Towards Xanadu

Unless you've actually be following me online so closely that I ought to be a bit worried, you might not be aware that I'm rather fond of the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (not to be confused with the composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor). Kubla Khan is my all-time favourite. I don't know why exactly. I suppose it's the romance of a vision of paradise lost forever by an interruption, along with the mysterious, other-worldly imagery and the pleasingly melodic rhyming structure.

Anyway, I wasn't aware that Coleridge was also a philosopher. Unfortunately, the Aeon essay leaves me so confused about what his ideas actually were that I'm going to skip over them completely and come at this from a totally different angle. What I like is the sentiment :

This inclusive attitude is one of the strengths of Coleridge’s approach, which grew from his celebrated powers of synthesis. Seeing polarised debates as revealing an interdependent whole, he tried to embrace the views of his philosophical opponents, rather than simply dismiss them. He saw dichotomous or binary thinking (B versus C) as merely disputative, whereas a broader trichotomy (B versus C within a broader unity of A) presented a unified whole as the higher ideal that fierce yet dependent polar opposition imperfectly represents. The view of a higher union of opposites leads to reasoning, while binary thinking leads merely to arguing.

This is considerably more interesting than Richard Dawkins quote that the truth is not necessarily midway between two positions, since one side may simply be wrong. I agree with this quote too; some options are mutually exclusive. But how much more productive to consider that both viewpoints usually don't emerge fully-formed from the head of Zeus, but have some solid (if often flawed) reasoning behind them.

For an example, quite separately I also read the following on social media :

“The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Martin Luther King Jnr. I think that this means something like: “It’s taking a long time for humans to become more just and fair, but it will eventually happen.”

And all that weirdness of H.G. Wells' (who was also strongly in favour of synthesis) strange views on women have been stuck in my head. I posited that maybe his views related to the higher infant mortality rates of the time. So in a discussion with Shirley, we took this to extremes. Suppose that centuries or millennia ago, you lived back when infant mortality was very high indeed. Not only that, but female mortality in childbirth was also very much higher than in the modern West. You also have no real birth control. Doesn't this necessitate that your moral values be rather drastically different than today ?

We think yes. If your population is small, and every pregnancy carries a serious risk of infant mortality, raising children is not an optional extra you can eventually get around to, otherwise your tribe or village or whatever is all the more likely to die out. Unless you breed, you will go extinct (albeit locally). And lacking much in the way of anything other than mother's milk as a food source, it follows that the bulk of a woman's time, when of breeding age, is going to be spent not only in making babies but also in childcare - a not inconsiderable fraction of her whole life. After which, having little knowledge of anything else, she'll be a full-time grandmother. So the idea of "a woman's place is in the home" conceivably arises out not of patriarchal suppression, but of sheer necessity.

Or in other words : start plotting a women's liberation movement in such an environment, and you'd be roughly analogous to being an anti-masker today. What is fair and just is strongly dependent upon context. The morality of a rule cannot be separated from the reason for that rule.

The flip side of this is that demanding to keep women at home today is equally immoral. Today, we have vastly improved medical treatments and a massively larger population enabling childcare to be outsourced to specialists. In this environment, denying women a choice, insisting that child-rearing is the sum total of their existence and an essential duty, shaming them if they opt out, is ludicrous. A would-be mother has every right to either take up the bulk of the responsibility or to minimise it; equally, there is no longer any necessity for any individual to have children if they don't wish to do so. Denying choice today would be abhorrent, but in the distant past... not so much.

Given the importance of context, the moral arc may not bend so much as it becomes wibbly-wobbly; morality adapts to fit the circumstances of the day. Often, technological progression facilitates greater resources which can enable greater freedoms and equality, but there is no law that says this must be so. 

Of course context is not the whole of it. Some countries today are considerably more free and equal than others despite roughly equal levels of technology and resources. Moral judgements are also self-perpetuating : there is not an equivalent of the "efficient market hypotheses" whereby society tends to be the most moral it can be. It clearly does not. If context lays the ultimate boundaries, then it is entirely optional choices which determine the direction.

What society deems to be moral can be self-perpetuating, such that there can be a strong mismatch between what is possible and what is chosen. That is, while patriarchal suppression may initially have been the consequence, not the cause, of gender roles in society, it could also be a symptom in the viral sense of the word, spreading itself from generation to generation. We could already have had had far greater levels of gender equality centuries ago, but actively chose not to. With women having a moral duty to raise children, it's a short step to keeping them at home. And it's another short step to not bothering to educate them - what would they need an education for since they'll never have the chance to use it ? And then inductive-based learning takes over into a vicious circle : all these women don't know anything, hence they must be stupid, so there's no point even trying to educate them. So amazingly enough a lack of education leads to half the population being, well... they wouldn't do well on Mastermind, that's for sure.

We could have broken the cycle. As populations grew and medical technology improved, we could have had greater division of labour. But we were stuck in the grip of circular reasoning. Only in the last century or so does there seem to have been any real shift towards true equality. Perhaps in part this is due to the pressure to change becoming unbearable : infant mortality is close to zero, schooling is ubiquitous, contraception is affordable and available. Under such conditions there is no need or desire for women to spend half their lives raising children and doing bugger all else, though we have still hardly escaped the misogynistic grip of our ancestors.

Of course, this is a simplification. Gender equality hasn't shifted linearly or uniformly and the history of gender roles is massively more complex than this brief outline. The point is that any model of how morality changes in society must use multi-scale thinking, a broad brush that paints with fine strokes. The constraints of circumstance limit the decisions which can be made, but the details of how they're expressed is far more optional. And there is a feedback between the two, with the nuances of the choices made affecting what choices are possible.

I don't think synthesis is possible between all viewpoints, let alone between all people. Plenty of people make contextually immoral choices out of pure malevolence, of sheer desire to inflict harm even at their own expense. I just think if we took half the energy we do on making clever memes to disparage everyone who disagrees with us, and instead used that to figure out the reasons for each other's conclusions (even some of the really awful/weird ones), the world might be a happier place.

Coleridge the philosopher

Though far more often remembered as a poet, Coleridge’s theory of ideas was spectacular in its originality and bold reach.