Extraterrestrials

If extraterrestrial life exists, and that life has evolved to a level of intelligence similar to that of humanity, which would imply that it exhibits free will to the same extent that humans do, then what would Christian theology have to say about its redemption? Was God’s only begotten Son killed and resurrected on Earth that aliens might enjoy eternal life? Would such alien lifeforms still exist in an unfallen state of grace? Would they be guilty of original sin with no hope of redemption?

At the beginning of the Space Age, these and similar questions were seriously tackled by Catholic theologians. In 1999, Professor Allen Tough organized a conference for the Foundation for The Future in order to investigate the possible impact of contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence. The results of that conference are available for free online. Section V contains a fascinating paper entitled “Roman Catholic Views of Extraterrestrial Intelligence”.

Meanwhile, the Hubble telescope has photographed a strange dust pattern, moving at 11,000 mph, which looks remarkably like a science-fiction spacecraft.

Liberia

This is disturbing.

Self-Indulgence

Blogs are very self-indulgent media. Every time one publishes a post to one’s blog, one assumes that someone else cares what one has to say. There are excuses and attempts to claim mitigating circumstances — “I really only write for myself”, “It’s more of a personal diary than a blog”, “I don’t care what other people think” — but none of them stand up to scrutiny. If one were truly writing only for oneself, or writing a personal diary, or one did not care about the opinions of others, one would not publish one’s writings on the Internet. If one is honest, one must admit to a certain level of self-indulgence, a bit of pompous arrogance in the assumption that the great unwashed care a fig about what one has to say.

My blog has very few readers and I know most of them personally — those that I do not know well I have at least corresponded with by e-mail. I am not sure if that makes my situation better or worse, more ludicrous and self-absorbed or less. I at least try to avoid the temptation to write a public diary: I try to post things that may amuse or interest without assuming that you care about my personal life.

However, sometimes the urge is just too strong. Now that the year AD 2010 has well and truly begun, I would like to review the previous year and wallow in the intemperate narcissism of it all.

2009 was the year in which I left London, the stinking metropolis that had been my home for around seven years, and moved across the Atlantic Ocean. I began by living in a small town in Ontario for about three months, continuing my previous employment but now working from home with the aid of the Internet. The next three months were spent on unpaid leave: I travelled west by car through the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast, drove south to the Sonoran and Mojave deserts, then back across the prairies to Ontario, where I spent the final month on the shore of Lake Huron. I returned to Britain for a month, only to move west again in December, when I took up a new job (albeit with the same company) in California. It is looking probable that the United States Customs and Immigration Service will soon force my return to Britain (although I have a visa to stay here for three years, it seems that my Canadian fiancée is not welcome.) Still, for the moment I live in San Francisco, which is a great improvement over London.

My greatest intellectual development in 2009 must have been the belated realisation that theism has a lot more going for it than I had thought. I had, admittedly in common with many people in the modern West, assumed that the philosophical debate between theism and atheism had been settled long ago. I thought that only those who clung to irrational faith were theists and that those who were honestly rational recognised the logical imperative to accept atheism.

My first surprise was the discovery that the debate is far from over. The book Atheism and Theism by J.J.C. Smart and J.J. Haldane (published in 2002 by Wiley-Blackwell as part of the Great Debates in Philosophy series) was very illuminating. I think J.J.C. Smart is now my model atheist philosopher. In particular, I appreciated his point that there are few “knock down” arguments in philosophy. I later came to appreciate the two-sided nature of rationality (it is always essentially a dialogue rather than a monological deduction) even more when I read Reason and Reality by J.R. Lucas (unpublished but available in rough form on his website: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas) at the end of the year. Without hyperbole, I think it is probably the most important philosophical text I have read for some time.

My second surprise was the discovery that theism is in many ways a more rational position than atheism. The first inkling that this might be so came to me from reading A Comprehensible Universe: The Interplay of Science and Theology by George Coyne and Michael Heller (published in 2008 by Springer). More evidence came from Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio (published in 2009 by Simon and Schuster) and especially the aforementioned Reason and Reality by J.R. Lucas. From a rather different perspective, the possible rationality of theism was made clear to me by Edward Feser’s books on Thomist philosophy, such as Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide (published in 2009 by Oneworld Publications). I owe a great debt to “Deogolwulf”, author of the brilliant blog The Joy of Curmudgeonry, for not only introducing me to many of the above authors but also for sharing his own ideas in personal correspondence with me. He also introduced me to Bill Vallicella’s blog, Maverick Philosopher, which is one of the better philosophy blogs on the internet.

It is possible that I was able to approach the theism/atheism debate with an open mind only because my general attitude towards religion changed over the course of 2009. For that, J.R.R. Tolkien is mostly to blame. I read The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by Humphrey Carpenter and published in 2006 by HarperCollins) over the summer and found them curiously inspiring. Tolkien had an ability to see and articulate truths in a manner that I have seldom encountered elsewhere. I find it hard to explain exactly what it is about his work that I find so moving, but perhaps his own explanation, given in his essay On Fairy-Stories, which I re-read for the umpteenth time at the beginning of the year, is better than anything I will ever produce. (On Fairy-Stories was published as part of a collection entitled Tree and Leaf: Including “Mythopoeia” in 2001 by HarperCollins.)

I am currently reading J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter (published in 1995 by HarperCollins) which a friend lent me before I moved to California. I read it while sitting in my armchair by the window, smoking my pipe and occasionally looking up at the leaves of the tree outside.

Tomorrow I shall attend a Latin Eucharist with Gregorian chant at my local Anglo-Catholic church.

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The final counter to the sceptical questioner is to ask what alternative he has in mind. Since reasoning is typically two-sided, it often involves an assessment of alternatives. If alternatives are offered, we can compare them with what we ourselves have put forward, possibly finding them preferable, but more probably finding them less well supported than the position that is under attack. But if, as often, no alternative is offered, we are not engaged on a serious exercise. It is the converse of an argument of Hume’s, who concluded that “a total suspense of judgement is . . . our only reasonable resource”, arguing that, since “every attack and no defence . . . is successful, victory must go to the man who remains always on the offensive and has himself no fixed station or abiding city which he is ever, on any occasion, obliged to defend”. But guerilla warfare wins no territory. The metaphysician is looking for a position in which he can abide, and which he would be willing to defend. His thoughts and communications may sometimes be troubled by a Humean sceptic, but he will have no incentive to abandon his position for another, if no other is on offer. For he is serieux; metaphysics is not a dilettante occupation, but a guide to life, and life is short and will not allow an indefinite suspense of judgement.

— Reason and Reality by J.R. Lucas; pp. 76 – 77

Blindness

I came across the above poster at work today, which made me laugh.

Someone told me that he doesn’t hold oil companies to blame for the impact they have on the environment. He said the demand for oil is to blame: it isn’t the oil companies’ fault if they are merely meeting other people’s demand. This strikes me as an even worse excuse than “I was only following orders.” At least one could plausibly argue that obedience to orders could constitute a moral good, albeit probably not one that outweighs the wrong typically performed by people who have cause to use that excuse. But meeting a demand? Really?

Truth

To most observers, Dawkins is the textbook aggressive champion of evolutionary theory. His new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, is intended to amass the scientific testimony for evolution in one place, answering creationist critics who say there is no evidence that evolution by natural selection has ever taken place. In person, Dawkins fails to live up to the “aggressive” label.

…

The Greatest Show on Earth tackles more controversial matters, too. Included is a transcript of his 2008 interview with Wendy Wright from Concerned Women for America, an out-and-out creationist who simply denies the existence of evidence for human evolution. As Dawkins urges her repeatedly to visit any museum and see the skulls and skeletons for herself, she simply ignores him and repeats her own orthodoxy. “Why is it so important to you that everyone believes in evolution?” she asks, almost plaintively. “I am a lover of truth,” he simply tells me. [1]

While I sympathise with his efforts to refute irrational creationists, I am astonished that anyone can claim to be a lover of truth and yet fail to study philosophy, at least to some extent.

Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy. It is also one of the largest. Truth has been a topic of discussion in its own right for thousands of years. Moreover, a huge variety of issues in philosophy relate to truth, either by relying on theses about truth, or implying theses about truth. [2]

Dawkins, it appears, is ignorant of all such work: he switches between various different truth theories as it pleases him, apparently without even noticing that he does so. Sometimes he seems to adhere to some sort of correspondence theory, sometimes a pragmatist theory, sometimes it isn’t clear what he means. [3]

It is odd that someone should make a career out of antagonising others, ostensibly because he thinks that they are mistaken and he cares deeply about being correct, without ever wondering what it means to be correct.

A couple of months ago, Bruce Charlton published an article entitled Is Atheism Literally a Delusion? [4] in which he attempts to counter Dawkins’ claim that belief in the existence of God is delusory by arguing that, in fact, atheism is a delusion. He employs a pragmatic theory of truth to do this, which Bill Vallicella criticises in his latest article: Is There a ‘No God’ Delusion? [5]

I believe that to be true is to reveal some aspect of the world as it really is. This is similar in some respects to a correspondence theory of truth, according to which a proposition is true if and only if it corresponds to the way things really are. For example, the proposition “snow is white” is true if and only if snow really is white. However, I find such theories inadequate in that they fail to capture the truth of myth. A story, although it might be classified as fictional by a correspondence theory of truth, may yet reveal some truth about the world: a truth, moreover, that may not be expressible in any system of formal logic.

That some genuine truths are extralogical should not, I think, be controversial. But it can be rigorously demonstrated anyway: Bill Vallicella has argued at some length, in book and article and blog, that existence is extralogical. [6] J. R. Lucas has shown that reason in general is not rule bound: rationality impels us to accept inductive arguments as well as arguments to the “best explanation”:

If reason is universal, it can reason about reason itself, and from self-referential reasoning, it emerges that it is not possible to set bounds to reason, and in particular that metaphysical argument is not beyond the bounds of reason. Deductive argument gives rise not only to recursive arguments, but to Gödel’s self-referential theorems; and inductive arguments merge into Inference to the Best Explanation, sometimes invoking entities beyond the bounds of possible experience. Practical reasoning leads on to empathy and moral argument, and they in turn lead to the humane insight of the humanities, and varieties of political, legal and judicial argument. Gödel’s theorem shows that even with deductive argument, we cannot formalise completely; however far we formalise our rules of inference, there will still be some inference which is clearly valid but does not fall under any of the rules thus far formulated. Even deductive argument is fuzzy-edged, and the transition from one type of inductive argument to another shows that the same holds good for inductive arguments about matters of fact and their explanation; and counts against the contention that reason cannot lead on to the various styles of practical argument.

We can go further. The simple argument of the Logical Positivists against metaphysics does not work. If metaphysics could be ruled out by the Verification Principle, so too would the Verification Principle itself. Similarly, any claim to set a boundary to reason can be challenged. Clearly, if the bounds of reason are so tightly drawn as to exclude philosophical argument, the claim will exclude any possible justification of itself. But more generally, in order to determine the boundary exactly, it will need to specify what lies beyond it and is to be excluded, as well as what lies within it and is to be included. And if the boundary is really a boundary reason cannot overstep, reason will be precluded from stepping over it, to specify precisely what is to be excluded. Reason itself, then, is unbounded. We have a negative, self-referential argument, analogous to the negative, self-referential mathematical argument underlying Gödel’s theorem, against any claim that reason can be corralled within any antecedently set limit, and are led to a crucial conclusion. Reason is not “thin”. [7]

This suggests to me that a correspondence theory of truth can only capture part of the nature of truth. Clearly the sentence “snow is white” does reveal some aspect of reality if it is the case that snow really is white. But equally some other sentence, or more likely a story, although it may not simply correspond to an empirical judgment about the world, may reveal some aspect of the world as it really is.

We could, perhaps, still call this a correspondence theory of truth, in as much as our hypothetical story expresses something that is true if and only if that something corresponds to reality. However, I think to call it such may be misleading. I do not mean to suggest that the story must be metaphorical or allegorical, like a parable, in which case its meaning might be otherwise expressed but we have chosen to use a story for didactic reasons, but rather that the story is itself true just as it is. I think this is the distinguishing mark of myth, in contrast to allegory or fable.

Heidegger espoused a concept of truth, which he called alétheia, that captures a similar idea of revealing or unveiling reality. But whereas he juxtaposed this with the correspondence theories of truth, I would rather attempt to include them. I find Heidegger’s theory of truth appealing because it allows myth and art in general to be true in more than a weak, metaphorical sense. However, if it cannot also accommodate the sort of truths that a correspondence theory can accommodate (e.g. snow is white) then it is just as inadequate as those theories that cannot accommodate the truth of myth.

I would like to formulate a theory of truth that includes simple correspondences between propositions and reality, so that the proposition “snow is white” can be counted as true if snow really is white, but which also recognises such simple correspondences as being only particular instances of a larger conception of truth, a conception not unlike the Heideggerian unveiling or revealing of reality, so that a myth that reveals truth is recognised as such.

One might perhaps start by making reference to J. R. R. Tolkien’s theory of Secondary Creation, as espoused in his essay On Fairy-Stories [8]. A myth might then be said to be a story consisting of propositions that correspond to how things really are in a secondary world. Tolkien alludes to the power of secondary worlds to shed light upon the nature of the primary world, thus a proposition that is true in a secondary world according to a correspondence theory of truth might be said to be unqualifiedly true in as much as it reveals some aspect of primary reality.

Such a theory of truth would be dependent on a full explication of the relationship between Secondary and Primary Creation, which is not only outside the scope of a single blog article but also perhaps best understood by reading what Tolkien has already written.

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[1] Richard Dawkins: ‘Strident? Do they mean me?’, interview by Emma Townshend, The Independent on Sunday, 4th October 2009. Available online: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/richard-dawkins-strident-do-they-mean-me-1796244.html

[2] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Truth, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/

[3] For example, see my earlier blog post: Simulations

[4] Christianity explored: Is Atheism literally a delusion?, http://scientistsconsideringchristianity.blogspot.com/2009/10/is-atheism-literally-delusion_150.html

[5] Maverick Philosopher: Is There a ‘No God’ Delusion?, http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2010/01/is-there-a-no-god-delusion.html

[6] A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated by William F. Vallicella, Springer, 2002. For examples of his many blog posts on the topic, see Maverick Philosopher: Pavel Tichý on Existence (http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2009/10/pavel-tich%C3%BD-on-existence.html) and Maverick Philosopher: Nausea at Existence (http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2009/11/nausea-at-existence.html) among others.

[7] Reason and Reality by J. R. Lucas, available online: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/

[8] Tree and Leaf: Including “Mythopoeia” by J. R. R. Tolkien, HarperCollins, 2001.

The Meaning of Life

As I see it, the subjectivist view of existential meaning is deeply incoherent. To be blunt, anyone who answers the meaning question by saying ‘The meaning of one’s life is the meaning one gives it’ simply has not understood the question. The question arises concretely when one begins to doubt the value of the dominant projects and purposes one has been pursuing. A novelist, a stockbroker, a philosopher, a professional chess player, even if successful, can come to doubt the point of being a novelist, a stockbroker, a philosopher, a professional chess player. ‘Have I wasted my life helping the rich get richer?’ ‘Have I dribbled my life away among bloodless abstractions in an illusory quest for an unattainable knowledge?’ ‘Am I squandering my life’s energies on a mere game?’ These are possible questions. Even if one has been entirely successful in achieving one’s life-goals, these questions can and do arise. They are not questions about success or failure within a life-plan but questions about the success or failure of a life-plan as a whole. Anyone who sincerely asks himself whether he is wasting or has wasted his life presupposes by his very posing of the question that there are objective factors that bear on the question of the meaning of life. To raise the question is to presuppose that existential meaning cannot be identified with agent-conferred meaning. One who wonders whether he is wasting his life perhaps does not thereby presuppose that there is exactly one recipe for a meaningful life applicable to all, but he does presuppose that there are one or more objectively meaningful uses of a human life. He presupposes that one can throw away one’s life, waste one’s time, fail to live a meaningful life. But if the meaning of one’s life is the meaning one gives it, then one cannot fail to live a meaningful life since any meaning is as good as any other. To tell such a person that it suffices for his life to have meaning that he invest it with meaning shows a failure to understand the question. The person can respond with an analog of G. E. Moore’s Open Question Argument: “You tell me that the meaning of my life is identical to the style of life I choose as meaningful. But is this style of life truly meaningful?” The fact that the question remains open even after the subjectivist answer has been proffered shows that the subjectivist answer is no answer at all.

— Bill Vallicella, Maverick Philosopher: Imago Dei and the Meaning of Life

The Long Now

Civilization is reviving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed—some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility—where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries.

- Stewart Brand, founding board member of the Long Now Foundation

Anglo-Catholicism

Anglo-Catholicism claims the continuity of the Church of England with the early days of Christianity in Great Britain, even before St. Augustine. Pope Gregory the Great sent St Augustine in the late 6th century from Rome to evangelise the Anglo-Saxons, a process completed in the 7th century. It is commonly thought that the conversion of the English marked the beginning of Christianity in Britain, though the Romano-Celtic society which existed in Britain prior to the arrival of the pagan Germanic tribes from Denmark and northern Germany practised a non-papal, episcopal Christianity…

King Henry VIII took England into schism from Rome when the Pope refused to declare null his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, but retained Catholic views in theology and liturgy, while some reformers (such as Bishop John Hooper) wanted to follow the radical reforms of Geneva… Consequently, when Queen Elizabeth I took the English throne, she sought to steer a via media between what her bishops felt were the excesses of both Rome and Geneva. Thus was born the Elizabethan Settlement and the promulgation of a single Book of Common Prayer for all theological persuasions in the Church of England. This marks the birth of the Anglican ethos which was championed by the Elizabethan divine, Richard Hooker.

From that time, through Archbishop Laud and the Caroline Divines, up to the time of the Oxford Movement Tractarians, the Anglo-Catholic Congresses and the present day, there has always been a theological party within Anglicanism which has sought to stress apostolic continuity all the way back to the Twelve Apostles. In response to Pope Leo XIII’s Apostolicae Curae (1896), which declared the Anglican apostolic succession invalid from the Vatican’s perspective, the Anglican Archbishops of Canterbury and York have claimed, starting with their official response, Saepius Officio, that there is an unbroken apostolic succession in the Anglican priesthood and that the historical episcopate has been in the British Isles from the earliest days of the Church…

A minority of Anglo-Catholics, sometimes called Anglo-Papalists, consider themselves under papal supremacy even though they are not in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Such Anglo-Catholics, especially in England, often celebrate Mass according to the contemporary Roman Catholic rite and are concerned with seeking reunion with the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.

— Wikipedia article: Anglo-Catholicism

Looking back over the controversies that drove many an embattled and despairing priest to renounce the Anglican Communion and deny the validity of his own priesthood, and even question that of his baptism, it is tragic and ironic to realize that many, perhaps most, of these were over points of practice and doctrine then considered hopelessly Protestant or even sacrilegious which are now common in the Roman Catholic Church since Vatican II — the vernacular liturgy, open communion, communion in both kinds, birth control, divorce, married clergy, the redefinition of scriptural, traditional and magisterial authority, of baptismal regeneration, and justification. Once the now apparently inevitable permission for a married clergy is granted, many Anglican and even some Lutheran churches and priests and ministers will be considerably more “High Church” than their Roman Catholic fellows.

— Kenneth Rexroth, The Evolution of Anglo-Catholicism

I attended the Remembrance Sunday service at Winchester College a week ago and found myself returning for another service this morning. Sitting in the serene but magnificent 14th century chapel, listening to the choir sing in Latin, I felt connected to a continuity of worship that transported me, albeit temporarily, to somewhere timeless.

Irrational though it may be — and recently I have begun to think that it probably isn’t, if rationality is to be a meaningful term at all — I experienced something during those services that my life otherwise lacks. No doubt there are many aspects to such an experience, some more profound than others, but the sense of being part of something ancient or eternal, immune to the vagaries and caprice of the outside world, is clearly an important one.

Genealogies

Every human faculty, by which we attempt to make sense of the world, may have its origins explained by evolutionary theory. But the validity of evolutionary theory presupposes the validity of such a human faculty. Thus the existence of an evolutionary Just So story, purporting to explain the origins of some faculty, cannot be used to invalidate the results of that faculty on pain of self-contradiction. Therefore, if we consider the faculty whereby we explain the actions of other entities in terms of purpose, or the faculty whereby we perceive the presence of the divine, in order to refute the claims of such faculties it is not sufficient merely to provide a plausible explanation of their origins.

Dirty Spectacles

As I recently admitted, I have in the not too distant past flirted with the excitement of Transhumanist philosophy. It is in many ways a religion of science, which makes it quite appealing: you get the feeling of purpose and destiny normally associated with religion but also the hard-headed rationality of science and technology. Of course, when one looks closer, it is anything but rational; nevertheless it is still surrounded by an aura of respectable logic and no-nonsense practicality, which tempts obsessive reasoners like me.

One of the rhetorical techniques used by the transhumanist crowd, which they share with fans of technological progressivism in general, is to accuse those who yearn for a “simpler” past of misplaced romanticism. Hence we find the following in the Transhumanism FAQ, intended as an answer to those who would like to “turn back the clock”:

The problem with this view is that the pre-industrial age was anything but idyllic. It was a life of poverty, misery, disease, heavy manual toil from dawn to dusk, superstitious fears, and cultural parochialism. [1]

Let us deal with each of these claims in order. First, what is meant by poverty? Notoriously, poverty is relative. The poorest members of modern Western society may well possess material wealth far beyond that of the wealthier end of Western society a few centuries ago; but this does not mean that they are happier with their lot. That wealth is significantly correlated with happiness is a claim that has been debunked time and again. Here is just one example:

“I started trying to understand the roots of happiness. [Shows a slide of a graph plotting personal income and happiness.] This is a typical result that many people have presented and there are many variations on it. But this for instance shows that about 30% of the people surveyed in the United States since 1956 say that their life is very happy. And that hasn’t changed at all whereas the personal income (on a scale that has been held constant to accommodate for inflation) has more than doubled, almost tripled, in that period. But you find essentially the same results, namely that after a certain basic point, which corresponds more or less to just a few thousand dollars above the minimum poverty level, increases in material well-being don’t seem to affect how happy people are.” [2]

So in one sense it is true that earlier societies were poorer than we are today: it is possible to construct absolute measures of material wealth according to which members of Western society are wealthier now than in times past. However, such an absolute measure of wealth is largely irrelevant. Recent research, as well as folk wisdom, shows that a rise in material wealth much beyond the minimum necessary for survival does not entail greater happiness. Even at the individual level, wealth is poorly correlated with happiness [3], but at the societal level it hardly seems relevant at all as long as basic needs are met.

As for misery, on what grounds do they claim that our ancestors were more miserable than we are today? Recent research does not support this claim:

“One problem that’s happening now is that although the rates of happiness are about as flat as the surface of the moon, depression and anxiety are rising. Despite that we’re in a world with so much more material wealth, much safer, better health, and all kinds of pharmaceuticals and treatments for mental illness, we’re still seeing rises in depression and anxiety. Some people might say this is because we have better diagnosis and more people are being found out, but [the data] suggest that we’re seeing it all over the world. In the United States right now there are more suicides than homicides; there’s a rash of suicide in China; and the World Health Organisation predicts that by the year 2020 depression will be the second largest cause of disability-related years lost after ischemic heart disease.

Happiness stays the same as ever. Now the good news here is that if you take surveys from around the world we find that more people are happy than not. [Shows a slide.] And we see that about three quarters of people will say they are at least pretty happy. But this does not follow any of the usual trends. So, for example, these two [charts] show great growth in income but absolutely flat happiness curves. So more money doesn’t seem to be doing anything to increase happiness level. [4]

Yet more evidence that wealth does not entail happiness and good reason to doubt that we are happier today than in the past. There seems no justification for the progressivist claim that pre-industrial life was “miserable”: with no data from the past to go on, the best we can do is to extrapolate from present data, which suggests that pre-industrial people were about as happy as we are today but they suffered from less depression and less anxiety.

However, although our mental health may be worse today than it was then, it cannot be denied that our physical health has improved. Modern Western nutrition may be awful, as the obesity and diabetes epidemics seem to indicate, but that is no reason to condemn modern medicine. In fact, it might be thought something of an achievement that we are so well cared for that blubber and sugar are some of our major worries. The revolution in so-called evidence-based medicine, which is essentially the consistent application of the scientific method to those areas of medical care amenable to such a method, is one of the few 20th century revolutions of which I thoroughly approve.

It would be extremely callous of me, safe in my relatively good health with a doctor just a telephone call away, to claim that improvements in medical care do not matter. Nevertheless, with regard to general happiness, there is a sense in which medical care is analogous to wealth. Disease is one of the accepted risks of life: whereas we would be horrified if a friend or relative were killed by smallpox, we still expect to lose friends to cancer. That is not to say that we shouldn’t attempt to eradicate cancer just as we eradicated smallpox, but only that once cancer was forgotten its eradication would no longer be a source of happiness. Thus although medical care is undoubtedly a good thing (in general — I do not consider the prolongation of old age without accompanying quality of life to be a good thing: “old people’s homes” are an abomination) and hence a cause to prefer living today than in the past, it cannot be used as evidence that pre-industrial life was miserable for people alive then.

And why does Bostrom believe that pre-industrial life consisted of “heavy manual toil from dawn to dusk”? That sounds a lot more like 19th century industrial work than anything pre-industrial workers had to suffer. The working day for a medieval peasant did indeed stretch from dawn to dusk (thus it was approximately eight hours long in winter and sixteen hours long in summer) but it was broken up by many periods of rest. Breakfast, lunch, the afternoon nap and dinner all took place during the so-called “working day”, unlike today when we are lucky to get an hour for lunch. Labourers in the 19th century who campaigned for eight-hour working days were not taking a great step forward for workers’ rights, they were merely trying to undo the damage done during the Industrial Revolution. [5]

In addition, the year was full of holidays: Christmas, Easter and midsummer were all celebrated with long holidays and the calendar was peppered with saint’s days and rest days. There were also week-long “ales” to mark personal occasions such as weddings and deaths. Overall, approximately a third of the year was given over to holidays in medieval England. Even the ancien règime in France guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days and thirty-eight holidays. Travellers in Spain reported that holidays took up five months of the year. [6]

Furthermore, a peasant was not required to work on every day that was not an official holiday:

The peasant’s free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor — the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work “by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day.” And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income — which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estimate finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year — 175 days — for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year. [7]

Erik Rauch at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has compiled a list of estimates of the average number of hours worked per year for different periods: [8]

13th century	Adult male peasant, UK	1620 hours
14th century	Casual labourer, UK	1440 hours
Middle Ages	English worker	2309 hours
1400 – 1600	Farmer-miner, adult male, UK	1980 hours
1840	Average worker, UK	3105 – 3588 hours
1850	Average worker, USA	3150 – 3650 hours
1987	Average worker, USA	1949 hours
1988	Manufacturing worker, UK	1856 hours

This demonstrates quite clearly that the only people who had to suffer long days of hard toil were those poor souls who had the misfortune to live through the Industrial Revolution. The claim that pre-industrial workers had a harder life than today’s workers is a lie based on falsely extrapolating early industrial conditions into the past. In fact, the working day wasn’t so bad until the industrialists turned up.

Finally, what should we make of the accusation of “superstitious fears and cultural parochialism”? We could point out that there are still plenty of superstitious fears around today, including many new ones. We could also suggest that a bit more parochialism might not go amiss in contemporary culture. However, it is clear by now that these are not reasoned arguments but merely baseless accusations fueled by ideology.

[1] Bostrom, N. 2003. Transhumanist FAQ (Humanity+) available at http://humanityplus.org/learn/philosophy/faq

[2] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talking in February 2004 at TED in Monterey, California. Available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXIeFJCqsPs. I quote from 03:15 to 04:15.

[3] Quiñones, E. 2006. Link between income and happiness is mainly an illusion (Princeton University). Available at http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S15/15/09S18/index.xml

[4] Nancy Etcoff talking in February 2004 at TED in Monterey, California. Available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W2dsnhC18Q. I quote from 01:44 to 03:05.

[5] Rogers, J. E. T. 1949. Six Centuries of Work and Wages (London: Allen and Unwin)

[6] Rodgers, E. 1940. Discussion of Holidays in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press)

[7] Schor, J. B. 1993. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books)

[8] Rauch, E. Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today’s. Available at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html