Ideas Animate Democracy

Keith Tidman 

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once advised, ‘Life can only be understood backwards … but it must be lived forward’ — that is, life understood with one eye turned to history, and presaged with the other eye turned to competing future prospects. An observation about understanding and living life that applies across the board, to individuals, communities, and nations. Another way of putting it is that ideas are the grist for thinking not only about ideals but about the richness of learnable history and the alternative futures from which society asserts agency in freely choosing its way ahead. 

As of late, though, we seem to have lost sight that one way for democracy to wilt is to shunt aside ideas that might otherwise inspire minds to think, imagine, solve, create, discover and innovate — the source of democracy’s intellectual muscularity. For reflexively rebuffing ideas and their sources is really about constraining inquiry and debate in the public square. Instead, there has been much chatter about democracies facing existential grudge matches against exploitative autocratic regimes that issue their triumphalist narrative and view democracy as weak-kneed.  

In mirroring the decrees of the Ministry of Truth in the dystopian world of George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four — where two plus two equals five, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength — unbridled censorship and historical revisionism begin and end with the fear of ideas. Ideas snubbed by authoritarians’ heavy hand. The short of it is that prohibitions on ideas end up a jumbled net, a capricious exercise in power and control. Accordingly, much exertion is put into shaping society’s sanctioned norms, where dissent isn’t brooked. A point to which philosopher Hannah Arendt cautioned, ‘Totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorising human beings from within’. Where trodden-upon voting and ardent circulation of propagandistic themes, both of which torque reality, hamper free expression.

 

This tale about prospective prohibitions on ideas is about choices between the resulting richness of thought or the poverty of thought — a choice we must get right, and can do so only by making it possible for new intellectual shoots to sprout from the raked seedbed. The optimistic expectation from this is that we get to understand and act on firmer notions of what’s real and true. But which reality? One reality is that each idea that’s arbitrarily embargoed delivers yet another kink to democracy’s armour; a very different reality is that each idea, however provocative, allows democracy to flourish.

 

Only a small part of the grappling over ideas is for dominion over which ideas will reasonably prevail long term. The larger motive is to honour the openness of ideas’ free flow, to be celebrated. This exercise brims with questions about knowledge. Like these: What do we know, how do we know it, with what certainty or uncertainty do we know it, how do we confirm or refute it, how do we use it for constructive purposes, and how do we allow for change? Such fundamental questions crisscross all fields of study. New knowledge ferments to improve insight into what’s true. Emboldened by this essential exercise, an informed democracy is steadfastly enabled to resist the siren songs of autocracy.

 

Ideas are accelerants in the public forum. Ideas are what undergird democracy’s resilience and rootedness, on which standards and norms are founded. Democracy at its best allows for the unobstructed flow of different social and political thought, side by side. As Benjamin Franklin, polymath and statesman, prophetically said: ‘Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government’. A lead worth following. In this churn, ideas soar or flop by virtue of the quality of their content and the strength of their persuasion. Democracy allows its citizens to pick which ideas normalise standards — through debate and subjecting ideas to scrutiny, leading to their acceptance or refutation. Acid tests, in other words, of the cohesion and sustainability of ideas. At its best, debate arouses actionable policy and meaningful change.

 

Despite society being buffeted daily by roiling politics and social unrest, democracy’s institutions are resilient. Our institutions might flex under stress, but they are capable of enduring the broadsides of ideological competitiveness as society makes policy. The democratic republic is not existentially imperiled. It’s not fragilely brittle. America’s Founding Fathers set in place hardy institutions, which, despite public handwringing, have endured challenges over the last two-and-a-half centuries. Historical tests of our institutions’ mettle have inflicted only superficial scratches — well within institutions’ ability to rebound again and again, eventually as robust as ever.

 

Yet, as Aristotle importantly pointed out by way of a caveat to democracy’s sovereignty and survivability, 

‘If liberty and equality . . . are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be attained when all persons share in the government to the utmost.’

A tall order, as many have found, but one that’s worthy and essential, teed up for democracies to assiduously pursue. Democracy might seem scruffy at times. But at its best, democracy ought not fear ideas. Fear that commonly bubbles up from overwrought narrative and unreasoned parochialism, in the form of ham-handed constraints on thought and expression.

 

The fear of ideas is often more injurious than the content of ideas, especially in the shadows of disagreeableness intended to cause fissures in society. Ideas are thus to be hallowed, not hollowed. To countenance contesting ideas — majority and minority opinions alike, forged on the anvil of rationalism, pluralism, and critical thinking — is essential to the origination of constructive policies and, ultimately, how democracy is constitutionally braced.

 

 

Miracles: Confirmable, or Chimerical?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Multiplication of the Loaves, by Georges, Mount Athos.

We are often passionately told of claims to experienced miracles, in both the religious and secular worlds. The word ‘miracle’ coming from the Latin mirari, meaning to wonder. But what are these miracles that some people wonder about, and do they happen as told?

Scottish philosopher David Hume, as sceptic on this matter, defined a miracle as ‘a violation of the laws of nature’ — with much else to say on the issue in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). He proceeded to define the transgression of nature as due to a ‘particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent’. Though how much credence might one place in ‘invisible agents’?

Other philosophers, like Denmark’s Søren Kierkegaard in his pseudonymous persona Johannes Climacus, also placed themselves in Hume’s camp on the matter of miracles. Earlier, Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote of miracles as events whose source and cause remain unknown to us (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1670). Yet, countless other people around the world, of many religious persuasions, earnestly assert that the entreaty to miracles is one of the cornerstones of their faith. Indeed, some three-fourths of survey respondents indicated they believe in miracles, while nearly half said they have personally experienced or seen a miracle (Princeton Survey Research Associates, 2000; Harris poll, 2013).

One line of reasoning as to whether miracles are credible might start with the definition of miracles, such as transgressions of natural events uncontested convincingly by scientists or other specialists. The sufficiency of proof that a miracle really did occur and was not, deus ex machina, just imagined or stemming from a lack of understanding of the laws underlying nature is a very tall order, as surely it should be.

Purported proof would come from people who affirm they witnessed the event, raising questions about witnesses’ reliability and motives. In this regard, it would be required to eliminate obvious delusions, fraud, optical illusions, distortions, and the like. The testimony of witnesses in such matters is, understandably, often suspect. There are demanding conditions regarding definitions and authentication — such as of ‘natural events’, where scientific hypotheses famously, but for good reason, change to conform to new knowledge acquired through disciplined investigation. These conditions lead many people to dismiss the occurrence of miracles as pragmatically untenable, requiring by extension nothing less than a leap of faith.

But a leap of faith suggests that the alleged miracle happened through the interposition of a supernatural power, like a god or other transcendent, creative force of origin. This notion of an original source gives rise, I argue, to various problematic aspects to weigh.

One might wonder, for example, why a god would have created the cosmos to conform to what by all measures is a finely grained set of natural laws regarding cosmic reality, only later to decide, on rare occasion, to intervene. That is, where a god suspends or alters original laws in order to allow miracles. The assumption being that cosmic laws encompass all physical things, forces, and the interactions among them. So, a god choosing not to let select original laws remain in equilibrium, uninterrupted, seems selective — incongruously so, given theistic presumptions about a transcendent power’s omniscience and omnipotence and omniwisdom.

One wonders, thereby, what’s so peculiarly special about humankind to deserve to receive miracles — symbolic gestures, some say. Additionally, one might reasonably ponder why it was necessary for a god to turn to the device of miracles in order for people to extract signals regarding purported divine intent.

One might also wonder, in this theistic context, whether something was wrong with the suspended law to begin with, to necessitate suspension. That is, perhaps it is reasonable to conclude from miracles-based change that some identified law is not, as might have been supposed, inalterably good in all circumstances, for all eternity. Or, instead, maybe nothing was in fact defective in the original natural law, after all, there having been merely an erroneous read of what was really going on and why. A rationale, thereby, for alleged miracles — and the imagined compelling reasons to interfere in the cosmos — to appear disputable and nebulous.

The presumptive notion of ‘god in the gaps’ seems tenuously to pertain here, where a god is invoked to fill the gaps in human knowledge — what is not yet known at some point in history — and thus by extension allows for miracles to substitute for what reason and confirmable empirical evidence might otherwise and eventually tell us.

As Voltaire further ventured, ‘It is . . . impious to ascribe miracles to God; they would indicate a lack of forethought, or of power, or both’ (Philosophical Dictionary, 1764). Yet, unsurprisingly, contentions like Voltaire’s aren’t definitive as a closing chapter to the accounting. There’s another facet to the discussion that we need to get at — a nonreligious aspect.

In a secular setting, the list of problematic considerations regarding miracles doesn’t grow easier to resolve. The challenges remain knotty. A reasonable assumption, in this irreligious context, is that the cosmos was not created by a god, but rather was self-caused (causa sui). In this model, there were no ‘prior’ events pointing to the cosmos’s lineage. A cosmos that possesses integrally within itself a complete explanation for its existence. Or, a cosmos that has no beginning — a boundless construct having existed infinitely.

One might wonder whether a cosmos’s existence is the default, stemming from the cosmological contention that ‘nothingness’ cannot exist, implying no beginning or end. One might further ponder how such a cosmos — in the absence of a transcendent force powerful enough to tinker with it — might temporarily suspend or alter a natural law in order to accommodate the appearance of a happening identifiable as a miracle. I propose there would be no mechanism to cause such an alteration to the cosmic fabric to happen. On those bases, it may seem there’s no logical reason for (no possibility of) miracles. Indeed, the scientific method does itself call for further examining what may have been considered a natural law whenever there are repeated exceptions or contradictions to it, rather than assuming that a miracle is recurring.

Hume proclaimed that ‘no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle’; centuries earlier, Augustine of Hippo articulated a third, and broader take on the subject. He pointedly asked, ‘Is not the universe itself a miracle?’ (The City of God, 426 AD). Here, one might reasonably interpret ‘a miracle’ as synonymous for a less emotionally charged, temporal superlative like ‘remarkable’. I suspect most of us agree that our vast, roiling cosmos is indeed a marvel, though debatably not necessitating an originating spiritual framework like Augustine’s. 

No matter how supposed miracles are perceived, internalised, and retold, the critical issue of what can or cannot be confirmed dovetails to an assessment of the ‘knowledge’ in hand: what one knows, how one knows it, and with what level of certainty one knows it. So much of reality boils down to probabilities as the measuring stick; the evidence for miracles is no exception. If we’re left with only gossamer-thin substantiation, or no truly credible substantiation, or no realistically potential path to substantiation — which appears the case — claims of miracles may, I offer, be dismissed as improbable or even phantasmal.