Markets and cognitive failure

I have long noticed that folk comfortable with market economics tend to have much more sophisticated discussions of the proper boundary between public and private action than do more progressivist folk. Among the latter, typically, anything that goes wrong in markets shows that government should do more. The proper answer is always that governments should do more. There is, apparently, no such thing as systematic government failure: no limits to its competence or efficacy, no perverse dynamics, information failures, etc. And no amount of government failure is damning, just as no amount of market success is justificatory. Underneath the “sophisticated” language, one is often dealing with a very simple moral and analytical universe. Which, of course, makes it an excellent structure for opinions as markers of status: nice, simple markers of status.

Though something deeper is going on. The problem is that government and political action is viewed as inherently more legitimate than private or market action. And how to you put any limits on the legitimate over the illegitimate?

Conversely, those comfortable with market economics tend to have much more complex and empirical debates about the proper boundaries of government and private action. There are those who argue that government should always do less (that is, treat private action and markets as inherently more legitimate—or at least more effective—than government and political action) but—given that there are not a lot of anarcho-capitalists around—even they must eventually confront the question of where the boundaries lie. Hence Greenspan, McCain, folk from the AEI, et al arguing that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac needed more effective prudential regulation (which they clearly did). In the words of a May 13 2005 AEI publication:

If Congress can bring itself to overcome the furious political opposition of the GSEs and their supporters, it will direct the new GSE regulator to reduce the size of Fannie's and Freddie's portfolios and endorse a workable standard by which to measure the proper size of the smaller portfolios that result. This will solve, finally, the problem of two entities using their implicit government backing to control the residential mortgage market, which creates massive risks for the taxpayers and the economy in general.
If Congress cannot take this essential step, however, no amount of additional authority--given to a purported "world class regulator"--will significantly change the course of events. Fannie and Freddie will continue to grow, and one day--as Alan Greenspan has predicted--there will be a massive default with huge losses to the taxpayers and systemic effects on the economy.

AEI is very much a pro-market think tank, but could see the need for firm prudential regulation. Indeed, had been issuing public warnings at least as far back as 1999.

Conversely, those who thought government should always do more did not consider the implications of (1) various states and cities rationing the supply of land for housing, creating one-way bets in their housing markets and (2) using government power to foster cheap housing credit, particularly to low income folk. It was all good-intentioned, government action: what could be wrong with that?

And when it all goes pear-shaped, what is the problem? “Greed” and “de-regulation”. And what is the solution? Much more government regulation, even much more government ownership (as if we do not have vast experience with the dysfunctions of the latter in particular). Yes, a very simple moral and analytical universe indeed. It must be such a comfort, to live in a world where the answers are all so obvious.
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Back in more complex reality, there were wider (and more serious) regulatory failures than those pertaining to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The lack of sufficient prudential regulation (both in rules and in their application) extended way beyond Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. See the comments of former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, who was a tad concerned back in May 2005. Which means that the Republicans are well and truly implicated as they had control of Congress 1994-2006 and the Presidency 2000-09. They are also implicated in the pumping of liquidity into the American economy which fuelled the amazing surge in stock prices away from long-term trends and in a misconceived response when the crisis broke.

But these all point to a perennial problem: regulators are not insulated folk, they will tend to go along with prevailing opinion. So if there is too much discretionary power given to regulators, they are likely to go (with some lag) in whichever direction prevailing sentiment encourages. In the 1920s and the lead-up to the current credit crisis, that was clearly too lax on American financial markets. (But, in our time, also too restrictive on land markets.) The interventions in response to the 1929 crash were too restrictive and either greatly exacerbated the economic collapse or retarded recovery: most obviously in the Smoot-Hawley tariff but also in many of the Roosevelt Administrations actions—massive policy unpredictability was and is not good for investment. (Scott Sumner has a striking take on the 1930s and the present crisis that give Smoot-Hawley in particular less significance than it often is.)

What is typically missing is a strong, robust sense of where the proper boundaries between public and private action lie. What regulators should and should not be doing, in particular. (That regulatory discretion should be minimised is fairly clear.)

But it is hard to have the debate to develop such a sense of where the boundaries should lie if large slabs of the intelligentsia are not concerned with being serious about the question at all. If, on the contrary, they engage in what is, ultimately, fairly simple-minded barracking and posturing.

Such barracking and posturing goes on in both directions but by far more broadly-based and virulent is the “government should do more!” noise. A sort of vulgar Marxism, based on the idea that private property, individual action, commerce and corporations really have no ultimate justification beyond a certain temporary pragmatism. Which leaves its adherents with nowhere to go but a form of magical thinking where one has to ultimately prefer public ownership and government control—despite the patent information and incentive problems thereof—in order to be a moral person. Such views have been less persuasive in recent decades simply because their claims were not backed up by the evidence. Indeed, were increasingly clearly contradicted by the evidence. They provided little or no practical solutions to the problems policy makers were actually facing. Nor do they now: such attitudes have little or nothing to contribute to the debate about proper boundaries, as there is no proper boundary to be found between the ultimately illegitimate and the inherently legitimate.

Lacking a genuinely robust debate on the proper boundaries between public and private action—particularly the role of regulation—has meant that ideas that accorded with various interests (rationing land, over-spruiking low-income mortgages, being far too lax in prudential regulation, pumping liquidity into the economy or, if Scott Sumner is correct, also engaging in inappropriate dramatic monetary tightening) interacted in ad hoc, and ultimately highly pernicious, ways.

What we really need is some clear, well-grounded thinking on the role of regulation and what intervention can and cannot, and should and should not, do. But most of those who are paid to be our cognitive elite will continue to be worse than useless for what is most needed.

The Ultimate Resource

I recently attended the inaugural screening of a new film society. The film screened was The Ultimate Resource from Free to Choose Media™. The title comes from a Julian Simon book title: that human inventiveness is the ultimate resource. The film starts with a West African ceremony celebrating the birth of a daughter (who has been declared likely to live and so no longer merely a visiting spirit). This hopeful and colourful ceremony is the lever to present the masses of children being born around the planet as potentially including those who will come up with ideas that may benefit huge numbers of people. It is a vision that presents people positively, rather than a plague species on the planet.

It is also a perspective that is positive towards other people’s ideas. (Having the view that your ideas show one to be morally and intellectually superior is antipathetic to such a perspective.)

The Ultimate Resource is divided into five vignettes, each treated informatively and positively.

The first, in a Ghanian fishing village, was Victoria’s schooling. We meet a fisherman whose father barred him from going to school while his wife’s father could not afford to send her to school. Their daughter, Victoria, wants to be doctor.

Government schools in their area have 75 student in a class, open for 4 hours a day, for boys and girls. Yet private schools dominate schooling (as they do in much of the developing world). They have less qualified teachers, but smaller classes and operate 7 hours a day. The parents send Victoria to “Supreme Academy”, Theophilus Quaye’s school that he started with a few students and now has almost 370 students.

The “pertinent expert” for the segment was James Tooley, Professor of education policy at Newcastle upon Tyne University. Prof. Tooley describes his discovery of private schooling for the poor in this excerpt from his book The Beautiful Tree.

We then move to the valley of Macchu Picchu in Peru and Eusebio’s dream. Eusebio is a small farmer, working land that three generation’s of his family. A man had come to his grandfather and claimed to own the land he worked. For two generations, they worked the land that someone else claimed to own.

In 1969, the Peruvian state nationalised the land and created cooperatives. Eusebio said things got worse, because now they worked for for low pay for the cooperative directors appointed by Lima bureaucrats while the cooperative directed wealth to the directors, who did not work but lived off the labour of peasants like Eusebio.

Now, a process of giving individual titles is operating, based on the advocacy and ideas of Peruvian property rights advocate Hernando de Soto (founder of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy) who talks of billions of people being locked out of the capitalist system by the lack of property rights. We see the process where individual titles are handed over. Eusebio says “I am 47 years old and I have finally seen my title. My parents have died and they did not see it”. It was the very moving satisfying of peasant land-hunger.

Then it is on to Pennies a day about a married pair of weavers, Minara Begum and husband, in a small village in Bangladesh, the benefits of microcredit and the work and vision of the Muhammad Yunus and Grameen (“Rural”) Bank (joint winners of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize). Professor Yunus had been teaching elegant principles of economics while poor people were struggling and starving around university.

He studied what was happening (and not happening) in the villages. Getting hold of even small amounts of money was a big problem, due to the only credit available being high interest loans from moneylenders.

The answer was micro-credit. Now the Grameen Bank makes 96% of its loans to women: they find that the women are cautious, have a family-focus, with long-term aims. The bank requires a village centre meeting each week. At these meetings, friends are developed, information swapped. The system works on peer pressure and individual pride with the required 16 principles being recited each centre meeting.

As Muhammad Yunus says, people “discover themselves and their creativity comes out.” As for the effect of lending to women, “now she has the power of money”. The loans average $85, with a 99% payback rate.
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We then have quite a change of context to Estonia Freedom’s Sound and the Estonia Piano Company. We get a sense of how bad things were under the Soviets (and the Nazis) and how different it is now. As one of the workers in the company says of the Soviet era, “just to buy an orange you had to know someone”.

The “visiting expert” was Johan Norberg from Sweden, the most “rah, rah” speaker in the film. The Estonia Piano Company had existed under Soviet Union. With the break up of the Soviet Union, their market disappeared. From 500 pianos a year, production dropped to 94 in 1997. A young pianist bought up the stock as it fell in value. When he became the majority owner, he revitalised the company by getting it to focus on quality. Now the Estonia Piano Company’s pianos rank close to Steinway™ in quality at about half the price. His father, Venno Laul, a choirmaster (whose father was executed by the Nazis) helped to improve the piano quality. The father was eloquent on how a free society was worth any price.

The final vignette was a 34 year old computer game entrepreneur, Sir Hai, owner of Snailgame™, a computer game company using 3D animations: his wife Jo is the company’s chief financial officer and The people’s economy. This segment had a more mixed overall tone than the other segments. The “talking head” was an economics professor from Fudan University, though his role was notably less than the other experts, both in screen time and content.

This is the China that has the fastest-growing major economy in world history. There are estimated to be 300,000 millionaires in China. Full of enthusiasm for the economic growth, the segment also notes the problems of corruption, rural poverty, underdeveloped legal system, the problems with political freedom (of which Sir Hai says “that is a difficult question”, the perennial code for “this can get me into trouble). Sir Hai makes the striking observation that “our generation is like the generation in Japan after WWII”.

The Ultimate Resource is both informative and uplifting. Rarely has a film had such a cheering and encouraging effect. It is also a powerful film, particularly as it addressed the real situation of the poor: things that mattered in their lives.

There was a discussion afterwards, which brought up various issues. It was the sort of the discussion where I found myself, in the one set of comments, pointing out that Peter Walsh held that working on his farm helped teach him to learn economics, that I preferred the term ‘free commerce’ to ‘free market’, that the among indigenous Australians during the 1960s and 1970s there had been a debate roughly between women (who wanted to develop their community’s internal resources) and men (who wanted to see how much money they could get from grants) and how notions of the possibility of change and progress enter into developing societies.

One of those present was able to provide further details on how the Grameen Bank work: in particular the existence of small circles were the next person does not get a loan until the previous one has been paid back and the centrality of the 16 points (which a lot of Muslim conservatives/fundamentalists strongly opposed to). Muhammad Yunus was the most impressive speaker in the film.

There will more documentary films put on by the film society: the organiser, has tapped into an “below the radar” movement of pro-liberty documentary makers.

City of Heavenly Tranquillity

If you have not realised that Mao was one of the great evil figures of the C20th, you have not been paying attention. If you have not realised that revolutionary socialism is an utter failure, except as a means for grasping total power, you have not been paying attention. Jasper Becker’s City of Heavenly Tranquillity: Beijing in the History of China is a jeremiad of outraged pain at what the Beijing regime has done to its capital city, a city where the author has lived for years as foreign correspondent and clearly loves.

When considering political institutions, the key thing to remember is that intentions change (or fail to be achieved), but the means remain. If the means of unchecked power are constructed, then they will be used whatever the original intentions. The economic policies of the Beijing regime may have changed dramatically over the years—from the conventional command economy of the 1950s, the mad will-worship of the Great Leap Forward, the deliberate anarchy of the Cultural Revolution, the return to a more conventional (if somewhat exhausted) command economy, followed by the accelerating shift to a corrupt, if dynamic, crony capitalism from 1979 onwards. The power of the Party, and the ability of its leadership to loot China, remains.

Becker sees the contemporary rushing destruction of old Beijing as a punishment for popular resistance which culminated in the Beijing massacre, noting the regime has spent far more on destroying and replacing old Beijing than healthcare. After providing some revealing statistics (p.8), Becker notes that PLA is the only army in modern history to mount an assault on Beijing (p.10). What has been going on is the physical destruction of memory (p.11). An acceleration of a trend that began from the start of the People’s Republic, for old China was seen as the enemy of the modernisation project (p.12).

Becker makes the revealing observation that both Moscow and Beijing started out as places to deliver tribute to nomad conquerors (p.16). Northern China has a history of pastoralist dynasties. Beijing is the end point of that grand engineering achievement, the Grand Canal, whose purpose was to deliver tribute northwards to a city that was neither on a major river nor a sea port (p.16).
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There is an argument the region worked “best” when the two monopoly rulerships (the Han dynasty in China and the Hun rulership in the steppes) managed each other (p.19). Pastoralist rule has reached into Western poetry, since the Mongol summer capital Shangdu = Xanadu, where, indeed, “Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decreed”.

When the Mongols conquered China, a minister of the conquered northern rulers, Ye-lu-chu-cai (not himself an ethnic Han but Khitan) recommended taxing the peasantry, rather than exterminating them and clearing the land for grazing, thereby becoming an object of veneration for centuries (p.31).

The Ming replaced the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty and ruled obsessed with the nomad threat, creating what we now think of as “The” Great Wall of China. (In fact, merely the last and greatest of a series of walls.) Historical evidence is that C15th inhabitants of Ming Beijing ate better than residents of People’s Republic Beijing did in the 1950s or 1980s (p.41).

But, as Ming rule decayed, the common symptoms of regime decline set in: food riots, declining finances, increasing corruption, collapsing commerce (p.42). Becker takes us through the iron, alienating cage of routine and goldfish bowl privilege that Ming emperors lived in and the struggle of eunuchs (who owed everything to the Emperors) versus mandarins (who had more connection to the wider society).

A perennial problem of dynastic empires—the ruling clan consuming more and more resources—also manifest under the Ming, as Ming princes of the blood were given tax-exempt land: part of (the ibn Khaldun pattern of) the ruling regime losing of control of its agents and declining social resilience (p.76). In the end, the Manchus (Qing) swept in past a Great Wall bereft of soldiers.

Becker notes that the Opium Wars are still resented (Pp83ff). They destroyed the Middle Kingdom's conception of itself, even though various internal C19th rebellions killed far more Chinese (p.87). He also notes that the Chinese behaved duplicitously and cruelly, something that is not remembered (Pp88ff). What lingers is the insult felt by having to treat foreign Powers as equals. Traditional Chinese outlooks provided no way to conceive of proper behaviour incorporating foreigners that was not based on the foreigner’s presumed inferiority.

Becker also notes that Qing China was an expansionary imperial power, and still very much a nomad/pastoralist Manchu regime (p.86).

Jesuit reports from the Ming court had encouraged European interest in things Chinese (Pp92ff). Western responses to China have tended to be polarised between China as rational, exotic, enlightened and China as tyrannical, cruel, backward, obscurantist. Becker notes how few foreigners there were in China in 1900 (Pp105ff).

Modern China has become a world where the past has no value (and therefore cannot be learned from) (p.102). Meanwhile, senior Party officials appropriate antiques for themselves (p.104).

As the above implies, Becker’s narrative takes us back and forth between the present and the past, with each illuminating the other. The weird, controlled, endlessly monitored lives of Chinese emperors is a continuing theme. Becker notes the the Manchu nature of Beijing ("the Tatar city") (p.128) and wonders if memories of that were partly driving Mao's animus to old Beijing. Becker takes us through the People’s Republic’s fluctuating attitude to Manchus and other minorities (Pp133-4).

We also get insights into Chinese lives, such as the joyless incompetence that Maoism inflicted on ordinary death (Pp 135-6). Then back to the past and Kaiser Bill being horrid (Pp 154-5) followed by the life of a remarkable courtesan.

Back to the present, and the corruption that is the hallmark of bureaucratized autocracy has settled in dramatically (Pp 160-1). Then more of Mao's mixture of "refined poetic sensibility, contrasted with utter ruthlessness" (p.162). The mystery of why Mao chose Beijing as the capital (p.165), the regime’s immediate acquisition of palaces as dwellings for the Party elite and how the reality of the success of the People’s Republic was of military conquest with limited popular support. A regime which rapidly displayed its intent to control and change (p.166), such as in the extermination of dogs, who represented private/individual loyalty (p.167).

The ultimate goal was the transformation of humanity from our current (unsatisfactory) nature to an imagined future purity (p.177).

One of the features of the very hierarchical structure of imperial China was the status regulation of buildings, regulating what level of person could live in what size dwelling with what features (Pp 186-7). A feature not exactly entirely absent from the People’s Republic.

In the People’s Republic, the logic of utopianism-in-power operated in all sorts of ways. For example, collaborating writers were the Cultural Revolution's first victims (p.210). There are also moments of humour, such as Brecht amusingly misunderstanding Peking Opera (Pp224-5).

Given the regime’s war against the past—and thus its war against Chinese culture—extensive Western collections meant much was preserved that would later otherwise be lost. (Hong Kong and Taiwan also provided refuges.) What China experienced was the rejection of the past by an all-powerful state: when the latter was the real legacy that needed to be rejected.

A persistent theme of the book is how senior Party people looted China – from the beginning of the People’s Republic (‘People’s Republic’ being, like ‘Democratic Republic’ a term which indicates its opposite) but intensifying during the Cultural Revolution. Becker also covers the deliberate and systematic destruction of Tibet's cultural legacy, which was pursued with particular intensity (p.244). The gold and silver bullion looted from Tibet and melted down may have helped the Party survive the disaster of the Great Leap Forward.

The Party’s attempts to create new ritual structures to replace those being repressed has largely been a failure: a failure of logos to abolish mythos.

Mao inherited an intact city that had avoided destruction both in the war against Imperial Japan and the civil war against the Kuomintang and proceeded to make an appalling mess of it - an industrial city without sufficient water but with awful pollution. Post-Mao has not been an improvement, such as in Deng's admonition to follow Hong Kong created imitations, including a service economy Beijing without port or stock exchange (p.286). Sadly, Deng's reforms provided the funds to destroy old Beijing. Beijing's Olympic bid was supported as aiding modernization and liberalization: the effect was opposite of that (p.289).

In the contemporary changes to Beijing, the malign influence of Le Corbusier is very clear. Beijing has become a huge, rather ghastly, mass experiment in the awful wrongness of Le Corbusier's ideas (p.294), with Le Corbusier followers extolling the vision the regime’s funds allowed them to engage in, since they shared a notion of buildings deliberately severed from the past (p.295). All this “progressive” architecture has accompanying art also completely unconnected to China’s history, culture or popular wishes. So a modern Chinese artist finding no one understood his work without the explanatory text (p.296).

The whole thing becomes so From Bauhaus to Our House with the regime acquiring new defenders from fawning progressive artists. After all, both love the future because it is the canvas for their grand visions: while the past is full of the achievement of others, so has no value. Hence, of course, in crucial ways they failed even to match the achievements of the past: many of the new buildings working much worse for their locations than Ming buildings (Pp298-9).

But Beijing has always expressed a problematic relationship between regime and people: for example, only non-Han were permitted to live within city walls under Qing (p.302). This is a story which shows again and again how means are so much more important than intentions. What the elite wants is the constant watchword of Beijing and so much of its destruction and failure flows from that. Becker notes Victor Segalen’s prediction that modernity would produce conformity and banality (p.325), a prediction that the Beijing regime seems to be very successful at fulfilling.

City of Heavenly Tranquillity is a profoundly informative and perceptive book of passion and despair. In his book about the steady destruction of a city he loves, Jasper Becker tells us so much about Chinese history, the Chinese state and the depredations of the current Beijing regime. And he does so in a way which leaves you with great sympathy for what the Chinese people have endured and still endure.

The Root of the Wild Madder

Brian Murphy is the religion correspondent for Associated Press. He is also a “Persian” carpet obsessive and has written a splendid book about “Persian” carpets, their history and the people who make them in The Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery, and Lore of the Persian Carpet.

The book is, in part, a travelogue. Murphy takes us to the Teheran carpet bazaar, to cities, to villages, to nomad camps across Iran and Afghanistan. We start in a field of wild madder, a key dye plant for carpets: chemical dyes had taken over to the extent that only 10% of carpets had natural dyes by 2000: the proportion is now 25% and rising, a response to consumer demand (p.5). The book ends in a Cairo shop, near the al-Hussein mosque he was visiting for a Sufi ceremony, where a shopkeeper digs up some coarse dry madder that no one has asked for a long time (p.288).

In between is a travelogue of both physical places and of people and societies. But it is also a journey through the history of carpets—particularly the Western discovery and appreciation of them—and the tangled history of the region. A time-line sets out events from 8,000BC (first settlements) to the 2004 Iranian election. History, personal experience, literature, local outlooks and culture weave together in a thoroughly entertaining narrative.

Murphy is a religious correspondent, and religious experience and practices wander in and out of the narrative. Particularly Sufism. Reading the book, it struck me that, like Tantra, Sufism developed in a society of pervasive religious rules. Like Tantra, Sufism can offer rule-breaking as release but still contained within a religious framing.

One of Murphy’s great virtues is the people speak for themselves: they are not corralled into convenient Western framings. So we do not get romantic nomads, but women who hope education will give their daughters and granddaughters better prospects. A man studying neuroscience thinks about how experience changes the brain while we seek to control the universe around us in mutual effect (P.282). The book makes clear—as more recent events have made even clearer—the popular disaffection with the theocracy, the sense of a revolution hijacked and betrayed.

At the end of the book, in the last of a series of interspersed vignettes, Murphy tells the story of Majit Enderva and three other Iranians who attempt to smuggle themselves into the EU from Turkey. Majit and two others are killed in the border minefield they accidentally come ashore in, only his best friend survives. Murphy goes to Majit’s village, where his mother presses onto him a carpet she was making during and after her son died in the hope that something connected to her son will end up in the place he died trying to get to. An ordinary, unremarkable carpet becomes a carrier of love, tragedy and connection.

Via the author’s passion for carpets, interest in religion and respect for people, The Root of Wild Madder brings alive Persian carpets, and a fraught and complex region, in a very human and accessible way.

Delizia!

John Dickie’s Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food is a wonderful romp through Italian history and eating from the late medieval period to the present. He is intelligent and perceptive on both: including the best insight into the failings of the Kingdom of Italy I have read.

Dickie debunks the myth, particularly strong within Italy, that Italian cuisine has its origins in peasant food. The peasants often ate quite poorly, stalked by famine and, at times desperately, gleaning any bit of edible foodstuff from the countryside.

What we think of as “Italian food” is urban food, a series of merging cuisines that began in the cities of Italy operating as centres of trade (and thus ingredients) and concentrations of wealth.

Dickie starts with the late medieval period, because that is when substantial written evidence begins again with the end of the long literary drought after the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire. Medieval food used spices because people liked them and they were expensive, so marks of success and status. (He debunks the myth that spices offered any protection against spoiled food.) Sugar was much used (when available) to counteract the salt that was added to so much of the meat to keep it.

The title ‘delizia’ refers to the rural pleasure retreats for the urban elite (p.82). A nice play on words, given the central thesis of the book.

Given how my mind works, it was the social and political details that struck me particularly. Thus Dickie notes that the increased power of the Pope as secular ruler increased Italian share of cardinals, as Italian princes were willing to invest so much in getting Conclave votes (p.117). He relishes telling the very Renaissance story of cardinal del Monte who, admonished by his mother on her deathbed for his numerous illegitimate children, sobbingly promised to give up women and stick to boys. He allegedly boasted that, if elected Pope, he would make his favourite (his monkey-trainer) a cardinal. Which he was and did (Pp117-8).
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He was (apart from a very brief Papacy) succeeded by the first of the Counter-Reformation Popes, who confined the Jews of Rome to a ghetto for the first time (Pp123-4). Since the Papacy was the main barrier to Italian nationalism in the C19th, and the Papacy was so avid in repressing Jews, Italian nationalism was free of anti-Semitism: on the contrary, a good Italian nationalist believed in civic equality for Jews. As, however, Mussolini’s regime got closer to the Vatican, the loyalty of Italy’s Jews was questioned for the first time. As the alliance with Nazi Germany developed, things worsened further (p.262).

One of the steps in the initial tightening of the Fascist regime was the press refusing to review the historical biographies of a former Radical politician, who was beaten up and banned from practising law (p.263). The “cold shoulder” tactic is not limited to repressive political regimes: mainstream Australian publishing has been known to act as an ideological cartel, as has book-reviewing in the major newspapers (small dissenting publishing houses have been frozen out of having their books reviewed).

Dickie also gives a nice example of the Christian Democrats handing out regulatory favours (p.297). And an amusing analysis of media scare stories as memetic viruses.

The grim side of Italian cuisine is also covered, such as near-slavery among tomato pickers (Pp309-10). Or how a classic of Italian cuisine was written by an Italian officer who was an Austrian PoW during WWI: the Kingdom of Italy, unlike the other Allied Powers, made no attempt to provide food for its PoWs in the blockaded Central Powers.

Dickie takes us through the importance of culinary books in both providing us with information about elite dining in past centuries and in spreading the concept of “Italian cuisine” to Italians themselves. The great collectors of recipes acted both as recorders of tradition and creators of them.

While Dickie is an insightful and informative observer of Italian history in general, it is his loving descriptions of what Italians ate and why which makes Delizia such a fun work of history.

Problems with the normative essentialism of classical natural law theory 3: Homicidal in origins, history and implications

This is the third and concluding part of a consideration of the problems with classical natural law moral theory, derived from Ed Feser’s admirably clear presentation of classical natural law property rights theory. Part one is here, part two is here and here.


Classical natural law theory entered Christian thinking by two ways, which probably were ultimately the same way. The first was the use by St Paul in his Epistles of the concept para physin or ‘against nature’. This was a very un-Judaic concept: it came from Greek philosophy. The second entry path was from the adoption and adaptation by early Christian thinkers of the philosophy of Philo of Alexandria. But there are good circumstantial and textual reasons to think that St Paul was himself borrowing from Philo, his older contemporary.

St Paul and other early Christian thinkers almost certainly adopted and adapted Philo’s philosophy for exactly the same reason. They wanted to preach to the Gentiles. Putting the Christian message in an intellectual language that appealed to educated Gentiles—which Greek natural law philosophy did—had obvious utility. Philo had already done the work in marrying Greek natural law philosophy to the Judaic tradition of Scriptural revelation, so they built on his work.

A couple of points need to be stressed about this. First, Philo was in no sense a Christian. There is no trace of Gospel thinking in his philosophy. Second, Philo’s philosophy was just a touch homicidal. Particularly about matters sexual (something Jesus has very little to say about in the Gospels, apart from being against adultery and divorce). Philo was following, and seeking to provide broader philosophical justification for, the Old Law. He was not following the new Christian Covenant.

What had huge implications for the future was the way Philo justified and extended the Levitican homicidal anathematisation of same-sex activity. He declared that it was against nature. Same-sex activity was thus defined as being against the natural order and outside the proper realm of human nature.

Moreover, Philo applied this to Genesis 19 and the Sodom and Gomorrah story. Philo is the source of the (now traditional) interpretation of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as being due to God’s horror not of rape, nor violent inhospitality, nor of selfish arrogance and idolatry (the sins the Prophets and the Gospels laid at the door of the cities of plain and which were at least of a collective nature) but of same-sex activity. Which meant that the most dramatic Biblical example of God’s Wrath (after Noah’s flood) became associated with policing the form of sexual activity. Being same-sex attracted was not only defined as being outside the realm of the properly human, it was defined as the people God wanted dead (and wanted it so much, He was prepared to destroy whole cities to purge the world of such “horror”).

Which is how we get to a theory whose notion of “human flourishing” leads to burning people alive for having sex or getting married. From the moment classical natural law theory entered Christian thought, it was very much about those whose flourishing counts and those who do not, of proper and improper versions of the human.

For it is well to remind ourselves that the notion of ‘sodomy’ is very much a natural law moral category and invokes the notion of God-the-virtuous-exterminator. But any such gradings into proper and improper versions of the human are inherently oppressive: whether it is of the “one true class”, “one true race”, “one true sexuality”, or whatever. There are all wars against human diversity, and such wars regularly lead to oppression and slaughter.

Subverting Christianity
What Philo’s classical natural law take on sexuality did was provide a mechanism by which one could use the first principle of Christianity to subvert the second. The two principles of Christianity were famously defined by Jesus in the Gospels as:

"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

Now, adopting Philo’s philosophy, “loving God” meant “kill the queers”: which is to say, the “sodomites”, the people God wanted dead. And it did it with particular thoroughness, since not only were they guilty of treason against God as Author of nature for using sex “against its natural end” but they were also defined out of the properly human (through their failure to be oriented to “rightful ends”) and so were therefore not moral neighbours, so not covered by the second principle of Christianity.

A long record of (fitful) barbarism against the same-sex active followed. Fitful barbarism because, since neither individuals nor the wider society was specifically harmed by such activity (issues of rape, adultery, abuse of minors, etc apply equally to same- and opposite-sex activity and a Church with required celibacy among its religious could hardly complain of simple failure to have children), the prosecution of such laws was largely dependant on occasional bouts of crusading zeal. Though the existence of such laws, and the framings that created them, blighted many lives, generation after generation.
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But this barbarism is inherent in being defined outside the properly human. In its obsession with form trumping human agency it went directly against part of Christ’s Gospel teachings. Christ held that human purpose (i.e. human agency) is more important than form when he preached that:

Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, "Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a man can make him 'unclean' by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him 'unclean.' "
After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. "Are you so dull?" he asked. "Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him 'unclean'? For it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body." (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods "clean.")
He went on: "What comes out of a man is what makes him 'unclean.' For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man 'unclean.' "

Such obsession with form over human purposes had the consequences Christ alludes to when he preached that:

The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were "unclean," that is, unwashed. (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.)
So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, "Why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with 'unclean' hands?"
He replied, "Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: 

" 'These people honor me with their lips, 

but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are but rules taught by men.'[
You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men."
And he said to them: "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, 'Honor your father and your mother,'and, 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.' But you say that if a man says to his father or mother: 'Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban' (that is, a gift devoted to God), then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that."

But creating highly contingent taboos, or other strictures, which define the boundaries of “righteousness”—so that priests become “gatekeepers of righteousness”—gives priests a lot of power. Take away concern for “uncleanliness”, and you take away much of the power of priests: no wonder they wanted this annoying teacher conveniently crucified by the Romans. (Islam’s concern for moral purity and, what is “clean” and “unclean”, gives its law—and those charged with its interpretation and enforcement—huge intrusive power in people’s lives; a pattern Islam took from Judaism: that Jesus said “choose love” while Muhammad said “submit” encapsulates the differences in their messages.)

Jesus’s instance that nothing from without makes one “unclean”, only what comes from within you, is a defence of human agency as the ground of moral concern. By contrast, the anathematisation of homosexuality is a pure attack on human agency. Consider the speech of Pausanias in Plato’s Symposium:

In Ionia and other places, and generally in countries which are subject to the barbarians, the custom is held to be dishonourable; loves of youths share the evil repute in which philosophy and gymnastics are held because they are inimical to tyranny; for the interests of rulers require that their subjects should be poor in spirit and that there should be no strong bond of friendship or society among them, which love, above all other motives, is likely to inspire, as our Athenian tyrants-learned by experience; for the love of Aristogeiton and the constancy of Harmodius had strength which undid their power.

Claiming love between men as a bulwark of free politics was a rhetorical commonplace for centuries: but binding association for political action is a form of celebration of human agency.

The anathematisation of homosexuality protects no one and nothing but profoundly assaults the very nature of those who are attracted to their own sex. They are defined as outside the circle of the properly human, with anything they may say in their own defence dismissed in advance. Indeed, they cannot be allowed to have any standing in their own defence, because if you grant them that much agency, why not go the whole hog? So, they cannot speak on their own behalf, since that acknowledges the legitimacy of their agency. Hence “sodomy” being the “silent sin”, its practitioners being “struck dumb before the Throne of God”. This was not merely a matter of the weight of social ostracism, there was a much profounder point about human agency involved. Hence the importance of the shift philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah notes when he writes:

... over the last 30 years or so, instead of thinking about the private activity of gay sex, many Americans and Europeans started thinking about the public category of gay people.

Hence also that long campaign to stop positive portrayal of same-sex oriented in film and television, for that admitted them ordinary humanity.

The division in debates over human sexual diversity is between those who get that attacking same-sex activity is attacking the personhood of the same-sex attracted and those who think the activity is so wrong that their actual personhood needs to be attacked/constrained: indeed, is a manifestation of how “twisted” their personhood is. Once the same-sex attracted become “just folks”—and so entitled to their aspirations—the moral case against homosexuality collapses.

The Vatican, in describing the same-sex attracted as being “ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil” and thus “objectively disordered” so as to ensure their aspirations are discounted, is simply applying an old and necessary logic. That then means the same-sex attracted are deemed to be ontologically lower than (for example) murderers—who are merely people who have killed someone, they are not “ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil” and thus “objectively disordered”—is simply following the logic of the thing. A logic increasing numbers of people are no longer willing to wear.

To call the misery inflicted on the same-sex attracted by such anathematisation as “a commitment to human flourishing” only works if neither the hurt and misery (let alone the violence) inflicted on the same-sex oriented, nor the joy involved in same-sex connection, count. That is to say, such people, their aspirations and experiences, are deemed to be outside the circle of what counts. But, in classical natural law theory, their very existence as same-sex oriented people generates no moral claim because they are defined outside the range of the properly human and their aspirations outside the range of proper human ends. The boundaries of human nature are drawn in ways that exclude actual humans.

To imply that this, in any way, represents concern for those so excluded is monstrous hypocrisy. The “love the sinner, hate the sin” approach is simply how a vile and corrosive contempt is made acceptable to otherwise decent people. (Try, for comparison, “love the sinner, hate the fact you are black” or “love the sinner, hate the fact that you are a Jew”.) A brutal devaluing of actual people, their experience and aspirations, the depths of their human agency, in the name of a narrow conception of human ends. One does not treat one’s moral neighbours with such contempt, with such profound disregard for fellow feeling.

The pathologising of their existence is, if anything, even more offensive. Especially as adhering to this monstrous attack on their agency and nature causes enormous misery and deforms lives. It is (despite the hugely overblown claims of “ex-gay therapy”) self-acceptance—that is, rejection of this deeply hostile framing—that is liberating. A reality that millions of same-sex attracted people can attest to: but, of course, according to classical natural law theory, none of that even counts.

The framing whose rejection is so liberating is one in which what is clearly a natural human variation, occurring in all human populations, becomes an unnatural variation, indeed an anti-nature variation. Who are outside, indeed against, God’s purposes. With all the contempt, brutality and subtle (and not so subtle) barbarities such a casting out involves.

This is, after all, not even remotely a mere theoretical point but brutal actuality, brutal history. The adoption of Philo’s “defining out of the properly human” normative essentialism was homicidal in its origins, homicidal in its history and (remains) homicidal in its implications. (Particularly given the Qur’an adopted the Philonic interpretation of the story of “Lut”, i.e. Lot and Sodom.) A normative essentialism that is not concerned with how people (actually) are, but how they are deemed to ought to be: a traditional version of the utopian barbarities that result from any war against people-as-they-are in the name of people-as-they-are-deemed-to-ought-to-be.

Given the reality of human nature as sexually diverse, societies and cultures have a range of options ranging from acceptance and incorporation of such diversity (i.e. defining people by their psyche) to denial and repression (i.e. defining people by their genitals). Human societies have evidenced every response in that range, with monotheist cultures all being down the denial-and-repression end. What Philo did was to develop a philosophical mechanism to justify an endless war against people-as-they-are in the name of people-as-they-are-deemed-to-ought-to-be. To say this has borne much evil fruit is an understatement. To say it wars against the second principle of Christianity is hardly less of one. But, then, Philo himself had no commitment whatsoever to that principle.

A repeatable mechanism
For here’s the thing. Once you have cast one group of people out of the circle of the properly human, out of the circle of one’s moral neighbours, the trick is extendable indefinitely. Having shown how Philo of Alexandria’s philosophy could be used so that the first principle of Christianity justified subverting the second—defining some group as so “offensive to God” they were no one’s moral neighbours—the trick could be, and was, used again and again. Especially as Philo included the notion that believers should continue to act against those who inspire God’s wrath.

The group it was used most infamously against was, of course, the Jews: Philo’s own people. For were they not the “Deicides”? The Killers of God-the-Son? The Chosen People who produced the Messiah and rejected Him? And so Christian Jew-hatred was away, with its brutal record of massacres, oppressions, expulsions and its constant attacks on the very humanity of Jews. With one of Philo’s most avid interpreters and adaptors, St John Chrysostom, patron saint of preachers, leading the charge (also here).

And down the ages, this horrid mechanism—so successfully pioneered by classical natural law thinking—was used again and again. Against “sodomites”. Against Jews. Against heretics and schismatics. It may have been a principle of Nazi ethics that:

Not everything with a human face is human

and that:

The Golden Rule applies only to your "racial comrades”
The Nazi Conscience (p.119)

but the notion that the properly human excluded actual humans was an idea that the classical natural law tradition brought into Christian thought right at the beginning.

When, in 1933, Achim Gercke, a Nazi interior ministry official, proclaimed that:

… only one ideal is humane, the promotion of the good and the elimination of what is bad. The will of Nature is God’s will. Just look around … Nature sides with the strong, the good and the fit and separates the chaff from the wheat. We fulfil her commandment. No more. No less.
The Nazi Conscience (p.166)

he was invoking a line of thought that goes back to Philo applying natural law thinking to turn Sodom and Gomorrah into God virtuously exterminating the morally quarantined, the morally “other”, the minority who are same-sex attracted—who, of course, were also victims of the Nazi killing machine.

So, yes, it really matters that classical natural law theorists such as Ed Feser define the properly human in a way that excludes actual humans. That human nature is defined in a singular way. That human ends are defined in a narrow and definitive way. That one adopts a normative, not a descriptive, essentialism. This is not a dry philosophical argument, it is one with huge consequences and implications,

Bigotry is moral
For it is crucial to realise that bigotry is always a moral claim: bigotry is a claim about the boundaries of the moral community. It is a claim about people’s status within the moral community. It never parades itself as bigotry, but as defending moral decency and the moral (and, usually, the social, and often the religious) order.

Jew-haters have always burned with their own sense of moral righteousness: the greater the hatred, the greater the righteousness. But that is true of all forms of bigotry, including queer-hatred.

For that is what is so subversive about the second principle of Christianity. It makes us all members of the moral community. Which is a real burden to priests, who, as “gatekeepers of righteousness”, police the boundaries of the moral community. Christ had quite a bit to say about that. There is something very apposite in the patron saint of preachers being such an avid spout of both queer-hatred and Jew-hatred.

And the same-sex oriented—a small minority of people, who grow up in other-sex oriented families and social milieus—are a very easy target. An excellent target to sell effortless virtue to the large majority who are not interested in sex with their own sex, so are required to give up nothing by the anathematising of same-sex activity. But effortless virtue is another persistent feature of bigotry: indeed, central to its appeal. Bigotry is both a moral claim and a moral indulgence. Hence the contemporary appeal of anti-gay rhetoric for televangelists and other hucksters of faith: the same appeal as anti-Jewish preaching had in previous centuries (and still does in the Islamic world).

The other-sex oriented majority give up nothing in the anathematisation of the same-sex activity. Nothing, except a great violence against fellow feeling; except genuine and full recognition of the humanity of the same-sex attracted: the recognition that the second principle of Christianity so strongly enjoins for all.

It really matters, to define some group as being outside the realm of the properly human. For years Christian (and particularly) Catholic apologists tried to excuse the Church from the horrors of the massacres of Jews on the grounds that Church doctrine said that was murder. After the Shoah and Vatican II, the Church realised that one cannot, century after century, make some group of humans profoundly morally problematic and then walk away from the (predictable and demonstrable) practical consequences of that.

Quite so. That is also a principle that is extendable.

The anathematisation of the same-sex oriented is, in no sense, philosophically compelled. Human nature exists, and it exists as sexually diverse. There is nothing that compels us to take a singular view of human nature, a narrow view of human ends, to define the properly human in a way that excludes actual humans, to slide from instances being closer or further from some category-standard to establishing that human ends trump human agency. Such is done in classical natural law thinking by sliding across different usages of concepts: from one sense of “good” to another, from one sense of “intentionality” to another, from human nature-as-is to human-nature-as-deemed-to-be, from nature-as-capacity to nature-as-compelling; from allowing the conclusion to set its own premises by setting its own boundaries of natural ends, and of the properly human.

Since the implications are so demonstrably noxious, and they are in no sense philosophically compelled, they should be abandoned. We should stop using the first principle of Christianity as a lever to subvert the second. We should stop using exclusory definitions of the human to subvert moral universalism. Ideas have consequences.

Problems with the normative essentialism of classical natural law theory 2b: Not being grounded in nature but convenient for doctrine

This is the second part of part two of a consideration of the problems with classical natural law moral theory, derived from Ed Feser’s admirably clear presentation of classical natural law property rights theory. Part one is here, the first part of part two is here. The concluding part three will be my next post.



What would the biological world look like if procreation was not the sole biological function of sex? If, for example, sex also had the functions of catharsis, pleasure and establishing and maintaining intense connection?

Then the capacity to perform those functions would exist beyond that needed for procreation. So the capacity to enjoy sexual pleasure, to experience catharsis, to establish intense connection would be much wider than that required for procreation: both in the sense of what actions performed those functions and in the sense of when those actions occurred and between whom.

We would observe in the natural world sexual acts that were not procreative—in form, in timing (i.e. would occur without both parties being fertile). These acts would clearly be functional: that is, they would fulfil various functions other than procreation. We would observe animals using tools to engage in non-procreative sexual acts. We would observe animals communicating to negotiate such acts.

Which is exactly what we do observe in the natural world, let alone the human one. The notion of a unitary function for sex is not based on what we observe in the natural world (even though, as we saw in the previous post, the Athenian, in Plato’s The Laws erroneously claimed it was). It is certainly not based on what we observe in the human world.

It is perfectly possible to agree that a sexual act between loving partners which conceives a child to be born and raised in love is the peak of what sex can achieve without it following that is the only aiming point which can justify sex. Without concluding that every single sexual act has to be aimed at that target, that sex only draws its justification from that highest possible achievement.

We certainly do not have to conclude that, for example, achieving procreation without love (for example, in a loveless marriage) is, by some huge moral gulf, profoundly better than a non-procreative sex act that expresses love such that the first is justifiable and the second is completely unjustifiable: which is the classical natural law position. To reach such a position, we must have some other reason to think that procreation is the only justifiable reason for sex.

We may, for example, want to maximise the number of soldiers and workers being born. (This seems to have been the Aztec justification for banning same-sex activity: one shared with Leninist and Nazi regimes.) Or we may think that sex is inherently problematic: so inherently problematic that only such a wonder as procreation can justify it.

Monotheism’s sex nervousness
Which is the position the Catholic thinkers in particular tended to maintain, part of a general monotheist insistence on procreation as the sole justification for sex. Clement of Alexandria, for example, thought that sex not intended for procreation “outraged nature” and that (also here):

... pleasure sought for its own, even within the marriage bonds, is a sin and contrary both to law and reason.

St Augustine of Hippo and Pope Gregory the Great:

“... conjugal union cannot take place without conjugal pleasure, and such pleasure cannot under any circumstances be without blame”
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage: A History (p.86)

echoed St Clement’s sentiments. The great medieval Jewish philosopher Maimondes argued that circumcision was beneficial because it reduced sexual pleasure.

Monotheism is the worship of the One God who is singular, so not of an active sexuality. Sexual activity is not part of the divine. On the contrary, sex is that which most distinguishes humans from God; it is what makes us most unlike God, and so (it is natural to feel) is what most divides us from God.
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Polytheists—with their Gods and Goddesses in sexual unions—might think sex can bring us closer to the divine: for monotheists, not so. On the contrary, sex is naturally conceived as a dangerous and distracting differentiation from the divine, particularly (as we have seen) its pleasure function. Hence also the general monotheist sense of sex and its products (such as semen and menstruation) being unclean, impure, polluting and the strong nudity taboos of monotheism, hiding those theologically disturbing genitals. Which are not made in the image of God. (With male genitals being particularly disturbing since males had authority from being more like God, yet the penis proclaimed and embodied difference and distance from God.)

ASIDE The pervasive misogyny of worship of the sexless—but conceived-as-masculine—One God is hardly surprising. The combination of only males making decisions on doctrine with sex being deeply problematic was bound to be bad news for women. It is no accident that the New Testament figure most concerned about sex and gender—St Paul—is its sole purveyor of misogyny and anathematisation of same-sex activity. While the monotheist insistence on a unitary moral order—and full inclusion of women as moral beings in that order—had benefits for the status of women (even within St Paul’s writings: part of his pervasive inconsistency) that provided only a partial counterpoint to the aforementioned deep pattern: particularly obvious in Patristic writings.

And the universalism of natural law thought combined with the universalism of Pauline Christianity also acted to anathematise same-sex activity between women (St Paul provides the only Scriptural reference to such), something the Old Testament and Talmudic law had not done.END ASIDE

The non-sexualised nature of the One God made for very clear differences between One God worship and the sexualised deities of polytheism. In the Apostolic references to the story of Sodom, Jude 1:6-8 alludes to the evil of sex with angels (i.e. divine beings), emphasizing the rejection of sexualized conceptions of the divine. In 2 Peter 2:4-7 the story of Sodom—a city labeled “ungodly” and “lawless”—is one of a list of cases of God’s punishment, a list which starts with the punishment of sinning angels (i.e. divine beings behaving badly), part of a general denunciation of false conceptions of the divine based on the inflaming of sensual lusts. St Paul may be alluding to the Sodom story in Romans 1:24-27, but even then St Paul’s central concern in that passage is with idolatry and its consequences.

Preaching in pagan empire where polytheistic religious beliefs very much saw sex as part of the divine—even as a way of connecting to the divine—emphasizing how transcendent, how not-sexed, God was differentiated the message of the Risen Christ very clearly from pagan belief. Just as the Hebrew strictures (Deuteronomy 23:17, I Kings 14:24, I Kings 22:46, II Kings 23:7) which forbid male (and, in the case of the first, also female) temple prostitution differentiated Hebrews as worshippers of solitary Yahweh from the surrounding polytheists. (Crompton argues that, as there were no female-to-female temple prostitution, female-to-female sex was not banned because it raised no issues of defining Yahweh worshippers. It also did not involve “lowering” men to a woman’s role.) As noted in my previous post, Philo of Alexandria was particularly horrified by public parades by effeminate priests of polytheistic deities. Contemporary African Christianity also struggles against animistic and polytheistic traditions with highly sexualised conceptions of the divine, which no doubt helps explain why it tends to notoriously uphold a very sexually restrictive view of Christianity.

But God is God the Creator. So the only aspect of sex that has any connection to God is the procreative function. So sex can only be justified if it is procreative (or, at least, links procreators). Thus we have Jewish writer Josephus writing in the first century:

The Law recognizes no sexual connection except the natural union of man and wife, and that only for the procreation of children. The sexual connection of males with males it abhors, and it punishes any guilty of such an offense with death. ... The Law orders all offspring to be brought up, and forbids women either to cause abortion or to make away with the foetus; a woman convicted of this is regarded as an infanticide, because she destroys a soul and diminishes the race.

With Catholic natural law theology being particularly intense in its narrowing down of permissible sex. But it is simply a particularly intense manifestation of a wider pattern that owes nothing to natural law theory per se but does make sexually restrictive construal of natural law theory congenial: particularly, that procreation is what justifies sex. Just as, over time, the wider pattern of worship of the sexless One God made sexually restrictive construal of the Word of God congenial. If the pleasure function is given any positive role, it is only by being completely subordinated to the reproductive function.

A wider pattern that leaves no place for the same-sex oriented. The same-sex oriented do not connect to anything of the divine. So their sexual activity become demonic in Zoroastrianism—in the words of the Vendidad:

The man that lies with mankind as man lies with womankind, or as woman lies with mankind, is the man that is a Daeva [demon]; this one is the man that is a worshipper of the Daevas, that is a male paramour of the Daevas

—an abomination in Leviticus; an unnatural sinfulness in St Paul; a wanton indecency which ignores limits in the Qur’an.

For the peak of construing the sin of Sodom as male-to-male sex is reached in Islam, where it is given Scriptural authority. The story of Lut (Lot) is much referred to in the Qur’an. While Sura 11: 77-82 is fairly close to Genesis 19, the other references— Sura 7: 80-84, Sura 26: 160-172, Sura 27: 54-58, Sura 29: 28-37—characterise the great sin of Sodom as being man-to-man sex. Sura 7 and 29 even claim that the men of Sodom invented sex between men. Which takes Jewish and Christian commentary on the sin of Sodom further still by placing it in Scripture, making it the direct word of God. One manifestation of the way Islam appropriates the Jewish (and Christian) prophetic tradition and reworks it.

Islam provides some revealing complexities. Being a religion of conquest whose precepts clearly sanctioned Muslim (male) conquerors enjoying the fruits (including the sexual ones) of conquest encouraged some leeway, particularly with slaves or other lower-status males. The segregation of woman also encouraged same-sex affection and activity (as it still does; Saudi Arabia is particularly notorious for the level of homosexual activity). While a hadith (tradition) of the Prophet held that:

… he who loves and remains chaste and conceals his secret and dies, dies a martyr.

This romantic martyrdom provided a sanction both for deeply religious poetry extolling contemplation of a beautiful (male) beloved as a path to the divine and for more secular poetic celebrations of male love. (Some examples here: that the classic line from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse, and Thou

refers, in the ‘thou’, to a wine boy is an example of the “queerness in plain sight” which occurs in literary culture.) Hence Islam—with enduring similarities to the social circumstances of classical Greece—was notoriously more relaxed about same-sex affection and activity than Christendom. Until the abolition of slavery and legal dhimmitude (and so there were no longer males of safely lower status, with the partial exception of visiting Westerners) and the increasing appeal of defining itself against the West—such as resorting to a narrow Qur’anic literalism and a sense of religious superiority—led to more brutal policies.

The answer to writer and MP William Beckford’s question—provoked by a 1816 hanging of a “sodomite”:

I should like to know what kind of deity they fancy they are placating with these shocking human sacrifices.

is a creative-but-unsexual One with a penchant for wrathful extermination based on sexual horror. To the extent that, The Golden Legend tells us, He required human slaughter to Incarnate. A notion that the Aztecs—also great judicial killers of the same-sex active on the grounds that it distracted men from performing their reproductive duty to breed children for the state (though there is some dispute about the translation of the relevant Aztec texts and the Aztecs do seem to have had some religiously-sanctioned same-sex activity)—would entirely understand. (That all monotheisms anathematise same-sex activity does not mean that all anathematising of same-sex activity is monotheist: though historically most of it has been.)

Clearly, monotheism does not need natural law theory to justify anathematising same-sex activity. The prohibitions in both Leviticus and the Vendidad well predate the development of natural law theory. But natural law theory certainly aided it and gave it extra power: it is the source, as I discuss further in the next post, via Philo of Alexandria, for the reading of Genesis 19 as being all about God’s horror at sex being of the wrong form.

Once you are committed to the great sin of Sodom being not violence against guests, not rape, not contempt for the servants of the Lord, but male-to-male sex (indeed, particularly anal sex), then you are committed to two men having sex together is worse than a man raping a woman. Which, being deeply logical thinkers, St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas both grasped; hence the ranking of sexual sin in the Summa Theologica so that sin against form is worse than a sin against people, Aquinas citing St Augustine on Sodom in support. Acceptance of Philo’s interpretation of the story of Sodom gave same-sex activity its grave metaphysical import.

And natural law theory in the hands of Philo and his later adapters could do that because of the malleability of classical natural law’s normative essentialism: its ability to draw conclusions based on citing what bits of how the world are convenient for its conclusions and dismissing as “improper” those bits that are not. With very grim consequences for a small and vulnerable human minority—those attracted to members of their own sex; but, as we shall see in my next and concluding post, not only for them.

Problems with the normative essentialism of classical natural law theory 2a: Ignorant confidence and selecting premises

This is the second part of a consideration of the problems with classical natural law moral theory, derived from Ed Feser’s admirably clear presentation of classical natural law property rights theory. Part one is in my previous post, the second section of this part is my next post, with the concluding part three in the following post.


One of the perennial difficulties with classical natural law theory is that practitioners often does not have the background knowledge the theory requires given the importance put on the ends, the functions (understood as purposes), of things. St Paul, for example, comments on the purpose of human hair when he was simply not in a position to know the biological function of hair. So what he does is turn the presumptions of his own culture into “the nature of things”:

Judge for yourselves: Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For long hair is given to her as a covering.

This problem with knowledge and premature essentialism is somewhat on display when Feser writes:

Suffice it to say that classical natural law theory rejects the classical liberal idea that the state is artificial, a product of human convention, and regards it instead as a natural institution to which we owe allegiance whether or not we consent to it.

The state is a contingent historical creation. Rulership is, if anything, more common (it is certainly historically prior: central to the difficulties in Afghanistan is a legacy of long experience of rulership, little of a genuine state). The term ‘natural’ is not helpful nor apposite here.

One of the hardy perennial problems with natural law theory is how ‘natural’ often turns into ‘what I am comfortable with’ and/or ‘what I know about’. This follows in part from natural law theory requiring knowledge that people often simply do not have. But, given approved human ends, and approved concepts of the nature—thus proper use of things—are such an essential part of the moral system, and have such power in it, where else are people going to appeal to than what they are comfortable with and used to? St Gerald of Aurillac coming across a woman working in the fields and, when he found that her husband was sick and the work needed to be done, giving her money to engage a day labourer because:

... women should not do the work of men, for God has a horror of what is against nature

was doing exactly what comes naturally to classical natural law thinking. As was St Paul.

This difficulty goes right back to the origins of classical natural law thinking. The claim that sex that was not procreative was “against nature” comes from the Athenian in Plato’s The Laws who claims:

If we were to follow in nature's steps and enact that law which held good before the days of Laïus, declaring that it is right to refrain from indulging in the same kind of intercourse with men and boys as with women, and adducing as evidence thereof the nature of wild beasts, and pointing out how male does not touch male for this purpose, since it is unnatural …

And further that:

… our citizens must not be worse than fowls and many other animals which are produced in large broods, and which live chaste and celibate lives without sexual intercourse until they arrive at the age for breeding; and when they reach this age they pair off, as instinct moves them, male with female and female with male; and thereafter they live in a way that is holy and just, remaining constant to their first contracts of love: surely our citizens should at least be better than these animals.

It is now common knowledge that nature uses a vast variety of mating and offspring-raising strategies. Hence selecting some for praise, and others for rejection, exposes your assumptions, not anything in nature, which provides no such grounding. (The same as citing some passages in Leviticus and ignoring others—including the ones which require all its laws to be followed—tells us about your premises and grounds nothing in Leviticus as such, but in the criteria used for such selection.)

Not only is there a vast diversity in nature, this diversity includes a lot of queer behaviour:

Animals of the same sex build nests and homes together, and many homosexual pairs raise young without members of the opposite sex. Other animals regularly have partners of both sexes, and some even live in communal groups where sexual activity is common among all members, male and female. Many creatures are “transgendered,” crossing or combining characteristics of both males and females in their appearance and behaviour. Amid this incredible variety of different patterns, one thing is certain: the animal kingdom is definitely not just heterosexual. …
On every continent, animals of the same sex seek each other out and have probably been doing so for millions of years. They court each other, using intricate and beautiful mating dances that are the result of eons of evolution. Males caress and kiss each other, showing tenderness and affection towards one another rather than just hostility and aggression. Females form long-lasting pair-bonds—or maybe just meet briefly for sex, rolling in passionate embraces or mounting one another.
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance (Pp9-12).

The Athenian is simply wrong in his claims of descriptive essentialism about sex and that leaves his normative essentialism without any grounding. It would be like holding that jaws and teeth only have the function of eating while ignoring their uses for fighting. Some of the biological reality of sex counts, and the rest does not, but there is nothing in how things actually are that grounds that setting of boundaries. Indeed, the argument is circular, since the “wrong” cases are excluded on the basis of inferences from how things are which excludes those cases. The pleasurable, cathartic and connection-expressing roles of sex are every bit part of its biological reality as procreation: indeed, more so, since they are more common.

If one responds to the sort of point that Bagemihl makes here:

… the only claim about naturalness that is actually consistent with the facts is the following: homosexual behaviour is as natural as heterosexual behaviour. What this means is that homosexuality is found in virtually all animal groups, in virtually all geopgrahic areas and time periods and in a wide variety of forms.
Biological Exuberance (p.78).

with the rejoinder ‘but that is not the same sense of ‘natural’, the answer is “yes, exactly”. And because it is not, the claims based on it are grounded in nothing but its own conclusions.

Hence St Gerald’s and St Paul’s ignorance of other cultural patterns, and the Athenian’s ignorance of biological reality, did not stop them happily applying natural law reasoning. This is because all you need to do so is the conclusion you want and the ability to frame the available evidence appropriately by concentrating on the use that is convenient for your conclusion. Because it is a normative essentialism, with a single view of natures (including human nature), according to a single set of ends, one can just set the boundaries of “what counts” so as to exclude inconvenient cases—any such just become “improper” instances. The conclusion gets to select its own premises: the utility of this for defending religious doctrine is obvious.
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In particular, it was ideal for Philo of Alexandria (of whom more in the next post), and his later adaptors, to express and justify monotheistic nervousness over sex. (A nervousness so intense that death was deemed an appropriate penalty for engaging in the wrong “form” of sex: justifying this, and attendant barbarities, on the grounds of a commitment to “human flourishing” has to be one of the viler perversions of philosophy.) Hence Philo’s characterisation, in On Abraman, of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as being God-the-virtuous-exterminator enforcing boundaries about the form of sex according to sex’s alleged single purpose of procreation:

But God, moved by pity for mankind whose Saviour and Lover He was, gave increase in the greatest possible degree to the unions which men and women naturally make for begetting children, but abominated and extinguished this unnatural and forbidden intercourse, and those who lusted for such He cast forth and chastised with punishments not of the usual kind but startling and extraordinary, newly created for this purpose.

A monotheistic nervousness that St Paul then expresses, such as in Romans 1:26-27:

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.

(The last phrase in particular is very Philonic.) One can seize on one manifestation of sex (procreation), dismiss the rest, and claim that establishes what is “natural”. But that is a normative essentialism grounded in nothing but the exclusion it seeks to justify. It is the Leviticus problem all over again: the grounding is in the criteria of exclusion, not in the thereby selected. Not in the nature of things.

A criteria what was then, of course, applied as the criteria of justification for selecting bits of Leviticus, and not others, to be deemed to have continuing authority. To transfer such homicidal anthematisation on the basis of the form of sex across from the Old Testament Covenant to the new Christian Covenant (about which I will also have more to say in the next post).

The history of Catholic debates over usury demonstrates the malleability of natural law reasoning. Scripture damns usury (Nehemiah 5:7-12, Psalm 15:4-5, Ezekiel 18:16-18 & Ezekiel 22:11-13). Operating in the way classical natural law theory does—start with the conclusion (usury is wrong) and then work back to the construing of form and purpose which gets the desired result—money, as round bits of metal, was deemed inherently sterile. So clearly it was improper to pretend it was generative. Which is what charging interest clearly did, so charging interest was usury and wrong. Alternatively, the primary legitimate function was exchange, so interest violated money’s nature as a medium of exchange and so is wrong. The crucial criteria are construed quite differently: what they have in common is providing the correct (pre-determined) conclusion.

Nor was this done by minor thinkers: the notion that money is barren (and so charging interest is unnatural) and that returning money with interest violates its function as a medium of exchange both come from Aristotle, who wrote:

The most hated sort (of wealth getting) and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest. And this term interest (tokos), which means the birth of money from money is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent.
Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most unnatural." (1258b POLITICS)

The notion that usury was use against money’s natural end as a medium of exchange was endorsed by Aquinas, who wrote:

To take usury for the lending of money is in itself unjust, because it is a case of selling what is non-existent; and that is manifestly the setting up of an inequality contrary to justice. …
Now according to the Philosopher (Aristotle), money was invented principally for the effecting of exchanges; and thus the proper and principal use of money is the consumption or disbursal of it, according as it is expended on exchanges. …
But compensation is given him according to the equality of justice, if the exact amount is returned to him that he has lent. Hence if he exacts more for the use of a thing that has no other use than the consumption of the substance, he exacts a price for that which has no existence, and so the exaction is unjust.

Alas, a blanket ban on interest got in the way of the interests of the Papacy (and of merchants), so things were adjusted over time. Time, risk, use and labour were all admitted to be relevant when Pope Leo X ruled on the matter in the bull Inter multiplices (1515). The purposes of people as users of money are clearly what drove the shift in moral evaluation.

Besides, it was a wrong-headed way to conceive of money. It is indeed a purpose, an intended function, of coin to facilitate exchange (and payment of taxes). Coins are deliberately given a form that makes them as unchanging as possible. (Coins are ridged, for example, to discourage clipping.) The more unchanging the form, the better coins serve productive purposes. Interest does not flow from some perverse pretend generative property from round bits of metal or from “misuse” of their role as media of exchange but the wider context in which those round bits of metal (or notes of paper or plastic, or electronic entries) are used. To focus on their physical form, or their immediate use, in such a way is absurdly reductionist. The inference from form, and even use, turned out to be fallacious. What matters is the human purposes in the creation and uses of money (as the Papacy effectively acknowledged in the 1515 Bull).

A descriptive essentialism is grounded in how things are. A normative essentialism is not, since it is normative precisely because it excludes some of what it is. But how is this boundary of exclusion set? The original claim about sex having, by nature, a purely procreative function was based on a claim about how nature (in the sense of non-human animals) actually was. But as a description of biological reality, that claim is simply false. So, if the boundaries of “proper” nature are not set by what exists, what is it set by? A claim about ends and purpose. But an ungrounded claim about ends and purpose for it requires some separation of legitimate from illegitimate ends which is not derived from how things are but from how some thing are: where the boundary is set by the conclusion, so cannot be the justification of it.

The metaphysical argument that the sole (legitimate) end of sex is procreation is that procreation is the final cause of sex, the reason it came into existence. But this is a very pre-Darwinian concept of biological function, as it makes the discovery of new uses of things somehow illegitimate. Sex may have come into existence for procreation, but once it has come into existence, new uses can be found (and clearly have been). Operate long enough, and they can result in new forms. But the forms do not determine the use, the use selects for the forms—it is basic to natural selection that something can evolve into a new thing. That is, after all, how fins turned into legs turned into the hands that write texts, hold books and operate computers. Just as one of the features of agency is that it can find new uses for things.

As an aside, that we live in a technologically dynamic civilisation, where new uses are discovered for things all the time, and new perspectives on existing things, as well as a post-Darwin intellectual world, seems to be to be part of the explanation of why the broader metaphysics of classical natural law theory are a bit hard for modern minds, even modern philosophers, to get their heads around. (Something Feser, typically quite legitimately, regularly complains about.)

That we live in democratic, commercial and culturally diverse societies also has some effect. Unless one is committed to certain religious framings, it becomes increasingly natural to treat the diversity of people as just how things are. Including a generalised, consent-based, respect for human agency. By contrast, to claim that a set of ends is greater than any human who instances them; indeed that a particular end (such as sex-is-only-for-procreation) is greater than the human who instances it, is to crush the greater into the service of the lesser. Which is why it leaves such misery and barbarity behind it and why its social plausibility is fading. Except among those where God is waved to shore up the claim (see my next post).

Returning to Feser’s arguments, any attempt to set the boundaries of proper and improper as per normative essentialism cannot be grounded in the existence of final causes, no more than Locke can ground moral claims in something being God’s property, for just as if anything is God’s property, everything is, so if any causal sequence has final causes, they all do. Nor can the notion of flourishing do the trick, since in the cacophony of biological reality, there is most emphatically no harmony of flourishing: no inherent border between the flourishing that counts and the flourishing that does not. We are perfectly ready to sacrifice the flourishing of a pig, and the leg whose original biological function was to move the pig around, to the human purpose of providing ham.

Criteria of judgement cannot be grounded in what they, themselves, judge. This is a clear sense in which one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.

For the final-causes-that-are do not tell us which causal sequences are proper just as the flourishings-that-are do not tell us which flourishings are desirable.