Category Archives: Politics

Middle Way Thinkers 5: John Stuart Mill

Great Thinkers, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Politics, , ,

“It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves…unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement….In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realised; that all the changes in institutions and opinions that you were looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.”

This is how John Stuart Mill, writing in his autobiography, tells us about the great crisis in his life: what we might now call a nervous breakdown. Mill is one of philosophical history’s great infant prodigies. Urged by his pushy utilitarian father, he was also intended as a living demonstration of the power of a rationally ordered way of life in pursuit of utilitarian objectives. Famously, John Stuart Mill started to learn Ancient Greek at the age of three. By the time of his breakdown at twenty, he had already been through a high pressure education and become a utilitarian campaigner. We can guess, however, that in this pressurised environment a great many other feelings were repressed. As repressed feelings tend to do, they made themselves unexpectedly, distressingly and disruptively manifest.

What makes Mill such an inspiring figure is the way that he dealt with this inner conflict. He neither tried to repress the inconvenient feelings further, nor did he entirely give way to them. Instead he learnt from them and modified his view of the world. He seems, in fact, to have integrated the conflicting desires, meanings and beliefs that lay behind this inner turmoil, by working through them in his philosophy. What had started off as a narrow, puritanical utilitarianism was broadened and modified in an attempt to recognise the importance of emotional and aesthetic experience. Mill became especially known for his essay On Liberty, the key founding text of liberalism and a hugely creative advance in the political thought of the time. In addition, with the collaboration of his wife Harriet, his essay On the subjection of women also became a key early text in the attempt to persuade the repressive male-dominated nineteenth-century world that women should also share men’s liberty as equal partners.

As with any other thinker one might identify as making an important contribution to our understanding of the Middle Way, Mill found a balance in some ways more than others. For example, Mill’s interpretation of Utilitarianism moves beyond the narrowness of his early mentor Jeremy Bentham, it still has the limitations of Utilitarianism in general.  Bentham wanted to reduce moral decision-making to a ‘hedonic calculus’, in which the pleasures and pains likely to result from different possible actions would be quantified and weighed up in a notionally mathematical fashion. In the scales of this calculus, Bentham argued that every pleasure weighed equally, and should be measured only by its intensity, duration and other quantitative features: in his famous phrase “Pushpin is as good as poetry” (pushpin being a fairly mindless game played in pubs at the time). After his breakdown and recovery, Mill began to argue that some pleasures were better than others. However, he did not really have a convincing account of why poetry was better than pushpin that went beyond the weight of social consensus. That poetry might have benefits in terms of the meanings it offers us is too intangible an idea to fit easily into a utilitarian framework.john mill

It is in  On Liberty that I find Mill at his best and closest to the Middle Way. The utilitarianism is nominally there, but fades into the background beside Mill’s passionate argument for the freedom of expression and action. If you allow people to express unorthodox views and behave in unconventional ways, Mill argues, society as a whole will benefit, because these people will be able to develop and test out new and better ways of thinking and acting. Adults should thus be allowed to act as they wish provided they did not harm others in the process. Mill challenged those who thought they knew the truth as to whether they thought themselves (and the socially accepted view) infallible: if not, he argued, the possibility of error needed to be tested out in a free discussion in which better justified views would become evident. Mill here gives a very practical expression to the Middle Way in the recognition of basic uncertainty, and draws out its implication of tolerance that allows people to reach their own autonomous, but justified, conclusions.

Mill goes on “Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it be suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but…the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason and personal experience.”

Mill here puts his finger on some of the key features of metaphysical dogma. By repressing alternative views, it not only prevents debate and experiment that might help us address conditions more effectively, it also represses emotions and creates conflicting psychological states that inhibit creativity and well-being. Personal experience may give rise to new ideas and beliefs, but these potential innovations must be crushed at source in order to ensure social conformity with the dominant beliefs. Unhappy individuals and rigid, fragile societies are the result. So much of nineteenth century literature is about this: the struggles of individuals to find sustenance and fulfil their vision in a stiflingly conventional society. But before the nineteenth century society was no less dogmatic and conformist. It was due to people like John Stuart Mill that awareness of the possibility of an alternative began to spread in a way it had not existed before.

Perhaps many people in the twenty-first century take this as old hat. We take tolerance of harmless individual differences for granted, at least in theory. Mill’s liberalism in its turn has now become the basis of a kind of social orthodoxy, which sometimes just goes through the motions of supporting creative individual freedom, but sometimes also genuinely does support that freedom to great positive effect. The Middle Way has now become much more a question for individuals, because dogmas can be carried around with us inside as well as laid on us from outside. But the fact remains, that without that basic degree of liberalism, our ability to find a Middle Way is severely curtailed by social pressure and control. That, perhaps, is why modernity is a much better context to practice the Middle Way than the traditional and hierarchical societies of the Buddhist East, even though these societies transmitted the Buddha’s idea of the Middle Way for many centuries.

 

Link to index of other posts in the Middle Way Thinkers series

The great conciliator

Current Affairs, News, Politics

The warm words from around the world following the death of Nelson Mandela seem to me to offer some powerful messages about effective integration. Frederik_de_Klerk_with_Nelson_Mandela_-_World_Economic_Forum_Annual_Meeting_Davos_1992I must admit to sharing a lot of the general admiration, and it was no accident that I put this picture of him shaking hands with F.W. De Klerk on the cover of my book ‘Middle Way Philosophy 2: The Integration of Desire’. What is so striking about Mandela is the way that his personal integration in prison was so decisive in the political integration of his country. In the complexity of politics, there are few such clear examples of the link between the two levels of integration, the microcosm and the macrocosm (Aung San Suu Kyi is perhaps another, but her mission to bring Burma to democracy still has a long way to go).

One needs to give priority to the big picture to admire Mandela in this way. One needs to compare what actually happened in South Africa with the bloodbath that might have happened, and emphasise his obvious importance in making the difference. Part of the basis for admiration also includes Mandela’s awareness of his own limitations, indicated in his decision to step down after one term as president, together with the stories of his personal kindness, including to people whom he had every reason to hate, such as Betsy Verwoerd, the widow of a previous hardline Apartheid Prime Minister.

However, if you look in more detail at some of the many obituaries that are featuring in the media today, Mandela’s many weaknesses also become clear. His two divorces, his apparent naivete in dealing with the wealthy and enjoying wealth himself, his apparent climbdown from former left-wing ideals when in office, and his lack of attention to the details of government, are all mentioned. Despite the fact that his conversion to violence was evidently reluctant, he could also at one time be labelled a terrorist (and indeed was). If you simply project a heroic archetype onto Mandela and expect him to fulfil every detail of that archetype, you will be disappointed.

What seems more important is to separate our projection of the hero from the complexity of the man, and appreciate both for what they were. The man was flawed, but, if you look at the big picture, still a real example of how integration can actually happen, both in personal and political terms, even if it seems against the odds. As an archetype we can put his image alongside that of other flawed human beings – Gandhi, Jesus, and the Buddha, for instance, as able to more generally reflect a way forward for us. I would not put his image on a shrine and burn a candle before it, because that to me seems to create too much confusion of the archetype and the person. Nevertheless, if we can maintain that awareness of the difference, and of the real complexity of the issues that the hero works with, there is no need to set any limits to our depth of admiration for the archetype. We can admire the hero, yes, but we can particularly admire the flawed hero who engages with the full difficulty of the conditions around him.

When to intervene?

Middle Way Philosophy, Politics,

I am reading a book so exciting that I can’t refrain from sharing some of what I’m getting from it even before I’ve finished reading it: that book is Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I am finding insights that relate to the Middle Way on almost every page. Taleb is a kind of 21st Century Nietzsche – he writes with more than a touch of arrogance, a skill of polymathic synthesis, and a talent for the incisive, resounding and insightful. He doesn’t always get it completely right: but I’d much rather read a book that offers gripping insights 80% of the time and overstates itself or makes misjudgements 20% of the time, than a more cautious one that doesn’t get anything ‘wrong’ but conveys nothing of great interest.

AntifragileThe theme of the book is the way in which the best systems can be actually strengthened by adversity – what he calls antifragility. For example, the body is strengthened by exposure to manageable stress, and theories are improved by being challenged. Taleb does not explicitly discuss the Middle Way, but I keep finding it implicitly in the balance of stressors that are needed to create this strength in a system. The opposing position is one of false certainty that is fragile – an attribute I have often used to describe metaphysical beliefs even long before I read Taleb. This fragility is a vulnerability to the unexpected that has not been considered in the all-encompassing plan that we thought we had. Taleb has spent time as a stock trader, and the state of the market in 2008 is an obvious example of such false certainty, based on a metaphysical belief that the market had been managed in the right way this time and that the vulnerabilities of the past were over. Fragility leads to sudden and catastrophic harm, whereas antifragility is a strength that goes beyond robustness into actual benefit from these “unexpected” events. Antifragility seems to be largely cultivable by avoiding the metaphysical beliefs that create fragility.

No doubt I shall return to write more about this book when I have finished it, but for now here is a particular example that I found rather striking. One area that Taleb discusses is the question of when and how much to intervene so as to prevent possible harm – a dilemma well-known both to governments and parents. A balance has to be struck here which seems to be that of the Middle Way. This is a balance based not on finding some sort of literal middle point, but on an assessment of conditions which includes sufficient awareness of our fallibility. Taleb gives two interesting examples based on government intervention on the roads.

On the one hand is a case for intervention in the matter of speed. Our cars can increasingly manage excessive speed with ease, but we are very poor at judging the dangers that accompany speed. I also struggle myself to recognise the compounded inefficiency that comes from speed beyond a certain point. It is so tempting to drive along an uncrowded motorway in the UK at 70mph (the legal limit and usual speed of most cars) rather than 60mph, which is only marginally slower but far more efficient. There’s a strong case here for speed limits and their enforcement, perhaps at a slightly lower level than they are now. There seems to be a good case for intervention here because of our lack of awareness of our fallibility.

However, for a contrasting case, Taleb cites the experiment that took place in Drachten, Netherlands, in which traffic lights and many road signs were removed (see newspaper article). The effect of removing a lot of the kind of intervention that we are accustomed to here from ‘the nanny state’ actually seems to have been healthy. In Taleb’s language, it reduced antifragility. Minor accidents increased slightly, but people drove more carefully and took more responsibility for their actions, leading to a decrease in serious accidents. The key difference between this and the speed example seems to be that people could be made more aware of fallibility by being given more responsibility in this case (at least in the Netherlands – I wonder if it would work in other cultural settings). On the other hand, if you removed speed limits on motorways people would become less aware of their fallibility rather than more.

These examples obviously offer pointers for the political application of the Middle Way. Those on the left who tend to be more in favour of state intervention are correct in some cases, and those on the right who are in favour of ‘small government’ are also correct in some cases.  What we need to beware of is attachment to a rigid metaphysical belief in a particular political ideology, but rather look more closely at the conditions at work in each case. In addition, our understanding of those conditions needs to make allowances at every stage for what we don’t know, as well as what we do know.