History ended. The only fight left is over who gets to inherit Michael Oakeshott’s legacy.

The end of history and the last man

Francis Fukuyama, the author of "The End of History” the 1989 lecture, which, along with Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations”which was written in response, framed much of the debate in international politics departments around the globe, has made a resurgent comeback. In a recent interview with DW, the influential social theorist argued that he’s still right about the end of history—that he’s been right all along. 

Author Francis Fukuyama

In response to a question asking how he’d respond to critics who question whether the triumph of Western liberal democracy was the last step in the human species’ sociocultural evolution—the endpoint of all human history, by saying, “I think the biggest problems have been with the misunderstanding. The concept of the end of history was the question: Where does the direction of history point? Does it point towards communism, which was the view of many intellectuals prior to that point? Or does it point towards liberal democracy? Which I think, in that respect, I'm still right.

History, in the philosophical sense, is really the development, or the evolution - or the modernization - of institutions, and the question is: In the world's most developed societies, what type [of institutions] are they? I think it's pretty clear that any society that wants to be modern still needs to have a combination of democratic political institutions in a market economy. And I don't think that China, or Russia, or any of the competitors out there really undermine that point.”

The End of History according to David Brooks

David Brooks in a recent New York Times piece advances an argument that echoes Fukuyama’s position. “The Cold War settled this contest of historic visions,” Brooks writes. “Democracy won.” 

David Brooks of the New York Times

But he’s a little less triumphant about this ideological victory than Fukuyama. Brooks cites Mark Lilla’s New Republic essay called “The Truth About Our Libertarian Age” as holding that “the post-Cold War era hasn’t meant the triumph of one ideology; it destroyed the tendency to rely upon big historic visions of any sort. Lilla argues that we have slid into a debauched libertarianism. Nobody envisions the large sweep of events; we just go our own separate ways making individual choices.”

Yes, history is over, Brooks asserts, but it has no shape. “The dream of universal democracy seems naïve. National interest matters most.” Brooks thinks Lilla is right to doubt Fukuyama in thinking that history is the inexorable march toward universal democracy—his piece “both describes and unfortunately exemplifies the current mood—and he laments it. “Arab nations are not going to be democratic anytime soon. The world is an aviary of different systems – autocracy, mercantile despotism – and always will be. Instead of worrying about spreading democracy, we’d be better off trying to make theocracies less beastly.”

Andrew Sullivan thinks Fukuyama was right and David Brooks is the only non-libertarian left standing

Andrew Sullivan wades into the debate—he’s ready to take Brooks on regarding his take on Lilla’s piece, on geopolitics, and, as we’ll see later, on Michael Oakeshott. Sullivan’s recent blog post more or less concedes that Fukuyama was right, too—calling “foolish” anyone who would “deny that most countries still seem headed over time toward Western norms. While I think Sullivan overstates the degree to which Francis Fukuyama was right, I completely agree with his point that illiberal, undemocratic political formations each have their own distinctive natures that need to be understood in their own terms, not as a lesser or greater form of democracy in potentia.

Andrew Sullivan of The Dish

Sullivan, the good Oakeshottian, rightly reminds us that “in the here and now, all sorts of hybrid [forms of government] are forming and will form, as they always have,” and that given such realities, “our goal in foreign policy is to understand them better by using the vast apparatus of political philosophy bequeathed to us by our Western canon, and tapping into our collective reserves of diplomatic and military experience, and adjust accordingly.” 

Sullivan labels Brooks a ‘liberal’ on the basis of Brooks’s impulse to assert the universal values found in American droit de seigneur. 

The passage in Brooks’s piece that Sullivan cites as being the exemplification of this ethos of American exceptionalism is this: “Such is life in a spiritual recession. Americans have lost faith in their own gospel. This loss of faith is ruinous from any practical standpoint. The faith bound diverse Americans, reducing polarization. The faith gave elites a sense of historic responsibility and helped them resist the money and corruption that always licked at the political system. Without the vibrant faith, there is no spiritual counterweight to rampant materialism. Without the faith, the left has grown strangely callous and withdrawing in the face of genocide around the world. The right adopts a zero-sum mentality about immigration and a pinched attitude about foreign affairs. Without the faith, leaders grow small; they have no sacred purpose to align themselves with.”

Toward a Libertarianism?

Sullivan argues that the same political ideology that regards government or governmental authority ‘axiomatically’ not keeping individuals from being what and who they want to be has been extended to apply to the international relationship of sovereign states. No super-power, even a benevolent one, has the “right to dictate the choices and fate of any other individual country, however despotic and evil its regime might be.” So, there’s no principle to stop Putin from annexing Crimea or to keep Israel from pursuing its policy agenda against the West Bank. Sullivan cites the Iraq war as the cause célèbre of this movement—as “a catastrophe now regarded as utterly illegitimate by everybody on the planet, apart from a few Cheney dead-enders and Tony Blair.”

Arguing over Oakeshott & what it means for politics

Michael Oakeshott argued that "politics is the art not of imposing a way of life, but of organising a common life… the art of accommodating moralities to one another." 

Michael Oakeshott

Oakeshott, interestingly, while Sullivan espouses a theory hewed from Oakeshott’s politics, it was Brooks who used Oakeshott’s thought as a guide to dealing with the goings-on in Iraq as far back as 2003. Brooks even cites Sullivan as providing the best insight into how to understand Oakeshott. “Sullivan, he wrote, observes that “the easiest way to grasp Oakeshott is to know that he loved Montaigne and Shakespeare. He loved Montaigne for his skepticism and Shakespeare for his array of eccentric characters. Oakeshott seemed to measure a society by how well it nurtured idiosyncratic individuals, and he certainly qualified as one.”

Brooks, circa 2003, sounds a lot like Sullivan from this morning—a similarity that extends beyond their shared desire to cultivate intellectual and personal idiosyrancies to encompass their outlooks on geopolitics.  In his 2003 piece ‘Arguing with Oakeshott, Brooks wrote, “We can't know how Oakeshott would have judged the decision to go to war in Iraq, but it is impossible not to see the warnings entailed in his writings. Be aware of what you do not know. Do not go charging off to remake a society when you don't understand its moral traditions, when you do not even understand yourself. Do not imagine that if you conquer a nation and impose something you call democracy that the results will be in any way predictable. Do not try to administer a country from behind a security bunker.”

Whose conservative?, Which rationality?

In thinking through the political landscape in 2003, Brooks made a ‘concession’ to his imagined Oakeshott: “government should be limited, prudent and conservative, but only when there is something decent to conserve. Saddam sent Iraqi society spinning off so violently, prudence became imprudent. The Middle East could not continue down its former course.” 

What was Brooks’s basis for holding such a position? He broke to Oakeshott, who was ambivalent about the American revolution, and thought that the ideals espoused in 1776 and the political regime that followed worked “precisely because our founders were epistemologically modest too, and didn't pretend to know what is the good life, only that people should be free to figure it out for themselves.” 

Compare that to Sullivan’s contemporary position that, in politics, we now must bracket “the simple democracy-spectrum and look for how to deal with various forms of oligarchy, kleptocracy, or emerging democratic society. Now and again, a little nudge might help (see the Balkans in the 1990s). But for the most part, the changes we want will happen without us (Tunisia, anyone?), and the places where we simply act as if the world were a blank page ready to be filled by democracies (Israel, Libya, anyone?) will turn out to be a case study in the frequent destiny of good intentions.”

I’m not the rationalist, you are

Both Brooks and Sullivan are careful to avoid the ideological plague that Oakeshott identified: rationalism. 

“By a pardonable abridgement of history,” Oakeshott wrote, “the rationalist character may be seen springing from the exaggeration of Bacon’s hopes and the neglect of the skepticism of Decartes; modern rationalism is what commonplace minds made out of the inspiration of men of discrimination and genius.” 

Oakeshott traces the evolution of the rationalist from his seventeenth century origins, in which what “was ‘L’art de penser’, became Your mind and how to use it, a plan by world-famous experts for developing a trained mind at a fraction of the usual cost. What was the Art of Living has become the Technique of Success, and the early and more modest incursions of the sovereignty of technique into education has blossomed into Pelmanism.”

Sullivan and Brooks both advance positions relative to international intervention that draw heavily on the ‘conservative’ thought of Michael Oakeshott. Interestingly, both react to Lilla’s use of the aviary metaphor. It’s Sullivan, though, who makes explicit the anti-rationalist insight borrowed from Oakeshott that would guide the Oakeshottian confronting such an unfriendly world. Sullivan is right: such a world calls for aviarists, not ideologues. 

The Plan to resist all planning is better than its opposite, but…

Oakeshott dismissed Hayek’s brand of political economic thinking with the line, “A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics.” He did so on grounds that Hayek had committed the kind of intellectual sin that Sullivan and Brooks are trying so hard to avoid: he was a rationalist. As Oakeshott put it, “This is, perhaps, the main significance of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom—not the cogency of his doctrine, but the fact that it is a doctrine.”

Sullivan and Brooks come to slightly different political positions from a very similar ideology. One thinker who better articulates the principled reasons (and the reasons are important—Oakeshott argued, “when we come to consider what a man actually thought, it is not [the] bare ideas which are important, but the grounds or reasons for them which he believed to be cogent, the ratio decidendi”) we might hold for deciding one way or another is Richard Flathman. 

Willful liberalism and the liberal principle

Flathman persuasively argues in favor of what he calls the 'liberal principle'. Flathman’s liberal principle holds "it is a prima facie good for persons to form, to act on, and to satisfy and achieve desires and interestes, objectives and purposes."

In addition to the liberal principle, Flathman calls for a general presumption in favor of freedom—meaning when we assess what people should and should not be allowed to do, our default position should always be in favor of letting them do it. And any restriction on human action needs to pass a rigorous bar.

The highest ideal available to us, from Flathman’s perspective, is individuality "understood as self-making or self-enacting." And that the pursuit of this ideal requires "abundant social and political plurality and, essential to both, the widest possible freedom of action." His devotion to individual freedom is so extensive, those passages come from a book called Reflections of a Would-Be Anarchist.

Flathman is consistently silent on matters of policy and how his ideas translate to the realm of politics (he comes by thisdisposition largely via Oakeshott, who thought that theory and practice were modally different enterprises. Many thinkers believe that theory and practice are different on normative grounds—for Oakeshott, the disjunction was epistemological!). But Sullivan’s take on politics can certainly fit easily within Flathman’s theoretical framework. Like Sullivan, Flathman argues insistently against the coercive power of the modern state.

Though Flathman is as wary of state power as any thinker I know, he’s no libertarian. Though it’s very begrudgingly, Flathman does allow that institutions are both necessary and desirable.

His reason? The most important question that can be asked about institutions is "whether or in what ways...[institutions] contribute to or obstruct attempts to pursue and...realize...the ideals of self-making, self-overcoming, and self-enactment."

Instead of libertarianism, Flathman posits a 'willful liberalism' in which a society will only work well so long as “a substantial number of people” for the most part “take care of themselves,” and don’t need to be “cared for” by others or by society. And there must be associates who, by cultivating virtuosities such as civility and especially magnanimity, care for others in the sense of not inflicting themselves harmfully or destructively on the latter.

Taking Flathman’s willful liberalism as a guide would allow for principled intervention—not on the basis of Brooks’s ‘spiritual’ purposiveness or Sullivan’s too-fatalistic libertarianism—but when it looks like stepping in is likely to do better for the institutions and institutionalisms people need to care for themselves.

Even better than Flathman: Mose Allison

I wasn’t convinced by either Fukuyama’s claim that history was at an end, or that any ideological opponent to ourselves as Hegelian last men would be on the wrong side of this post-historical world. You’d have to take a long—very long—view to be as sanguine as Fukuyama is here, “I think we're in for a rough period of time, with both Russia and China expanding. But I do think that it's a limited phenomenon - that in the long run, there's really only one important organizing idea out there: the idea of democracy in a market economy. So in the long run, I'm still optimistic.”

Whether Sullivan is correct that the answer is conservative—with conservatism properly understood—or more liberal—as Richard Flathman’s cultivation of a Nietzschean ‘pathos of distance’ vis-à-vis the coercive power of the modern state, the appropriate response to the set of circumstances we find ourselves in is perfectly embodied by Mose Allison:

“Ever since the world ended / There’s no more black and white / Ever since we all got blended / There’s no more reason to fuss and fight / Dogmas that we once defended / No longer seem worthwhile / Ever since the world ended / I face the future with a smile.”

What Robert Grosseteste has to teach us about the universe...and multidisciplinary education

Robert Grosseteste: An interesting Thinker

A thirteenth-century depiction of the geocentric cosmos.
L'image Du Monde by Gossuin de Metz, Bibliothèque Nationale de France

The Economist's Babbage blog recently published an interesting piece on Robert Grosseteste. Calling him “an intellectual giant,” the piece not only lauded the English scientist, philosopher, mathematician, and theologian, but it also turned some modern scholarship on his work into a morality tale. 

Robert Grosseteste is a terribly interesting figure. He was one of the earliest significant thinkers to read both Aristotle and his Islamic commentators.  His masterwork on light, De Luce, used Aristotle’s naturalistic approach in an attempt to develop unified physical laws to explain the universe’s origin and form. Of course, as a thinker of his time—Grosseteste served as Bishop of Lincoln—the universe he sought to explain was a medieval, geocentric universe; his thinking (or at least his explanations) in many ways bounded by the Catholic Church’s cosmological views. At least partially as a result, he avoided some of the more radical implications of his work. This avoidance can be seen most glaringly, for example, in that not one of his surviving treatises "discusses the possibility of other forms of universe, however close he came to implying it in his cosmogony." The Papal edict of 1277 banned teaching that more than one universe might exist. 

Still, the heavens and Earth he described are fascinating. 

De Luce, the first work to posit a single set of physical laws to account for the different structures of the heavens and Earth, predates Newton’s unifying concept of gravity by hundreds of years. His use of Aristotle’s approach departed significantly from his peers’ (and Aristotle’s) by turning the same physics of light and matter that explain why ordinary, Earth-bound objects onto the cosmos as a whole[i].

Though his approach was heavily influenced by Aristotle and the Greek’s naturalistic approach to discovery, Grosseteste offered an explanation that is sharply at odds with his predecessor’s famous nihilo ex nihilo—nothing can come from nothing. According to Grosseteste, an initial explosion of a primordial sort of light, lux expands the Universe into an enormous sphere, thinning matter as it goes.

Grosseteste, from this position, assumed that matter had a minimum density at which it becomes 'perfected' into a sort of crystalline form. This perfection occurs first at the outer edge of the cosmos, where matter crystallizes into the outermost sphere of the medieval cosmos. This perfect matter then radiates inward. But it’s no longer lux, but lumen, a different kind of light capable of producing a force that ‘pushes’ matter as it radiates. The research team points to the inward propagation of shock waves in a supernova explosion as an analogous process found in our contemporary understanding of physics.


At this point in his theory, the finite ratio of infinite sums returns as a 'quantization condition'.  The researchers from The Ordered Universe Project compare the way this rule allows for only a discrete set of solutions to the way our current understanding of atoms’ behavior is constrained by various energy levels. What that means is that applying Grosseteste’s theory to our universe will produce a finite number of spheres. There were nine perfect spheres in the medieval geocentric cosmos for which he had to account: the 'firmament', the fixed stars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. Grosseteste’s theory called for taking this system and doubling the density of the second sphere, tripling the density of the third, and so on, to produce a nested set of spheres (see graphic below).

Artistic rendering of Robert Grosseteste's nine-sphere universe.

Ingeniously, Grosseteste’s theory postulates that as the center of the universe is approached unperfected matter becomes dense enough and the inwardly radiating lumen weak enough that no further ‘transitions’ (or ‘perfection’ of matter) are possible. He thus accounts for the Aristotelian distinction between the perfect heavens and the imperfect Earth and atmosphere.

The Ordered Universe Project team added calculus and the computing technology to Grosseteste’s “remarkably precise…formulation of physics” and the six physical 'laws' he detected. The team were then expressed those laws in mathematical terms (including concepts that we now understand that were not understood in Grosseteste’s lifetime—such as opacity—so long as the concepts were consistent with his text even if those concepts were not explicitly found in Grosseteste’s original work).

The result is spectacular. 

The team of scholars was about to produce a “rich set of solutions” from Grosseteste’s work. “A narrow set of parameters did indeed produce the series of celestial perfected spheres and, within the Moon's orbit, a further four spheres corresponding to fire, air, water and earth — as the medieval world view demanded. But most choices of the four parameters yielded no spheres, or a disordered mess of hundreds of concentric spheres with no radial pattern to their densities. Other possible model universes contained infinite numbers of spheres, some with unbounded density.”

It’s amazing how interesting an old, obviously outdated view of the universe can be. While we’re all aware that any geocentric model of the universe has been rendered absolutely untenable by telescopic observations, the Ordered Universe Project researchers point out that in 1225, Grosseteste’s  “was the simplest theory consistent with the observations.” They also remind us that his magisterial effort points to the “limitations of our own current cosmological theory, with its reliance on intangible factors such as 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'.” 

Beyond the limits of our power for observation, I’m also interested in the way ideology shapes the way we interpret what we see. Charlie Munger points to the danger of ideology in ways that are instructive not just to understanding how astronomers like Tycho Brahe’s let their worldview influence their cosmological theories, but how all of us are subject to biases that shape what we think about what we see.

A ‘Model’ 21^st Century Workforce?

Charlie Munger is as interested—perhaps more interested—than anyone in cultivating multidisciplinary education. The Ordered Universe Project team’s work on Grosseteste holds some interesting implications for how we think about multidisciplinary education.  To return to the Economist’s invective against what it takes to be the ‘irksome’ view that “if schools simply focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)—at the expense of frivolous ‘non-scientific’ subjects—then a model 21st-century workforce would magically materialize.

The Economist, instead, argued that taking a cross-disciplinary approach will yield novel, interesting, and superior results than work done when researchers who think of themselves only as scientists use only scientific methods.

The researchers working on the project agree, arguing, “the translation of De Luce is an exemplar of the importance of collaborations between the arts and sciences, of thinking and learning together in new ways, and a reminder that the intellectual tradition we now call science has a long and rich history.” Their collaboration was ‘transformational,’ forcing the scholars “to engage with different ideas and problems.” Despite challenges in getting accustomed to the ways their colleagues thought and the different vocabularies they used to express their thoughts, they stated that, “our expectations changed. At the start of the project we had hoped for a sharper understanding of the text; we were surprised when new science emerged as well.”

Charlie Munger On Multidisciplinary Education

Munger’s address at the Fiftieth Reunion of Harvard Law School’s Class of 1948 is a clarion call to remake our (elite) educational institutions. What Munger wants is a truly multidisciplinary education. I won’t go into the details, but in that address he asks (and, not surprisingly, answers) five simple questions:

1)   Do broadscale professionals need more multidisciplinary skill?

2)   Was our education sufficiently multidisciplinary?

3)   In elite broadscale soft science, what is the essential nature of practicable best-form multidisciplinary education?

4)   In the last 50 years, how far has elite academia progressed toward attainable best-form multidisciplinarity?

5)   What educational practices would make progress faster?

Munger has, to my view, had an outsized influence on helping push elite institutions in this country nearer toward the multidisciplinary vision he has in mind. Places like Stanford and Duke not only attempt to provide a multidisciplinary education, they also attempt to tell everyone about it.  Yale offers a course in ‘grand strategy’. New York Times editorialist David Brooks articulates why ‘grand strategy’ is so important in his piece ‘Saving the System.’ His argument is interesting[ii], but I’m even more fascinated in the fact that ‘grand strategy’ is getting taught at all. And how institutions are recognizing, a la Charlie Munger, that what people learn (and what we try to teach them) needs to be more connected. Not too many people who aren’t Munger acolytes use the terms ‘latticework’ or ‘mental models,’ but they do gesture in his direction.

Multidisciplinary Education for Business Schools?

A recent Wall StreetJournal article highlighted a similar multidisciplinary trend in Business Schools. “Most business-school students are gunning for jobs in banking, consulting or technology.” The piece stated. “So what are they doing reading Plato?”

WSJ mentioned a handful of schools in which the philosophy departments are “invading” the M.B.A. programs. Taking a page out of Munger’s book, (and spurred on by the global financial crisis) these institutions are trying to train business students to think beyond the bottom line. With “courses like ‘Why Capitalism?’ and ‘Thinking about Thinking,’ and readings by Marx and Kant,” these schools are asking their students to think about business in a broader context. Employers, they argue, are concerned with the spate of graduates who “are trained to solve single problems but often miss the big picture.”

Business School Courses and Readings

Munger has been famously critical of business schools, once responding to a question that asked about the wisdom in a particular business transaction by saying, “That was a foolish thing to do, but they can’t help it: some of them went to business school.”

What Would Munger Think About All This Multidisciplinarity?

You might think that Munger would be thrilled that his ideas are enjoying the popularity that they are. But I don’t. In fact, he might not even be thrilled if he thought all of these places were getting it right. Which I’d doubt. Munger is an unabashed elitist when it comes to multidisciplinarity in education (note the ‘Elite’ in his forth question. It’s not there by accident) and in psychology, stating, “I don’t think it’s good teaching psychology to the masses. In fact, I think it’s terrible.”

I understand Munger’s elitism. I do take issue with it—at least in part. But, setting that aside for now, I think he’d probably object on other grounds. And I’m inclined to agree with him on those.

I recently had the good fortune of corresponding with a man who has thought a lot about Munger’s ideas regarding multidisciplinary education. I didn’t ask about any particular attempt to realize Munger’s practice, but did ask what he thought about the possibility of doing so & wondered why more people don’t try.

No Dice.

He wasn’t sanguine about the effort. He thought the academic world is so woefully inadequate that when institutions try to be multi-disciplinary, their efforts “usually cause more harm than good.” He thought this was so because of academia’s tendency to divide the world into specialties. He understood this impulse, because not to do so would make the world and its complex systems too hard to understand. 

But this legitimate practice has a horrible side-effect: slicing up the world this way “fools most people into thinking that’s how the world works. It doesn’t, it’s holistic, linked, one,” he argued. “Universities think that by partially re-joining a couple of specialties back together, and labeling it as ‘multi-disciplinary’, they’ve accomplished something.  But they are still so very far from the true threshold of required understanding as to kidding themselves.”

So, what did he think it really takes to get the kind of latticework Munger wants?

He used a metaphor: the NY Times Sunday crossword puzzle. People who “can complete [the NYT crossword puzzle] must have massive knowledge across multiple domains: the English language, literature, pop culture, etc.  Bring anything less than that broad domain base of understanding, and it can’t be done.  This metaphor is a good one because people recognize this as a simple up or down proposition - you either have sufficient knowledge or you don’t.  If you don’t, no dice.”

As for all these recent attempts at institutionalizing multidisciplinarity? I’d suspect Munger would argue: no dice.

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[i] Aristotle’s distinction between the perfect celestial and imperfect earthly realms led to the problem of why, if atoms are point-like (as they were considered at the time to be), then how is it that materials have volume? Light, from this perspective, was considered a medium for filling space. Grosseteste’s theory provided an explanation for why matter had bulk and why that bulk was stable. His idea was that light operates on matter the way two infinite sums can produce a finite ratio. 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + ...etc. expresses an infinite sequence; 0.5 + 1 + 2 + 4 + …does, too. Grosseteste took the first of these and divided it by the second, to produce a finite value of 2. Though contemporary mathematicians point out that he didn’t work through the limits that are necessary to make this mathematically rigorous, the gist of his argument is clear—simultaneously adding to both numerator and denominator will produce a finite ratio.

[ii] The explicit argument in Brooks’s New York Times Op-Ed is that our liberal pluralistic system and the freedoms it affords aren’t natural—we’ve got to protect them. Moreover, because it’s difficult to “get people to die for a set of pluralistic procedures to protect faraway places,” finding ways to protect it isn’t an easy task. Worse, because there’s a bunch of bellicosity in a ton of places today, those interested in keeping the kind of political leader that wants to achieve regional dominance and establish cultural and political uniformity at bay will be increasingly difficult.