Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

The constant decline of civilization?

An instructive series of quotations, collected over the years, on the theme of pessimism about the present in relation to the past:

Plato, 360 BCE: “In that country [Egypt] arithmetical games have been invented for the use of mere children, which they learn as pleasure and amusement. I have late in life heard with amazement of our ignorance in these matters [science in general]; to me we appear to be more like pigs than men, and I am quite ashamed, not only of myself, but of all Greeks.” (Laws, Book VII)

Catullus, c. 60 BCE: “Oh, this age! How tasteless and ill-bred it is!”

Horace, c. 23-13 BCE: “Our fathers, viler than our grandfathers, begot us who are viler still, and we shall bring forth a progeny more degenerate still.” (Odes 3:6)

Alberti, 1436: Nature is no longer producing great intellects — “or giants which in her youthful and more glorious days she had produced so marvelously and abundantly.” (On Painting)

Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1620: “For what else can our degenerate race do in this age of error. Our lowly disposition keeps us close to the ground, and we have declined from that heroic genius and judgment of the ancients.”

Mary Wollstonecraft, c. 1790: “As from the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind.”

William Wordsworth, 1802:
“Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.”
(”London”)

John Stuart Mill, in 1859, speaking of his generation: “the present low state of the human mind.” (On Liberty, Chapter 3)

Frederick Taylor, 1911: “We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron is in sight.” (Scientific Management)

T. S. Eliot, c. 1925: “We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity.”

So has the world really been in constant decline? Or perhaps, as Gibbon put it in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776): “There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.”

Words to keep in mind as we try to assess objectively our own generation’s serious problems.

Audacious historical cause-and-effect claims

In an 1846 review of Grote’s History of Greece, John Stuart Mill makes this claim: “The Battle of Marathon, even as an event in British history, is more important than the Battle of Hastings.”

My first reaction to Mill’s sentence was agreement. My second reaction was to the audacity of the claim and to wonder how it could be justified.

The 1066 CE Battle of Hastings was 780 years Before Mill, and the 490 BCE Battle of Marathon was 2,336 years BM. But how does one make cause-and-effect claims about human actions involving millions of people across thousands of years? That takes major conceptualizing cojones.

Here is Mill’s sentence in context: “The interest of Grecian history is unexhausted and inexhaustible. As a mere story, hardly any other portion of authentic history can compete with it. Its characters, its situations, the very march of its incidents, are epic. It is an heroic poem, of which the personages are peoples. It is also, of all histories of which we know so much, the most abounding in consequences to us who now live. The true ancestors of the European nations (it has been well said) are not those from whose blood they are sprung, but those from whom they derive the richest portion of their inheritance. The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings. If the issue of that day had been different, the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods.”

Mill is doing “What-if” history: We know we are what we are today significantly because of the Greek victory at Marathon, but where would we be if the Persians had won?

Let’s separate two propositions:
1. The Greeks defeated the Persians at Marathon. Therefore, we are where we are today. What evidence do we have connecting those two sentences?
2. If the Persians had defeated the Greeks at Marathon, then … . How do we complete the sentence?

On 1. The Greeks’ defeating the Persians made it possible for Greek culture to be transmitted across the generations. That was not a deterministic process — each generation’s decision-makers to varying degrees had to accept and propagate its distinctive Greek inheritance of independent, naturalistic thinking, and to the extent that each generation did it developed a culture of rationality, creativity, innovation, science, and artistry. As historians we can see the positive evidence for those connections as they played out across time: the western European decision-makers of the 300-1000s largely rejected the Greek philosophy and declined into the Dark Ages; but further east Byzantium continued to flourish, keeping the Greek texts and ideas alive; the decision-makers of the 1100s to 1400s rediscovered and rejuvenated the Greeks and the Renaissance ensued; and so on.

On 2. What counts as evidence here? We can imagine victorious Persians stamping out Greek culture or dispirited Greeks letting themselves slide into insignificance. But we can also imagine a more relaxed Persian regime content with tribute or tenacious Greeks keeping the flame alive and rebelling a few years later.

Imagination aside, we can think analogically to real historical cases. From the 300s to the 500s CE, the victory of early Christianity did lead to the suppression and extermination of Greek culture. But previously, from 197 to 30 BCE, the Romans systematically defeated the Greeks — yet the Greek inheritance survived, becoming not only part of Roman culture but for many generations the dominant philosophy of the Romans. (I like the saying that the Romans defeated the Greeks but the Greeks conquered the Romans.)

So a Persian victory would have led to which result? I don’t know. And not knowing that, can we say how important Marathon was to where we are 2,500 years later?

Related:
My lecture “What Moves History: An Introduction to the Philosophy of History,” available as a free audio download.

Seminar: Philosophy and the Evolution of the Mixed Economy

One of my talks at Francisco Marroquín University was on making sense of our mixed economy–an unwieldy combination of market and socialist elements. The 28-minute talk integrates themes from my intellectual heroes–Smith, Mill, Mises, Hayek, Rand, Popper, Friedman, Buchanan, and Tullock–and connects market economics, politics, ethics, history, and public choice to explaining our semi-coherent mixed economy. The flowchart worked through is online here.

Related:
The above talk at UFM’s site.
The flowchart: Pathologies of the mixed economy (or, How we got into this frackin’ mess).
The previous talk referred to at the beginning: Seminar on entrepreneurial ethics.
Interview with UFM’s Luis Figueroa on Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility.

Interview with Alexei Marcoux on moral partiality in business

Alexei Marcoux of Loyola University Chicago spoke at Rockford College on whether ethics requires moral partiality or impartiality in business decision-making. Below is my follow-up sixteen-minute interview with Professor Marcoux. Along the way, we discuss nepotism, conflicts of interest, fiduciary obligations, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and contemporary business ethicist Norman Bowie.

Part I:

Part II:

Cross-posted at the CEE site.

Am I really a Marxist revolutionary?

[Update: I received a note of apology from the author and the post has been retracted. Thank you to everyone who acted on my behalf to correct the error.]

What can I say?

According to Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website, Professor Stephen Hicks of Rockford College is a Marxist devoted to educating cadres of revolutionaries.

A good case of an under-researched post that jumps to a very wrong conclusion. (Thanks to Hal Hollis for the pointer.)

Here is the full context for the video clip — my fifteen-part series of lectures on the Philosophy of Education, in which I present many philosophies, Marxism included.

Now I wish I had a photo-shopped image of myself with a red beret and a t-shirt saying something nasty about capitalism. That would be proof indeed.

For a good statement of my actual philosophy of liberal arts education, I recommend Chapter 2 of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, a key portion of which I excerpt here:

‘There is a class of persons (happily not quite so numerous as formerly) who think it enough if a person assents undoubtingly to what they think true, though he has no knowledge whatever of the grounds of the opinion, and could not make a tenable defence of it against the most superficial objections. … [T]his is not the way in which truth ought to be held by a rational being. This is not knowing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth. …
‘If the cultivation of the understanding consists in one thing more than in another, it is surely in learning the grounds of one’s own opinions. Whatever people believe, on subjects on which it is of the first importance to believe rightly, they ought to be able to defend against at least the common objections. But, some one may say, “Let them be taught the grounds of their opinions. It does not follow that opinions must be merely parroted because they are never heard controverted.” …
‘But when we turn to subjects infinitely more complicated, to morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life, three-fourths of the arguments for every disputed opinion consist in dispelling the appearances which favour some opinion different from it. The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth. He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess. They do not know those parts of it which explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred. All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavoured to see the reasons of both in the strongest light. So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil’s advocate can conjure up.’

Zeev Sternhell on the Nazis’ pillaging of Nietzsche

Zeev Sternhell’s The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (Yale University Press, 2010) is a scholarly study of the most disturbing intellectual trend of the modern world: the ongoing lineage of intellectuals opposed to the Enlightenment tradition of reason, naturalism, individualism, and freedom.

Along the way Sternhell asks, of Nietzsche’s place in the trend, an excellent series of questions:

“When a work is seized upon and shamelessly pillaged, as was Nietzsche’s by the Nazis, should one not nevertheless ask if it did not lay itself open to this treatment? Did not Nietzsche’s long campaign against humanism, equality, and democracy, despite his strong criticism not only of German nationalism but also of nineteenth-century German culture, help, by playing a leading role in the education of two generations of Germans, to open up a breach that permitted this—in itself unacceptable—usurpation? Why did a mishap of this kind not happen to the work of Tocqueville or of Mill?” (pp. 32-33).

Exactly. My thoughts Nietzsche and the Nazis are here.

[Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.]

John and John on liberal psychology

Locke and Mill, that is.

Locke on freedom of choice for students: “great care is to be taken, that [education] be never made as a business to him, nor he look on it as a task. We naturally, as I said, even from our cradles, love liberty, and have therefore an aversion to many things, for no other reason, but because they are enjoin’d us. I have always had a fancy, that learning might be made a play and recreation to children; and that they might be brought to desire to be taught, if it were proposed to them as a thing of honour, credit, delight, and recreation …” (Some Thoughts concerning Education, Section 148)

And now Mill on freedom of movement: “Many a person remains in the same town, street, or house from January to December, without a wish or thought tending towards removal, who, if confined to that same place by the mandate of authority, would find the imprisonment absolutely intolerable.” (Principles of Political Economy, p. 213)

Religion: help or hindrance to philosophy?

The Greeks were the first to do philosophy, and one of the perennially great questions is: Why the Greeks and not some others? Various answers focus on their cosmopolitan trading economy, their concurrent development of democratic politics, or some other combination of factors.

I have long thought that the Greeks’ naturalistic religion was a positive, contributing factor. Since their deities were naturalistic beings, the Greeks were less likely to think of the world as governed by other-worldly beings beyond their comprehension. Since the Greek deities intervened in human affairs for motives we can understand (lust, rivalry, envy, revenge), the Greeks were more likely to think of the world as intelligibly cause and effect. And so on.

So let me turn to the dissenting view, from the estimable John Stuart Mill, which I only recently came across. In an 1846 review of George Grote’s History of Greece, Mill takes up the question of philosophy’s birth and says this about the Greeks and their religion:

“With a religious creed eminently unfavourable to speculation, because affording a ready supernatural solution of all natural phenomena, they yet originated freedom of thought.”

Mill’s suggestion is that since the Greek religion already provided easy and intelligible explanations for natural events, there would no reason to seek further. Religion of the Greek sort is thus a hindrance to the development of philosophy.

Thoughts? Should I stick with my original view, or should I switch to Mill’s intriguing hypothesis?

[Mill's “A Review of the first Two Volumes of ‘Grote’s History of Greece’” from the Edinburgh Review, October 1846, can be read online here.]