Righteous rage

In September, there were two horrific jihadi attacks in Africa against "soft targets"--the 21 September attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya and the 29 September massacre of students in the male dormitory of the College of Agriculture in Gujba, Yobe State, Nigeria.  The first attack killed at least 61 civilians (plus 6 Kenyan soldiers and 5 jihadis), the second 44 (mostly Muslim) students.

Conflicted history

Africa has a long history of jihadism. The frontiers between Islam, Christianity and animism have been violently contested ever since the first waves of Islamic conquest swept across North Africa and into Spain from the mid C7th to early C8th. The notion that the jihadi impulse went dormant after the initial wave of Islamic imperialism until being "revived" by Western imperialism is quite false, and particularly so in Africa.

Not only was there violently contested religious frontiers, but the social pattern of isolated trade cities and thin agrarian strips surrounded by lineage-organised pastoralism which had produced the original Islamic explosion in the Arabian peninsula was reproduced in North Africa, especially in the Maghreb. Periodically, a religious leader would inspire unity across lineages, leading to another wave of conquering, religious-inspired pastoralists, such as the Almoravids in the C11th and the Almohads in the C12th.

Not that Africa is the only border area of Islam where there is a long history of contested religious frontiers. The tiny Christian minority in Pakistan continues to be the regular target of mass-murder attacks.

Revealing rage

The September attacks were massacres of civilians (in the second case, teenage boys), though the Westgate mall turned into a prolonged gun battle when Kenyan forces arrived. The attacks were mass murders, and intentionally so. In the case of the Westgate mall attack, there seems to have been some attempt to only target non-Muslims.

The attacks prompted me to re-read Bernard Lewis's 1990 essay The Roots of Muslim Rage. The analysis therein does help make sense of such attacks in ways that "blaming the West" narratives do not. The organisation behind the massacre of students--which has previously carried out similar attacks--is Boko Haram, whose name apparently translates as "Western education is sinful". Such attacks are about controlling behaviour and belief--above all, within Muslim societies themselves.

Who is attacked, how and where can be very revealing. Consider the attempt to kill 14 year old Malala Yousafzai, an advocate for schooling for girls. How can a 14 year old girl be such a threat that she had to be killed?

Very easily, if one understands that the focus is control and belief; particularly controlling women. Indeed, what could be a greater threat to that goal than a Muslim teenage girl who publicly embraces actively thinking and seeking knowledge for oneself?

Attacks on Western targets are subordinate to that ultimate goal and make sense in terms of that goal. First, because the West is seen as the most dramatic source and exemplar of belief and behaviour outside the designated righteous patterns. Second, t0 create an "us and them" dynamic, to encourage more Muslims to see the West as the wicked Other. Third, to display the power and commitment of the jihadis, through their ability to strike at the powerful West--especially the most powerful and culturally salient Western Power, the US.

None of which reasons operated in the slaughters of Boko Haram, in the Westgate mall massacre, in the slaughters of Pakistani Christians, in the attempt to kill Malala. It is not a matter of how Western policy or actions drive such attacks, it is a matter of how the underlying motivation--given the goal of controlling belief and behaviour--drives who is attacked, how and where.

Which means that US policy can have only a very limited impact on the motivation behind the attacks on US targets because they are not driven by responding to US policy. American films and TV shows, and the culturally subversive patterns therein, are ultimately a greater offense than, for example, supporting Israel. The level of anti-Americanism in Muslim countries has much more to do with the local dynamics of political mobilisation (pdf) than the specifics of US policy or even the local level of religious piety. Turkey is one of the most secular of Muslim countries, yet anti-American sentiment is high. Senegal is one of the most traditionally pious of Muslim countries, yet anti-American sentiment is low.

Ironically, phrases such as "they hate our freedoms" and "the war on terror" are closer to the mark in describing that nature of the jihadi struggle than more "knowing" sophistications. It is not, however, their being "our" (i.e. of the West) freedoms which is the problem; the problem is the spread of such freedoms--that they become not merely of the West. That is what is truly threatening.

Hence a murderous attack on a 14 year old girl.

Culture jihad

Complaints about waging the war on terror being a "war on a noun" (which, strangely, do not come up when people talk about fighting racism, for example) do have a germ of a point, however. The problem is the homicidal rage of the righteous. Terror may be their strategy, but it is a cultural struggle, a kulturkampf, that they are engaged in.

Yet the mere fact of cultural struggle is not, in itself, a problem. The problem is precisely in what means they employ to prosecute that strategy. So, in that sense, it is a war on terror that the West is engaged in.

If, however, the aim is to get the jihadis to foreswear the strategy of terror, then there is a deeper problem. For there is no more complete way to express rage than slaughter and no more complete statement of commitment than embracing death for the cause. Terror then becomes not a merely strategy but a fulfilment. Both an instrument to an end and an end in itself. Suicide bombing may be a tactic, but it is one overwhelmingly associated with religious motivations; especially when it is realised that the leadership of the "secular" Tamil Tigers also invoked religious claims.

Fuelled by righteous rage, terror becomes a fulfilment which does not simply profoundly discount the costs to others. Horror at the attacks, pity for the victims, these are manifestations of empathy. Yet, in the dynamics of righteousness, refusal to empathise with the unrighteous is not psychopathology, it is commitment to righteousness; it is the highest morality. All who refuse to follow the path of righteousness are guilty.  The pain and horror inflicted are not "collateral damage", they are successful punishment of, and warning to, the unrighteous. The costs to (unrighteous) others is part of the benefit to the righteous.

For the unrighteous do not become non-persons, they become anti-persons. Their pain is gain to righteousness and the servants thereof. There is no warrior code to restrain the killers, because all the unrighteous are legitimate targets in the highest struggle of all. Warrior codes exist to distinguish between warriors and murderers and this war of righteousness makes no such distinctions in who may be killed, just by whom and why.

Particularist moral systems--such as those of tribal and nomadic communities--differentiate between members of their moral community and outsiders. The latter are effectively moral neuters, who are treated with amoral pragmatism. The are, in a sense, morally non-persons. Though they may gain moral status--as in the rules concerning hospitality.

Universal moral systems have no category for moral outsiders in the above sense. The moral rules apply to everyone--that is what makes such a system a universal one. To be outside its precepts is to be morally pathological, unrighteous, and not as some unfortunate accident but as deliberate choice. Systems of sin or grace both expand the ways to be fallen and the consequences of being so. To wilfully embrace unrighteousness is to become an enemy of righteousness. You are not merely outside the moral system, you are opposed to it. Hence you are not merely a non-person--a moral neuter--since a universal moral system admits no such category, but an anti-person, an enemy of righteousness. Someone whose success is an offence to righteousness, and whose loss is therefore a gain to it; a literal reversal of moral standing from someone of positive moral standing to someone of negative moral significance.

Systems of eternal salvation raise the stakes, and hence the anxiety, attached to adhering to righteousness. Vilifying the unrighteous becomes an excellent way of displacing one's own anxiety while signaling to oneself, and others, one's commitment to righteousness. (The Islamic doctrine of "the torments of the grave" adds to such anxiety.)

In such universal moral systems there is status and authority to be had from acting as gatekeepers of righteousness. Righteousness becomes a club good, and there is power and authority in saying who is in and who is out; what is righteous and what is not. Pakistani clerics issuing fatwas against Christmas celebrations are precisely playing that game. But so, of course, is a Cardinal-Archbishop denying communion to those displaying the rainbow sash.

Not that is purely a religious game. Political correctness is simply a secular form of righteousness, where part of signalling how righteous you are is ad hominem denunciation of those who fail to follow its precepts of righteousness. The point being precisely that those who so fail are not merely mistaken, but of bad character, as the point of the club is to mark out the better people, the "good" people, and the more intense the vilification, the greater one's commitment to righteousness and the more one is one of the "good" people. There is a certain wry amusement to be had in watching human rights commissions and Catholic and other clerics struggle over who gets to be socially dominant gatekeepers of righteousness, who gets to be the more effective moral bullies. It is, however, a struggle that rarely leads to murders; still less to patterns of mass murder.

There is a range in degree of adherence to generalised normal norms (applying to everyone) or to limited (ambit) moral norms (typically tribal or clan based), to adopt a distinction from social science literature (pdf). Thus, Europe has developed more reliance on generalised norms ("the city"), China more reliance on (pdf) (via) limited norms ("the clan"). Islam offers universalised norms in a region when limited ambit clan/lineage norms are very powerful. It is perhaps not surprising that "tipping over" into commitment to norms with wider application is both more intense and more easily structured into a new, and particularly intense, form of insider-outsider norms. Especially when, due to its all-encompassing nature, Islam is structurally hostile to alternative generalised norms (such as nation, citizenship or democracy-based norms).

Indeed, in the Asharite theology that al Ghazali helped make dominant in mainstream Sunni Islam, there is literally no knowledge, morality or binding injunction outside God's will and revelation. Revelation does not reveal what is good or evil, it constitutes what is good or evil. Allah is a Nietszchean (beyond good and evil) legal positivist whose revealed law is the only morality. Islam is, in effect, a system of limited-ambit norms with universal claims and exclusions. With very different notions of locus of control than presumed in Western thought, so very different presumptions about individual responsibility and standing--or, indeed, causation in general. There is no other evil than disobeying God because God's revelation literally defines good and evil. There is no individual conscience, there is only submission to God.

Signals and framing

Demands from within the West for other Muslims to publicly reject the actions of the jihadis is usually simply signalling reassurance--are you Muslims we can live with or are you all our enemies? But there is also a framing reassurance--do you buy into the framing of righteous versus unrighteous used by the jihadis?

To which the accurate answer is usually--well, yes, to some extent. The jihadis are not engaging in a delusional fantasy about Islam. They are being highly selective in which manifestations of Islam they embrace and the religious authority for some of their actions is very thin, to say the least. But their framings are not just made up. Jihad as religious war against non-believers is deeply rooted in Islamic jurisprudence, the working out of God's rules (which is all that there is left after the Asharite reduction of everything to God's will and power).

Moreover, the technology may be modern but the outlook is familiar from history. The Zealots of Jewish history had essentially the same motivations, framings and modes of action as contemporary jihadis. They, after all, were also engaged in a kulturkampf against contamination of Jewish culture by Graeco-Roman culture.

Titus destroying the Second Temple.

Waves of brutal Roman repression, and dispersal to permanent minority status, shifted Jewish history into the same sort of path that the Ismailis (whose religious lineage includes the original Assassins) have embraced for the same reasons. But cultural threat colliding with an aggrieved sense of righteousness generated very similar responses among Jews under Roman rule as among contemporary Muslims under Western cultural hegemony.

The Zealot impulse burned itself out once the costs were demonstrably so high that Jewish culture evolved mechanisms to ensure that path was closed. Given how comparatively limited the costs to the global Muslim community have been from jihadi actions and the responses to same, I suspect that Islam's fraught interaction with modernity will continue to motivate jihadi responses for decades to come. That righteous rage will continue to generate mass murders. And that the spectre of hi-tech jihad will continue to hang over us.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Why is the Middle East so rife with conspiracy theories?

This dispatch provides examples of what observer after observer remarks about the Middle East: it is rife with conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories seem to pervade people's cognitive maps to an extent which is truly astonishing.

Two fairly obvious features of Middle Eastern societies are highly controlled media and domination by authoritarian regimes, many of which came to power via conspiracies. If one has no trust in public media, and constant experience of deliberate control of the same, then conspiracy theories obviously have an appeal greater than they otherwise might, particularly due to the lack of respected public fora for their debunking. That various regimes came to power through conspiracies just reinforces the notion of hidden, or not so hidden, controllers behind the scenes.

Of course, the far more open societies of the West are not exactly immune to conspiracy theories either. The extreme right and the not-so-extreme left are both rather prone to conspiracy-mongering. 9/11 "truthers" are just propounding the latest in a long line of conspiracy theories. Both groups experience significant levels of alienation from their surrounding society and operate through activist networks. Conspiracy theories provide an "explanation" for why things do not happen as they want/expect as well as reflecting aspects of their own political existence.

While the far more open Western societies also provide plenty of avenues to debunk such conspiracy-mongering, conspiracy mongering still appeals to the cognitive bias to (over) ascribe intention to actions and particularly consequences. Still, the level of conspiracy-mongering in the West is clearly much lower than it is in the Middle East.

Nor does the greater level of alienation by ordinary folk from their public institutions, and the lack of respected public fora to debunk conspiracy theories, seem to be quite enough to explain the extent of the conspiracy-mongering in the Middle East.

The alternative to conspiracy mongering is greater confidence in more impersonal processes of causality. The epitome of which is science. It is another feature of the Middle East (and the Muslim world in general), that the level of scientific activity and understanding is much lower than in the West. Muslim scientists, or scientists with a Middle Eastern background, write long, thoughtful essays about, or otherwise discuss, the problems of science in the Middle East and the Islamic world. So, the lack of confidence in, or awareness of, other, far more impersonal, causal explanations may also be part of the problem.

It is, after all, notable that the extreme right in the West tends to put much emphasis on the heroic will -- which encourages conspiracy mongering -- while much leftwing thought in the West is still beholden in one form or the other to Marxism which -- with its notions of hidden forces, differential consciousness and individuals as manifestations of classes -- also encourages a personalised conception of causality that leads easily to conspiracy mongering.

The cognitive map which most pervades the Middle East, and the Islamic world in general, is, of course, a religious one. Moreover, a religious one which, since al-Ghazali, has emphasized a conception of causality as just the manifestation of God's will with no inherent ordering beyond that which God happens to follow. All of Creation is taken to be a manifestation of the intentional will of God in a specific, day-to-day, every-moment sense. Such a profoundly personalised conception of all of causality undermines more impersonal notions of causality and so encourages other personalised conceptions of causality -- such as conspiracy theories. Hence, a whole series of factors encourages conspiracy theories, leading to the intense level of conspiracy-mongering that is such a feature of the Middle East.

Which is not a good thing for the prospects of more formal systems of social action, such as the rule of law and democracy. The penchant for conspiracy mongering is not only a penchant for illusion and delusion, it is also a barrier to other ways of thinking about, and so acting in, the world.

[Cross-posted at Critical Thinking Applied]

How Chiefs Came to Power (2)

This is the second part of my review of Timothy Earle’s How Chiefs Come to Power: the Political Economy in Prehistory. The first part is here.

Warrior worries
Having started, in Chapter Three, with Sources of Economic Power, Earle then moves to, in Chapter Four, to Military Power: The Strategic Use of Naked Force. Since coercion would seem to be the basic element in rulership, one would think that is where one would start but Earle is determined to have economic power to be causally primary. (Note, this is not to be confused with the reality that a controllable surplus in excess of subsistence is needed for rulership to be possible: my point is that force is likely to be basic to control of such a surplus – a property right you cannot enforce is not much of a right, let alone a basis for rule.)

Earle starts the chapter with:

The military is a segment, group, or institution of warriors or other fighting specialists. They conquer, defend, police and intimidate (p.105).

The term ‘military’ has organisational implications I am uncomfortable applying to such early forms of rulership. Earle sees military power as basic to creating regional chiefdoms by conquest of other rulers and notes the ‘protection racket’ analysis of the creation of stratified and centrally organised society.

An approach Earle regards as insufficient:

Inherently warfare is limited in its effectiveness as a power for central control. Although military force may created a broadly integrated polity, it can as well dissolve it by intrigue, coup and rebellion. The power of force rips at the social fabric, the institution of society. To be effective as a power of centrality, coercive force must itself be controlled, a difficult task that is achieved by binding the military with economic and ideological tethers (p.106).

Well, warriors have to be paid, there has to be some basis for loyalty and giving warriors a vested interested in social stability greatly encourages said stability. But, again, Earle seems to have underlying his analysis a view of “natural” social processes that is not well grounded in actual social processes: particularly not the dynamics of specialist warriors.

Earle then takes us through the scholarly debate over the role of coercion in the development of societies and rulership. Earle identifies the key question as:

whether the warfare of chiefdoms represented the political failure of chiefs to organize stable regional systems or a successful chiefly tool to construct such systems (p.109).

Or both? Depending on local dynamics.

The point Earle wishes to make is that:

Only with the evolution of complex chiefdoms does the nature of warfare change fundamentally. It then ceases to be an outcome of unregulated competition and become a means of conquest. … Conquest warfare seizes control over the subsistence base in an emergent system of stable finance (p.109).

Which seems to be a way of saying that chiefs need access to sufficient surplus, sufficient military force and sufficient control capacity to achieve substantial regional power. That stable power must be broadly based. For:

the problems faced by elites who depend on tribute; when payments are withheld, costly and unpredictable punitive missions must be carried out. But the warriors are always a threat, whose demands quickly turn to treachery (p.110) .

Earle just does not like military force, or the folk who use it.

Yet plenty of societies manage to evolve quite stable systems of warrior loyalty. To the extent that, in early Central Eurasian societies, a ruler’s warrior band was expected kill themselves on his death and be buried with him. Even when that level of loyalty was not required, the notion that you did not survive a battle where your lord was killed remained a powerful idea for centuries. Warrior honour was not some invented figment, it has been a real and powerful force down the ages. Why is a fascinating question.

All societies need ways to distinguish warriors from murderers. But a warrior who cannot be relied upon is neither of use to his (or sometimes her) comrades nor attractive to a possible lord. Warriors have powerful reasons to communicate that they are honourable and to shun or reject those who are not. The commitment not to survive one’s sworn lord communicated that reliability in a very compelling way. Again, the notion of beneficial exchange, let alone social signalling, seems to pass Earle by.

In his analysis of the Andean highlands, Earle concludes that warfare was endemic, and there was a persistent failure to consolidate regional chiefdoms, because chiefly power rested solely on military power: chiefs were not able to extend their bases of power into broader and more enduring structures (Pp 113ff). By contrast, the Inkas were able to organise their state for war and conquer the squabbling chiefdoms with greater military force (p.122).
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After characterising the world of the Icelandic sagas as one of chiefs and their families living in constant fear, Earle traces the development of association of male status with weapons in Danish burials. The low population, the lack of evidence for fortified settlements and the pattern of weapons and barrows suggests a warrior elite focused on control of cattle to sustain prestige goods trade based on control of the craftspeople who produced the bronze weapons that dominated warfare (Pp124ff). Earle concludes that:

Warfare alone is an unstable source of power except where the very technology of warfare can be controlled and its spoils can be invested effectively in expanding the political economy (p.131).

Or simply dominated. The knightly class of medieval Europe did not depend on the control of the crafters that produced their armour and weapons for their position. Rather, their position was based on a high level of training being required to use the technology to maximum effect and that the combination of weapons, armour, trained warhorse was expensive. That being so, purchasing their weapons and armour from free crafters worked fine.

Earle then returns to the Pacific to illustrate the example of Hawai’i as warfare being part of an integrated structure of control. The evolution of warfare amongst the Maori as population strained resources (particularly after the Moa were hunted to extinction, though that specific trigger is not mentioned) resulted in endemic warfare with highly fortified settlements (pa) which provided excellent defence given the available technology and greatly impeded building large chiefdoms (Pp132-3). Until, that is, until potatoes and European military technology were imported, followed by an attempt to create a unifying figure to protect Maori interests.

By contrast, despite the histories being full of chiefly warfare where defeated enemies were reduced to food and utensils, in Hawai’i there was little evidence of fortified settlement or warfare affecting the pattern of settlement at all. The military technology was fairly egalitarian, with the canoes used to ferry troops being the only element with any inherent tendency to elite control. Like the Maori, the Hawai’ian chiefs attempted to adopt European technology as soon as it was available. Dying in bed seems to have been a rare event for a Hawai’ian chief. Those who reached any age were often greatly scarred while maintaining the support of one’s warriors seem to have been a matter of constant wariness (Pp133ff).

Yet even exemplifying Earle’s analysis of the inherently unstable nature of military power, the Hawai’ian chiefdoms still managed to construct complex structures of rule that hovered on the edge of being states by the time the Europeans arrived.

The structure and objects of warfare differed in the three cases – land and defence of settlements in the Andes, control of cattle in Denmark, control of commoners and the system of staple finance in Hawai’i. Earle quotes Machiavelli who contrasts strong rulers who can put large, well-equipped forces in the field with weak rulers who rely on friends and high walls. Earle interprets this to mean that walls are a sign of weakness: surely, Machiavelli’s point is that relying on walls is a sign of weakness (Pp141-2). Even the strongest of agrarian empires built fortifications, since they can be so useful for dominating a region.

Idea power
Which brings the analysis to Chapter Five, Ideology as a Source of Power. Earle defines ‘ideology’ as:

the proportion of cultural meaning that is used strategically to institute political domination or resistance (p.143).

Ideologies are thus associated with particular social segments. Earle has already framed consideration of ideas and culture such that it has elements systematically politicised and patterned to particular social groups. Why would ideology exist like that and did it actually conform to social segments in that neat way?

Earle argues that to be used strategically, ideology:

must be made concrete in forms such as ceremonies, symbols and monuments (p.143)

Certainly such activities can express power and send messages. An ideology:

as a view of the world, set forth an understanding of what is right, what is natural. It contains theories of the world and the place of human society and its segments within it …
An ideology also sets up institutional patterns of knowledge and meaning on which patterns of control are logically constructed and legitimized (p.144).

Which seems to be a way of not quite saying that rulership requires legitimacy based on some implicit (or even explicit) social contract to have any stability and the more complete and broadly based that legitimacy is, the more stable it is likely to be. Except that ‘legitimacy’ has implications that do not seem to fit into Earle’s analysis.

We then get a survey of the literature on ideology leading to an extended analysis of ideology and on to consideration of the ‘materialization of ideology’. The key question being:

how an individual’s motivations and worldview can be controlled and directed to work to the interests of one segment and potentially against the individual’s own interests (p.152).

There is a ‘delusion/false consciousness’ dynamic underlying this analysis which I am very uncomfortable with. But that rather goes with the discounting of human rationality and beneficial exchange that pervades the analysis.

One of the blessings of Earle’s analysis is that, with occasional lapses such as ‘materialisation’, he generally expresses himself in clear language and makes points of great simple sense:

Monuments convey a simple message of power and wealth. This elemental message comes regardless of the viewer’s language, age, gender or cultural affiliation. (p.156).

Quite so. Earle goes on to intelligently consider the utility and role of monuments for expressing and buttressing power (Pp156ff).

He begins his discussion of ideology in Denmark by reference to sagas such as Beowulf that, though they date from much later, do express the outlooks of a warrior elite. He notes that:

Dishonor is worse than death because it means loss of respect and the support on which all warriors depend (p.159) .

Correct, but a view rather lacking in his earlier analysis of military power.

For Earle, ideology becomes a way of building and reinforcing chiefly power through routines of compliance – rituals, common building processes and so forth. Thus the Inka had much more extensively articulated routines of compliance, monuments and material provision than the Andean chiefdoms (Pp188-9). In the three case study studies, the Andean chiefdoms were not able to expand their warrior leadership into the routines and practises of the society while the Danish chiefs were somewhat more able to gain some supporting symbols with the advent of bronze weapons. It was only in Hawai’i where chiefs were able to dominate and control key productive capacities (the irrigation channels and associated land) and to weave routines of compliance with supporting claims of divine connections into a system of power which verged on becoming states (Pp190ff).

Framework uber alles
Hence Earle’s conclusion:

To build political institutions, chiefs shape their positions from three primary power media – economy, military and technology.

So:

The consolidation and institutionalization of power depends on the systematisation of power strategies. Power strategies are the means by which ruling segments combine the sources of social power to pursue their political goals (p.193, emphasis in original).

Thus:

In the cases considered, the primary determinant appears to have been the nature of the developing political economy. The operationalization of one power strategy versus another rested on the ability to intensify and control aspects of the political economy and to use the mobilized surplus to develop power sources. (p.194, emphasis in original).

The nature of the power strategies adopted then deeply influence future social evolution. The Andean chiefdoms were never able to extend beyond specific walled-villages, the Danish chiefdoms beyond specific herds, so chiefdoms remain limited in both resources and territorial coverage (Pp194ff).

The Hawai’ian chiefdoms did much better, turning control over highly productive irrigation facilities into extensive social dominance. A small change in technology (the Western introduction of cannons and guns) was sufficient to turn rule of individual islands into a multi-island state (Pp 200ff).

Well yes. States originally evolved in river valleys, for they had the population density and surplus to support social complex societies with extensive social control structures. Pastoralist states evolved later and did so where there was enough trade with farming communities to provide sufficient surplus to support a dominant ruling clan and enough effective military mobility (chariots, then cavalry) to consolidate control over a sizeable area. This seems to be a long journey to get to a very unsurprising conclusion.

But Earle does not consider such wider patterns. His case studies are not enough of a basis to examine the origins of state-formation.

What he wants to draw from his case studies is a general analytical framework. So he identifies ease of control and the ways it might be extended to be crucial variable characteristics of power so:

The first critical variable appears to be how power may be restricted to (and controlled by) a few hands (p.203, emphasis in original).

Such leads directly to:

Economic power is the most easily controlled. The essence of the economy is its material nature (p.203).

Really? When we look around human societies, which is more centrally controlled: the means of violence or the means of production and exchange? Clearly the means of violence is almost always more centralised than economic activity (and then leads into control of the same). Earle is correct when he notes that economic activity can grow but such growth is often contra-indicated by highly centralised control.

Farmers are more easily controlled than foragers or herders, but that is a feature of being a stationary form of production. Indeed, binding peasants to the land is a classic way of extracting a surplus. The extractable surplus gives on reason to bind them to land, but it does not give the power to do so. (All these points apply even more so to mines, which often used slave labour.)

Control begins with control of violence. The question becomes how much one can embed that control within the society to provide stable control of a sufficiently substantive extracted surplus. But that does not provide the right answer, because it does not start with a Marxian ‘material basis’. A friend recently cruelly observed to me that Marxist academics’ notion of research is to look for footnotes, as they start with the answers. Earle’ concluding few pages are where that element in How Chiefs Come to Power is most obvious. (Particularly when he goes on about the features of the material nature of the economy Pp203-4.)

Earle agrees that military power is the essence of coercion, but sees it as hard to control. Hence the importance of:

Ideological power is the essence of social law. People act in certain ways because it is proper and necessary (p.205).

Which leads to:

The second critical variable of power appears to be how the media power may be used to co-opt and control one another (p.203, emphasis in original).

Each media of power has limits to intensification, so it is their interaction and mutual support which gives the most powerful effect.

So, in the three examples, the Andeans were hill-fort chiefdoms, the Danish were prestige-goods chiefdoms but the Hawai’ian were staple-finance chiefdoms, so had the most complete level of control and came closest to developing full states (Pp209-10). Earle’s conclusion being:

the sources of power are effectively co-opted by using the surplus generated from intensified agriculture to finance control over warriors and police, craft specialists and managers, priests and ceremonies. But if the political economy cannot be centrally controlled, the various sources of power also are difficult to control, and multicentric societies develop (p.211).

Sort of: the way I would put it is that turning power into authority is a matter of resources, coercion and legitimacy. The more broadly authority is based on these things, and the more it is embedded in patterns of life, the greater and more stable such authority is. Stationary intensive agriculture is easier to control, and provides more resources, so is a far easier path to state-building.

Part of my problem with Earle’s approach is that I do not see ideology as a separate “thing” to be managed. It pervades a society and is built on such things as the need for meaning, the need for rules, the operation of property and exchange that pervade social existence long before chiefly authority. Yes of course these are things that power-seekers have to pay attention to and seek to mould and use for their benefit. But the process is interactive, with resource possibilities, and what patterns and institutions exist or can be developed, playing off each other. Earle misses out those deeper connections, so starts his analysis at too reified a level.

This is also true in his consideration of violence. Why bother fighting? This is a basic question. Hunting wrests subsistence violently from nature: it is deeply part of the origins of our species. Hunter-gatherers are, by far, the most violent mode of human existence. For millennia, warrior elites emphasized their hunting prowess as way to display their effectiveness, virtues and utility as violence users.

Farming and herding are distinctly less violent modes of human life for the simple reason that they represent repeated interactions between individuals, families and groups with vulnerable assets. Farming is less violent than herding, since one is more tied down and so more vulnerable. If you are going to examine the origins of basic human social forms, they need to be connected to the basic patterns and frameworks of life, something Earle is very erratic at doing.

Not that there is any mystery as to why: it comes from the Marxian framework he wishes to use and vindicate. The problem is not from having an analytical framework. Far from it, economic historians and lawyers are often advantaged in their use of evidence precisely they have an analytical framework: it forces a useful analytical discipline – provided one remains grounded in the actual evidence (which economists do not always manage to do but the better economic historians are generally very good at). But they are analytical frameworks built up by prolonged engagement with reality: they represent distilled engagement with evidence, not deduction from first principles.

Marxism suffers from not being a framework built up in such a way. Its basic contours are pre-determined and Earle’s analysis is just another example of the common flaw of Marxist analysis of reality being forced into maximum conformity with the framework. The Marxist framework often does prompt people to ask good questions. Alas, it does not encourage answers anywhere near as good. As Earle's How Chiefs Come to Power demonstrates.

How Chiefs Come to Power (1)

Timothy Earle’s How Chiefs Come to Power: the Political Economy in Prehistory is a study sufficiently well-grounded in archaeological and anthropological evidence that the well-presented facts rather escape from the theoretical framework Earle wants to fit them in.

I originally was alerted to Earle’s work via a harsh review archaeologist Michael E. Smith had posted on Yoram Barzel’s book on the theory of the state. I greatly admire Barzel’s book on property rights but had not read this later work, so I was intrigued by the response. Having read a selection of Prof. Smith’s publications and finding them informative, very accessibly written and analytically sensible, his strong endorsement of Earle’s book was encouraging. Particularly given he also admired a book I had read and thought excellent.

How Chiefs Come to Power Earle is attempting to answer a straightforward question:

What allows aspiring leaders to be successful in one situation but fail utterly in another? (p.2).

In other words, since aspiration to leadership and power are part of the human condition, why does rulership (in its first stage of chiefdom) occur in some places and not others?

Earle distinguishes between authority, “the right and responsibility to lead”, power, “measured by the mastery a leader exercises over others” and control, “the ability to restrict access to the resources which are the media from which power can be fashioned” (Pp3-4). As Earle accepts a Lockian-Marxian notion of property and value coming from labour, his thinking about control gets a bit confused: all property is based on control—an act of trade is an exchange of control. Things are clearer if it is grasped how basic to human society the notion of property—of legitimate control—is, something that grows up and extends (pdf) well before the development of authorising authorities. But that requires some notion of spontaneous order based on a strong notion of beneficial exchange. For it is not labour that distinguishes the productive power of homo sapiens from other primates—all animals engage in mere labour—it is the notion of property and thus the power of exchange: ideas having sex in Matt Ridley’s vivid metaphor. How our species' distinctive creation of niches through discovery and transmitted learning generates its productive power.

Earle identifies the sources of power as social relationships (particularly kinships), economic power (being able to buy compliance), military might (coercing compliance) and ideology (routines of compliance). He holds that kinship, military might and ideology are, on their own, all weak sources of power while economic power depends on military power to defend resources and ideology to institute rights of unequal access (Pp4ff). The discussion is punctuated with references to various Marxist positions on the broad issues. (An Israeli archaeologist once explained to me that archaeologists tend to adopt broadly Marxian positions as so much of what they study is the product of the generation of economic surpluses beyond subsistence.)

The problem with political power is that it:

… must be inherently problematic, as it is contingent on multiple factors that can be used against central authority as well as being used by it (p.10).

Yet the long-term trend of world history has been for central power to expand and the number of independent polities to shrink: from maybe 100,000 at the time of the Neolithic agricultural revolution to about 160 now, the largest covering over a billion people (p.10). Clearly, the integration of the sources of power has become more effective over time: a selection process in favour of more successful techniques.

Earle holds that:

… the different sources of power are fundamentally intertwined and interdependent, but that they grow from a material base (p13).

Very Marxian, but surely somewhat dubious: after all, how does one get that material base in the first place? That they have to be sustained by a material base is clear, but that is not quite the same.
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Earle takes the view that the process of creating and stabilising power is multi-linear: different techniques win the process of selection in different circumstances. The key variable to success or failure is the chief’s ability to control and extend access to the sources of power (Pp12ff).

A chiefdom being:

a regional polity with institutional governance and some social stratification organising a population of a few thousand to tens of thousand people (p.14).

Making them intermediates between village-based polities and large, bureaucratic states. Hierarchies are used for coordination, granting advantages resulting in social stratification: the use of monumental constructions and prestige goods being used by archaeologists to document their evolution. All of which makes them emergent polities. Earle holds they have fundamentally the same dynamics as states, so are a good basis for studying rulership more generally, including the basis of modern states (Pp14-5).

The book is based around three examples, each covering about a millennia: Neolithic and early Bronze Age Denmark (2300-1300BC); Hawai’i from settlement to incorporation in the modern world (800-1824); and high Andes Peru to the Inca conquest (500-1534). By interweaving the analysis of the three examples, and how specific (particularly economic) circumstances affect choices and outcomes, Earle seeks to reveal the dynamics of rulership (Pp15-6).

Having established the framing, Earle sets out the long-term dynamics of the chiefdoms of the three regions one after another (Pp17ff). The Andean case has some puzzling population surges: the first likely due to the introduction of new crops. The second occurred without any noticeable technological change and during a period of glacial advance: the production of extra warriors for defence during a period of increased warfare is Earle’s suggested explanation (Pp54-5).

Though the chosen examples display different pathways to complexity, Earle believes that the comparison is still analytically fruitful: such as the complex interaction with population pressures. Earle writes of the animal herding in the Denmark case study:

Animal herding lowers the carrying capacity of a region and makes no sense in the logic of a subsistence economy. Its increase most probably resulted from the use of animals as a source of moveable wealth within a prestige good exchange system (p.65).

Really? Power can consolidate itself by reducing the productiveness of its area? Whether looked at in terms of internal dynamics or competitive interaction with other cultures, this looks deeply implausible. Earle's claim about carrying capacity is true in some areas but highly misleading and does not sustain his conclusion. In some areas, such as river valleys and plains with particularly rich soils, farming is the more productive activity in the sense that it can support more people. In other areas, not so much. What herding typically does is produce more value for less effort. So animal herding can increase the resources available to a culture: otherwise it would not have evolved in so many different cultures and would not be persisted with. That herding societies – which certainly had chiefdoms, even states – were freer and richer than agrarian societies was a perennial observation of visitors from agrarian empires. It does require trade with farming cultures, and clearly access to prestige goods from trade can consolidate a ruler’s position, but it does so precisely by increasing the access to goods from choosing more productive activity. Earle could do with more confidence in human rationality and the implications of beneficial exchange.

What animal herding also provides is inheritable and expandable assets. There is the resource base for social differentiation – something herding societies tend to display. Earle then points to evidence that expanded agricultural activity (such as through irrigation works) in Hawai’i and Peru supported expanded surpluses rather than expanded populations, surpluses used for elite purposes (Pp64-6). So why wouldn’t animal herding also represent expanded capacity?

In examining the sources of economic power, Earle begins:

The development of political systems must be based on an ability to lead and to have others follow. Leaders who provide rewards are accepted, but those who fail to do so lose authority. Leadership is always problematic; it requires an individual, family, community, or nation to relinquish and transfer autonomy and transfer loyalties. No individual or group does this joyfully, for it means sacrificing personal or group interests to a different, larger, or distant body (p.67).

This seems to rather preclude that people may see political leadership as some sort of exchange beyond direct rewards. Unless there is some sense of “return” for accepting leadership, why would not revolt be a permanent (or at least a permanently incipient) thing? Do leaders not provide public goods, for example?

Earle says of economic control that:

Control over the economy is a direct and material control over the lives of people (p.67).

He then asks if such control is possible in a subsistence economy, exploring two lines of analysis: voluntarist, adaptionist theories seeing chiefdom as a form of solution to social problems or way of expanding social possibilities and coercive political theories arguing that autonomy is not give up except in the face of power. (Why the answer cannot be both escapes me: coercion as a way of delivering public goods.)

Earle argues that the model developed by Marx and Engels “may have general applicability to the emergency of social complexity” (p.70). Since it is based on a false theory of value, an incoherent theory of exploitation and has a truly terrible track record when operationalised as a political theory or economic management approach, I am more sceptical. Particularly as one starts off with two deep problems for analysis: first, not grasping that all exchange is about swapping control (i.e. property is prior) and, second, that exchange results in mutual improvement (i.e. gains from trade).

Earle differentiates staple finance (payments to rulership, either in kind, goods or labour service) and wealth finance (objects such as primitive valuables, prestige goods or money exchanged within the ruling elite). For the former, he sees land tenure as vital:

The critical factor appears to be how the development of technologically intensive farming provides the opportunity for control by ruling institutions through a land tenure system (p.71).

First, what about herding? Second, land is stationary, therefore farmers are more easily controlled whether they are direct owners of the land or not. (We come back to pastoralist societies being freer and wealthier than agrarian ones.)

That Earle may be going for rather too much analytical complexity here is indicated by his partly perceptive, partly way over-egged analysis that:

Technological improvements of the resource do two things. First, they radically differentiate land in terms of quality. … Second, improvements evidently delimit and mark the resource in ways that can be easily represented and recognized within the cultural landscape. Improvements such as walls, terraces, and ditches materialise the division of the landscape and form the basis of a cultural system of land ownership (Pp 71-2).

I get that academics often like talking about ideas (their expertise) and not the niceties of production and exchange (their distance from which often feeds into their sense of status), but really. Farming makes people much easier to control, the creation of a surplus-to-subsistence allows the support of an elite, expandable and inheritable productive assets promote social differentiation. Clearer and simpler, surely? What’s more, it is also usefully extendable, yet differentiable, to the herding case.

Trying to build irrigation into some generally important factor in the development of rulership – a continuing theme in Earle’s discussion: his original PhD thesis, a critique of the irrigation management thesis of Wittfogel and Service, analysis Hawai’i chiefdoms as using ownership of irrigation as a form of economic control and extraction – strikes me as dubious. Irrigation is surely much more likely to have its largest (and most common) effects in establishing patterns and structures of interactions between farmers. (One of Elinor Ostrom’s anecdotes in this presentation goes to that.) But, as previously noted, notions of spontaneous order do not appear to figure much in Earle’s mental landscape: he seems to lack the necessary building blocks of mutually beneficial cooperation as a pervasive feature of human economic interactions.

The sense of rather too much missing the basic point continues:

In chiefdoms, wealth is the means of symbolising relationships upon which social ranking rests. Since the social structure is the most important determinant of cultural, political and economic values, substantivist economists define the economy as “institute process” (Pp73-4).

Wealth is not a social ranker in itself? Nor a benefit in itself? Does not any signalling effect flow from that? And, if the social structure drives cultural, political and economic values, what creates and drives the social structure? Human action does not seem to be causally gradable in such a way.

So Earle’s contention that:

control over the ideology of social ranking rested on control over the system of wealth finance (p.74)

rests on the same dubious causal ranking. Building on his original dissertation, Earle argues that the use of control over irrigation by Hawai’ian chiefs fails to conform the “managerial” “solution to problems” hydraulic analysis of Wittfogel. The control by the chiefs was the dominant factor, with land use rights of commoners flowing from provision of corvee labour: so a widow could only retain land use if she remarried, transferring the rights to the new husband (Pp75ff).

The structure is not so different from medieval serfdom, where a warrior elite protected serfs in return for labour and inheritance generated an interest in long-term investment in making the lands more productive. Clearly, the elite control has to be accepted, but military power, protection and access to land provide a potent combination to ensure acceptance. I see no need to reify ideology in quite the way Earle does, but then I have no problem with property and exchange being endemic to human society.

If, however, you do not see property as endemic to human societies (particularly in farming societies), nor the control relationship as in any way protective, then the basic dynamics of power and property does become more a mystery to be explained. Hence Earle discusses the differences in dynamics between irrigation and dryland agriculture in Pacific islands, and particularly Hawai’i, making rather more of a meal of what seem to be the practical dynamics of control and extracting a surplus than seems necessary (Pp84ff). Particularly as intensive irrigation seems to have grown up in a period of intensive competition between chiefdoms – which is to say, one where the value of providing protection and extracting maximum value from the lands one does control was maximised, while the production possibilities of irrigation may have also encouraged conflict – more surpluses to seize.

That Earle rather doesn’t “get” the protective role is indicated by this following passage in his discussion of the emergence of chiefdoms in Denmark:

during this period permanent settlements were placed prominently on the highest ground. Why would these settlements have been built on these exposed hills, where the winds bite mercilessly? Perhaps their high visibility declared the territorial rights of the community over the lands upon which the settlements looked (p.100).

And perhaps tops of hills were easier to defend and made it easier to see enemies coming? That would be my vote, given it was the normal reason people set up their homes on tops of hills.

As herding developed, so did chiefly power. Earle does note that cattle are controllable assets that permit social differentiation. Though he seems not to understanding pastoralism very well:

Cattle … would have difficult to control unless their pasturelands were owned. The open pastures were naturally unbounded, and it must have been difficult to define their ownership and rights of use (p.101).

Pastoralist societies did not find it particularly so: with techniques such as branding, regulated use of common lands, the considerable memory capacity of pre-literate societies, they managed.

Earle then makes a meal of arguing that trading for metal goods would have consolidated chiefly power (Pp100ff): metal weapons would certainly have increased warrior power and the connection between cattle-owning chiefs and their warrior bands.

The ability to control economic resources and to extract a useable surplus does seem to have a great deal to do with the extent and permanence of chiefly power (p.104): but Earle makes reaching this unsurprising conclusion much more analytically inelegant than he needs to, not because the cases are complex, but because he too much wants to have social causality to be structured in a particular way and is too ready to overlook enduring basic patterns.


This review will be concluded in my next post.

Hume (and Popper) should take experience more seriously

It is truly remarkable that Hume (and before him al-Ghazali) was able to convince so many that there was something profoundly and systematically wrong (or, at least, seriously problematic) with our knowledge of causation, for there is surely nothing we have more intimate, varied and continuous experience of than cause-and-effect. It pervades our existence, from acts of breathing to the most elaborate projects.

How does Hume do so? By the same means al-Ghazali does. By putting the threshold of reason-to-believe very high and by putting the strength of the evidence of causation very low, both the experiential and what might be called the “metaphysical” evidence.

Regarding reason-to-believe, both Hume and al-Ghazali require proof in the sense of deductive validity. That is, they deny we can infer from cases to generalities, they deny the power of probabilistic reasoning. That all observed swans are white demonstrably does not prove that all swans are white: witness the black swans of Australia. All fine, but Hume and al-Ghazali go further, they claim that all observed swans have been white gives no reason to believe that the next observed swan will be white. For if one accepts that there are reasons to believe which are not proof, but nevertheless rational bases for belief, then Hume and al-Ghazali’s argument fails.

This is the key premise on which the entire argument sits. But, in order to make their case more plausible, both Hume and al-Ghazali recast our experience of causation into passive observance. That all we are doing is observing coincidental occurrence of cause and effect.

But that is not even remotely a full description of our experience of causation – or, indeed, our experience of experience. Experience is primarily not passive, but active. We actively – indeed interactively – experience pattern, structure and causation. Our prime experience of causation is not observing, but doing. We act, and by acting build up great experience of causation, of what does or does not happen when we do various acts. We are “inside” causation, and experience it thus. This is rather more than passive observance of coincidental cause and effect. It is only by making us think of causation as something “out there” – as something of removed, passive observation – that Hume and al-Ghazali make the characterisation of causation as mere coincidental occurrence remotely plausible and so seem as not having sufficient proof to constitute knowledge.

In his response to al-Ghazali’s argument, ibn Rushd (“Averroes”, known to medieval Scholastics as The Commentator, just as Aristotle was The Philosopher) appealed – alas, in a somewhat roundabout way – to the rationality of our belief in, and the depth of our experience of, causation when he stated that:

To deny the existence of efficient causes which are observed in sensible things is sophistry, and he who defends this doctrine either denies with his tongue what is present in his mind or is carried away by a sophistical doubt which occurs to him concerning this question. For he who denies this can no longer acknowledge that every act must have an agent. The question whether these causes by themselves are sufficient to perform the acts which proceed from them, or need an external cause for the perfection of their act, whether separate or not, is not self-evident and requires much investigation and research. And if the theologians had doubts about the efficient causes which are perceived to cause each other, because there are also effects whose cause is not perceived, this is illogical. Those things whose causes are not perceived are still unknown and must be investigated, precisely because their causes are not perceived; and since everything whose causes are not perceived is still unknown by nature and must be investigated, it follows necessarily that what is not unknown has causes which are perceived. ‘ The man who reasons like the theologians does not distinguish between what is self-evident and what is unknown, z and everything Ghazali says in this passage is sophistical.

Ibn Rushd then continues on to re-state the Aristotelian analysis of causes.

Hume and al-Ghazali are both correct to say we lack deductive proof of causation. As it is never certain that we have perceived and understood every aspect of some event, we never have more than probabilistic reasoning available to us about specific causal sequences. (So the notion that a “disproving” observation partakes of some deductive power that a “confirming” one does not is false: my old teacher David Stove used to make this point, but it took me years to fully understand what he was getting at.) Yet probabilistic reasoning can still be good reasoning, well up to the task of providing a rational basis for belief (and our systematic understanding of probabilistic reasoning has advanced quite a lot since Ibn Rushd’s day). Hume and al-Ghazali are wrong to insist that only deductive proof will do.
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While I do not find Ibn Rushd’s restatement of the Aristotelian analysis of causation in his response to al-Ghazali a satisfactory one, he is correct to take a metaphysical, which is to say a “structural” turn, for Hume and al-Ghazali’s “flattening” of experience is intimately connected to the way they discount considerations of pattern and structure. Our understanding of causation is very much built up on the basis of pattern and structure: that, for example, you can do things with a fork that you cannot do with a bat, and vice versa.

Both Hume and al-Ghazali are reacting against Aristotelian Forms, deemed to be direct apprehensible by the human mind from which causation can be deduced from our knowledge of said defining forms. But, in the way of human thought, their reaction turned into over-reaction. The belittling of the role of pattern and structure went rather too far. Hume was, for example, quite wrong to claim all knowledge of the world comes from mere experience, treated as a mass of sense-impressions, because without pattern and structure there is no basis for connecting one experience with another. We come into the world primed to identify pattern and structure: we have to be, to be able to learn, to be able to connect one experience to another. In the words of a early childhood educator, babies:

… apply limited Action Schemes to everything they come across, which is part of learning about the world. The earliest action schemes are things like grab and suck. Babies are born knowing how to do this—or at least they can do it within hours of being born. Later there is grasp & shake, which is why we give babies rattles. There's also banging, dumping (around 9 months) and turning things over to see the other side. As babies develop they get to combine these basic action schemes into more complicated patterns. So younger babies are kind of looking at the world of objects as: is this something I bang, something I shake or something I ignore? Babies & toddlers put everything in their mouths too, just like animals do. Touch it, to feel its texture, grasp and shake and turn it over, taste it. Watch a gorilla do the same thing to an unknown item the next time you're at the zoo.

Anyone who has to deal with a complex and crowded intersection for the first time will testify how different that confusing experience is to later experiences of the same intersection when one becomes familiar with its patterns and structures. Pattern and structure is basic to, and pervades, both our experience and our learning from experience, for without pattern and structure there could be no learning to speak of at all. (Nor, for that matter, any existing things at all.)

Which is not to say this priming to perceive pattern and structure is itself definitive. As a brain scientist Gary Marcus says:

The initial organization of the brain does not rely that much on experience … Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises … ‘Built-in” does not mean unmalleable; it means organised in advance of experience” (Gary Marcus, 2004).

The priming is malleable and interactive with experience. We are not compelled to wander off into Kant’s world of phenomena and unknowable things-in-themselves noumena.

What is even more surprising about the intellectual success of scepticism about our knowledge of causation is that no one actually believes we have no understanding of causation: indeed, all of us continue to act on the basis of our built-up understanding causation based on our experience of (and inferences from) pattern and structure. (Which is then expanded by information transferred to us by language from others.) Hume’s monetary economics, for example, is all about generalised causation.

Al-Ghazali’s success is marginally less surprising than Hume’s, however, since al-Ghazali achieved extra plausibility by appealing to God: his take on causation becomes another manifestation of the submission to God that is the essence of Islam.

Aristotle was not wrong to be so concerned with pattern and structure: it is necessary for things to exist, including for thought to happen, and for any learning to be possible at all, for one experience to have any implication or connection to another. Since pattern and structure are necessary for things to exist, the universe can therefore be described using mathematics, the science of pattern and structure. The trouble was being too Platonic about pattern and structure: to put too much confidence in ideas, in the human capacity to directly categorise accurately and definitively.

But we need to be wary of the opposite problem, of being too dismissive to human perception and reason. To be sure, that mathematics has the “gold standard” of deductive proof available to it is a seductive example. But our logical and cognitive apparatus is not so impoverished that only deductive proof is good enough. This cannot be so, since so little is available to us to connect on the basis of deductive reason from what is known with certainty. We live in a world of uncertainty and so of probabilities.

And of reasoning perception based on a capacity to categorise which is far from perfect and definitive but demonstrably good enough to get by. And good enough due to reasons beyond mere happenstance. That something is not certain is not a reason not to believe it. Mere possibility is certainly not a superior reason to believe than experience. Indeed, it is not even as good a reason to believe.

Which is why the cool rationality of Hume’s scepticism about our knowledge of causation is, in fact, deeply irrational since it elevates mere possibility (which is what uncertainty is) as more defining of experience than experience itself, in the sense that mere possibility trumps inferring from experience.

Hence Hume, and those whose philosophy descends from him, such as that of Karl Popper, should take experience, including of pattern and structure, as a basis for inference more seriously in their philosophy. Indeed, as seriously as they did every waking moment of their lives.

So, Ibn Rushd has a point, the reasoning is sophistical, as long as we grant that the first deceived were the reasoners themselves.

Scepticism about our knowledge of causation

David Hume’s sceptical argument about our knowledge of causation is the most important piece of reasoning in modern philosophy. Modern philosophy may be said to have started with Descartes trying to find a certain basis for reasoning – his cogito ergo sum – but his method turned out to be fruitless. It is Hume’s sceptical empiricism from which modern philosophy descends, with differing lines of philosophy deriving from different responses to it.

Accepting Hume’s sceptical conclusion about inference from experience led Kant to create his philosophical system of phenomena (what we humans perceive and can reason about) and noumena (things-in-themselves, not accessible to human knowledge or reason). From Kant comes Hegel and (eventually) post-modernism. Cultural anthropologists talking of “other ways of knowing” and science as a “patriarchal Western discourse” are ultimately, whether they know it or not, disciples of a dead white Scottish male (via various dead white German, Austrian and French males).

Scepticism about our knowledge of causation is not good for the status of science. This was demonstrated centuries before Hume was born. Compare Hume’s claim, first published in 1737:

When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connexion; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. There is required a medium, which may enable the mind to draw such an inference, if indeed it be drawn by reasoning and argument. What that medium is, I must confess, passes my comprehension; and it is incumbent on those to produce it, who assert that it really exists, and is the origin of all our conclusions concerning matter of fact. This question I propose as much for the sake of information, as with an intention of raising difficulties. I cannot find, I cannot imagine any such reasoning. But I keep my mind still open to instruction, if any one will vouchsafe to bestow it upon me.

With this passage from Muslim thinker al-Ghazali, in his C11th The Incoherence of the Philosophers:

our opponent claims that the agent of the burning is the fire exclusively; this is a natural, not a voluntary agent, and cannot abstain from what is in its nature when it is brought into contact with a receptive substratum. This we deny, saying: The agent of the burning is God, through His creating the black in the cotton and the disconnexion of its parts, and it is God who made the cotton burn and made it ashes either through the intermediation of angels or without intermediation. For fire is a dead body which has no action, and what is the proof that it is the agent? Indeed, the philosophers have no other proof than the observation of the occurrence of the burning, when there is contact with fire, but observation proves only a simultaneity, not a causation, and, in reality, there is no other cause but God.

Both thinkers are deeply skeptical about the capacity of human cognition to perceive the inner workings of reality. Of the two, al-Ghazali at least has some way of explaining causation – it is the will of God. In Hume’s case, causation is just a mystery we cannot ultimately know anything of. Hence Kant’s phenomena and noumena, the former being the realm of human reasoning (and theory), the latter being the unknowable reality of things. But a reality that we cannot truly know is no restraint on human reasoning. Which leads us to human reasoning as a playground of human theories and thus to the triumph of Theory: to all the pathologies of post-modernism with science just one “discourse” since all human discourses are equally impotent to discern reality and so none is privileged over any other.

In al-Ghazali’s case, it leads the only path to truth about the universe being knowledge of the will of God, via the revelations of the Prophet. The triumph of his view in Islam also undermined any hope for science in that civilisation, as any structures or patterns we perceive are just manifestations of the will of God, while encouraging a deeply fatalistic approach to human agency (as outlined in the work of Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels) since we are not Aristotelian agents acting in an ordered universe but creatures of God utterly in His power. The further consequence of this is being deeply inclined to the conspiratorial mindset, since reality is, in a sense, one Great Conspiracy operating according to the will of the ultimate Hidden Power. If that is your ultimate and pervasive model of how the universe works, and you do not believe in the authoritative efficacy of ordinary (and individual) human action, of course it is going to be natural to explain the world in terms of hidden conspiracies.

But belief in powerful hidden agencies, the impotence of individual action and a tendency to postulation of conspiracies we can equally see in all the lines of thought which descend from Kant and (especially) Hegel. Marx may have been influenced by British empiricism, but he is ultimately too much of a Hegelian, and his disciples even more so, even more in the thrall of theory (and, eventually, Theory). Moving from Marxism (or post-modernism) to Islamism is much less of a shift in one’s mode of thinking that one might expect.

Both al-Ghazali and Hume were arguing against Aristotelianism, though al-Ghazali was doing so more directly. (Even so, there are some medieval precursors to Hume’s thought.) The difference, apart from al-Ghazali having God as his ultimate backstop, is that al-Ghazali’s skepticism about human epistemic capacity was operating a civilisation which had not undergone the Scientific Revolution – indeed, his intellectual triumph within Islam probably did much to forestall any chance of Islam experiencing such a sustained breakthrough – while Hume, Kant, Hegel and co were operating in a civilisation which not only had made the various breakthroughs which we know call the Scientific Revolution but which was, in many ways, increasingly defined (or, at least, profoundly transformed) by those breakthroughs in theoretical and practical knowledge and capacity.
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Still, even if Hume’s scepticism about our knowledge of causation did not the civilisation-defining effects that al-Ghazali’s did, it has still been profoundly influential. And not in a good way.

True complexities
We can also see Hume’s epistemic scepticism as a manifestation of the retreat from Plato leading to the retreat of confidence in the notion of truth. To some extent at least, the notion of truth is inherent in language, since if words do not have specific meanings, we cannot have language. If we say ‘dog’ means dog but not cat, we are committed to some notion of truth. (I.e. that it is true that ‘dog’ means dog and false that ‘dog’ means cat.)

There is also little point to language unless it has some connection to reality. Why bother having language unless it is to communicate about the world around us? (Ask any parent: both babies and parents find the lack of language skills of small children frustrating.) There are a lot of situations where accuracy about the world is important: hence lying is broadly disapproved of and a reputation for dishonesty is a handicap. (Though whether it shows respect or disrespect for others makes a difference: lies to spare people’s feelings are often regarded as acceptable.) Perjury is a necessary crime for the functioning of law.

It is regarding general explanatory claims about the universe where we start to run into problems. With Plato, where ideas are more “real” than the reality that is a flawed reflection of them, truth is not a particularly problematic notion. The most “real” things are ideas and so the human grasp of such ideas is the deepest form of truth. Truth is almost equally unproblematic in Aristotle: even if Aristotelian Forms are immanent in reality, they are directly apprehensible by the human mind. Plenty of scope for argument about what is true, but the notion of truth is not problematic.

If, however, we can only get knowledge about the world from experience (empiricism), and we cannot make general inferences from experience (Humean scepticism), then the notion of truth – particularly general, explanatory truth about the world – becomes much more problematic.

That all observed swans are white makes it likely that the next observed swan will be white but, as the discovery of black swans in Australia demonstrated, certainly does not prove the next observed swan will be white. (In fact, of course, humans have been observing black swans for thousands of years. It is just that no European knew about this before the European discovery of Australia.) Hence confidence in the whiteness of swans suddenly turned out to be misplaced. Humean scepticism takes that lack of certainty and turns it into a disabling barrier.

One that looks particularly plausible when confronted with the collapse of confidence in previously taken-for-granted conceptions of the universe. Newtonian physics looked pretty good, until Relativity came along. We thought Newtonian physics was true: it turned out to be merely approximately true. (In effect, true except for very, very small and very, very large phenomena.) But the propositions of Newtonian physics do not much look like E=mc2. So how can they be (approximately) true and Relativity be true? Leaving aside this somewhat ambiguous example, the history of science is full of the debris of now rejected, but previously believed, theories.

It is hardly likely to be some coincidence that Hume’s scepticism, which arose in the wake of the collapse of Aristotelian physics, acquired a new wave of admirers (most famously Karl Popper) in the wake of the fall of the Newtonian empire in physics.

The concept of truth looks seriously shaky in such circumstances.

Not helped by the fact that Platonic and Aristotelian Forms both encourage a view of truth as a binary ‘yes/no’ matter. You either apprehend the Form or you don’t. The notion of partially true, or approximately true, does not recommend itself in such circumstances. If, however, one accepts the complex reality where nature abhors a category, approximately true, or partially true, looks just fine. But that also requires a more complex understanding of how propositions connect to reality, so what one means by ‘truth’.

If medieval philosophy was the period of metaphysics par excellence, modern philosophy is the period where epistemology is a central concern. But just as medieval metaphysics was abandoned when its claims about what we know turned out to be way overblown, so modern philosophy has failed to solve the problems of epistemology it attempted to wrestle after the failure of medieval metaphysics.

The detritus of post-modernism is, as Stephen Hicks demonstrated, a massive indictment of the failure of epistemology. If we can see that Hume’s (and al-Ghazali’s) scepticism about our knowledge of causation does not lead to good intellectual places – and does not remotely accord with our every day experience and confidence about our causal efficacy – then it is reasonable to ask what is wrong with their arguments. Something I will discuss in a later post.