Three Wishes

This post is a little longer than my previous entries. It started as a tangent from my original project on teleology, but has grown. While I compile notes on Gaia, this has been my amusement. 500 words is a good optimum for success given the internet attention span, so I am not optimistic about this. Still, it was fun to write and it might be fun to read too.

 

As semi-professional killjoys, we spend much of our time examining and analysing things to the point where their magic and enjoyment is lost. Initially we do this consciously, but once started the tendency cannot be checked. It is a blind, mechanical process without end. I am Lovecraft’s Pole Star which “leers down from the same place in the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.” Or maybe that’s just alcohol. Either way it is inevitable.

It was in this mindset that I cheerfully sat down to watch Disney’s Aladdin the other day. The turning point in the film – as in all versions of the story – is the appearance of the Genie of the Lamp, who is able to grant wishes. Versions of the tale differ (and in fact the entire story is a later European addition to the original One Thousand and One Nights) but the one known best, at least in the West, involves three wishes, perhaps with limitations in their scope. In the Disney version the holder of the lamp is unable to use wishes to kill, to raise from the dead, or to make a person fall in love. This is very convenient within the context of Disney since these are precisely the powers a Disney hero would require to carry out Hollywood’s ideological requirements of defeating the irredeemably evil villain and forming the romantic couple. Arbitrary restrictions on the use of magical powers have always been among the best starting points for fantasy plots, so this is ideal for the narrative.

I was unsure whether to take the Disney prohibitions seriously when I came to speculate on the consequences of wishes. It always bothered me that Robin Williams’ genie forbade raising people from the dead, not as an absolute impossibility, but on the basis that it was ‘messy’ and for that reason he ‘didn’t like doing it.’ Most likely this was part of the humour of the character and the prohibition was real, but it created doubt. I decided the best solution was to start with potential wishes which would avoid these issues. But where to begin?

The first place for anyone with normal, embarrassing levels of selfishness would be personal and material gain. Perhaps the fabled “riches beyond the dreams of avarice” ought to be one of the three? But this is something with much broader implications than it first appears. Consider another popular film franchise: The Hobbit. Tolkien’s book did not specify in any great detail the value of the treasure hoard possessed by the dragon Smaug, but I’m willing to bet an appreciable fraction of said hoard that it was nowhere near the eventual CGI glitter-party of Peter Jackson’s hyperbolic mind. To ruin these films too, let me just point out that Smaug’s defeat would lead to a sudden, catastrophic injection of gold into the economy of Middle Earth which would plausibly lead to the collapse of society itself – though truly this is well overdue, considering that the long-distance shots of the cities of Minas Tirith, Osgiliath and Edoras show vast plains of grass and not a single farm, ranch, small-holding or allotment – presumably they all subsist on Lembas bread and Pipeweed. For currencies based on gold the result would be an unmitigated disaster which would rival several of the other outrageous hardships faced by the average citizen of Gondor. No-one would be interested in the Return of the King in the climate of Weimar-style inflation on the price of Old Toby.

A large enough quantity of cash will either break the monetary system altogether, or be indistinguishable from political power. Why buy luxury good X when you can buy the factory? Why not buy the town? This leads to the second self-seeking possibility: wishing for political power.

Nowhere is the American origin of the Disney Aladdin more apparent than in the results of the hero’s first wish – the wish to be a prince. Rather than producing fake proof of royal heritage, or altering the past to create an actual heritage, the genie seems to overcompensate in the outrageous lie by focusing on providing seventy-five golden camels (don’t they look lovely, June?) and purple peacocks fifty-three (fabulous Harry, I love the feathers). In conversation an American friend of mine once assumed that hereditary nobility in Britain gained their status by first getting rich and then – in some hellish eternal version of the American Dream – being granted a special title until the end of time. Obviously the opposite is the case given the recent emergence of capitalism and the much longer period of military feudalism which created the original inequalities that later found new modes of expression in a market economy; until relatively recently ‘new money’ didn’t exist, and until very recently it was incapable of exerting as much influence as true capitalism should allow, at least in Britain. With a few late exceptions, they aren’t lords because they’re rich, they’re rich because they’re lords.

To return to the point, Aladdin is later faced with the dilemma of whether to continue lying about his origins or telling the princess Jasmine the truth. The ‘truth’ in this case – utterly bizarrely, to my mind – is that he is ‘not really a prince’. Obviously the genie’s powers are even more limited than we thought, since Aladdin’s wish to ‘be a prince’ was interpreted as to ‘appear to be a prince’. One could let Theory out of its cage here to make Lacanian squawks about Aladdin’s symbolic identity. The madman is not just the beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king – the status of king being nothing more or less than being treated as the king – rather than some inherent property which magically makes people bow, on the contrary, it is the bowing itself which works the magic. Thus one reading would have us believe that Aladdin really is meant to be the prince, but that he nonetheless has a Richard III-style hysteric outburst in which he questions his symbolic identity. I think this is too clever. Really the genie has just provided him with a light-show, and the real essence of Prince-ity (unreal concepts can bear stupid names) has not been delivered. Somehow, in spite of being treated as one, Aladdin is not a prince.

Considering the alternatives, Robin Williams’ genie seems to have chosen the smart option. But it is also perhaps the only option available. Recall the rules the genie lays down at the very beginning: no killing, no raising, no romance. These three types of wish are probably a complete list of the ingredients required for the alteration of history. It is hard to imagine how a respectable lineage can be established for Aladdin without the use of any of these – even leaving out the paradoxes in personal identity which would result. Then again, the genie seems very loose on wishes which might indirectly result in any of these three coming to pass – how many thousands may live or die based on Aladdin’s eventual ascendency?

Again, my instinct is to leave these rules behind. They seem very ambiguous (especially the love one) and some of the genie’s other powers ought to overrule them a fortiori. A genie without these limitations may be too terrifying though. Aside from those explicit limitations, must we hold on to the implicit ones? What are the implicit ones?

Here we return to the familiar ground of omnipotence. There are certainly a few more thinkers – and people generally – who profess to believe in an omnipotent God than those who have a deep faith in genies. And more philosophy has been done concerning the nature of such a God than about any other subject – at least in the West. It is therefore troubling for our investigation that no real agreement has been reached on the property of omnipotence. If God can ‘do anything’ then can he create a round square? In other words, is he constrained by the laws of logic? If he is not then our method of discourse breaks down entirely, since we have no way in language to talk about such a being, except perhaps poetry, given that language as we use it is predicated on an adherence to non-contradiction. But if he is so constrained then we are also entitled to ask whether the constraints end there. Some things which are logically possible might not be metaphysically possible, or nomologically possible. We cannot be clear on the boundary.

Whatever the case for God, it seems like he might be capable of frightening things but never be inclined to do them. Whether this counts as a limitation is also contentious. At least it might mean that his moral sense could prevent him from waking up one morning and deciding to destroy the whole universe. Either way, the genie of the lamp will differ from God in that his powers will not express the will of a perfectly good being, but a human animal, the holder of the lamp. Human animals are capable of great altruism and nauseating pettiness – in fact our evaluations of both are always calibrated by humans as we find them, so that humans as a whole species no more ‘are’ good than they ‘are’ evil. The problem is that even a generous normal distribution over three wishes would likely give us at least one unpleasant desire realised with magical inevitability. Even Disney’s hero, who was meant to be a moral paragon, a “diamond in the rough”, only used one of his wishes selflessly, when he freed the genie at the end of the film.

Even leaving aside the explicitly repugnant wishes, there are plenty of well-meaning wishes which might have consequences which we would worry about. For example, one of the common hallmarks of utopian political projects is that they are concerned not only with changing material conditions, but precipitating a change in consciousness, a change in people themselves; humankind must be transformed in order to realise the bright future. For some this is a transformation which inevitably takes place through education or the escape from wage slavery. For others, such as Fanon, the only effective catalyst is violence. But what if one could simply wish this transformation into existence? Wouldn’t the world be better if, for example, humans were a bit more empathetic? Or a bit cleverer? Or suddenly fully possessed ‘class consciousness’? Wouldn’t Aladdin have an obligation to create such a world?

This is important because it does not seem to violate the genie’s original prohibitions – at least, no more than adding a new member to Arabian royalty would – and it becomes clear that wishes like these change everything. The human condition itself can be altered. Unless we are (like God) necessary beings with necessary characteristics, there is no reason to suppose that we could not be other than we are. True, we have evolved in a certain way, but why should this be the only way?

All of our valuation systems and all of the language we use to express these systems become inadequate. As I just mentioned, we judge the great altruism and nauseating pettiness on a scale in which humans are placed dead-centre as our reference point. Kant creates ‘supererogatory actions’, virtue ethicists need a harmonious mean, and utilitarians talk about ‘least suffering’ to absent themselves from a messianic quest of moral exceptionalism, all because they presuppose a norm of humanity – sometimes good and sometimes bad – and recognise this as an unsurpassable limit to their projects; there is no point trying to apply tennis strategy to a swingball set, which has a ball which is never capable of long shots but is stuck orbiting the same post anchored in the dirt. The perfectly virtuous agent whose tennis ball flies freely can only be God, while the rest of us carry out the same rotations of only slightly differing shapes. To wish to cut the rope and make us God-like in our virtue might be the logical decision.

Humans thus changed become inhuman. The paradigm of such collectivism is perhaps the ant or the bee, neither of whom seems like an attractive role-model. Even another higher primate which behaved in such a way would earn our contempt. We constitute at least a part of our identity on the ability to think for ourselves and to rebel against authority, rather than taking pride in roboticism. Weighing up the advantages of such a wish becomes impossible given that it does not represent a move from a worse to a better situation, but a shifting of the very coordinates against which we judge what is worse and what is better. Some would have said that God was constrained if he would not be prepared to use his omnipotence for evil, are we not similarly constrained if we are reborn as incapable of evil? What of literature?

Perhaps this is indeed what someone in possession of the lamp would desire. But if so this is a choice which cannot truly be justified on moral grounds since it is the very redefining of the moral system itself. Kant recognised that even if we cannot prove the freedom of the will, we must presuppose it for morality to make any sense at all. My pleasure at seeing the reform of a villain is predicated on the freedom of his will, so that the genie’s coercive magic feels like cheating. I grant that I am defending the right of humans to do evil, which obviously sounds monstrous to some, but maintaining a sound moral system without this is fraught with hardship.

How can any of these decisions be made without the relevant information? I don’t know what the queer features of morality demand, any more than anyone else who has dedicated countless barren hours to thinking about ethics. It would probably be wise to spend the first wish on a magical, exhaustive encyclopedia. We could determine finally whether free will exists in the first place. We could sort out once and for all what moral reality demands – and whether or not it exists in the first place. If not, could we wish it into existence or is the concept itself meaningless? Obviously we would probably spend some time asking the encyclopedia whether intelligent life existed elsewhere, whether faster than light travel was possible, how to finally defeat ageing etc. But after a while the puckish among us would begin to ask it the questions which the early Wittgenstein considered meaningless – those about ethics, aesthetics and religion. Not to mention finally discovering what we mean by “this sentence is false”. I wonder whether many philosophers actually believe in a determinate answer to these questions, and whether they would want to know the answer if it was so readily available.

Would I?

 

Consider this post the beginning of a longer conversation about wishes. This has been surprisingly fruitful so far. I am edging closer to the idea of the importance of limitation to define activity. If I can wish away all humans and wish them back again, they suddenly appear expendable and contingent. If I can wish for wealth or poverty then everyday struggle becomes a silly game. Knowledge might be attractive, but what does one do afterwards? The whole drama and striving of existence becomes nothing more than a casual pastime to alleviate boredom – assuming one hasn’t wished time itself away or something even more outlandish.

Now we return to the real world where genies are probably scarce. But paddling in the shallow water of speculation has made us painfully aware of the unthinkable things in the deep, which are only vague, dark shapes from the surface. All our work is ahead of us to reconcile ourselves to the limits of the world, since the alternative could be worse. We will return, properly equipped, some time.

 

I repeat that this has gone on rather longer than I had originally planned, and yet I feel that I have skimmed over important details. There are even whole avenues which I have deliberately avoided exploring in the interests of brevity. Perhaps if this had been better thought out then it would have a pleasing structure and even a sustained thesis, without an ending which trails off abruptly. Perhaps if I rewrite it then all the tensions will resolve themselves so that there will be nothing worth saying. We can hope.

Religion: Content, form and utopia

The sort of ‘postmodern’ acknowledgement of religious diversity and its attempt to nullify the potentially deadly consequences of the inherent disagreements seems to me to be completely backwards. The idea is that all the different faiths, especially the monotheisms, are really talking about the same things in different ways – that the content of their belief is fundamentally the same and it is the form this belief which differs. It is certainly a useful fiction for curbing the worst excesses of religious violence, but one is inclined to wonder whether it is applying a plaster where an amputation might be more prudent.

It should already give us pause for thought that what I am about to say next would outrage, or at least cause discomfort to, a great many tolerant, liberal people: the major monotheisms are not talking about the same thing and are, at their core, fundamentally irreconcilable. A world in which there was no friction between religions would be a world in which the constituent beliefs were empty or nearly so. They differ at the level of content.

On the other hand one can argue that the form of religious belief is indeed common. As I have indicated in an earlier post on David Hume, the usual form of religious belief is one whose primary feature is a willingness to take seriously ancient written testimony of miraculous events. The content of the belief will be dependent on which of the holy texts one chooses to take seriously. Although such experiments are obviously impossible, it would be very enlightening if one could go back in time and transfer one of the faithful at birth to a different family of a different religious confession and see if the form of belief would latch onto different contents in a different environment.

My mental response to the fact that the majority of people adopt the religion of their parents is one of bemusement.

Simon Blackburn has given a brief treatment of the status of religious belief. It may be the case that religious moderates do not treat their beliefs in the same way they treat other beliefs. At the most mild end they might be merely a set of useful stories which help ground a series of community traditions and practices and help keep families and societies cohesive. The fact remains though that there are a great many people who take every letter of a particular religious text as the literal word of God. I have a great deal of sympathy for these people since it cannot be denied that they have been brought up in an environment with these traditions and practices which tell them that ‘these stories are really, really true’ but then paradoxically expects them to return to their secular lives, rather than taking the logical step of treating their religion as the most important – perhaps the only important – thing in their life. If they are not ‘really, really true’ then the wrong thing is being preached.

The liberal postmodern wants to allow the flourishing of the moderates on the basis that they are looking at the same thing from different angles. A more appropriate analogy would be that they are looking in opposite directions from the same point. It is because of the wildly different contents of religious beliefs that a pluralistic harmony is impossible in a society which includes literalists of differing faiths. And it is because of the ambiguous approach of moderates to their ‘beliefs’ that such literalists are bound to emerge within multicultural nations. The liberal, postmodern vision turns out to be strikingly utopian.

How Hume clarifies the ‘God debate’ (part 2)

Yesterday we had a very brief look at Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and their implications for theism. Before we move on to his better-known work on miracles I would like to reiterate how frequently the first half is misunderstood despite its simplicity. It is important and acts as foundational to what comes next.

At the end of the previous post we granted that one or more of the proofs of God’s existence might hold (although it is not clear that any of them do) but the debate is not over. In fact it has just begun. It is rarely the case that one who is convinced by the proofs is willing to leave the matter there. Having established the existence of some entity which deserves the title ‘God’, they will usually begin to assert all manner of things about the nature of this entity, which is absolutely fine if they remain strictly in the realm of the a priori. However, most (if not all) will stray into statements which can only possibly be supported with empirical evidence.

It is here that Hume strikes his second blow. Real belief is more often produced in one who has witnessed a miraculous occurrence than in one who has read a philosophical treatise supporting the existence of God. To one who believes they have witnessed a miracle, Hume simply asks whether it is more likely that the laws of nature have been temporarily suspended in your favour, or whether you are deceived by another person or by your own senses. In every instance you should reject whichever is more unlikely (the ‘greater miracle’). The matter is even more serious if it is not a miracle you have witnessed yourself, since written or verbal communication adds another level of separation from the actual event. We all know of stories which get altered in the retelling, whether by deliberate lying or by exaggeration. Nor is it convincing for a record to talk of an event being ‘witnessed by many’ – without independent verification the record still counts as a single report (and one is tempted to reply ‘nice try’ when authors of scripture are at pains to assert that hundreds of other people saw an otherwise unrecorded event). Hume recognises that lure of a sense of wonder – believing in fantastical occurrences is certainly enjoyable, but he warns that this in itself is no form of evidence.

A common misreading of Hume’s Of Miracles is to conclude that Hume was committed to disbelieving in the occurrence of any miraculous event whatsoever. This is not the case, and he gives the example of a hypothetical situation in which records from isolated corners of the Earth all document the sky growing dark for several days at a particular point in the past. Hume’s algorithm would simply lead to the conclusion that the greater miracle would be for a set of inaccurate records to correlate with one another precisely in spite of the lack of any possible contact between the authors. In a situation such as this, Hume would be forced to admit that the miraculous darkness had in fact occurred. His point is simply that there is no such evidence for any of the miracles reported by religious authorities. Or if we are to believe that the miraculous had occurred, then what is allowed for one religion cannot be denied to another. This is a problem because – to put it simply – they can’t all be right.

Overall Hume wishes to know why the faithful believe what they believe, and to challenge them to question themselves and others. We close with a rather affable scepticism which makes better arguments than many within the so-called ‘New Atheism’ movement and does so without descending into vitriol. It is the friendly debate of the philosophical sceptic with the academic theologian and is probably best conducted over a good meal and a bottle of wine.

How Hume clarifies the ‘God debate’ (part 1)

David Hume, who is perhaps the greatest Scottish philosopher, recognised two primary sorts of argument in favour of religious belief. The first were arguments from natural theology, the second concerned miracles. Into the first category fall arguments for God’s existence such as the argument to design or the cosmological argument. It seems highly unlikely that anyone is ever moved from a position of scepticism to a position of belief by these sorts of argument, but it is true that many who already hold religious convictions can (and often do) call on these arguments to supply a rational foundation for their faith. Hence Hume saw it as important that they were taken seriously.

Hume plays with these types of argument in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. An example of this comes when he parodies the teleological argument, which proposes an analogy between the world and the human mind (or products of the human mind such as Paley’s ‘watch in a field’) by pointing out that the world has just as much resemblance to a vegetable as it does to a mind. Throughout the dialogue it is clear that the character Philo – who advocates scepticism, although not outright atheism – has the upper hand, which makes it slightly mysterious that the dialogue closes with the narrator awarding victory to Cleanthes, the advocate of teleology. One possibility is that Hume was simply being ironic, using a technique he had employed elsewhere of blindly reaffirming Christian orthodoxy at the end of his pieces to reinforce his view of its absurdity.

In his recent book on Hume, Simon Blackburn gives an insight into Hume’s overall project concerning religious matters. He argues that Hume is quite happy to allow these classic philosophical arguments for God’s existence precisely because they prove almost nothing. At the end of a serious wrangling over the cosmological or teleological argument, what is one left with? The so-called ‘God of the Philosophers’ about whom we know next to nothing. It is here that time and time again philosophers and theologians commit an unforgivable non sequitur by moving from an apparently successful argument in natural theology to a full-blown theism which simply assumes what it must prove.

To put this all another way, Hume’s (and Blackburn’s) thought on this matter is that even granting that any of these arguments hold, we are in no position to now assert that any particular God (or group of gods) exists. To go from a successful demonstration of the cosmological argument to the assertion that the God of the New Testament sent his son to die on the cross is just as invalid as moving to assert that God’s angel Jibril dictated His final word to the prophet Muhammad. Indeed, it is no more or less outrageous to reason to ignore both of these major religions and move to Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism or the Rastafari movement. For the theist, all the really important work is yet to come.

Once this has been laid out it may all seem rather obvious. But consider the mind-numbing God arguments beloved of debating societies. If the problem is not correctly identified it is inevitable that both sides will talk past each other. The lesson to learn from Hume’s discussion of natural theology is that proofs of the existence of God should be no part of the theist’s arsenal in such debates since they are apt to misfire or even backfire in the presence of members of an incompatible religious confession. Hume’s work on religion is not exhausted here, and I shall touch on the second prong of Hume’s attack in a future post where we shall consider his ‘Of Miracles’.

Understanding theological fatalism

Since the time of Boethius and even before, it has been recognised that there is a worrying contradiction which emerges when a theist makes the two following claims:

1. God is omniscient; he knows the truth-value of every proposition, including those which refer to events in the future.

2. Human beings have real, libertarian (in the philosophical ‘could have done otherwise’ sense, not the political sense) freedom.

There is an obvious problem here. If God knows the decisions I will make ahead of the actual act of deciding, then how can I possibly be said to have been ‘able to do otherwise’? This argument about ‘theological fatalism’ is one which many people are aware of, but most theists ignore. On the rare occasions when it is actually confronted head-on, the theist will usually spin a convoluted theodicy which will inevitably be based on a careful cherry-picking of likely sounding phrases from scripture. Failing that we will be confronted with a more or less convincing compatibilism which will turn out, upon analysis, to be just another form of fatalism, albeit a more subtle one.

The issues surrounding this problem are numerous and filled a dissertation in my undergraduate degree (they could have ended up filling several books if left unchecked) but here I wish to focus on a mere clarification. The issue of divine foreknowledge is perpetually misunderstood by philosophers and theologians, believers and non-believers. There is an element of the dialectic above which amounts simply to a logical claim, but has been dressed up in theological language. Susan Haack calls the argument “a needlessly (and confusingly) elaborated version of the argument for fatalism discussed by Aristotle in de Interpretatione 9.”

It turns out the problem predates Christianity and, indeed, is still a philosophical worry if God is removed from the situation. In order for God to be in a position to know any facts about the future, it must be the case that there is some fact of the matter to know in the first place. Aristotle’s own version of this problem used the example of a naval battle which was to take place the following day. As the commander in this situation, I have the power to give an order which will lead to this battle, or I have the power to give a different order which would prevent it. Aristotle’s problem was that (meaningful) propositions are either true or false – either the battle will take place or it will not – but if that is the case, then my decision today is not really free because, if there will be a sea battle tomorrow then I must be about to give the order which will lead to such a battle, rather than the opposite one.

This argument looks close to mere sophistry, although it has been revived in the last 50 years by Richard Taylor with the added weight of modal logic. The point is that Aristotle’s argument works from the exact same assumption as the theological argument for fatalism we considered before. Aristotle’s main concern was with whether the same logical laws applied to statements about the future or whether they were ‘neither true nor false’ or ‘undecided’ or some other variation. This is the real issue which we must face – if there is a God who knows everything then this may exclude statements about the future if they are simply ‘logically unknowable’. The other side of this coin should make the atheist just as uncomfortable as the theist since if the future has the same ontological status as the present then it seems like free will still goes down the toilet, even without God.