Curator
Analytic philosophers, Monogamy, Reality, the CIA's Literary Fronts
My old college friends seem to be very invested in discussing sexuality in terms of analytic philosophy and normative ethics. I find this kind of a bizarre trend and am trying a bit to understand what’s behind it.
Take, for instance, the linked essay contending that there may be a moral case to make against monogamy. The origin story for this is an essay by a philosopher named Harry Chalmers who wrote the provocatively-named paper ‘Is Monogamy Morally Permissible?’ Brian Earp, whom I like and respect, rises somewhat half-heartedly to monogamy’s defense, concluding, “We shouldn’t rule it out in principle, condemning all who would ever try to make it work.” But, apparently, the philosophical consensus - from a whole cohort of thinkers, including Chalmers, Justin Clardy, Ole Martin Moen, Aleksandr Sorlie, etc - is that the burden of proof is on monogamy, that monogamy is both patriarchal and racist (discriminating simultaneously against women and against “ethically polyamorous” African American men), and that constraints on sexuality themselves may ipso facto be inadmissible in morality court.
Nothing in this argument strikes me as in need of being taken very seriously. Monogamy is a vast topic - much greater than intramural disputes within American identity politics. I don’t find the linkage of patriarchy and monogamy to be exactly convincing, no matter how many times this becomes a staple of feminist rhetoric. For what it’s worth, my experience of the world has been that men aren’t exactly the ones driving monogamy - and in deeply patriarchal cultures, of which there are many all over the world, polygamy is more typically the expression of patriarchy than monogamy. And the idea that monogamy can be tossed out entirely on normative grounds seem strikingly like the kind of cool-sounding, counter-intuitive argument that could get a philosophy paper placed in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior - but not to have applicability beyond that. Earp’s pastorly conclusion, “Let us all be more reflective, open-minded, and communicative, and then let us say: to each their own,” is of course inarguable and, at the level of philosophical conceptions, puts the matter to rest. What I’m wondering about is why even have this conversation in the first place - or, more precisely, what are the intellectual impulses that are causing various intelligent people to have this conversation.
I have the sense that this is exactly the same thought-process that led to Amia Srinivasan’s widely-read and wildly-misguided essay ‘The Right To Sex.’ The connection is the use of normative-language and the logic of ‘rights’ to legislate sexuality. In Srinivasan’s case, the idea is that the sexual drive itself is contingent on the blessing of the body politic and has to be earned - act badly and you may lose the ‘right to sex’ altogether. In Earp’s case, sexuality is swept into a philosophical discussion of freedom and equality. In that universalist logic, ‘constraints’ are bad; therefore, a sexual relationship based on constraint e.g. monogamy may well be inherently wrong.
For me, all of this has the flavor of college - a brief moment when ‘analytic philosophers’ had a great deal of social cachet and a kind of nexus of debate team lingo and a smattering of talking-points from the philosophy department had the ability to really sway a room. I found that, for myself, the spell of analytic philosophy dissipated very quickly. Its pseudo-mathematical framework had nothing to do with the messy business of living; and other philosophers were convincing in dismissing the analytic incantations as sophistry.
But, now, here it all is again - and there’s a certain charm in the peregrinations of analytic philosophers into sexology journals and the diaries of incels. But it also feels - and philosophers like Earp and Srinivasan are honest enough to admit it - that it’s all an exercise in futility. Rationality, as a whole, is seen as being on the defensive in political life. Analytic philosophy doesn’t have a lot of outlets. But, in the mass contemporary confusion about sexuality, analytic philosophy senses an opportunity to ride to the rescue - speaking the language of rights and norms, legislating a whole array of behaviors. The feeling here is of the beleaguered liberal order hanging on to whatever seems familiar and safely analyzable. And there is, come to think of it, a certain confluence with the way that prep school debaters, Sally Rooney and Ben Lerner, have taken over literature - even the titles, Normal People, The Topeka School, Conversations With Friends, pointing towards an effort to creating certain rules of engagement for social interaction, some abiding belief that intellectual discourse can lead, in the end, to improved social behaviors.
The problem in all of this is that, whatever sexuality is, it’s not norm-based. Human sexuality is wild and it’s full of asymmetries and is almost perfectly irreducible to the kind of 17th century rights-reasoning that underpins normative logic. Sex is not really like voting or like legal representation - the principles that everybody is equal simply do not apply for the good reason that sex is based on pairing, on selection, and is inherently unequal and therefore inherently cruel. As Michel Houellebecq puts it, “When you think about it sexuality has to be an absolutely evil force.”
These are not exactly insurmountable problems - as humans, we have been dealing with the cruelty of sexuality for a long time, and we suffer immensely from it, write songs and poems about it, try to navigate the shoals of love, make do the best we can. What we do not do is try to create tightly-orchestrated social codes to eliminate suffering from sexuality. Well, that’s not true, we’ve done that many times - rules for marriage, strict religious laws to constrain sexuality, etc, and they all have their rationales and, inevitably, they run into problems of emotional repression and the deeper problem that sex simply doesn’t abide by rules, whether enforced monogamy or some philosophically-concocted prohibition on monogamy.
What is it with analytic philosophers named Chalmers? Justin E. H. Smith, whom I find to be really brilliant, has an excoriating takedown in Liberties Journal of the analytic philosopher David Chalmers who is arguing against ‘reality’ on allegedly philosophical grounds much as the analytic philosopher Harry Chalmers, discussed in the article above, has it in for monogamy. Smith fully annihilates his Chalmers, who seems after all to be writing a pretty low-brow, pop-philosophy kind of work, and isn’t really a worthy adversary. Smith’s actual point - which I fully share - is that philosophy, with its sham of ‘analytic rigor,’ isn’t really the right field of discourse for the important questions of how to live. The real field of discourse is politics - what do we want and how can we go about getting it in a messy and corrupt world - and ‘philosophy,’ as it’s currently conceived, is mostly a political tool, useful for anybody who happens to have a grip on power and wishes to give their own perspective the stamp of smart-sounding authority. “Philosophy, while in its most enduring expressions always stands apart from the era in which it emerges, also has a long history of subordinating itself to whatever appears in its day as the biggest game going, as the most dazzling center of concentrated power and influence,” writes Smith - and the inconsequent David Chalmers, with his baby-talk and his VR goggles and his algorithmically-queued writing, is taken as a stand-in for a whole cast of devious philosophers who mistake trend-lines for truth and see in the advent of tech the resolution of previously-bedeviling philosophical questions. Never mind that there is a remarkably close overlap between the precepts of ‘philosophy’ and the profit-motive of tech, the imprimatur of analytic philosophy, with its presumptions of rigor and objectivity, is applied to a whole host of ideas that, really, would be much better understood as salesmanship.
By my count, there are, at the moment, three very nasty ideas floating around that have support from the philosophical or scientific community and are blithely disseminated as some kind of higher truth. One is the argument - usually presented as a fact - that free will has been disproven. Another is dataism - the idea that data offers a true picture of reality than anything human intuition can apprehend and is therefore a better guide for decision-making. And the third is the simulation, an idea that was originally presented in indisputably fictional terms in The Matrix but somehow came tearing out of the philosophy departments repackaged as a viable hypothesis, as in the work of writers like David Chalmers.
Each of these is a philosophical postulate that has been part of philosophical discourse since time immemorial but is now allied to some particular ‘scientific’ domain and reenters public discourse gussied up as a provable fact. The ancient argument against free will, which used to run through the harsher branches of deterministic theology, has jumped ship and is now under the aegis of neuroscience, holding that since everything has been microscopically demonstrated to be material and mechanistic, there is no place for free will except through recourse to ‘disproven’ spirituality. Dataism has its precedents in Chinese Legalism and Greek Atomism but really derives from Baconianism in the idea that the natural world has no real existence except as a giant mine for resources which are then reorganized and repurposed in lab conditions. For authority, dataism rests on some gee-whiz statistical factoids, demonstrating that intuition is really a form of bias and that statistics provide better modeling methods. The evidence for this are things like the fact that football teams are better off going for it on fourth down when most humans would prefer to punt and the fact that the birthdates of Canadian hockey players turn out to be better predictors of long-term success than just about anything else in their background. The simulation is the newest arrival to this three-headed hydra. If anything, it has more storied roots than any of the others - in the Buddhist concept of maya, in Chuang Tzu or Diogenes’ assertion that physical reality is basically illusion - but it emerges out of computer science and, to an embarrassing degree, film studies in the gosh-and-golly hypothesis that if we can get fully immersed into computer games and IMAX movies and VR headsets, well, maybe we are already in a computer game being played by some advanced civilization of the future.
As with anything, it’s important always to search out the motive, and in every case it’s pretty straightforward. Each one of these bright new theories plays into conceits that downgrade the singularity of individual human beings and reify notions of social control and of the all-powerful profit motive. If human beings lack free will, then everything is conditioning, and the business of social life is to play into that conditioning, say with products that provide optimal convenience or that gratify existing neural pathways. If data is the ultimate form of epistemology, then decisions should be made by whoever has access to the most data, which can be large bureaucracies hooked up to excellent data-gathering operations or, increasingly, can simply be computers spitting out best-fit courses of action. And if everything is a simulation, then computers, the metaverse, the AI algorithms become a higher form of truth and the world itself is reduced to reality 1.0, a sort of not-great test system before the machines and the corporate overlords who run the machines really kick into gear and create a reality with a higher degree of intelligence in it.
The response to each of one of these nasty ideas is really simple - don’t fall for it. The argument for free will is the same argument that’s run from Epicurus through Hume. It holds that the determinists are distorting the terms of the debate by insisting that free will - to even exist - has to be free of all restrictions. But that’s not actually what anybody means colloquially when they talk about free will. It’s a given that there are in-built restrictions for the entirety of our existence - notably that everything in our reality is on time’s arrow and hurtling towards the future. Those restrictions are not in dispute, but within that there is the ability to make choices. Put that in chemical terms - call it the prefrontal cortex or whatever - and there is still a difference in kind between the mechanism of decision-making that animals with consciousness make millions of times a day as opposed to the mechanism of particles slamming into each other. Show that the operating components of consciousness are at bottom particles as well and it makes no difference to what everybody means when they discuss free will and alters none of the moral responsibility associated with it. The argument against dataism is that the dataists, much like the determinists, have simply been rigging the terms of the discussion. Data is an effective judge in closed fields of endeavor with complete sets of information - and the more that human society is rejiggered to mirror a closed data set (with an intense focus on predictable, measurable patterns of behavior, in sports, finance, use of technological equipment, etc) the more that the data models are correct. Never mind that - as Hume knew - data can say virtually nothing at all about the future and never mind that data does not begin to have anything valuable to offer on the messy business of human relationships, which is where the heart of life takes place. The idea that algorithmic models will begin to improve outcomes even in apparently ‘qualitative’ endeavors like making music or writing novels proves nothing at all either - a computer, using algorithmic methods, can play a better game of chess or write better music only according to in-put standards of what is ‘better’. Simply change the terms of what is better - for instance, to ‘providing more pleasure to the people engaged in the activity’ - and the whole notion of dataism creating an irresistibly ‘improved’ future starts to look like a paper tiger. And the simulation is almost too silly to engage with - and only makes sense if one gets tricked by Wired Magazine (or David Chalmers’ “merry band” of VR-playing philosophers) into ignoring one’s most deeply held intuitions. Of course there is a difference between a biologically-determined reality and a silicon-determined reality. We all feel that and know it to be true, and the biological reality demands a certain respect and the dedication, really, of all of one’s powers.
The story of CIA funding for the arts is one of these oddly-buried pieces of intellectual history. A great deal of it is pouring forth now and it’s kind of a nail-in-the-coffin to a whole cast of mid-century intellectuals, Matthiessen, Spender, Kermode, etc, who in addition to having been patrician patriarchs and so forth were also tools of U.S. intelligence. There’s a whole reckoning to be done with this - and it’s great news that Louis Menand’s The Free World is telling aspects of this story for a mainstream public - so, for the moment, just a handful of stray observations connected to Rhodri Lewis’ anguished consideration of whether Kermode’s reputation is salvageable given the revelation that the CIA had been secretly financing Encounter Magazine while Kermode was editing it. One is that it really is charming that the CIA would be so dedicated to intellectual journals and would have seen them as part of the frontline of the Cold War. I take this to be a side-effect of so many of the CIA’s founding generation having been Yale graduates and literature students and retaining an outsize belief in the power of literature and intellectual exchange to change hearts and minds. (To a great extent, many of them - James Angleton, Cord Meyer, etc - really would have preferred to have been modernist poets but were diverted by the accident of the war into becoming unlikely spies.) Second is that the catastrophic and untenable structure of financing for magazines makes it so that some corruption is inevitable: if no benevolent philanthropist is forthcoming, then magazines survive only through some sort of unholy system such as backdoor payments from intelligence agencies. And, in that sense, the CIA’s involvement in magazines like Encounter comes across as somewhat benign - if nationally-funded arts programs are non-starters in America, then it’s nice that somebody or other in government sees value in art and creates back-door payments to support it. Third, though, is that CIA involvement is never benign - and the entire structure of mid-century American art has to be understood a bit differently with the late-breaking revelations of the extent of the CIA’s involvement. It was precisely magazines with an ‘independent flair’ like Encounter or The Paris Review that turned out to have been compromised; and so a certain image of the unattached intellectual, free to say anything or do anything they please - debonair George Plimpton comes most directly to mind - is, in fact, exactly the locus point for the kind of positive propaganda that was being pushed out by the CIA.
That means that the artistic legacies that everybody has gotten used to from the mid-20th century are ripe for some reexamination. People like Plimpton, Matthiessen, Spender, Arthur Koestler, who had these long-lasting, prolific, wonderful careers weren’t successful entirely on their own merits - they had help, even if some of them may not have known it. (Even Orwell - our saint of moral rectitude - is due for some reexamination given the list of ‘crypto-Communists’ he provided to British intelligence.) Last point is that the specific type of propaganda the CIA was pushing casts a pall over the entire project of liberal pluralism. The CIA did not need the writers and editors on its payroll to be stridently anti-Communist or even to toe some narrowly pro-Western line. They were left more or less alone, they were free to critique the Western system - “the fact that dissent was tolerated in the West was a major Cold War selling point,” as Menand puts it - but they were discreetly rewarded for stances that advocated ultimately for the ‘free world’ over Communism. What the CIA was doing does not sound very repressive at all, but from the CIA’s perspective it remained a military exercise in ‘soft power’ - advocacy of a ‘pluralistic’ intellectual tradition that was elegant, intelligent-sounding, and that routed discourse in a different direction from the brass tacks materialistic critiques that were typical of the left-wing press. “To many of those on the left, the exposure of CIA funding merely confirmed that which they already believed to be true: liberal pluralism was a sham designed to spare the blushes of a military-industrial complex that, in its turn, propped up the inequitable structures of capitalist society,” writes Lewis. This is a bitter sentence for me to read - and the whole constellation of issues connected to it is difficult for me to think about. Many of the writers who were revealed to have been connected with the CIA front organizations - Orwell, Isaiah Berlin, Cyril Connelly, Mary McCarthy - are exactly the kinds of people whom I had always taken to be paradigms of independent, uncorrupted thinking. Does the fact that they were, to some extent, funded by Western intelligence agencies invalidate their writing or their careers? I don’t think so. But it does force somebody like me to think a little bit more critically about my intellectual heroes - and to recognize that in any profession in which money is involved, writing being one of them, there is no such thing as independence.
Analytic philosophers + theories on sex = beyond me
(head shake + eye roll)
lol