Clive Hamilton's "The Freedom Paradox. Towards a Post Secular Ethics" (Sunday Forum)

by James, Australia, Saturday, January 31, 2009, 22:02 (1569 days ago)

Clive Hamilton’s book, “The Freedom Paradox, Towards a Post-Secular Ethics” is a very engaging read, very clear and well written. There are very few books on philosophy that a layman can read without finding one’s eyes glazing over and this is one of those few.

The impression that I got as I went through the book is that there was a certain feeling of déjà vu about his opening lines – you know, the world has gone to the dogs, the younger generation are lost, stupefied by drugs, depressed and committing suicide, greed is good, no one is happy despite unprecedented wealth. And it all has to do with the flight away from traditional religion, the family, social bonds etc etc etc. Not that Hamilton suggests a return to these values. He accepts the fact that this old world is over.

I have always been puzzled by such pronouncements because they seem to be the prerogative of old men to say them. One can find similar cries from the heart by old men about the degeneration of the young in ancient Greece and Rome and every other generation before and since. But of course the Greeks and Romans were talking about the breakdown of their religions and their social structures, and the rejection of their gods. If all these old people were right, then humanity must have been on a slippery dip downhill ethically during its whole history and we should be off the graph by now.

In fact, I think it is quite the contrary, although of course, there is still a long way to go, as Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq at one extreme and perhaps the “greed is good” ethic at the other, would attest. There have been ethical advances in terms of prohibitions on slavery, burning witches, anti-Semitism, racism.

Much of the world has set up social security systems, education and health care for the poor, the Geneva Conventions on treating prisoners of war, the International War Crimes Tribunals, equal opportunities for women and prohibitions on torture - until George Bush made the great leap forward to water boarding, known as the “wimple” in the Inquisition, and without a blip from John Howard. Hopefully we are back on a progressive track with the change of leaders.

In recent times there has been a proliferation of “happiness studies”, but their conclusions do not come as any surprise to anyone who listened to their grandmother (“money isn’t everything, dear”). There has always been throughout evolutionary history this constant struggle between altruism and egoism, both individually and socially. Sometimes altruism wins and sometimes egotism does.

Hamilton turns to Kant and Schopenhauer for his “post-secular” ethic. I am not sure what the “secular” ethic was for this one to be “post”. But in any event, he points out that Kant made the revolutionary statement that there is a difference between what we see with our senses and perceive with our brain and what really is “out there”, the “thing in itself”. Plato had said something similar with his analogy of the shadows in the cave, but Kant brought a new refinement. Kant’s revolutionary contribution was that there is a form of innate knowledge. He described what we see and experience directly as the “phenomenon” and what is the thing in itself as the “noumenon”.

Kant did not have the scientific tools to find out what is the difference between the two, and what is the extent of this innate knowledge. In the last 50 or so years, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology studies are starting to provide us with at least some answers.

For example, when the sun or moon comes up over the horizon, it looks much larger than when they are high up in the sky. I always had accepted the explanation that it had something to do with the volume of atmosphere that you were looking through and that this had a magnifying effect. Not so apparently. It is your brain that does it, and we cannot avoid it. The reason the brain does it is because it has been very useful for man to know how far a charging elephant is away from him than a rat up close that might otherwise occupy the same volume at the back of the retina.

The same is true of the sensation of thinking the moon is moving fast during heavy winds and lots of clouds or thinking that your train has pulled out of the station when it is the train next to you that is moving. These are but two small examples of where the “phenomenon” is not the “noumenon”.

Other examples are where people who have been blind from birth and are then operated on to cure their “blindness” have great difficulty coping with the world, and do not see what we see. Yet their eyes are perfectly normal. The deficit is in the neuronal connectors that have not developed because of blindness from birth. Neuroscience is continually providing us with other examples arising from studies of brain damaged people and from the new imaging technology.

The problem with this “phenomenon/noumenon” concept is that we do not really know how much of what we see is “real”, ie exists independently outside of us and how much is created by our brains. Hamilton suggests that we do get a glimpse of this transcendental essence, and he then applies that to ethical decisions. The “noumenon” is not only what is out there, but a “universal essence” that sometimes filters through to us to make correct moral decisions.

On page 182 of his book, he writes,
“Yet we know that there is a form of knowledge other than the knowledge of the phenomenon – the ‘non-sensible’ intuition Kant deduced but denied we could have access to, the special knowledge Schopenhauer wanted to believe in but could not quite accept. I maintain that there are times in adult life when circumstances converge in such a way as to give even the most hard boiled rationalist a glimpse of the universal essence that binds humanity.”

Well, what is this “glimpse”? Is it the realization that something is morally wrong? Is this the insight that Wilberforce and others had about slavery and is it the more modern glimpse that we can’t keep destroying the earth the way we are? Undoubtedly people have these “glimpses”, but are they of the “universal essence that binds humanity?”. Maybe, maybe not.

I have some problems with this idea of a “universal essence”. Evolutionary psychologists like Harvard’s Stephen Pinker or Colombia’s Antonio Velez state that the source of our morality is not something “out there”, but is hard wired into our brains in the same way as the capacity for language is hard wired into us, and has come about through the same evolutionary forces. Language was, and still is, an essential survival tool. Those children who understood their parents when they were warned not to go near a cliff survived, and passed on their genes to their descendants. Those who did not died and left none. Children who are not taught to speak by the age of about 12, lose the capacity to learn a language.

Pinker and Velez say it is the same with morality. Altruism and cooperation within small groups, were also survival tools, but they disappear once the group gets bigger, and the survival of the fittest mentality returns. This is the reason for the failure of socialist systems that become paradises for parasites. It is the reason why there is generally altruism and cooperation within families, and small tribes, but why we need laws to govern large groups.

Morality, like language, is biologically hard wired into our brains, but it also needs practice and training. Unless children are trained to act morally, then you end up with the Lord of the Flies. But once we have been trained, we can improve, just as we can with language.

There is also other hard wiring that is not so attractive and this explains things like selfishness, xenophobia, racism, aggression and war, again brought about by those same evolutionary forces of adaptation. The challenge for humanity according to these thinkers is to put the lid on this reptile brain underneath our rational one, and to develop cultural means to counteract its impulses.

True moral advancement comes not from some “noumenon”, but from recognizing when the reptile brain is overcoming the rational brain and setting up structures and systems to counteract it. It has long been recognized that legal systems to deal with criminal activity are designed to stop people killing each other as much as to mete out justice. International War Crimes Tribunals may be another such structure and its effect could be profound on the behavior of political leaders. There are reports that Henry Kissinger now does not travel without legal advice because of the number of summonses against him from other countries wanting information about his role in the Pinochet coup, as well as other alleged war crimes.

Theologians would say that you need God for morality, and indeed all morality comes from the divine law. Hamilton rejects that idea but then he comes up with the idea that we need to be united with the noumenon to be moral…well do we?

I could not help thinking that Hamilton was creating a deus ex machina, to explain the existence of our innate morality. All he seems to have done is to change the deus and call it a “universal essence”, rather than God.

During the sixties, theologians like Karl Rahner were concerned about the obvious fact that there were many very good people in the world who were not believers in Jesus, or even in God for that matter. If morality came from the grace of the Christian God, how do you explain this obvious fact?

Rahner came up with this idea of the “anonymous Christian”, and it was adopted by the Second Vatican Council. This means that good people in the world are really anonymous Christians who are inspired by Jesus to be good. To me this was another attempt to explain some obvious fact in the world that sits uncomfortably with Christian theory. It also has its innate contradiction because it must also apply not only to those who know nothing about Christ in some wild far off jungles, but also to people who have been brought up with the Bible, and maybe even a Church, and have specifically rejected Jesus – yet nevertheless are good, moral people.

What concerns me about Hamilton’s theory is that his is a kind of “anonymous Christian” explanation. There are good people in the world who are not religious at all (like Mandela to whom he refers). Is this because Mandela is more connected with the noumenon, which by definition is something that we cannot detect directly but occasionally “glimpse”? Hamilton’s answer seems to be yes, he was or is. That seems to me to be very similar to a Catholic explanation that Mandela really is an anonymous Christian who has received some special grace from God to be the person that he is. Hamilton starts with the premise that Mandela is a good and virtuous man and the cause of that must be because he is in touch with the noumenon, or “man’s essential essence” more than the rest of us.

I personally don’t think we can explain why Mandela is the person he is, other than to say that he is, and there may well be all sorts of genetic and cultural factors that have fortunately come together in one man. We have to be very thankful for that, but I don’t think it helps the rest of us to say that he is more in touch with the noumenon. That immediately asks the question, “Well how do I get in touch with it”. Hamilton does not explain that. Of course he says that you don’t do it by living a life of hedonism or by being a slave to modern consumerist advertising. One can only agree, but I don’t consider that I came to that conclusion by being more in touch with the “noumenon” than those with ripped jeans, Rolex watches, 6 monthly turnovers of convertible cars, and different sex partners every night. It probably had more to do with my listening to my grandmother.

The evolutionary approach to understanding human behaviour seems to me a bit more useful. I find it more useful to understand that underneath the peculiar cerebral cortex of human beings, there is also the primitive reptile formed by those same adaptive forces that led to us being where we are now.

It helps to know what those adaptive forces are, how and why they arose, to recognize them and to keep the reptile under control. And if social structures can help us to do that, well and good. We have so much to improve.

“The Freedom Paradox” is a great read, and a book I found hard to put down. It certainly improved my knowledge of Kant, Schopenhauer and modern philosophy generally. In the end, however, I did not come away convinced.