Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

JOHN GRAY LITERARY REVIEW London UK

The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

By Antonio Damasio Pantheon Books 

When, in 1842, Queen Victoria saw Jenny, an orangutan that had recently arrived at London Zoo, she is reported to have commented that she found the ape ‘disagreeably human’. Like Charles Darwin, who had visited the zoo a few years earlier, the monarch saw in Jenny our near kin. ‘When we observe the great apes,’ writes Antonio Damasio, ‘we sense the presence of precursors to our cultural humanity.’ Chimpanzees are like humans in creating tools, using them intelligently to feed themselves and transmitting their inventions to others. But their most important affinity with us, Damasio believes, is their capacity for feeling, which they share with species as different as elephants and marine mammals: ‘mammals possess an elaborate affective apparatus that, in many respects, resembles ours in its emotional roster.’

According to a conventional view, the most fundamental difference between humans and the other great apes is humans’ more highly developed capacities for thought and language – in other words, our superior intellects. A more decisive difference is the human capacity for feeling, and it is this that has enabled us to develop our cultures. As Damasio points out, however, cultural behaviours do not exist only in ‘minded creatures’. They can be found in very simple unicellular organisms, which rely on chemical molecules ‘to detect certain conditions in their environments, including the presence of others, and to guide the actions … needed to organize and maintain their lives in a social environment. For instance, bacteria can sense the numbers in the groups they form and in an unthinking way assess group strength, and they can, depending on the strength of the group, engage or not in a battle for the defence of their territory.’ Organisms without minds display kinds of behaviour we normally reserve for animals like ourselves; though humans do not descend directly from bacteria, our lives are governed by the same imperatives. The common thread linking the two is a process of homeostasis, operating in organisms to secure not only their survival but also a state of flourishing. This is where feeling comes in: ‘Feelings are the subjective experiences of the state of life – that is, of homeostasis – in all creatures endowed with a mind and a conscious point of view.’

In terms of the history of philosophy and of neuroscience, this is a revolutionary view of the mind and its place in the world. A thinker whose work straddles both disciplines, Damasio has criticised the inherited account of the mind in several of his books, notably Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994) and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (2003). Descartes’s dualism, which represents humans as immaterial minds controlling mechanical bodies, has been abandoned by pretty much all philosophers today. But they have not presented a compelling alternative, and something like Descartes’s error persists throughout Western culture. Surfacing in visions of humans uploading their minds into cyberspace, thereby conquering death, and in fears of self-aware robots turning on their makers, a Cartesian world-view remains deeply embedded in our thinking.

In what must by any standard be rated a ground-breaking shift in the way we understand ourselves, Damasio has shown that our lives, our cultures and our very selves are outgrowths of feeling, the origins of which are in humble micro-organisms that lived billions of years ago. We have been taught to think that our distinctively human activities originate in a recently evolved capacity for conscious thought, when in truth they are offshoots from life’s primordial beginnings. Not only social cooperation and the institutions of government but also art and religion spring from our essential nature as feeling beings. As Damasio writes with lapidary beauty, ‘A life not felt would have needed no cure.’

The implications of this radically post-Cartesian view of life and mind are profound and far-reaching, and for orthodox Darwinists they will be highly controversial. Damasio points out the parallels with Spinoza’s conception of the conatus, the continuing attempt in everything that exists to achieve a positively regulated life – ‘the first reality of our existence, as Spinoza would say when he described the relentless endeavor of each being to preserve itself’. There are also affinities with James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, in which life on Earth is a complex self-regulating system and planetary life operates through homeostatic processes that enable it to survive and renew itself. Damasio is demanding a paradigm shift in our view of ourselves, which many will be unwilling to accept.

One consequence of the view of mind that Damasio presents seems to me to be undeniably true. Ultra-reductionist theories in which humans are no more than algorithms – a view suggested in some of Yuval Harari’s otherwise highly illuminating writings – are nonsense. We are not lines of code accidentally embodied in living organisms. Being embodied is an essential part of what it means to be human. That is why utopian visions of cybernetic immortality and dystopian nightmares of superhumanly intelligent robots lording it over us are both unreal. It may become technologically feasible for the information that is stored in individual brains to be uploaded into cyberspace, but the result will be a shadow of the person that once existed, not that person immortalised. Artificial intelligence may conceivably spell the end of human life as we have known it, but not because robots have become super-powerful versions of humans. Damasio questions whether robots could be conscious, which he says requires having ‘an individual perspective of our own organism and individual feeling’. Perhaps they could evolve consciousness of this kind, possibly as a result of flaws in programming or defects in their mechanical bodies. But if robots ever do become conscious, they will be more like the bifurcated creatures imagined by Descartes than human beings.

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking, physicist who came to symbolize the power of the human mind, dies at 76

By Joel Achenbach and Boyce Rensberger Washington Post

Stephen W. Hawking, the British theoretical physicist who overcame a devastating neurological disease to probe the greatest mysteries of the cosmos and become a globally celebrated symbol of the power of the human mind, has died at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.

His family announced the death but did not provide any further details.

Unable to move a muscle, speechless but for a computer-synthesized voice, Dr. Hawking had suffered since the age of 21 from a degenerative motor neuron disease similar to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Initially given two years to live, a diagnosis that threw him into a profound depression, he found the strength to complete his doctorate and rise to the position of Lucasian professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, the same post held by Isaac Newton 300 years earlier.

Dr. Hawking eventually became one of the planet’s most renowned science popularizers, and he embraced the attention, traveling the world, meeting with presidents, visiting Antarctica and Easter Island, and flying on a special “zero-gravity” jet whose parabolic flight let Dr. Hawking float through the cabin as if he were in outer space.

“My goal is simple,” he once said. “It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.” He spent much of his career searching for a way to reconcile Einstein’s theory of relativity with quantum physics and produce a “Theory of Everything.”

He wrote an international best seller, “A Brief History of Time” (1988), which delved into the origin and ultimate fate of the universe. He deliberately set out to write a mass-market primer on an often incomprehensible subject.

Although the book was sometimes derided as being dense, and had a reputation for being owned more than read, it sold millions of copies, was translated into more than 20 languages, and inspired a mini-empire of similar books from Dr. Hawking, including “The Universe in a Nutshell” and “A Briefer History of Time.”

With his daughter, Lucy, he wrote a series of children’s books about a young intergalactic traveler named George. His blunt 2013 memoir, “My Brief History,” explored his development in science as well as his turbulent marriages. In addition, Dr. Hawking was the subject of a 1991 documentary, “A Brief History of Time,” directed by Errol Morris, and countless newspaper and magazine articles.

With the aid of a voice synthesizer, controlled by his fingers on a keyboard, he gave speeches around the world, from Chile to China. He played himself on such TV programs as “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “The Simpsons,” the latter featuring Dr. Hawking telling the show’s lazy animated patriarch, “Your theory of a doughnut-shaped universe is interesting, Homer. I may have to steal it.”

He insisted that his reputation as the second coming of Albert Einstein had gotten out of control through “media hype.”

“I fit the part of a disabled genius,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “At least, I’m disabled — even though I’m not a genius like Einstein. ... The public wants heroes. They made Einstein a hero, and now they’re making me a hero, though with much less justification.”

His scientific achievements included breakthroughs in understanding the extreme conditions of black holes, objects so dense that not even light can escape their gravity.

His most famous theoretical breakthrough was to find an exception to this seemingly unforgiving law of physics: black holes are not really black, he realized, but rather can emanate thermal radiation from subatomic processes at their boundary, and can potentially evaporate. Scientists refer to such theoretical emanations as “Hawking radiation.”

This revelation impressed other scientists with the way it took Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which is essential for understanding the gravity of black holes, and connected it to newer theories of quantum mechanics, which cover subatomic processes.

Plus, he threw in a dash of old-fashioned thermodynamics — achieving a kind of physics trifecta.

“Black holes ain’t as black as they are painted,” Dr. Hawking once said in a lecture, characteristically describing complicated physics in ordinary language. “They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole, both to the outside, and possibly, to another universe. So, if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.”

He also hypothesized that miniature black holes, remnants of the big bang, may be strewn through space, though he noted that so far they haven’t be discovered. “This is a pity, because if they had, I would have got a Nobel prize,” he joked.

Early life

Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on Jan. 8, 1942 — the 300th anniversary of Galileo’s death, he liked to point out. His father was a physician and specialist in tropical diseases; his mother was active in the Liberal Party.

Both parents were Oxford-educated, and Stephen — the eldest of four siblings — grew up surrounded by books. But he did not show particular academic promise, despite an obvious streak of brilliance that caused his friends to nickname him “Einstein.”

“I always wanted to know how everything worked,” he told Omni magazine. “I would take things apart to see how they worked, but they didn’t often go back together.”

He was a bit lazy, and a bon vivant, as he later would admit. After being admitted to the University of Oxford, he skimped on his studies and enjoyed carousing with fellow members of the Oxford Boat Club, for which he was a tactically savvy coxswain. He graduated in 1962 and did just well enough on his final exam to earn admission to the University of Cambridge to pursue a doctorate.

“Physics was always the most boring subject at school because it was so easy and obvious. Chemistry was much more fun because unexpected things, such as explosions, kept happening,” Dr. Hawking wrote in his memoir. “But physics and astronomy offered the hope of understanding where we came from and why we are here. I wanted to fathom the depths of the Universe.”

Then came what he later referred to as “that terrible thing.” He’d noticed at Oxford that he’d become increasingly clumsy and would sometimes stumble and fall for no obvious reason. Tests revealed motor neuron disease; he could not expect to live more than a couple of years.

After a period of despondency in which he holed up in his room and listened to Wagner, he attended a New Year’s Eve party at which he met a young student named Jane Wilde. Their courtship spurred his will to live. They married in 1965.

“We had this very strong sense at the time that our generation lived anyway under this most awful nuclear cloud -- that with a four-minute warning the world itself could likely end,” Jane Hawking later told the British newspaper the Observer. “That made us feel above all that we had to do our bit, that we had to follow an idealistic course in life. That may seem naive now, but that was exactly the spirit in which Stephen and I set out in the Sixties -- to make the most of whatever gifts were given us.”

They would have three children before his condition deteriorated to near-complete paralysis.

He received a doctorate in 1966 and became a postgraduate research physicist at Cambridge, where he hoped to study under the celeberated astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. Instead, he was assigned to Dennis Sciama — a disappointment, at first.

But, as he later wrote, “This turned out to be a good thing. Hoyle was abroad a lot and I wouldn’t have seen much of him. Sciama on the other hand was there, and was always stimulating.”

A few years later, while on the staff of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, he formed a close collaboration with Cambridge colleague Roger Penrose. They developed a theorem that the universe has not always existed.

The two showed that if the theory of relativity is true, the universe must have sprung into existence, out of what appeared to be nothing, at a specific moment in the past and from a place where gravity became so strong that space and time are curved beyond recognition -- what is known as a “singularity.”

At the remarkably young age of 32, Dr. Hawking was named a fellow of the Royal Society. He received the Albert Einstein Award, the most prestigious in theoretical physics. He joined the Cambridge faculty in 1973 as a research assistant in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics; he was promoted to professor of gravitational physics in 1977.

Early fame

While at Cambridge, Dr. Hawking began to question the big-bang theory, which by then most people had accepted.

Perhaps, he suggested, there was never a start and would be no end, but just change — a constant transition of one “universe” giving way to another through glitches in space-time. All the while, Dr. Hawking was digging into exploding black holes, string theory and the birth of black holes in our galaxy.

Dr. Hawking was known to weigh in rather playfully on grand cosmological questions. He once suggested that if the universe stopped expanding and began to contract, time would run backward. He later said that he’d changed his mind on that.

He gained headlines when he declared that humans should colonize other worlds to hedge their bets against the possible destruction of this one.

In an updated, illustrated (easier to handle) version of “A Brief History of Time,” he added a chapter on wormholes — back-alley cosmic tunnels that might conceivably let someone travel back in time. Prancing on the edge of the plausible, he nonetheless stuck to what science can tell us.

“He thought about the deep and important questions in novel ways,” said David Spergel, Princeton University’s chairman of astrophysics. “Hawking’s important contribution was identifying new ways to answer those questions and formulating mathematically sophisticated ways of connecting general relativity and quantum mechanics.”

Dr. Hawking had sought to come up with a so-called Theory of Everything that would essentially put an end to theoretical physics by answering all the outstanding questions. But whether such a theory can ever be found is unclear.

Dr. Hawking said our universe might not be the only one there is -- that many more may be popping into existence all around us. He suggested that “cosmic wormholes” briefly link those universes to ours and that subatomic particles may travel from one universe to another through them, accounting for some of the strange behavior of particles that physicists observe.

The power of Dr. Hawking’s celebrity was measured at times by the tabloid coverage he drew for his complicated personal life. His wife Jane spent hours every day bathing, washing and feeding Dr. Hawking, who required constant nursing care. He developed pneumonia in 1985 on a trip to Geneva, and Jane battled doctors who wanted to turn off his life support.

But the marriage grew strained, in part because of her Christian faith and his adamant atheism, and in part because of what she called his remote and stoic temperament. She described him as an “all-powerful emperor” who seemed blind to how demanding his illness became for her as she also took care of their young children. He refused measures that would have made life easier for her, and she felt it was “too cruel” to coerce him to see it her way.

They grew apart and, in 1990, just shy of their 25th wedding anniversary, separated when Dr. Hawking left Jane for his nurse, Elaine Mason. He married Elaine five years later after his divorce from Jane became final. Dr. Hawking called his second marriage, which also ended in divorce, “passionate and tempestuous.”

Survivors include his children, Lucy, Robert and Tim.

Dr. Hawking’s offices were filled with photographs of him standing with admirers ranging from popes (he was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) to the late Soviet physicist and human rights campaigner Andrei Sakharov.

The theoretical physicist once described his heroes as “Galileo, Einstein, Darwin and Marilyn Monroe.” The last was of particular appeal to the scientist who hung posters of her and collected Monroe-related bric a brac.

“My daughter and secretary gave me posters of her, my son gave me a Marilyn bag and my wife a Marilyn towel,” he once said. “I suppose you could say she was a model of the universe.”

Boyce Rensberger is a former Washington Post science writer and editor.

The Puzzle Of Patriotism

The Puzzle Of Patriotism

Phil Badger (Philosophy Now) tries to make sense of a tangle of pride, identity and metaphysics.

“If you believe yourself a citizen of the world then you are a citizen of nowhere.”

UK Prime Minister Theresa May, October 2016

My national identity seems to me to be both contingent and coincidental. Being born British, while quite lucky in terms of my life chances and political rights, wasn’t something of my own doing. Therefore it is no more something for me to be proud of than my being born in the middle of the twentieth century. I was once told a (possibly apocryphal) story about a former Prime Minister of Belgium who, when asked if he was proud of his nationality, replied that the question was ridiculous and that he might as well be asked if he was “proud of being a man.”

Some people will find this idea simply outrageous. For them there is nothing accidental about nationality. Such people hold what I might call a ‘metaphysical theory’ of their identity: consciously or otherwise, they feel that a kind of spiritual thread connects together those who share a particular nationality so that they also share a set of mutual obligations and rights.

Not me. When I was about fourteen, the BBC put on one of its series aimed at educating and informing the population. In this particular case, the actors pretended to be philosophers such as Plato and Socrates. I suspect that the whole thing was a ghastly hamfest; but for me the important thing was that a toga-clad Socrates asked his pupil “How should men live?” Putting aside the inherent misogyny of the question, this was a crucial moment in my young life. First, the revelation that people actually asked questions like that was mind-blowing; second, the seed was planted that there could be an answer to it which pertained to humans in general and not just to those in my own community. At that moment, with deference to Socrates, I became a citizen not of a small town in northern England, but of the world.

In this article I’m going to do my best to get to grips with the idea of patriotism in the most generous-spirited manner I can muster. I will refrain (after now) from references to Dr Johnson, who opined patriotism to be “the last refuge of the scoundrel” and instead examine a trio of philosophical models of patriotism.

Model 1: Communitarian Patriotism

In his wonderful book Justice (2010), the ethicist Michael Sandel tells a well-authenticated story about Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Lee, it seems, began the American Civil War as an instructor at West Point military academy, and, respected military genius as he was, was approached by Abraham Lincoln with an offer to take command of the Union armies in the coming conflagration. The story goes that Lee asked Lincoln for a night to think the offer over. Lee spent that night pacing his rooms and juggling the competing claims of principle (he was apparently no supporter of slavery) and loyalty to hearth and home. In the end, Lee chose the demands of filial loyalty over those of abstract principle. He refused Lincoln’s offer, and headed south to defend a system he despised rather than take up arms against his fellow Southerners.

What are we to make of this story? Sandel’s view – one he knows will outrage the liberal-minded – is sympathetic to Lee’s position. He points out that for most people the feeling of connection to our homes, our communities, and their histories, is what gives us our sense of who we are. This is the communitarian view. Conversely, for liberals, ideally, the individual decides upon his or her principles from a position of detachment.

Lee’s story brings into sharp relief the gulf of incomprehension that exists between the liberal and the communitarian on the issue of identity. For the liberal, the notion of what we might call ‘inherited responsibility’ is simply an absurdity: I am no more responsible for the crimes of the British Empire than a Russian person of my age is for those of Stalin. But for the communitarian the idea seems plausible, even obvious. Of course, the liberal is willing to accept that we might owe something to those who are still suffering the impact of past actions by our co-nationals – for example, political chaos in the Middle East – but only to the extent that we are still benefiting from them. If my grandfather robbed your grandfather, that’s nothing to do with me, so long as his ill-gotten gains didn’t put me through university.

You might be feeling a little uneasy at this point. Specifically, you might be feeling an intuitive sympathy for the communitarian view. You might even be thinking that there’s something psychologically odd about the kind of person who can’t grasp it.

If so, you are in good company. In his book The Righteous Mind (2012), the evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Haidt sees such liberals as lacking something that most people have as a matter of instinct. He does not precisely say we’re defective (although he comes close), but he certainly thinks we’re evolutionary anomalies, born without the full range of moral intuitions possessed by others.

One of the things wrong with Haidt’s view is that he fails to see that the detached liberal position is not based on an odd moral intuition but on a kind of achievement which requires work. Many of us as children and since have indulged in national pride but liberals have learnt to treat these psychological tendencies with a certain caution and allow them only limited weight in wider, more universal schemes of values.

Model 2: Contractual Patriotism

Contractual theories of patriotism acknowledge the ‘accidental’ nature of identity yet seek to maintain that we nevertheless have special obligations to those who share membership of our particular communities. There is no notion here of there being an actual contract. Only if you become a naturalised citizen is there ever some kind of official ‘signing up’. Instead what is usually invoked is a sort of implicit contract based on mutual benefit and shared hazards.

A common way of understanding how such implicit communal loyalties develop is through considering ‘The Prisoner’s Dilemma’. In the classic version of this thought experiment you imagine yourself as a criminal who has been arrested with your partner in crime. The police separate you for purposes of interrogation, and you’re told that if you confess you’ll receive a lesser punishment than if you don’t say anything and yet are found guilty because your colleague confesses. However, the only way you can be found guilty is if either of you confesses. If neither confess, you both go scot free. Of course, the implication is that the same offer is being made to your friend. Your decision becomes a matter of strategy. You could assume the loyalty of your accomplice and stay silent – a position that carries with it the obvious risk that he won’t stay silent; or you can sing like the proverbial canary. What would you do?

One limitation of the standard prisoner’s dilemma is that it is a one-off situation in which neither person has any incentive to do anything but look after their immediate interests. Other versions of the game have proposed a repeated (‘iterated’) form in which you get to play the game over and over again, so that over time you can punish disloyalty by giving back in kind. The most successful strategy for establishing stable co-operation then turns out to be initial mutual cooperation, followed by tit-for-tat.

All of this has much to do with how implicit contracts are built up. In 1968 the economist Garrett Hardin published a hugely influential paper called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, in which he predicted ecological disaster. Commons resources are resources not owned by any particular individual, such as fish stocks in the ocean or communal grazing land. Hardin predicted that these resources would be decimated because no-one would have any incentive not to exploit them – the logic being that if I don’t grab what I can others will and the resource will soon be gone anyway. What Hardin got wrong, at least in part, was that the actions of the users of commons are not one-off events. If we both live in the same village and you let your herd of sheep overgraze the common land, then I, the local blacksmith who have only a couple of goats which I keep for milking, will be seriously unhappy with you. This won’t much matter if you never need a blacksmith or your shoes mending (my brother is the local shoemaker), but you will. Our lives are a kind of iterated prisoner’s dilemma in which, in due course, my daughter has a pretty good chance of marrying your son. You might think twice before ripping off one of your grandchild’s other grandparents.

This suggests that localism is a good strategy for producing high levels of co-operation. Of course, we won’t be entirely self-sufficient, so we’ll establish trading relationships with outsiders who will win our trust or not based on a larger-scale version of the same iterated interactions. No doubt the definition of who ‘we’ are will be modified over time, and ultimately ‘our’ community might become the nation state.

The problem with this view concerns what we might call the limits of pragmatism. In the context of our local community I might treat you fairly because I need to do so. The flaw in the pragmatist position is that at the scale of the nation state things are just too big and complex for this to work. We simply can’t build up relationships of trust based on mutual dependency with people whom we will either never meet again, or increasingly, never meet at all. Looking around my study there are few, if any, items that I can see that are locally sourced. My bookcases came from a very nice shop my partner found, but I have no idea where they were made, and my laptop certainly isn’t a local craft product. By the same token, the reason that there are still fish in the North Sea is more to do with soulless regulation achieved at the supranational level than through the iterated contact of fishermen.

The implicit contract based on pragmatism and acquired trust that binds us to our fellow citizens locally is not one that ever has the chance to evolve to the national level. From the outset nations were governed by abstract laws and values. In the terminology of the sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), the local involves Gemeinschaft (community) and the national involves Gesellschaft (impersonal) models of social cohesion. And it gets more impersonal over time as the scope and complexity of government increases and co-operation becomes more global. Edmund Burke’s ‘small battalions’, what we usually call ‘civil society’, have necessarily given way to ‘big government’. For many people this is a matter of profound regret. It’s even a problem for those proponents of the activist state who want citizens to be more than consumers/tax payers with strong ties only to their own families. Personally, I love paying tax when I can see it being used to improve the community and make my and others’ lives longer, healthier, and more secure; but this seems to some a rather pallid basis for social cohesion, and one prone to fall apart at the least suspicion (justified or otherwise) of freeloading, by individuals or groups.

Model 3: Reasonable Assent & Patriotism

The last model I’ll consider is associated primarily with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant argued that we owe the state our loyalty to the extent that it embodies laws that any rational being would consider just. The exact qualities and laws that such a state might have and make are a matter for serious debate; but the point is that if they can be agreed upon, their reasonableness confers legitimacy and, therefore, obligation.

This model of patriotism has several major advantages over the others. Firstly, it gets around a famous objection to the idea of implicit contractual consent made by David Hume. Hume likens the idea of our belonging to a society to which we automatically owe obligations to the condition of a press-ganged sailor who is provided with food, water and a bunk on a ship if he works, but who was never asked if he wanted to go along for the ride. By contrast, Kant’s position is that we owe an obligation to our society only to the extent that the society keeps a bargain that anyone would reasonably accept, given the option. If the community falls short of its laws being reasonable, then our obligation to it to that extent vanishes.

Of course, communitarians aren’t going to be impressed by this, since it is the felt rather than the thought aspects of obligation which concern them. Indeed, they may (wrongly) see Kant’s argument as reducing identity to a consumer choice, rather than, as he would argue, the rational duty of a rational agent.

An advantage of Kant’s position is that it gives us a way of understanding our obligations which is far more applicable to our current circumstances than one based on a shared language, culture, or frequent interactions. Regardless of the promises of some politicians, the developed world will have to learn to live with the reality of mass migration, which will only become more pressing as climate change renders it a necessity. Bangladesh is going to sink, and globalisation is not going away either. Indeed, if we want to preserve any genuine (as opposed to a tourist theme park) localism, countries need to work together, since multinationals have a habit of riding roughshod over diversity unless prevented by regulation from doing so.

However, it is arguable that Kant’s approach constitutes the death knell of patriotism. On Kant’s model, ‘we’ are not those who share geography or culture in common, but rather, those who reach similar conclusions about the values that define a just society. The list of values might not entirely coincide for all liberals, but it would be surprising if they didn’t include notions of respect for individual autonomy, the rule of law, and democracy. Regardless of minor disagreements, liberals the world over have more in common with each other than with the communitarian conservative who lives next door to them and shares superficially similar cultural traditions.

For liberals the power of tradition is explainable in anthropological rather than moral terms. My own country is mired in traditional strangeness (we have, for example, a hereditary head of state, a partly unelected legislature, and an established church); and while US citizens might see their country as a comparative paragon of Enlightenment rationality, they are manifestly no less prone to nostalgia. When Kantian rationalists do get misty-eyed – the sight of a Spitfire in flight gets me every time – it is not patriotism that inspires the emotion but an altogether more abstract commitment: the aeroplane is emblematic of the triumph of the values Nazism aimed to extinguish. I’m even moved by the sight of the EU flag which, despite that institution’s multiple failings, represents an attempt to collectively face up to shared challenges by societies which have huge amounts in common. Cosmopolitans aren’t folk swept along by the emotional impact of listening to one too many John Lennon songs, but people who have reached conclusions and committed themselves accordingly. This is, in the end, what might make us seem strange to many people, because it takes work to be sceptical about the kind of tribalism that is natural to most of us. Like Edmund Burke, people tend to prefer prejudice to abstraction, so that feeling, often and tragically, trumps reason. We live in a world where we can no longer afford to let it do so.

© Philip Badger 2018

Phil Badger studied social sciences, including economics, psychology, and social policy, with philosophy, and teaches in Sheffield.