George Berkeley and Slavery

 

George Berkeley is known for his doctrine of immaterialism: the counterintuitive view that there’s no material substance underlying the ideas perceived by the senses. We tend to think of a horse-drawn coach as a thing, but Berkeley tells us it’s really a set of ideas – the sound of the coach in the street, the sight of it through a window, the feel of it as we get in. We regularly perceive these ideas going along with each other, but there’s no material thing, beyond the ideas, that supports or holds them together – the ideas are all there is. It’s a hard view for a present-day reader to stomach. It was hard on the stomachs of readers even in Berkeley’s day in the early 1700s. He acknowledged that ‘it sounds very harsh to say we eat and drink ideas’ but insists that nourishment is nothing more than various ideas of the senses.
 
Berkeley also says that pain, real pain, is an idea. This assertion seems to have antagonised and amused his contemporaries. John Arbuthnot, physician to Queen Anne, engages in some light-hearted teasing when writing to his and Berkeley’s friend Jonathan Swift in 1714 that the ‘Poor philosopher Berkley [sic]; has now the Idea of health which was very hard to produce in him, for he had an Idea of a strange feaver upon him so strong that it was very hard to destroy it, by introducing a contrary one.’ It was and is hard to think of all phenomena as ideas and nothing more; even harder to think of our own perceiving, feeling, digesting bodies as ideas and nothing more.
 
Nevertheless, Berkeley is clear on this: such things as coaches don’t exist independently of being perceived, because they consist of ideas and perceptions. Without there being a perceiver, they simply can’t exist. Do things exist when not perceived by any human mind? Here Berkeley gives a positive answer in the notebooks he kept while he was developing this new doctrine, as he called it: the horses are in the stable, the books are in the study despite no one being there to see, smell, hear or touch them. That is, even when I’m not there to perceive these things, they exist. How so? After all, things exist only when perceived by a mind.
 
Here, God comes in: because God wills things into existence when she (Berkeley would have said ‘he’) perceives them, then anything that God creates has an existence in her mind. Because God knows and perceives all, those things that are at any given time unperceived or unconsidered by any finite mind have an existence through the infinite mind. God comes into this picture as a saviour, preventing Berkeley from having to say that objects enter and leave existence continually as they’re perceived and then not perceived and then perceived again by particular finite minds.
 
But God’s role in Berkeley’s thought is not only or most importantly as a backstop for his immaterialism. It is as the giver of laws that other minds must try to follow. These God-given laws structure the moral, social and political world, just as others structure the phenomenal world. I would like to reorient the understanding of Berkeley by bringing the social and political consequences of his religious beliefs to the centre and seeing his immaterialism in relation to them. This aspect of his philosophy is often neglected by those who want to introduce Berkeley as a specimen in the history of philosophy, someone who took empiricism to its limits. A fuller appreciation of the role of God in Berkeley’s philosophy explains why he adopted immaterialism, and why he thought his immaterialist philosophy would serve a social purpose, something that isn’t immediately obvious from the narrow view of Berkeley’s approach that we find in histories of philosophy.
 
At an early stage in his intellectual development, Berkeley realised that the created universe depends on God, a universe that is known to humans through the relatively dependable series of ideas they experience. God is, then, central to Berkeley’s thought, providing the context in which the human world elaborates itself: he described the biblical creation as God progressively revealing to other minds some of the eternal contents of her own mind. It’s only because God determines that human acts of will have certain consequences in visual, tactile and other sensory ideas that we have any ideas of our bodies, and that human agency has consequences in the world at all, let alone dependable consequences. It is for these reasons that Berkeley said that the visual world was a universal language ‘whereby we are instructed how to regulate our actions’, that the phenomenal world was designed by God to demonstrate his grandeur and show us how to behave. Berkeley’s purpose in writing was to convince his readers that we have a ‘most absolute and immediate dependence’ on God.
 
The precise conception Berkeley has of dependence on God and its consequences for human obligation – to God, to other humans, and to the rest of the creation – isn’t an aspect of his thinking that can be bracketed and ignored (as it has been so often by philosophers). The relationship of dependence on God is one of subordination to laws that humans, as responsible agents, are obliged to try to follow. These two things, the existence of a God and the moral responsibility of humans, would have made up the second part of Berkeley’s most famous book, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), had the manuscript not been lost while he was touring Europe. Berkeley’s universe is best understood as a body of law that human agents and other finite minds attempt to read and then follow through their actions.
 
This is where I think we should start, with a legible world dictated by God, when interpreting Berkeley today. Such a reading will give us a philosopher who is not just or even foremost an immaterialist, but rather a social and religious philosopher who is constantly emphasising the need for subordination, the following of rules and laws, and the necessity of obedience. His immaterialism, indeed, somewhat surprisingly, serves that end. That is why Berkeley conceived of his immaterialism as part of his lifelong struggle against what he variously called atheism, scepticism or free-thinking – the challenge to religious authority over the social world.
 
Immaterialism is not (just) a counterintuitive doctrine that surprised Berkeley’s contemporaries and still surprises his readers, nor is his God just the saviour of that doctrine. Rather, Berkeley expressed, through a wide range of writing including his great immaterialist texts, the necessity of social, political, moral and religious dependence on higher beings. He was a thoroughly religious philosopher, and his religion implied a politics. That politics was of a conservative cast, and included (disappointingly) the defence of slavery, as well as some more progressive or emancipatory forms of conservatism such as the promotion of education and economic development. Appreciating the role of God-given laws in his outlook unlocks a fuller understanding of his immaterialism. Without this, it’s very hard to appreciate why immaterialism is so relevant to some of his other somewhat eclectic concerns, including economic development, the swearing of oaths, and slavery.
 
In a text built up from three discourses delivered in the Chapel at Trinity College Dublin as part of his duties as a fellow, and published in 1712 under the controversial title Passive Obedience, Berkeley asked ‘what relation is there more extensive and universal than that of subject and law?’ He was talking about humans living under human laws, but just a few paragraphs earlier he’d made a case for the comparability of natural and moral laws. The laws of nature are ‘nothing else but a series of free actions produced by the best and wisest Agent’. The natural and moral worlds are to be conceived of as the free actions of God, and binding as laws for all other spirits. We should recognise both the kinds of law that govern events beyond our wills, such as those of gravity, and also those that require us to exercise our wills, such as the absolute negative moral law against rebellion that Berkeley elaborated in this short book. This conception of the human relationship to God as conforming to the will of a superior should remain central to our understanding of Berkeley’s philosophical project. We’re under an obligation to conform to natural and moral laws because a superior agent wills them, and wills that we conform to them.
 
In his roles as fellow of a college, chaplain, dean and bishop, Berkeley preached, and a significant part of his preaching addressed the question of how people should manifest in their behaviour the duty they owe to God. Religion, he said, ‘is nothing else but the conforming our faith and practice to the will of god’. ‘What else is the design and aim of vertue or religion,’ he asked in the same sermon, ‘but the making our several distinct wills coincident with, and subordinate to, the one Supreme will of God?’ We honour and show love for superiors ‘by performing their will, & endeavouring that others perform it’. This subordination isn’t of all finite spirits equally to the one infinite spirit: there are degrees of conformity to God’s will. Berkeley says there is ‘Some sort of union with the Godhead’ in all people ‘but with men, Xtians, inspired persons, Xt in different degrees.’ Different degrees of conformity are different degrees of unity with God.

Conformity brings spiritual rewards. It also brings temporal privileges. As Berkeley said in an early sermon on zeal: ‘As we are Christians we are members of a Society which entitles us to certain rights and privileges above the rest of mankind.’ In his ‘Address on Confirmation’, Berkeley said that, while the whole world might be understood as the kingdom of Christ, the phrase also had a more restrictive sense and applied to ‘a Society of persons, not only subject to his power, but also conforming themselves to his will, living according to his precepts, and thereby entitled to the promises of his gospel.’ That is, when Berkeley talked about the phenomenal world of ideas forming an instructive discourse directed to us by God, the God he had in mind requires conformity to his will. Greater or lesser degrees of conformity result in privileges expressed in the social and religious hierarchy of this world.
 
The God who produces the immaterial world, then, requires specific behaviours of different kinds of people, and grants them specific privileges. The distinction is not just between Christians and non-Christians, but between various types and classes of person in Christian societies. Here Berkeley is quite in line with his times and the large number of books dedicated to differentiating and specifying the duties of types and classes of people – children, parents, spouses, magistrates and so on. Berkeley’s sense of stratification and distinction by social status or rank is most obvious in his economic writings of the mid-1730s, chiefly the three volumes of rhetorical questions called The Querist, which put forward a programme for Irish economic renewal. The (‘native’, Catholic) peasantry are to give up their alleged sloth and dirtiness for habits of cleanliness and industry. The (absentee, Protestant) gentry are to give up imported wines and textiles for Irish cider and linen. Both classes will find they have higher desires – the peasants for beef and better clothes; the gentry for local productions of the fine and useful arts. A national bank will support the increased rate of circulation in the economy, or its momentum, as Berkeley calls it. And a class of philosophical educators such as Berkeley himself will manage the necessary transformation of opinions, desires and practices, chiefly by educating the gentry. Different classes of people – the higher, the lower, the educators – have different roles in practising and producing conformity to God’s will.
 
All classes of people have responsibilities to God that are in part expressed through their behaviour towards their own and other classes of people. ‘Charity’ is the term that, for Berkeley, captures the fulfilment of these responsibilities. He preached on charity at the English merchant colony in Livorno in Italy in 1714, saying – perhaps with an eye to the background of his audience – that the mutual satisfaction of wants through commerce was a form of charitable action within the reach of all. Duty to God and charity to his neighbour will make the true Christian attempt the conversion of heathens and infidels, Berkeley said in the sermon he preached to the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts on his return from his failed expedition to found a university in Bermuda. That project was itself geared towards the conversion of Native Americans, as well as the religious reform of white colonists.
 

Berkeley wrote Alciphron (1732) while in Rhode Island awaiting the funds for the university he hoped to found, which never arrived. One of the characters who voices views closest to those Berkeley expressed elsewhere says that it’s an obligation to dispense ‘Medicine for the Soul of Man’. In 1734, Berkeley became Bishop of Cloyne in southern Ireland. He described the poor of Cloyne, a small town in Cork, as ‘objects of charity’, and the employment of around 100 men in agriculture led by his wife Anne as ‘a charity which pays it self’. Berkeley’s last major work, Siris (1744), is an idiosyncratic text that begins with instructions on how to mix water with pine resin to create a medicinal drink for treating the epidemic of dysentery that swept Ireland in 1740-41, and continues to argue for the compatibility of ancient and Christian accounts of the soul and the Trinity. He said there that he was ‘indispensably obliged by the duty every man owes to mankind’, and that ‘charity obligeth me to say what I know’.
 
 
Charity is, if you like, the positive side of an obligation to other people, and to God. In contrast, Berkeley frequently expressed a negative or restrictive obligation that’s broadly concerned with implicitly or explicitly giving one’s word. It’s one of the assumptions of Passive Obedience that any social order is better than none, and that accepting the benefits of social order (simply those of not ‘anarchy’) is to accept the legitimacy of the sovereign who governs that order and the absolute obligation not to rebel against that sovereign. When Berkeley wrote to persuade Tories not to break their oaths of allegiance to George I as the Jacobite uprising of 1715 unfolded, he noted that:
 
‘’Common mutual faith is the great support of society; and an oath, as it is the highest obligation to keep our faith inviolate, becomes the great instrument of justice and intercourse between men. Whatever, therefore, lessens the sacredness or authority of an oath must be acknowledged at the same time to be highly detrimental both to the Church and the Commonwealth.”
 
Berkeley presented similar views in 1738 when he thought the social fabric was under threat from the atheistical blasphemies of a rogueish Dublin society called the Blasters. ‘Obedience to all civil power is rooted in the religious fear of God,’ and only reverence for God ‘can beget and preserve a true respect for subordinate majesty in all the degrees of power, the first link of authority being fixed at the throne of God.’ Misusing oaths is to threaten the very source of civil life, submission to the authority of God.
 
More specific oaths also concerned Berkeley. He took a strong view of the obligations of the marriage vow. When one of his brothers was condemned to death for bigamy, but saved by the interventions of Berkeley’s friends, Berkeley wrote to reimburse them for the expense. He noted, however, he ‘would not have disbursed half the sum to have saved that villain from the gallows’. When Berkeley excerpted a discussion of the marital vow of obedience from a book on The Relative Duties of Parents and Children, Husbands and Wives, Masters and Servants (1705) for his anthology The Ladies Library (1714), he inserted some thoughts of his own: that it is ‘a Command, the Breach of which is a Sin, and the Punishment of all Sin, Death eternal’. If we have any interest in order at all, if we have an interest in the world appearing to us as a regular, dependable, interpretable chain of events, an interest in our own wills producing predictable and stable outcomes, then we must obey the source of this order, the supreme authority of God.
 
Obedience can be presented more positively as charity, but it remains an attempt to conform to a higher will, in the expectation of gaining privileges and responsibilities in this world and the next. Humans depend on God for an orderly sequence of ideas and experiences as they interact with the physical world; they also depend on God for social and moral order. To maintain social and moral order, humans must feel religious awe towards God, and acknowledge the legitimacy of subordination of people into different classes and ranks, with different privileges and responsibilities. God doesn’t exist to repair the problem of occasionally existing objects in Berkeley’s immaterialism. Berkeley’s immaterialism exists to give his readers a sense of their entire dependence – social, moral and political as well as experiential – upon God. Dependence upon God models forms of human dependence and relation that Berkeley described in a wide range of writings.
 
As we have just seen, Berkeley’s God is the source of all authority, subordination and order. Finite spirits aren’t obliged to obey only God, but also to obey their superiors in the social order. Servants are obliged to obey their masters. In a way that distinguishes him from immediate predecessors such as John Locke or Samuel Pufendorf, Berkeley blurred the line between servitude and slavery, between contractual and forced, temporary and permanent servitude. In The Querist, Berkeley asked: whether ‘other nations have not found great benefit from the use of slaves’ for public infrastructure projects? ‘Whether temporary servitude would not be the best cure for idleness and beggary …?’ ‘Whether all sturdy beggars should not be seized and made slaves to the public for a certain term of years?’
 
Berkeley’s language here minimises the difference between slavery and servitude. Likewise, in notes for a sermon preached in Rhode Island, he said that in the New Testament ‘servants’ signified ‘slaves’. I’m not suggesting that Berkeley believed slavery was a positive good. Rather, he believed that what he understood to be dissolute, dirty, cynical, slothful, asocial forms of life were a great ill, and that being forced to participate in projects promoting the public good was better than being left at liberty to dehumanise. Such a view, of course, legitimises slavery.
 
 
Berkeley presents slavery within an orderly Christian society as preferable to forms of liberty that, he believes, limit the development of important human capacities. When Berkeley was in Rhode Island waiting for his college funding, there’s evidence of him buying two and baptising three enslaved people. The historian Travis Glasson has convincingly argued that the Yorke-Talbot legal opinion, issued in 1729, that baptism and slavery were compatible was the result of the activism of Berkeley or his circle, trying to facilitate the baptism of enslaved people in America. Berkeley had argued in his Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches (1725) for the college that would take Native American and Black students, as well as the sons of white planters, that ‘Slaves would only become better Slaves by being Christian’. Berkeley supported obedience to forms of temporal subordination that are now recognised as morally repugnant, and argued that some forms of forced labour, perhaps temporary, perhaps not, were a social good – a greater good than the ills of servitude or slavery.
 
There’s much about this picture of Berkeley’s God, and the human and divine relationships it implies, that Berkeley shares with other Christian writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. It’s not surprising to see Christianity connected to subordination and obedience, both in political and social life, and encompassing slavery, for instance. It’s more unusual, perhaps, in the precise obligations it entails for someone like Berkeley, a philosophical educator. This person has to conform to God’s will by following laws, by accepting privileges and responsibilities to shape and govern other people through discourse and through the founding and maintenance of social institutions, from colleges to farms, in order to produce the same great good for them – conformity to the highest will. In doing these things, the philosophical educator is imitating God. God discourses continually to humans through the phenomenal world, through its regularities and dependable phenomena; but also through its less predictable events, such as illness, earthquakes and extreme weather. The philosopher should also learn to read these phenomena.
 
The immaterialist doctrine exists to promote this understanding of and conformity to God, rather than God being a convenient backstop for immaterialism. In both its typical and its more idiosyncratic respects, therefore, Berkeley’s sense of the religious foundation and lived texture of social life isn’t something that can be set aside without the risk of mischaracterising his immaterialism and his philosophical ambitions in general.
 
The central realisation Berkeley wanted his readers to undergo is that of absolute and continual dependence upon the will of a superior for everything in their world – their sensory experiences, the laws of nature, the capacity of their wills to bring about consequences, the complex coordination and subordination of wills involved in producing a social world. This realisation issues in the striking doctrine of immaterialism. But it also issues in the particular form of conservative political and social life that Berkeley lived and promoted in his varied activities as a churchman, economist, husband, brother, slave-owner and so on. Understanding Berkeley’s immaterialism, and the role of God in his immaterialism, requires an acknowledgement of his religious view of political and social life. Some of that view is closely shared with other Christian writers of his time, some of it more idiosyncratic and characteristic of the visionary immaterialist that he was.
 
On the Necessity of Obedience. By Tom Jones. Aeon, June 18, 2021.

 

May 2021 marks the publication of a major new intellectual biography of Bishop George Berkeley by Tom Jones (University of St Andrews), George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life (Princeton University Press, 2021). Trinity Long Room Hub is pleased to host a conversation with Dr Jones that will centre on Berkeley’s life, connections to Trinity and Ireland, and his relationship to colonialism as he moved between the ‘new’ world and the ‘old’. 
 
George Berkeley, Colonialism, and Ireland: A Conversation with Tom Jones.  TLR Hub , May 19,  2021

 

The days of uncritically lionising great men of western civilisation are coming to an end. Some see this as a threat to social order but surely hero-worshipping was never a good idea, given that every man – after a certain length of time – starts to resemble an embarrassing uncle.
 
Go back a few hundred years and it’s hard to find a European writer who didn’t have views on race or gender that we would today consider backward.
 
Last month, this column queried the rap sheet against Enlightenment thinker David Hume but there’s a more troubling case closer to home. The “good bishop” George Berkeley (1685-1753), who is synonymous with Trinity College Dublin (TCD), is widely regarded as Ireland's great philosopher but recently he has attracted negative attention due to his ownership of slaves while doing missionary work in Rhode Island.
 
Last February, TCD launched a two-year investigation into the college’s “complex colonial legacies” – a project that will be greatly aided by a new biography of the Co Kilkenny-born Berkeley by Tom Jones.
 
George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life is not only a meticulously researched and clear-sighted assessment of the philosopher’s character, it also measures the weight of his “revolutionary” ideas. Jones, a long-standing Berkeley scholar who is based at University of St Andrews, Scotland, describes the process of biography as trying to avoid the traps of both hagiography and “attributing a great or even implausible degree of internal coherence to a particular life”.
 
Berkeley was a man of contradictions - a social reformer heavily engaged in charitable works and prescient in advocating the public ownership of banks to curb reckless speculation but he also believed strongly in obedience to hierarchy. Jones explores these incongruities further as this week’s Unthinkable guest.
 
JH : You’ve written extensively on Berkeley over the years but how did this particular project come about?
 
TJ : “There hadn’t been a book-length biography of Berkeley since 1949, so I wanted to bring together all of the material that different scholars and historians had discovered since then, and add my own researches to see what picture of Berkeley emerged.
 
“There were also two things that it seemed to me no biography had ever attempted before. The first was to show how other people and institutions – family, schools, colleges, societies, the church – shaped Berkeley’s beliefs and actions. The second was how Berkeley’s philosophy related to his practical life – as a teacher, churchman, family man and social activist.
 
“Berkeley’s life in education is a good illustration of these points. I think he was very strongly shaped by the orderly and emphatically Protestant environment of Kilkenny College and Trinity College. He took a lifelong interest in educating others – students at Trinity, his own – male and female – children, the children of colonial Americans, Native Americans and African-Americans.
 
“Berkeley’s wife continued to educate and guide her children after his death, frequently citing his example. So I tried to tell a story of Berkeley’s life that showed how his striking and individual philosophical beliefs were woven in and out of his relationships with other people, and how his active life was tied up with his contemplative life.”
 
 
JH : Is it fair to say that, to the extent that Berkeley was interested in the condition of slaves, it was on the narrow point of whether or not they should be baptised?
 
TJ : “Slavery is a subject Berkeley only touches on a few times in his writings, and what we know of his practical involvement in the question of slavery could be interpreted in various ways, so this is a complex issue.
 
“It is important to acknowledge that Berkeley never openly questions the legitimacy of the system of chattel slavery, that he bought enslaved people, and that he was therefore involved in this great historic crime – as were, more or less directly, many British subjects of his era.
 
“Baptism is, indeed, what seems most to concern Berkeley about slavery... For him, however, baptism is not a narrow point, but a key element of human dignity. Being admitted to religious instruction and the rites of the church was being recognised as human where it mattered most, in Berkeley’s view.
 
“In his writing on economic questions Berkeley blurs distinctions between servitude and slavery. That can have the effect of legitimising slavery. But it can also be an argument that slavery shouldn’t be more punitive than servitude, or exclude enslaved people from recognition of their humanity. So when Berkeley baptised Philip, Anthony and Agnes Berkeley, identified as ‘his negroes’, he was doing something he would have regarded as a recognition of the most important aspect of those people’s humanity.
 
“There don’t appear to be records of baptisms of any other people of African heritage in the same church in Berkeley’s two years in Rhode Island – not that skin colour would necessarily have been consistently noted in such records – so he might have been making quite an unusual and visible statement. So, whilst this is a narrow concern from one perspective, it is also testimony to a concern for the religious education of African people in America.”
 
JH : Was Berkeley just “a man of his time” in respect to defending slavery or was there something more much calculating going on?
 
TJ : “One thing I try to do in the biography is compare Berkeley’s views to those of other people and groups of his time, and the one group that is actively organising against the institution of slavery in the late 1720s is the Quaker community – as Brycchan Carey has shown. Berkeley does not challenge the existence of the institution, and indeed points out ways in which it is compatible with his aims of religious conversion and instruction.
 
“He doesn’t defend slavery by saying that it is all certain groups of people are fit for, or that it is a property right that cannot be challenged. His defence is more that slavery is like servitude, and it may be better – in his view – to be obliged to serve a greater good than to be free and live a life that seems to go against God’s intentions for humanity.
 
“It’s useful to compare Berkeley’s thinking about the Catholic population of Ireland here. Late in life he compared the ‘native’ Irish both to Africans in America and to Native Americans, saying their conditions of life were savage and abject. He suggested that a way for Irish peasants to avoid a degrading life of dirt, sloth and beggary was for them to be seized and made ‘slaves to the public’ for a period of time.
 
“So there is a calculation going on that involves asking whether it’s better to be free and degraded, or enslaved but orderly and productive. For Berkeley, that participation in social order was really central to being human.”
 
JH : You say there is no record of what happened to the people Berkeley purchased. Is it possible they were brought to Ireland?
 
TJ : “It is possible that the people Berkeley bought in America came to London and then Ireland with him and his family, although there is no evidence either way. The historian Patrick Kelly noticed that a set of reading cards for children referred to two of Berkeley’s servants at this time by name – Patrick Norway and Enoch Martyr. So these are not the same people as were baptised by Berkeley in America.
 
“In occasional references to Berkeley’s servants in letters and other documents no mention is made of a servant of African heritage – though again ethnic background might not always have been mentioned in such papers.
 
“One historian puts the black population of Ireland in the second half of the 18th century between 1,000 and 3,000. It seems likely that some of these people arrived in Ireland with families by whom they were owned or for whom they worked, across the Irish sea or the Atlantic. The people Berkeley bought could have been among them.”
 
JH : Of Berkeley’s philosophy, you comment in the book: “There was something revolutionary about his immaterialism, but it was one of those conservative revolutions that seeks to leave things as they are.” For all his philosophical innovation, was Berkeley ultimately engaged in a very reactionary religious project?
 
TJ : “Berkeley’s religious project was radical in asserting the entire dependence of the universe on the will of a superior being, God. It’s radical because Berkeley says we are dependent on God for all the ideas conveyed by our senses – not on matter that lies behind and provokes ideas or sensations...
 
“It’s a striking picture of God constantly talking to his creatures through the creation itself. The central feature of this religious view of the world is dependence on a superior will, though, and it echoes through Berkeley’s social and political thought. He believed lower sorts of people ought to trust to the higher sort to govern, and to religious educators to mediate ideas they could not expect to grasp themselves. So hierarchy is built into Berkeley’s view of the world, by analogy with his religious vision.
 
“Many other political and religious thinkers of the 18th century held similar views, but none of them in the unique combination of immaterialist metaphysics, religious vision and social reform that characterise Berkeley.”
 
George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life by Tom Jones is published by Princeton.
 
Was Ireland’s greatest philosopher a hero, villain or ‘man of his time’? By Joe Humphreys. The Irish Times , July 15, 2021.

George Berkeley is one of the greatest philosophers of the early modern era. Along with John Locke and David Hume, he was a founder of Empiricism, which championed the role of experience and observation in the acquisition of knowledge. He influenced Kant and John Stuart Mill, and even pre-empted elements of Wittgenstein. His book The Principles of Human Knowledge is a masterwork still set on university philosophy courses the world over, and indeed there is a famous university named after him in California. The celebrated Irishman even inspired a limerick.
 
Yet Berkeley is also widely misunderstood. Different aspects of his thinking, not to mention his character, seem to clash quite spectacularly. His most famous doctrine was viewed as heretical in its day, yet Berkeley was a bishop and fierce believer in the supremacy of the Anglican church. He simultaneously advanced radically counter-intuitive and staunchly conservative arguments. He was a passionate social reformer but was complicit in appalling social evils. This makes Berkeley a fascinating subject. He appears a study in contradiction—but stick with him long enough and you realise that maybe there is no contradiction at all.
 
Tom Jones, an academic at the University of St Andrews, is well qualified to tell the story, having spent years researching and publishing on the life and work of this multi-faceted thinker. Here, over 550 richly detailed pages, he carefully explains how the different parts might fit together. It is a project of some importance, because you can only assess a thinker’s worth by seeking to understand them in the round.
 
Born in south-east Ireland in 1685, Berkeley studied at Kilkenny College and then Trinity College Dublin. He entered a world of ideas recently transformed by the likes of Descartes, Locke and Malebranche, and was publishing from his early twenties, when he developed the theory that would come to define him in the public imagination: immaterialism, the view that matter does not actually exist and all objects are in the mind.
 
The intuitive view tells us that when we perceive an object, our perception connects to something “out there” in the external world. When I look out of the window and form the image of a tree in my mind, I assume there is a lump of matter in the garden lying behind the image—namely the tree. There may be questions over the nature of the relationship between the tree and my perception of it—and these were interrogated in depth by Berkeley’s contemporaries—but the idea that the tree exists in material form was not disputed. Locke had said: “the certainty of things existing in rerum natura, when we have the testimony of our senses for it, is not only as great as our frame can attain to, but as our condition needs.”
 
Yet for Berkeley there was no reason to assume the existence of a material object at all. When we think we perceive the tree, what information do we have? Nothing beyond the perceptions themselves: sense data of its shape, size, colour and so on. This sense data, for Berkeley, is what constitutes the object. To most people it seems like a radically sceptical view, perhaps even more so than doubting the existence of free will or objective moral laws. But Berkeley, advancing the theory chiefly in his Principles and the Socratic dialogue Hylas and Philonous, thought it was precisely the opposite. Like Locke, he stressed the role of sensory perception in human knowledge, but took this position to its logical conclusion: when something is unperceived, it ceases to be. The famous question of whether a falling tree makes a sound if no one is around to hear it is inspired by Berkeley.
 
In Berkeley’s conception, the only things that exist are spirits (of which God is the greatest), minds and ideas.
 
This was not a universally popular theory. Pope, otherwise an admirer, called it “the most outrageous whimsy that ever entered into the head of any ancient or modern madman.” Boswell described a conversation with Johnson: “we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed that though we are satisfied, his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.’” Johnson was appealing to the common-sense view that matter—the rock—exists, and in this case has obvious solidity.
 
It was immaterialism that earned Berkeley his reputation as an iconoclast. But what at first glance seems revolutionary is in fact another facet to Berkeley’s profoundly conservative disposition. His is the story of a reactionary coming full circle.
 
Objectionable social attitudes are elevated to philosophy in Berkeley’s reflections on hierarchy and social order. He believed that subordination to our betters is a good in itself. Unreflective obedience is not just right and proper but speaks to humanity’s participation in the divinity: life is structured around order, regularity and chains of command, with God at the top. It is right that human societies echo this in their own relations—be it sovereign and subject, master and servant or husband and wife.
 
This extends to slavery. Berkeley owned slaves and wrote in support of the practice. He may even, possibly inadvertently, have helped solicit the infamous Yorke-Talbot opinion from the British law officers, which served as a legal bulwark for slavery throughout the British Empire. Berkeley was not much more enlightened in his views towards Irish Catholics, whom he regarded as innately inferior to their Protestant compatriots. He advanced the primacy of the Anglican church with literally missionary zeal at home and overseas, planning unsuccessfully for several years to found a college in the Americas to spread the gospel.
 
In his daily life the most important figure was God, and his chief intellectual opponents were the “free thinkers” whose irreligion he condemned in his Christian apologetic Alciphron.
 
Despite the heretical appearance of immaterialism, Berkeley didn’t actually believe he was facilitating scepticism, let alone atheism. In fact, while for him God did not create the world in a material sense, he lies behind all of our ideas, imprinting them on our minds. Berkeley’s system thus retains God as the ultimate cause and creates an intimacy with the deity which can form the basis for our moral judgments. He wrote that his philosophical project was “directed to practise and morality, as appears first from making manifest the nearness and omnipresence of God.”
 
For Berkeley, the real problem arises if we take the existence of matter as a given. Then we have to describe the relationship between our perceptions and the external world, and admit the possibility of disharmony between the two. In this gap there is the room for doubt: why think that what I see, feel or smell accurately corresponds to what is “out there”? This is “the very root of scepticism,” he writes, for whether our ideas “represent the true quality really existing in the thing, it is out of our reach to determine.”
 
His ingenious solution was to circumvent the problem completely, by collapsing one category into the other: if you identify the object and sensory experience of it as one and the same, the room for scepticism disappears. Immaterialism is thus, in Berkeley’s framing, a solution to sceptical doubt rather than an example of it. It is specifically designed to dispel “impious notions.”
 
That is not to say Berkeley was home and dry. Some asked how hallucinations fit into his picture, alleging that they sever the link between ideas and reality in some distinct way his system cannot account for. Another classic objection has it that the corollary of believing that things do not exist unless they are being perceived is that objects must be continually popping in and out of existence depending on whether they are being looked at or not, which is metaphysically untidy to say the least.
 
The response available to Berkeley is to argue that God is a perceiver too, and that it is unlikely that God has stopped perceiving the tree. This point is captured in a limerick attributed to 20th-century theologian Ronald Knox:
 
There was a young man who said “God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there’s no one about in the quad.”
 
 Reply:
 
“Dear Sir: Your astonishment’s odd;
I am always about in the quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.”
 
The conservatism underlying the immaterialist philosophy becomes clearer when you realise that in the final analysis, it tells us that there is a tree in the quad, and that the rational agent perceives it accurately. Berkeley writes: “my speculations have the same effect as visiting forein countries, in the end I return where I was before, set my head at ease and enjoy my self with more satisfaction.” The exercise is a clarificatory one, aimed not at demolishing our current understanding but improving it, thus enhancing our relish of the world God has provided for us—and leaving its inequalities intact.
 
Jones is an authoritative tour guide through all of this. He admits from the outset that constructing a unified portrait from inevitably fragmented historic evidence is challenging, made more difficult still when comparing the different elements of such a complicated thinker. The end result, carefully written and impeccably well researched, is a must-read for those with a background in philosophy. Some passages will be intimidatingly complex to beginners, especially given the book is not strictly chronological, while the focus can stray towards areas that you suspect Jones is interested in personally (such as Berkeley’s belief in the medicinal properties of tar water) rather than having been written with the general reader in mind. None of this changes the fact the book is overwhelmingly a success.
 
What Jones has revealed is the fascinating combination of chaos and coherence laced through Berkeley’s life. What was his ultimate contribution? For Schopenhauer, Berkeley was “the first to treat the subjective starting-point really seriously and to demonstrate irrefutably its absolute necessity.” Much great philosophy followed from this, both in support of and opposition to Berkeley’s ideas, with Kant’s “transcendental idealism”—stressing the role of perception in our knowledge of the world, and like Berkeley’s theory aimed at combatting scepticism—perhaps the most famous example. To this day, even if you think Berkeley’s metaphysics is wrong it can be difficult to explain precisely why. And there is so much more to explore, including highly original contributions to the philosophy of science and language. Berkeley was not a perfect thinker and his philosophy will remain the subject of misconceptions. But it overflows with riches.
 
Mind over matter: the contradictions of George Berkeley. By  Alex Dean. Prospect Magazine, May 25, 2021. 

Nikhil Pal Singh on The Settler Mindset and The Cold War

In the spring of 1774, two members of the Shawnee tribe allegedly robbed and murdered a Virginia settler. As Thomas Jefferson recounts in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), “The neighboring whites, according to their custom, undertook to punish this outrage in a summary way.”

In their quest for vengeance, the white settlers ambushed the first canoe they saw coming up the river, killing the one, unarmed man as well as all of the women and children inside. This happened to be the family of Logan, a Mingo chief, Jefferson says, “who had long been distinguished as a friend of the whites,” but who now took sides in the war that ensued. The Mingos fought—and lost—alongside the Shawnees and Delawares against the Virginia militia that fall, and Logan’s letter to Lord Dunmore after the decisive battle is, according to Jefferson, a speech superior to “the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero.”

“There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature,” Logan says of his decision to fight the white men. “This called on me for revenge. I have sought it: I have killed many: I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country, I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbor a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one.”

Logan’s speech went viral by eighteenth century standards; it was reprinted in newspapers across the country and admired for its tragic eloquence. Its popularity and resonance among white colonialists illustrate a defining aspect of settler storytelling: an acknowledgement of the injustice of Indian killing alongside an affirmation of its inevitability and salience as a guide to action. In their authenticity, Logan’s words validated a structuring precept of the white settler colony: that those who are violently displaced and eliminated are distinct from kin, whose passing should be mourned, and also opaque to posterity because they are sundered from webs of social relatedness.

Through this sleight of hand, the settlers achieved a unique perspective—one that justified violence because it afforded them a certain freedom, the productive freedom of a blank slate. As historian Patrick Wolfe famously described it, settler colonialism is thus a “structure, not an event.” Its mindset is not backward but forward looking as it consciously blurs the lines between preemption and self-defense, allegation and retribution, dispossession and property right.

Consider Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence. A defining feature of life in the “free and independent” states, he wrote, was constant warfare with the denizens of a vast territorial frontier, “the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction, of all ages, sexes and conditions.” From its inauguration, then, American freedom was founded on this unrelenting vision of a frontier populated by unjust enemies. Jefferson’s founding brief for continuous expansionary warfare in the name of collective freedom has animated the country’s sense of itself ever since. It is, as political theorist Aziz Rana has noted, a foundational yet unexamined precept within U.S. accounts of political liberty—one that continues to define practices, institutions, and American ways of living that exact a violent toll.

Not least, the Indian wars bequeathed a lasting military orientation—one that extended and codified ethical, legal, and vernacular distinctions between civilized and savage war as a core national experience and conceit. Settler militias invested expansive police power in ordinary citizens as a corollary of collective security, and justified practices of extirpative war focused on populations and infrastructures, without distinction between combatants and civilians. Through the more than two centuries of frontier and counter-insurgency wars that the United States has fought (and continues to fight) the world over, the elimination or sequestration of “savages” has been represented, Jodi Byrd argues, as integral to the transit and development of American security, power, and prosperity.

At the end of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, claimed that “control of this continent is to be, in a very few years, the controlling influence in the world.” Following the last Indian wars and the closing of the territorial frontier at the end of the nineteenth-century, President Theodore Roosevelt romanticized “the winning of the west” as the arc of progressive history. He ridiculed the anti-imperialists of his day who criticized brutal U.S. counter-insurgencies in the Philippines and Cuba as sentimental dreamers who would give Arizona back to the Apaches. The settlers’ outlook and its understanding of freedom poses the question “would you want to give it back?” to demonstrate an absurd proposition. The idea that there could be such a thing as settler decolonization is not only impossible, but also unthinkable.

By connecting the concept of democratic self-rule with a continual project of expansion, the settler narrative shaped collective institutions, ways of war, visions of growth and prosperity, and conceptions of political membership that still run deep. Indeed, our own period has not been immune. Describing the supposedly unmatched achievements of liberal-democratic society at “the end of history” in 1992, Francis Fukuyama reached back to the frontier allegory: “mankind will come to seem like a long wagon train strung out along a road. . . . Several wagons, attacked by Indians, will have been set aflame and abandoned along the way. . . . But the great majority of wagons will be making the slow journey into town, and most will eventually arrive there.” A decade later, following 9/11, the mood had shifted, but not the narrative reflex. As George W. Bush put it on October 6, 2001, “Our nation is still somewhat sad, but we’re angry. There’s a certain level of bloodlust, but we won’t let it drive our reaction. We’re steady, clear-eyed, and patient, but pretty soon we’ll have to start displaying scalps.”

Defending the launching of the global War on Terror, U.S. diplomatic historian John Gaddis gave scholarly imprimatur to the settler idiom: the borders of global civil society were menaced by non-state actors in a manner similar to the “native Americans, pirates and other marauders” that once menaced the boundaries of an expanding U.S. nation-state. Foreign affairs writer Robert Kaplan concurred: “The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier,” as he heard U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq repeat the refrain, “Welcome to Injun Country.”

The reference, Kaplan insists, echoing Jefferson’s homage to Logan, “was never meant as a slight against Native North Americans.” It was merely a “fascination,” or an allusion to history—indeed, one that fits nicely with our aptly named Tomahawk missiles and Apache helicopters. But these comments and this history reflect a deeper, more sinister truth about the American dependence upon expansionary warfare as a measure of collective security and economic well-being.

The history of the American frontier is one of mounting casualties and ambiguous boundaries, of lives and fortunes gained and lost. In the settler narrative, “collective security” never meant just the existential kind of safety, that is, situations where material survival and self-defense were mainly at stake. Freedom is essential to the equation, and freedom in this conception is built once again upon dreams of a blank slate—this time cheap, empty, exploitable lands and resources that must be cleared of any competing presence. Indeed, the settlers’ conception of freedom belies the commercial interests in protecting an investment prospectus: the speculative value of the land itself—what surrounds it and what lies beneath it—is of paramount importance. 

The main colonial enterprise, after all, was risky and speculative land merchandising. Early American governance was arguably more preoccupied with mundane simplifications of deed and title, mapping, parceling, and recordkeeping than it was with Indian fighting. From inception, the U.S. founders envisioned the land west of the Alleghenies as a great commercial estuary, one that was gradually emptied of any other human claimant. As George Washington, the land speculator turned general, wrote upon resigning his command of the victorious continental army in 1783 (which included organizing a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Iroquois), “The Citizens of America, placed in the most enviable condition, as the sole Lords and Proprietors of a vast Tract of Continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of the World, and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life, are now by the late satisfactory pacification, acknowledged to be possessed of absolute freedom and Independency.”

Geographer Thomas Hutchins echoed Washington’s sense of America as a world brimming with valuable resources and directing human enterprise toward uncertain boundaries. In An Historical Narrative and Topographical Description of Louisiana and West Florida (1785), he takes stock of the land’s bounty: grapes, oranges, lemons, cotton, sassafras, saffron, rhubarb, hemp, flax, tobacco, and indigo. Although enslaved Africans, the producers of most of these agricultural commodities, go unmentioned, Hutchins pauses impassively every few pages to observe a curious feature he also attributes to the landscape: this or that “once considerable” nation of Indians “reduced to about twenty-five warriors,” or “only about a dozen warriors.” Indigenous expiry is thus quietly inscribed as necessary to the continent’s supposedly inexhaustible riches.

U.S. military pacification was only one tool for the diminution of Indian sovereignty and the subsequent sequestration and marginalization of tribal remnants. Extensions of federal plenary power, the legal recasting of Indian political life as a peculiar subordinated status of domestic dependency, and redefinitions of indigenous resistance and counter-violence as crime were also central. Woven throughout was the settlers’ forward-looking framework: there is no alternative. In his 1835 letter to the Cherokee people, for example, President Andrew Jackson framed Indian removal as an essential by-product of commercial growth. “Circumstances that cannot be controlled and which are beyond the reach of human laws render it impossible that you can flourish in the midst of a civilized community.” The true nature of those circumstances was revealed five years prior in an address Jackson made to Congress: “what good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people?”

As the Indian wars began drawing to a close in the late nineteenth century, the North American territorial frontiers closed as well. Understood to be an event of world-significance, it forced settler thinking to confront new challenges. Diplomat Paul Reinsch, who was a student of Frederick Jackson Turner and an early theorist of U.S. global reach, observed that expansion through overseas colonialism would be uniquely difficult: “we have to deal with a fixed element, the native population, long settled in certain localities and exhibiting deeply engrained characteristics; a population . . . that cannot be swept away before the advancing tide of Caucasian immigration as were the North American Indians.”

In the ensuing decades, then, a host of morbid symptoms arose from similar perceptions that while expansion was necessary, it would never again be so easy and unproblematic. For thinkers such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard (both prominent eugenicists) the limitation of territories for future white settlement and a “rising tide of color” threatened the supremacy, even survival, of Western civilization. This meant that the United States itself needed to seal its borders against unwanted detritus from the outer world. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, along with the subsequent Immigration Act of 1917 (which established an “Asiatic barred zone”), conjured fears of a “yellow peril” that threatened to reverse the ordering virtue of white settlement in western lands. Ruling on Chinese exclusion in 1909, the U.S. Supreme Court was explicit, describing “foreigners of a different race” as “potentially dangerous to peace” even in the absence of “actual hostilities with the nation of which the foreigners are subject.”

In the lead up to World War I, the challenge of how to continue a dynamic of economic expansion in the wider world without becoming corrupted politically by proximity to savage and inferior, non-white subjects was a central preoccupation of U.S. thinkers. John Carter Vincent, a confidante of the Roosevelt family and later a U.S. foreign service officer, suggested a vision of the western hemisphere as the model for a “painless imperialism,” where nominal sovereignty and separation from mestizo populations was underwritten by strategically placed Marine barracks. This would ensure the smooth passage of commerce and security for propertied interests and what Woodrow Wilson called the election of “good men.”

In May of 1942, after the United States had entered World War II, the editors of Fortune, Time, and Life magazines published a joint statement titled “An American Proposal” that echoed Vincent and Wilson. They observed that the United States was not “afraid to help build up industrial rivals,” which they saw as a virtue: “American ‘imperialism,’ if it is to be called that” is “very abstemious and high minded . . . because friendship, not food, is what we need most from the rest of the world.”  These leading business ideologues laid their cards on the table: an age governed by aviation and “the logic of the air,” Fortune’s editors observed, would need an extensive network of strategic bases and technical facilities similar to “the colonies and dominions” that supported imperial Britain during its age of maritime power. “In the world-to-be,” they warned, “a dozen or more equivalents of Pearl Harbor may be simultaneously possible. . . . Our problem, therefore, is not to restore the status quo ante, but to break out.”

Settler colonial narratives thus needed to be rewritten to suit extra-territorial and global purposes. To be clear, rising U.S. globalism and imperialism were not simply an extension of settler freedom, but nor should we lose sight of how they were intertwined with it. As Fortune’s writers insisted: “The U.S. economy has never proved that it can operate without the periodic injection of new and real wealth. The whole frontier saga, indeed, centered around this economic imperative.” As such, “The analogy between the domestic frontier in 1787 when the Constitution was formed and the present international frontier is perhaps not an idle one.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself viewed the 1940 “destroyers for bases” agreement with Great Britain—which saw the exchange of U.S. naval ships for land rights on British possessions—as the most important action in “the reinforcement of our national defense . . . since the Louisiana Purchase.”

A decade later, as historian Megan Black has recently shown, engineers from the U.S. Department of the Interior—with longstanding expertise charting Indian reservation lands for hidden energy and mineral resources—were dispatched the world over to survey sources of strategic minerals required to defend “the free world.” In short order, U.S. military forces were calling Vietnam “Indian Country,” forcibly sequestering its peasants on reservations, while fighting to ensure its reserves of tungsten and tin didn’t fall to the red tide of international communism.

U.S. imperialism abroad, however, did not erase the influence of settler ethics and practices closer to home. As Time Magazine magnate Henry Luce suggested, even as non-interventionist sentiment ran high in the run up to World War II, “Americans had to learn how to hate Germans, but hating Japs comes natural—as natural as fighting Indians once was.” In turn, few events evoked the Indian removal of the 1830s more than the 1940s herding of 100,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans into camps in the Western interior while many of their white neighbors avidly claimed their farmlands and possessions.

An expansive and celebratory vision of white settlement also retained its purchase: by the 1950s, Andrew Jackson’s studded republic was remade through the promise of homeownership on “the crabgrass frontier.” Working in conjunction with real estate and banking industries, federal housing authorities drew up “residential security maps” that identified with stark red-lines where the valued property, credit, and people needed go—and where untrustworthy denizens should remain fixed.

By the late 1960s, as sharply racialized contests over public space and civic belonging gave way to the “wars” on crime and drugs, sociologist Sidney Willhelm foresaw that urban blacks in particular, who were no longer required for industrial labor, were “going the way of the American Indian” into carceral warehouses. It is hardly incidental that Michigan’s Oakland County Executive Brooks Patterson thought it apt, quite recently, to characterize inner city Detroit as a “reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and the corn.”

This push and pull of U.S. settler ethics, narratives, and corollary institutions of violence in the name of freedom has yielded a distinctive and multi-layered carceral history and geography, at once domestic and transnational: a global archipelago of prisons, internment camps, and detention centers. In the past years, at Standing Rock, its raw circuitry of indigenous sequester and citizen protection was once again laid bare as state police and U.S. military forces had tense stand-offs with thousands of Sioux and supporters who were blocking construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline through Indian reservation lands.

Here, we might observe how settler ethics and practices continue to create liberated citizens and subordinated subjects together; the former are defined by democratic, formally egalitarian claims to nationhood, legal status, consumer choice and protection, and the latter defined as atavistic, backward, passively disappearing, slated for elimination, subject to sequestration, or bound by what is thought to be permanent inferior status. “Savagery,” in short, has been a fungible and centrifugal construct, with fears of the native fueling racism as well as nativism, while a recursive, blank-slate conception of settler primacy and preeminence animates movements, programs, and policies for eliminating or warding off alien or foreign presence.

The inceptive structuring of indigenous elimination as a condition of the settlers’ freedom has yielded an enduring tendency among American officials, and among the publics they conscript, to think of democratic self-rule as interdependent with expansive and coercive rule over alien subjects. After 9/11, this historical subtext returned to the foreground as Americans were told not only that fighting terrorists overseas meant not having to fight them at home, but also that continuing to shop and spend at home was no less the duty of a civilized and prosperous people. The term “enemy combatant” itself was a neologism invented for “unlawful” fighters, those deserving no legal standing or status—those who could be detained (and tortured) with impunity—those subject to an unlimited deprivation of freedom, one whose avowed legal precedent, once again referred back to the Indian wars.

As inhabitants of a finite and ecologically stressed planet, the challenges of undoing settler ethics—its ways of war, its presumptions about a need for limitless growth, its hostile vision of blank slate autonomy without dependency, and its delimitations of social and political membership—have never been higher. For more than simple racism or discrimination, the destructive premise at the core of the settler narrative is that freedom itself must be built upon eliminationism, and that growth therefore requires expiry.

And it this temptation—to remain on the right side of might that makes right—that stalks the future of a planet in the grips of climate destruction, secular stagnation, and unevenly distributed misery. Earthly co-existence, material subsistence, and ecological sustainability demand nothing less than a new dispensation of human freedom. Otherwise, there truly will be none left to mourn.

 The Pervasive Power of the Settler Mindset. By Nikhil Pal Singh. Boston Review , November 26, 2019. 

On September 21, 1945—five months after Franklin Roosevelt’s death—President Harry Truman assembled his cabinet for a meeting that one historian has called “a turning point in the American century.” The purpose of the meeting was to discuss Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s proposal to share atomic bomb information with the Soviets. Stimson, who had directed the Manhattan Project, maintained that the only way to make the Soviets trustworthy was to trust them. In his proposal to Truman, he wrote that not sharing the bomb with the Soviets would “almost certainly stimulate feverish activity on the part of the Soviets . . . in what will in effect be a secret armament race of a rather desperate character.”

Henry Wallace, the secretary of commerce and former vice president, agreed with Stimson, as did Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson (though he later changed his position), but Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal laid down the definitive opposition. “The Russians, like the Japanese,” he argued, “are essentially Oriental in their thinking, and until we have a longer record of experience with them . . . it seems doubtful that we should endeavor to buy their understanding and sympathy. We tried that once with Hitler. There are no returns on appeasement.” Forrestal, a skilled bureaucratic infighter, had made his fortune on Wall Street and frequently framed his arguments in economic terms. The bomb and the knowledge that produced it, Forrestal argued, was “the property of the American people”—control over it, like the U.S. seizure of Japan’s former Pacific Island bases, needed to be governed by the concept of “sole Trusteeship.”

Truman sided with Forrestal. Stimson retired that very same day, his swan song ignored, and Wallace, soon to be forced out of the Truman administration for his left-wing views, described the meeting as “one of the most dramatic of all cabinet meetings in my fourteen years of Wash­ington experience.” Forrestal, meanwhile, went on to be the country’s first secretary of defense in 1947 and is the man who illustrates perhaps more than anyone else how Cold War militarism achieved its own coherence and legitimacy by adopting economic logic and criteria—that is, by envi­sioning military power as an independent domain of capital expenditure in the service of a political economy of freedom. From his pivotal work in logistics and procurement during World War II, to his assiduously cultivated relationships with anti–New Deal congressmen and regional business leaders sympathetic to the military, Forrestal both helped to fashion and occupied the nexus of an emerging corporate-military order. He only served as defense secretary for eighteen months (he committed suicide under suspicious circumstances in 1949), but on the day of that fateful cabinet meeting, he won the decisive battle, advocating for what he once called a state of ongoing “semi-war.” The post–World War II rise of a U.S. military-industrial complex is well understood, but it still remains hidden in plain sight. Today warnings about Donald Trump’s assault on the “liberal international order” are commonplace while less examined is how we arrived at a point where democratic and “peacetime” governance entails a global military infrastructure of 800 U.S. military bases in more than 70 countries.

Moreover, this infrastructure is under the command of one person, supported by a labor force numbering in the millions, and oriented to a more-or-less permanent state of war. If a politics of threat inflation and fear is one part of the answer, the other, more prosaic component is that the system itself is modeled after the scope of business and finance. By managing a diverse portfolio of assets and liabilities and identifying investment opportunities, it envisions a preeminently destructive enterprise as a series of returns calibrated to discretionary assessment of threats and a preponderance of force. This was Forrestal’s bailiwick.

A little-known anecdote about Truman’s 1947 call to Congress for decisive intervention in the Greek civil war—generally viewed as the official declaration of the Cold War—illustrates this point. Truman’s speech is famous for its emphasis on political freedom, particularly the idea of protecting peoples’ rights to self-determination against “armed minorities”—“the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by communists.” “One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States,” Truman said, establishing the characteristic linkage between World War II and the Cold War, “is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. Our victory was won over countries which sought to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other nations.”

 The moral and rhetorical heightening of the opposition between democracy and communism (and, incipiently, terrorism) was a conscious choice. Truman was famously advised by Republican senator Arthur Vandenburg that securing public and congressional support for unprecedented and costly peacetime intervention into European affairs entailed “scaring the hell out of the American people.” Another, less visible choice, however, was to downplay the role of the accountant’s ledger, which was more overt in an early draft of Truman’s speech. That draft argued that emergency financial support for Greece (and Turkey) was now a requirement of world capitalism: “Two great wars and an intervening world depression have weakened the [capitalist] system almost everywhere except in the United States. If, by default, we permit free enterprise to disappear in other countries of the world, the very existence of our democracy will be gravely threatened.” Acknowledging the less-than-compelling purchase of this argument, Secretary of State Dean Acheson remarked derisively that it made “the whole thing sound like an investment prospectus.”

Truman’s delivered address, by contrast, made use of the words “free” and “freedom” twenty-four times in a few minutes, as if talismanic repetition were enough to hinge the defense of private capital accumulation to the maintenance of popular democracy the world over. Yet, despite the inflated rhetoric, economic considerations remained the skeletal core of the Truman Doctrine. Buried inside the address was the acknowledged collapse of British imperial policy in the region, along with an “invitation” from a dubiously democratic, right-wing Greek government for “financial and other assistance” in support of “better public administration.” The imperatives of democracy and self-government—preeminent political values understood by the U.S. public—were subordinated to building “an economy in which a healthy democracy can flourish.” In a final nod to the bean counters, Truman noted that the amount he was requesting was a mere fraction of what the United States spent during World War II, and no less justified as “an investment in world freedom and world peace.”

 The challenge for U.S. policy makers going forward was to reconcile a lofty rhetorical and moral emphasis upon the principle of political self-determination with the necessity of investing military force (i.e., “other assistance”) whose paramount end was securing the market freedoms of national and international capitalists. The teleological (and tautological) proposition that a substratum of properly capitalist economic relations organically yielded a democratic harvest would be the farmer’s almanac of a rising generation of modernization theorists. But the reality on the ground—in a world where the main provenance of self-determination was defined by the bloody rearguard defense of colonial prerogatives on the part of the United States’ most important allies and industrial partners—was bitter, and far less susceptible to universalizing nostrums. Straight-talking U.S. policy makers, particularly those at the center of the military apparatus, knew it.

The following year, for example, George Kennan, author of the “containment” doctrine, a protégé of Forrestal, and the single most influential strategic foreign policy thinker of the moment, offered a strikingly candid version of the task at hand, in a classified memo that consciously punctured the universalist ambit of the Truman Doctrine:

     ’’ We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. (emphasis added)””

When thinking about nations and peoples, particularly those outside of Europe, Kennan again foregrounded a logic of investment and risk management, and he advised restraint and limitation of liability, espescially with respect to “the peoples of Asia . . . [who] are going to go ahead, whatever we do, with the development of their political forms and mutual interrelationships in their own way.” Kennan warned that the coming period would be neither “liberal” nor “peaceful,” and that such countries were likely to “fall, for varying periods, under the influence of Moscow, whose ideology has a greater lure for such peoples, and probably greater reality, than anything we could oppose to it . . . [or that] our people would ever willingly concede to such a purpose.” In this light, he concluded that the United States needed to dispense with commitments, rhetorical and otherwise, to “unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”

This view is sometimes depicted as an exemplary instance of realism—wiser and more in tune with the messy, uneven world that emerged from World War II—and a point of view that, had it been heeded, may have prevented the costly overreach of global cold war, especially “blunders” such as the Vietnam War (which Kennan, long retired to academia, opposed). The concept of realism, however, fails to grasp the functional logic of risk and threat assessment—the insistent and anxious hedging and speculation that made the careers and fortunes of Kennan, Forrestal, and many that followed them. Forrestal fretted obsessively in his diary along these lines: “I am more impressed than ever as things develop in the world today that policy may be frequently shaped by events unless someone has a strong and clear mental grasp of events; strong enough and clear enough so that he is able to shape policy rather than letting it be developed by accidents.” This recurrent epistemic anxiety initiated an insistent demand for anticipatory policy, abiding mistrust, and the maintenance of a preponderance of force. As Forrestal bluntly put it, “Power is needed until we are sure of the reign of law.”

 Despite his long period of service within a New Deal liberal political milieu, Forrestal (like Kennan) was disinterested in universalizing the scope of political self-determination overseas, recognizing as more press ing the preservation of a capitalist economy built on uneven development and asymmetric military power at a world scale. Electrified upon reading Kennan’s “Long Telegram” (1946), Forrestal viewed his fellow Princeton man as a kindred soul, one who had intuited similar grounds of Orientalist menace, inscrutability, and immunity to anything but the language of force in Soviet conduct. It was Forrestal who brought Kennan to Washington, D.C., from Moscow and into the policy-making apparatus; both men were solicitous toward the value of rank and privilege, tolerant of authoritarian deviations from liberal standards, and assured that freedom from coercion was the provenance of those who, in Kennan’s words, were already imbued with “Anglo-Saxon traditions of compromise.”

Forrestal framed his own deference for hierarchy in terms of the prerogatives of corporate capitalism—the idea that practical men of business, rather than reformers and intellectuals, had won World War II and needed to be running the world going forward. Among his more forceful conclusions was that liberal globalism would be disastrous if it were not steeled with counterrevolutionary animus. As he confided to diplomat Stanton Griffiths:

   “”Between Hitler, your friends to the east, and the intellectual muddlers who have had the throttle for the last ten years, the practical people are going to have a hell of a time getting the world out of receivership, and when the miracles are not produced the crackpots may demand another chance in which to really finish the job. At that time, it will be of greatest importance that the Democratic Party speaks for the liberals, but not for the revolutionaries.”

For these realists, even more than the wooly moralists they sometimes ridiculed, it was the credibility of U.S. threats of force that ensured the freedom and mobility of productive capital and supported its resource needs and allied interests across an ever-widening sphere. Of a more aristocratic and consciously anti-democratic mien, Kennan likewise recognized that the animating logic was not strictly anti-communist but counterrevolutionary—indeed even racial. The inevitable dissolution of the colonial system meant that the challenge of U.S. policy in the coming period was broader than the struggle with Soviet communism, as “all persons with grievances, whether economic or racial will be urged to seek redress not in mediation and compromise, but in defiant, violent struggle.” Inspired by communist appeals, “poor will be set against rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers against established residents.”

By eliding soviet designs with those of heterogeneous movements demanding effective sovereignty and challenging material deprivation, Forrestal and his colleagues contributed to a perverse recasting of the dynamic of European colonial disintegration as the field of Soviet imperial expansion. This rhetorical and ideological frame practically demanded the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, with U.S. “counterforce” the only alternative to a world ruled by force. As such, along with Arthur Radford, Forrestal was instrumental in developing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and that agency’s work soon echoed his. In 1948, for instance, a CIA document entitled “The Break-Up of Colonial Empires and its Implications for US Security” defined expressions of “economic nationalism” and “racial antagonism” as primary sources of “friction between the colonial powers and the US on the one hand, and the states of the Near and Far East on the other.”

The CIA’s analysts suggested that poverty and a legacy of anti-colonial grievances rendered colonized and formerly colonized peoples “peculiarly susceptible to Soviet penetration” and warned that the “gravest danger” facing the United States was that decolonizing nations might fall into alignment with the USSR. At the same time, they faulted Europe’s colonial powers for their failure to satisfy “the aspirations of their dependent areas” and advised them to “devise formulae that will retain their good will as emergent or independent states.” Envisioning U.S. responsibility to author such formulae in the future, the classified brief concluded that the United States should adopt “a more positive and sympathetic attitude toward the national aspirations of these areas,” including policy that “at least partially meets their demands for economic assistance.” Otherwise “it will risk their becoming actively antagonistic toward the US,” including loss of access to previously “assured sources of raw materials, markets, and military bases.”

While the emerging U.S. foreign policy clearly accepted the un-resolvable antagonism toward the Soviet Union, the challenge of the future, as the CIA argued, was how the United States should address the “increasing fragmentation of the non-Soviet world,” or, in a word, decolonization. The means for assessing risk and reward in this expansive and heterogeneous terrain of imperial disintegration were by no means clear. But it is revealing that the possibility of potential alignments between decolonizing nations and Soviet power was far less concrete and worrisome to the United States than the more definite and delineated material losses faced by the United States and the colonial powers with which it had aligned itself—namely, being deprived access to formerly “assured sources of raw materials, markets and military bases.” In other words, the challenge of the future, as Kennan had underlined, was to devise “formulae” to buttress the forms of political authority that sustained economic inequality (at a world scale) in the face of inevitable revolt and revolution against such authority and the social conditions it supported.

Despite his later misgivings, Kennan had authored the concept whose rhetorical elasticity and ideological indeterminacy proved crucial to fashioning a nemesis that suited this consciously expansionist vision of U.S. economic and military power. With the creation of the CIA, the National Security Council, and Forrestal’s own new position of secretary of defense, these years saw the growth of a national security bureaucracy that was divorced from meaningful oversight and public accountability for its actions, including myriad moral failures and calamities. A covert anti-Soviet destabilization campaign in Eastern Europe, for example, greenlit by Forrestal and Kennan, enlisted Ukrainian partisans who had worked with the Nazis. This type of activity would become routine in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, where Kennan derided respect for the “delicate fiction of sovereignty” that undeserving, “unprepared peoples” had been allowed to extend over the resources of the earth.

Over the next quarter century, fewer than 400 individuals operated the national security bureaucracy, with some individuals enjoying decades of influence. That the top tier was dominated by white men who were Ivy League–educated lawyers, bankers, and corporate executives (often with ties to armament-related industries) lends irony to official fearmongering about armed conspiracies mounted by small groups, let alone the idea that the role of the United States was to defend free choice against coercion imposed by nonrepresentative minorities. This fact, perhaps more than any other, suggests that, as much as the Cold War represented a competition between incompatible, if by no means coeval or equally powerful systems of rule (i.e., communist and capitalist), it was marked by convergences too. The Soviet “empire of justice” and the U.S. “empire of liberty” engaged in mimetic, cross-national interventions, clandestine, counter-subversive maneuvers, and forms of clientelism that were all dictated by elite, ideologically cohesive national security bureaucracies immune from popular scrutiny and democratic oversight.

Those charged with governing the controlling seat of U.S. globalism consistently doubted the compatibility of normative democratic requirements and the security challenges they envisioned, including distrust that often bordered on contempt for the publics in whose name they claimed to act. “We are today in the midst of a cold war, our enemies are to be found abroad and at home,” remarked Bernard Baruch, coining the term that names this era. In this context, “the survival of the state is not a matter of law,” Acheson famously declared, an argument similar to one being advanced by former Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. Vandenberg, echoing defenders of Roosevelt’s accretive accumulation of war powers, was positively wistful lamenting “the heavy handicap” that the United States faced “when imperiled by an autocracy like Russia where decisions require nothing but a narrow Executive mandate.” For Forrestal, “the most dangerous spot is our own country because the people are so eager for peace and have such a distaste for war that they will grasp for any sign of a solution of a problem that has had them deeply worried.”

Forrestal felt that the danger at home manifested itself most frustratingly in the threat that congressional budgeting posed to military requirements. The preservation of a state of peace was a costly proposition when it revolved around open-ended threat prevention the world over. Upholding the permanent preponderance of U.S. military power at a global scale required a new type of fiscal imagination, one that had to be funded by the future promise of tax receipts. During his final year in office, Forrestal’s diary records in mind-numbing detail his worries about acquiring Pentagon funding adequate to his projections for global military reach. In Forrestal’s view, budgetary considerations were captive to the wrong baseline of “peak of war danger” and combatting “aggression” rather than to “maintenance of a permanent state of adequate military preparation.”

A fascinating aspect of these budget wrangles is Forrestal’s manic efforts to translate future-oriented geostrategic needs into precise dollar values. Just months before his forced retirement and eventual suicide, he confided to Walter G. Andrews:

   ’ Our biggest headache at the moment, of course, is the budget. The President has set the ceiling at 14 billion 4 against the pared down requirements that we put in of 16 billion 9. I am frank to say, however, I have the greatest sympathy with him because he is determined not to spend more than we take in in taxes. He is a hard-money man if ever I saw one.’”

Despite his grudging admiration for the stolid Truman, Forrestal’s Wall Street background had left him at ease in a more speculative or liquid universe; at that precise moment, he was devising accounting gimmicks to offset near billion-dollar costs of stockpiling raw materials as a “capital item” that could be “removed from the budget.” The important point to emphasize is the relationship between two interrelated forms of speculation and accounting—economic and military—in which an absolute inflation of threats tempted a final break with lingering hard-money orthodoxies and a turn to deficit spending. Forrestal did not live to see the breakthrough, but his work paid off.

As Acheson described it, the Korean War—the first hot war of the Cold War era—“saved” the fledgling national security state. With its outbreak, the dream of eternal military liquidity was realized when Leon Keyserling, the liberal economist serving as Truman’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, argued that military expenditures functioned as an economic growth engine. That theory then underpinned NSC 68, the document that justified massive U.S. defense outlays for the foreseeable future and which was authored by another Forrestal protégé, Paul Nitze. By yoking dramatically increased federal spending to security prerogatives, military Keynesianism thus achieved a permanent augmentation of U.S. state capacity no longer achievable under appeals to Keynesianism alone.

The embedding of the global priorities of a national security state, which sometimes appears inevitable in retrospect, was by no means assured in the years leading up to the Korean War. It was challenged by uncooperative allies, a war-weary or recalcitrant U.S. public, and politicians who were willing to cede U.S. military primacy and security prerogatives in the name of international cooperation. But by 1947, men such as Forrestal had laid the groundwork for rejecting the Rooseveltian internationalist inheritance, arguing it was necessary to “accept the fact that the concept of one world upon which the United Nations was based is no longer valid and that we are in political fact facing a division into two worlds.” Although the militarization of U.S. policy is often understood to have been reactive and conditioned by threats from the outside, his ruminations illustrate how militarized globalism was actively conceived as anticipatory policy (in advance of direct confrontations with the Soviet Union) by just a few architects and defense intellectuals—men under whose sway we continue to live and die.

Ultimately, the declaration of the Cold War says more about how these U.S. elites represented and imagined their “freedom” and envisioned the wider world as a domain for their own discretionary action and accumulation than it did about enabling other people to be free, let alone shaping the terms of a durable and peaceful international order. As early as 1946, Forrestal began taking important businessmen on tours of the wreckage of Pacific Island battles, which also happened to be future sites for U.S. nuclear testing. Forestall described these ventures as “an effort to provide long-term insurance against the disarmament wave, the shadows of which I can already see peeping over the horizon.” The future of the bomb and the empire of bases were already on his mind.

Forrestal recognized that force and threat are always fungible things to be leveraged in the service of the reality that truly interested him, the reality made by men who own the future. For those of his cast of mind, “international order” was never more than the fig leaf of wealth and power. As he noted in a 1948 letter to Hansen Baldwin of the New York Times: “It has long been one of my strongly held beliefs that the word ‘security’ ought to be stricken from the language, and the word ‘risk’ substituted. I came to that conclusion out of my own business experience.” It was the job, after all, of these East Coast lawyers and moneymen to make sure all bets were hedged, and Forrestal knew that speculation could turn into “an investment gone bad.” As a leading investor in the Cold War project, he wanted a guaranteed return, even if the rule of law never arrived and even when the price was ruin.

Banking on the Cold War. By Nikhil Pal Singh. Boston Review,  March 14 , 2019.

Nikhil Pal Singh is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University and Faculty Diretor of the NYU Prison Education Program.

New York University