About modernism

Christopher I. Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present in a history of central Eurasia that anyone interested in the wider patterns of world history will profit from reading. It is a book with the “barbarians”, the steppe nomads, at the centre. In reconfiguring Eurasian history Beckwith, almost as an afterthought, puts European imperialism in the context of Eurasian history far better than anyone else I have read—even those who were deliberately, even ostentatiously, trying to do so.

I will have more to say about Empires of the Silk Road in a later post. It is Beckwith’s specific analysis of Modernism that interests me here.

In his preface, Beckwith has a wonderful denunciation of the effects of Post-modernism, particularly on historiography. He puts this denunciation in the context of a wider critique of Modernism that is developed later in the last two chapters of the book and associated endnotes. When one first comes across the brief gesture about Modernism, it is intriguing, especially when he casts religious fundamentalism as a manifestation of Modernism (p.x, n8).

Modernism one notes, not modernity.

Beckwith writes:

According to the Modernist perspective, the old must always, unceasingly, be replaced by the new, thus producing permanent revolution. The Postmodernist point of view, the logical development of Modernism, rejects what it call the positivist, essentially non-Modern practice of evaluating problems or objects according to specific agreed criteria. Instead, Postmodernists consider all judgements to be relative. “In our post-modern age, we can no longer take recourse to [sic] the myth of ‘objectivity’” (p.ix).

Beckwith is not having this, and is wonderfully scathing in explaining why.

Beckwith stands, instead, with the view Norman Geras defended when he wrote:

If there is no truth, there is no injustice. Stated less simplistically, if truth is wholly relativized or internalized to particular discourses or language games or social practices, there is no injustice. The victims and protesters of any putative injustice are deprived of their last and often best weapon, that of telling what really happened. They can only tell their story, which is something else. Morally and politically, therefore, anything goes.

Beckwith thinks a profound historiographical injustice (and plenty of historical ones) has been visited on the “barbarians” and he is very firm that the weapon to reveal and correct this injustice is the truth of what happened, to be determined by careful scholarship.

Good on him.

Beckwith comes across as a particularly grumpy version (when he is letting fly) adherent of the sceptical Enlightenment—the stream of thought that holds that human nature exists, is remarkably constant across time and we need to apply our reason to understand ourselves and history in that light:

The consistency of human behaviour over such great expanses of space and time can clearly be due only to our common genetic heritage. Viewed from the perspective of Eurasian history over the past four millennia, there does not seem to me to be any significant difference between the default underlying human socio-political structure during this time period—that is, down to the present day—and that of primates in general. The Alpha Male Hierarchy is our system too, regardless of whatever cosmetics have been applied to hide it. To put it another way, in my opinion the Modern political system is in fact simply a disguised primate-type hierarchy, and as such is not essentially different from any other political system human primates have dreamed up (p.xi)

Not one for democratic triumphalism, then.

At the end of Empires of the Silk Road, in Chapters 11 and 12, Beckwith returns to his critique of modernism in much more detail, explaining what he means:

The core idea of Modernism is simple, and seems harmless enough by itself: what is modern—new and fashionable—is better than what it replaced. … But Modernism was not merely a finite sequence in which something new (the industrial and urban) replaced something old (the aristocratic and rural) and that was that. If only what is new is good, it is by definition necessary to continually create or do new things. Full-blown Modernism meant, and still means, permanent revolution: continuous rejection of the traditional or immediately preceding political, social, artistic, and intellectual order.
Permanent revolution meant that what went before, including any previous evolution (and its products), was bad and had to be rejected. Even Reason—free enquiry, independent thinking, logic, questioning—was identified as one of the old ideas and practices of old aristocratic intellectuals (p.289).

He regards “religious-political fundamentalism” as “a particularly pernicious form of Modern populism” (p.289 n.69).

Beckwith puts the blame within the Enlightenment, specifically the ideas flowing from Rousseau (p.290). Which is to say, the radical Enlightenment, the stream of thought focused on the notion that even humanity itself could be transformed by human action. For if human nature is regarded as a constant, then there are lessons and value to be had from past experience. But if human nature itself is a work-in-progress, then the past is just the dross arising from fettered or untransformed humanity. The sceptical Enlightenment constructs the US Constitution based on a “failure analysis” of past republics. The radical Enlightenment produces Leninism, whose ultimate evolution (and stunting of the human) we can see in North Korea and its society of “racist dwarves”.

Beckwith sees Central Eurasia as suffering with particular intensity from the impact of Modernism, hence his concern. He deals at some length with the effect of Modernism on the arts because:

Even after the worst of the terror was over, Modernism in the arts continued to spread across Central Eurasia, especially via architecture, because the foreign rulers tore down traditional Central Eurasian-style buildings and replaced them with Modern buildings. The physical appearance of Central Eurasian cities changed drastically, and the cultural heritage of the region was impoverished accordingly (p.289, n68).

He sees Modernism not as a mere wrong turn in culture, art and appreciation of beauty but an attack on, and denial of, culture, art and beauty: as things rooted in, and carrying truths across, time. For Modernism, the new is always better, it is always more “truthful”. But the notion that there is no truth, beauty, knowledge or understanding embodied in the past which can be as powerful and profound, or more so, than new productions, is a nonsense that can only be sustained by attacking the very notions of truth, of beauty, of art and of culture. Beckwith’s claim that Postmodernism is just a hyper manifestation of Modernism (p.317, n26) seems to get to the heart of what is going on.

Beckwith’s claim that religious fundamentalism is a form of Modernism seems a bit odd at first, until one realises that religious fundamentalism is typically a rejection of evolved religious tradition in favour of the revealed Word. Its adherents essentially claim a direct connection to truth, one that is outside time and so remakes the faith, and the world, anew. Fundamentalism also includes attacks on science: thus on reason and truth applied to the world as it is, rather than as it is imagined it could be. That Christian fundamentalists build churches that are typically very Modernist in style is more indicative than one might think.

Beckwith sees the consequences of the French Revolution, the development of mass warfare, the industrial revolution and its accompanying urbanisation as leading to Modernism by undermining the social carriers of traditional ideas (p.292). As he writes:

The socio-political stripping of the elite aristocracy’s hierarchical position above ordinary “commoners” and the institution of populism was thus mirrored in intellectual and artistic life by the elimination of the dichotomy between the elite, which strived for perfection, and the ordinary, which strived for the commonplace (p.293).

This leads to an extended denunciation of the effects of Modernism on arts and culture (Pp293-301) even more extensive and scathing than his early critique of Postmodernism in scholarship. The reason for his passion seems clear enough in his concluding statement:

By the end of the twentieth century, the evil done in the name of Modernism and “progress” left Central Eurasians bereft of much of their past (p.301).

Which Beckwith holds a great injustice: his book is very much about reclaiming that past for the peoples of Central Eurasia. The concluding Epilogue of Empires of the Silk Road is a sustained attack on the notion of “barbarian”.

Reading this passionate attack on Modernism—including populism—I have a worry that the book will not have the influence and impact it deserves since these views are so dreadfully unfashionable: particularly as Beckwith’s rejection of modern “democracy” (as he invariably shudder quotes it) is so sweeping. There are definite indications of that being a problem among the comments on Amazon.com on the book.

Why Modernism?
It is worth taking a step back and asking what is the attraction of Modernism and populism.

Part of it, surely, is that there has been an immense expansion of human understanding and capacity. The notion that there was more truth in the new and to be had in the future was far from a silly thing. Even in ordinary life, there were lots of new things that just worked.

Much of these new understandings did call into question a wide range of past apparent verities. Starting with the impact of Charles Darwin’s analysis of biological existence and the acceptance of geological and cosmological time of millions and billions of years rather than scriptural time of thousands of years.

As human capacities expanded, so the possibilities down the social order expanded. Much of the history of the last couple of centuries is driven by the way the expanding circle of social capacity became an expanding circle of social engagement and involvement. People could do much more for themselves, either directly or through their chosen agents.

Some form of “populism” was surely inevitable. Beckwith’s tendency to let various monarchies off rather lightly—notably, the last Shah’s regime in Iran and the role of the Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Romanov dynastic regimes in the outbreak of World War One—seems to result from him being too aware of the downside of the new and not enough of the failures of the existing.

Which is not to deny that there was a great deal of destruction of what was still valuable, true, valid, viable and so on, in the name of things that turned out to be none of these things. The dreadful idea that human nature itself was being, or could be, transformed by all this—the wars against humans as-they-are in the name of humans as they were deemed-to-ought-to-be—led to all sorts of horrors.

Expanding capacity could certainly expand faster than sense, understanding, institutions, norms could keep up with, and did. But avoiding changes in politics that involved and engaged the mass of the population was surely unavoidable. The only live question was whether this would be done well or badly. Often it was done badly: sometimes megacidally badly. We are still in a collective learning process that is by no means complete.

That much of the intellectual classes have embraced ideas that elevate themselves has meant that their role has often been useless or actively disastrous in all this. The desire to seem “cutting edge” and superior to the mass society around them have made the seductions of Modernism very appealing. They are often the last people to think helpfully about what is going on and how it could genuinely be done better.

But it would be wrong to see Beckwith as some grumpy reactionary. He finds hope in popular music (including rock music) as new art forms unpolluted by the Modernism of the academy and the intellectual, artistic and literary elite. As he writes:

Although it is not yet possible to call it “high” art, at least it really is music; perhaps one day it will develop into an elite art (p.318)

Among the bright lights he includes:

… technologically the Internet, which has had a powerful enlightening influence (p.319).

He sees hope in new art and art forms because they are art, where ‘new’ is just an adjective (p.318).

Beckwith’s discussion of Modernism, however passionate, is only a small part of the effort in historical reappraisal involved in Empires of the Silk Road. But it has implications much wider than his specific subject matter and makes one look at our own societies, and the wider trends of human history, in a more critically enlightened way.

Intellectual property

This expands a comment I made here. Skepticlawyer herself kindly looked over it, so I have incorporated her longer comments (slightly edited so they agree in audience) as indented quotes.


Intellectual property (IP) comes in three basic forms: trademarks, which are a form of branding and operate as long as they are being commercially used; patents, which operate for limited times (typically 20 years or less); and copyright, which lasts for the lifetime of the artist plus some period (now 70 years).

I once heard Kenneth Arrow say in a lecture that he could never resolve his thoughts on intellectual property because he could not determine how to balance that before the fact, we want to encourage people to create things, but after the fact we want as much access as possible to maximize the benefit gained from the thing created. Since the benefit from disseminating the knowledge protected by patents is the most extensive (in both scale and scope), it is hardly surprising that they have the shortest lifespan of the forms of intellectual property. Since trademarks are a form of labelling—so their wrongful use is typically straightforward fraud, pretending to be something you are not—it is hardly surprising they last as long as the brand is operative. They are still a form of IP, since they invoke reputation (and other associations), but a fairly unproblematic form of IP.

But the dilemma Arrow pointed to is, in a sense, true of anything useful that we create. What makes intellectual property distinctive is:
(1) use of the created thing can occur, repeatedly, without degrading the thing itself; and
(2) it is hard to block access to the thing created once it is in the public space.
Note that neither point is as simple as saying they are non-rivalrous (though they generally are) and non-excludable (though exclusion is typically difficult): i.e. are public goods.

Skepticlawyer comments:
Not always public goods, but almost always non-rivalrous; club goods are also non-rivalrous.

Where IP is non-rivalrous but at least somewhat excludable, they are club goods. But an odd sort of club, since the only benefit of being in the “club” is avoiding legal hassles. That is, “membership” only involves use of the IP that is entirely usable without the “club”. The more difficult exclusion is, the more salient that is.

To see the implications of non-degradability, suppose someone clears land for a farm that proves highly productive. Allowing anyone to use that farm however they liked would quickly degrade the farm. We would lose the benefit of the thing created, even without considering the disastrous incentives created to not engage in difficult productive activity.

But if someone composes a song, then any number of people can play or listen to the song without it being in anyway degraded. On the contrary, that people use it “keeps it alive”.

Even the issue of the incentive to create is not quite the same in both cases, since the author can get kudos from the repeated use of his or her work. Though the issue of degradation is not entirely absent: copyright can protect vulnerable contributors to (for example) a documentary.

It is relatively easy to stop outsiders degrading the farm: one can fence the farm, the borders can be marked and the normal processes of the law used to protect the physical boundaries. There are marked boundaries, physical barriers and legal recourse: the latter is more effective the easier trespass is to identify. For then it is more likely to be prosecuted while such prosecution will be less needed the more widespread is respect for delineated boundaries (which likelihood of prosecution can, of course, further encourage).

Property rights depend quite fundamentally on the existence of a general willingness to abide by them and sufficiently effective legal recourse to back them up, as well as sufficient clarity in boundaries that they can be usefully enforced and easily respected. Hence the legal concept (laches) that one can lose rights by not exercising them: if you do not take a boundary seriously, why should anyone else? (Or even, in some circumstances, know they are there.)
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Intellectual property has real boundary (and other) problems. It is a lot easier to put fences around a farm than around a song or the knowledge of how to do something. The farm is a singular physical thing. A song is an arrangement of things that can be repeated any number of times. (To be somewhat Aristotelian about it, the farm is property in a thing, owning a song is property in the form of a thing that can have any number of instances.) Copyright is about controlling copy right, after all.

Skepticlawyer comments:
This touches on the point that armacny raised in comments: there are fundamental differences between corporeal property and non-corporeal property—choses in possession as opposed to choses in action. IP law—in certain crucial respects—tries to treat the two as identical, but they are not; the differences, while subtle, bleed out everywhere in practice.

Identifying trespass on a farm is policing a specific physical space. Identifying trespass on a song requires policing public and private spaces in general. A farm has a clear boundary: what level of commonality in arrangement of things constitutes intellectual trespass is a lot more unclear. (Such as deciding a common 10-note sequence constitutes “use” and thus trespass and so chargeable use—since it is the power to block usage which gives one something to charge for doing or not doing.) Identifying and policing boundaries is far more difficult for intellectual property than ordinary property. Though trademarks are easier to deal with than patents or copyright, since trademarks are in regular use on physical things.

Which means, of course, that it relies a lot more on the formal structure of enforcement (courts) and informal structures of enforcement (respect by individuals) primarily because the legal property rights align so poorly with economic property rights (control of the thing). So much so, that what is surprising is not that there are difficulties with intellectual property, but that the idea has any legs at all.

Revealingly, it seems to have legs in direct proportion to clarity of boundaries, difficulty of access and balance of benefits. TV stations, cinemas, books and other “hard copy” materials are relatively straightforward for intellectual property since they are so public in operation. The operators are also very much in the business of dealing with intellectual property as both beneficiaries and potential transgressors, so they have counterbalancing incentives. That they can operate intellectual property regimes is not surprising. Indeed, the main role of the state may well be to cut down on transaction costs by providing a single set of rules plus dispute resolution tribunals.

Manufacturing patents are in a somewhat similar situation. The main exception being where incentives are very one-sided. So we would expect poor attention to intellectual property by countries whose manufacturers are far more users of intellectual property than creators of it. Places such as China or Pakistan, for example.

Skepticlawyer comments:
Bit of IP history people may find amusing: the USA was notorious for abusing intellectual property in the 18th and 19th centuries; they were constantly doing to European inventors then what China is doing to American inventors now. This even overspilled into literature, and was still going on in the 20th century. That’s why there were so many ‘pirate’ US editions of Lord of the Rings and practically the whole oeuvre of such noted authors as George Eliot and Charles Dickens—something that annoyed both Eliot and Dickens no end, as they were probably the two most successful novelists in the world at that point.

There is a not dissimilar pattern with respect to strong and weak interpretations of international law: C19th US was all for strong interpretations of international law. Post 1945 US, not so much.

The rise of computers and the internet make intellectual property (specifically copyright) issues much trickier because it means that use is far less public, far more decentralized and private, so much harder to spot. We also get far more people who are direct users of intellectual property but not creators of it, so have little incentive to respect it. In other words, the particular model of distributing copyrighted products—due to the dramatically cheaper and easier access and shift in the balance of benefits among those with such access—is under severe technological stress (to put it mildly).

But one has to careful here. The desirability of different forms of ownership of some arrangement of notes/words etc may still allow sale of intellectual property even when free versions are easily available. When Baen Books put On Basilisk Station up on their website as a free e-book it promptly hit the NYT bestseller list: i.e. people went out and bought versions of it.

Is this people respecting intellectual property? Or is it that the internet acts best as a “billboard” and people just like having the hard copy version? Some performers, such as Prince, hold that giving music away free on the internet is still worth it because enough people will still go and buy the CD or whatever that it is worth one’s while. It is better to be seen to be “with it” than trying to enforce unenforceable property boundaries with all the arbitrariness that involves. Of course, whether this strategy would work so well if everyone did it is another question.

Skepticlawyer comments:
There is quite a bit of research to be done on this very peculiar form of altruism out there. It is related to those city councils that have a ‘donation’ system for parking. Once they’ve sacked their parking meter people and reallocated police enforcement elsewhere, the council often finds it makes as much—or more—money from its parking meters than it did when there was a draconian system of enforcement in place. Both Linkin Park and Radiohead have also released free versions of their music online at various times; in both cases, the bands finished up making MORE money than they would have had they pursued a ‘normal’ studio release for which everyone had to pay.

If humans did not have strong basic norms of ownership, any strong form of private property would be quite impossible. (Chimpanzees, for example, do not seem to be able to develop norms of ownership of things when in the wild.) This seems to be a manifestation of the strong human norm of ownership (which I would argue arises from us being a tool using and pair-bonding species: chimpanzees are neither).

It is clear enough that “intellectual property” is not a nonsense-construct or a mere exercise in exploitation. On the contrary, it seems a natural way to deal in ideas. Up to a point. But, like all property law, it relies on being generally respected and enforceable at the margin.

Which means it is possible to over-reach. Law that cannot be enforced is likely to become arbitrary, which undermines respect for it, or become a dead-letter, so rather pointless.

Skepticlawyer comments:
Legal philosopher and jurisprudential scholar Joseph Raz first made this argument; he was the one who argued that morality was most often separate from law for the simple reason that it has to apply to citizens independently. If morality depended on law for its enforcement, we would need a ratio of one citizen to one policeman in order to stop us all from killing each other, or raping each other, or whatever. The main reason most people don’t murder or rape is not because there is a law against them, but because they are wrong. For this reason Raz argues that if someone suggests that a moral principle is ‘universal’ and thus requires legal enactment/enforcement, any truth claims they make about public compliance with the moral norm must be examined with very great care.

US interests tend to be very keen on intellectual property—and have a lot of sway with US policy makers—because a very significant proportion of US exports are the products of intellectual property (computer games, films, porn, the products of patents). Hence contemporary free trade agreements with the US (either bilateral or multilateral) have strong IP provisions.

Which have tended to get stronger—there is something to the story that IP gets extended to protect Mickey Mouse. “Getting stronger” here means “more likely over-reach”. Just as property rights can persist when the state denies that they do (hence black markets) so the state can notionally create property rights beyond its competence to enforce or which are sufficiently badly delineated so as to prove of limited use or even negative use (if they cannot generate enough respect for them such that they waste resources). The further any property rights regime moves from economic property rights (who actually controls what) the more likely it is to fail. A property rights regime which most people can see they are getting something from will work much better than a property rights regime that significant numbers of people see as not giving them enough benefits: taking the public with you is not incidental to property rights, it is basic to it. (Even enforcement of widely agreed property boundaries is, in a sense, keeping faith with people).

If there is substantial “extra legal” action, then that means the property rights regime is failing. The answer to that is to realign the regime so as to maximize the range of people who are benefiting from it: and thus to maximize the extent it is self-enforcing. Extra enforcement is an easy answer: it is only the correct one if very widely accepted boundaries are not being enforced. (A poll result saying a majority of people are in favour of banning something does not constitute the needed acceptance: such superficial expressed preference is not the very broad revealed preference required.) If the problem is that too many people do not agree with those boundaries in the first place (typically because the benefits seem too one-sided), then one has to move the boundaries.

Skepticlawyer comments:
In sum, laws need to align as much as possible with self-interest as economists understand it; to the extent that they don’t, said laws are pissing into the wind. Seriously. This is my main argument against ‘moral’ and sumptuary laws of all stripes, and is in part derived from Raz’s explorations of the issue.

Quite.

Indeed, sumptuary laws provide a revealing example, because medieval sumptuary laws performed much the same role as modern laws against “identity theft” do: they were to stop people passing themselves off as something they were not. In a society with limited literacy and very strong social role dynamics, this mattered. They acted as genuinely informative “social trademarks”. But they were also transitional. Earlier, the knightly class (in the broad sense) so dominated the economy that mere merchants would not be able to afford the “wrong” clothing. Once merchants began to become wealthy, the laws were needed, since the merchants could afford as good, or better, clothing than the knights and the nobility. As the commercial revolution took hold, literacy spread and the state became much more important in providing public order, sumptuary laws became (where they persisted) an inappropriate holdover propping up a structure of privilege which had lost connection with social functioning.

Remind folk of anything we discuss above?

What some interests would like to get away with in IP is well beyond what current technology supports: a trend that is likely to get worse rather than better. IP law and practice needs to work with who actually has control of what and what boundaries are sustainable because of real enforcement capacity given the balance of benefits and people's sense of fair boundaries.

ADDENDA And who thinks charging a 24-year old lives-with-parents gamer A$1.5m for uploading a game sold to him a week early by a retailer by mistake is fair?

FURTHER A web “insider” casts a sceptical eye on some of its effects and implications, including for the value of creative work.

AND ALSO Richard Stallman gives an excellent lecture on the history of copyright law (and why 'intellectual property' is a confusing and distorting notion that does bad things to one's thinking).

Bollywood to the rescue?

We have been having some trouble with attacks on Indians here in Australia, and particularly in Victoria.

It is hard to sort our what is really going on. Indian students do work in particularly exposed jobs (driving taxis, late night retail) but without good statistics on cases, patterns, etc it is hard to pick out whether there is a specific problem or it is a visible manifestation of a wider crime problem. Though this does suggest there is a specific issue.

Sometimes, it helps to look at things a little differently. A friend, in another place, commented about young East Asian males who work in exposed late night jobs not being attacked:

The point about Chinese not being attacked as much having a fair bit to do with drunken yobbos not wishing to find out if the inoffensive-looking guy with the laptop is actually Jackie Chan's nephew and training partner.

Clearly, Bollywood should get right onto it.

But there may be a more serious (and somewhat consoling) point in this: that being ethnically Chinese is no longer “foreign” in the land of Oz, even to drunken yobs. And Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Karate Kid, martial arts movies have had that effect, as well as the one my friend was suggesting.

The vision of Bruce Lee—that Westerners could come to appreciate things Chinese through martial arts—coming true.

Unpolished Gem

Sometimes, the best way to appreciate your own country—your own time and place—is from someone who has no reason to take it for granted because they are here, yet come from somewhere else.

Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung is a memoir of growing up in Footscray, in a Cambodian-Chinese family. The tale moves back and forth between the experiences of her parents and grandparents, family life from the inside and her experiences at school, university and work.

The prologue is of her father, working in the Footscray Markets, remembering the family first experiencing traffic lights with pedestrian crossings that were actually obeyed. We then move to that experience. The family, newly arrived in Australia, staggered at the wealth handed to them (clothes from St Vincent’s) standing at traffic lights staggered anew as the cars stopped for pedestrians, no matter how unimportant, merely because the lights changed; working out how things worked.

The little Green Man was an eternal symbol of government existing to serve and protect. And any country that could have a little green flashing man was benign and wealthy beyond imagining

(pp8-9). In simple, vivid prose Alice Pung shows us the wonder of things we take for granted because they were so very, very not things to take for granted for her family and what they had come from. By making their story, and her story, so alive she helps us see ourselves.
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Weaving back and forth in time and place, from person to person, Pung builds up her tale, so we slowly spiral into understanding their experiences. Happenings, experiences and reactions are touched on lightly but powerfully. The description of looking down from the Rialto it is what is not seen that gives what is seen its real power:

It is a country where no one walks like they have nothing to hide … No Khmer Rouge-type soldiers dressed like black ants prodding the inhabitants of the Central Business District into making a mass exodus to Wangaratta …

Back in the refugee centre which is their first experience of Australia, they learn not to hoard the packets of sugar, jam and honey from the breakfast tables because there are always more next day:

they learn that here, no one dies of starvation (p.9).

(p.9). Alice Pung is perhaps too polite to mention that the theories that destroyed their countries came from the West (though not from Australia as such). But then, perhaps that is far less important than that the people whose implementing of them was so murderously vile did not:

After Ah Pot’s revolution, people from the Land of the Golden Tower no longer greeted each other with “Have you eaten yet?” No, now it was “Who is left in your family?” (p.112).

Or perhaps it is simpler still: countries with good institutions did not suffer those disastrous ideas, even if they did spawn them and produce local devotees, and it is simply how different societies work which is the crucial thing.

Alice Pung makes her family, her parents, grandparents (particularly her Father’s Mother, with whom she was very close and her Mother), their loves, their hates, their hopes, dreams and fears very vivid. Including the emotional claustrophobia of it all, which she experienced so strongly as the first born and eldest daughter.

Through her experience and her families, she makes brings the migrant experience alive, in its hopes and fears, understandings and misunderstandings. Her father takes various jobs eventually ending up a very successful Retravision™ franchisee. Her mothers works as a jeweller, at home, providing jewellry for various Chinese jewellery shops: an outworker who never thinks of herself as a businesswoman, despite being precisely that. Sometimes she gets gypped, particularly when clients go bankrupt. Pung provides a vivid description of commercial life in the East Asian communities, such as in an anecdote about how her mother got money owed from one jewellery business that was going out backwards. They probably didn’t know that in Australian law outworkers are not protected debtors. Maybe that didn’t matter anyway for

we all came from countries where the laws were scattered and broken, and where they could be bought with bribes, where wars happened and currency was rendered worthless at the flash of a bomb, so that the only dependable commodity of trade was gold (pp138-9).

So they just went on good business practice, mostly, though the extremis of bankruptcy could be a different matter.

Her mother and her grandmother (who seemed to have been perpetually at war, mother-in-law versus daughter-in-law) are particularly vivid. In many ways, her grandmother—secure in her authority, toughened by a life of survived adversity (starting with the error of being a genuine peasant activist in Mao’s China leading to an escape to Cambodia where Leninism destroyed her life all over again), surrounded by devoted children and grandchildren, a great storyteller—coped better than her mother.

Pung describes well the slow morphing of herself, her father and siblings into not only English speakers, but thinkers in English: more and more her mother, who spoke five languages fluently but not English, was surrounded by aliens at her dinner table (p.139). The more her husband’s business prospered, the less reason she had to work, particularly as the chemicals she used were not the safest. But, if she did not work, what use was she who could neither speak nor read English? She was one of pattern of wives and mothers who had no idea how to live lives of idleness and luxury (p.147). Her mother’s struggles—declining into depression—and triumphs become one of the spiralling themes of Pung’s tale. The writing is so effectively evocative, one recognises the pride of depression in her mother’s self-sabotage.

The claustrophobia becomes all too for Alice herself, who has an emotional breakdown towards the end of Year 12, becoming an emotional deadzone. Too much pressure, too much fear, too many expectations. But then she does brilliantly in her exams, and the sudden prospect of university and hugely expanded possibilities breaks the emotional logjam and she steadily recovers.

Another of the spiralling themes is the migrant’s complex view of the society around them—particularly the white ghosts as the “skips” are called. There is a brilliant passage of the valedictory night at her posh grammar school where the non-skip parents realise with a shock that their children are, like them, Watchers. That they are not in the midst of the social swirls, that they do not go up on the stage. That paying for an expensive education has not meant their children now “fit in” (p.186). Pung explains that children like her do not party with the beautiful people, nor debate with the studious; parental strictness precludes the former and cultural distance the latter:

We were funny that way, always believing that we were rescued by white people even when the white people did not see themselves as our rescuers – in fact, they probably thought that we were self-sufficient, hard-working heroes from Hanoi or Hunan who manufactured their T-shirts and married their sons.
But we were also hypocrites. We loved them for their easy-going natures, their laid-back generosity, their simple acceptance of our culture, or whatever we told them constituted our culture. We fed them fluorescent yellow lemon chicken and sludge-black beef in black-bean sauce and they lauded our fine Chinese cuisine. Anything nuanced, like brown braised chicken’s feet (we were never wasteful) was also cultural but in an idiosyncratic “only Chinese eat that” sort of way. We loved their country, their supermarkets and their sheer genius in inventing Glad-Wrap; and the more we loved these things, the more it made us realise how much we hated the dirt, the sludge and the smells of our homelands, the squelchy grottiness of our markets and the self-abnegation of our souls.
And, most of all, we hated ourselves for loving them (pp 226-7).

The spirals come together in the last part of the book, which is a very funny (I often laughed out loud), and very touching, description of her relationship with her first ever boyfriend. A vegetarian country boy skip. The debates with herself are often hilarious:

because then he will know you are insecure! That you blow little things into big grotesque carnival floats that cast shadows over perfect summer afternoons (p.250).

There is so much in this book; the observations of the people who come into a store for reasons which have little to do with shopping, the passing comments that make things familiar seem new and vivid, her grandmother blessing Father Government for amazingly providing money for old people every fortnight. The way Alice went to Mao-Bin university for:

their pronunciation made the place sound like a shonky university in China for discarded communists (p.233).

It is a book to read and enjoy for many reasons, But above all for how well, with what a sure, light touch, Pung conveys the immense richness of her subject matter.

Thinking about depression and its lies

The following are some excerpts from a piece I drafted, intended for publication. Folk may find them helpful.


Depression—which has been written about for centuries under the older term of melancholia—is a pattern of thought, belief, feeling. It is—in the powerful metaphor of Australian-born psychologist Dorothy Rowe, whose description of suicide [when helplessness—I cannot see what I can do to make it better—becomes hopelessness—whatever I do will not make it better] I used above—a prison. Depression is where the sufferer lives. The vantage point from which you view the world. It is patterns of thinking and habits of mind. The story you tell yourself, your interpretation of past and present, that makes sense of your feelings and experiences. Creating thereby dire expectations of the future. Folk who have suffered from both cancer and depression regularly report that depression is worse—for it blights your entire life. To think your way out of the disastrous pattern of your thoughts is not an easy thing to do, since what one wishes to use to heal is precisely what is wounded and malfunctioning.
...
Something I later came to realise about deep emotional distress, particularly depression, is that one operates in layers. A depressed person is trying to manage internal pain. So they behave in ways that respond to that. Ways that can be deeply irrational, even destructive, for their interactions with the outside world. But internal pain has acquired a lexical priority over external sense.
...
Depression is ultimately a pattern of thinking, and it is that which has to change. The notions from Buddhist psychology of stilling the mind and the illusory insistence of wanting are great aids to eliminating anxiety. First, by simply stopping mental “chatter”. Second, by being sceptical about the pattern of one’s thoughts. This creates space to examine one’s anxiety. As well as other emotions and presumptions.

It is a bit like climbing a mountain range. Sometimes you break through above the clouds of fear, anxiety, delusion. Then you slide back into the valley and they close over you. But, if you keep working at it, each mountain is higher than the previous—so you spend more time unclouded—and each valley also—so you sink into the clouds less and less each time. It is being imprisoned by things that you do not see which is the most destructive. Whispering traitors of the mind are the most profound barriers precisely when they cannot be brought out into the light and examined. So, the more you dig out such whispering traitors and expose them to the withering light of critical examination, the more time you spend above the clouds and the less far you get dragged back in any relapse.

If depression is a destructive cycle of anxiety, anger and helplessness, then each part has to be attacked. Once one learns to recognise the impulse to be anxious, and separate it from actually being anxious—that anxiety is a stress reaction, and can be free-floating, and so can find anything to latch onto. But the particular thing it latches onto (bodily malfunction in my case) is a mere epiphenomenon, not to be given any moment. It can thereby, with practise, become remarkably easy to kill anxiety attacks. Anger can be a little more difficult, since there is often reason to be angry. But it can also be interrogated—even, if necessary, laughed at. The great lie of depression—its most insidious and deadly, from which all its other lies flow—is that there is only the one way to look at something, the way that is making you sick.
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Helplessness is the gap between what one thinks one ought to do and what one thinks one can do. One’s expectations about both can be wildly off. Indeed, if one is suffering from depression, that is more or less guaranteed to be true. So, you need to work to raise one’s confidence in what you can do, and moderate one’s expectations about one ought to do (such as no longer believing one has to twist oneself into false shapes to “fix” everything). If you steadily work to expand what you can do (by doing things), and lower the self-flagellating expectations of what you ought to do, then you can reach a state where what one believes one can do is greater than what you believe you ought to do. In which case, you are no longer helpless.

Dorothy Rowe argues that there is a lot of pride in depression. And pride is a deadly sin because it blocks you from reconsidering things. Having the humility to consider that there might be other ways of looking at your experiences, and the appropriate reactions thereto, is very important.

Particularly in liberating yourself from depression’s lie of the dire future. The truth is, you simply do not know the future. So you have no right to decide that it will be bad.

Waterboarding and sleep deprivation are torture

I just wanted to make that clear. They are clearly torture as defined by the Torture Convention which lots of countries (including Oz and the US) have signed and ratified. President Ronald Reagan signed the convention on behalf of the US. The Convention defines torture as:

...any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in, or incidental to, lawful sanctions.

On my reading that includes waterboarding and sleep deprivation.

In transmitting the Convention to the Senate for ratification, President Reagan wrote (via):

The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.

The declared policy of the Reagan Administration on terrorism (pdf) (also via) was:

Another important measure we have developed in our overall strategy is applying the rule of law to terrorists. Terrorists are criminals. They commit criminal actions like murder, kidnapping, and arson, and countries have laws to punish criminals. So a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are -- criminals -- and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against them.

In other words, to not become what we were fighting.

In a 1980 decision, the US Federal Court accepted a claim to damages from a family for an act of torture that had occurred in Paraguay. In its decision the court held that:

Indeed, for purposes of civil liability, the torturer has become like the pirate and slave trader before him hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind. Our holding today, giving effect to a jurisdictional provision enacted by our First Congress, is a small but important step in the fulfillment of the ageless dream to free all people from brutal violence.

In fact, it had even older antecedents in British (and thus American) law. In a recent decision, the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords ruled that:

... that from its very earliest days the common law of England set its face firmly against the use of torture. Its rejection of this practice was indeed hailed as a distinguishing feature of the common law, the subject of proud claims by English jurists such as Sir John Fortescue (De Laudibus Legum Angliae, c. 1460-1470, ed S.B. Chrimes, (1942), Chap 22, pp 47-53), Sir Thomas Smith (De Republica Anglorum, ed L Alston, 1906, book 2, chap 24, pp 104-107), Sir Edward Coke (Institutes of the Laws of England (1644), Part III, Chap 2, pp 34-36). Sir William Blackstone (Commentaries on the Laws of England, (1769) vol IV, chap 25, pp 320-321), and Sir James Stephen (A History of the Criminal Law of England, 1883, vol 1, p 222). That reliance was placed on sources of doubtful validity, such as chapter 39 of Magna Carta 1215 and Felton's Case as reported by Rushworth (Rushworth's Collections, vol (i), p 638) (see D. Jardine, A Reading on the Use of Torture in the Criminal Law of England Previously to the Commonwealth, 1837, pp 10-12, 60-62) did not weaken the strength of received opinion. The English rejection of torture was also the subject of admiring comment by foreign authorities such as Beccaria (An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, 1764, Chap XVI) and Voltaire (Commentary on Beccaria's Crimes and Punishments, 1766, Chap XII). ... In rejecting the use of torture, whether applied to potential defendants or potential witnesses, the common law was moved by the cruelty of the practice as applied to those not convicted of crime, by the inherent unreliability of confessions or evidence so procured and by the belief that it degraded all those who lent themselves to the practice.

The House of Lords further stated that:

Despite this common law prohibition, it is clear from the historical record that torture was practised in England in the 16th and early 17th centuries. But this took place pursuant to warrants issued by the Council or the Crown, largely (but not exclusively) in relation to alleged offences against the state, in exercise of the Royal prerogative: see Jardine, op cit.; Lowell, op cit., pp 290-300). Thus the exercise of this royal prerogative power came to be an important issue in the struggle between the Crown and the parliamentary common lawyers which preceded and culminated in the English civil war. By the common lawyers torture was regarded as (in Jardine's words: op cit, pp 6 and 12) "totally repugnant to the fundamental principles of English law" and "repugnant to reason, justice, and humanity." One of the first acts of the Long Parliament in 1640 was, accordingly, to abolish the Court of Star Chamber, where torture evidence had been received, and in that year the last torture warrant in our history was issued.

In other words, we settled this issue in the C17th, why is it even up for discussion?

The reason why I wanted to make my position quite clear is that myself, Mario P and Sam H spent a frustrating time arguing with someone who thought:

(1) waterboarding and sleep deprivation were not torture (but he would not define what was torture);
(2) even if it was, the US had only done it to three people;
(3) they were very bad people and deserved it; and
(4) do we not understand that we are at war and what the people we are at war with are like.

To which we responded with:

(1) yes it is, under the UN Convention definition;
(2) a wrongful act is wrong regardless if done once, thrice or a hundred times;
(3) they were but no-one does (in particular, no one deserves to have us degrade ourselves like that), that is the point;
(4) yes we do, but if we become like those we fight, we lose.

I understand why the US went down this path. Panic coupled with outraged tribalism plus the bravado pseudo-toughness of the hollow. The scale of the Sept 11 attack (which violated the US sense of being a haven from the problems of the world), the belief (clearly justified IMHO) that modern technology gave the possibility of horrific acts which the jihadis would engage in if they could, and (reprising the circumstances of the C16th and C17th) not knowing how to tell decent Muslims from the homicidal maniacs led to a "such means are justified' approach, even if on a retail basis rather than a wholesale one.

But that is the point of being civilised: to look beyond panic and outraged tribalism and be able to grasp that there are things You Do Not Do. To know real strength, not the wicked pretense of it.

It was one of those wicked and stupid things that Clever Stupid People do. The Clever Stupid people with a hollow core. "I understand the stakes so therefore ...". Actually, no you do not. The House of Lords does, but you do not.

I just wanted to make my position quite clear on this point.

ADDENDA You would think that people who call themselves 'conservatives' might have some grasp that torture is a violation of centuries of their common law heritage. But, as a friend of mine says, a lot of modern "conservatives" are post-modern conservatives for whom "conservatism" is a free-floating attitude, a statement of tribal "authenticity", not something grounded in a genuine appreciation of what our heritage actually is.

FURTHER A useful link about the general issue of torture is here.

UPDATE Vice President Cheney has publicly stated that he was a supporter of waterboarding:

CHENEY: I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques that...
KARL: And you opposed the administration's actions of doing away with waterboarding?
CHENEY: Yes.

I will leave it to those more versed in international law than I to decide whether he has, indeed, just confessed to a war crime. But my comments above about "conservatives" who do not understand the heritage they are conserving: they most certainly apply to Dick Cheney. And, for that matter, to Karl Rove.

KEY DOCUMENT The 289page 10MB Office of Professional Responsibility report on the "torture memos" is here (pdf).

A house remembered

In early 2001 and early 2002 I visited New Zealand for the Sounds of Summer symposium, travelling with Daffyd. On both occasions, we met up with the Archwizard, the Wizard of New Zealand, Daffyd’s mentor who has been a fixture at the Sounds of Summer,

On both occasions, we travelled to, and stayed at, the Wizard’s house in Christchurch. I got to see the Wizard doing his thing in Cathedral square.

The house was the sort of residence a wizard ought to have. A rambling, two-storey colonial mansion made of wood, nestled in a large garden with a creek running through it. The house was full of memorabilia – art (particularly C18th and C19th prints), mementoes particularly on the wizardly theme, a huge vinyl record collection that seemed to be everywhere. In the drive was the Wizard’s famous ‘two-rears’ VW beetle.

The house was a warm and comforting place, both old-time and other-worldly. It seemed rooted in place, belonging to where it was as if had set down deep roots, and yet a haven that was apart from what was around it.

During my second visit, the Wizard talking about doing a Prospero, and hanging up his staff. A plan he later put into action.

It was my firm intention to stay with the Wizard and his lady in Christchurch in their wonderful residence on the way. The Wizard himself was very keen.

I won’t be able to do that. The house was destroyed by arson. They effectively lost everything. A haven of wonder was destroyed.

What Science Knows

Jim Franklin’s What Science Knows: And How It Knows It is a wonderfully lucid explication of science and the philosophy of science.

Philosophers are not always the clearest of writers. Sometimes it is a result of the complexity of the ideas they are grappling with. Sometimes it is because their thinking is not all that clear, and their prose reflects that. Sometimes, I suspect, it is because they associate being very clear with being simple: lucid prose does not, apparently, imply profundity of thought.

Jim Franklin’s thinking is clear and he has no such false ego, so we get powerful thinking about science presented very clearly, clearly enough for any reasonably intelligent layperson to follow. It may help that he is a mathematician who also does philosophy.

This book is a defence of science, both against its enemies and misunderstandings by its friends. Science is about reasoning from evidence, so the first chapter sets out an Objective Bayesian (or logical probabilism) view of evidence which:

… holds that the relations of uncertain evidence to conclusion is one of pure logic (p.7)

It is certainly the view I am most comfortable with, that makes the most sense and to which our actual reasoning seems to tend to conform. Franklin sets it out very clearly, interspersed with useful selections from key thinkers. While it is all clear, sensible and informative, I particularly commend his discussion of observation and experiment (Pp21ff).

The next two chapters are on the enemies of science and their criticisms, starting with the Sophists and ending up with what Franklin’s teacher (and mine) David Stove famously called Four Modern Irrationalists (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend) who would generally not regard themselves as enemies of science. But, if as Franklin does, you hold that deductivism is false (i.e. you are not a sceptic about induction), and science operates because it is false, then enemies of science they are. Franklin’s writing is full of dry wit that makes it a delight to read. This discussion of the popularity of Kuhn’s analysis gives a taste of its pleasures:

Kuhn’s success is also an instance of the enduring appeal of theomachy, a mode of explanation that worked so brilliantly for Freud and Marx, and, long before, for Homer. What was previously thought to be a continuous and uninteresting succession of random events is discovered to be a conflict of a finite number of hidden gods (or classes, complexes, paradigms, and so on, as the case may be), which manipulate the flux of events to their own advantage, but whose machinations may be exposed by the elect to whom the interpretative key has been given.
Further reasons for Kuhn’s success are not hard to find. He gave permission to anyone who wished to comment on science to ignore completely the large number of sciences that undeniably are progressive accumulations of established results—sciences such as ophthalmology, oceanography, operations research, and ornithology, to keep to just one letter of the alphabet. That certainly saved a lot of effort. Kuhn’s theory had a special appeal to social scientists as well. Political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists recognized Kuhn’s picture of disciplines relegating the accumulation of evidence to the background while bringing fights about theory to the fore; they were delighted to hear that what they had until then considered an embarrassment was the way things were done in the most respectable sciences. Kuhn even offered something to massage the egos of natural scientists themselves. It might seem at first glance that his claim that most scientists were drones was an insult, but there was good reason why it was met with the same equanimity one notices in fundamentalist religious circle at the news that only 144,000 were saved. The damned may be a majority, but of course they are other people; every scientist had the opportunity to cast himself as a revolutionary hero of a new paradigm, shamefully ill-used by the establishment (Pp34-5).

Ouch!

The next chapter is about postmodernist enemies of science. The Sokal Hoax naturally features prominently, as it ought to (it is both funny and revealing), but just as part of a deadly dissection of postmodernism.

Having cleared the undergrowth of intellectual weeds, and laid out the key intellectual tools, Franklin then takes us through a chapter-by-chapter journey through science.
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Starting with the ‘furniture’, the concepts science uses. Franklin cheerfully starts with ‘the cat sat on the mat’ and moves on and up so that, a little over a dozen pages later, we are treated to one of the most lucid explanations of quantum mechanics one is likely to read (Pp66-7). Franklin notes that:

While science is largely in agreement with common sense and our grammatical categories when it comes to the basic furniture of the world, it has made, in the course of time, certain adjustments to the “manifest image” of the world. In certain, though limited, respects, “folk” concepts have turned out to be inadequate (p.68)

He takes us through these adjustments, being careful not to overstate the matter. Franklin comes across as having a certain basic respect for the mass of his fellow humans that sharpens his wit when considering those who give themselves cognitive airs and graces. (No wonder he finds the history of religion such a useful source of historical analogies.) He nominates energy as being where science has the most divergence from folk concepts (Pp70-1). Then there are the genuinely new concepts science has needed (such as acceleration), most of which have come from mathematics (p.72).

Considering the physical sciences, Franklin divides them into fundamental physics and all the others. As the science of the basics of material things, he concentrates on physics: what is concerned with; how we gain knowledge in physics (including what thought experiments are); the general outline of current knowledge concluding with how dark matter is reasonable speculation, but not knowledge.

A sense of the depth and the limits of our knowledge is very vividly conveyed in his next chapter looking at biology and the cognitive sciences, including the travails of Artificial Intelligence. Then it is on to mathematics (which Franklin is a professor of):

Mathematics is the gold standard of knowledge. Mathematics is proved true, and is stays proved true. Proofs convey certainty and (if the proofs are not too long for our minds to cope with) they induce understanding of why mathematical truths must be true (p.107).

This is a robust view that, of course, has come under attack. But Franklin is having none of it. Mathematics is as much about the world as biology:

The subject matter of mathematics is structure, or pattern (p.109)

There follows a very enlightening discussion of what mathematics is about and how proofs work.

The following chapter examines the enemies of mathematics, primarily Lakatos, and how their criticisms either misconstrue mathematics or confuse application with mathematics itself—that our universe may not be entirely Euclidean does not make Euclidean geometry false as mathematics, just (possibly) not perfectly accurately applicable to the world. What is true of a formal structure as a formal structure is a different question from whether that formal structure applies in the world. As Franklin notes:

The writings of the irrationalists about mathematics have had absolutely no impact on mathematicians (p143).

With Lakatos himself being re-interpreted by mathematicians so his ideas have become harmless. Mathematics education has suffered some inroads, however.

The last 70 years or so has seen the emergence of a series of new formal sciences variously labelled ‘computer science’, ‘control theory’, ‘signal processing’ … They have the further charm that:

They supply a number of concepts, like “feedback”, that permit in-principle explanatory talk about complex phenomena without demanding too much attention to detail (Pp146-7).

One can see the attraction. Discussion of verification in programming leads to a nice discussion of the difference between necessity and certainty (p.156).

Chapter 10 takes us through probabilities and risks, a necessary but easily confusing area of reasoning. Franklin both sets out the logic involved and the connection to acting in the world.

Chapter 11 wrestles with the question of whether social sciences are sciences. The examples of Adolphe Quetelet’s pioneering 1835 work on the predictability of the level of suicide and modern analysis of traffic dynamics (both very nicely explained) are used to establish that the scientific method applies to the social world. Which is a different matter from claiming that the current social sciences “have made it”:

So the answer to the question, “Are the social sciences sciences?” is “Yes and no”. Their logic of confirmation of theories is the same Bayesian reasoning as is found in science, and theories in science can be established beyond reasonable doubt. Statistical methods can predict short-term trends from data just as well as in the harder sciences. But finding the appropriate concepts and the causal connections between them is much more difficult, while imaginative insight into the minds of individual actors gives an extra mode of understanding unavailable outside the sciences of the human (p.196).

One only has to contemplate the parlous state of macroeconomics (nicely discussed here), in contrast to the much stronger situation of microeconomics, to see what he is getting at.

Science is (as irrationalists and postmodernists make much of) done by actual people in specific institutions and processes. Franklin’s chapter on “actually existing science” shows a nice appreciation of the realities of “doing science”, particularly his discussion of the necessary, but inevitably flawed process of refereeing papers (Pp203ff). But processes of inferring from evidence to conclusions are not invalidated by being done by fallible humans: fallibility does not entail irretrievable failure. That people sometimes fail or do things badly does not mean that they never succeed.

In his penultimate chapter, Franklin tackles the complexity barriers to knowledge. Not all complexity is a problem—modular (able to be dealt with in bits), averaged and turbulent complexities can be dealt with. But if there are a lot of unknowns in a complex system, so that both the evidence and the logical reasoning involved are complex, that is another matter. Franklin uses the cases of evolution and global warming as examples, concluding that:

In both evolution and climate change, the majority view of the scientific experts is well ahead. In neither case is there any known coherent alternative. But the complexities of the evidence are such that a higher standard of politeness in skeptics who raise serious problems would be well-advised (p.235).

Events in the realm of climate science since the book was published have not made this conclusion less true.

The final chapter considers limits to science. As he points out, this is not a scientific but a philosophical question:

… science itself does not make any findings about its limits. (p.237).

Franklin then considers why consciousness may, and ethics will, remain (at least in part) beyond the ambit of science. He has a nice response to D. M. Armstrong’s materialism about the mind:

An awareness of one’s own sensation, as sensation, is basic. And not only basic to philosophy, but to science, which depends entirely for its ultimate inputs on observations, that is, human sensations. It would not be easy, logically, for science to start with the sensations, infer the existence of a physical world, and then cut off the branch it was sitting on by deleting the sensations (p.240)

More generally, it would not be sensible to be so impressed by the achievements of science that one rendered what scientists do as people engaged in the activity of science otiose, as eliminative materialism appears to do.

Franklin is happy with the notion of a science of consciousness, it is just that:

None of that serious work on consciousness and physics has any tendency to support materialist view of the mind (p.242).

His position on ethics is somewhat similar, though more so. Science has discovered interesting facts about ethical behaviour in people. But these facts do not generate ethical conclusions, since one cannot infer an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.

As to what the universe must be like to include beings of irreducible moral worth:

That is an extremely difficult question. Science has taken us to the brink of another kind of knowledge, by opening up to us a vast range of natural facts but also exposing us to the limits of its own ways of knowing. We cannot believe that what science knows is all there is (p.251).

Not merely because science has large areas of unknowns even in its realm of concern, but because the realm of what can be known may well be larger than what can be known by science.

Franklin is thus an enthusiast for science, but not for scientism. What Science Knows is a great source for understanding the soaring achievements of science: that they are achievements, and how they have been achieved. In particular, it is an excellent starting point for the basic concepts of science in general and various sciences in particular.

The tragic dangers of a new science

A recent paper establishing that there was no scientific consensus behind the “global cooling” scare of the 1970s says something much more important in the first sentence of its abstract:

Climate science as we know it today did not exist in the 1960s and 1970s.

When people say “climate scientists agree that …” they are referring to a category of scientist that is effectively a few decades old.

A Melbourne scientist, in his analysis of the CRUtape letters (aka "Climategate"), makes the very pertinent observation about problems with climate science being so new:

Instead of seeing large collaborations of meticulous, careful, critical scientists, we instead see a small team of incompetent cowboys, abusing almost every aspect of the framework of science to build a fortress around their “old boys’ club”, to prevent real scientists from seeing the shambles of their “research”. Most people are aghast that this could have happened; and it is only because “climate science” exploded from a relatively tiny corner of academia into a hugely funded industry in a matter of mere years that the perpetrators were able to get away with it for so long.

For there is a history to new sciences and public policy, and it is a history of great tragedy.

The problem with new sciences is many levelled. First, precisely because it is new, the wider society, and especially the wider scientific community, has not built up experience in judging a new science’s claims and processes. This seems to have been, from what the CRUtape letters reveal, a real problem in the new area of climate science (pdf):

The Climategate emails show that these self-regulating mechanisms simply failed to work in the case of climate science—perhaps because “climate science” is itself an aggregation of many different and disparate scientific disciplines. …
It is at this “stitching together” layer of science—one could call it a “meta-discipline”—that the principles of the scientific method have broken down. …
Instead of embracing this diversity of knowledge—thanking them for their experience (no one knows everything about everything) and using that knowledge to improve their own calculations—these power-brokers of climate science instead ignore, fob off, ridicule, threaten, and ultimately black-ball those who dare to question the methods that they—the power-brokers, the leaders—have used. And do not be confused: I am here talking about those scientists within their own camps, not the “skeptics” which they dismiss out of hand.
This is not “climate science”, it is climate ideology; it is the Church of Climatology.
It is this betrayal of the principles of science—in what is arguably the most important public application of science in our lifetime—that most distresses scientists.

Just how inimical who what is revealed in the CRUtape letters is to effective science is shown by considering recent research on how science operates in practice: in particular, how effective scientific practice overcomes the natural cognitive bias to defending existing theories and dismiss awkward anomalies. The crucial feature is situations that trigger cognitive openness: particularly, situations of open debate involving other perspectives. Acting to enforce conformity (both conformity to our prior expectations and conformity to group norms) is a natural human inclination that science, to be effective, must challenge—not randomly or blindly, but challenge nevertheless. The power and problem of “climate science” catastrophism is precisely that it panders so strongly to the will to believe on the part of a range of folk. What it does not do is encourage any sense of the cognitive dangers of conformity and the need to engage outsiders: on the contrary.

As scandals with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change multiply—from the ludicrous comedy of errors in the false glacier claims and snow, to dubious claims about rainforests, to advocacy being based off as science—it is well to note that people had been complaining for years about the IPCC processes being deeply flawed. Concerns now thoroughly vindicated but had previously been treated with a contempt that now itself seems utterly contemptible, and was certainly thoroughly inimical to the cognitive openness required for science to operate properly.

Second, there is the blush of “new discovery”. A new science can convey an intoxicating sense of vast new vistas of understanding previously denied to humanity. There is a natural inclination to demonstrate the utility of that new understanding by providing warnings of perils to be avoided or to otherwise pander to existing preconceptions: all the more because the new science itself has not built up experience about its own areas of weakness and risk.

It is notable how prominent scion of climate science, Steven Schneider, moved straight from global cooling climate catastrophism to global warming climate catastrophism without dallying in that large excluded middle of no-human-catastrophism. But any form of catastrophism made such work terribly, terribly important. [Hansen did some computer work [[that was used by]] a then advocate of global cooling: he may not have actually supported such predictions and was not a co-author of the Rasool-Schneider paper: this post has been amended accordingly.]

Third, because the new science offers the benefit of demonstrating how “with it” one is scientifically: that one is “up” with the “cutting edge” of human understanding. That what one is doing, or what one understands, is so very important.
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We have been here before
Two examples demonstrate just what capacity for tragedy there is in the intersection of public policy and “new science”. The first is the appallingly inadequate response of the incoming Liberal Government in the UK to the Irish potato famine. There was a range of factors involved—the ham-fisted nature of the initial attempt to help by the preceding Peel Government; that, as a result of the Act of Union, Ireland was now far more governed from London than Dublin; the connection with the debate over the corn laws; the effect of the pre-existing failures of British administration in Ireland; the continuing strength of anti-Catholic (and specifically anti-Irish) sentiment.

But part of the problem was how the issues were framed as a result of the “latest science”. Because the new science of classical economics was held to warn against the dangers/pointlessness of “interfering” with the “iron laws” of supply and demand. This was complete bollocks: if the same response as that of Dublin Castle to the 1800-01 famine had been followed (offering a bounty to imported grain), then the famine could have been greatly ameliorated. But the “new science” of economics provided a framing that pandered to all sorts of existing prejudices, and nothing effective was done. About one million people starved to death or died of disease. Another million migrated from Ireland. It was an appalling failure of public policy: but one that the “new science” of classical economics provided aid and support to.

We, of course, now know how bad the pre-existing incentives structures were in Ireland and there were things that could have been done (indeed, had previously been done). But a learning process has taken place: economics, as an organised discipline, was only a few decades old at the time.

The second case of the disastrous conjunction of new science and public policy is provided by eugenics. Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace’s identification of the process of natural selection followed by Mendelian genetics provided—particularly in conjunction with some of Darwin’s rhetoric but even more the advocacy of his brilliant but rather misanthropic scientist-cousin Sir Francis Galton—the basis for a looming “threat”: that of genetic collapse due to the “poor genetic stock” of the lower classes breeding far more than the “good genetic stock” of the upper classes.

Now, again, this was pandering to all sorts of existing prejudices. But it was taken to be based on “the latest science”. Eugenics was something that the great and good, across the political spectrum, took seriously and endorsed.

After the Nazi “genetic purification” slaughters, eugenics lost respectability. We are also aware of small matters such as genetic drift that has rather increased our understanding of how genetics does (and does not) work. But we simply do not understand the actual historical context if we do not grasp how morally and scientifically respectable eugenics was.

Which brings us to “climate science”, a discipline a few decades old. One whose climate catastrophism appeals to all sorts of existing prejudices and interests. The utility of scares to generate research grants and sell newspapers: in particular, to turn the weather into a coherent media narrative with heroes and villains. Its utility to a multi-million dollar industry of environmental advocacy: in particular, its substitute as a critique of Western capitalism for those leaving the failed vehicle of socialism. The way environmentalism is fairly clearly a religion-substitute, fitting into the Christianity-shaped hole in Western culture: with Gaia and Gaia-concern substituting for Christ and Christian compassion; its own sets of sins, taboos and marks of virtue; with associated denunciation of heresy, heretics and other maleficent non-believers. Financial interests willing to make money in carbon-trading or using environmentalism as an excuse for protectionism against competitors and rivals. And so on.

All helped by that special arrogance which claims that the patterns of history do not happen to, or apply to, “people like us”.

As to the “settled science”, I simply direct attention to this post from stalwarts of the “climate science” community about the way CO2 lags temperature in ice core data. In particular, how their take on the lag is such an ad hoc way to treat data and, if both upward and downward turning temperature points lead CO2 increases, that indicates clear negative feedbacks in how the atmosphere works (there needs to be significant positive feedbacks to make the catastrophist case work).

What the CRUtape letters show is that the “argument from authority” which has been resorted to so much—particularly “climate scientists agree” and “in the peer-reviewed literature”—is simply not something to give credence to. Science is not about arguments from authority. It is precisely the (abuse) of the authority science had built up from the triumph of Newtonian mechanics in particular that allowed classical economics and eugenics to parlay that authority into disastrous influences over public policy. “Climate science” must not be allowed to replicate that pattern any further than it already has.

The media-and-other ubiquity of the message of looming climate catastrophe is also not an argument from authority, even though it gives the catastrophist case a powerful-but-spurious authority. For so much of that ubiquity is clearly based on the notion that climate-concern shows you are a “good person”. Once you are in the “good people believe X” game, the resulting cognitive blockages (since any evidence that X is not true becomes an attack on “morality”, “concern”, “settled science” etc and people’s sense of their own moral status) screw up the evidence base for public policy and public debate. This is made worse by the way environmentalism explicitly discounts human wants, so any human experience or concerns that contradicts X gets thoroughly discounted too. It is very like the way Christian belief affected public policy in pre-Enlightenment Europe; both in its discounts of inconvenient human experience and concerns but also in the way the “message” became so ubiquitous that in itself is held to “establish” its truth.

Climate “denialism” has become, after all, a modern version of heresy. With the patterns of medieval heresy: including the attribution of maleficent motivation, since only wilful failure could explain how any could dissent from “obvious” (and morally urgent) truth.

Which takes us back to environmentalism as religion-substitute. After all, one of the fundamental functions of religion is to separate the righteous from the unrighteous: to establish and police group membership, and to do so on a moral basis, including a whole set of morally-charged truth claims.

As I have noted previously, with the decline of the radical Enlightenment (the notion that reason can transform human nature and thus human society), opposition to the sceptical Enlightenment (with its presumption that human nature is a given, so we apply reason within that constraint) has become more and more based on the Counter-Enlightenment (with its concern for authenticity, identity, commitment, celebration of nature, etc). The celebration of “organic food” and concern for “food miles” both come out of late C19th and early C20th blood-and-soil mysticism, for example. But concern for “food miles” also turns ordinary human effort into the mark of perdition, so that those who make their living from the “grubby” movement and creation of stuff are inherently less virtuous than those who make their living from electronic zapping of symbols or other, more intangible, ideas-based human services. Environmentalism is hardly innocent of very familiar social status games: with the moral middle class turning out to be inherently more “virtuous” than vulgar workers or nasty Gaia-damaging stuff-creating-and-selling business folk. (Who can, nevertheless, “purchase” the right moral indulgences by showing how “environmentally concerned” they are.)

Mark Twain famously observed that:

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Climate catastrophism is far too convenient for far too many people based on an area of science that is far too new and far too narrow. We really have been here before and need to step back and remember just how new “climate science” is and just how dangerous buying into the absolute reliability of a “new science”, particularly a socially convenient new science, can be.

Because such failures are not mere intellectual failures: they can end up killing by the millions. That we do know, because they have.

We particularly need to remember that the advocates of “laissez faire” and of “eugenics” were often highly educated, well-read, scientifically sophisticated and morally concerned. They were “people like us”.

Sex, gender and bigotry(2): John Finnis and the perverse instrumentalism of natural law sexual morality

This is the second part of a two part consideration of a published essay Law, Morality, and "Sexual Orientation" (pdf) by John Finnis arguing for Catholic natural law sexual morality and its (highly selective) legal implementation. The first part was in my previous post.


Note the linked goods of “children and mutual affection” in Finnis’ statement that:

Genital intercourse between spouses enables them to actualise and experience (and in that sense express) their marriage itself, as a single reality with two blessings (children and mutual affection). Non-marital intercourse, especially but not only homosexual, has no such point and therefore is unacceptable.

Now, it is perfectly obvious that a wide range of sexual acts can express mutual affection. But that does not count. The human purpose of mutual affection is not enough on its own. It has to be expressed in a particular way (unobstructed penal-vaginal intercourse within marriage). The procreative purpose is absolutely dominant, as Finnis makes clear:

The union of the reproductive organs of husband and wife really unites them biologically (and their biological reality is part of, not merely an instrument of, their personal reality); reproduction is one function and so, in respect of that function, the spouses are indeed one reality. So their union in a sexual act of the reproductive kind (whether or not actually reproductive or even capable of resulting in generation in this instance) can actualise and allow them to experience their real common good. That common good is precisely their marriage with the two goods, parenthood and friendship, which are the parts of its wholeness as an intelligible common good even if, independently of what the spouses will, their capacity for biological parenthood will not be fulfilled by that act of genital union. But the common good of friends who are not and cannot be married (for example, man and man, man and boy, woman and woman) has nothing to do with their having children by each other, and their reproductive organs cannot make them a biological (and therefore personal) unit.

In other words, sex which is not an instrument of the procreative function has no legitimacy.

There is the obvious difficulty that, even with married couples, procreation is not always possible: one or more both may not be fertile, either as a permanent or temporary condition. That is still fine, because the procreative form has power even if it lacks even procreative possibility:

… such sterility does not render the conjugal sexual acts of the spouses non-marital. (Plutarch indicates that intercourse with a sterile spouse is a desirable mark of marital esteem and affection.) For: a husband and wife who unite their reproductive organs in an act of sexual intercourse which, so far as they then can make it, is of a kind suitable for generation, do function as a biological (and thus personal) unit and thus can be actualising and experiencing the two-in-one-flesh common good and reality of marriage, even when some biological condition happens to prevent that unity resulting in generation of a child.

Only procreation justifies sex because only the procreative form generates true unity.

Which raises the question of whether this form creates its unity in a loveless marriage, or during rape and so on. Presumably not: so the procreative form is the boundary in which only legitimate sex can take place but it is clearly taken that not all sex that does take place within that form is legitimate. Which does raise the question of whether the extra emotional elements that create that extolled unity could also operate in other sexual forms.

To which the answer is an emphatic no:

… that there is no important distinction in essential
moral worthlessness between solitary masturbation, being sodomized as a prostitute, and being sodomized for the pleasure of it. Sexual acts cannot not in reality be self-giving unless they are acts by which a man and a woman actualize and experience sexually the real giving of themselves to each other …

Sex is only legitimized by procreation. Sex within the procreative form by a married couple:

… differs radically from the acts of a husband and wife whose intercourse is masturbatory, for example sodomitic or by fellatio or coitus interruptus. In law such acts do not consummate a marriage, because in reality (whatever the couple's illusions of intimacy and self-giving in such acts) they do not actualise the one-flesh, two-part marital good.

One would have thought that if one is driven to claim sex between two people is masturbatory, one might stop and consider that a certain conceptual confusion might be involved. But, then, that one is defending a theory of sex that led people to decide it was a fine thing to burn people alive for having sex or getting married might give one pause too.

Let us consider the notion that all sex that does not operate according to the unobstructed penile-vaginal form within marriage is equally worthless. Clearly sex is regarded as profoundly problematic if procreation (or, at least, the procreative form) is the only thing that can make it legitimate. Consider further the profound denigration of human agency involved. What people want, what they consent to—unless it is to perform unobstructed penile-vaginal sex within marriage—is entirely beside the point. Indeed, equally morally worthless.

On the denigration of human agency, it is worth noting that the notion of the unitive “one flesh” nature of marriage was, until very recently, held to operate to bar any concept of rape within marriage, since a woman was held to have given consent forever when she said “I do”. While the bar on convenient forms of contraception—those that did not keep to the correct sexual “form”—brought home to millions of women in particular how much this sexual morality restricted (their) human agency.

The rich world of human eros is thus reduced by this concept of only unitive sex being legitimate to one very narrow legitimate form. The general denigration of human agency is encapsulated in Finnis’ statement:

… it is to the realities of our constitution, intentions and circumstances that the argument applies the relevant practical reasons (especially that marriage and inner integrity are basic human goods) and moral principles (especially that one may never intend to destroy, damage, impede, or violate any basic human good, or prefer an illusory instantiation of a basic human good to a real instantiation of that or some other human good).

The term “illusory instantiation” is doing a lot of work.
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The more specific denigration of the agency of the same-sex attracted is much more explicit. Same-sex activity is put on a similar moral plane as bestiality:

Copulation of humans with animals is repudiated
because it treats human sexual activity and satisfaction as something appropriately sought in a manner as divorced from the expressing of an intelligible common good as is the instinctive coupling of beasts -- and so treats human bodily life, in one of its most intense activities, as appropriately lived as merely animal. The deliberate genital coupling of persons of the same sex is repudiated for a very similar reason. It is not simply that it is sterile and disposes the participants to an abdication of responsibility for the future of humankind. Nor is it simply that it cannot really actualise the mutual devotion which some homosexual persons hope to manifest and experience by it, and that it harms the personalities of its participants by its dis-integrative manipulation of different parts of their one personal reality. It is also that it treats human sexual capacities in a way which is deeply hostile to the self-understanding of those members of the community who are willing to commit themselves to real marriage in the understanding that its sexual joys are not mere instruments or accompaniments to, or mere compensations for, the accomplishment of marriage's responsibilities, but rather enable the spouses to actualise and experience their intelligent commitment to share in those responsibilities, in that genuine self-giving.

A pretty thorough attack on human diversity: one, moreover, which requires humans to conform to the proper purpose of sex. Sex is not to be understood as people may conceive of it, but as they have to conceive of it: as the only permissible way to conceive of it: a very Catholic notion of absolute possession of the truth. Eros is not an instrument of their purposes, they are instruments of its purpose and only act legitimately when they are so. As we shall see, the consequence of requiring human agency to conform to the deemed purpose of sex is that sex that serves “mere” human purposes becomes an “instrumental” misuse of a human body (either yours, in the case of masturbation, or someone else’s, in the cases of all non-penal-vaginal sex, any penal-vaginal sex not within marriage and any deliberately obstructed penal-vaginal sex within marriage).

The attack on the nature of the same-sex attracted is made absolutely explicit:

Homosexual orientation in this sense is, in fact, a standing denial of the intrinsic aptness of sexual intercourse to actualise and in that sense give expression to the exclusiveness and open-ended commitment of marriage as something good in itself.

Same-sex attracted people are the people who should not exist. The attack on human agency is also made absolutely explicit:

All who accept that homosexual acts can be a humanly appropriate use of sexual capacities must, if consistent, regard sexual capacities, organs and acts as instruments for gratifying the individual "self" who has them.

Yes, that would be the alternative view. One that, apparently, threatens the very basis of marriage:

Such an acceptance is commonly (and in my opinion rightly) judged to be an active threat to the stability of existing and future marriages; it makes nonsense, for example, of the view that adultery is inconsistent with conjugal love, in an important way and intrinsically—not merely because it may involve deception. A political community which judges that the stability and protective and educative generosity of family life are of fundamental importance to the whole community's present and future can rightly judge that it has compelling reasons for judging that homosexual conduct -- a "gay lifestyle" – is never a valid, humanly acceptable choice and form of life, in denying that same-sex partners are capable of marrying, and in doing whatever it properly can, as a community with uniquely wide but still subsidiary functions (see section 1 above), to discourage such conduct.

So the same-sex attracted are not only the people who should not exist, their existence as sexually-active persons is a threat to the very basis of marriage. (Like Jews used to be held to be threats to the Christian religion, perhaps?)

One might consider the possibility, that if one’s theory of marriage and sex is such that the existence of a small minority of people is ruled as both improper and a threat to the large majority, it is time to re-examine one’s theory of sex: but no, because if they are an improper form of the human, their existence is a problem of moral repression, but not of moral reconsideration. They are to be sacrificed to the theory that is taken to trump their existence.

Contract and evidence
Let us just consider what a nonsense this claim about threats to marriage is in terms of the simple law of contract. Do we really think that the idea that people enter into contracts for their own reasons in any way undermines the very notion of a contract and makes keeping contracts profoundly more difficult? Of course we do not. This claim about the threat to marriage only makes any sort of sense by treating sex as something profoundly problematic: so problematic that only one narrow form of it can be recognised as legitimate, otherwise moral chaos will result.

Which is, in fact, an empirical claim. Which, given not many people both believe and act upon the moral theory Finnis is supporting, would seem to be already refuted. For a line of argument fond of talking of objective moral facts, natural moral law theorists are often remarkably reluctant to consult existing anthropological data. Which shows, quite clearly, that societies can have functioning heterosexual families and marriages perfectly happily in conjunction with same-sex marriages and relationships. Particularly as same-sex relationships and couples have, in fact, always existed. Finnis is waving around what is a danger to (his) theory: that the public acknowledgement of the legitimacy of same-sex relationships endangers the theory of sexual morality he supports, not other people’s marriages.

Just as divorce acts to improve the general quality of marriages—allowing choice tends to improve performance in this as in other areas of life. (Divorce statistics are highly misleading: most modern marriages end only with death; a minority of people are bad at marriage and re-marry a lot, creating highly misleading averages.)

The form of marriage Finnis is delineating and defending—monogamous marriage between a man and a woman treated as full legal equals—is a historically quite rare form of marriage. (The last certainly did not apply when the Church controlled marriage law) Many cultures have permitted same-sex marriage of various forms. Clearly, they did so on different theories of sex and, often, of gender than that Finnis is supporting (that one’s genitals entirely define one’s gender; which makes sex-change operations illegitimate too): theories of sex and gender that gave far more credence to human agency.

Besides, let us grant for the sake of argument Finnis’ claim that unitive sex is the only morally worthy sex. What would follow, as a matter of public policy from that? Nothing. Equality before the law does not rest on the relative worthiness of citizens or their activities. Equality before the law rests on them being citizens, on their common humanity. The case for same-sex marriage is the same as for marriage: that people will pair up, that transactions costs will be lower if the state provides a standard marriage contract, that multiplication of marriage or marriage-like contracts is not good public policy, that citizens who seek to build lives together are entitled as citizens to equal protection of the law: all applying with particular force since some of those couples (both same-sex and opposite-sex) are and will be raising children. Given Finnis’ claims about damage to other people’s marriages or willingness to marriage are demonstrably false, and that the modern state has never regulated marriage to require procreation, the moral worthiness of the sex engaged in within same-sex marriages is something public policy should take no cognizance of just as it does not for current opposite-sex marriages. We can see here how much Finnis’ argument ultimately rests on denying that the same-sex attracted are proper versions of the human.

After all, he puts them in the position that to be “moral” they have to lie (pretend erotic engagements and interests that are not authentic) or be celibate. To experience burdens and costs that are far in excess of what happens if the “wrong form” of sex is engaged in. The damage done—in judicial murder, imprisonment, being social outcast, emotionally and psychologically stunted and harmed—in taking the same-sex attracted as being not a proper form of the human is so much greater than any “danger” they represent. But to worry about that entails worrying about them as if they are proper versions of the human and that their experience therefore counts. The utterly unnecessary emotional turmoil same-sex attracted youth go through, for example, is clearly simply a non-issue in this calculus: a “necessary cost” of establishing heterosexuality as the only acceptable sexual manifestation of the human.

But there is no reason to grant Finnis’ claims for unitive sex, as he provides no evidence for the absolute superiority of unitive sex: apart from (as we shall see) a silly claim about using the body instrumentally, it is argument based on assertion. He is making three claims: (1) unitive sex exists with the characteristics he claims for it; (2) it is the most morally worthy form of sex; and (3) no other form of sex has any moral worth. As to (1), that is entirely a religious claim, not found in classical philosophy but relying on Scriptural statements about “one flesh” and not based on the breadth of human experience of sex. As for (2), for sex that creates life within a loving marriage, that may well be true, without making (3) true. As for (3), that rests on a denigration of human agency, and the actual human experience of sex, that we have no good reason to grant and many reasons not to.

One of the features of being same-sex oriented is that one finds sex with one’s own sex far more profoundly satisfying than sex with the opposite sex: in particular, that the former is far more likely to be an expression of a profound erotic engagement with another person. But, of course, Finnis has framed things—as the natural moral law tradition does—so that nothing the same-sex attracted say on their own behalf in such matters count. An evidentiary procedure that should be utterly contemptible to anyone trained in law. (This is a system that really does turn priests into commissars of natural law, with the same-sex attracted having no more recourse against the burden of the theory than someone designated a ‘counter-revolutionary’ would have against Leninism.)

Finnis does cite evidence that homosexual pairings tend not to be monogamous. First, he only cites evidence about male couples: evidence about female couples would be quite different. Second, the evidence is from societies where there is no history of public recognition of same-sex couples: Finnis is hardly in a position to claim that changing the law does not have implications for attitudes and behaviour. Thirdly, marriage has survived having sub-groups with distinctly different patterns of behaviour (the British aristocracy comes to mind). Fourthly, the law need not concern itself about such matters: as, of course, it does not for heterosexual couples except in so far it affects pleas for divorce.

Silly instrumentalism
The only real argument Finnis advances for the absolute superiority of unitive sex so that all other sex is morally worthiness is one about not treating humans as instruments. Such as:

For want of a common good that could be actualised and experienced by and in this bodily union, that conduct involves the partners in treating their bodies as instruments to be used in the service of their consciously experiencing selves; their choice to engage in such conduct thus dis-integrates each of them precisely as acting persons.

Or:

… the self-understanding of those members of the community who are willing to commit themselves to real marriage in the understanding that its sexual joys are not mere instruments or accompaniments to, or mere compensations for, the accomplishment of marriage's responsibilities, but rather enable the spouses to actualise and experience their intelligent commitment to share in those responsibilities, in that genuine self-giving.

And:

All who accept that homosexual acts can be a humanly appropriate use of sexual capacities must, if consistent, regard sexual capacities, organs and acts as instruments for gratifying the individual "self" who has them.

Finnis also cites Kant on instrumentalism:

The post-Christian moral philosophy of Kant identified the wrongfulness of masturbation and homosexual (and bestial) conduct as consisting in the instrumentalisation of one's body, and thus ("since a person is an absolute unity") the "wrong to humanity in our own person".

All this rests on the same deep problematising of sex that the rest of Finnis’s position rests on. Apparently, any use of the body for sensual pleasure is a wrongful instrumentalism of the body, since they all involve the use the body to experience sensual pleasure as much as sex does: weird of the body to have such capacities then.

Moreover, it is a ludicrous characterization of human interaction for pleasure and joy. Are we going to damn games and sports, for example, as illegitimate instrumentalisations of the body? (Kant really needed to get out more.) The notion that one person expressing their love for another by giving them sexual pleasure (or indeed sensual pleasure, such as a massage) is an illegitimate instrumentalisation of the human body or person is an utter nonsense which only gets any plausibility at all by putting sex in this weird, deeply problematic box—whether because of the issues monotheism has with sex, or because you have some deep problem with human passions, or do not understand the role of catharsis or whatever. Semen and orgasms are not fixed resources: ejaculation or orgasmic release in one context does not preclude or limit it happening in a different context. The simple joy of comfort with your own body and intimate joy with another are good in their own right: they do not have value only as instruments of procreation.

But not only are Finnis’ claims here nonsense (and nonsense that has no relevance to the law) but his breast-beating about turning people into instruments is deeply hypocritical. Because that is precisely how he treats the same-sex attracted. For the role he puts the same-sex attracted is: your existence is inconvenient to our theory of sex, so we are going to seek to truncate your lives in ways that are convenient to our theory of sex regardless of the costs to you; we are not going to concern ourselves with what you want; indeed, we are going to frame things so there is nothing you can say on your behalf of your erotic aspirations; we are not going to concern ourselves with whether what we demand of you is reasonable or not; we are not going to concern ourselves with the implications for your status within your own society. None of these things we will give any standing to. The only thing that matters is the convenience of our theory.

This does not derive a concept of “human flourishing” from how people actually are, it uses its concept of “human flourishing” to define the human. If you do not fit, you are not “properly” human. Is that not treating the same-sex attracted with a thoroughly dehumanising instrumentalism? Of course it is. Is thus a monstrous hypocrisy? Of course it is.

That is, it is as long as you think that the same-sex attracted are people, in the ordinary moral sense of the term. But if they are not proper versions of the human, then it is not hypocrisy, merely utterly vile.

For, no matter how one dresses it up, Catholic natural law sexual morality is a thorough attack on the agency—and thus the elementary humanity—of the same sex attracted. It treats them as not proper manifestations of the human, as metaphysically deformed due to having:

… a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder

and so not due considerations which would otherwise be elementary. It thereby uses them as instruments to be sacrificed to natural law moral theory. Literally sacrificed as burnt offerings in judicial murders in past centuries, whatever level of repression can be got away with in our own time, in a slow process of responding to liberalising social attitudes that the Church has fought at every step of the way.

Casualties of priestly authority
All of which, of course, completely subverts the second principle of Christianity. But priests hated Christ’s teaching at the time, because it took away their power as "gatekeepers of righteousness" to say who was morally “in” and who was “out” with its notion that everyone should be treated as if they were morally “in”. They do not hate that teaching of His any less now. The Church refuses to change its teachings because, not merely would such a reversal of itself undermine its authority but because rationing orgasms is very much about keeping priestly authority—the authority to say who is in and who is out—going: an authority that rests crucially on the subversion of the second principle of Christianity.

Indeed, it is worth considering what evils done by the Catholic Church—its homicidal wars against religious, intellectual and sexual diversity, the denigration of Jews, the betrayal of children in its care—have not been products of the creation and maintenance of priestly authority.

This matters for the essay being examined here as John Finnis—like Robert George and Ed Feser—defends this teaching because it is the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Indeed, part of the casualties of this maintenance of priestly authority is someone like John Finnis arguing for the proposition that some of his fellow humans are metaphysically deformed—and so not entitled to the equal protection of the law—on the basis of an approach to natural law not in any way based on Gospel thinking and which was homicidal in its origins, homicidal in its history and continues to be homicidal (in unofficial murders) in its implications.

But, like His insistence on promiscuously offering moral inclusion to all—and thus the “insult of equality” to all those convinced that entire categories of their fellow humans are emphatically not their moral equals—Christ’s teaching that belittling others was not only wrong for what it did to them, but also wrong for how it diminishes the belittler, remains highly subversive.