Over on his blog Bentham’s Bulldog, Matthew Adelstein is arguing that Insects Matter More Than People. It is the sort of counterintuitive premise that can make for a fun little essay, what we called a “hot take” ten years ago, or a “Slate pitch” ten years before that; it’s the kind of thing you might expect from a very young philosophy undergrad who did debate club in high school. Which makes sense since that’s literally what Adelstein is: a very young philosophy undergrad who did debate club in high school. So if I call his post sophomoric, I don’t entirely mean this entirely as an insult: having read a million papers from sophomores in my teaching days, it’s about what you’d expect.
That said, it is — particularly for an aspiring philosopher — a pretty terrible essay. Zero engagement with the rich history of relevant literature, argument that immediately derails onto multiple tangents that he doesn’t recognize as tangents, endless controversial premises that are either unexamined or simply asserted, and so on. Insofar as anything is argued at all, Adelstein mostly tries to find clever ways to finesse difficult questions instead of grappling with them. So we get stuff like this:
Can insects feel pain? I don’t know. But it’s not very unlikely that they can. I’d probably put their being able to feel pain at over 50% odds.
Whether or not creatures like insects can feel pain is a meaty philosophical and scientific question that dates back at least to the 8th century BCE Jainists, if not earlier. For a good millenium of recorded history the standard understanding seems to have been that they could, either by virtue of having a soul of some sort or simply through a projection of the human experience. In the 17th century, Descartes popularized the stance that they could not feel pain — indeed, that non-human animals are essentially automata that do not have experiences like we do. By the twentieth century, the radical subjectivism that emerged from postmodern thought found expression in the idea, advanced by philosophers like Nagel, that we cannot really know how an animal experiences the world; and from here, intellectuals like Singer concluded that we should therefore err on the side of caution and assume that they can experience pain. Against this tendency, however, scientific inquiry into the evolution and operation of the nervous system has demonstrated that we can know certain things about pain. We know for example that pain is a signal to the brain that one may experience (or not experience) at different levels of consciousness; this is why, for example, doctors will often try to distract you right at the moment that they stick you with a needle. We know that in mammals the experience of pain has a lot to do with the cerebral cortex, which is why disrupting communication in the cerebral cortex with anesthesia can eliminate the experience of pain. And we know that organisms like insects simply have no cerebral cortex at all.
This inclines me to suspect that insects probably do not experience pain in the same way that humans do. Granted, I can imagine taking an absolutely agnostic position about this on radically subjectivist Nagelian grounds. But what I cannot imagine, given the knowledge we have and the current state of debate, is just declaring as Adelstein does that it’s likely1 that they can. And I certainly cannot imagine trying to justify this on behavioral grounds, as if the distinction between experiencing pain and reacting to it is at all controversial.2
Again, I don’t think it’s a very big deal that a college undergrad is posting half-baked musings about whether insects experience pain. What troubles me is when you notice the sheer number of people defending this post: and not just random teenagers, but academics, AI professionals, and AI academics. This isn’t the sort of thing you saw ten or twenty years ago when a guy who was too young to buy beer kept a livejournal read by his two closest friends: this is a mainstream intellectual with tens of thousands of subscribers. And if you pay any kind of attention to the kind of thought coming out of the tech-adjacent intelligentsia these days, you will instantly recognize this as an utterly ordinary exercise in semi-erudition on two of their pet topics, intelligence and utilitarianism. This is the sort of thing your oligarchic overlords actually believe.
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One of liberalism’s most powerful justifications for private property relies on its profound faith in rationalism. It is public reason, after all, which governs the efforts of capitalists and consumers alike to maximize their own welfare in the free market; it is public reason which ensures that capitalist control of mass media confers upon them no real advantage in democracy since their ideas will still be tested in the marketplace of ideas. For this reason, the surest route to progress is simply through education and persuasion. Magnanimously, liberalism even invites Marxists to make their case in the public square; this is a sign of liberalism’s strength, while the censorship of Marxist thought is always an unmistakeable sign that liberalism’s power is in decline.
Why has rationalism proven to be such a compelling perspective, one that so many people accept that liberalism can rely on it as a foundational premise? Foucault suggests that it emerged as traditional explanations of human irrationality (what he calls “unreason”) as expressions of sin or of incomprehensible mystical truth lost their place in secular society. Thus in the seventeenth century, unreason could only be understood as a kind of sinister, destructive force of barbarity — and thus liberalism proclaimed, as Foucault put it, that “rationalism could watch out for and guard against the subterranean danger of unreason”.
This has a certain plausibility to it, but I do not think it adequately accounts for the persistence of a certain kind of pre-Enlightenment rationalism that preceded secular thought. Particularly in the Hellenistic world, in the Islamic Golden Age, and in certain Indus River valley traditions, one can find confidence in rationalism existing side-by-side with distinctly mystical belief. A more thorough explanation, I would argue, has to do with the profound leap in human thought that marked the Axial Age. Here we see, in the flourishing of literature and ideas that accompanied that moment, a sudden turn towards second-order thought, towards thinking about thinking — precisely the sort of thought that ideas like “rationalism” depend on to exist. This shift was not the kind of intellectual movement or cultural fad that Foucault appeals to in his appeal to the emergence of secularism; it is a deeper evolution in the kind of thought that humans, on a mass scale, are able to engage in.
The advent of second-order thought made the problem of unreason impossible to ignore any further, but it did not provide any implicit explanation for this problem or any ways of dealing with it. The mystical explanations for unreason that Foucault grapples with are probably best understood in this regard as remnants of pre-Axial thought. One of the earliest Axial Age texts, found in the fragments of Parmenides of Elea, begins as divine revelation just as so many ancient texts have: but the goddess of this poem challenges Parmenides to choose between “the path of Persuasion (for it attends upon Truth)” and what we could call the unreason of mysticism, a path entirely unable to be investigated: For neither can you know what is not (for it is not to be accomplished) nor can you declare it.” Here we already have the basic duality that Foucault held could only exist in the secular Age of Enlightement.
The better question, then, is why rationalism transitioned from a controversial premise held and debated among elite intellectuals into the default premise of much of the modern world. This is a difficult question (and one that I will return to eventually), but the simplest answer I can provide here is that the Axial Age revolution was not just a cultural fad but a foundational re-ordering of civilization. The institutions required for it to endure, for example — persistent literacy among a reasonable powerful segment of society, the construction of liberaries and universities and of scholastic practices for examining texts that were quite different than the memorization-centric practices of oral society; a persistent level of cultural mixing and dialogue that prevented cultures from decaying into unreflective defence to tradition; and even, as some anthropologists argue, the widespread use of currency, which taught even illiterate people to distinguish between a thing’s actual and ostensible meaning — all of these shifts were both initiated and reinforced by the Axial mind, and they took root much more deeply and much more quickly in some cultures than in others. In cosmopolitan cities where your typical citizen could be bombarded by radically different perspectives all over the world, humans adapted relatively quickly with new ways to evaluate and discriminate among them. In more remote areas and among lower classes where the world was hardly different from bronze age civilization that preceded it, there was little need to think about whether something was rational or irrational, much less to develop a theory about what this meant for society.
This explanation tells us certain things about rationalism’s contemporary hold on the human psyche that I do not think Foucault can quite explain. It casts rationalism not a kind of coping “strategy” that humans society has collectively chosen to rely on to understand irrational behavior, but as a direct expression of our cognitive capacity for second order thought. And it became relevant when it did not just because of the rise of secularism, but because of the arrival of a whole post-Axial mode of civilization that simply took a millenium or so to proliferate. Many of the factors that abetted the rise of rationalism were not intellectual or philosophical at all; they were material in nature, having to do with things like migration patterns and even the circulation of coinage.3
The bottom line, in any case, is that our belief in human rationalism is probably very old, and has deep roots in the kinds of civilization that humans have lived in for over a thousand years. It is not an intellectual fad, or even ideological dogma that has been baked into the bread of capitalism; it expresses an extremely stable adaptation of the human mind to the civilization we have created.
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And that’s what has made it extraordinarily difficult for me, at least, to accept that rationalism — at least in its in its simplistic form advanced by liberal thought — is absolutely false.
Its theories of human sociology and psychology are demonstrably incorrect on multiple accounts. Humans do not, as popular science writing often suggests, seem to have a limitless curiousity about how the world really works; on the contrary, they will often only seek new information when forced to, and will only accept it when it is consistent with their pre-existing beliefs. Humans are not typically capable of disciplining their reasoning with logic; they often do not even have the opportunity because they are afflicted with cognitive biases and unconscious modes of rationalization that they are not even aware of. And language, which humans rely on to convey rationally acquired knowledge to each other, is not even a very reliable means of transmission; it is simply too semantically flexible, porous, and ambiguous to stand against the problems of sophistry and misinterpretation.
Ironically, meanwhile, even as it ultimately relies on rationalism, modern liberal discourse has often proven unusually hostile to it. A decade ago, for example, it became common to ridicule a certain kind of online pedant for his lawyerly and usually incorrect obsession with calling out logical fallacies in casual debate; today, however, that fad has metastasized into a widespread belief that fallacious reasoning is basically fine, and that objecting to it is a form of petty nit-picking. You do not have to take a philosophy class to understand why our political ideas need to be theorized and internally consistent; but today one often needs to explain this basic point just to make any progress in debate, and it is not at all uncommon to encounter (especially among activists) a kind of Nietzschean rejection of consistency’s demands. Similarly, as almost any writer will tell you, modern audiences don’t merely refuse to read much more than a headline of any given article — they will refuse to read your article and insist on the right to nevertheless criticize it.
This sort of unreason — as Foucault, again, was at pains to point out — has always been with us. Still, it’s clear that at least in the United States the problem has only become worse over the last forty years. The gap between readers achieving the highest literacy scores and the lower percentiles has todays reached its widest levels since 1992; today for example the weakest 10% of readers are doing 16 points worse compared to the strongest 10% than they were at the beginning of the first Obama administration. Similarly, the number of Americans who can only read at the lowest level of competence (level one) has expanded by neary 10% over the last decade. In that same time period, verbal and mathematical reasoning scores on the SAT have declined by 10 and 20 points, respectively.
Perhaps most importantly: over the last forty years, the American ruling class has established and refined mechanisms and techniques for control of the mass media in ways that Edward Bernays never even imagined when his book Propaganda launched the project a hundred years ago. It has abandoned early crude strategies like censorship and replaced them with discursive flooding; it has replaced influence techniques that relied on prestige and authority with techniques that rely on social proximity; it has learned to hide its fingerprints through dark money schemes and messaging decentralization; and most importantly, it has committed levels of capital to the dissemination of messaging that are several orders of magnitude greater than its investments at the beginning of the twentieth century.
All of this — persisting irrationalities in human thought, modern trends in illiteracy and uncritical thinking, and unprecedented investments in propaganda — have created a political discourse where rational persuasion and education play almost no role whatsoever in the evolution of political thought. It is why we now live in a world where arguments like “Insects Matter More Than People” are now not only entertained, but taken seriously by significant segments of the population, and even endorsed by what passes for 21st century intellectuals.
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You may have noticed that my pace of publication on this site has considerably slowed, not just over the last few years, but in particular over the last few months. The reason is simple: after several decades of believing this academically, I have finally started to take seriously in practice the probability that discursive activism and education just cannot accomplish much at this point in history.
It is impossible to miss that, over the past two months, a certain faction of elite right-wing Democrats have embarked on an aggressive and well-funded campaign to destroy the American left. This is not a conspiracy theory: it is headline news, as reported for example in articles about Third Way’s decision to launch an opposition campaign against DSA. And right now even their strategy is clear: they have chosen to make left streamer Hasan Piker the face of the American left because they think he makes for an easy target. Thus we have an endless barrage of articles, video clips, and social media activity from actors who have obviously coordinated their messaging even as they play coy about it.
I do not want to spend my adult life running a futile volunteer counter-messaging operation against this kind of nonsense, but more and more I find that my writing is getting caught up in it. Just about everything I’ve posted on this site in recent years is in direct response to some well-funded reactionary campaign to propagandize the public in the opposite direction, and I am being outspent and outgunned.
As I have mentioned a few times elsewhere, I have spent most of the last year working on a book. I will continue to use this Substack for my usual impulsive posting, and even have some collaborative efforts in the works that will go public sooner than later. But for now as I consider the way forward, I hope readers will bear with me; I would much rather use my writing to accomplish something than to simply publish for the sake of publishing.
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Seems to have become fashionable among middlebrow American liberal intellectuals to use the double negative as a kind wormy way to avoid making the affirmative claim one is clearly making: thus instead of saying that something is likely you say that it is not unlikely. This was also popular in aristocratic Victorian salons, and for similar reasons; in any case, I am not going to indulge it.
To appreciate the difference, consider what happens when you touch a hot stove: by the time you experience pain you will have already jerked your hand away. That’s because the reflex and the conscious experience of pain are two different things involving two different parts of the nervous system, and one happens significantly faster than the other.
The author of this argument currently escapes me (it could be Jaspers), but a theory one often encounters in literature about the Axial age is that coins confronted humans, many for the first time, with a material signifier that had multiple significations: on one hand their value as currency, and on the other hand their value as pieces of metal. It is hard to spend much time thinking about this before being drawn into the kind of second-order thoughts that define the Axial age: what is this coin really worth? How would you even go about answering such a question? What exactly does it mean to talk about what a coin is really worth?