Old tractors aren’t all romance and fond recollections. It’s an old joke but I can remember my grandfather lighting a little fire under his Fordson to warm up the oil in the crankcase so the motor would turn over easier, hopefully to make the tractor start quicker. That’s fun to recall, but not any fun to have to do. Starting tractors could be a brutal affair. I was watching when my father was crank-starting our Massey Harris Challenger and the crank “kicked” and nearly broke his leg. Tractors increased the pace and intensity of farm work. Don’t let anyone tell you that the piston engine made farming easier than farming with horses. Tractors just meant you could get more field work done in a day. The wet year of 1947, we kept our tractor running day and night to get the crops in because we could. One afternoon Dad, completely exhausted, put me, a child, on it to “work ground” while he laid down under a tree at the field’s edge and fell asleep. He meant to nap only a little while. I knew how to stop the tractor by turning the key off but I did not know how to start it up again so if I stopped, Dad would have his sleep cut short. When it looked like the tractor was overheating, I just kept going round and round the field till it stopped of its own accord. Dangerous business. One of my cousins in the same desperate situation tied his little boy, age 6, in the tractor seat so he couldn’t fall out and had him “work ground” that way, guiding tractor and disk over the plowed ground while the father followed up with another tractor and the planter and kept a sharp eye on the son. Can you imagine what the labor laws would do to a farmer today who tried that?

In the days when we abandoned horse farming for factory farming, we abandoned biology for machinery and let the futile thought of getting rich override our common sense. After that farming became grueling slave work even if it was faster. We didn’t save time. Lights on the tractor just meant we could work longer. It wasn’t long after 24 hour work days that the Sunday day of rest went off the calendar too. Too bad. Even heathens like me need a Sunday day of rest.

— Gene Logsdon, The Contrary Farmer: “Old Tractors Never Die“

One of the ablest agnostics of the age once asked me whether I thought mankind grew better or grew worse or remained the same. He was confident that the alternative covered all possibilities. He did not see that it only covered patterns and not pictures; processes and not stories. I asked him whether he thought that Mr. Smith of Golder’s Green got better or worse or remained exactly the same between the age of thirty and forty. It then seemed to dawn on him that it would rather depend on Mr. Smith; and how he chose to go on. It had never occurred to him that it might depend on how mankind chose to go on; and that its course was not a straight line or an upward or downward curve, but a track like that of a man across a valley, going where he liked and stopping where he chose, going into a church or falling down in a ditch. The life of man is a story; an adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God.

— G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Project Gutenberg: March 2010)

Reading the definition of nihilism on Wikipedia recently it really struck me that it is just the logical outcome of modern western belief.

I would be horrified at the suggestion that one should believe in God because everything would be better that way.  My personal journey was via nihilism, I guess.

I really do prefer to believe that which is true / real,  if possible.

My feeling is that any honest person who does not believe in God has to become a nihilist. When they get around to thinking about it.

What else?

— Commenter “John B”, commenting on a Samizdata blog post: “Not as rational as Sam Harris likes to claim“

If the physicist wished to continue modelling the donkey, he would be forced to continually update the set of particles in his model. However, there is no way he could do this without leaving the realm of physics and asking a biologist for help. There is nothing in the fundamental laws of physics that can tell him what is and what isn’t part of a donkey. Such information exists only in a different mode of explanation, that of biology. Of course, this is in fact true right from the beginning: the physicist could not even have begun his experiment without first asking a biologist to identify a donkey.

We might be tempted to think that the physicist could circumvent this problem by modelling everything. If he were to model everything in the entire universe, surely he would be modelling the donkey too, since it has to be in there somewhere? This is rather the point: the donkey most certainly is in the universe but it is not part of the physicist’s model. It is not possible, from the physicist’s model alone, to deduce anything about a donkey. Therefore, we must conclude that the physicist’s model of every fundamental particle in the universe is not in fact a model of everything that exists.

Well, there is one other option open to us. We might conclude that the donkey does not exist. If we had some other reason to believe strongly that only that which is modelled by physics is real, then we might try to convince ourselves that donkeys are not real. We may succeed – after all, people are capable of convincing themselves that all sorts of crazy ideas are true – but this isn’t really an option for anyone who wishes to be rational. Since the argument applies just as well to people as it does to donkeys, the correct response to anyone who claims that physics explains everything is to ask, “Who said that?”

Perhaps one source of confusion is the fact that clearly donkeys are composed of physical matter. Although that matter is constantly changing, at any one instant in time the donkey is made up of some set of fundamental physical elements. Thus even though a donkey is not the same thing as the matter out of which it is composed, its existence is dependent on matter. If there were no matter, there would be no donkey. But it is important that the donkey’s existence does not depend on any particular matter. A healthy donkey will live to around 30 years old, sometimes another decade or more after that, by which time it is highly likely that not a single atom in its body was present when it was born. The facts in the previous sentence cannot possibly be deduced from a physicist’s model of the universe alone: therefore the physicist’s model cannot possibly be a complete explanation of the universe.

I chose to illustrate my point by comparing donkeys with those entities that appear directly in the laws of physics. I did this for a rhetorical reason: I thought that the claim that donkeys do not exist would be so obviously absurd that my point would be easily understood. However, I could have made the same point by comparing any entity that is not fully explicable in terms of its constituents with those constituents. For example, the entities of chemistry — a covalent bond, say, or a particular molecule — are also real things about which facts exist that cannot be deduced from the laws of physics alone. This leads us to an important point: if we wish to have a complete, scientific explanation of the world then we cannot rely on physics alone. Physical law is not a complete description of the universe.

Note that I am not claiming that different things are composed of different substances: everything I have said is consistent with the view that everything is made of matter. All I am saying is that the method of explanation we call physics, i.e. the description of the interactions of fundamental physical particles according to the laws of physics, is not capable of explaining or even describing all that exists. As such, there is no reason to grant physical explanations any sort of primacy over other sorts of scientific explanations: they are not more real, more true or more basic than the explanations of, say, chemistry or biology.

We may still want to attach some sort of prestige to physics, over and above that attached to other sciences, because it deals with the basic units out of which everything else is composed. Although the interactions of subatomic particles are not all there is to be said about a donkey, you might think that it is at least made of them. In other words, we can construct a meaningful hierarchy of matter — protons contain quarks, atoms contain protons, molecules contain atoms, cells contain molecules, donkeys contain cells, or something along those lines — and so we should consider the indivisible units at the bottom of the hierarchy to be fundamental, the basic units of the universe. However, it turns out that there are no such basic units. Even the subatomic particles of modern physics can themselves be understood as disturbances in underlying fields, as patterns in a substrate [1]. Furthermore, there is no logical reason why a “high level” entity such as a donkey must be composed of a particular sort of “low level” entity: to the best of our knowledge, donkeys as we know them are always composed of familiar atoms (mostly carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen), which are themselves composed of familiar subatomic particles such as quarks and electrons, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t be composed of functionally similar yet different entities. That is the point: donkeys could be composed of any sort of entity, as long as they behave in the right sort of way. Perhaps we live in a universe in which the only entities that behave in the right sort of way to make up a donkey are those that we have thus far observed in donkeys: quarks, electrons and so forth. But perhaps we don’t. Either way, there doesn’t seem to be any logical necessity for it to be so, which puts something of a damper on any claim that subatomic particles are really “fundamental” in any meaningful way.

It seems clear that there is nothing special about physics as compared to chemistry or biology. It is not the case that biology can be reduced to chemistry or chemistry reduced to physics. The entities of biology are every bit as real as the entities of chemistry and physics — they exist in their own right just as much as a hydrogen bond or a quark exists — and they cannot be fully explained in chemical or physical terms. Furthermore, there is no reason to stop at biology: we may, for example, employ the same style of argument to show that just because our minds depend for their existence on our brains, that does not mean that our minds can be reduced to our brains.

I wish to promote the view that the different sciences do not correspond to different levels of abstraction but to different modes of explanation, suited to explaining different aspects of existence. We do not use the language of biology to investigate life only because it is too difficult to do so with the language of physics. We could not, no matter how clever we are or how long we worked, write the equivalent of a biology textbook using only the tools and concepts of physics or chemistry. To attempt to do so would be tantamount to a category mistake. Organisms are not mere abstractions on top of underlying chemical reactions: they are as real in their own right as any electron or photon. There is a hierarchy of sciences only in the very weak and not particularly interesting sense that the entities studied by one science have not so far been observed to exist unless the entities of a “lower level” science also exist.

I suppose the final conclusion of this argument, which like a depressing amount of contemporary philosophy is more concerned with “defeating the defeaters” than with anything positive, is to point out something that ought to be blindingly obvious anyway, if only we still lived in enlightened times: a person is every bit as real as, and cannot be reduced to, the material parts out of which he is made.

[1] For more details on this, see Steve Grand in Creation: Life and How to Make It (Harvard University Press, 2003) pp. 36 & 37, and also in the comments on my previous blog article Forms, and J. R. Lucas in Reason and Reality (Ria University Press, 2009, also available from his website http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/) Chapter 13 “Reductionism”.

The motor road, inhuman, unnatural and altogether relentless, drives like a ram through the countryside with as much regard for its forms and design as a hot poker drawn over a carpet.

— H.J. Massingham, quoted (with complete reference) by Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti (I highly recommend you go and read the whole quotation)

Useful in a scientific sense means that the idea has observable consequences. That means it has some kind of effect that can be detected by carrying out an experiment. By “experiment,” we mean any measurement of anything at all; the swing of a pendulum, the color of light emitted by a burning candle flame, or the collisions of subatomic particles in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (we’ll come back to this experiment later on). If there are no observable consequences of an idea, then the idea is not necessary to understand the workings of the universe, although it might have some sort of chimerical value in making us feel better.

— Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, Why Does E=mc²?, Da Capo Press (2009), pp. 11 & 12

I wonder how much confusion is caused by the tendency of scientists to confound the observable with the measurable. (Is there an experiment we could perform to elucidate the matter?)

Consider, for example, the “about-ness” of thought. Does it make sense to say that one physical state is about another state? C. S. Lewis thought not:

We are compelled to admit between the thoughts of a terrestrial astronomer and the behaviour of matter several light-years away that particular relation we call truth. But this relation has no meaning at all if we try to make it exist between the matter of the star and the astronomer’s brain, considered as a lump of matter. The brain may be in all sorts of relations to the star no doubt: it is in a spatial relation, and a time relation, and a quantitative relation. But to talk of one bit of matter being true about another bit of matter seems to me to be nonsense. [1]

Surely the laws of physics govern these physical states without any reference at all to what they are “about”. If we knew all the physical facts about the world, I contend that it would be like watching a silent movie without subtitles. Different scenarios with respect to the meaning of what is going on could be compatible with the same physical state of the world. If two people are watching the same silent movie without subtitles, it is likely that each of them is seeing a somewhat different story line. There is nothing about what each is seeing on the screen that determines that either of them is correct about what is actually going on in the movie. If reality is fundamentally physical, and the state of the physical world does not uniquely determine what meaning a word has, it follows that the word has no determinate meaning. So how could there be any determinate meaning to the words and concepts that we use? W. V. Quine argued that physical information leaves it indeterminate as to what, say, a speaker of a foreign language means by the word gavagai. There is no fact of the matter as to whether the native is referring to “rabbit” or “undetached rabbit parts” [2]. But similarly, would not this argument also show that there is no fact of the matter as to what Quine means by naturalism when he says “naturalism is true”?

So we might develop the argument as follows:

1. If naturalism is true, then there is no fact of the matter as to what someone’s thought or statement is about.
2. But there are facts about what someone’s thought is about. (Implied by the existence of rational inference.)
3. Therefore, naturalism is false.

Some philosophers of mind, known as eliminative materialists, maintain that since intentional states will probably not be found in the course of brain science, it follows that there are no intentional states of the human person. So, for instance, eliminative materialists maintain that there are no beliefs. The obvious question that occurs to most people when they hear this sort of thing is to ask, “You expect me to believe that?”

Although advocates of eliminative materialism have argued that the eliminativist position is not really self-refuting, attempts to defend eliminativism against this charge seem not to be successful, as Lynne Baker, William Hasker and I have argued in print [3]. Rather than going into a detailed discussion of this debate, I will just point out that to accept eliminative materialism is to accept something akin to the belief that we are brains in vats, or that in some other way we are massively deceived about everything. If this expedient is necessary to save naturalism from the argument from reason, it is a desperate one indeed, one that undermines the foundations of the very scientific enterprise on which it is based.

— V. Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea (InterVarsity Press, 2003), pp. 74-76.

[1] C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (Eerdmans, 1967), p.64

[2] W. V. Quine, Word and Object (MIT Press, 1960), chaps. 1 and 2.

[3] Lynne Rudder Baker, Saving Belief (Princeton University Press, 1987); Victor Reppert, “Ramsey on Eliminativism and Self-Refutation”, Inquiry 34 (1991): 499-508; Victor Reppert, “Eliminative Materialism, Cognitive Suicide, and Begging the Question”, Metaphilosophy 23 (1992): 378-92; and William Hasker, The Emergent Self (Cornell University Press, 1999), pp.1-26.

According to evidence released from secret archives since the dissolution of the Soviet Union (which some experts consider understated), during 1937 and 1938, when the Great Terror was at its height, the security organs detained for alleged “anti-Soviet activities” 1,548,366 persons, of whom 681,692 were shot — an average of 1,000 executions a day. The majority of the survivors were sent to hard-labor camps.

— Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (Modern Library 2003), p. 67

Thousands of ‘kulaks’ were evicted from their farms and sent to labour camps in Siberia. In Estonia as many as 80,000 people were deported in 1949 alone. The total numbers deported in 1944-52 have been estimated at 124,000 for Estonia, 136,000 for Latvia and 245,000 for Lithuania.

— John Hiden and Patrick Salmon, The Baltic Nations and Europe (Longman 1991), p. 129

On the Soviet side of the demarcation line the NKVD carried out an undisclosed number of summary executions followed by several waves of deportations, first in the eastern Polish provinces (kresy) and then in the Baltic States and Bessarabia. Stalin’s population policy was intended to be more ‘selective’. The aim was to destroy the old elites, but the implementation of this policy, as N. S. Lebedeva’s article demonstrates, turned out to be less discriminating. Estimates of the total number of former Polish citizens who were deported or recruited for labour in the Soviet Union range from Andrei Vyshinskii’s figure of just under 388,000 to the Polish government-in-exile’s total of 1.25 million. Over half of those deported were ethnic Poles and under 30 percent were Jews. The deportations were brutal and may have cost the lives of 300,000 civilians. The arrest and subsequent execution of some 4,500 Polish officers and police in the Katyn camps was a particularly severe loss to the ruling elite.

— Alfred J. Reiber, Forced migration in Central and Eastern Europe, 1939-1950 (Psychology Press 2000), p. 15

The result of Stalin’s policies was the Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932-33 — a man-made demographic catastrophe unprecedented in peacetime. Of the estimated six to eight million people who died in the Soviet Union, about four to five million were Ukrainians. The famine was a direct assault on the Ukrainian peasantry, which had stubbornly continued to resist collectivization; indirectly, it was an attack on the Ukrainian village, which traditionally had been a key element of Ukrainian national culture. Its deliberate nature is underscored by the fact that no physical basis for famine existed in Ukraine. The Ukrainian grain harvest of 1932 had resulted in below-average yields (in part because of the chaos wreaked by the collectivization campaign), but it was more than sufficient to sustain the population. Nevertheless, Soviet authorities set requisition quotas for Ukraine at an impossibly high level. Brigades of special agents were dispatched to Ukraine to assist in procurement, and homes were routinely searched and foodstuffs confiscated. At the same time, a law was passed in August 1932 making the theft of socialist property a capital crime, leading to scenes in which peasants faced the firing squad for stealing as little as a sack of wheat from state storehouses. The rural population was left with insufficient food to feed itself. The ensuing starvation grew to a massive scale by the spring of 1933, but Moscow refused to provide relief. In fact, the Soviet Union exported more than a million tons of grain to the West during this period.

The famine subsided only after the 1933 harvest had been completed. The traditional Ukrainian village had been essentially destroyed, and settlers from Russia were brought in to repopulate the devastated countryside. Soviet authorities flatly denied the existence of the famine both at the time it was raging and after it was over. It was only in the late 1980s that officials made a guarded acknowledgement that something had been amiss in Ukraine at this time.

— Encyclopædia Britannica, Ukraine – The famine of 1932-33, available online: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/612921/Ukraine

A provisional balance sheet of statistics on the terror might run as follows:

• 6 million dead as a result of the famine of 1932-33, a catastrophe that can be blamed largely on the policy of enforced collectivization and the predatory tactics of the central government in seizing the harvests of the kolkhozy.
• 720,000 executions, 680,000 of which were carried out in 1937-38, usually after some travesty of justice by a special GPU or NKVD court.
• 300,000 known deaths in the camps from 1934 to 1940. By extrapolating these figures back to 1930-1933 (years for which very few records are available), we can estimate that some 400,000 died during the decade, not counting the incalculable number of those who died between the moment of their arrest and their registration as prisoners in the one of the camps.
• 600,000 registered deaths among the deportees, refugees, and “specially displaced”.
• Approximately 2,200,000 deported, forcibly moved, or exiled as “specially displaced people”.
• A cumulative figure of 7 million people who entered the camps and Gulag colonies from 1934 to 1941 (information for the years 1930-1933 remains imprecise).

— Stéphane Courtois, Nicholas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Margolin (trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer), Livre Noir du Communisme (Harvard University Press 1999), pp. 206-207

Part of this mass killing was genocide, as in the wholesale murder of hundreds of thousands of Don Cossacks in 1919, the intentional starving to death of about 5,000,000 Ukrainian peasants in 1932-33, or the deportation to mass death of 50,000 to 60,000 Estonians in 1949. Part was mass murder, as of the wholesale extermination of perhaps 6,500,000 kulaks (in effect, the better-off peasants and those resisting collectivization) from 1930 to 1937, the execution of perhaps a million party members in the Great Terror of 1937-38, and the massacre of all Trotskyites in the forced labor camps.

Moreover, part of the killing was so random and idiosyncratic that journalists and social scientists have no concept for it, as in hundreds of thousands of people being executed according to preset government quotas…

I call all this kind of killing, whether genocide or mass murder, democide. Throughout this book, democide will mean a government’s concentrated, systematic, and serial murder of a large part of its population.

In sum, the Soviets [between 1917 and 1987] have committed a democide of 61,911,000 people, 7,142,000 of them foreigners. This staggering total is beyond belief. But… it is only the most prudent, most probable tally, in a range from a highly unlikely low figure of 28,326,000 (4,263,000 foreigners); to an equally unlikely high of 126,891,000 (including 12,134,000 foreigners). This is a range of uncertainty in our democide estimates — an error range — of 97,808,000 human beings.

— Rudolph J. Rummel, Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917 (Transaction Publishers 1990), p. 3

“If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.”

— George Galloway, in an interview published by The Guardian, 16th September 2002, available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/16/iraq.interviews