Steve Watson

Greens vs Humans

July 5, 2026 – 9:50 am

Almost all mainstream political programs have ultimately aimed at (or at least have been justified in terms of) improving the lot of humankind. In this respect you might call them Eudaimonist. Socialists think that humans will flourish better with equality maximised, liberals think the same for maximising liberty, and so on for the other standard political positions. On the other hand, we have in recent years seen an increase in political appeal of a movement that is generally labelled Green, and it is remarkable that their political aim is not Eudaimonist at all but is the protection of encouragement of non-human Nature.

It is difficult to think of any other political movement through history, or any other political philosophy likewise, that didn’t have as its ultimate end the betterment of humanity or the greater flourishing of humans. When I have asked about this in discussions the only barely reasonable responses have referred to, say, the heated controversies over the trinity in some periods of the Late Mediaeval, or over the nature of the relationship between God and Christ in Constantinople (where it was said that one couldn’t even go for a haircut without the barber interrogating you on whether Jesus was of the same or similar nature as God.) These are certainly examples of ‘popular’ obsessions with theories that don’t seem intimately related peoples’ mundane interests, but I’m not sure they’re quite what I was thinking of. I guess the question is whether if that had been proposed as a political platform it would have been essentially inimical to human interests or whether it would have been irrelevant. In fact, I hardly see it as a political question at all – but why not? Perhaps because I imagine politics as being the question of settling the rules by which people live in a political community. This isn’t a question of rules of living but of rules of believing. Beliefs are relevant to the way we live but they’re not the same thing. Many things are ‘relevant’ to modes of life without being political facts or questions. 

Another example was given which I dismissed at the time but might be more relevant given the mode of life nature of politics I’ve just proposed. It was noted that the Albigensians were committed by their beliefs to the idea that sex is wrong and damaging to the soul and that they were therefore likely to act so that they went extinct. That’s true, I said, but their politics was still centred on human flourishing because they took the souls of humans as being the entities that required to be encouraged to flourish rather than their bodies. Humans are essentially their souls, not the meat packages in which they arrive on Earth. I’m not so sure about that now, because if politics is about establishing the rules of living in a community, then because the rules that derive from Cathar beliefs are counter to the continuance of that community they cannot be seen as focussed on the happiness of the members. Or is that just a rhetorical confusion? More thought is necessary, clearly.

If pressed on this, a Green might attempt to argue that we can’t have human flourishing without a healthy planet and that this justifies their focus, but their focus is nevertheless on the flourishing of Nature, not Man, and we are a secondary good if a good at all. Moreover, one might ask how they might react if made to choose between Man and Nature – they’d deny the reality of the choice, of course, but that would be transparently a dodge: we see repeatedly that whenever there is a choice between a human good and a good for ‘Nature,’ they will act for the latter against the former. And that’s not even counting the vast number of examples of their declared enmity towards humankind. How often have we heard that humans were a plague on the planet, that the world would be better without us, that zero population is our goal, and so on. One suspects that the argument for Nature from Man’s requirements is an ad hoc response and not at all a primary motivator.

One wonders what could possibly motivate this, and I have proposed two possible answers in conversation. In the first place, Nature is being taken as a replacement God for the secular age. It is a final value-giver in a world where the alternatives are either nihilism – accepting that there is no such thing as ultimate value and that there is no greater purpose to life than the satisfaction of simple self-interest that constitutes the very lowest level of our practical reasoning – or deism – pretending that there is a higher power of the God-sort that is able to give value to things. The latter is unacceptable to us as epistemologically unjustifiable, and the former is unacceptable to us as being psychologically destructive.

In the second place, I proposed that the current nihilistic anti-humanism of the Greens is a natural exaggeration in development of the moral nihilism and anti-modernism or anti-Westernism that entered into the environmental movement when it was recognised as a potential tool in the Cold War by the communists in the West and East. Since it became impossible for the Reds plausibly to argue directly for the benefits of the Communist system following the XXth Party Congress but long before the USSR fell, the environmental movement was seen as a stalking horse to encourage anti-nuclear sentiments, anti-development, anti-whatever as a way to weaken the West from within. Like the anti-nuclear movement itself, it continues as a zombie Trotskyism long past the use-by date of its instigators.

In any case, the consequence is that we cannot rely upon the Greens to enact or support policies that benefit humans, and they may actually find that our advantages are their disadvantages. The fact that they value Man below Nature is reflected in the net-zero obsessions of our political class, as just one example. And of course, any ideology is driven by its most enthusiastic supporters and there is a tendency to head to the extremes of ideological purity. In the case of the Greens and the environmentalists in general we see this with the very commonly expressed sentiments that Man is a cancer on the planet, that ZPG is to be embraced, that the population explosion is on us, our carbon footprint will smother the world, that the world cannot support so many of us, that human extinction might be a good thing, who’d miss us, Extinction Rebellion!, and so on.

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The Nephilim

July 3, 2026 – 12:07 pm

Genesis 6:4 in the KJV says

There were giants in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

Here ‘giants’ translates the Hebrew nephilim. The same choice was made by early Latin and Greek translators, who used gigantes/γίγαντες at that place. The choice requires explanation, because the word nephilim doesn’t mean ‘giant,’ but seems rather to derive from the root naphal and to mean something like ‘the fallen ones.’ That term has given rise to a lot of speculation in later interpretations and expansions of the meagre and ambiguous source material to the effect that the nephilim were fallen angels, and that they were the sons of God who came down to Earth to lie with the daughters of men and that their children were the men of renown.

None of that speculation and invention is justified. Terms derived from naphal are used elsewhere in the OT to describe those who have fallen in battle – as, for example, in 2 Samuel 1:19 that talks of “how the warriors have fallen” – and it is nowhere used to talk of those who have come down from Heaven. The natural interpretation is therefore that the nephilim are those qui ante illos fuerunt. They were those who were the mighty men of old, men of renown; and they were the offspring of the sons of God and daughters of men, and they have passed away and are no more.

This interpretation is reinforced by the fact that the nephilim are mentioned also at Numbers 13:32-3

And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature.
And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so were we in their sight.

Here too the word ‘giants’ translates nephilim, and here we can see one reason why the translators chose the word ‘giants’ to translate it – since there were no people otherwise known by the demonym Nephilim and the nephilim are here explicitly said to be characterized by gigantic stature. In this case, however, the nephilim are not the children of the sons of God and the daughters of men, but the sons of Anak. Nor are they, of course, fallen angels. Nor, again, are they apparently the men of renown of the past, but a tribe of people actually present at that time. They seem, in fact, to be quite unrelated to the nephilim of Gen 6:4, and we get no particular help in this regard from their new family: the Anakim were said to be a Rephaite tribe (Deuteronomy 2:11) that lived in the land before they were expelled by Joshua (Joshua 11:22,) and like all of the Rephaites, were known for their great size, but apart from this we have little else to identify them.[4]

The nephilim may be mentioned once more in Ezekiel, particularly 32:27, though this is not certainly talking about the same people. There it is said that

… they do not lie with the fallen warriors of long ago who went down to Sheol with their weapons of war, whose swords were laid under their heads, and whose shields are upon their bones; for the terror of the warriors was in the land of the living.

This would seem to identify the nephilim again with warriors of days gone by, but there is no hint here that they are of any special lineage or stature. They are remarkable only by comparisons with the hordes of the uncircumcised who lie in shame in Sheol, for they do not appear to share in their shame.

The significance of this passage is principally that the translators of the Classical period may have taken it into account when determining a proper translation for the term nephilim. That term, they would have seen, names a people with some divine ancestry or a semi-divine status, a notably great stature, and a place in the underworld a little elevated above the common ruck of the enemies of God. In the context of late Hellenic culture in which the translators worked, this would naturally suggest an association with the Earth-born Giants of Classical mythology, who were then often conflated with the Titans, a predecessor race of gods banished by the Olympians to Tartarus[1].

The question remains, however, why the fallen of Gen 6:4 should be associated with great stature in the first place. A fairly obvious theory[2] is that the fallen, or the ones who went before in the land of Canaan, were supposed to be those who were responsible for the impressive cyclopean masonry of the abandoned fortresses that the Israelites found in the Land to which they had come. It’s a reaction that we’ve seen in other places. The term cyclopean itself refers to the supposed builders of Mycenaean walls that the Classical Greeks could not believe were man-made,[3] and in the famous Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin the poet huddled in the wreck of Rome speculates that those walls were the work of giants ‘whom Wierd took.’

The Middle Bronze Age walls of Tell er-Rumede/Tel Hevron, Hebron, home of the Anakim.

The use of the term nephilim in Numbers could then be explained by assuming that the term had become associated with giants living in the land quite independently of whether they were the prior inhabitants, and the author of Numbers had no intention of associating the two concepts.

[1] See W Smith (ed.) A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, s.v. ‘Gigantes’

[2] GE Wright (1938) ‘Troglodytes and giants in Palestine’ Journal of Biblical Literature. 57 (3): 305–309

[3] Pliny, Hist. Nat.vii.57.195

[4] In ‘Hebrew Myths’ p. 113, Robert Graves suggests that the Anakim [SW: like the tribe of Dan, perhaps] might be Mycenaean Greeks of the Sea Peoples’ confederation that troubled the area in the 12th-13th centuries BC. The name Anak could be a form of (w)anax – the Mycenaean term for a king – plural anakes; and note that that term was widely used as an epithet for the Greek gods. Greek myths also speak of a giant Anax ruling Anactoria (Miletus) which thus associates that term with the reputed stature of the Anakites.  

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Three Poorly Formed Concepts

July 2, 2026 – 8:16 am

A standard justification for the approach of Analytic philosophy is that no real progress can be made on philosophical problems until the concepts with which it deals are made properly clear, and until we have determined that the concepts are in fact well formed. That this is not always the case even now can be seen in the following three examples.

God

I made the point (in these very words) when criticizing the supposed necessity of apophatic treatments of the divine (in Crossing the Via Negativa) that

the impossibility of describing or thinking of God at the same time positively and coherently is a consequence of the fact that the very concept of God is not well-formed. The problem seems to be that it began as a positively defined concept within comprehensible limits but has subsequently been expanded into incoherence by the necessities of philosophical argument – in particular, philosophical arguments for His very existence. One can give a Just-So story: primitive man wanted to explain how the world came into being; he looked at examples of things coming into being that he could understand, like his making a flint tool, and analogised a world-knapper. The world-knapper was just like him but bigger, distant, more powerful, wiser. More than that though, the world-knapper became, as devotion and reverence demanded, not just bigger but as big as possible, and so on, and thus we arrived at the qualities of omniscience, omnipotence, omni-benevolence, as well as ineffability, eternality, ubiquity, etc. These unlimiting concepts are, however, both difficult to directly comprehend and collectively incoherent. The puzzles that arise are well-known. Can God make 2+2=5? Can He make a rock He can’t move? Can He do wrong? Can there be evil in the world He made? And so on. The ultimate point of this is that the seeming necessity of the via negative should be taken not as a sign of the transcendence of God, but as a sign of the ill-discipline of thought about God.

Free Will

Another example of what I take to be an incoherent concept is the notion of Free Will as it is generally understood – or rather as it is generally not understood. The first thing to get straight is what is meant by the Will in these contexts: it’s just the faculty of mental action that initiates an action by which we intend an outcome. (Even that has a lot of baggage that would need unpacking. Is the intention of an outcome different from an act of Will? In what way is ‘intend’ to be understood? Does the Will physically cause the action? If not, then what is its relationship to the action or to the outcome? Much else is also mysterious.) In any case when we say that the Will is free it means that we are free to make any sort of mental exertion whether or not the willed action is possible or prudent. A person in chains can will to be running even if they can’t actually run. They can Will themselves to be a beautiful flower even when there is no action possible to make that so. (Actually, I now wonder whether that sort of Willing is even in the bounds of the provisional definition I gave: does it make sense to say that one can perform a mental act that would have had the effect of initiating an action if that action is logically impossible or physically impossible and known to be so? What could ‘would have’ mean here? More questions. Never mind, the general idea of the general idea is clear enough.

What is meant by saying that the Will is free is simply that it is not constrained by external forces. The notion is used by unconsidered analogy with physical freedom: we are physically free to do something that no-one constrains us from doing. In this case it is acceptable to say that we are free to be a flower even when we know it’s impossible. The implication of lack of external constraint is felt, and the freedom is understood to be nugatory or nonsensical, but it is still a coherent concept. In the philosophical debate, the notion of freedom from constraint is extended – because there is no obvious limiting principle – to freedom from all restraints whatever. And at this point we get into trouble when we realise that the Free Will can therefore not be restrained by the causal structure of the universe. This is clearly nonsensical but has led to all sorts of attempts to make it non-nonsensical.

Moral Law

As a final example, modern moral philosophy (G. E. M. Anscombe (1958) Philosophy, 33 (124):1–19) has come to be based on notions of obligation, rights, and duties modelled on the eponymous legal notions. I have described elsewhere (How we got Rights) the historical process whereby we transitioned from the classical virtue theories that have their central theorist in Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics,) via the Stoic claim that the idea of norms for each thing in the world that constitute a law for their operation can be extended to a Natural Law which describes how the World should/does work, and via the Christian claim – admittedly adapting the Stoic view of Nature and Law as Zeus – that this Natural Law could only come from a Divine lawgiver, to, finally (?,) the view that whether or not there is a Divine lawgiver there must be a Divine Law in which are grounded our rights and duties and which defines our obligations and prohibitions.

The effect of this development has been to create a category of truth-claims phrased in terms of statements of obligation and permission that seems to have no connection to the way that the world is. That is, as ‘normative’ statements, they are not derivable from ‘positive’ statements; as prescriptive statements they are independent of descriptive ones; and as judgements on how the world ‘ought to be’ they cannot be reduced to statements about how the world ‘is.’ This particular problem is only unusual in that it has been well known – if not universally explicitly accepted as a problem – since at least the time that David Hume formulated his ‘Is/Ought’ argument (in his Treatise on Human Nature III, i, i.) However, given that the last few hundred years of Western ethical thought has been devoted to overcoming this difficulty and failing at it, it’s pretty clear by now that (1) it is accepted to be a difficulty, and (2) there is no good solution to it.

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Against the Silurian Hypothesis

June 29, 2026 – 11:22 am

Some have speculated that humans are not the first intelligent life to form a civilization on Earth, that there might have been civilizations created by intelligent dinosaurs millions of years ago that have disappeared and because of the effects of time have left no obvious traces. The name of this ‘Silurian Hypothesis’ refers to an episode of Doctor Who[1] in which the Silurians, an ancient reptilian race, attempt to emerge from hibernation after a long absence. The idea in various forms has since had a lot of traction in popular culture[2], and there are also a good number of serious scientific investigations into it – though in the latter case the main interest is not actually in the idea of intelligent dinosaurs but in using that speculation as a point of departure for investigations into the kinds of evidence there might be of any industrial civilization after millions of years.[3]

One critique of this possibility that I never see addressed is that the brain complexity of life decreases very rapidly as one retreats in time. It’s unlikely that there would have been enough brain power before the rise of mammals to create any sort of civilization. Moreover, the encephalization quotient in reptiles generally is very much lower than that of mammals, so that dinosauria would be very unlikely to produce a sufficiently encephalized species to create any sophisticated social order (let alone a technological civilization.)

 And after mammals, the evidence of such a civilization would not have been so thoroughly destroyed that it would be undetectable. In any case, primates are the only likely candidate hosts for a mammalian civilization, and we know their story pretty well, and we’re way above the best of the rest of them.

[1] Doctor Who and the Silurians (TV story) – Tardis Wiki. Note that in this story the Silurians are actually only as old as the Eocene.

[2] John McLoughlin,  Toolmaker Koan, Harry Harrison.  West of Eden, Distant Origin (episode) | Memory Alpha | Fandom

[3] See, for example, G Schmidt & A Frank (2018) ‘The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?’ | International Journal of Astrobiology | Cambridge Core. The topic is also well discussed here: Civilization Before Homo Sapiens? | Centauri Dreams

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On Supposed ‘Indigenous Ways of Knowing’

June 28, 2026 – 11:40 am

What are these ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ (henceforth, IWK)? Let’s ignore the term ‘indigenous’ for the moment: we will see that it has its own problems. An unsystematic review of many of the official and semi-official resources available online is extremely confusing, since there seems to be no consistent distinction made between several very different possible meanings. We find IWK treated, for example, as describing:

1. Actual alternative epistemologies, in which beliefs may be accepted as knowledge on the basis of justifications or even forms of justification that are not accepted by the non-indigenous. This would be the most interesting possibility, and it sometimes seems to be what the proponents of IWK think that they are claiming, but it isn’t usually what the longer discussions address.
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2. The ways in which beliefs are received and transmitted; by song, campfire yarns, mothers talk, initiation rites, instruction by and observation of elders, observation of the world around them, some trial and error, etc.
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3. The sorts of things that are known or believed by indigenous persons. How seasons affect game, the names of the natural features and the plants and animals they live with, the associated myths and legends, the techniques of hunting, gathering, farming, distributing resources, and so on. In this case, the IWK is hardly distinguishable from what are called Indigenous Knowledges (IKs, note the plural.)
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4. The ways in which those ideas are incorporated into the indigenous society, or how they are experienced. In such societies, it seems to be thought, beliefs are not just ‘had;’ they only exist as the motivations for dances and rituals, the themes and content of stories and myths, the methods and traditions that guide successful hunts and house building and parenting, the assumptions of the language, and so on. The ‘beliefs’ are thus supposed to be integrated into the lives of the people and not separable from them.

As Ways of Knowing

In so far as we are concerned with knowledge in a philosophical rather than an anthropological sense, it is really only the first listed understanding that is of any interest; and in so far as the discussions surrounding IWK are intended to be relevant to that understanding, it would seem that the claim is (implicitly) made that the justifications by which belief may become knowledge are that they are incorporated in story, embodied in cultural practices, heard from elders, or are presented via some other such mode.

Presented clearly in this way it becomes patent that IWK cannot be taken seriously as ways of gaining knowledge. None of those modes of presentation are adequate in themselves to assure us of the truth of the claims that they present. The only way that that might be disputed is by adopting some non-standard view of truth that makes it relative to a particular indigenous culture. I have no sympathy with such relativisation, but that’s a rant for another time. Suffice it to say that if IWK are to be defended on that ground it will face an uphill battle for acceptance outside the captured Academy.

As Indigenous

One notes that IWK are always and only contrasted with Western Science. I suppose that in a certain sense that’s reasonable, since ‘Western’ Science is the most successful intellectual epistemological project in the entire history of life on Earth, but Science is not the be-all and end-all of Western ways of knowing. Scientific methodology does not notably feature in historical writing, poetic or literary analysis, wine tasting, and any number of other areas. Moreover, it isn’t absolutely clear that all Westerners are non-indigenous. I doubt that the Welsh or English, the Bretons or the French, the Basques or Germans could reasonably be described as less ‘indigenous’ to their places of habitation than the Maori or the Bantu or the Comanche. And yet, it is never claimed that the ways of knowing in those ‘Western’ (they mean ‘White’) populations are to be included in the list of characteristics claimed to belong to the IWK.

 

We get a better idea of what’s really being compared here when we further note that the Chinese and the Indians and the Persians and the Arabs and so many other highly civilised peoples who have an equal right to be known as the indigenous of their lands are also utterly ignored in the characterization of the IWK. Does anyone think that the vast complexity of ‘traditional’ Indian epistemology or knowledge production is well captured by the left lune of the diagram above? How homogeneous are we to think are the Chinese ‘traditions’ of Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism (and that’s just the majors,) and how well described as / reduced to IWK? How, finally, are we to imagine that the intellectual epistemological traditions of all those civilisations are to be seen as basically the same as Maori, Mohican, or Hottentot?

Clearly, the ‘Indigenous’ in the term IWK is not referring to peoples picked out by their indigeneity, but rather according to the sophistication of their culture. But that of course, would be an unacceptable observation for two reasons: firstly, and most importantly, because it might ‘hurt their feelings,’ and secondly, because it would then become much more obvious why we might no longer accept IWK as providing appropriate epistemological standards.

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On the Platonic Frenzies

June 27, 2026 – 2:18 am

Plato is not now generally thought of as being overly sympathetic to the mystical path to knowledge – the later position of the Academy notwithstanding – yet in the Phaedrus 244^a-245^c, 265^b and Symposium 210^e-211^b, Plato makes claims that seem to amount to an acknowledgement that there are paths to truths that are independent of the use of logos/reason (whether working on sensation or not,) and that some truths may be inaccessible to it. Certain truths, he seems to say, are accessed through varieties of mania[1], which are a kind of frenzied ecstasy that takes a person inspired (or enthused) by the relevant gods.

At Phaedrus 265^b Plato says of mania that:

… in the divine kind we distinguished four types ascribing them to four gods: the inspiration of the prophet [Prophetic] to Apollo, that of the mystic [Telestic] to Dionysus, that of the poet [Poetic] to the Muses, and a fourth type which we declared to be the highest, the madness of the lover [Erotic,] to Aphrodite and Eros

1. The prophetic eumania is at first blush the easiest to understand. It simply refers to knowledge of future events that the relevant God (not necessarily Apollo, incidentally) makes known to us through an inspired oracle. Those of Delphi and Dodona, for example, were well known and respected through the Greek world. On the other hand, to know about the future in Plato’s epistemology, means to know something about the changing world and that is not something that Plato elsewhere readily admits. The world is rather the realm of belief or opinion, but if the God tells you that a thing will happen and it is therefore a necessary and unchanging fact that that will happen, then that hardly seems to be a matter of mere opinion. Nor, however, can it be a matter of unchanging universals and general truths such as are imagined in the realm of the Forms and which are the objects of actual knowledge, so the nature of this ‘knowledge’ of the future turns out to be a bit mysterious.

2. Even more uncertain is the nature of the telestic Plato’s accompanying statements to his introduction to this form of inspiration have long puzzled readers. It seems to say that help for the suffering is granted through the institution of rites and prayers and purifications on the advice obtained through manic communications. The Dionysiacal connection indicates, as does later interpretation, that the rites and rituals here are the Eleusinian mysteries (and note that the Phaedrus is set near the site of those rituals,) the Corybantic rites, and the Bacchic and Sabaziac initiations. This might suggest to us that the ‘frenzy’ is that of the ritual itself and this has indeed been the usual interpretation since those rituals were certainly said to involve possession by deities,[2] but that doesn’t seem to be what Plato says:[3] the manic revelations seem rather to be prior to the ritual frenzy. In either case the knowledge involved is actually less problematic than for the prophetic eumania: it is either practical advice on treatment – a knowledge of what to do in order to achieve a good outcome – or it is knowledge by acquaintance of the god.

3. With poetic eumania, we are to understand only that the poet comes to have ‘knowledge how’ to get his message across.

… [I]f any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness.

But ‘knowledge how,’ is not a category of knowledge that appears in Greek philosophy, and it does not constitute a challenge to the standard forms of Platonic epistemology.

4. Plato finally declares that the highest form of eumania is the erotic, in which the lover loses his reason in contemplating the beauty of the beloved. But when we look more closely at the consequences of this mania as it is presented by Diotima in the Symposium we see that it does not present any truths about Beauty or anything else, but only inspires an ascent up a ladder of more perfect instantiations or participations in the Form of Beauty, resulting at last, for those whose intellect and virtue are capable of it in acquaintance with the Form of the One itself.

It looks, therefore, as if, except in the historically special case of prophetic eumania[4], these frenzies are not in fact supposed to constitute paths to ultimate truth inaccessible to the normal ways of coming to know about things, they are rather ways that the Gods can give us a nudge in the right direction towards various kinds of ‘knowledge,’ or they are pointers towards a path towards knowledge (of one form or another.) As such, they do not pose a threat to the Platonic epistemology or give support to mystical claims. This is actually consistent with Plato’s cautious declaration in introducing them that

The greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, indeed of madness that is heaven-sent.

[1] The term mania itself is as ambiguous or equivocal in Plato’s usage as it is in our own. He clearly intends that the person affected by such a mania should be considered to be operating outside the usual constraints of reason and in that sense to be like those whose manic condition is caused by some kind of illness, but in the case he is considering this is the result of a God’s possession of a mortal to a very particular purpose. (Note that mental illness in the ancient world was generally thought to be a possession of some kind anyway[1] – so simply distinguishing it as ‘a possession’ would be inadequate.) In future, if the need arises, we can distinguish the two intentions as eumania and dysmania.

[2] Yulia Ustinova (2018) Divine Mania: Alteration of Consciousness in Ancient Greece. London; New York: Routledge

[3] The Greek here is apparently quite unclear.

[4] In the special case of prophetic eumania, there are a number of ways that Plato could make them less offensive. He could declare that they are merely statements by the gods through their oracles and no more inherently ‘knowledge’ than any other statements, though they are contingently more reliable because of the closer acquaintance of the Gods with reality. Moreover, much of what they predict is in their power to make come to pass, so these are statements of intent rather than revelations of already exiting facts about the future.

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The Progressivist Case for Space

June 26, 2026 – 3:23 am

Reading a longish entry (Automation, Space and Utopia: Making the Utopian Case for Space) in the ‘Philosophical Disquisitions’ blog on the subject of justifications for the effort to create a sustainable space-based culture. There were some interesting points, but many places where I thought the argument was lacking, so that whereas I had intended to forward the link to the Centauri Dreams blog, I had to change my mind.

The first difficulty was with the treatment of the Necessitarian argument for space – that it was a moral necessity to attempt it. The counterargument that he was addressing assumed that only very long term threats were to be considered in which case there was no urgency. But there are many threats whose ‘term’ we have no idea of. Asteroid impacts, for example, or gamma ray bursts – and urgency is not at all relevant to the question.  Moreover, considering the probability of these possible disasters and discounting them in that way can’t be done without considering their potential costs. If an asteroid strike – however unlikely it may be – exterminates all human life, then any cost of getting into space is justifiable. And there is a prudential argument for space that says that you are morally obliged to do that which is required for the achievement of moral goods – and human survival is the greatest of these.

In fact his main argument is a utopian one, but one in which utopianism is to be understood not as a final state to be achieved but as any form of society in which the options for human flourishing are maximised. I think that’s a reasonable goal, but why call it utopian when there’s a perfectly appropriate term ‘progressivist’ for that. Possible confusion with the current use as a synonym for leftism perhaps? Moreover, his fear of the utopian label inspires him to propose certain limitations on the utopias that he’ll allow, including preferences for pluralism in concepts of flourishing and dispreferences for violence in their pursuit. That’s all very nice, but it’s quite irrelevant and unworkable in practice.

I was quite interested in the arguments for utopia, but the whole thing really begs the question of how we are to judge objectively – or at least plausibly intersubjectively – the relevant or absolute status of civilizations. We say that the Australia is better than the Assyrian Empire, that Australia is better than Angola, etc. and we have very strong intuitions that those are correct judgements, but on what are they grounded? We need more than just preferences and so I would propose some set of criteria such as resource access, resource utilisation, information production and access, health outcomes, etc – things that are at least conceivable measurable and that are at least plausibly related to value for humans of the culture being judged. At the worst we could give a new name for the characteristics so collected and avoid ‘moral’ comparison while making it quite clear where the preferences ‘ought to’ lie. Let’s call it CP, ‘cultural prosperity’ (‘cultural’ to distinguish mere economic prosperity, which is probably included.)

The arguments actually given in his utopian defence of space are rather weak I thought.

1. Expanding horizons. Supposedly of possibility; but possibility of what. Most of the examples he gives are no more than locational possibilities. There needs to be more definition of what ‘possibility’ should include. As it stands it doesn’t seem like something that has any preference direction at all – some may want it and some may not. So what?
2. Improved satisfaction of human goods. He’s especially keen on intellectual goods such as artistic creativity, scientific discovery, and philosophical insight, but these are incidental to space and can’t be used to justify it. For one thing, they can be had on Earth more easily, and for another the causal link to space is very weakly argued and really implausible. I don’t doubt that these things will benefit, but they will be consequences of general improved prosperity. Other benefits such as freedom, are quite irrelevant and depend completely on contingencies of future events. Where I think he would have a good case is in demonstrating that space would allow a vast economic boom – and much would follow from that, in all likelihood.
3. Facilitates utopian pluralism. Maybe. But again that all depends how it’s done. And if it turns out that such pluralism isn’t going to be maximised then would he say that space was unjustified? Of course not. In any case, the version he gives of utopian pluralism is itself a type of social structure – but one that is more like the the culture of Anarres in LeGuin’s ‘Dispossessed.’

As to the objections that he rehearses to his argument, I have to say I find them also to be pretty weak. 

1. Opportunity cost. This is the strongest and is the one that is always presented. I think that the response here, that the principle behind the objection requires excessive moral demands of us all is ok, but a bit misguided. The principle is clearly some sort of more-or-less naive utilitarianism, and no-one seriously holds that position now (pace Singer – I said seriously.) But are there not other moral principles that are more plausible and which have something like the same effect? That need to be addressed before this objection can be laid to rest.
2. It’s impossible, so don’t try. Well, we’ll see won’t we – or is this another opportunity cost argument? 
3. There are other options for utopian plans. Yes sea-steading would be fun. So? Space is bigger than any of the options. And cyber-space is a fake option. 
4. Dehumanisation. This is Arendt’s idea that we’ll be dehumanised by exploration and colonisation. I can only say, I haven’t noticed it here so far. His arguments against this are good.
5. Hobbesian War. There’s not the slightest reason to think that space will change our nature in that way, and Hobbesian war is either the rule on Earth – so it’s clearly not that bad – or it has never existed – so there’s no plausible danger of it ever existing.

I think a better objection would be that as the ideology of progress is the justification for space, and that ideology does not take account of the finiteness of resources, that ideology needs to be denied, and thus the justification for space disappears. That’s an old argument too, and the response is equally old: why stop progressing now? There are no pressing shortages of resources, space can increase them vastly, there is no advantage to stopping now rather than later, so why stop before we have extracted as much benefit as we can from the universe. The same arguments could have been made in the stone age, but we never think it would have made sense to have stopped progress in the stone age. (Well, some do, but they are crazy people.)

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What the Brookings Report Said

June 25, 2026 – 5:53 am

Extract from the Brookings Report 182-4

The implications of a discovery of extraterrestrial life

      Recent publicity given to efforts to detect extraterrestrial messages via radio telescope has popularized — and legitimized — speculations about the impact of such a discovery on human values. [33] It is conceivable that there is semi-intelligent life in some part of our solar system or highly intelligent life which is not technologically oriented, and many cosmologists and astronomers think it very likely that there is intelligent life in many other solar systems. While face-to-face meetings with it will not occur within the next twenty years (unless its technology is more advanced than ours, qualifying it to visit earth), artifacts left at some point in time by these life forms might possibly be discovered through our space activities on the Moon, Mars, or Venus. If there is any contact to be made during the next twenty years it would most likely be by radio — which would indicate that these beings had at least equaled our own technological level.

      An individual’s reactions to such a radio contact would in part depend on his cultural, religious, and social background, as well as on the actions of those he considered authorities and leaders, and their behavior, in turn  would in part depend on their cultural, social, and religious environment.[34] The discovery would certainly be front-page news everywhere; the degree of political or social repercussion would probably depend on leadership’s interpretation of (1) its own role, (2) threats to that role, and (3) national and personal opportunities to take advantage of the disruption or reinforcement of the attitudes and values of others. Since leadership itself might have great need to gauge the direction and intensity of public attitudes, to strengthen its own morale and for decision making purposes, it would be most advantageous to have more to go on than personal opinions about the opinions of the public and other leadership groups.

      The knowledge that life existed in other parts of the universe might lead to a greater unity of men on earth, based on the “oneness” of man or on the age-old assumption that any stranger is threatening. Much would depend on what, if anything, was communicated between man and the other beings: since after the discovery there will be years of silence (because even the closest stars are several light years away, an exchange of radio communication would take twice the number of light years separating our sun from theirs), the fact that such beings existed might become simply one of the facts of life but probably not one calling for action. [35] Whether earthmen would be inspired to all-out space efforts by such a discovery is a moot question. Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they have had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior.

      Since intelligent life might be discovered at any time via the radio telescope research presently under way, and since the consequences of such a discovery are presently unpredictable because of our limited knowledge of behavior under even an approximation of such dramatic circumstances, two research areas can be recommended:

. . . Continuing studies to determine emotional and intellectual understanding and attitudes — and successive alterations of them if any — regarding the possibility and consequences of discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life.[36}**

. . . Historical and empirical studies of the behavior of peoples and their leaders when confronted with dramatic and unfamiliar events or social pressures.[37] Such studies might help to provide programs for meeting and adjusting to the implications of such a discovery. Questions one might wish to answer by such studies would include: How might such information, under what circumstances, be presented to or withheld from the public for what ends? What might be the role of the discovering scientists and other decision makers regarding release of the fact of discovery?

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Three Thoughts on the Trinity

June 25, 2026 – 2:17 am

1. Powers aren’t Persons

The status of the Holy Spirit has often been a bone of contention amongst sectarians and is central to many of the heresies that the Church had had to fight off. it seems to have been a hypostatization of the Divine Presence or the Divine inspiration that appears from time to time in the Old Testament. The Jewish sects that continued after the split with Christianity spoke of the Shekinah, for example, which is an important concept in the Kabbalistic ideology, and the Parousia was also originally something of that sort. One could also mention the Zoroastrian – really, the Old Persian – idea of Farr, as a kind of halo of mana surrounding a powerful/charismatic being. It’s a mystery, however, why the HS had to be hypothesised as a person of the trinity: what does it do that an angel couldn’t do, for example; and what does the New Testament say about it that makes it necessarily an independent aspect of God? The evidence for its function is really no more than the authors of the gospels saying that the spirit of God did such and such, or God did such and such by means of His spirit. All that is no more requiring of hypostatization than the claims that God’s power is great or He did whatever by His power. Why isn’t there a 4^th person: the Holy Power? The Old Testament and the Jews took this view of those passages: the ruach elohim was not supposed by them to be a thing in itself, but just a quality of God.

2. Don’t Blame the Platonists

The Christian debate over a Trinity occurred in a classical world which had already largely concluded that if there was going to be a connection between an ultimate abstract Good/Beauty/… entity and the everyday world of material stuff, there would have to be something like a logical/ontological derivation of the latter from the former – otherwise the natures of the two kinds of thing are so dissimilar that no relationship is possible. Neopythagoreans, Middle Platonists, and then Neoplatonists had come to the further conclusion that the form of relationship that would work would be some sort of emanation that created things increasingly distant and distinct from the ultimate, but the most popular forms of this at the relevant period made the highest emanations form a kind of trinity with the One of Intellect or Logos and a so-called World Soul. It was this structure, with the accompanying hierarchy of beings – though not the particular role-occupants – that seems to have been adopted by the Christians. The Gnostics did it somewhat more transparently with their emanations of Barbelo and Christ, but neither for the orthodox nor the unorthodox Christians was the trinity justified by metaphysical arguments of possibility. There really doesn’t seem to be any need for that sort of hierarchical creative/coming-into-being structure if they had already decided upon a creator God who could just make the world.

3. Where are the Women?

If there was a felt need to complete the Godhead, it’s a mystery why this didn’t result in a feminine principle. The pagans of the period, to whom the early church was advertising and from whose ranks the later converts were drawn and in whose culture the church grew to its strength were very familiar with Divine females, so why didn’t that result in the obvious concept of a consort for God? It’s not as if the Jewish God had not historically been known to have taken a wife: the ‘Asherah’ is still symbolically present in the Jewish Temple, so the idea was still present even in that time. Amongst the (Christian) Gnostics the figure of Sophia, who was one of the emanations of the Godhead and played a fundamental role in the Creation, was perhaps the fruit of such a cultural and psychological longing for the feminine, but she was very much a subordinate figure in Gnosticism, and in fact, rather opposed to the will of God than enacting a consummation. The figure of Mary was emphasized in later – much later – Christianity as a fulfilment, but she was of course not even partially Divine but only a pure woman and later again conceived as conceived without Sin.

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The Triad of Plotinus

June 23, 2026 – 8:23 am

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