Will Durant, “This I believe”

[pood]

Will Durant came up in another thread, so I thought I’d pick apart his essay “This I Believe.”

I find in the Universe so many forms of order, organization, system, law and adjustment of means to ends, that I believe in a cosmic intelligence and I conceive God as the life, mind, order and law of the world.

This seems to be more or less Einstein’s conception of a metaphorical, not a personal or literal god, but I am dubious. I don’t see any adjustment of means to ends and I don’t think the universe is governed by laws. Moreover, we find that there are only little isles of order in a vast cosmic lacunae of quantum vacuum. Rising entropy will eventually destroy the isles of order according to our best current models, which may of course be wrong.

I do not understand my God, and I find in nature and history many instances of apparent evil, disorder, cruelty and aimlessness.

Apparent?

But I realize that I see these with a very limited vision and that they might appear quite otherwise from a cosmic point of view.

Perhaps. But what is a “cosmic view”? Rorty rejected, correctly I think, the existence of any “view from nowhere.”

How can an infinitesimal part of the universe understand the whole? We are drops of water trying to understand the sea.

A metaphor or analogy. Rhetorically interesting but not particularly helpful IMO.

I believe that I am the product of a natural evolution.

Agreed.

The logic of evolution seems to compel determinism …

Disagree. I don’t see how he arrived at this conclusion. The logic of evolution seems to reveal contingency, randomness, accident. Random mutation, natural selection, drift. But as noted, there is a recent study indicating that not all mutations are random with respect to the environment. And then there is epigenetics. So perhaps Lamarckism is making a minor comeback.

…but I cannot overcome my direct consciousness of a limited freedom of will.

Agree. I of course have never denied, in these free will discussions, that nature and nurture, genes and memes, play a huge role in our behavior. I simply deny the hard determinist stance that we are unfree to choose anything at all.

I believe that if I could see any form of matter from within as I can see myself through introspection, I should find in all forms of matter something akin to what in ourselves is mind and freedom.

This sounds like panpsychism, to which I am open. Or, again, possibly he is speaking metaphorically.

I define "virtue" as any quality that makes for survival, but as the survival of the group is more important than the survival of the average individual, the highest virtues are those that make for group survival: love, sympathy, kindliness, cooperation. If my life lived up to my ideals I would combine the ethics of Confucius and Christ; the virtues of a developing individual with those of a member of a group.

Fine, but I am somewhat conflicted. I agree with the stuff about Confucius and Christ, though other people whose works I admire, like Nietzsche, would disagree. Rand would certainly disagree (I don’t admire her works except for the novel The Fountainhead) A deeper problem is that Hitler said the exact same thing — that the survival of the Volk was the main thing, not the survival of the individual. Obviously he did not mean such survival in the sense of Confucius or Christ, but the Nazis did invoke Nietzsche thanks to his stupid sister. I also think Dostoevsky was a Christian atheist, and would agree with Durant wrt the above quote.

I was a Socialist in my youth and sympathized with the Soviet regime until I visited Russia in 1932. What I saw there led me to deprecate the extension of that system to any other land.

I think likening socialism to Stalinism is bogus.

Experience and history have taught me the instinctive basis and economic necessity of competition and private property.

Disagree, There is nothing instinctive about competition and private property. The evidence seems to suggest that our ancestors survived mainly through cooperation and sharing.

I’m not so fanatical a worshipper of liberty as some of my radical or conservative friends; when liberty exceeds intelligence it begets chaos; which begets dictatorship.

Agreed. We are seeing this dynamic work out now in Trumplandia.

We had too much economic liberty in the later nineteenth century due to our free land and our relative exemption from external danger.

Agreed. That was the Gilded Age. We are going through another one today.

We have too much moral liberty today, due to increasing wealth and diminishing religious belief.

Strongly disagree about the diminishing religious belief part.

The age of liberty is ending under the pressure of external dangers; the freedom of the part varies with the security of the whole.

Tentatively agree, depending on how these terms are being defined. I also of course recognize that Durant wrote this stuff long before the present, so that is another complicating factor in evaluating the argument.

I do not resent the conflicts and difficulties of life. In my case, they have been far outweighed by good fortune, reasonable health, loyal friends and a happy family life. I have met so many good people that I have almost lost my faith in the wickedness of mankind.

Note the critical “almost.” Myself, I greatly prefer non-human animals.

I suspect that when I die I shall be dead. I would look upon endless existence as a curse as did the Flying Dutchman and the Wandering Jew. Death is life’s greatest invention; perpetually replacing the worn with the new. And after twenty volumes, it will be sweet to sleep.

Fully agree.

 

[ideologyhunter]

I think you did justice to Durant here. I looked up the essay on the Durant website, and it's short enough to print on the back of a Cheezits box. It's a precis, not really an essay, and he says hardly anything that could offend an American reader living in the Christian-infused culture of midcentury USA (when I assume he wrote it.) It's pablum, with a statement of the teleological argument that ignores all the obvious objections. It's just not incisive. Readers Digest could have reprinted the entire piece. In Durant's active years as an author, the atheist label was harsh, and only a few high-profile writers chose to use it. Durant does not seem to have been an adherent of any religion, and his 'belief' statement for a creator is just too wishy-washy to be of use to believers or skeptics. Wikipedia gives this Durant quote which covers some of the same ground, although no date is given:
"I am prepared to have you put me down as an atheist, since I have reluctantly abandoned belief in a personal and loving God. But I am loath to leave the word God out of my life and creed...(I am) a Christian in the literal and difficult sense of sincerely admiring the personality of Christ and making a persistent effort to behave like a Christian."
My guess: he had some churching in his youth and just could not shake off the residue of his upbringing. To publicly claim the label atheist, without a lot of shambling qualifiers, was too much for him.
In 'This I Believe' he strives to explain that he reveres the ethics of Jesus, which would also have made him Readers Digest-worthy. If you read the chapter in Caesar and Christ in which he summarizes the teachings of Jesus, he goes into the loonier Jesus pronouncements that stem from 1st Century eschatology -- for instance, Jesus exhorting anyone who follows him to abandon parents, spouse, children; the business of praising "those who make themselves eunuchs, for Heaven's sake"; the teaching that history was to end in the lifetime of his listeners. Durant writes "these were not rules for ordinary life; they were a seminomastic regimen fitting men and women for an election by God into an imminent Kingdom in which there would be no law, no marriage, no sexual relations, no property and no war." Then, in spite of this dramatic casting of these radical statements as hard to reconcile with great teachings, he gives a feel-good summation of Jesus as "the most lovable of men," advancing the Christian claim that Jesus opened his ministry to include non-Jews, although a much stronger case would be that he never intended his ministry to be anything but a Jewish movement. But Caesar and Christ came out in 1944, when outward piety was the American default setting for writers and commentators. Durant hedges, hems & haws when the subject is faith and the 'great religions of man'.