchers concluded: “the subliminal presentation of a national flag can bring about significant changes not only in a citizen’s expressed political opinions within an experimental setting but also in their ‘real-life’ overt political behavior”.

What makes this result so interesting for answering my question “who steers my zombie?” but also so worrying is not only that it tells us something about how we form our political opinions and behaviour but also that they can easily be manipulated by others, while we are not aware of it. This is the more worrying, while there is no reason to believe that such manipulation will move us only to the political centre. It is also possible, as the researchers point out, that priming of national symbols can activate extremist ideologies in those who have them already. In other words, what my zombie does for me unconsciously for me can easily be manipulated by not all too honest politicians. Then it may happen that we vote no longer for what we think right, for what we stand for, but simply for our national flag, rightly or wrongly.

Source http://www.pnas.org/content/104/50/19757.full . The quotations are also from this article.

The economic benefits of transgenic maize and the free rider problem

Maize field after harvest

Recently I read in a Dutch newspaper an article about the economic effects of the cultivation of genetically manipulated maize, in this case Bt corn. Bt corn produces a toxin that is poisonous to the European corn borer, one of the pests of corn. According to the article, a study on the effects of Bt corn in the Midwest of the USA published in Science showed that also on fields where non-manipulated corn was grown the population of the European corn borer decreased with 28 till even 73 percent. The introduction of Bt corn in the region has led to an economic benefit of 6.9 milliard dollars since 1996. However, almost two third of the benefit falls to farmers who do not cultivate Bt corn, but they do not have to pay for the license.

Coen van Wagenberg from Wageningen University speaks here of a free rider effect. Usually a free rider is defined as a person who profits by a public resource without paying a fair share in its costs. You live in an area protected by dikes but don’t want to pay the land draining rates from which the dikes are paid. You take the train but don’t buy a ticket. When there are too many free riders, dikes will not be constructed, public transport will not ride any longer for lack of money and everybody suffers, including the free rider. Therefore the state forces everybody to pay his share and tries to catch fare dodgers. In van Wagenberg’s view, also farmers who do not cultivate Bt corn in a region where other farmers do: The former take advantage of what the latter do, but they do not pay for the costs. The free market, so van Wagenberg, does not work here. Therefore the state must interfere and make that everybody in a region where transgenic maize is grown pays his share in the costs.

At first thoughts the argument seems reasonable: everybody profits by transgenic maize, so everybody has to pay for it. But is this really a case of free riding? I think it is not. Actually the arguments turns the world upside down and it limits freedom in the name of freedom. For does a person have to pay for his neighbour’s decisions?

I live in a terraced house. In winter I set the thermostat of my central heating on 19^oC, while my neighbours left and right prefer 21^oC. Then warmth flows through the walls to my house and my heating costs are reduced a bit. I profit by what they pay for their heating. Must I pay my neighbours then in order to equalize my benefit? I guess that nobody would get the idea. Everybody is free to choose how warm or cold his house will be and if a neighbour will have it warmer, she must accept that some warmth goes to the neighbour next-door.

I see here no fundamental difference with the case of growing transgenic maize. It involves as little a free rider problem as the case of me warming my house. In fact it is not the “free riding” farmer who undermines the free market as suggested in the article but the farmer growing transgenic maize and those on his side. Maybe some farmers try to profit by what their neighbours grow, but other farmers are simply against growing transgenic plants because of the harmful effects for nature and men’s health of genetic manipulation. It is a matter of private choice that is not comparable to profiting by the protection of dikes or not buying a train ticket. You cannot help that your neighbour chooses to grow Bt maize, like that you cannot help that your next-door neighbour will have her house warmer. The core of the problem whether or not the state must interfere here is not the functioning of the free market, but whether one can force a private person to pay a share in the costs that other private persons have because of their private decisions, so that the costs are fairly shared by all who have the benefits. Growing Bt corn is not a public good, just as making cars isn’t. The problem is an ethical one about freedom of choice and not about unfair competition in a supposedly free market. And it is also about the ethically acceptability to manipulate plants genetically and having persons pay for it who are against it.

Trust

Someone gives you money for an investment project. He says that it would be nice to give it back in case you make good gains but you do not need to do so. Your investment is successful and the amount doubles. What will you do? Experiments show that you’ll give it back. Suppose now that your financier says that you have to pay back at least a part, say 20%. It is your choice to pay back more. Again you succeed to double the amount received. What will you do? Experiments show now that the chance that you’ll pay back the whole amount diminishes. Fewer people are prepared to pack back the whole amount now than in the first case.

This is only one instance of what we call trust. Trust is a kind of promise. It says that you will not let your interests prevail at the cost of the interests of the person who trusts you. Trust can be expressed in words, for example by saying “You can trust me” or by behaviour that shows that you can be trusted. Although past behaviour is not a guarantee for what you will do in future, behaviour in the past that undermined that you were trustworthy tends to undermine that you can be trusted in the future.

As these and other experiments show, trust can also be undermined otherwise. Being a kind of promise, trust involves a moral obligation and it relies on an intrinsic motivation. Everything that undermines this intrinsic motivation undermines also trust. People tend to become calculating and to give preference to their own interests at the cost of interests of other people, when rules and regulations prescribe what they have to do and when, and what is allowed and what is not. When money stimulates or sanctions their behaviour trust is undermined, too. However, rules and regulations and monetary relations can never completely replace trust. Not everything can be prescribed and ways to avoid rules remain. Not all interpersonal relations can be steered by prescriptions and money. And then trust plays its part. Or rather we must say that trust comes first and that, when need arises, it is replaced by prescriptive relations (rules and regulations) and money. But this replacement is a double-edged sword. While it helps society function better where trust fails, it undermines trust as well so that the chance that trust will fail grows. Therefore, one must be very careful not to make more rules and regulations than necessary. The same effect can be seen when society becomes too money-based. Then personal relations, relations based on trust, tend to become relations guided by the question: what can I gain from it, what will it bring to me? One of the most extreme forms of this is corruption, and corruption has a disruptive effect on societies. Whichever way you look at it, trust is the foundation of society. Or alternatively: Trust is a lubricant for society and the better quality the lubricant is, the smoother society runs.

The group a person belongs to

A few years ago Mark Rutte, the new Dutch prime minister but then the leader of his parliamentary party, objected to the fact that one of the state secretaries in the government had a double nationality: she had both a Dutch and a Turkish passport. However, when he presented his new cabinet two weeks ago, it turned out that also one of the state secretaries in this cabinet had two passports: a Dutch one and a Swedish one. When asked how this was defensible in view of his former opinion, the prime minister answered that he did not mind that the state secretary had a Swedish passport but when she had had a Turkish passport, it would have been a point of discussion. No wonder that some accused him of discrimination. Apparently a minister or state secretary (and many other people) is not judged here by his or her personal loyalty to the government and the Netherlands but by the group s/he officially belongs to.

But why is just having a certain nationality so important? In the end a person belongs to many different groups and they can all have influence on one’s loyalty to the state. One can think of groups related to gender, class, language, profession, community, race and so on. And isn’t it so that in the past class belongingness was said to be international and that labour leaders often have stressed that workers from different countries would not fight against each other? (So sad, that this did not really happen). Doesn’t this imply that class membership can be by far more important than one’s passport? Or what to think of the language group one belongs to and the many separation movements in this world based on language? And isn’t it so that through the ages the belongingness to a religious group has also been important in determining loyalty to the state? And, to take another example, who cares about the international loyalties (and the loyalties to their own pockets!) of the fraudulent bankers, despite the recent bank crisis?

Amartya Sen argued in his The Idea of Justice that seeing a person “merely as a member of just one particular group would be a major denial of the freedom of each person to decide how exactly to see himself or herself. The increasing tendency seeing people in terms of one dominant ‘identity’ … is not only an imposition of an external and arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups …” (pp. 246-247). And that is what often happens. The case of the Dutch prime minister is only one instance. He did not doubt at all about the loyalty of the state secretary with the Turkish passport. It was just that she had a Turkish passport (and apparently not a Swedish one) that counted. So we often do: we judge people not by what they say and do, but by their belongings, even if they cannot help that they have them and even if they cannot change them (like gender, race, but often also the passport). Actually people are then judged by mere formal qualities. We see it, as Sen warns, “particularly … in the present intellectual [and I want to add: political] climate in which individuals tend to be identified as belonging to one social category to the exclusion of all others …, such as being a Muslim or a Christian or a Hindu, an Arab or a Jew, a Hutu or a Tutsi, or a member of Western civilization … Individual human beings with their various plural identities, multiple affiliations and diverse associations are quintessentially social creatures with different types of societal interactions. Proposals to see a person merely as a member of one social group tend to be based on an inadequate understanding of the breadth and complexity of any society in the world” (p. 247). And isn’t it so that in this time of globalization there is a tendency to get international and supranational group belongings? That it has become more likely that one has several nationalities, maybe not formally but actually in the sense of having different national roots? In this age of globalization having other-national group belongings is just an asset. It helps giving a person a wider view of what is happening around him or her. Seen this way, membership of a big number of groups, especially those crossing the national borders and those on the other side of the national border should have to be praised, including having a double nationality.

On being selective when travelling around

When travelling around, on holiday, I used to visit many of the buildings and sites recommended in my travel guide. See this! See that! Do not fail to visit this church, you must go to that museum, my guide said, and although I do not want to say that I visited all these places (in the end I wanted to keep some time for visiting the places I liked and for doing the things I preferred), I went to a lot of the sites advised to visit, anyhow.

Since a few years I do less so. Sometimes I feel a bit guilty and think it is stupid not to see the highlights of the local, national or international culture I pass, but often I had the feeling that they do not really appeal to me. Of course, the master pieces of art and intelligence are beautiful, but each time most of what I see appears fundamentally new to me. It is as if through the years I haven’t developed a mental frame that helps me to compare a new church and its ornaments, the next mediaeval town hall and the next painting or sculputure with those that I had seen a day before, not to speak of what I had seen months or years ago. Often the things I see do not fall in a slot, by way of speaking. Of course, there are exceptions. I remember that when I went into a church in Florence, my eye was immediately caught by a beautiful statue. It appeared to be one by Donatello. And Dutch painters, not only the big names like Rembrandt or van Gogh, have by far more meaning for me than foreign painters. But let’s say that 95% of those “musts” for tourists do not really fit a scheme in my mind, and I forget most of it very soon. This doesn’t mean that I do not visit those highlights of art and intelligence any longer, but gradually I have changed my strategy. I have become very selective and I look only at those things which probably will fit my mental scheme. So when I was in the Escorial near Madrid I gave only attention to what was related to Dutch history (and I visited the Escorial because I expected to find such things there). The LVR-LandesMuseum in Bonn was interesting for me because of it prehistoric objects and I ignored all other departments. And so on.

I hardly dared to tell other people about my “disinterest” for the highlights of culture till I read Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel. In this book de Botton shows us ways of travelling but he also put these them into perspective, especially the more “traditional” way of visiting famous places. When de Botton was in Madrid and stood there amidst of a crowd of tourists, he wondered “what am I doing here?” And a few pages further he points to the terror of the travel guides, which praise certain places as interesting, force you to visit them and to show enthusiasm, and implicitly belittle those people who do not agree or prefer to ignore these places. Besides that, so de Botton, it happens often that we see these things on the wrong moment, when we are not yet ripe for appreciating them. This can make that the new information has no value for us (compare what I told about my mental scheme). Or if it has, maybe it would be better after our visit to the Notre Dame in Paris, not to go to the next tourist attraction nearby but take a train and compare it with the cathedral in Reims. That makes more sense than just keeping looking around where you are, with a travel guide in your hands, for by doing so your curiosity is deformed by a superficial geographic logic, by what happens to be placed together – things that may have no intrinsic relations – and by what is only recommended by our travel guide. It is the same, so de Botton, as letting your choice of books be determined by their sizes and not by their contents.

When I had read The Art of Travel I felt very relieved and now I dare to tell everyone: I did not see that famous sculpture, that church and that painting and I avoided them with intention. And I need not be ashamed for doing so and telling it to you, for being selective when travelling around does not only fit better my idea of what makes travelling around pleasant, it has also a philosophical foundation! See what de Botton wrote about it!

Making a reader think

“Il ne faut pas toujours tellement épuiser un sujet qu'on ne laisse rien à faire au lecteur; il ne s'agit pas de faire lire, mais de faire penser” (We must not always exhaust a subject, so as to leave no work at all for the reader. My business is not to make people read, but to make them think.) - Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws, Book 14, ch.XX)

 By chance, when thinking about my next blog, I met this quotation on the Philosophy Calendar, which hangs here somewhere on a wall in my house. I looked it up on the Internet in Montesquieu’s work (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27573/27573-h/27573-h.htm) in order to see in what context it had been placed. Montesquieu, so he said there, originially had the intention to investigate for all kinds of moderate governments known how the three powers are distributed and what the relations with the degrees of freedom are, but he wouldn’t do that for something had to be left to the reader: one must not only make him or her read but also make him/her think.

The comment added to the quotation by the Dutch journalist and philosopher Vanno Jobse related it to the difference between what a good book is and what is just a book: Some authors write a book where the whole thread and all thoughts are completely spun out. Then, you read the book and that’s it. Good books, however, have been developed well, everything is thought-out but, despite that, not everything that can be said about the main theme is said, and it gives the reader handles to make him or her think.

When I look back to how I wrote in the past, I must say that I was the type of author and thinker who tried to be complete. My attitude was: try to be as complete as possible. And when I discovered yet a little loose thread in my thoughts I tried to fasten it. I must say, I was also stimulated to do so by others. In case I had sent a paper to a journal, I usually got comments like: “How about this?” “How about that?” “There you can be criticized”. And so on, forgetting the main line of the thought. In the end I was fed up with it. What sense does it have to try to be as precise as possible? So I gradually changed my way of writing, I loosened my style and let the loose threads hang down. Or I intentionally left some points open without discussion. I started a blog website, too, which is exactly a place where you can have your thoughts run freely without thinking whether each thought can be substantiated. It is not that I hoped that I could make other people think, although that would be nice, of course. I write my blogs for myself, often as a reflection on what I have just read. But when I read later an old blog again, I often discover failures or imperfect thoughts that make me think again. And I enjoy it.

Liberty of conscience

At the moment I am reading a philosophical book which is very different from those I have recently discussed here in my blogs: Amartya Sen’s The idea of Justice. Although one can wonder whether it is that different, for there is not a real gap between a concept like responsibility and a concept like justice.

Sen is not new to me. I “met” him already when I was studying sociology with economics as a minor and I became intrigued then by his Choice of Techniques, which discusses an aspect of a planned economy. Sen’s ideas and points of interest and mine developed through the years, although in different directions, but now and then I read some of his newest works like Identity and Violence, which is important for me because of my interest in (personal) identity and nonviolence. His present book is mainly a discussion with Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and his idea of justice as fairness.

Although I have read only less than a third of the book till now, I met already many stimulating ideas. One of the things that permeates the book is Sen’s multicultural education. Most people tend to become prejudiced in favour of their own cultures, also because as an outsider it is difficult to get to know the huge achievements of other cultures. Sen, living in several countries through the years, got the chance to become acquainted with many cultures and he used it. He tells for instance about the Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great, who lived from 1542-1605 in what now is more or less Pakistan, Northern India and Bangladesh. Akbar, a Muslim, an enlightened ruler, “ not only did insist”, so Sen, “that the duty of the state included making sure that ‘no man should be interfered with on account of his religion, and any one was to be allowed to go over to any religion he pleased’, he also arranged systematic dialogues in his capital city of Agas between Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Parsees, Jews and others, even including agnostics and atheists” (The Idea of Justice, 37). This happened in a time that religious wars reigned in Europe and people were sent to the stake because of their faith. This quotation makes us think. In a time that right-wing extremism flares up in many European countries (including in my own country, the Netherlands), it shows us another face of Islam than the one presented by this political ideology, which also forgets the zealotry with which Christianity was spread over the world during the ages, including in Islamic regions. When thinking of this zealotry and especially of the religious wars between Catholics and Huguenots in France in his days, Montaigne reacted in this way: “ ‘Tis usual to see good intentions, if carried on without moderation, push men on to very vicious effects.” The essay that starts with this sentence bears the title “Of liberty of conscience”. It tells us to be tolerant for other views, even when we do not like them. Although written more than 400 years ago, we can still learn a lot of it, just as we can from the words and practice of the Muslim ruler Akbar.