In 1859, two revolutionary books were published. One was Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The other was John Stuart Mill’s pamphlet On Liberty. Darwin’s book revolutionized biology and fundamentally altered the debate between science and religion. Mill’s book revolutionized the way we think about innovation in social and moral life.
What is your opinion of innovation? Do you think it is a good thing? Of course you do. You may or may not have read Mill on the subject, but you have absorbed his lessons. What about established opinion, customary ways of doing things? Do you suspect that they should be challenged and probably changed? Odds are that you do. Mill has taught you that, too, even if you have never read a line of On Liberty.
Mill’s essay was ostensibly about the relation between individual freedom and society. Mill famously argued that the only grounds on which society was justified in exercising control over its members, whether that control be in the form of “legal penalties” or simply “the moral coercion of public opinion,” was to “prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”
This part of Mill’s argument quickly attracted searching criticism. The British judge James Fitzjames Stephen, for example, went to the heart of the problem when he observed that Mill assumed that “some acts regard the agent only, and that some regard other people. In fact, by far the most important part of our conduct regards both ourselves and others.” As for withholding “the moral coercion of public opinion,” Stephen observed that “the custom of looking upon certain courses of conduct with aversion is the essence of morality.”
Stephen’s criticisms of Mill were published in his book Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, which appeared about a decade after On Liberty. Many of the criticisms are devastating. Intellectually, Stephen made mincemeat of Mill. But that has hardly mattered. Mill’s doctrines have taken the world by storm, while Stephen has receded to become a footnote in intellectual history.
Why? One reason is that Mill said things that people wanted to hear. Mill seemed to be giving people a permanent vacation from the moral dictates of society. How often have you heard the argument “It’s not hurting anyone else” put forward as a justification for self-indulgence?
But it was not simply what he said about the relation between individual freedom and social control that made On Liberty such an influential tract. Much more important was the attitude, the emotional weather, of the book.
On Liberty is only incidentally a defense of individual freedom. Its deeper purpose is to transform the way we regard established morality and conventional behavior as such. In brief, Mill taught us to be suspicious of established morality not because what it says is wrong (maybe it is, maybe it isn’t) but simply because it is established.
Think about that. The tradition that Mill opposed celebrated custom and established morality precisely because they had prevailed and given good service through the vicissitudes of time and change; their longevity was an important token of their worthiness.
Mill overturned this traditional view. Henceforth, the customary, the conventional was suspect not because it had failed but simply because if was customary and conventional. Consider, to take but one example, what has happened to the word “prejudice.” When was the last time you heard it used in a neutral or positive sense? And yet originally “prejudice” simply meant to prejudge something according to conventional wisdom. It was in this sense, for example, that Edmund Burke extolled prejudice, writing that “prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit. . . . Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.”
Mill was instrumental in getting us to associate “prejudice” indelibly with “bigotry.” He wanted to take the wisdom out of the phrase “conventional wisdom.” He repeatedly argued against the “despotism of custom” — not because it was despotic, but simply because it was customary. According to Mill, the “greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history because the sway of custom has been complete.” It was against custom — a.k.a. conventional behavior, tradition, established moral and religious practice — that Mill opposed originality, individuality, eccentricity, what he famously referred to as “experiments in living.” (A phrase that really came into its own 100 years after Mill, in the 1960s and 1970s.)
In the context of the prevailing intellectual/academic atmosphere, this argument along with the authorities quoted, is highly unconventional, madly eccentric, and startlingly original.
Am I along in believing that “unconventionality” has become so conventional as to be indistinguishable from ritual? The OWSbabble reinforces this impression.
No, you’re not alone, or along either. There is change for something better, and then there is change simply for change’s sake. In the latter, it is sometimes good to change the coach or manager (e.g., Torre’s tenure with the Yankees) just because things stagnate. But that’s a minor issue. Too often people have to one up others and be a bit more outrageous. That way leads to Nero and Caligula.
Roger, I do have a quibble about Mill saying what people wanted to hear. The American experiment was still quite new, most people (around the world) were still more comfortable with feudalistic society, where everyone knew his place. And with marxism, it still seems true. Individual liberty is scary. Liberating, but scary.
This abuse of rational thought is the foundation of progressive. What else is new?
I have not read Mill or Spencer so maybe I am missing something here. But it seems to me that while there is much to be said for preserving what has worked in the past, there is nothing wrong with examing and reexaming current precepts. The obvious example of the institution of slavery, in effect for all of recorded history and beyond comes to mind. Personally, I have worked with both start-up companies and long established companies. I much prefered the start-ups. There were no mindless proceedures to get in the way of getting the job done. I have long thought that one of the reasons for the success of the USA was precisely because we were able to break free of the established but useless customs of England. Long established cultures collect customs and foibles that may have become obsolete. I am definately not saying that all change is good, but at the least we should not be afraid of questioning the established order. But maybe I am missing some part of the argument. I will say that I am very consevative about preserving the meaning of language. When we get to the point, as we are now, of changing the meaning of words to reflect current fads, that way leads to madness and all communication is lost.
I was thinking of writing something similar before reading this posting but then I hit upon another issue, he doesn’t imply that. People aren’t saying that we must stay the same forever, its implying caution. That simply because an idea is new doesn’t mean it is good, as it doesn’t mean that because an idea is old it is good or bad. Maybe that message is just getting lost in all the political ramblings, the rhetoric, violent or not.
I think you missed the entire point about what Mill was arguing. Mill was not interested in comparing custom and tradition to objective truth and shaving off the bad from the good. Rather, like a modern liberal he wanted to challenge it simply because it was the established norm. It comes down to “I question it because I can” versus “I question it because it seems untrue.”
There is equal stupidity in slavishly following “we’ve always done it that way before” and “we should change this because we can.” There is wisdom in sifting past methods and deciding if there is a new/better way of doing something. All of one or the other leads to more problems.
I’ve never read Mill so I don’t know if his position was as simplistic as “Old = Bad, New = Good.” The other extreme is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” No society (or business) always clings to one of these principle to the exclusion of the other. People innovate sometimes and sometimes they do things the old fashioned way. It happens naturally – always has and always will. Only an intellectual would think mankind needs his/her guidance in this area.
You may prefer working with innovators, but you can’t have NOTHING BUT neophiles and rebels. The new, hip, cool, innovative, radical aspects of a startup often hide a foundation of solid business practices that haven’t changed in centuries. My impression is that many startup business people have experience working in “typical” companies with fusty old rules and assumptions. That’s where they learned what works and what doesn’t. It’s sort of like what they say about art: you have to learn the rules before you can break them.
As for those antiquated rules and regulations you find in mature businesses – are you sure they’re needless? Maybe they just work so there’s no need to change them.
Mr Kimball’s analysis is very shrewd. J S Mill’s private life could also be evidence for the claim that he wanted to embarrass the existing order of society. I am very grateful to learn about Justice Stephen’s arguments.
Dear Dr. Bones,
Mr. Newchips, the BTBK , is back marketin’ himself again, which fun indeed it is to watch.
But seriously, sort of, sir: if you had the misfortune to be Wally Wombschool, ¿would you care to entrust Wally Jr. to a particular sophist on such grounds as that she knows who Fitzjames Stephens was, an’ you do not?
Happy daze.
–JHM
“Never mention Lenin or Pol Pot, Marx or Hegel, Robespierre or the Marquis de Sade.”
Yes, the people on the far left always seem to miss guys like that. Like the European communists of today, they always say, “But we can do it better this time around.” Sure they can, but they always seem to end of with the same people. If you took “Hope and Change” to its logical conclusion, the place where people like Obama and Reid and Pelosi want to take you, they will always end up in the same place, with people like Marx or Lenin in charge. Funny how people from the far left never seem to get that, or is it that they intentionally forget that? That is why they must be stopped, now. And a great place to start would be by throwing Obama and his minions out in 2012. Perhaps that would be the first step down the road towards real liberty. Perhaps. Well, it can’t be worse than what we have now, that’s for sure.
Well, no, not with Marx and Lenin in charge. With 0, Pelosi, and Reid in charge. After all, how can one have a good, traditional communist government without a “superb” group at the top? And that would the the usual suspects on the Left.
How excellent to encounter someone else who’s aware of this!
Mill was so adamant in defense of the innovator that he was willing to proclaim virtually every existing standard for behavior wrong for that reason alone — and not even “guilty until proven innocent,” but “guilty a priori,” and without appeals. It’s a fine demonstration of the besetting sin of the self-conscious intellectual: the conviction that one can remake the world from one’s own cogitations, and score an unqualified success.
Whoever it was who said that there are some ideas so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them just might have been thinking of John Stuart Mill.
Yes, except that all of the examples of bad innovators are not actually innovators. What they proposed were regressive bad ideas disquised in new clothes.
This, however, is true of most “innovators”.
Those who built communes in the ’60s thought they were being “new” and “daring”. Except that, since the landing on Plymouth Rock, people in America had tried communal living over and over and over and failed, every time.
As compared to what? That which is traditional? And, of course Mills challenges the traditional on the basis of it being TRADITIONAL!! There is a saying that goes something like this: ” It became old and has been rediscovered and is new again!” The economic conditions we are currently experiencing are strikingly reminicent of the mid 1930′s!
Context and point of view are ‘EVERYTHING’.
I imagine that the Columbus Affect looks totally different when viewed from Montezuma’s palace.
If the context is that I and about 10 million others are armed and willing, and if our point of view is to completely eliminate Progressivism, then that will be EVERYTHING (because we will win)! The concept of an effective army of thespians, lawyers, bureaucrats, welfare recipients, OWS participants, PHDs, etc. is laughable. Progressives would manage an army about as badly as they manage everything else. It is partly why Progressive Republicans & Democrats soo don’t want to discuss the possibility of another civil war.
This article misses on, at least, a couple of points.
It’s ironic that Darwin’s tract is mentioned at the beginning as the same thing that applies to Darwinian evolutionary thought applies to this argument and to the cry Tevia made, “Tradition!”. In fact longevity has nothing to do with whether a “moral” custom is good or not. The only thing it proves is that the tradition is not bad enough that it changed because it was destroying society. Just as with evolution, a trait that a creature has that is actively contra-survival will cause that trait to eventually die out (as it will cause the creature to die before reproducing), but a trait that is not beneficial but purely neutral in surviving can go on forever. A custom that is not actively destructive to society can go on forever because the inherent inertia of society and people will not encourage change.
The thought process you are espousing here is exactly the same process that bred the precautionary principle that has been used to stunt growth of society. Society is indeed a complex thing and indescriminately getting rid of a custom is a scary and unwise thing, but there is some truth in the proposition that, “The times they are a changing”. Progress driven by innovations of material objects can sometimes cause a societal custom to no longer be operative, or not beneficial. We no longer live in a hunter gatherer society so the societal customs of a hunter gatherer society no longer would be effective for us. To espouse a sort of precautionary principle having to do with custom would have us emotionally and intellectually living in caves just as much as a precautionary principle of physical progress would still have us physically living in caves.
The other part of your thesis that is, well, I want to say intellectually bankrupt but that seems overly harsh, is that custom and morality and the rules of behavior that society imposes on the individual are all equivalent and are imperative to the well being of the society. I think modern thought rather rejects that thesis, and for good reason. If you contextualize Mill you will find that, at the time and not long before that time, it was immoral to think the monarchy was not divinely created and supported, that the church (corrupt or not) was divinely inspired and guided, that peasants were the near property of their lords and masters and so on. These are all propositions that were supported by the “morals” and “customs” of the time. The middle class was just starting to be created and a lot of the “traditional” thought was being challenged, and rightfully so. Mill and others were groping in the dark having to do with the major societal upheavals of that growing middle class, corrupt rulers and church and other artifacts of a more primitive society. Your propositions would have made that progress “immoral” since it challenged the societal norm. What we have come to believe as Americans is that there is indeed a morality and one expression of it is that all have the natural right of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”. Note I said natural right, that is my belief but I also recognize it as an article of faith, which does not require a deity, nor does it imply that any moral codification is required in government, or society for that matter. Unless you define morality as those rules that allow humans to live together in relative harmony, which I sense is not your definition, then all the other frills that religion brings to the word morality are utterly unnecessary and should be forbidden from the laws, very few laws, that are really needed to ensure individual freedom and that “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”.
I think that a brilliant group of people came to the realization that people do not need a ruler, in either heaven or earth and forcing either on people is one of the supreme immoralities. Custom and tradition is no longer an excuse to oppress someone, nor is religion. Indeed one persons insecurities or beliefs are not grounds for restricting others. This works for many things from gun control to the war on drugs to the desire to bring back rulers through socialist/progressive/communist agendas. That was a hugely disruptive trash canning of custom and tradition and we should continue to honor their brilliance and work toward human progress by continuing this wonderful experiment we call America.
I think you are the one who has missed the point of this excellent article. I’ll make a few comments on each of your paragraphs if I may.
In paragraph one, the point is not the longevity of a collective habit but that fact that there IS such a collective habit. Since our species has no innate knowledge then, we necessarily must live within a collective. This collective develops a knowledge base; this base must be both stable (or we’d live in informational chaos) and yet, must have some flexibility to enable adaptation. The latter, adaptation, emerges from the freedom of the individual. The former, stability, emerges from the constraints of the collective.
Your 2nd paragraph is too obtuse for me to figure out and comment.
In paragraph 3, I’d say you are historically inaccurate. Mill wrote in the 19th c, not the medieval era of the lord and serf, not in pre-Reformation church era, and in an industrial era when the middle class was very strong and in political control. The middle class, by the way, began to emerge at least in the 13th and 14th centuries.
Finally, I’d suggest that any ideology that focuses on the power of Individual Will and ignores the constraints of normative knowledge also has to be wary of the pitfalls of oppression by Individual Will – i.e., by the dictator, demagogue and godfather power.
Good points. The previous commenter’s point seems to be that Mr. Kimball’s criticism of Mill’s ideas on innovation somehow reflects poorly on the Founding Fathers. It might help to remember that one reason colonial Americans started agitating for liberty was their belief that Britain was denying them the legal and traditional rights they claimed as HM subjects. They did not become radicals just because they thought new systems of government were preferable to old ones. They tried for years to find ways to fit into the existing system. Only when that failed did they take the radical, innovative step of declaring independence. They abandoned the old system because it wasn’t working, not because it was old.
Excellent, excellent points!
At the very least an interesting take on iconoclasts in our history and the pains they took to upset the so-called ‘accepted natural order’ to effect societal and other norms. Man is an imaginative and intuitive being, capable of rendering his surroundings to reflect himself as well as understanding the limitations nature inflicts upon him, but he will not be pigeon-holed or otherwise stunted because ‘conventional wisdom’ dictates so. The yearning to be free of the ‘intellectual shackles’ of the aforementioned wisdom is the one dominant trait of our species. Anyone ever heard the phrase; “that’s just crazy enough to work”?
But, disaster is the most often result. No problem, unless you are the one left under the rubble.
Cutomary, not customary, new and old ideas….. Seems to me the real, as in dangerous, part is when they are required and enforced with force.
Mill has always been enlightening and inspiring, so I can understand how Spencer faded into obscurity. My favorite quote of John Stuart Mill is truer today and deserves to be read loudly to all liberals:
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
How liberty dies, America is on the brink.
“In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When
the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to
give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from
responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.”
~Edward Gibbon
This country has been engage in wars almost constantly since it’s inception so what is your point? “Liberals” , whatever that means, and “conservatives, whatever that means, alike have been perpetrating and perpetuating wars and very few of them were worth it. Perhaps this statement needs to be read aloud to the chicken-hawk warmongers: don’t be so eager to send people you don’t know to war when you don’t have a clue what war is.
Who said that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all mankind are natural rights? How different are these rights from the natural right to consume and be consumed? The right to privately own property alone implies an agreement that there is something inherently sacred that resides in every individual.
RC’s argument relies totally on the assumption that there is no deity at all, and that “natural law” alone is sufficient. Of coarse natural law, to an innovator is to be preferred because natural law, outside the scope of any divine oversight or societal constraint is open completely to individual interpretation. Who says you know more about nature and its laws than I do? Who understands nature more and who exactly should society rely upon to help us clarify the finer points of what is right and what is wrong, George or Lennie?
Talk about a bankrupted argument!
Steven Hawking once observed, as he considered the chaos that was inherent at the singularity of a black hole, “if chaos reigns anywhere in the universe it should reign everywhere.” What then keeps chaos in check? What keeps the atoms from spinning out of control simply because.
No matter how important man thinks he is and no matter how self determined he thinks he has a right to be, his ability to maintain natural order in society is doomed without the recognition of an order that is greater than nature. And whether man chooses to recognize it or not God is always in the mix and his will, will be done. Whenever man attempts to ignore God’s will or discount it as irrelevant he suffers. There is a force that is greater than chaos and that force is both intelligent and purposeful. That force can be apposed, but the opposition creates the heat that leads to its own destruction.
Just because God exists and that He is both intelligent and purposeful and just because His laws govern all the laws of nature, it does not mean that he apposes human creativity or innovation. And just because God’s laws are supreme and apply to every detail in life, it does not mean that He has not given man a wide range of options within which he can live.
Conversely, just because God exists and maintains a will for mankind, it does mean that man understands it or that societies of men are governed by it.
Since Adam, no culture has ever fully embraced God’s revealed will and yet they have somehow maintained order for a time. Men have tried all manner of methods for establishing societies with a wide range of success and failure. Even the Great American Experiment was a compromise between human systems that seemed to work well and “Natural Law”. Note, freedom of religion.
Since societies of men have never fully embraced the full wisdom of God there will aways be room for innovation, change, mavericks and even eccentrics. And since no man lives who serves as the divine arbiter between man and God, except in the person of Jesus Christ himself, societies will continue to fluctuate between good and evil, evil and good. Those societies which tend to do better are those who seek to truly and sincerely embrace the teachings of Christ those that do worse are those who reject them. Consequently those innovations that bring society closer to Christ and the will of his farther tend to be the most profound and ultimately provide the most good.
In the end, there will be nothing that will matter more than God. In the end, every knee will bow. So why not start now. Why wait? If natural law is so good, then why ignore the one who created and maintains it?
Now let me say one more thing. Those who believe they can out smart God by relying upon nature to give them clues as to how they should live without ever giving credit to the creator are among the most evil. This is what is called, having a form of godliness but denying the power behind it. It is within that very denial where evil lurks.
Beware!
John Locke, I believe.
Who says you know more about nature and its laws than I do? Who understands nature more and who exactly should society rely upon to help us clarify the finer points of what is right and what is wrong, George or Lennie?
Talk about a bankrupted argument!
That IS a bankrupted argument. It operates on the same premise as the Left it excoriates: that the good is determined by reference to a “Who” rather than a “What”. They differ only on who the ultimate “Who” is; the Left fancies society/the collective as the arbiter, while the religionists say God is the arbiter.
Standing opposed to this, the option you and all religious moralists consistently whistle past, is to ask not “Who says”, but “What says”. “What” is, of course, objective reality.
If I set out to make ice cream using eggs, milk, cream, sugar and some flavoring, while you set out to make ice cream using charcoal, saltpeter and sulfur, the results in the real world, the “What”, will show both of us who “knows more about the laws of nature” at least as far as ice cream is concerned.
Mill famously argued that the only grounds on which society was justified in exercising control over its members… was to “prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”
Jeremy Bentham’s felicific calculus set forth that the point at which any individual’s freedom is curtailed is when that individual’s behaviors begin to impinge on others.
Bentham’s calculus is a pretty good rule of thumb in assessing one’s own limits.
Hippocrates rule of thumb was do no harm. He also instructed that administering “abortive remedies” was against the art of medicine, but that portion of the Hippocratic Oath is no longer used in most re-writes of the Oath taken by new doctors.
Speaking of doing harm…
The “democrat media complex” no longer even tries to fill its role as preserver of a fair and free press and guardian of liberty.
As Newt rises, it’s his turn to roll into the left’s gunsights.
What slime, what scum, what slithering sick morons call themselves journalists these days.
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
To be fair, let’s include the whole poem and correctly attribute it.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
“what slime, what scum, what slithering sick morons call themselves journalists these days” I agree! And that goes double for the “conservative” ones.
Mention no past innovators except those who were innovators-for-the-better. Harp away endlessly on the examples of Columbus and Copernicus, Galileo and Bruno, Socrates and (if you think the traffic will bear it) Jesus. Conceal the fact that there must have been at least one innovator-for-the-worse for every one of these (very overworked) good guys. Never mention Lenin or Pol Pot, Marx or Hegel, Robespierre or the Marquis de Sade.
Innovation is an act of stepping forward into enlightenment, knowledge & improvement of the human condition.
It would never occur to me to label any in the second group as “innovators”.
Now that political correctness is the dominant culture, we need Mill in order to undermine it. The politically correct get most upset when they are accused of prejudice and censorship and Mill is cited against them. A conservative can shrug off Mill, a liberal is trapped and can be made to squirm.
What do you mean, exactly?
I still agree with Mill. Of course, you can argue that all actions will have an effect on others. Some of these can be shown to be harmful. Heck, some of anything can be shown to be harmful to someone. You can use that argument to control all activities. Especially those you don’t agree with. Liberal Fascism anyone?
“Never mention Lenin or Pol Pot, Marx or Hegel, Robespierre or the Marquis de Sade.”
Except of course they did harm others, and thus are not covered by what Mills advocated.
Which makes that a nice strawman, but in no way a refutation.
But do let us consider how “wrong” Mills was to suggest “His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”
Why if we held to that we would have no grounds to impose sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco;
We would have no grounds to ban trans-fats and other ingredients and methods of food preparation;
We would have no grounds to disarm people for their own safety;
We would have no grounds to establish national healthcare and retirement programs;
We would have no grounds to redistribute wealth through confiscatory taxation;
We would have no grounds to indoctrinate youth in the “approved” “Progressive” ideology.
We would simply have no grounds for the multitude of intrusions into our private lives sought by government “reformers” of one stripe or another.
Such foolishness indeed!
Yes, yes, if we took that as a guide people would be free to indulge in various forms of non-reproductive sexual activity particularly homosexuality; they would be free to smoke and drink and eat and “medicate” themselves insensate; they could dabble in the most absurd of religious heresies, sects, cults, and even *GASP* atheism; clinging to their guns, Bibles, or accumulated wealth would be their most onerous daily choice; they might even share their moral and political values with their children.
What madness to tolerate such diversity!
And all because we would dare to challenge that people may only act, and dress, and think according to the democratically mandated “custom”.
Ha! Good point.
I admit that I consider Darwin’s outline of evolution as flawed. I certainly agree with evolution, understood as ‘organized mass’ adapting to other ‘organized mass’. What I reject in Darwin is his mechanical outline of such adaptations.
That is, Darwin and Mill were both focusing only on the individual and ignoring the collective. I’ll add a word to both nouns: ‘informational’. Both Darwin and Mill were focusing only on the informational individual and ignoring the informational collective. That is, they were ignoring or rejecting that informational processes take place not only within the individual mass but also within the collective mass.
This left Darwin locating the origin of changes as purely mechanical. Random. Not as constructive adaptive reactions of a species/group to changes in the environment. But as purely random changes which might succeed, but as in lottery tickets, are more usually, unsuccessful. That’s an enormous waste of energy within the natural world and that’s why I suggest a different mode of evolutionary/adaptive processing…which I won’t bore you with here.
But, it’s interesting that both Darwin and Mill focused all agency within the individual and ignored the collective. The collective was viewed mechanically, as the sum of bits.
I think that the more accurate analysis is that both modes of organized mass, the individual and the collective, play vital roles in the informational organization of our world.
Hope and change was probably lifted from the first chapter of Eric Hoffer’s book entitled “The True Believer”. He points out that those two words are the signatures of all true believers.
1859 was also the date of publication of Samuel Smiles’ Self Help.
I tried to read On Liberty, but I was too bored. However, skipping forward to chapter 5 (Applications), I was alarmed to find that, for JS Mill, economic freedom is a lower sort of freedom: it should be granted only because it is good for the economy, not because people have a right to decide what to do with their money. That is particularly alarming since JS Mill believed that people have a right to a “higher” sort of freedom that has nothing to do with money.
Basically, JS Mill had the English upper-class attitude that making money is vulgar.
Granted that every change for the better has depended on someone embarking on a new departure. Well, so too has every change for the worse. And surely, Stove observes, there have been at least as many proposed innovations which “were or would have been for the worse as ones which were or would have been for the better.”
THIS is where Darwin comes in: changes for the better survive, changes for the worse perish. The US Constitution survives (for now); communism has perished almost everywhere. (RC, #10 above, seems to say pretty much the same.) Not that Darwin was the first to have this intuition, but he expressed it perhaps most clearly.
“It is a gospel written largely by John Stuart Mill.”
Wait a minute, JSM starts to sound more like an echo of the Protestant Reformation as I read this. A Gospel written by…Martin Luther?
Reading this fine article, I recalled Calandrino, a painter in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Calandrino is an “uom semplice e di nuovi costume,” a simple-minded man and of unusual habits. In other words, Calandrino, the butt of several practical jokes, is foolishness partly because he is eccentric.
Stove’s argument fails (as does yours), and so did Mill’s, because nobody who has made or opposed the utilitarian arguent has offered a serious calculus of values for departures from tradition. Can you provide a function that allows an objective weighing of the value (+ or -) of doubling the mean age at death (in large parts of the world), due to innovative (scientific) departure from traditional practices — against the value (+ or -) of the improved lethality of armaments, due to the same? If you can, you solve the utilitarian coundrum. But a convincing calculus has not, as yet, appeared. Thus it is possible, at times, for an enlightened philosopher of science, like stove, to sound on some subjects like a backwoods revivalist. (But then, he WAS a philosopher.)
The mention of Darwin at the beginning of the article is instructive as regards to Mill. As has been pointed out many times, the majority of mutations (new changes) are destructive or neutral. What occurs in evolution is the winnowing of baneful changes, the good ones proceed through the gate and the game begins again.
The preening self-absorption of the 60′s and 70′s where the act of change was deemed good has continued on to our present circumstances.
However, the accumulated intellectual and material achievements of the West can only survive mendacity and stupidity for so long. The world is the only place complicated enough for all unintended consequences to run their course.
Think about that. The tradition that Mill opposed celebrated custom and established morality precisely because they had prevailed and given good service through the vicissitudes of time and change; their longevity was an important token of their worthiness.
Roger Kimball is lambasting John Stuart Mill for lauding innovation just because it’s innovation, and rejecting tradition just because it’s tradition… only to turn right around and cite “longevity” as the “token of their worthiness”.
“It’s good because it’s old”. Tradition is good just because it’s tradition. Kimball is trying to smuggle in the assumption that tradition was maintained because it was “good”, but he doesn’t name the standard of the good — because in reality, the traditionalists that Mill attacked held on to old ideas because they were old.
Completely left out of the equation is the idea of measuring the good of an idea by reference to the relationship between one’s purpose and the facts of reality. To use the example I noted earlier: which ingredients are good for making ice cream? Eggs, milk, cream, sugar — or charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur? Are you going to sit there and tell me that the way to answer that question is by reference to which recipe is *traditional*? Or do you simply observe the facts of the ingredients, and of their results?
It should be obvious that “tradition” and “innovation” are irrelevant to the question of whether any idea is “good”. There are good and bad innovations, and good and bad traditions. As a measure of whether an idea is good or bad, it compares quite poorly with the direct observation of reality.
It’s when one asks *why* anyone would want to substitute such a non-essential variable as “age” for direct observation, that the real motivation behind this false alternative becomes clear: to determine whether an idea is good involves, well, dealing with facts, i.e. with things as they are. Conservatives refuse to believe that such a thing is possible. They have this barrier, called the “is/ought” dichotomy, which exists to protect their primitive moral prejudices, their “oughts”, against precisely that threat known as directly observation of what is.
One consequence of this barrier, is that religious conservatives cannot deal with questions of “What is good” by means of using their reason. They must cast about for some alternative. Being unable to directly examine facts, they must find some substitute. That substitute is, of course, the judgment of others. Instead of looking at the “what” of reality, they look at the “Who” of tradition. “Who says this is good?” Well, everybody’s been doing X for a long time, X is old, it has “longevity” so it must be good.
Along comes John Stuart Mill, who sees that many good things have come from innovation in his time, and that many traditions (like slavery) are being rejected because they are *wrong*. Unfortunately, he too has that same barrier, though for different reasons, and so he simply takes the other side of the same false coin and applauds innovation simply because it’s new.
It should be clear why that’s just the inverse of the same bankrupt premise: John Stuart Mill and Roger Kimball agree that “good” must be determined by some standard, any standard, so long as it isn’t the facts of objective reality. They only differ in their concept of the source of that standard, the ultimate arbiter that isn’t reality: for Mill and his Leftist heirs, it is the collective, of society or “community”; for pure conservatives, it’s God. (If you are thinking that there’s lots of crossover here — conservative invoke “community” a lot themselves — that should tell you something about these so-called “opposites”.)
Conservatives will always hedge and waffle, of course, when called on it. Their usual defense in these cases is to invoke “common sense” under the same rubric that makes them so comfortable with hypocrisy: that one shouldn’t “go to extremes”. (and there’s an Emerson quote that usually shows up here too.)
But they don’t have to do this very often. Objectivists are few and far between. It is their low estimation of their audience’s intellectual defenses that allows them to try to get away with utter absurdities like Russell Kirk’s brazen characterization of the American Revolution and its radical political innovations as — get this — “a conservative revolt against royal innovation” (!)
Since the glorious facts of American history are still too obvious to hide, this sort of philosophical revisionism is as rampant among conservatism as it is on the Left — and for the same basic reasons.
Conservatism accepts tradition just because it’s tradition, and spurns innovation just because it’s innovation. Each will misrepresent themselves as being the “rational” side, but in fact they are merely heads and tails of the same, irrational coin — the coin of disdain for objective reality.
It’s easy to torpedo that argument with one example: Slavery was a tradition with a long, long history.
The underlying commonality between Kimball and Mill here, is what I noted elsewhere in these comments: both Mill and Kimball are ultimately concerned only with “who says” rather than “what says”.
To reject/applaud innovation just because it is innovation,
I read Mill in College as an essay for incoming freshmen [1962]. Then I thought it was somewhat egocentric and an attempt to rationalize his adulterous life.
I reread it about 7 years ago and thought that it was a commentary on the excesses of democracies. My favorite term was the “tyranny of the majority”.
Why resist the majority for it must have everyones’ best interests at hand?
Examples of exercises of the democracy for everyones’ best interests:
Obamacare, exempting half the population from income taxes; gropings at airports; sovereign immunity despite government intervention into private ownership, “green toilets, CFL bulbs, protecting the snail darter, $40 trillion to save the planet from melting; virtually anything relating to not drilling for oil, mining coal, or other energy regulation ; foreign aid ; illegal immigration, Bailouts, etc. I believe “On Liberty” related this simple fact; with liberty comes the requirement that it be exercised responsibly. If it is not it becomes license.
I suggest th reader might consider reading the essay. It is free at this link:
http://www.bartleby.com/130/
It has long been looking for an article on Roger’s Rules » Liberty, Equality, Fraternity .