WHENEVER SOMEONE starts talking "natural" as in "natural law" my skepticism starts kicking in. I have, repeatedly, noted that the modern meaning of the term in the claims of science are a mixed bag, indeed, finding both closer approximations of the truth IN SOME AREAS and peddling claims that are anything from dubious as a product of the violation of that quintessential (NOTE THE "ESSENTIAL" IN THAT WORD) requirement of accurate and measured observation of nature given as a complete explanation of phenomena. In the most legitimate uses of that idea, such as the demonstrably successful products of physics and chemistry, those claims work out for a large range of observable phenomena until they don't. Most famously the massively successful framing of Newtonian physics proved to be deficient as a complete explanation of observable phenomena during the 19th century and the early 20th century drastically modified that view in both Einstein's model and in quantum physics, which are, famously, not yet and perhaps never will be entirely reconciled with each other. No doubt the concepts of physics today are far more complete as a workable explanation of observed physical phenomena as Newtonian physics is still enormously useful as an explanation of a range of physical phenomena and a tool for harnessing what are contained in that explanation as "forces" such as energy and gravity - in themselves anything but completely or even basically defined, descried and understood.
The hubris of those for whom science and its methods are taken as a replacement for another very mixed bag of thought, religion, has given rise to the superstition that all phenomena, all of existence, in fact, must conform to "laws of nature" which science has defined. That can lead to the inept and entirely unevidenced application of such "laws" usually in the form of some mathematical modeling, in itself of little to no demonstrable connection to what is observed - psychology, sociology, much anthropology, the "political-science" which I have recently expressed my doubts about and that other extremely dangerous "science" economics are all the product of the superstitious belief in what I've described in this paragraph. All of those university ordained courses of study, departments, even schools in modern universities are about as scientific in fact as astrology is and their wildly, bizarrely obvious inability to come up with firm and durable OR EVEN TESTABLE theories and even hypotheses should have discredited all of them to the extent that their official academic standing should be that of astrology or other ancient forms of divination and would be manipulation of "natural phenomena" but such is the ubiqutious modern superstition about the validity of the "natural laws" that scientists have successfully demonstrated in some areas and very partially demonstrated in others giving us a known and entirely reliable framing of reality so as to rely on such pseudo-scientific procedures and claims, that we can just brush past the falling of previous universal framings as Freudian or Behaviorist psychology as the inadquacy and, sometimes demonstrable fraudulence of them to go on to the next big thing of as little actual legitimacy peddled by the next "school" of psychology that gains prominence in universities. Evolutionary psychology is probably the one that is now ripe for overturning and succeeding now.
Most dangerously for the world, right now, are the various frames and claims of economic theory, theories which are put into law directly to the benefit of the few over the needs of the many and, ultimately, to the destruction of the biosphere on which all of us depend. I've noted here now the combination of economics with Darwinist claims of the universal efficacy of the far from demonstrated theory of natural selection is directly responsible for Trump I and such as the government of Sweden adopting policies that needlessly resulted in the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths during the Covid pandemic and are currently endangering many more through the Trump II administration of RFK jr. which again makes the crudest of Darwinian eugenics the actual law of the United States. And in that I will stress that the "natural law" of natural selection which is a pillar of such thought is, in itself, the most over-sold "law of nature" in the history of science. One which flows from the crudest and most self-unaware of economic theory, the Brit upperclass framing and call for mass death of Malthusian economics - in case you think I'm being overly dramatic in the potential for this kind of pseudo-science adopted by the academic industry as a universal "natural law' to get lots of People killed, not only as an incident of neglect but as an adopted and intentional part of human made law. I could go for several more paragraphs on the part of that other field of academically blessed and peddled "law" the legal profession but if you read me you know that my skepticism of that racket (the thing that gives Little Bobby Kennedy his credentialing and misplaced authority) is currently boundless.
I would hope, while actually thinking it's hopeless, that scientists would adopt what should have been a universal law of science that what cannot be adequately observed or measured cannot be the subject of the scientific method, which would immediately disqualify all of those pseudo-social-sciences and such things as "natural selection"* from membership of the science club, with all the rights and privileges attached to that. No matter how desirable it might be to be able to treat such subjects and obtain such successful results as you sometimes get with physics and inorganic and some organic chemistry, permitting it to have the rights and privileges on the basis of that desire without the ability to actually submit them to real scientific procedures is one of the most consequential of academic sins of often deadly effect.
What has provoked me to point this out, again, is an article by Sean Micheal Winters enthusiastic about the recrudescent emergence of "natural law" talk in poly-sci and the ever dubious field of journalism.
It's been a good week for natural law. People are talking about it even if they do not mention it by name.
David Brooks, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, [Note: BS shield activation] spoke about the pattern of "rupture and repair" that has characterized our society. Brooks said that we are in a moment of rupture now, and offered some ideas about how we commence the work of repair.
Near the start of his talk, which I watched this past weekend after three friends sent me a link, Brooks quoted two of my favorites, the evangelical historian George Marsden and columnist and thinker Walter Lippmann.
Marsden wrote, "What gave such widely compelling force to [Martin Luther] King's leadership and oratory was his bedrock conviction that the moral law was built into the universe." Brooks commented that, in the past 60 years, "we've become a much more individualistic country. ... The moral order has frayed."
To try to encapsulate something as complex as "King's leadership and oratory" so as to come to a simple conclusion as to what made it what it was strikes me as a habit of thought that is related to, if not a product of the superstitious extensions of science where science cannot go. To complicate that with the like of David Brooks making use of Marsden's thinking of it extends all of it well past the point where anything said is reliable. If my view of the legal profession has failed, my view of journalism failed a lot longer ago, espcially when it comes to that most debased embodiment of that racket, the "columnist." While I am totally dismissive of a creature like Brooks, even a better practitioner of column scribbling like LIppmann gets you way out on the ice where it gets very cold, soupy and deep.
The problem is not just individualism, however, but our conception of freedom. Lippmann wrote in 1955, "If what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what the individual chooses to invent based on his feelings, we have left the ground of civilization."
America's core understanding of freedom has always been a negative freedom, a "freedom from." Our revolution aimed to free us from British control. American liberalism through the 19th century and first half of the 20th century sought freedom from the overly large influence of the business interest. Our involvement in two world wars was about making the world free from tyranny. Throughout, freedom of religion and speech and assembly were understood as freedoms from government control.
This conception of freedom was essentially political and it could be because Americans held to a widely shared conception of the moral order. The one time we could not agree on what that moral order required, we fought a great and terrible civil war to resolve the difference.
In the years after World War II, that shared conception of the moral order evaporated as the personal became political. There was a shift in our conception of freedom to something not just more individualistic but more volitional. We believed we could "choose" and "invent" the morality that worked for us.
He goes on in the article in ways I don't have the time to deal with, today.
While I think Winters is on to somethings in some of this, I would remind him that there was nothing new in the "choosing and inventing" of morality in America under its so-called "democracy," what with Indians being murdered so their land could be stolen, Africans kidnapped and brought here into slavery, the breeding of slaves (with even those who supported slavery noting how often the slaves resembled the fathers and male members of the enslaving family), the subjugation of Women, the legalized theft of wage slavery, etc. inventing and choosing morality has been a part of it, all along. It has been easy as pie for relatively affluent, straight, white males (even Gay white males) to not notice that, as it is for those not the object of those to ignore those evils happening all around them. Such as has had control of academic discourse, by and large, the reaction to the small amount of academic discourse dealing with the experiences of all of those Others, being among the things most decried and suppressed by those with power.
This is libertarianism, and it is found on the left in social issues and on the right in economic ones. Both versions paved the way for Trumpian authoritarianism. Both.
I agree with this statement almost without reservation and with the crisis in the concept of liberty, especially, but also "freedom."
How do we recover a shared sense of the moral order that is built into the universe? I am not sure, but dusting off the idea of a natural law might allow us to at least find a shared moral vocabulary again. That might lead to the discovery of shared moral ideals, without which any project at renewal and repair after Donald Trump will be stillborn.
I am not discouraging anyone from reading Winter's articles or even reading the NYT whited sepulcher Brooks or Lippmann (and when you throw in him on such subjects, you should always See Also that other over-rated and under-rated thinker John Dewey) but I will note that in this article the complete absence of two of the most salient words to an understanding of how American democracy has failed "equality" through the assertion of inequality and "lies" as Trump is a direct product of, lies told and permitted to be told by the freest of "free presses" in American history, both the "news" divisions and, especially relevant, the "entertainment" division (he would never have had a political career without "reality TV" which is, start to finish, the presentation of lies and pretend) though as a journalist I have no doubt that Brooks, Winter, Lippmann, or John Dewey, for that matter, would not be too enthusiastic over a real and rigorous, even a quasi-scientific analysis of the consequences of "free press-speech" absolutism in the corruption of democracy because it impinges directly on their professional careers. John Dewey was, by the way a practitioner of the rank pseudo-science, psychology, so I'll toss that fact into this mess - Lippmann, while I disagree with him about much, was about the least compromised in that way of all mentioned so far. I don't know how much psychology he may have imbibed through his study with William James at Harvard or if he just got the his reliable philosophical thinking from him. I'm somewhat more confident in Marsden's profession though I know little about Marsden's writing. But whenever someone starts talking "natural law" even in the less pretentious forms of that surrounding theology I get my back up. Perhaps it's due to the use of that phrase against Women and LGBTQ+ People that accounts for that, though my skepticism about the actual ability of anyone to discern with complete accuracy a single "law of nature" enters into that, too. It might be desirable to have such a law book to hand but I doubt any one ever compiled will be any more valid than the laws of the pseudo-social-sciences or the literal mother of all such pseudo-laws, in the current world natural selection.
That "shared sense of the moral order" is certainly not something to recover because that "shared sense" of it existed with all of the evils of inequality and the product of freely told fully present in the society and in American law right up to the adoption of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts whatever partial and very brief period was had while those were the law of the land now overturned by such in the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts who have nullified them - I would bet most of them, to one extent or another, great enthusiasts for the concept of "natural law." Things are far too slippery to allow such language to control how we think about these things. Trying to do so so they would fit into a course of philosophy at an old lCatholic university such as Notre Dame was and, to too great an extent, still is, only gets you farther from the truth.
I think political experience is if not more reliable, at least is less prone to lead you on wild goose chases than academic and columnist babbling.
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