Brooks on 'the end of philosophy' or 'the end of humanity'

The End of Philosophy by David Brooks (New York Times)

Socrates talked. The assumption behind his approach to philosophy, and the approaches of millions of people since, is that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation: Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it.

One problem with this kind of approach to morality, as Michael Gazzaniga writes in his 2008 book, “Human,” is that “it has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people. In fact, in most studies, none has been found.”

Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous.

As Steven Quartz of the California Institute of Technology said during a recent discussion of ethics sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, “Our brain is computing value at every fraction of a second. Everything that we look at, we form an implicit preference. Some of those make it into our awareness; some of them remain at the level of our unconscious, but ... what our brain is for, what our brain has evolved for, is to find what is of value in our environment.”

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.

In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, “The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”

The question then becomes: What shapes moral emotions in the first place? The answer has long been evolution, but in recent years there’s an increasing appreciation that evolution isn’t just about competition. It’s also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats. Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history. We don’t just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions. We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.

Read the rest of this wretched but interesting piece here.

My commentary:
As science comes up with 'explanations' for why humans feel the need to be moral, the moral 'values' that we hold will become useless. This is because, as science will have proven, it's all biologically determined anyway. This sort of reasoning admits a limit on what is reason; reason is strictly limited to the verifiable or empirical. Science hasn't accounted for feelings like "patriotism", but as Brooks asserts, eventually it will. Hence the title: "The Death of Philosophy". How does this not give a person pause? Reason is limited to materialistic determinism? Say 'bye, bye' to philosophy, theology, and reason-based ethics. An "epochal" shift. I think the article should be titled: "The End of Humanity". Brooks doesn't seem to get where this is going.... the topic is "above his pay grade".

The scientists seek to pair human morality with the reigning dogma on evolution/chance. This, of course, is not science but ideology. How are terms of 'value' and 'morality' and 'purpose' scientific? Explain why it is valid for scientists to be theorizing about such topics. Brook's article assumes evolution of random chance is true (so much for God's creative Spirit), and is more interested in taking such a view into the realm of morality with metaphysical underpinnings. The article posits, at least the scientists (it seems to me that Brooks doesn't get it), that reason is the slave of emotions because that's the only account empiricism can make for any 'moral' judgments. It very much appears that the 'science' going on here in Brooks' piece is just what you rail against in the quote above. This is especially seen when Dr. Quartz moves from 'the brain processing info at a vast rate' to 'this is what the brain is for' (assigning purpose... but I thought we were just moving particles at random?) to assigning 'value' to 'this is how we make moral judgments'. Where did the science end and the philosophy begin? I don't know about you, but I find it absurd when humans are compared to bees, moral decisions to tasting food, and that adults are no more qualified to make moral judgments than babies (yes, the article asserts all of those things). Hence, Brooks notes in the conclusion that the proposition of the 'moral scientists' is "an epochal" change; aka kiss religion, reason based morality, and what Lewis calls "the Tao" goodbye. Forget "The End of Philosophy" and enter "The End of Humanity". Which reminds me, you need to read The Abolition of Man if you haven't already; it's a great account of reason based morality that gives a role to emotion that I think you will find interesting.

At this point, the more important discussion is about the Brooks piece, and it gets back to The Metaphysical Club as well as Neuhaus' brilliant summation of Rorty and liberal irony.
One must choose:
a) To be with the materialists asserting that man's reason is slave to the emotions, and morality is simply as pragmatism describes (ready, fire, aim); truth is also always evolving and in-flux and determined by the utility in any given time by 'majority' consensus. Reality is really just what man percieves in his own mind; it does not apply to others. Such claims foundationally are anti-institution, anti-tradition, and anti-religious; usually if not always they favor a radical and unbridled positivism in the academy/polis.
-or-
b) To be with the realists who believe that man ought to and can order his emotions by using right reason and conquer his appetites, striving for the good, true, and beautiful which exist 'out there' and is accessible by our (God-given) reason, and embodied in the eternal Logos (in this account one can still recognize that we often act on emotions without thinking.) Such claims are friendly to religions, traditions, and hierarchical institutions (they are also not 'western' arguments exclusively); positivism has its place, but it is ordered to right reason.

There is no half-way house between the two. It's option 'a' or 'b'. This is the crux of our entire discussion! Again, even Brooks sees it as "an epochal" change - hence the problems of modern education as Deneen, Fish, and many others argue. Neither choice gives any road to a 'third' option; they are diametrically opposed. I'm interested to see what your choice is, and why.

The Metaphysical Club

This book is an excellent portrait of post-protestant, progressive, positivism in the late 19th century. A fascinating study of disembodied faith falling into agnostic secularism.

Below are my thoughts about pragmatism.

Pragmatism: what is it really, and can it be appropriated by Christians?

Names: There are different ‘brands’ of pragmatism; for instance, William James called it pragmatism, John Dewey called it instrumentalism, and others called it humanism. Although each fellow had his own emphasis for the philosophy, there still remains a basic foundational claim common to each.

Foundational claim: At the most basic level, pragmatism purports that human beings 1) act, and only after acting 2) examine the action, determine meaning, and assess utility and/or success of the action. It is worth noting, as Louis Menand himself recognizes, that pragmatism has no logical account for desire or love. The following description is from the Catholic Encyclopedia [my emphasis]:

Pragmatism, as a tendency in philosophy, signifies the insistence on usefulness or practical consequences as a test of truth. In its negative phase, it opposes what it styles the formalism or rationalism of Intellectualistic philosophy. That is, it objects to the view that concepts, judgments, and reasoning processes are representative of reality and the processes of reality. It considers them to be merely symbols, hypotheses and schemata devised by man to facilitate or render possible the use, or experience, of reality. This use, or experience, is the true test of real existence. In its positive phase, therefore, Pragmatism sets up as the standard of truth some non-rational test, such as action, satisfaction of needs, realization in conduct, the possibility of being lived, and judges reality by this norm to the exclusion of all others.

Pragmatism as a ‘system’: Pragmatism may not be a complete philosophical system per se, but it is certainly a foundational account (logia – ideological psychology) of how humans operate – specifically the mind and decision making. This foundational account is hugely important to any direction the philosophy is taken under any name, coloring every aspect of human life: freedom, choice, truth, goodness, civil society, etc.

Assumptions: All forms of pragmatism embrace and assume the following: a) democracy is the best form of civil organization – anti-hierarchical; b) scientific positivism is the future by which man must evaluate himself and his environment – social engineering is assumed via methods such as the law of averages and the bell curve; c) man is always ‘progressing’ and becoming better/smarter; d) pragmatism is anti-institutional, especially old traditional institutions; e) pragmatism rejects all classical, Hellenistic, and scholastic methods of thinking (philosophy and theology) – it also implicitly rejects old creedal formulae (aka: De-Hellenization); f) every ‘problem’ that man now faces was once a ‘solution’ to a previous ‘problem’ (until it was subsequently deemed a ‘problem’). Looming large in the philosophy and the background context of pragmatism is Hegel’s process theology. Process theology asserts that as human history progresses and develops, God also progresses and develops and ‘comes into His being’; this implies that God is ‘mutable’ or changeable as well as ‘passable’ (can suffer). Such claims fly in the face of any orthodox Christian thinking: God is impassible, immutable, omnipotent, and omnipresent; these classic notions of God are garbaged without examining the implications. Although James was the most Christian of the pragmatists found in The Metaphysical Club, the other gentlemen, while denying God or claiming to be agnostic, still viewed ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ as always coming into being and progressing in time. Therefore, man today is automatically further and better developed than man 1,000 years ago.

Why created? The philosophy originated with Charles Pearce, but was taken up and somewhat reappropriated by William James. James intended pragmatism to be a philosophy that once again legitimized the position of God in a progressive, modern, scientific, and rational world; it was an account of reality and how men think which rationalized God in such ‘brave new world’. For the Christian observer, James is probably the one figure for whom to have sympathy, albeit his actions were based in a sort of nostalgia and he fatally sacrificed orthodoxy to make pragmatism ‘work’ (James was guilty of being pragmatic). Pragmatism was also created to legitimize philosophy in a positivistic/scientistic world; abstract thinking was no longer seen as useful or pragmatic as man liberated himself from old institutions and ways of thinking. Philosophy, as seen in pragmatism, came to be dominated by empirical data (law of averages etc.) and the new psychology, and was a hybrid of philosophy undergirded by ‘scientific’ data about human behavior. Pragmatism was also an account that proved to be more useful to control/clean up the messiness of man’s environment/life, and proved itself useful for the rising economic and industrial revolutions. The philosophy was also created as a reaction against the ante-bellum period status quo in America; this is laudable, but only resulted in replacing the former status quo with a new status quo, legitimizing new and destructive western behaviors (scientism, industrialism, abusive capitalism, materialism, Americanism- the manifest destiny of the nation, and social engineering). Pragmatism was also created to help bridge the alleged gap between fides et ratio (faith and reason); such a perceived gap can only come from a Christian fundamentalist backdrop. But such a gap between faith and reason can only be reconnected by the dynamic power of Greco-Roman abstract philosophy, not scientific positivism; ‘scientism’ is simply another form of fundamentalism and maintains the gap between faith and reason.

What are the implications of pragmatism? There are a number of serious problems with pragmatism as well as its implications for the masses. First of all, it implies that human life can be manipulated and predicted according to formulae, averages, and allegedly ‘scientific’ data; social engineering toward creating a worldly utopia is the dangerous result. According to the basic claims of pragmatism, truth is essentially developed and invented by the philosophy as a reaction to the success/failure of human action; every problem is basically the solution to problems prior to it – there is no goal that humans are attempting to reach, no truth to which we strive. Everything as a result is in-flux; there is nothing in society that man can rely upon as a constant, because reality (and/or God) is always constantly coming into being. This has obvious implications for morality: morality becomes a ‘ready, fire, aim’ process; a process that reflects upon action only after the fact. The action itself is arbitrary and subjective, and subsequently the action can be judged subjectively by terms subjectively developed by the actor - moral relativism, plain and simple. One cannot claim truth is not relative, then embrace pragmatism which essentially is creating truth on its own terms all the time; this is a contradiction. Pragmatism, as understood properly, is also deterministic and has the great potential to be oppressive and destroy human love, hope, and freedom. With human life being so predictable and determined, as well as asserting that humans act then assess action, pragmatism can be seen as anti-contemplative; the philosophy is anti-contemplative not because its founders were unintelligent or thoughtless, but because it implies that for the rest of humanity, thinking before acting is not necessary or not the case at all; in fact, it is better if man acts then determines the utility and satisfaction of action after the fact. Lastly, ideas no longer have power unless backed by empirical data; science is the new gospel of truth – yet humans clearly know that science is far from understanding everything about reality, yet it is relied upon in this philosophy to account for everything. Pragmatism is on a larger scale, what Agassiz does with God and his 'science' (it is an irrational fundamentalism): it tries to maintain the status quo of America's ‘manifest destiny’ in the post bellum period - America needs science and industry and progress - and as a result needs a 'philosophy' accounting for human thought and behavior that legitimizes such a mechanistic approach to human life: thus humans do not act before thinking (progress, industry, and the economic machine). As Agassiz is the ‘proto-intelligent design’ fundamentalist, the "Metaphysical Club" (broadly speaking) is a ‘proto-agnostic humanism’ (with some deism) based on anti-institution, democracy, anti-contemplation (as implicated for masses), and the denial human dignity (seeing men as 'averages'.).

Origins & Fruits: Looking at the origins and historical context of pragmatism (disembodied Christian world, post Christian in many ways, positivistic, industrial, progressive, and nationalistic), one can see that it originates in a troubled period. It was forged by agnostics, deists, and Hegelian disciples – this alone breaks any continuity with authentic Christian faith. Looking then at the personal lives of the founders, one can see the ‘fruits’ of such ideology. Charles Pearce is seen as the origin of pragmatism: this makes perfect sense as he was ruled by his appetites, wreaking havoc on everything he touched. James sacrificed, albeit well intentioned, orthodoxy to make pragmatism work. Dewey employed the philosophy in his educational practices: creating schools that ‘developed the child’ through social engineering; education was now about making children into ‘well adjusted’ members of society through scientific methods. Dewey called the philosophy instrumentalism, and his ‘school’ was called the laboratory. Dewey did not desire pragmatism to create individuals, but to make everyone the same – to streamline and ‘perfect’ humanity. Holmes denied human dignity, but insisted on human ‘rights’; he also replaced the language of guilt and sin with the mechanistic terms such as ‘negligence’; this fits well with pragmatism for it allows for the continued re-evaluation of what is true and good. Menand’s work portrays the majority of the ‘transcendalists’ and members of the ‘metaphysical club’ as men who lived scandalous lives, living it up in the ivory towers and high places, and using their influential positions in society to impose their ideology.

Love: Pragmatism does not account for love, and can be seen to destroy or instrumentalize it. Love is a choice; it is the proper ordering of the will (the heart, seat of emotions) by the intellect. The intellect, of course, has to assent to ideas first and be formed by ideals. Love is not based in emotions, but in the choice to give of self and choose the other despite difficulties; the pragmatist claim that man acts before thinking either does not understand this classic and true understanding of how humans operate or it flies in its face (probably the latter). To act without cognition assumes that humans are slaves of their emotions or desires; this is strange and ironic because pragmatism has no clear account of desire. One can logically ask: what then rules human action? Nothing. All is in-flux, and men and women make up truth as they see fit in the context of their existence. Dewey, as Menand asserts, was not for radical individual freedom, but sought to find harmony in the community, but this intention (albeit good) does not work in such a philosophic system. What results is simply a ‘contract society’ (John Stewart Mill – a hedonistic, materialistic society – “life is nasty, brutish, and short.”) where everyone is asserting their will, and as long as no one is bothered or offended the society ‘flourishes’. To examine this more, consider the following example: imagine an infant or toddler – this child operates off the ‘pragmatism’ method of act first, then assess the success/pleasure. The difference between and adult and such a young child is the formation of their intellect, and the process of thinking before acting. Certainly a small child can love his mommy, but if he grows up maintaining love in the same manner (a one-way street, mom does it all), he will really not be able to love another person well as an adult. Love needs to be modeled and trained to children or it will be disordered, negatively affecting the subject and the community; this seems clear ipso facto - just look at our society.

Truth & God: If truth is always in-flux, as pragmatism asserts, then can the pragmatist say that God is Logos? “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” says Christ, the Incarnate Word; “Everyone that is of the truth, heareth my voice.” Such a statement implies that truth is knowable and accessible by the human intellect. Who would deny that the Christian God is the God of Truth? Can man really not know God, nor act from any knowledge of God? What are the 10 Commandments? Is the world God created reflective of the Logos, or not? Or is the world/reality simply the manner in which man describes it, or the name subjectively given (Nominalism)? To the point, here’s what the Wiki page on pragmatism says [my emphasis]:

James and Peirce were inspired by the crucial links among belief, conduct, and disposition by saying a belief is a proposition on which a person is prepared to act. Inspiration for the pragmatists include Francis Bacon who coined the phrase "knowledge is power", David Hume for his naturalistic account of knowledge and action, Thomas Reid for his direct realism, Immanuel Kant for his idealism and from whom Peirce derives the name "pragmatism", Georg Hegel for his introduction of temporality into philosophy (Pinkard in Misak 2007), and J.S. Mill for his nominalism and empiricism.
Concept of truth

Going back to James, in pragmatism spoken truth is not ready-made, but jointly we and reality "make" truth. This idea has two senses, one which is often attributed to William James and F.C.S. Schiller, and another that is more widely accepted in pragmatism: (1) truth is mutable, and (2) truth is relative to a conceptual scheme.

(1) Mutability of truth

One major difference within pragmatism about the definition of 'truth' is the question of whether beliefs can pass from being true to being untrue and back. For James, beliefs are not true until they have been made true by verification. James believed propositions become true over the long term through proving their utility in a person's specific situation. The opposite of this process is not falsification, but rather a belief ceasing to be a "live option." F.C.S. Schiller, on the other hand, very clearly asserted that beliefs could pass into and problems. If I want to know how to return home safely, the true answer will be whatever is useful to solving that problem. Later on, when faced with a different problem, what I came to believe when faced with the earlier problem may now be false. As my problems change and as the most useful way to solve a problem shifts, so does the property of truth.

C.S. Peirce thought the idea that beliefs could be true at one time but false at another (or true for one person but false for another) was one of the "seeds of death"[1] by which James allowed his pragmatism to become "infected." Peirce avoided this position because he took the pragmatic theory to imply that theoretical claims should be tied to verification practices (i.e. they should be subject to test), not that they should be tied to our specific problems or life needs. Truth is defined, for Peirce, as what would be the ultimate outcome (not any outcome in real time) of inquiry by a (usually scientific) community of investigators. John Dewey, while agreeing broadly with this definition, also characterized truthfulness as a species of the good: to state that something is true means stating that it is trustworthy or reliable and will remain so in every conceivable situation. Both Peirce and Dewey clearly connect the definitions of truth and warranted assertability. Hilary Putnam also developed his internal realism around the idea that a belief is true if it is ideally epistemologically justified.

The claims above are problematic on a number of levels for the Christian, most notably the idea that truth is always evolving and changing. The philosophy rejects the Trinity motto: verum, bonum, pulchrum, because man cannot arrive at truth (as Plato says); for the pragmatist, truth is no longer ‘what is’ – that which is absolute, eternal, infinite, good, and beautiful. Ultimately, there is not much of a relationship with God if God is continuously ‘coming into being’; how can man even know himself if God is perpetually in-flux as well? Also, how can man then account for the tragedy and evil of the gas chambers and gulag if history is all part of God’s realization of himself, all things coming into being with the Creator? (cf. Hart, David Bentlely. No Shadow of Turning: on Divine Impassiblility. Pro Ecclesia.) Pragmatism can thus only be seen as intellectual and moral relativism cleverly wrapped up into a positivistic psychology dubbed ‘philosophy’.

Ecumenism? Pragmatism, because of its violent rejection of institutions, hierarchies, traditional creeds, and Hellenistic/scholastic theology/philosophy, as well as its unquestioning embrace of democracy and the mutability of truth, cannot be seen as a groundwork of Christian ecumenism. It formally rejects Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Anglicanism (Episcopal Church), Missouri Synod Lutheranism, Coptic Christianity, et al. that hold faith in their immutable truth claims.

Objections to the above claims: Let us assume that the founders of pragmatism are 'innocent' of any damage and/or negative intentionality; the founders’ ideas still were taken to their logical conclusions by their disciples and the cultural milieu - ideas are dangerous and have consequences (pragmatism was bankrupt, as I describe, from the foundation). Let us assume next that there is something to how humans look back on actions and events and then shape and develop new ideas (as pragmatism asserts with, for instance, the lobster and steak example); this alone cannot be seen as what pragmatism is. All the assumptions (which I addressed above) have to go with the claim. The aforementioned idea can be accounted for in any philosophical system; pragmatism cannot be boiled down to the ‘steak and lobster’ example; humans can and do think before action, even if at times they do not.

Counter Example: The stem cell controversy, I think, is a helpful example. The pragmatist would say: act, act, act. Yet the action to make something practical or useful happen does not in this case. As it turns out, embryonic stem cell research is has produced no major medical breakthroughs. On the other hand, orthodox Christianity, which contemplates first principles of human dignity before acting, has been correct, supporting only the use of adult stems cells. Adult stem cells have produced much medical fruit. This example can be seen to disprove 'pragmatism' in action: morally and practically speaking, it is illogical and bullheaded - it bears the mark of progressive 'scientism' unwilling to consult abstract philosophy and theology.

Conclusion: Based on the overwhelming evidence above, pragmatism, as an account of human thought and action, cannot be appropriated by an authentic Christian orthodoxy in any way.