Philosophy in History: How Ideas Have Shaped Our World

By J.R. Wordie

What kind of forces have shaped our modern world? Have they been political, economic, scientific, or perhaps even theological? The answer is that all of these forces have been at work, but they have all been the product of ideas, as our views on all of these topics have changed over time. Can ideas be more powerful than armies? Surprisingly, the answer is ‘yes’. History teaches us that nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Throughout history, rulers, generals and in our own day even stockbrokers and plutocrats have always imagined themselves to be in charge, with that last group even describing themselves as ‘masters of the universe’. In reality, however, all of these individuals have themselves been the products of ideas, owing their positions entirely to existing trends of thought. How this has come about and how it has delivered for us our present-day world are the themes explained in this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398428966

J.R. Wordie

James Ross Wordie was educated at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, and Queens’ College Cambridge, where he took a degree in History in 1963. He then spent a further year at Cambridge, taking a PGCE at Cambridge University’s Department of Education, intending to teach at a school or college. However, he was persuaded to begin PhD research at the University of Reading, specialising in Agricultural History. This PhD was completed in 1967, and he next began to lecture at St. David’s College in Lampeter, which was then the oldest  constituent college of the federal University of Wales.  In 1970 he returned to the University of Reading where he lectured on British Social and Economic History until his retirement from lecturing in 2004.

Book preview

About the Author

James Ross Wordie was educated at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, and Queens’ College Cambridge, where he took a degree in History in 1963. He then spent a further year at Cambridge, taking a PGCE at Cambridge University’s Department of Education, intending to teach at a school or college. However, he was persuaded to begin PhD research at the University of Reading, specialising in Agricultural History. This PhD was completed in 1967, and he next began to lecture at St. David’s College in Lampeter, which was then the oldest constituent college of the federal University of Wales. In 1970 he returned to the University of Reading where he lectured on British Social and Economic History until his retirement from lecturing in 2004.

Dedication

To Kim

Copyright Information ©

J.R. Wordie 2022

The right of J.R. Wordie to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The story, experiences, and words are the author’s alone

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398428959 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398428966 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Professor Emeritus Ralph Houlbrooke, Dr. Roger Wilkes, and Dr. Chris Woods for their comments on earlier drafts of this book, which were most helpful. Of course, responsibility for this work remains my own: none of the above entirely agreed with my views (nor with each other). Thanks also go to my two sons, Mark and Jonathan, for their many helpful comments, and to my wife Kim for putting up with me during the 13 years I spent in researching and writing this book.

Introduction

This book is dedicated to the proposition that it has been neither generals, nor plutocrats, nor even politicians that have shaped the destinies of nations. Rather, it has been the irresistible power of ideas whose time has come that have exercised the decisive influence. Unfortunately for humanity, however, these have been, for the most part, the wrong ideas, to the great detriment of humankind throughout our history. Let’s remember a few. ‘Might makes right.’ ‘War is glorious.’ ‘Government should be the preserve of a small, hereditary elite.’ ‘White people are superior to all coloured people.’ ‘Imperialism is a great idea.’ ‘Slavery is a fine institution.’ ‘Nothing is more important than religion.’ ‘Public floggings, burnings, hangings, and disembowelments are grand forms of popular entertainment.’ ‘Women are inferior to men in every way.’ ‘Hygiene is of no importance.’ ‘Those who cannot afford to pay for medical care should be left to die.’ ‘Not all children need to be educated.’ ‘The world is here for us to pillage and exploit.’ etc. etc. All this prompted Edward Gibbon (1737-94), the great historian of the Roman Empire, to remark that all history was ‘little more than a register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind’. The importance of having the right ideas to live by can hardly be overstated, particularly at this point in our history, for the twenty-first century will surely prove to be ‘make or break’ time for our species, as we shall see below. Our present course is clearly unsustainable, and will have to be altered.

We have undoubtedly made some progress, but unfortunately some bad ideas remain with us. A case in point for our own times is neoliberalism, a very bad idea indeed, from which a host of other ills has flowed, and yet it has become, in the words of Stephen Metcalf writing in The Guardian for August 18, 2017, ‘The Idea that Swallowed the World’. The nature of this sinister creed is fully explained in the Economics chapter below, and some suggestions as to what we can do about it are made in the Conclusion. Indeed, we are still trying to find our way, especially in the fields of economic, political, and ecological thought, where we are still far from settling on the best courses. We are still engaged upon an Unended Quest, to quote from the title of Karl Popper’s intellectual autobiography. For good or ill, however, ideas have shaped not only our material world through the work of scientists and engineers, but also our mental world, determining which economic and political creeds come into fashion, our views on morality, and our perceptions of ourselves, our world, and our place in the universe. I will argue here that we occupy an extremely improbable position in the great scheme of things, and that we are in fact very lucky to be here at all. This great good fortune should not be taken for granted.

The political systems under which we live have of course clearly been the products of ideas. Academic philosophy as taught in our universities has some contribution to make here, but I will argue in this book that academic philosophers take too narrow a view of their subject. ‘Philosophy’ is after all a term from the ancient Greek, φιλοσοφία, with φιλο (philo) meaning ‘to love’, or ‘a love of’ and σοφία (sophia) generally taken to mean wisdom. But the ancient Greeks themselves did not use it only in that narrow sense. In their day it could also have meant knowledge, skill, craft, or prudence. It was an elastic term in those times, and I would argue that it should still be an elastic concept today. The very narrow sense in which ‘philosophy’ is defined academically in the twenty-first century has been entirely the work of a small band of professional philosophers, as I will show below. In fact, until the nineteenth century, the term ‘philosophy’ had a much broader application. Science, for example, was described only as ‘natural philosophy’, just another branch of a broader discipline, while in his day Adam Smith was never regarded as being anything other than a philosopher. The ‘love of wisdom’ embraced a wide range of wisdoms to be loved, and I will argue here that this broader definition of ‘philosophy’ should be revived.

We really ought to ask ourselves what philosophy is for. Can it ever serve any useful purpose? I believe that it can, so long as we keep our eye on the ball here. In my opinion ‘good’ philosophy is that which deepens our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe, or has real, beneficial applications to daily life, including its political and social aspects. The rest is merely ‘clever’, or ‘interesting’, the plaything of academic philosophers, but of no practical use at all. It could be said that the primary task of philosophy should be a striving to answer that greatest of all questions namely, ‘How should we live, both as individuals and as communities?’ But the answer to so broad a question as this cannot be found within the narrow definitions of academic philosophy alone. I would suggest that, as examples, religious thought, economic thought, ecological thought, and scientific thought should also be regarded as legitimate forms of philosophy for this purpose, since all have represented a love of wisdom of one kind or another, and all can contribute towards answering the question of how we should live. In short, philosophy is too important to be left to the philosophers. Unless those disciplines mentioned above are also recognised as being genuinely ‘philosophical’, the full impact of ideas upon our historical development cannot be appreciated.

Taking this broader definition of ‘philosophy’, seeing it rather as schools of thought, it could even be argued that our entire history has been shaped by the philosophies to which people have adhered over the past twenty-five centuries or so. No agency on Earth can resist the power of an idea whose time has come. Those generals, politicians, and stock dealers who believed that they were in control deluded themselves, even although those last thought themselves to be, in the words of Tom Wolfe, ‘Masters of the Universe’. Rather, they themselves have all been the products of ideas. This is not an original proposition: others have made much the same claim before me, including Edmund Burke (1720-97), Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), Victor Hugo (1802-85) and Benedetto Croce (1866-1952). But at this point I will quote from only two of them; first, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), who wrote in his classic work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936),

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the general encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are influential for good or evil. (Chpt. 24 Section V, p. 241 of pdf version, available online)

Personally, I would certainly regard Keynes as being a philosopher in the sense that he was a ‘lover of wisdom’, albeit mainly economic wisdom in his case. But note his disparaging references to ‘defunct economists’ and ‘academic scribblers’. In general, philosophers hold a very poor opinion of other philosophers, each one utterly convinced that he and only he holds a monopoly on truth, and reading the delightful pieces of invective that they hurl against each other will be one of the pleasures afforded by the text below.

Keynes had a great rival in the field of economic thought in the person of Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), the Viennese economist and philosopher. There was very little that they agreed upon, but on those two points they found common ground. Both had noted the power of ideas, and also the time delay in their implementation. Hayek wrote,

Experience indicates that once a great body of intellectuals has accepted a philosophy, it is only a question of time until those views become the governing force of politics. (Cited in D. S. Jones, Masters of the Universe (2012) p. 160)

The delay involved usually amounted to a few decades, as in the case of neoliberal thought.

But readers may want to know at this point what manner of man is making these observations, and what his own philosophical standpoint might be. For my part, although I am not a professional philosopher I was, by background and training, a professional historian: an academic, Master of Arts, Doctor of Philosophy, elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, with thirty-seven years of experience as a teacher of History at university level, mainly at the University of Reading. None of this, of course, offers any guarantee against my writing utter nonsense, as have so many philosophers before me, but it does put me in with at least a chance of having something interesting to say. Although a historian by training, I am a philosopher by inclination, and what I have to offer here are the fruits of a lifetime of study and thought, backed by an academic training.

My main field of expertise was in the social and economic history of modern and early-modern Britain. However, History was never my sole field of interest. Economics and Politics also fell within my purview as a lecturer, while of course religious thought has often exerted a profound influence upon historical developments, and so some grasp of theology was also called for. In addition, I have also always been interested in Philosophy and in Science. Since my retirement from lecturing in 2004 I have been able to devote more time to studies in these fields, and I have recently felt competent enough to include chapters on both topics below. I freely admit that I am not an expert in either field, but this is not a book for experts: it is simply a general survey for the general reader who has a wide range of interests in the workings of the world: all that I can do is apply something of the historian’s analytical rigour to the subjects covered. The professional scientist, philosopher, or economist will not be impressed by what I have to say here, for this is not a work of original research. To them it will all seem superficial and ‘old hat’. ‘Surely everyone knows that’, they will think. But in fact everyone does not know ’that’. The specialists will not learn anything new about their specialities here, but the scientist might learn something about economics, the economist something about philosophy, and the philosopher something about science. Moreover, all of them will learn something about Islam and its significance from the chapter on Religion. Islam is today the world’s fastest growing religion, forecast to overtake Christianity in terms of nominal adherents in the near future. But I have yet to meet a British Christian who can tell me even so much as what the Five Pillars of Islam are. Religious thought is still playing an important part in the shaping of our world today, in particular Islamic religious thought. In short, the strength of this study lies in its breadth, rather than its depth. Put all the pieces together, and what do you see? A complete answer to, ‘life, the universe, and everything’? Well, perhaps not, but something rather like it: opinions on this question may differ. Indeed. Max Tegmark in his book, Our Mathematical Universe (2014) even playfully suggests, with the help of some well-chosen figures, that there is in fact something to be said for the answer, ‘42’! (pp. 246-7) Max is superbly numerate, but I rather fear that the answer is just a little more complicated than that. The whole can become greater than the sum of its parts, a development known as ‘the phenomenon of emergent qualities’, of which more below. Readers may make up their own minds on that point. We all have to specialise too much these days: sometimes, you have to step back and look at the bigger picture to see things in perspective. ‘Only connect’, as E.M. Forster would say.

Albert Einstein once famously remarked, ‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind’. But perhaps he could have better said, ‘Science without philosophy is lame, philosophy without science is blind’. The two subjects may certainly be linked, but the relationship is asymmetrical: philosophy has much more to learn from the scientists than science has from the philosophers. It is most important to begin by establishing the nature of reality as accurately as possible, for if we choose to premise our conclusions upon false assumptions, the consequences for us all could be seriously adverse. Until we can establish what is true, we cannot make what is best right. But the search for truth must incorporate a wide range of fields of thought. Indeed, seemingly unrelated disciplines can often be found, upon closer examination, to have some features in common. For example, some similarities of methodology and purpose can be traced even between Science and History, particularly in two respects. First, when it comes to motivation, we historians do share with the scientists a rather obsessive compulsion to discover the truth, or at least to get as close to the truth as we possibly can, which is the best that either discipline can hope for. Secondly, in terms of methodology, there are also some similarities. For example, the scientific method may be said to proceed in four stages:

Observation

Speculation

Experimentation

Validation/refutation

The key stage is of course (c), experimentation. If the experimental evidence fails to support the speculation, then the speculation is wrong! When it comes to us historians, the equivalent of Science’s reliance on experiment is our reliance upon primary sources. In the case of History, these are always written sources: that is what distinguishes our discipline from Archaeology. ‘Historical’ times are those which have been chronicled in documentary materials: the rest is prehistorical. Nearer to our own times these may be supplemented by paintings, photographs, film archives, and the like. For the Archaeologists, their primary sources consist of surviving artefacts, ecofacts such as dried seeds and bones, and buried or still standing remains of buildings, roads, field systems, or fortifications. It may sometimes happen that both sets of sources, historical and archaeological, are available for certain periods, but the distinction between the two disciplines remains clear enough. So how does the historian approach his task? Well, all written sources are of course written by people, so historians too adopt a four-fold approach when it comes to considering their sources. We ask,

Who wrote it?

What were his qualifications for writing this? Does the writer really know what he is talking about? Is he capable of historical analysis?

Is this an impartial account of events, or does this particular writer have his own agenda?

Is this source in fact a doctoring of an earlier account, or even an outright forgery?

Source materials should be written by those who were alive at the time of the events described, ideally by those who actually witnessed or participated in them. Thus Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (431 BC) in which he actually fought, or The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) who kept a diary from 1660, or Winston Churchill’s six-volume History of the Second World War (1948-1953), might all be regarded as primary sources. But even primary sources may not be free from bias. Winston Churchill famously said, ‘History will be kind to me – because I shall write it!’ and so he did. Indeed, even ‘official’ documents may sometimes be suspect, and ye sceptical historian must proceed with extreme caution, consulting as wide a range of sources as possible. In general, it remains true, for example, that history is usually written by the victors, since the losing side tends to display a reluctance to chronicle its defeat. In addition, history is littered with cases of notorious forgeries, such as the putative Donation of Constantine, allegedly issued by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (c.272-337), which purported to give the popes both spiritual and secular authority over the western Roman Empire, but was actually forged in the Vatican at some time during the eighth century, or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic document forged by the Tsar’s secret police in 1903 claiming to reveal a Jewish plot for world domination, or the infamous ‘Hitler Diaries’, which were complete forgeries.

Having said all that, however, it must be admitted that none of us can ever be entirely impartial. Historians try their best to be so, but we all carry our cultural baggage with us, however hard we may try to discard it. Ideally, we would like to be able to say, ‘He that loveth country, or religion, or culture, or ideology more than the quest for truth is not worthy of the name of historian’, but in reality we all cling to our personal beliefs and prejudices. Since some of what follows incorporates my own views, I ought perhaps to begin by ‘coming clean’ about just what my basic views are. When it comes to conversation, I have always regarded talking about yourself as being the nadir of the art but here, because we historians attach such great importance to the questions (a) ‘Who wrote it?’ and (b) ‘What were his qualifications for writing this?’, I feel obliged to include some autobiographical material here.

In my own case, I have always harboured a penchant for philosophy, and began to develop a philosophy of my own at quite an early age. I had begun to think of myself as both a deist and a determinist by the time I went up to Cambridge as a Queens’ College exhibitioner in 1960. At that time I had not yet heard of the term ‘pantheism’, but simply thought of God as being The Great Nature of All Things, which incorporated both The Way Things Are, and The Way Things Work. It seemed to me that such a system would have to be deterministic, since it would be supremely incumbent upon such a God to obey His own laws. Not even God would have free will. I kept an open mind at the time, quite prepared to change my views in the light of better knowledge, but all my subsequent reading has in fact supported and confirmed them, rather than undermined them. Scientific support for these ideas will be provided in the Einstein section below.

I thought at first that such views made me a deist, but later learned that I was actually a pantheist, and later still a panentheist. The distinction between the latter two terms is quite a subtle one, but of some significance. The pantheist believes that God is seen in the universe and all its works, but the panentheist, while he would agree with that, goes further in seeing God as being greater than the mere material universe. This is my own position, based upon the assumption that the whole can be ‘greater’, from our point of view, than the mere sum of its parts. The human body is a very good example: it consists basically of water, with a few handfuls of cheap chemicals thrown in. But we all know that it amounts to much more than that. This is known as ‘the phenomenon of emergent qualities’, or what the philosophers might call ‘holism’, or Gestalt theory from the German for ‘overall shape’ or form.

Both pantheism and panentheism, however, reject the idea of an afterlife, and envisage an abstract, impersonal, and amoral God who is utterly indifferent to the doings, and indeed the survival, of humankind. At the same time, He is the creator, sustainer, and controller of the universe, following His own deterministic laws. (I will follow the convention of referring to God as ‘He’ and ‘Him’ here, even although the panentheist’s God is nothing like a human being.) The phenomenon of emergent qualities suggests that there is almost a kind of intelligence behind these laws, a deep mystery at the heart of the universe. We deceive ourselves if we believe that everything has been explained. This position of awe and wonder was one adopted by both Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) and Albert Einstein (1879-1955), who might each be described as panentheists, as we shall later see in the sections devoted entirely to them below. Both were religious sceptics, but both indignantly rejected the charge of atheism: a panentheist is most certainly not an atheist. Both took an essentially religious view of the world.

As an uncompromising rationalist, I can at least boast that my views were formed on purely rational grounds, and were not determined by my cultural background. Indeed, those views were very unpopular with everyone else at the time. The Christians regarded panentheism as a form of atheism, while the atheists regarded it as a form of religion, which indeed it is, albeit one in which even the most rational of individuals could believe. I was therefore unpopular with both camps, but of course a quest for truth and a simultaneous quest for popularity are usually incompatible. This did not bother me, because I felt at the time that the acceptance of orthodoxy represented the surrender of thought, while contempt for authority was the beginning of wisdom. It was only a beginning to be sure, but it was an essential start. Of course, you also had to keep an open mind, for arrogance and dogmatism are the enemies of truth.

When it came to my determinism, I soon discovered that this was regarded with horror by Christians and atheists alike. At Cambridge in those years existentialism was the philosophical flavour of the month, the inevitable intellectual uniform of the ‘individualist’ at that time. The existentialists eagerly explained to me that we bore our fortunes in our own strong arms, that we ‘made ourselves’, that man was ‘condemned to freedom’, that he had free will and was totally responsible for the decisions that he made, and yet spent his life in flight and terror from the hideous responsibility that he bore, thus giving rise to existential angst, and a great deal more nonsense along the same lines. They seemed to find these ideas ‘liberating’, but they just made me laugh. I told them to stop worrying. I argued that on the contrary they had no free will at all, but were simply the instruments of God’s purpose, living out an inevitable destiny that had been prepared for them from the beginning of time. They were ‘responsible’ for nothing, and had no control over their future destiny at all. In a sense it had already happened, just as surely as their past had happened. The existentialists simply couldn’t cope with that at all. They saw this as being a doctrine of despair, when of course it is no such thing. Truly, we are all in God’s hands, but your predetermined future might well turn out to be a very happy one, especially if you are fortunate enough to live here, in the developed Western World. We British tend to take our good fortune for granted, without ever pausing to consider how lucky we are to have been born in this place, at this time, and as members of this species, rather than as one of the millions of other species that inhabit our planet. Philosophy turns the mind to such thoughts as these: it inspires in me eternal gratitude for my miraculous good fortune, and contributes substantially to my personal happiness.

I suppose that I should not have been surprised by the violent reaction that my views provoked from the existentialists, but I was. They seemed to be deeply shocked. One said, ‘If I really believed that, I would kill myself!’ Another threatened to kill me! He got very angry indeed, and pulled out a knife that he flicked open and brandished in front of my face (knife carrying was not illegal in those days, it seems). He insisted that he did have free will, and indeed that I myself lived at that time only because he had decided to let me live, but that he was free to change his mind at any moment and kill me. This was an obvious bluff, and we both knew it: in fact he had no choice about the matter at all. But it struck me that attempting to win an intellectual opponent over to your point of view by threatening to kill him if he didn’t agree with you represented the very nadir of the dialectical process. So I informed him that, on the contrary, as far as he was concerned I might as well have been at that moment clad in plate armour from head to toe. It was utterly impossible for him to kill or even wound me, because that was in neither his destiny nor mine, and that there was absolutely nothing that he could do about it.

I thought at the time that his kind of intellectual bankruptcy was unusual, but I learned in later life that, sadly, there are still many people in the world today who say, ‘Agree with me or I’ll kill you!’: far too many, in fact. It might be said that I bet my life on my philosophy at that moment, but I did so without a qualm, because I was completely sure that my philosophy was right and his was wrong, and so indeed it proved: I live to tell the tale. However, this was not to be the last occasion on which my views were to elicit homicidal inclinations. I am always disappointed at this, because thought is free, and we should all be capable of mutual toleration and engagement in civilised debate. But it soon became clear to me that if you prioritise a quest for truth, then while humility and keeping an open mind are important, at the same time you cannot afford to be overly concerned about other people’s opinions of you. The philosopher who succeeds in upsetting nobody probably has nothing of any great importance to say.

It seemed to me that panentheism and determinism walked hand in hand, and together could form the basis of an entire philosophical system and moral code. Moreover, as my reading progressed, I began to notice signs of deterministic beliefs amongst some of the great writers of the past. Listen first to the eleventh-century Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) in the wonderful 1859 English translation by Edward Fitzgerald:

Oh Thou who didst with pitfall and with gin

Beset the way that I must journey in,

Wouldst Thou thus with predestination hedge me round,

And then impute my fall to sin? (Verse 57)

Or William Shakespeare:

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough hew them how we will. (Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, lines 10-11)

Or T.S. Eliot in the opening lines of ‘Burnt Norton’, the first of his Four Quartets:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation. (Lines 1-8)

T.S. Elliot, it seems, had quite a good grasp of the nature of the space-time continuum. Or listen to Leo Tolstoy. If you read to the very end of War and Peace you come to the punch line with which he concludes this great work. He ends by mocking the captains and the kings who so fondly imagined that they swayed the destinies of nations. Nonsense, says Tolstoy. Those men were but pawns in the hands of fate. They exercised no free will at all in the decisions that they made. Free will is as much of an illusion as the impression that we receive of the sun going round the earth. To quote from his last lines,

It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time and on cause, we arrive at laws. In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognise a motion that we did not feel: in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognise a dependence of which we are not conscious.

Incidentally, it is interesting to notice that Pierre Bezukhov, the central character of War and Peace who is often taken to reflect the views of Tolstoy himself, was attracted to the philosophy of panentheism.

Of course, beliefs in determinism are considerably older than any of those cited above. The ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides of Elea (present-day Ascea) who lived from about 515 to 460 BC, was the first to have specifically taught the idea, and it was later taken up by the Stoics, who were also early pantheists of a sort. Determinism has a long history. In ancient Norse mythology even the Nordic gods were in thrall to Fate (Wyrd), which controlled the destinies of all things. The ancient Greeks and Romans also believed in ‘The Fates’ (Moirai), who were deaf to the pleas of mortals, while the polytheistic Hindus believed in Karma, or fate, an emanation of Atman, the universal soul, which represented your inescapable true self. Therefore, no temples were raised to Atman or The Fates, for there was no point in beseeching them: their minds had been made up. Only the lesser gods were partial to entreaties. Therefore, an ancient Greek might still pray to Athena for guidance. Quite possibly, The Fates had decreed both that he should do so, and that Athena would answer his prayer. Indeed, it might be said that a belief in determinism, in the form of ‘The Fates’, was more or less universal in the Indo-European pre-Christian world.

But then, human hubris began to rear its head. Certain clever people began to think that it demeaned humanity to see man as just the plaything of the gods. Surely man, ‘the measure of all things’ according to Protagoras, had to be greater than that! The first Europeans to argue this way were the pre-Socratic Greek Sophists, men like Protagoras of Abdera, (c490-c420 BC), Gorgias of Leontini (c485-c380 BC) and Hippias of Elis (c450-c399 BC). They argued that by acquiring certain skills, especially in arms or rhetoric, a man could ‘rise above his destiny’, and to a degree ‘create himself’. This theme was later taken up by Plato and Aristotle, who developed it into the doctrine of free will. The choices that a man made in his life were crucial to his future: character was destiny. I would agree with this, but I would add that both his character and his choices were predetermined. We do what we want to do and so experience the illusion of free will: but it is precisely what we want to do that is predetermined. As Schopenhauer put it, ‘A man may do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills’. It seems that determinism is an aspect of reality that humankind finds it particularly hard to accept, but I must ask readers to restrain their indignation at this point, and wait until the Einstein section, where it will be explained more fully in scientific terms. Basically, it rests upon the nature of the space-time continuum. Time does not ‘flow’, it simply is, and we move through it. The future is as real as the past, and just as unalterable.

Of course panentheism too was an unpopular concept, not only in Cambridge at the time, but also historically, at least in the Christian West, where panentheism was seen as a form of heresy and atheism. I later discovered that only one prominent modern philosopher had ever had the courage to make panentheism and determinism central to his thought, and that man was Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) whose parents were Portuguese Jews, although he himself spent his life in the Netherlands. I read about him with increasing incredulity as I came to realise how closely his views paralleled my own. I found this to be quite an emotional experience. No one else had ever agreed with me before, but now here was a man dubbed by Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) as ‘the prince of philosophers’ who actually did agree with me. I felt reassured. I will soon be forgotten, but Spinoza will never be forgotten. It was easy enough for me as a twentieth-century man living in a liberal and tolerant age with all the scientific knowledge we had at our disposal to reach the conclusions that I did, but for Spinoza to have done the same in the ill-informed and highly intolerant seventeenth century was truly remarkable.

As I later learned, pantheism and panentheism also had long histories. The term ‘pantheism’ was not coined in English until the early eighteenth century, but early Taoism, Hinduism, and the Bahá’i faith had included elements of pantheist thought. The pre-Socratics Anaximander of Miletus (611-546 BC) and Heraclitus of Ephesus (535-475 BC) had put forward the idea, and it was espoused by the Stoics, including the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD). Its later proponents included Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), John Toland (1670-1722), the ‘Nature Poets’ William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), and the Americans Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). Panentheism was in addition the self-proclaimed ‘faith’ of Albert Einstein (1879-1955), a great admirer of Spinoza. Einstein is on record as saying, ‘God does not play dice’, one of his best known quotations.

Another realisation that occurred to me early on was the fact that change is the first law of the universe. Nothing ever actually is, but rather all things are in a permanent state of becoming something else. Therefore nothing in the universe is forever including, so the cosmologists tell us, even the universe itself! God is simply not a forever sort of guy, at least as far as this universe is concerned, as Brian Greene explains for us in his recent book, Until the End of Time (2020). It must be so, for change is life, while stasis is death. Of course, change is also death, rather like Janus, the two-faced god, or the Hindu Shiva, who was lord of both creation and destruction. But at least change gives you a crack at life along the way! It is here that philosophy intersects with science, specifically the laws of causality and of thermodynamics, but more on this below. Needless to say, this was not a new idea either. I later learned that in this case I had been scooped by about 2,500 years by Heraclitus of Ephesus (535-475 BC), who had observed that, ‘all is flux’ and that, ‘you can never step into the same river twice’. But you have to learn to forgive those people who steal your best ideas and publish them thousands of years before you were born: with philosophy, this happens all the time!

Another early idea of mine that I once fondly imagined was original related to the question of selfishness and morality. It seemed to me it could be argued that there is no such thing as an unselfish action, in that nobody ever does anything unless doing that thing makes them happier than not doing it. The comparative degree of the adjective ‘happier’ is significant here. The action need not make the perpetrator ‘happy’, just ‘happier’ than not doing it.

To take an extreme example, imagine a small band of soldiers fleeing from a much larger force. One of those in the fleeing group is wounded, and is slowing the progress of his companions. That man volunteers to stay behind alone, to fight a desperate rear-guard action against overwhelming odds, in order to give his colleagues more time to escape. Surely this is the supreme example of altruism, the sort of episode depicted at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), where a small band of partisans is being pursued by Franco’s Fascist troops. But even here, it could be argued that the man who stayed behind did so not because it made him happy, but only because it made him happier than staying with his companions, and thereby imperilling the lives of them all. Blaise Pascal put this point rather well in his famous Pensées, where he says,

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end...the will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves. (Section vii, no. 425)

This concept will be considered more fully in the Conclusion below, as part of an in-depth discussion of the meaning of the term, ‘morality’. This point will also figure in my discussion of Economics: you might say that nobody ever does anything unless they think that they are going to profit by it. It is this assumption, indeed, that underpins our entire free market economic system, as we have been seeing, rather to our cost, recently. Taken to extremes, it brings us to the currently fashionable economic creed of neoliberalism, which declares that, ‘There is no such thing as society’. A corrective is badly needed here, as we will see in the Economics chapter below. It seems that the profit motive is hard wired into the human psyche, but because human beings are infinitely varied, everyone’s conception of what constitutes ‘profit’ is also varied. That of the drug addict will be very different from that of the hedge fund manager, for example, although both are addicts in their way. In fact, it could be argued that even love is nothing more than a purely selfish interest taken in another person or thing for the sake of the pleasure that they have to offer you. As Confucius once noted, ‘Can there be a love that does not make demands of its object?’ ‘Aber Gott im Himmel, was ist das?!? Dieser Mann ist as pessimistic as Schopenhauer, as cynical as Camus! I will read no more of this amoral rubbish! Into the bin with it!’ But nay, nay. Soft, gentle reader: stay thy revengeful hand. Only hear me out, and all will yet be well. Things work out. Personally, I have always rated love very highly on my list of priorities. Remember too the observation made by Alexander Pope (1688-1744) in his very long work, An Essay on Man that was finally published in 1734. Towards the end of ‘Epistle III’ he notes,

Self-love forsook the path it first pursued

And found the private in the public good...

Thus God and Nature linked the general frame,

And bade self-love and social be the same. (Lines 281-2, 317-8)

Pope is talking about what we might call, ‘enlightened self-interest’ here. The basic selfishness of humankind is in fact a zero-sum game: it all comes out in the wash: it does not make us all monsters. We are still the same people that you see around you every day. One man’s idea of ‘profit’ is not necessarily another’s: people choose different routes to happiness. Surely it is through giving that we receive, by loving that we are loved, and in service to the community that we find our place. Some people derive great happiness from making others happy, a motivation that we should all aspire to, for surely those who bring happiness into the lives of others cannot keep it out of their own. The motivation may be selfish, but the consequences of people’s actions are always of much greater significance than their motivation for those actions. I little thought at the time I first conceived those ideas how hideously perverted and misapplied they were later to be by the neoliberals, who drew mainly on the philosophy of Ayn Rand (1905-82).

Besides, this idea of the basic selfishness of man, like all my other early thoughts, of course turned out to be not so original after all. I later came to realise that many others had danced around the concept, while not perhaps stating it as bluntly as I do here. I might just mention in this context Epicurus of Samos (341-270 BC), Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Blaise Pascal (1623-62), David Hume (1711-66), Claude Helvétius (1715-71), and the economic theorists Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) and Adam Smith (1723-90). Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and the Utilitarians also toyed with the idea in the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century the study of the subject had been put onto a more scientific footing, under the heading of ‘egoism’. The sub-categories of ethical egoism, rational egoism, and psychological egoism were distinguished by writers like Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Ayn Rand (1905-82), and Derek Parfit (1942-2017). When it comes to academic Philosophy, it seems that there really is nothing new under the sun!

Of course, philosophers tend to over-analyse and rarefy their concepts to such an extent that they cease to have any meaningful existence at all. For a concept to have practical utility, you have to keep it simple. If you come across a philosophical tenet or scientific theory that is impossibly complicated, you must suspect that it is either,

Completely wrong or

Right, but completely irrelevant or

Half right, but equally irrelevant

The man who stayed behind to fight a rearguard action gave his life as a ransom for many, and therefore deserves to be honoured with the honour that is due to him in the society that we humans have superimposed upon God’s world. Self-sacrifice is the highest form of morality, according to our human system of values, and we live now in a world of human values. But these are not God’s values, as will later become clear. Nevertheless, this story will have a happy ending, although getting there might take a bit of reaching. and a bit of grasping, and, for that matter, a bit of courage. We must be prepared to look the truth in the face, however ugly that face may be. We often find this hard to do. As T.S. Eliot observed in Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets, ‘human kind cannot bear very much reality’ (lines 42-3). But I would argue that the face of truth is not all that ugly – rather more a face of...er...’character’, perhaps. Well, some would say ‘character-riddled’ I suppose, but in my view it is a face that the wise man can learn to love. It will be noted that my tone throughout is one of cheerfulness and gratitude for what I believe to be very good reasons, as we shall see.

I would like to mention at this point that as an academic I have been used to writing scholarly pieces of work that have been heavily referenced and footnoted: indeed, sometimes the footnotes have taken up half of the page! But I want to avoid footnotes here for a number of reasons. First, they will be rather tedious for both the reader and for me as the writer. Since this is basically just a general survey for the general reader, written in what I hope is plain language, I don’t want to spoil the fun for either of us: I hope to make this something of an entertaining read! I will, however, always make a point of sourcing the lengthier quotations in the text, and I will provide page numbers when I cite references from journals. This book is not intended for professional philosophers or great intellectuals, but only for the interested layman, who feels that a background knowledge of philosophers and Philosophy ought to have a place in the well-furnished mind.

Secondly, a certain proportion of what follows will be simply my own views, with which you may agree or agree not. Thirdly, this text is so replete with references that once again footnotes would take up half the page, or require frequent flipping to the back of the book. Fourthly, I have a precedent for this. Bertrand Russell himself in his monumental History of Western Philosophy (1946) produced a book that was very short on footnotes indeed: they were almost entirely absent. But finally, and most important, we now live in a new age of profound intellectual revolution. There is no longer any excuse for anyone of an enquiring mind to remain ignorant about anything. I refer of course to the near-miraculous powers of the internet, the modern-day Oracle of Delphi, which will surely change our world in the most profound of ways. I have used it myself in the writing of this book. Of course, not all of the information provided on the web is accurate, and ye sceptical historian must remain as suspicious of this source as of all the others, if not more so, but multiple entries are provided for each topic, and they can all be checked against external sources. I often came to feel, in the course of researching and writing this text over thirteen years, that I was supporting Amazon’s book department single-handed, but I found the web to be an invaluable guide to the books that I needed to buy to help with this project. So what I suggest is this. Read me with your laptop, tablet or smart phone glowing by your side. If you doubt anything that I say, or want more information on a topic, check it out immediately with The Oracle. Nobody is infallible, but I have gone to a lot of trouble here to ensure that my factual statements will prove to be robust. The text that follows is packed with information that I have found to be very interesting and which, I hope, may also prove to be of interest to others. As Confucius once noted, ‘It is impossible to open a book without learning something’, and I will be very surprised if anyone, whatever their speciality, can read through this entire text without emerging a little the wiser. Dull would he be of soul indeed who cannot find at least something of interest in the pages that follow. If all else fails, readers might amuse themselves by playing ‘spot the literary allusion’ as they go through the text. Have you just missed one?

If my tone is sometimes donnish, I must apologise for that: long years of teaching have left their mark. You can take the teacher out of the classroom, but not the classroom out of the teacher! Forgive me too for doing all the talking: as a teacher, I used to employ the Socratic method in my seminars and tutorials, constantly questioning the students about the topic they were supposed to have studied for that week. I found this to be a splendid way of getting the old brainboxes creaking into action: something of a heuristic approach. The more I could get the students talking, and the less I said myself, the more I counted the tutorial a success. Of course, this didn’t always work! But I would say to teachers everywhere, if you are learned, then wear your learning lightly, and keep a sense of humour. If readers can get through this entire text without at least one hearty belly-laugh, then I will have failed! There is always room for humour in every context. If there is one thing that philosophy ought to teach us, it is not to take ourselves too seriously, and not to take the world too seriously either: you’ll never get out of it alive! Arrogance is the enemy of truth. But on the other hand, professionalism should be taken seriously, for its own sake.

While on the subject of teaching, I would like to mention here something that long years of teaching have taught me. It is, quite simply, that important points need to be stressed more than once. If readers note, therefore, that some points are reiterated in different locations, it should not be assumed that this is indicative of encroaching senile dementia on my part: the re-stressing is deliberate, in the interests of clarity at different points. Teachers should also try to guide their charges towards clarity of thought, and encourage them to care about their fellow men, as so many of our

great religious figures have taught us. There is a place for religion in the world, and in our lives, but religion does need to be kept firmly in its place, and not allowed to run out of control. It will be a recurrent theme of this treatise that religion makes a good servant, but a bad master. The same might be said of economic philosophies.

Having said that, however, I must admit that those philosophers whom I admire the most were all religious sceptics, or at best indifferent on religious questions. I have in particular four ‘heroes’ who are Baruch Spinoza (1632-77),

Tomas Paine (1737-1809), Albert Einstein (1879-1955), and Karl Popper (1902-94). Spinoza and Paine in particular appealed to me because both were uncompromising rationalists like myself. These four will all receive more detailed treatment in the chapter devoted exclusively to them below. The good philosopher needs to be possessed of a rare combination of courage, self-confidence, and humility, always remembering that however strongly he may feel that he is right, the only thing he can ever know for sure is that he could be wrong. All too often, however, this courage can shade into foolhardiness, the self-confidence into arrogance, and the humility into unshakable conviction. Not even my four philosopher heroes are entirely innocent on those counts. No one is perfect, no one is ever completely right, and even my four ‘heroes’ are open to criticism, as I shall show below.

My four thinkers all appealed to me initially entirely on the grounds of their philosophies, but on later researching into their backgrounds I was surprised to discover how much they had in common. First, three of my four heroes were Jewish by descent: Thomas Paine was the only gentile in my quartet. Next, three out of four trained as craftsmen before they became famous as writers and philosophers: Spinoza was a lens grinder, Paine a stay maker, while Popper left school at 16 and became an apprentice cabinetmaker. He did not begin serious academic studies until he was 23. Only Einstein had anything like a conventional academic education, although even his was patchy and disrupted. Considered to be rather dim academically, his tutors gave him poor references. He was unable to get the teaching job that he had trained for, and began his working life as a Patent Office clerk, not getting a full-time academic post until he was over 30. Not one of them took the primrose path through an expensive private schooling and on to a top flight university: indeed, not one of them ever took a first degree at all, although Einstein and Popper both acquired teaching certificates, and were able to submit dissertations in later life which earned them doctorates. But all four did have one thing in common: they all displayed a healthy contempt for authority, and were more than ready to think for themselves. Indeed, Albert is on record as saying, ‘God has punished me for my contempt for authority by making me an authority myself!’, while Paine observed, ‘I never quote: I always think’. All four were in fact very largely self-educated men. Spinoza and Einstein were both panentheists and determinists and therefore held an obvious appeal for me as kindred spirits, but Paine and Popper were most certainly neither. Popper in fact harboured a profound distrust of ‘historicism’, which he saw as a kind of determinism, while Paine was simply a deist, describing his religion as ‘doing good’. He came close to pantheism, but in the end retained his belief in a personal God and an afterlife. A final point of similarity between them was that all four suffered struggle, hardship, and persecution over the course of their lifetimes. Indeed, Einstein and Popper were forced to flee for their lives from Nazi Germany. Although they gave us so much, not one of them died a wealthy man. In fact, Spinoza and Paine died in poverty. Einstein and Popper became full-time academics, and as I know well, academics never die rich! But we count ourselves fortunate in other ways.

Now why those four in particular? The good philosopher must be possessed of total scepticism, utter disrespect, and complete indifference to other people’s opinion of him. His loyalty must be only to the truth as he sees it, even if this truth proves to be unpalatable to his audience. All four of my heroes possessed these qualities in large measure. Einstein was cordially detested by the Right, and Popper by the Left, while Spinoza and Paine were perfectly happy to be unpopular with everyone. Despite this, however, all four were great humanitarians. In the cases of Paine, Popper, and Einstein their humanitarianism was overt, manifest, and palpable. In the case of Spinoza, some reading between the lines is required, but he too was a great humanitarian, with a genuine concern for the wellbeing of mankind.

Philosophy tends to be regarded by most people as an impossibly elevated, ethereal, abstract, and intellectual study that they would prefer not to have anything to do with. As regards academic Philosophy as taught in university departments, they may have something of a point there, but I believe that academic philosophers insist upon too narrow a definition of their subject. I intend to treat it in a broader context here. In my view, ‘philosophy’ in its broader sense may be seen as intersecting with every other academic discipline, and with every aspect of life in general. I suspect that in fact most of us become philosophers by compulsion: we have to arrive at a view of the world that makes sense to us. In my case, I was never overly concerned about whether my views were right or wrong: I simply thought that you had to believe in something as a starting position, and then keep an open mind, being ready to change your opinions in the light of new knowledge or experiences. But my own speculations have led me to the conclusions that,

Truth is absolute, not relative.

Morality is absolute, not relative.

Reality (for the individual) is objective not subjective.

But happiness is subjective, not objective.

In the political and economic spheres I am a Centrist: fanaticism and extremism are always to be avoided. I believe that every successful economy must have a free enterprise capitalist system at its core, and in consequence we must be prepared to tolerate a degree of inequality as a result of this. The question is, of course, how much inequality is tolerable? I do not stand for making the rich poor, but I believe that the poor need to be made richer. I am reminded here of Karl Popper’s dictum that we should strive not for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but rather for the least misery of the greatest number. Moreover, the capitalism that we have should not be unbridled, ‘let ’er rip’ private capitalism: this form of capitalism has proved itself to be ultimately self-destructive twice in recent times, once in the 1930s and again in 2007-9. Capitalism, like religion, makes a good servant, but a bad master. It needs to be regulated, controlled, and harnessed so that it works for the benefit of the entire community, and not just for a fortunate few. Capitalism on its own is not enough: the state also has a role to play. I have not changed my political and economic views greatly over the course of a longish lifetime, but the world has lurched violently to the Right around me in economic terms so that I now appear to be a ‘Lefty’, although I would see myself more as a Centrist. Apart from the monarchy and the House of Lords, which I have always believed to be indefensible, I approved of the status quo in the 1960s and was seen as a conservative: in fact, I even voted Conservative in 1964. I remember infuriating the Marxists of those days by telling them that I believed capitalism to be based upon a sounder understanding of human nature than was Communism. But today’s Conservative Party bears no resemblance to the party that I voted for in 1964 and so, without changing my views, I now appear as a radical in terms of my economic thought. Basically, however, I stand with Karl Popper as a pragmatist and a humanitarian.

Now ‘truth’ has of course proved to be a somewhat elusive commodity over the centuries, but even the highly sceptical Popper was not prepared to deny that absolute truth did exist, only that it was impossible to prove. Well, perhaps so, but being a simple fellow I apply just two criteria as tests for truth.

Does it work? If so, I say that it is true enough to be going on with.

Does