Right Reason

The Skeptic as a Conservative

 The skeptic is a natural conservative. He is so because a conservative is someone who abhors innovations and who views human society as something that simply cannot be improved by human reason. To him, society is a creation of thousands of years of history, of the designs of millions of individuals and is held together by the fabric of traditional social institutions that have emerged in the process of history. What can the puny human mind manage to do other than inadvertently tear asunder those institutions and leave society worse off. Michel de Montaigne, a diligent student of Pyrrhonian skepticism, expressed this opinion in his essay I:23 “On habit: and on never easily changing a traditional law”:

And here is one drawn from a different barrel: it is greatly to be doubted whether any obvious good can come from changing any traditional law whatever it may be, compared with the evil of changing it; for a polity is like a building made of diverse pieces interlocked together, joined in such a way that is impossible to move one without the whole structure feeling it. He who gave the Thurians their laws ordained that if any man wished to abolish an ancient one or establish a new one he should appear before the people with a rope round his neck, so that he could be hanged at once if anyone failed to approve of his novelty.

 

Of course, when I write of conservatives here, I do not mean “Conservative” in the sense it has in modern American politics, though there are certainly plenty of shared traits. Instead, I mean it in the most literal, and perhaps original, sense of someone who simply views conserving the institutional structure of society as the best policy. The skeptic in turn who takes seriously that all judgment is fallible and that relies on other means of justifying human behavior other than ratiocination like tradition (a famous example of this is Sextus Empiricus' reliance of traditional remedies rather than on reasoned inquiries into the nature of medicine in his own practice as a physician).

Unlike many modern aberrations popular among high schoolers and undergraduate, skepticism does not lead the skeptic away from traditions; instead, it drives them closer. Like the conservative, the skeptic's doubts about the powers of human reason leads them down the road of the traditionalist. That which is is for a reason and what better can we know? When a man comes forward with a innovation to society, the skeptic is then common partner with the conservative in wanting to hang him at once as a threat to society. As Montaigne said:

To speak frankly, it seems to me that there is a great deal of self-love and arrogance in judging so highly of your opinions that you are obliged to disturb the public peace in order to establish them, thereby introducing these many unavoidable evils and that horrifying moral corruption which, in matters of great importance, civil wars and political upheavals bring in their wake – introducing them moreover into your country.

Thus the skeptic becomes a conservative with the rallying cry: we have the society that we have been given by history, it is our job not to mess it up.

 

It is only once we are able to esteem human reason and to save some of it from the skeptic's critique that we are able to step away from a pure traditionalist conservatism and begin to think about stepping away from a historical fatalist notion of society. If Hume's approach to whittle down the claims of reason through philosophical critique were able to leave nothing left, then human reason would be incapable of comprehending the maze of chains of cause and effect that are necessary to comprehend to even critique social institutions. After all, if the human mind is going to be able to create a better course for the evolution of institutions than history, it must be able to understand how institutions affect human action and how they guide people to take certain actions.

Any critique must in turn also have a normative standard for how human beings ought to act and to create that standard human reasons must understand successful patterns of human action. Hence any argument against conservatism must be able to raise human reason above the critiques of skepticism and show that it can construct standards for reform that break from the historical evolution of human institutions. If that is ever going to succeed, then the skeptical arguments against reason must be beaten back.

That human beings so often critique them with the claims of reason is evidence that skepticism is more often an exercise in philosophy rather than a serious approach and that critiques of social institutions are so often successful in their aims is evidence that human reason can understand well enough the concatenation of events in society contra the claims of skepticism.   

On The Power of Familiarity and the Wane of Wonder

 

 

A panoramic of Angel Falls.

 

 

From essay I:23, “On Habit: and on never easily changing a local law” by Michel Montaingne as translated by M.A. Screech in Penguin Classic's The Complete Essays:

Miraculous wonders depend on our ignorance of Nature on the essence of nature, Our judgment's power to see things is lulled to sleep once we grow accustomed to anythings.

Similarly, Montaigne argued earlier in I:23 that the reason that no one ever heart the music of the spheres speculated by astronomers since the Greeks was that each person had grown so accustomed to the sound that no one could consciously discern it from the other sounds around them:

There is no need to go in search of what is said about those who dwell near the cataracts of the Nile; nor what the philosophers deduce about the music of the spheres: so that those solid material circles rub and lightly play against each other and so cannot fail to produce a wondrous harmony (by the modulations and mutations of which are conducted the revolutions and variations of the dance of the stars) yet none of the creatures in the whole Universe can hear it, loud though it is, since (as in the case of those Egyptians) our sense of hearing has been dulled by the continuity of the sound.

The parallel with the Egyptians near the banks of the cataracts not being able to hear the sound of the roaring rapids was borrowed from Cicero's The Dream of Scipio where Cicero also argues that the only reason no one hears the music of the spheres is because no one has never not heard it so we have all become dull to it.

 

Perhaps there is something tragic in the power of familiarity. Whether it be Angel Falls in Venezuela, the Grand Canyon, the red wood forests of California, or the Great Barrier Reef, much of the wonder comes to just how unaccustomed the onlooker is to what he sees. Everything in life is compared to something else, this tree is taller than that tree, this hole is deeper than that hole, and thus that something is even considered a wonder implies that it is so much greater in some quality than anything else in the world.

Angel Falls is the highest uninterrupted fall, by the time that the water reaches the bottom it has dispersed into a fine mist. The Great Barrier Reef is the largest system of coral reefs in the world and the largest single biological structure made by a single organism. The onlooker is thus faced with something that they have never seen before, a sight that breaks them from the habitual experiences they are used to and that refuses to be ignored in the background. However, as the onlooker grows accustomed to even the greatest sights even they can fade into the background. Thus he can be lulled by the force of habit to take things for granted and to not realize the magnificent qualities of that which has waned into the mundane

 

There is much lament in this human propensity, but to dwell too long on the tragedy alone would be myopic. After all, even though the power of familiarity may make us numb to the greatness around us, it also serves to make human life bearable in even the most terrible of circumstances. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune may be shocking to a man accustomed to better, but before long they become lost in the background.  Habit then becomes something to be grateful for, something that enables us to focus on what is good in life rather than being lost in a sea of what we would like to change.