As political fissures widen on the international stage, collective mental health continues to deteriorate, and global warming threatens the very survival of our planet, we find ourselves in a period of radical, unprecedent- ed change. Some see in this change potential and hope, while others spy jeopardy on the horizon. So it is that the theme for HowTheLightGetsIn London this year is ‘Uncharted Territory’. Each of our debates takes on one of the biggest issues transforming the world around us, in search of ways to grasp the future and make it work for all of us.

Aeon never shies away from a challenging question, and enlists the world’s leading thinkers – working at the frontier of research in philosophy, science, history, psychology, and the social sciences – to find original answers. We’ve teamed up to curate this collection of their most daring articles: each one speaks to a debate programmed for HowTheLightGetsIn London 2019.

Sebastian Purcell’s exploration of the social quality of virtue in Aztec moral philosophy perfectly supplements our debate ‘Virtue and Vice’; Nabeelah Jaffer’s meditation on the causal links between isolation, disempowerment and terrorism echoes in ‘Reason, Rage and Revolution’; Rebecca Kukla’s subtle review of the language of sexual communication resonates with the complex reality of the sexual space confronted in ‘Bad Boys’; Tim Rogan turns to Amartya Sen’s critique of capitalism, in a way that will inform our debate ‘Is Capitalism Broken?’; Stephen T Asma’s argument that religion evolved to help humans with emotion regulation might provide one answer to questions posed in ‘New Gods’; and Elise Crull’s mind-bending reckon- ing with entangled time examines the far reaches of science, and the inevi- table failure of grand unifying theories, as we will explore in ‘A Crack in Everything’.

With over 70 debates and talks on everything from post-truth to patriarchy and beyond, HowTheLightGetsIn London 2019 is shaping up to be our most intellectually vibrant festival yet. We hope this Aeon Edition, specially designed for offline reading, will launch your reading list before the festival commences – and we know that Aeon has much more onsite for further reading, when the festival draws to a close. 2019 Aeon Editions How The Light Gets In, London 2019

© Copyright 2019 Aeon and the authors, artists, designers, photographers and other contributors.

No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission from the editor and publisher. The opinions expressed in Aeon Editions are those of the contributing authors and not necessarily those of the editor or publisher.

Cover image: Serpent Labret with Articulated Tongue, 1300–1521 CE. Labrets were the visual markers of the eloquent, truthful speech expected of royalty and the nobility in Aztec culture. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Image 1: Paris, Port de la Chapelle, 2017. Photo by Gueorgui Pinkhassov/Magnum Image 2: Photo by Alan Levine/Flickr Image 3: Serpent Labret with Articulated Tongue, 1300–1521 CE. Labrets were the visual markers of the eloquent, truthful speech expected of royalty and the nobility in Aztec culture. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Image 4: Amartya Sen photographed in New Delhi, 2017. Photo by Priyanka Parashar/Mint/Getty Image 5: Photo by Terry Vine/Getty Image 6: Photo by Ted Spiegel/National Geographic/Getty Contents

Uncharted Territory

1. Loneliness is the common ground of terror and extremism Nabeelah Jaffer

2. You thought quantum mechanics was weird: check out entangled time Elise Crull

3. Aztec moral philosophy didn’t expect anyone to be a saint Sebastian Purcell

4. Why Amartya Sen remains the century’s great critic of capitalism Tim Rogan

5. Consent and refusal are not the only talking points in sex Rebecca Kukla

6. Religion is about emotion regulation, and it’s very good at it Stephen T Asma E S S A Y

Nabeelah Jaffer In extremis

As Hannah Arendt argued, there is one common thread which connects individuals drawn to all kinds of extremist ideologies

A few years ago I discovered that my friend Tom was a white supremacist. This put me in a strange position: I am a Muslim and the daughter of immigrants. I am a member of one of the so-called invading groups that Tom fears and resents. He broadcasts his views from his social media accounts, which are a catalogue of aggrieved far-Right anger. One post warns ‘the Muslim invaders to keep their filthy hands off our women’. Another features a montage of black faces above the headline: ‘This is the white race after “diversity”.’ Underpinning this is a desperate resentment of ‘liberal Leftie attempts to control free speech’. Tom has never mentioned any of these ideas to me; on the contrary, in person he is consistently warm and friendly. He vents his convictions only online, and it seems unlikely that he would ever translate them into violent actions. And yet much the same was once said of Thomas Mair, the 52- year-old from Birstall, a village in northern England, who spent time helping elderly neighbours tend to their gardens, and who in 2016 murdered the pro-immigration MP Jo Cox, while shouting: ‘This is for Britain!’ His actions were found to have been inspired by white supremacist ideology.

James Baldwin was right to say that ideas are dangerous. Ideas force people to confront the gap between their ideals and their manifestation in the world, prompting action. Ideas can prompt change for better or for worse – and often both at the same time. But attempts to create change are always charged with danger: to act in new ways is to erode old limits on our behaviour. In the forging of new territory – and the sense of danger that accompanies it – actions that might once have been deemed excessive can come to seem not merely necessary but normal.

But to understand what has led someone to extremism it is not enough to point to ideology. Ideas alone did not bring Mair to leave his home that morning with a sawn-off shotgun and a seven-inch knife. The accounts that emerged in the weeks after Cox’s murder dwelt on many details of Mair’s previously blameless life. But more than anything else, they repeatedly echoed the words of a woman who runs a meditation centre in Mair’s local area, which he visited the evening before he killed Jo Cox: ‘He just seemed a really lonely guy who wanted someone to talk to.’

It is worth knowing that my friend Tom finds little satisfaction in his daily life. He does not enjoy his work and has never had a romantic relationship. His part of Oxford is thick with cultural diversity but he has few friends there. A mutual friend once described Tom as seeming spiritually wounded. Like Mair, he exudes an aura of biting loneliness.

‘Loneliness is the common ground of terror’ – and not just the terror of totalitarian governments, of which Hannah Arendt was thinking when she wrote those words in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). It also generates the sort of psychic terror that can creep up on a perfectly ordinary individual, cloaking everything in a mist of urgent fear and uncertainty.

By ‘loneliness’ Arendt did not simply mean solitude, in which – as she points out – you have your own self for consolation. In the solitude of our minds, we engage in an internal dialogue. We speak in two voices. It is this internal dialogue that allows us to achieve independent and creative thought – to weigh strong competing imperatives against each other. You engage in it every time you grapple with a moral dilemma. Every clash of interests, every instance of human difference evokes it. True thought, for Arendt, involved the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. True loneliness, therefore, was the opposite. It involved the abrupt halting of this internal dialogue: ‘the loss of one’s own self’ – or rather, the loss of trust in oneself as the partner of one’s thoughts. True loneliness means being cut off from a sense of human commonality and therefore conscience. You are left adrift in a sea of insecurity and ambiguity, with no way of navigating the storms.

Adolf Eichmann was a senior SS officer who was involved first in the voluntary emigration of Jews, then in their forced deportation, and finally in their extermination. According to Arendt, Eichmann exhibited just such loneliness. He had an ‘almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view’ – to empathise in a way that would have meant stepping outside his own Nazi worldview. When questioned about his past by a Jewish policeman in Israel, he defaulted to self-pitying explanations about why he had not been promoted to a higher rank in the SS: ‘Whatever I prepared and planned, everything went wrong … whatever I desired and wanted and planned to do, fate prevented it somehow.’ As Arendt drily notes, it didn’t occur to Eichmann that his interviewer was unlikely to value a rapid rise through the ranks of the SS in the same way that Eichmann himself did.

It was loneliness, Arendt argued, that helped Eichmann and countless others – who might otherwise be models of amiability, kind to their subordinates and inferiors (as Eichmann was reported to be) – to give themselves over to totalitarian ideologies and charismatic strongmen. These totalitarian ideologies are designed to appeal to those who struggle with the internal moral dialogue that Arendt valued as the highest form of thought.

Totalitarian ideas offer a ‘total explanation’ – a single idea is sufficient to explain everything. Independent thought is rendered irrelevant in the act of joining up to their black-and-white worldview. Eichmann himself was always a ‘joiner’ who feared the possibility of ‘a leaderless and difficult individual life’. Becoming an ‘idealist’ assuaged these fears (the word is perhaps better read as ‘ideologue’). After all, if you sign up to the idea that class struggle, racial competition or civilisational conflict is absolute, then you can achieve meaning and kinship as part of a race, class or civilisation without ever requiring two-sided thought – the kind of thought that involves weighing competing imperatives and empathising with a range of people. For Arendt, the evils of the Final Solution were enacted by joiners such as Eichmann. It was pointless to argue with them that their logic was flawed, or that the facts of history did not support it. That wasn’t really why they had signed up to it in the first place.

The act of ‘joining up’ to an absolute ideology involves a kind of winnowing. It happens when someone begins to see the world through the lens of a single story. Friction with a teacher at school, or a struggle to find work, or a neighbourhood becoming more culturally mixed, or casual racism begin to seem like facets of one simple problem. And simple problems offer the alluring prospect of simple, radical solutions. If all our problems are simply part of a bigger story of an inevitable clash of civilisations between the West and Islam, then one has only to pick a side. It seemed to me that Tom – like Eichmann – had found his ideology, and had picked his side.

Of course, Tom is not alone. When I talk to him I am reminded of the young men and women I have interviewed who have expressed their sympathy and support for ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and other violent terror groups. Like Eichmann, many were joiners, drawn to the binary answers and black-and-white worldview on offer. Not one of the jihadist supporters I got to know seemed inherently evil. But all of them viewed the world through jihadist clichés – they struggled with two-sided thought. The theme of turning away from ambiguity and empathy runs through jihadist propaganda. ISIS’s English-language magazine repeatedly criticised the ‘grayzone’ – a term used to describe anything that lay between their own ideology and that of the kuffar, or unbeliever. The epithet was often directed at the space of compromise that immigrants inhabit: between two cultures, two sets of values, and two ways of life. More than one ISIS supporter told me that the problem with Western Muslims was that ‘they are living in the grey area, confused, hesitant and ashamed of their Deen [religion]’.

To say that someone struggles with two-sided thought is not to say that he is stupid: Tom is an engineer by training, and many of the jihadist- sympathisers I have interviewed have had higher education. But they are thoughtless in that they neglect their capacity for independent thought in favour of total commitment to their chosen movement. Like Tom, most of these jihadist supporters had never taken any violent action. But many also mirrored Tom in their concrete adherence to a single ideological premise that seemed to them to explain the world. Like him, they believed that the West and Islam were two clear opposing entities engaged in an unstoppable war. They had simply chosen to support the other side.

If loneliness is the common ground of terror, then there is something fundamentally wrong with the way that we talk about extremism – particularly the jihadist variety. All too often it is viewed as a foreign threat: an infection from an alien civilisation.

Arendt suggested that certain kinds of solitude made people vulnerable to loneliness and therefore to terror. She drew particular attention to a structural problem: the ‘uprootedness and superfluousness’ of modernity. The breakdown of pre-modern political institutions and social traditions had created societies in which people had ‘no place in the world, recognised and guaranteed by others’, and – crucially – no sense of belonging. Society is the mirror in which we see ourselves. Finding our place within it – in ‘the trusting and trustworthy company of equals’ – helps us to understand our own identities, to know ourselves, and to trust our own thoughts. When we are excluded from society, we are vulnerable to the kind of fear and insecurity Arendt talked about. But while Arendt was thinking of alienation among the bourgeoisie, her words acutely describe another experience of not-belonging that is common in Western societies today. Last year I interviewed someone currently undergoing trial for disseminating terror materials in the UK. As we talked, he returned again and again to a complaint that underpinned his interest in violent extremist materials.

‘I don’t have a place where I can say this is my place,’ he said. ‘A sense of belonging – we don’t have that.’ ISIS had gone a bit too far, he conceded, ‘but their idea of having a place like that – where we can belong…’ His face was bright and his smile was easy as he contemplated the idea. ‘That’s it, it’s as simple as that.’

Belonging – or rather its absence – is a common theme among extremists. Take the case of Abdullahi Yusuf – a Somali-born 17-year-old from Minnesota who tried to join ISIS in 2014 but was stopped at the border. Like so many young extremists, Yusuf was well-integrated into Western society. He had an American accent, loved NBA basketball and supported the Minnesota Vikings. But it is possible to be well-integrated and still feel as if you do not really belong. Yusuf had moved schools three times in a single year – once because the school had been abruptly shut without warning. He didn’t ‘know anyone successful’, as he told New York magazine in 2017, and – perhaps even more importantly – he felt as if there was no way to cling to his Somali and Muslim identity while also finding a place in the US. At his trial, Yusuf spoke about watching videos that told him ‘that Muslims shouldn’t live in the West, that it’s better for them to make a journey to an Islamic State … it’s a better place to live.’ By the time he watched them, he and his friends were ripe for the ideology on offer.

Difference always produces friction. But we rarely acknowledge that no problem of difference is one-sided: difference always involves two parties. And the story of young jihadist supporters is rarely a simple story of failed integration. It is often at least partly a story of young people feeling as if they do not belong in the West, despite having integrated – despite speaking the language and wearing the clothes and adopting the customs. One young female ISIS supporter said: ‘I remember the kuffar telling me: “Go back where you came from!” So I went to the Islamic State :-).’ An American-Somali man from the US who tried to join ISIS spoke with quiet anger about how ‘You have to come here and adapt, and adapt…’ In these stories, I see the failure of these young people to think in a two- sided way. They struggled to see that the ‘greyzone’ is not a terrible place to live. Life is not simply a story of cultural difference. If loneliness is a failure to engage in independent, empathetic thought, then these individuals were achingly lonely.

But I also wonder why young people who were born and raised in the West should always have to shoulder the burden of thoughtful compromise. Minorities are – by their nature – less powerful than majorities, and consequently less able to give up things without losing their identity altogether. Why should any young woman have to learn how to deal sensitively with being told to go back to where she came from? And why should any young man feel he has to give up wearing foreign clothes, or shed traces of his parents’ foreign accent, or avoid expressing his foreign religion – in order to have a future in the country he was born in? Isn’t their failure to feel at home in the West simply a reflection of the majority’s failure to feel at home with them? Their loneliness has not sprung from nowhere – it is nurtured by their daily lives in the West.

What is the right way to deal with these lonely extremists? If Arendt is right, then the structural causes of loneliness run deep – often, far too deep for a few personal connections to make a difference.

‘I sometimes go a bit too far online,’ Tom admitted to me once, before gently asserting that he didn’t have a problem with me. He was invoking a common distinction: between the collective group – which he fears and stigmatises – and the individual member of that group whom he professes to know and like. It is a sentiment that often begins with the words: ‘Some of my best friends are…’ Eichmann, who allegedly had a Jewish mistress, was also unaffected by his friendships. The businessman Berthold Storfer was a Jew from Vienna who worked closely with Eichmann to deport Jews to Palestine under the Nazi regime in 1940. Sometime later, Storfer went into hiding and was caught and sent to Auschwitz. He asked for Eichmann, who visited to tell Storfer he was unable to help: Heinrich Himmler’s rules were inflexible – nobody could leave the camps. Eichmann chided Storfer for having tried to run, but had him moved to a less strenuous work duty. ‘We shook hands,’ Eichmann said later, ‘it was a great inner joy to me.’ Six weeks after this happy encounter, Arendt notes, ‘Storfer was dead – not gassed, apparently, but shot.’

Knowing me has made little difference to Tom’s broader ideology, and to his conviction that immigrants in general and Muslims in particular are the great enemy of our time. Factual debate also makes no impact. When our mutual friends disagree at length with Tom’s extreme opinions, he hardens into polarised opposition. He is quiet but stubborn, retreating into his shell with a wounded air. Of course, all of us suffer at times from confirmation bias – a tendency to favour information that supports our existing beliefs. But Tom does not simply prefer certain facts to others – he seems almost uninterested in them. Instead, he returns repeatedly to cliché (something Arendt also noted in Eichmann). ‘Religion taking over like it always has,’ he writes in a typical post, ‘sharia will creep to power and form an Islamic State.’ This is beyond the common run of immigration-skepticism and the distaste for religion that any decided atheist might have. It drums out a single narrow account of the world – past, present and future.

There is chilly logical consistency to Tom’s ideas. If you presume that Western culture represents a single (and singularly enlightened) worldview, then it follows that non-white immigrants attached to less perfect cultures are a threat that must be stopped. If you are convinced that Islam also entails a single worldview that is coincidentally the total antithesis of the consummately enlightened Western approach, then it follows that it must be fought. If you have already decided that civilisation is all that matters in this story, then what need is there for anything else? In ‘Ideology and Terror’ (1953), Arendt suggested strict self-evident logicality was the main capacity left to those who could not engage in true thought: the fact that two and two equals four cannot be denied ‘even under the conditions of absolute loneliness’. Such logical reasoning becomes ‘the only reliable “truth” human beings can fall back upon’ once they have lost the sense of mutuality needed to know their way in a common world. (Though there might be other reasons for this correlation, it has often been noted that a disproportionately large number of violent Islamist extremists have backgrounds in engineering, science or maths.) Logic, after all, needs neither the self nor the other in order to function. Only one premise matters – and it must be allowed to race freely through mankind, executing its inherent law.

Tom’s narrative has no need of facts. They are beside the point. Like other ideas that aspire to ‘total explanation’, the narrative pretends ‘to know beforehand everything that experience may still have in store’. Armed with omniscient knowledge of the ‘true’ cause for all events, believers are relieved of their sense of insecurity. Here, at last, is a consistent explanation for everything. Totalitarian ideas emancipate their believers from reality: their worth lies in presenting a coherent absolute narrative of the world, which, as Arendt noted in Origins, is ‘more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself’. Experience is irrelevant: there is nothing new to be learned about the situation. The idea of a Jewish world conspiracy was once made to seem more true than reality by the Nazis, who simply acted ‘as though the world were dominated by the Jews and needed a counterconspiracy to defend itself’. Truth is simply not as relevant as what seems to be the truth.

When Arendt argued that loneliness was the common ground of terror, she was not thinking of individual acts of terrorism perpetrated by those on the margins – but of the terror of authoritarian ideologies and governments being slowly embraced by society’s dominant majority. The ideal subject of these governments, she argued, was not a convinced extremist but simply an isolated individual, too insecure in himself to truly think: someone for whom the distinction between true and false was beginning to blur, and the promise of a movement was beginning to beckon. Tom did not always hold the beliefs he espouses now. Friends who have known him longer tell me that although he had a troubled early life, his current views crystallised only in his late 20s. But he was once, perhaps, the sort of ideal subject Arendt described.

Tom seems no more evil to me than the angry young ISIS and Al-Qaeda supporters I have talked to. Indeed, I find it impossible to actively dislike him. I rarely see him but when I do he is gentle and amiable, and so clearly unhappy in his loneliness that it is difficult not to feel sorry for him. He is not Iago and not Macbeth, and has no desire ‘to prove a villain’. Thoughtlessness is not a rare quality, and if history were to unfold in a certain direction then he would not be the only person later held to account for supporting entirely logical brutalities. I doubt that most would even fully realise what they were doing.

Nabeelah Jaffer is a former associate editor at Aeon. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Oxford, and her work has been published in The New Statesman, The Guardian, FT Weekend and The Times Literary Supplement. I D E A

Elise Crull You thought quantum mechanics was weird: check out entangled time

In the summer of 1935, the physicists Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger engaged in a rich, multifaceted and sometimes fretful correspondence about the implications of the new theory of quantum mechanics. The focus of their worry was what Schrödinger later dubbed entanglement: the inability to describe two quantum systems or particles independently, after they have interacted.

Until his death, Einstein remained convinced that entanglement showed how quantum mechanics was incomplete. Schrödinger thought that entanglement was the defining feature of the new physics, but this didn’t mean that he accepted it lightly. ‘I know of course how the hocus pocus works mathematically,’ he wrote to Einstein on 13 July 1935. ‘But I do not like such a theory.’ Schrödinger’s famous cat, suspended between life and death, first appeared in these letters, a byproduct of the struggle to articulate what bothered the pair.

The problem is that entanglement violates how the world ought to work. Information can’t travel faster than the speed of light, for one. But in a 1935 paper, Einstein and his co-authors showed how entanglement leads to what’s now called quantum nonlocality, the eerie link that appears to exist between entangled particles. If two quantum systems meet and then separate, even across a distance of thousands of lightyears, it becomes impossible to measure the features of one system (such as its position, momentum and polarity) without instantly steering the other into a corresponding state.

Up to today, most experiments have tested entanglement over spatial gaps. The assumption is that the ‘nonlocal’ part of quantum nonlocality refers to the entanglement of properties across space. But what if entanglement also occurs across time? Is there such a thing as temporal nonlocality?

The answer, as it turns out, is yes. Just when you thought quantum mechanics couldn’t get any weirder, a team of physicists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reported in 2013 that they had successfully entangled photons that never coexisted. Previous experiments involving a technique called ‘entanglement swapping’ had already showed quantum correlations across time, by delaying the measurement of one of the coexisting entangled particles; but Eli Megidish and his collaborators were the first to show entanglement between photons whose lifespans did not overlap at all.

Here’s how they did it. First, they created an entangled pair of photons, ‘1- 2’ (step I in the diagram below). Soon after, they measured the polarisation of photon 1 (a property describing the direction of light’s oscillation) – thus ‘killing’ it (step II). Photon 2 was sent on a wild goose chase while a new entangled pair, ‘3-4’, was created (step III). Photon 3 was then measured along with the itinerant photon 2 in such a way that the entanglement relation was ‘swapped’ from the old pairs (‘1-2’ and ‘3- 4’) onto the new ‘2-3’ combo (step IV). Some time later (step V), the polarisation of the lone survivor, photon 4, is measured, and the results are compared with those of the long-dead photon 1 (back at step II).

Figure 1. Time line diagram: (I) Birth of photons 1 and 2, (II) detection of photon 1, (III) birth of photons 3 and 4, (IV) Bell projection of photons 2 and 3, (V) detection of photon 4.

The upshot? The data revealed the existence of quantum correlations between ‘temporally nonlocal’ photons 1 and 4. That is, entanglement can occur across two quantum systems that never coexisted.

What on Earth can this mean? Prima facie, it seems as troubling as saying that the polarity of starlight in the far-distant past – say, greater than twice Earth’s lifetime – nevertheless influenced the polarity of starlight falling through your amateur telescope this winter. Even more bizarrely: maybe it implies that the measurements carried out by your eye upon starlight falling through your telescope this winter somehow dictated the polarity of photons more than 9 billion years old. Lest this scenario strike you as too outlandish, Megidish and his colleagues can’t resist speculating on possible and rather spooky interpretations of their results. Perhaps the measurement of photon 1’s polarisation at step II somehow steers the future polarisation of 4, or the measurement of photon 4’s polarisation at step V somehow rewrites the past polarisation state of photon 1. In both forward and backward directions, quantum correlations span the causal void between the death of one photon and the birth of the other.

Just a spoonful of relativity helps the spookiness go down, though. In developing his theory of special relativity, Einstein deposed the concept of simultaneity from its Newtonian pedestal. As a consequence, simultaneity went from being an absolute property to being a relative one. There is no single timekeeper for the Universe; precisely when something is occurring depends on your precise location relative to what you are observing, known as your frame of reference. So the key to avoiding strange causal behaviour (steering the future or rewriting the past) in instances of temporal separation is to accept that calling events ‘simultaneous’ carries little metaphysical weight. It is only a frame-specific property, a choice among many alternative but equally viable ones – a matter of convention, or record-keeping.

The lesson carries over directly to both spatial and temporal quantum nonlocality. Mysteries regarding entangled pairs of particles amount to disagreements about labelling, brought about by relativity. Einstein showed that no sequence of events can be metaphysically privileged – can be considered more real – than any other. Only by accepting this insight can one make headway on such quantum puzzles.

The various frames of reference in the Hebrew University experiment (the lab’s frame, photon 1’s frame, photon 4’s frame, and so on) have their own ‘historians’, so to speak. While these historians will disagree about how things went down, not one of them can claim a corner on truth. A different sequence of events unfolds within each one, according to that spatiotemporal point of view. Clearly, then, any attempt at assigning frame-specific properties generally, or tying general properties to one particular frame, will cause disputes among the historians. But here’s the thing: while there might be legitimate disagreement about which properties should be assigned to which particles and when, there shouldn’t be disagreement about the very existence of these properties, particles, and events.

These findings drive yet another wedge between our beloved classical intuitions and the empirical realities of quantum mechanics. As was true for Schrödinger and his contemporaries, scientific progress is going to involve investigating the limitations of certain metaphysical views. Schrödinger’s cat, half-alive and half-dead, was created to illustrate how the entanglement of systems leads to macroscopic phenomena that defy our usual understanding of the relations between objects and their properties: an organism such as a cat is either dead or alive. No middle ground there.

Most contemporary philosophical accounts of the relationship between objects and their properties embrace entanglement solely from the perspective of spatial nonlocality. But there’s still significant work to be done on incorporating temporal nonlocality – not only in object-property discussions, but also in debates over material composition (such as the relation between a lump of clay and the statue it forms), and part-whole relations (such as how a hand relates to a limb, or a limb to a person). For example, the ‘puzzle’ of how parts fit with an overall whole presumes clear- cut spatial boundaries among underlying components, yet spatial nonlocality cautions against this view. Temporal nonlocality further complicates this picture: how does one describe an entity whose constituent parts are not even coexistent?

Discerning the nature of entanglement might at times be an uncomfortable project. It’s not clear what substantive metaphysics might emerge from scrutiny of fascinating new research by the likes of Megidish and other physicists. In a letter to Einstein, Schrödinger notes wryly (and deploying an odd metaphor): ‘One has the feeling that it is precisely the most important statements of the new theory that can really be squeezed into these Spanish boots – but only with difficulty.’ We cannot afford to ignore spatial or temporal nonlocality in future metaphysics: whether or not the boots fit, we’ll have to wear ’em. This Idea was made possible through the support of a grant from Templeton Religion Trust to Aeon. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton Religion Trust.

Funders to Aeon Magazine are not involved in editorial decision-making, including commissioning or content approval.

Elise Crull is assistant professor in history and philosophy of science at the City College of New York. She is the author, together with Guido Bacciagaluppi, of the book The ‘Einstein Paradox’: Debates on Nonlocality and Incompleteness in 1935 (forthcoming). E S S A Y

Sebastian Purcell Life on the slippery Earth

Aztec moral philosophy has profound differences from the Greek tradition, not least its acceptance that nobody is perfect

When Halloween rolled around last year, my wife and I were prepared to be greeted by scores of eager trick-or-treaters. Guided by the thought that too much candy was better than too little, we bought entirely too much, and simply poured the excess on to a platter in our living room. The problem is: I have a sweet-tooth. ‘I can’t stop eating these!’ I said to my wife, peevishly, a few days later. Nearly every time I passed the coffee table, I succumbed to my cravings for a sugar rush, and then I’d feel frustrated and irritated.

When I returned from work that evening, I noticed the platter was empty. ‘Oh, I just took it to work and gave it away to the students,’ my wife said, when I asked. Just like that, my cycle of transgression and guilt was broken.

This little episode illustrates two aspects of Aztec virtue ethics that distinguish it from ‘Western’ forms, such as Plato’s or Aristotle’s. The first is that I did not overcome my vice so much as manage it. The second is that I didn’t manage it on my own, but rather did so (almost entirely) with the help of another person.

While Plato and Aristotle were concerned with character-centred virtue ethics, the Aztec approach is perhaps better described as socially-centred virtue ethics. If the Aztecs were right, then ‘Western’ philosophers have been too focused on individuals, too reliant on assessments of character, and too optimistic about the individual’s ability to correct her own vices. Instead, according to the Aztecs, we should look around to our family and friends, as well as our ordinary rituals or routines, if we hope to lead a better, more worthwhile existence.

This distinction bears on an important question: just how bad are good people allowed to be? Must good people be moral saints, or can ordinary folk be good if we have the right kind of support? This matters for fallible creatures, like me, who try to be good but often run into problems. Yet it also matters for questions of inclusivity. If being good requires exceptional traits, such as practical intelligence, then many people would be excluded – such as those with cognitive disabilities. That does not seem right. One of the advantages of the Aztec view, then, is that it avoids this outcome by casting virtue as a cooperative, rather than an individual, endeavour.

At its core, Aztec virtue ethics has three main elements. One is a conception of the good life as the ‘rooted’ or worthwhile life. Second is the idea of right action as the mean or middle way. Third and final is the belief that virtue is a quality that’s fostered socially.

When I speak about the Aztecs – the people dominant in large parts of central America prior to the 16th-century Spanish conquest – even professional philosophers are often surprised to learn that the Aztecs were a philosophical culture. They’re even more startled to hear that we have (many volumes of) their texts recorded in their native language, Nahuatl. While a few of the pre-colonial hieroglyphic-type books survived the Spanish bonfires, our main sources of knowledge derive from records made by Catholic priests, up to the early 17th century. Using the Latin alphabet, these texts record the statements of tlamatinime, the indigenous philosophers, on matters as diverse as bird-flight patterns, moral virtue, and the structure of the cosmos.

To explain the Aztec conception of the good life, it’s helpful to begin in the sixth volume of a book called the Florentine Codex, compiled by Father Bernardino of Sahagún. Most of the text contains edifying discourses called huehuetlatolli, the elders’ discourses. This particular section records the speeches following the appointment of a new king, when the noblemen appear to compete for the most eloquent articulation of what an ideal monarch should be and do. The result is a succession of speeches like those in Plato’s Symposium, wherein each member tries to produce the most moving expression of praise.

At the end of the noblemen’s speeches, the king himself turns to address his people. He tries to articulate the character of excellent men and women, the standard he expects from his subjects. Of men, he says:

And he is revered; in truth [nelli], he is taken to be a defender and sustainer. He becomes like the silk cotton tree, like the cypress tree, by which everywhere people take refuge … [Yet] this same [virtuous] one weeps and sorrows. Is there anyone who does not wish for happiness? [Translations my own.]

The passage is striking because it highlights a fundamental difference between the Ancient Greek and the Aztec approaches to the good life – namely, that the Aztecs did not believe there was any conceptual link between leading our best lives on the one hand, and experiencing pleasure or ‘happiness’ on the other. This image of the virtuous man finds its closest Greek analogue in the Iliad’s Hector, the person to whom everyone flocked for refuge, the one who supported his whole house, but was nevertheless undone by Achilles.

A common saying among the Aztecs was that ‘the earth [tlalticpac] is slippery, slick’. Elsewhere, the meaning is clarified: ‘Perhaps at one time, one was of good life; later, he fell into some wrong, as if he had slipped in the mud.’ The Aztecs held, in short, that it’s unrealistic to think that anyone can lead a perfectly good life, one in which you never slip up. A better goal, then, is to try to lead a rooted life, which they called neltiliztli: literally, rootedness. In this kind of life, one is able to manage the mistakes and slip-ups well, rather than avoid them altogether. The reward is not happiness necessarily, but the promise of a worthwhile life.

If we’re convinced by this line of reasoning – that the good life consists in doing what is worthwhile, regardless of whether it makes us happy – the next question becomes: what does it take to lead a rooted life?

For the Aztecs, a rooted life is one that is lived well, with excellence. The traditional word used for this concept in English is ‘virtue’. Our word finds its origin in the Latin virtu, a metonymic expression that aims to capture what is best about a man (vir) – manliness, in brief. The Aztecs also used a poetic expression for virtue: in qualli in yectli, meaning ‘the good and the straight’. For example, in the confessional rite, which is also recorded as an edifying discourse in the sixth volume of the Florentine Codex, the confessor tells the penitent that before committing wrongs:

You were excellent [ca ti-qualli, ca ti-yectli] when you were sent here … You were cast, perforated like a precious green stone, a bracelet, a precious turquoise.

The idea itself is clear: before vicious actions, one is virtuous, one is like the most precious of things, turquoise and jade. Afterwards, the confessor tells the penitent, one is unbalanced, filthy. Thus, when one’s actions are virtuous, one maintains balance, is rooted like the tree to whom others flock for cover. These virtues include: moderation, justice, prudence and courage.

What the list of virtues doesn’t answer is: just what is it that makes an act courageous rather than rash? Why would my own inability to control my craving for sugar be considered immoderate? The Aztec’s answer is that virtuous actions follow the middle path, they strike the mean. In an edifying discourse, a mother tells her daughter about the difficulties of living on the earth (tlalticpac):

On earth we live, we travel along mountain peaks. Over here there is an abyss, over there is an abyss. If thou goest over here, or if thou goest over there, thou wilt fall in. Only in the middle [tlanepantla] doth one go, doth one live. Place this word, my daughter, dove, little one, well within the chambers of thy heart.

As the passage suggests, the mean or middle way (tlanepantla) is not so much an exact middle of something as it is a metaphor for the apt expression of a choice, action or feeling. In other passages, the middle choice is the one that represents the right form of dress, with clothes that are neither too shabby, nor too formal. For example, the text presents as bad the case of an overly carnal woman, who conducts and presents herself sexually even when shopping in the marketplace.

Our actions are virtuous, then, when they are aptly expressed. This aptness of expression turns on the circumstances (eg, how formally we should dress), our social position (eg, male or female, commoner or noble), our social role (eg, warrior or physician), and whether we are performing a rite of a specific sort. A memorable example of this last kind concerns drunkenness. Public drunkenness was severely punished in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire; for nobles, the penalty was death. But the elderly at a wedding were not only permitted, but expected to become drunk.

There was, then, no formal test for the apt expression of an action, but one could learn to develop a sense for it in the way that we might speak today of a person’s aesthetic sensibilities. Just as we might say that our co- worker’s sense of style is impeccable, we also know of some people who are just good at understanding human relations in a nuanced way, who always seem to know what to do. How we develop this understanding of virtuous action leads us to the final pillar of Aztec ethics.

Recall that for the Aztecs, our lives are led on the slippery earth. Moral education, then, is not something that one completes in childhood or adolescence. Rather, it is something that’s needed throughout life. This is why even the king is admonished by the old, and the elderly admonish each other. The virtues, as a result, are sustained and retrained throughout life.

This training can occur in at least three ways. The first of these is a sort of moral education that parallels what happens in Plato’s Republic (books 3- 4) or Aristotle’s Politics (book 8). In the third volume of the Florentine Codex, for example, there’s a detailed set of passages that address education among the young and adolescents. Early in life, up to about the age of six, children are taught at home by their parents, and are to be given a practical education as well as instruction on basic moral teachings. When the children go off to school, they’re divided into two groups: those who go to learn a specific trade or become warriors, and those who would go to learn the arts suitable to the noble courts, such as law, astronomy, history, philosophy and religious matters.

Of those students who pursued a ‘noble’ education, the development of virtues was a primary focus. The reasoning was that a greater level of virtue, especially of moderation, would be required if they ever became a lord. The students would thus have to get up very early in the morning to perform tasks, to gather items in thorn bushes, to sleep in the cold, and to go on fasts. All of these practices, and others, were set up to enable the students to practise and habituate to moderation in its various forms. Comparatively, one priest remarks, ‘the manner of life of the [other] youths was not very good’, since they were not held to the same standards of excellence.

After this schooling, virtues were fostered via rites that weren’t strictly religious – what might best be called social rituals. For example, when merchants were preparing to travel to another city, they made special preparations. An auspicious day would be selected by a day-sign reader, and the merchants would make a burnt offering to the appropriate divinities the night before. Then, on the dawn of the day of departure, they would ask the leaders of their neighbourhood to appear. Seated in a circle that reflected their stature, they would describe the details of their travel, and the leaders would respond with advice about the journey, contingency plans, and urge certain moral virtues so as not to offend others in foreign lands. While this was a ritualised matter, the practice allowed merchants to put their affairs in order before undertaking what was often a dangerous exercise. This risk explains why they wanted to make their peace with the divine and their community before venturing out. Yet the practice also provided a socially acceptable means to exchange relevant information about the journey, as well as urge certain virtues of character, including moderation and circumspection. It served, in short, as a sort of ‘refresher course’ in moral virtue.

Yet the groups themselves were arranged in ways that enabled the merchants to support each other. Mothers and fathers would arrange for their children to travel with others, reasoning that ‘perhaps, with their help, he will become prudent, mature, understanding’. The young, however, carried no heavy merchandise (the Aztecs did not have horses, and so carried much of the burden themselves). The most experienced would lead the group, the others would carry what was appropriate, and each encouraged the others so that they could remain moderate and circumspect.

Finally, the merchant ritual highlights something that has been implicit in my argument so far: namely that the excellence of practical reason or prudence (Greek: phronēsis) was not primarily a quality that individuals possessed. For Aristotle, for example, the phronimos is a rare person who could discern the right means of achieving ends. This explains why Aristotle thought that the best society was a monarchy that was ruled by a single and most wise man. The Aztecs, by contrast, thought that practical reason was best exercised in groups – and one finds evidence for this everywhere, from the merchant rites, to the choice of school for children, to the decisions of the king himself. Moreover, the Aztecs weren’t democratic about the matter. Rather than weigh all advice evenly, they gave greater weight in the deliberative process to those with the most practical experience (ixtlamatiliztli), who were often the elderly. This explains why the leader of the merchants asks the elderly men and women for advice, even though he is thought to be the principle trainer of the young.

Virtue is thus fostered socially among the Aztecs throughout life. This begins in one’s early childhood, continues through formal education, advances in one’s profession where one is ‘refreshed’ by one’s peers, and is sustained by social rituals. Even the assessment of ‘the middle way’ remains a collective rather than personal effort, since it was believed that practical wisdom worked best in groups that placed a high value on the opinions of the most experienced members. The Aztecs thought all this because they believed that we humans lead lives on the slippery earth (tlaticpac). The best guard we have against this eventuality, then, is each other.

Plato’s Republic ends with the myth of Er, a warrior who dies and returns to Earth to tell others about the afterlife. Like many of the myths in the Platonic corpus, this one expresses not something that Plato holds, but something for which we might hope. In Er’s transcendent experience, he sees that in the afterlife the virtuous are rewarded and the bad are punished for 1,000 years. After this term, they draw lots to determine how they will be reincarnated, and their choices are informed by the states of their character (that is, whether they are virtuous or vicious). Odysseus has bad luck and is given the last pick of lives, after everyone else has been able to go in front of him. Yet he chooses the same life he would have picked if he’d been given first choice. The Republic thus ends with a message: if you are virtuous, not only will you be rewarded in the afterlife, but above all, you can beat chance itself.

The Aztecs would never have written such a story. Plato, of course, is replacing the heroic warrior Achilles with the thinking man Odysseus. We saw above that the Aztecs would likely have preferred Hector – the supporting beam for the house of Troy, despite being on the losing side. But this preference suggests a stronger disagreement, since the Aztecs would have held that it is an error to think that virtue can save one from the vicissitudes of chance. No matter how virtuous you are, there’s always a possibility that a younger, more skilled, and more impetuous man with a sword will strike you down. And we ourselves are always prone to slipping up, despite our better upbringing. Wisdom in human affairs consists in the recognition that the best that we can do is to learn to stand with the help of others, to alter our circumstances for the better, and to clasp hands so that we can pull ourselves back up when we fall. This is the fundamental insight behind the social dimension of Aztec ethics. As challenging as it seems to ‘Western’ sensibilities, perhaps there’s enough that’s right about it to help us lead better, more worthwhile and rooted lives.

This Essay was made possible through the support of a grant to Aeon magazine from Templeton Religion Trust. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton Religion Trust.

Funders to Aeon Magazine are not involved in editorial decision-making, including commissioning or content approval.

Sebastian Purcell is assistant professor of philosophy at SUNY-Cortland in New York, where he researches history, social conditions, globalisation, concepts of justice and Latin American philosophy. I D E A

Tim Rogan Why Amartya Sen remains the century’s great critic of capitalism

Critiques of capitalism come in two varieties. First, there is the moral or spiritual critique. This critique rejects Homo economicus as the organising heuristic of human affairs. Human beings, it says, need more than material things to prosper. Calculating power is only a small part of what makes us who we are. Moral and spiritual relationships are first-order concerns. Material fixes such as a universal basic income will make no difference to societies in which the basic relationships are felt to be unjust.

Then there is the material critique of capitalism. The economists who lead discussions of inequality now are its leading exponents. Homo economicus is the right starting point for social thought. We are poor calculators and single-minded, failing to see our advantage in the rational distribution of prosperity across societies. Hence inequality, the wages of ungoverned growth. But we are calculators all the same, and what we need above all is material plenty, thus the focus on the redress of material inequality. From good material outcomes, the rest follows.

The first kind of argument for capitalism’s reform seems recessive now. The material critique predominates. Ideas emerge in numbers and figures. Talk of non-material values in political economy is muted. The Christians and Marxists who once made the moral critique of capitalism their own are marginal. Utilitarianism grows ubiquitous and compulsory.

But then there is Amartya Sen.

Every major work on material inequality in the 21st century owes a debt to Sen. But his own writings treat material inequality as though the moral frameworks and social relationships that mediate economic exchanges matter. Famine is the nadir of material deprivation. But it seldom occurs – Sen argues – for lack of food. To understand why a people goes hungry, look not for catastrophic crop failure; look rather for malfunctions of the moral economy that moderates competing demands upon a scarce commodity. Material inequality of the most egregious kind is the problem here. But piecemeal modifications to the machinery of production and distribution will not solve it. The relationships between different members of the economy must be put right. Only then will there be enough to go around.

In Sen’s work, the two critiques of capitalism cooperate. We move from moral concerns to material outcomes and back again with no sense of a threshold separating the two. Sen disentangles moral and material issues without favouring one or the other, keeping both in focus. The separation between the two critiques of capitalism is real, but transcending the divide is possible, and not only at some esoteric remove. Sen’s is a singular mind, but his work has a widespread following, not least in provinces of modern life where the predominance of utilitarian thinking is most pronounced. In economics curricula and in the schools of public policy, in internationalist secretariats and in humanitarian NGOs, there too Sen has created a niche for thinking that crosses boundaries otherwise rigidly observed.

This was no feat of lonely genius or freakish charisma. It was an effort of ordinary human innovation, putting old ideas together in new combinations to tackle emerging problems. Formal training in economics, mathematics and moral philosophy supplied the tools Sen has used to construct his critical system. But the influence of Rabindranath Tagore sensitised Sen to the subtle interrelation between our moral lives and our material needs. And a profound historical sensibility has enabled him to see the sharp separation of the two domains as transient.

Tagore’s school at Santiniketan in West Bengal was Sen’s birthplace. Tagore’s pedagogy emphasised articulate relations between a person’s material and spiritual existences. Both were essential – biological necessity, self-creating freedom – but modern societies tended to confuse the proper relation between them. In Santiniketan, pupils played at unstructured exploration of the natural world between brief forays into the arts, learning to understand their sensory and spiritual selves as at once distinct and unified.

Sen left Santiniketan in the late 1940s as a young adult to study economics in Calcutta and Cambridge. The major contemporary controversy in economics was the theory of welfare, and debate was affected by Cold War contention between market- and state-based models of economic order. Sen’s sympathies were social democratic but anti-authoritarian. Welfare economists of the 1930s and 1940s sought to split the difference, insisting that states could legitimate programmes of redistribution by appeal to rigid utilitarian principles: a pound in a poor man’s pocket adds more to overall utility than the same pound in the rich man’s pile. Here was the material critique of capitalism in its infancy, and here is Sen’s response: maximising utility is not everyone’s abiding concern – saying so and then making policy accordingly is a form of tyranny – and in any case using government to move money around in pursuit of some notional optimum is a flawed means to that end.

Economic rationality harbours a hidden politics whose implementation damaged the moral economies that groups of people built up to govern their own lives, frustrating the achievement of its stated aims. In commercial societies, individuals pursue economic ends within agreed social and moral frameworks. The social and moral frameworks are neither superfluous nor inhibiting. They are the coefficients of durable growth.

Moral economies are not neutral, given, unvarying or universal. They are contested and evolving. Each person is more than a cold calculator of rational utility. Societies aren’t just engines of prosperity. The challenge is to make non-economic norms affecting market conduct legible, to bring the moral economies amid which market economies and administrative states function into focus. Thinking that bifurcates moral on the one hand and material on the other is inhibiting. But such thinking is not natural and inevitable, it is mutable and contingent – learned and apt to be unlearned.

Sen was not alone in seeing this. The American economist Kenneth Arrow was his most important interlocutor, connecting Sen in turn with the tradition of moral critique associated with R H Tawney and Karl Polanyi. Each was determined to re-integrate economics into frameworks of moral relationship and social choice. But Sen saw more clearly than any of them how this could be achieved. He realised that at earlier moments in modern political economy this separation of our moral lives from our material concerns had been inconceivable. Utilitarianism had blown in like a weather front around 1800, trailing extremes of moral fervour and calculating zeal in its wake. Sen sensed this climate of opinion changing, and set about cultivating ameliorative ideas and approaches eradicated by its onset once again.

There have been two critiques of capitalism, but there should be only one. Amartya Sen is the new century’s first great critic of capitalism because he has made that clear.

Tim Rogan is the author of The Moral Economists: R H Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E P Thompson and the Critique of Capitalism (2017). He lives in Sydney. E S S A Y

Rebecca Kukla Sex talks

The language of sexual negotiation must go far beyond ‘consent’ and ‘refusal’ if we are to foster ethical, autonomous sex

Communication is essential to ethical sex. Typically, our public discussions focus on only one narrow kind of communication: requests for sex followed by consent or refusal. But notice that we use language and communication in a wide variety of ways in negotiating sex. We flirt and rebuff, express curiosity and repulsion, and articulate fantasies. Ideally, we talk about what kind of sex we want to have, involving which activities, and what we like and don’t like. We settle whether or not we are going to have sex at all, and when we want to stop. We check in with one another and talk dirty to one another during sex. In this essay I explore the language of sexual negotiation. My specific interest is in what philosophers call the ‘pragmatics’ of speech. That is, I am less interested in what words mean than I am in how speaking can be understood as a kind of action that has a pragmatic effect on the world. Philosophers who specialise in what is known as ‘speech act theory’ focus on what an act of speaking accomplishes, as opposed to what its words mean. J L Austin developed this way of thinking about the different things that speech can do in his classic book, How To Do Things With Words (1962), and many philosophers of language have developed the idea since.

For instance, consider the question: ‘Can you take the train to New York?’; the statement: ‘You can take the train to New York!’; the order: ‘Take the train to New York!’; and the advice: ‘I’d take the train to New York if I were you!’ These speech acts use almost the same words, but they are quite different in their pragmatic ‘force’. That is, what differentiates them is less their meaning than what they do, and what kinds of actions they call for from their audience. One calls for an answer, one conveys information, one demands an action, and one suggests an action for consideration.

All speech acts perform some sort of action, with some set of social effects. And all speech acts are governed by what philosophers call ‘felicity norms’ and ‘propriety norms’. Felicity norms are the norms that make a certain speech act a coherent possibility. So for instance, my teenage son can’t call a national vote – he just doesn’t have the right authority for that to make any sense as a speech act that he can perform. Likewise, I can’t name someone else’s baby just because I feel like it, by shouting a name at it. These would be infelicitous speech acts. Propriety norms are norms that make a speech act situationally appropriate. So, although I have the authority to order my son to clean his room, it would be a massive norm violation for me to walk into his classroom at school and shout at him to clean his room in the middle of class.

Different speech acts with different force can enable or undermine ethical, pleasurable, autonomous sex. In public discussions about the ethics of sexual communication, we have tended to proceed as though requesting sex and consenting to it or refusing it are the only important things we can do with speech when it comes to ethical sex – the only kind of speech we need to be worried about. I will try to show that our narrow focus on consent has distorted and limited our understanding of sexual self- determination, and of the various roles that language can play in making sex ethical and fulfilling, or unethical and harmful.

How does our focus on consent limit us? Here are a few ways:

Consenting typically involves letting someone else do something to you. Paradigmatically, consent (or refusal of consent) is a response to a request; it puts the requester in the active position and the one who consents in the passive position. And in practice, given cultural realities, our discussions of consent almost always position a man as the active requester and a woman as the one who agrees to or refuses him doing things to her. Surely we hope that sexual negotiation will be more mutually participatory than this? Much of our actual sexual communication isn’t about asking for sex or agreeing to it. In communicating about sex, I might begin to articulate a fantasy, suggest a possibility that I think might please the other person, probe to find out how the other person feels about an activity or role, or seek help in exploring how I feel about it, for instance. Good sexual negotiation often involves active, collaborative discussion about what would be fun to do. It also often includes conversations about limits, constraints and exit conditions. None of this fits nicely into a request-and-consent-or-refuse model of sexual negotiation. Autonomous, willing participation is necessary for ethical sex, but it is not sufficient. We can autonomously consent to all sorts of bad sex, for terrible reasons. I might agree to do something that I find degrading or unpleasantly painful, for instance, perhaps because I would rather have bad sex than no sex at all, or because my partner isn’t interested in finding out what would give me pleasure.

One person requesting sex and the other consenting to let sex happen is not the most typical – and almost never the ideal – way for sex to be initiated. So what are other ways in which we can use language in order to initiate sex and, especially, what are ways to do it well? I will focus on two: invitations and gift offers.

Usually, when all goes well, initiations of sex take the form of invitations, not requests. Especially when we are just getting together with someone for the first time, whether for a casual hookup or at the start of a more serious relationship, invitations are a more common and typically more appropriate way of initiating sex than are requests. Once I am in a relationship with someone, it’s not always out of bounds for me to request sex, as a favour. But when I’m trying to establish intimacy with someone as I am getting to know them, an invitation is more typical and likely more conducive to good, flourishing sex than a request.

What kind of speech act is an invitation? What does it do? Invitations create a hospitable space for the invitee to enter. When you invite someone to something, they are not obligated to accept the invitation. But also, you are not merely opening a neutral possibility; you are making clear that they would be welcome. If I say to you: ‘I’m cooking dinner at my place on Wednesday and I want you to please come, and if you don’t I’ll be hurt,’ then I am requesting your presence, not inviting you. Conversely, if I say to you: ‘I’m cooking dinner at my place on Wednesday and you can show up or not, it’s totally up to you, I don’t care either way,’ then this is not really an invitation but perhaps more like an offer; at best it’s a highly unwelcoming, inept invitation. Invitations leave the invitee free to accept or reject them. If you turn down my invitation, I get to be disappointed, but not aggrieved (although I can feel aggrieved if it is turned down rudely or insultingly). An interesting quirk of invitations is that, if they are accepted, gratitude is called for both from the inviter and the invitee. I thank you for coming to my dinner, and you thank me for having you.

Although an invitation leaves the recipient free to turn it down, this does not give anyone carte blanche to issue any invitation they want. Invitations can be infelicitous, or inappropriate. I can’t invite you to come to vote in my precinct. This is infelicitous: I don’t have the standing, and it’s not an invitation that institutions make it possible for you to take up. And a felicitous invitation can be inappropriate. If I meet a stranger on the bus and chat with her for two minutes about the traffic, it would be inappropriate for me to invite her to my wedding.

A sexual invitation opens up the possibility of sex, and makes clear that sex would be welcome. Invitations are welcoming without being demanding. Although we are usually pleased when people accept our sexual invitations, we generally don’t want people to agree to sex with us as a favour to us, as it would be if it were the granting of a request. And the invitation needs to be felicitous and appropriate. I cannot invite you to have sex with someone else other than me (which would be both infelicitous and unethical). I cannot invite you to have sex with me if doing so would be an abuse of power, or if for other reasons it would be difficult for you to say no to the invitation (which would be both inappropriate and unethical), or at the end of a two-minute chat about the weather in the grocery line (which would be inappropriate and probably uncomfortable). The mere fact that an invitation can be freely turned down does not give people licence to issue infelicitous or inappropriate invitations – which is something that street harassers, for instance, often don’t seem to understand.

I propose centring invitations rather than requests in our model of the language of sexual initiation. This opens up a whole set of new ethical and pragmatic questions. When are sexual invitations felicitous and appropriate, and who has authority to issue them to whom? Since invitations strike a complex balance between welcoming and leaving the recipient free, what maintains this balance and what throws it off-kilter? An invitation might be degrading by being insufficiently welcoming, for instance. Or it might be coercive by being too pressing. Notice that if I invite you, appropriately, to have sex with me, then consent and refusal are not even the right categories of speech acts when it comes to your uptake. It is not felicitous to consent to an invitation; rather, one accepts it or turns it down. So the consent model distorts our understanding of how a great deal of sex is initiated, including in particular pleasurable, ethical sex.

When we are first trying to establish sexual intimacy with someone, sexual invitations are more common and typically healthier than sexual requests. Once we are in an established, long-term relationship with a partner, sex is sometimes initiated via a gift offer. While it would be odd and almost always inappropriate to offer sex as a gift to someone we barely know, it’s not unusual for longtime partners to offer each other gifts of sex. I might offer my partner sex as a way of saying goodbye before leaving for a trip. I might offer to role-play or indulge a fetish that both of us know is not my ‘thing’. There is nothing inherently problematic about offering to engage in a sexual activity with someone we care about out of generosity rather than direct desire. Although some have recently advocated for a model of ethical sex that requires ‘enthusiastic consent’ from everyone involved, not all sexual encounters or all activities within them have to be enthusiastically desired by all parties in order to be ethical and worthwhile.

As we did with invitations, let’s back up and think about the pragmatic structure of gifts and gift offers before proceeding. Gifts are, of essence, freely given and generous; a gift that I am compelled to offer is not actually a gift. (In practice, we are routinely compelled by various rules of etiquette to give various ‘gifts’ – but these are not really gifts, and insofar as they have that surface presentation, they have to masquerade as freely given). Gifts, by nature, cannot be demanded or even requested. If you ask me to indulge some sexual desire of yours, then my doing so is not a gift but the granting of a favour. A gift must be designed to please the recipient; it might not actually succeed in pleasing, but an offering that is not expected to please is not actually a gift. It is also essential to gift-giving that the recipient need not accept the gift. Gifts that are accepted call for both gratitude and reciprocation from the receiver.

Social scientists have long been fascinated by gift-giving, both because of the complexity of its norms and because of its important role in sustaining and negotiating community. As John Sherry explores in his 1983 article on the anthropology of gift-giving, different sorts of gifts and different kinds of uptake and reciprocation are appropriate for a business associate, a hospitalised friend, a bachelor party, a lover, a wedding, a child’s birthday party, and so forth. Every culture also has distinctive norms governing the refusal and acceptance of gifts. A striking feature of gift-giving is its essentially reciprocal character, which is part of every gift-giving system despite cultural variations. Gifts need to be reciprocated, and this is part of how they sustain relationships.

Part of what is complicated about the norms of gift reciprocity is that they are inherently open-ended. What counts as proper reciprocation is tricky. For instance, reciprocating a gift too quickly or too closely in kind is a norm violation: if you give me a book that you think I would love, it is inappropriate for me to immediately hand you a different book back, and even more inappropriate for me to give you the same book back at any time. The size, timing and content of reciprocation must all be keyed subtly and not too directly to the original gift. Partly because gifts must be given generously and not compelled, this logic of reciprocity is tricky – while gifts call for reciprocation, if the reciprocation they call for is too specific, then they are no longer gifts but something more like barters.

An invitation need not presume that the recipient wants to accept it. But a gift offer is designed to be an act of generosity that pleases the recipient (whether or not it succeeds in doing so), and it calls for reciprocation. This is part of why, unlike sexual invitations, sexual gift offers are typically presumptuous and inappropriate in the early stages of getting to know someone, when you don’t yet know what would please them and you aren’t yet in a position to impose an obligation to reciprocate on them. But generous offers of sexual gifts, designed first and foremost to please one’s partner rather than to directly satisfy one’s own sexual desires, are a normal part of an ongoing healthy relationship. Such gifts do create an obligation to reciprocate, though not immediately, or exactly in kind, or on any particular schedule. If you routinely indulge my sexual desires out of generosity, it is disrespectful and undermining of our relationship if I never reciprocate.

Notice that typically, if someone offers me an appropriate gift, I need a good reason to turn it down. Turning down a gift is a hurtful snub. This is not true for sexual gifts offers, which can be turned down for any reason at all; no one has the standing to feel aggrieved by their rejection. If I offer to indulge your fetish, say, and you turn me down, I might be disappointed or surprised, but I don’t get to take you as having wronged me in any way.

Sexual gifts, like invitations, can be appropriate or inappropriate, and felicitous or infelicitous. Unsolicited dick pics are typically not appropriate gifts, for instance. Sexual gifts offered too early in a relationship are inappropriate. It would be infelicitous for me to try to give you some other person’s sexual attentions as a gift. An authentic, appropriate and thoughtful sexual gift offer within a relationship calls for an expression of gratitude (though not necessarily for acceptance), even if the recipient happens not to be in the mood for that particular gift at that time.

So far we have been discussing ways in which people might initiate sex; I’ve tried to move beyond the model in which one person initiates sex with a request, which the other person then consents to or refuses. But the language of sexual negotiation importantly includes more than just sexual initiation. Ideally, we communicate about all sorts of things other than whether to have sex, including what sorts of things we like to do during sex, what we definitely want off the table, whether we are having fun, what we want to adjust as we go, when we want to stop, and much more. Although there’s lots of kinds of speech I could talk about here, I want to focus on just one more type of speech act, because I think it’s an especially interesting and important ethical tool for sexual communication. I will talk about safe words and their pragmatic structure.

Even if we freely consent to a sexual encounter, or otherwise enter it autonomously (for instance, by accepting an invitation), we also need to be able to exit that activity easily and freely. Entering autonomously is not enough; sexual activity is autonomous only when everyone understands the exit conditions and can stop at will, and knows and trusts that they can do this. This requires shared linguistic norms for exiting any activity. Safe words, properly employed, provide a framework that allows everyone to understand when someone wants to exit a sexual activity. People negotiating sex sometimes establish a safe word in advance. This can be a random distinctive word that is pretty certain not to come up in the course of normal conversation during sex (one friend uses ‘kimchi’ and another uses ‘Helsinki’). Or participants can use a ‘green’, ‘yellow’ and ‘red’ system, which allows for more nuance: ‘green’ reassures your partner that everything is going well, and indicates active enjoyment and a desire to continue. ‘Yellow’ is a way of indicating your discomfort or wariness, and calling on the other person to ease off and be on the lookout for signs that you want to change or stop the activity. ‘Red’ ends the sexual encounter; if someone calls ‘red’ then everyone not only stops what they are doing but exits the sexual context altogether.

Part of what is interesting about safe words is that they let someone exit an activity at any time without having to explain themselves, or accuse anyone of transgression or any other kind of wrongdoing (although they can also be used when there has been a transgression). Calling ‘red’ does not imply that anyone has messed up or violated consent; it simply ends things. It calls for no apology and requires no apology after its use. It is significant that safe words are typically semantically irrelevant words that are not going to otherwise come up in a normal sexual encounter – they are designed to intrude minimally and unambiguously, without calling for interpretation, discussion or conversational response. Without a safe-word system, if I want to abruptly end a scene or activity, I need to say something like: ‘Stop this immediately.’ It’s very difficult for such a speech act not to come off as a rebuke; it almost inevitably creates a rift in our interaction that now needs repairing.

Safe words have a complex pragmatic structure. The negotiation of safe words is a kind of metaspeech that lets participants decide together how to make clear the boundaries of a sexual encounter; they serve a powerful function in creating the scaffolding within which activities can happen, even if they are never used. One reason they are important is that inside a sexual encounter, speech is frequently nonliteral. If someone calls out: ‘Oh, daddy, no, stop!’ they almost certainly don’t think their partner is actually their father, and they might well not want to stop. We need very clear ways to be able to tell when someone wants to leave this nonliteral discursive context. Having a safe-word system in place lets participants establish norms for exiting a nonliteral discursive frame that might include role- playing, metaphor and experimentation with boundaries. ‘Yellow’ functions not so much as an order as a direction of attention, along with a call to shift gears a bit. ‘Red’ is a specific kind of order: it retracts consent, but it also ends an encounter, shifting the participants out of the sexual context and into their everyday context.

Safe words are powerful discursive tools for enabling sexual autonomy, pleasure and safety, in at least two senses. Most straightforwardly, they offer a tool for exiting an activity cleanly and clearly, with almost no room for miscommunication. But even more interesting to me is the fact that safe words allow people to engage in activities, explore desires and experience pleasures that would be too risky otherwise. When we want to experiment with something that might give us pleasure, but also might make us uncomfortable or put us at risk, we need to be especially sure that we can exit the activity easily. Safe words thus expand the space of opportunities for sexual agency. There are all sorts of things that we might like to do or try that are dangerous or unappealing if we don’t have confidence that we can stop them without ambiguity or extended negotiation or hurt feelings. This might include potentially painful or uncomfortable activities, as well as activities in which we are role-playing coercion or domination and submission, and any other activities involving nonliteral speech. But it can also include anything that we would like to explore, even though it potentially pushes the boundaries of our comfort zone.

And safe words should never become the only way that someone can exit a scene or activity – all participants need to remain flexibly responsive to other discursive cues as well. So, ‘Oh no, please, I can’t take any more, no!’ might well be part of a consensual domination scene rather than an attempt to end it, but ‘No really, get off me, I need to pee and you are pressing on my bladder’ is almost always an indication that autonomous participation has been withdrawn, as is ‘Damn it, it’s already 8:00 – I need to leave for work.’ Safe words are a tool for enhancing sexual autonomy and safety, but they should never replace the force of the rest of speech.

While (unsurprisingly) the original and paradigmatic home of safe words is the BDSM community, I think it would be fantastic if the use of safe words became standard practice (even outside the sexual domain), and in particular if training in the use of safe words became a completely standard part of sex and health education for teens. Safe words give people the ability to stop an activity clearly and without an argument or a formulated reason. This is especially important for young people who are just beginning to explore sex, figure out what they enjoy, and learn how to hear and respect one another’s limits. Safe words also enable people to explore desires whose fulfilment would otherwise be dangerous or uncomfortable. Normalising their use would be a major step in empowering and protecting the safety and autonomy of everyone. Having the system in play creates a space for ongoing consent and active experimentation and sexual collaboration.

I’ve suggested that our strong social tendency to focus our discussions of sexual negotiation on consent and refusal has resulted in a narrowed and distorted view of the pragmatics of sexual communication. Correspondingly, we have tended to focus on rape and assault, understood as nonconsensual sexual activity, as the only sexual harm we need to worry about. In fact there are many ways in which sex can go ethically wrong, other than by violating consent. Sometimes people autonomously agree to participate in a sexual activity for ethically problematic reasons – perhaps because they think that it’s required to prove their ‘real manhood’ and impress their friends, or because they feel guilty not having sex with someone who was nice to them and now wants it ‘in return’. Sometimes people agree to do things that degrade or exploit them. And sometimes sexual communication violates ethical and pragmatic norms: an invitation might be unwelcoming or inappropriate, or too pressing; a gift offer might be insulting; people might agree to participate in an activity that puts someone in danger without clarifying how that person can exit the situation; and so forth.

When we talk about sexual autonomy, our conversations generally focus on one of two areas. One is access to contraception, abortion and sexual healthcare and education (which have not been my topic here). The second is consent – or, more specifically, as I suggested early on, typically women’s ability to successfully refuse consent to men. Both of these are, indeed, deeply important topics, especially since both are under serious legal and cultural threat right now. But I have argued that sexual autonomy also requires the ability to engage in clear, pragmatically complex, fine-grained sexual communication – including uses of language that go well beyond consenting to and refusing requests for sex.

Rebecca Kukla is professor of philosophy at Georgetown University and senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. She is the author of Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers' Bodies (2005). She lives in Washington, DC. I D E A

Stephen T Asma Religion is about emotion regulation, and it’s very good at it

Religion does not help us to explain nature. It did what it could in pre- scientific times, but that job was properly unseated by science. Most religious laypeople and even clergy agree: Pope John Paul II declared in 1996 that evolution is a fact and Catholics should get over it. No doubt some extreme anti-scientific thinking lives on in such places as Ken Ham’s Creation Museum in Kentucky, but it has become a fringe position. Most mainstream religious people accept a version of Galileo’s division of labour: ‘The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.’ Maybe, then, the heart of religion is not its ability to explain nature, but its moral power? Sigmund Freud, who referred to himself as a ‘godless Jew’, saw religion as delusional, but helpfully so. He argued that we humans are naturally awful creatures – aggressive, narcissistic wolves. Left to our own devices, we would rape, pillage and burn our way through life. Thankfully, we have the civilising influence of religion to steer us toward charity, compassion and cooperation by a system of carrots and sticks, otherwise known as heaven and hell.

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim, on the other hand, argued in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) that the heart of religion was not its belief system or even its moral code, but its ability to generate collective effervescence: intense, shared experiences that unify individuals into cooperative social groups. Religion, Durkheim argued, is a kind of social glue, a view confirmed by recent interdisciplinary research.

While Freud and Durkheim were right about the important functions of religion, its true value lies in its therapeutic power, particularly its power to manage our emotions. How we feel is as important to our survival as how we think. Our species comes equipped with adaptive emotions, such as fear, rage, lust and so on: religion was (and is) the cultural system that dials these feelings and behaviours up or down. We see this clearly if we look at mainstream religion, rather than the deleterious forms of extremism. Mainstream religion reduces anxiety, stress and depression. It provides existential meaning and hope. It focuses aggression and fear against enemies. It domesticates lust, and it strengthens filial connections. Through story, it trains feelings of empathy and compassion for others. And it provides consolation for suffering.

Emotional therapy is the animating heart of religion. Social bonding happens not only when we agree to worship the same totems, but when we feel affection for each other. An affective community of mutual care emerges when groups share rituals, liturgy, song, dance, eating, grieving, comforting, tales of saints and heroes, hardships such as fasting and sacrifice. Theological beliefs are bloodless abstractions by comparison.

Emotional management is important because life is hard. The Buddha said: ‘All life is suffering’ and most of us past a certain age can only agree. Religion evolved to handle what I call the ‘vulnerability problem’. When we’re sick, we go to the doctor, not the priest. But when our child dies, or we lose our home in a fire, or we’re diagnosed with Stage-4 cancer, then religion is helpful because it provides some relief and some strength. It also gives us something to do, when there’s nothing we can do.

Consider how religion helps people after a death. Social mammals who have suffered separation distress are restored to health by touch, collective meals and grooming. Human grieving customs involve these same soothing prosocial mechanisms. We comfort-touch and embrace a person who has lost a loved one. Our bodies give ancient comfort directly to the grieving body. We provide the bereaved with food and drink, and we break bread with them (think of the Jewish tradition of shiva, or the visitation tradition of wakes in many cultures). We share stories about the loved one, and help the bereaved reframe their pain in larger optimistic narratives. Even music, in the form of consoling melodies and collective singing, helps to express shared sorrow and also transforms it from an unbearable and lonely experience to a bearable communal one. Social involvement from the community after a death can act as an antidepressant, boosting adaptive emotional changes in the bereaved.

Religion also helps to manage sorrow with something I’ll call ‘existential shaping’ or more precisely ‘existential debt’. It is common for Westerners to think of themselves as individuals first and as members of a community second, but our ideology of the lone protagonist fulfilling an individual destiny is more fiction than fact. Losing someone reminds us of our dependence on others and our deep vulnerability, and at such moments religion turns us toward the web of relations rather than away from it. Long after your parents have died, for example, religion helps you memorialise them and acknowledge your existential debt to them. Formalising the memory of the dead person, through funerary rites, or tomb-sweeping (Qingming) festivals in Asia, or the Day of the Dead in Mexico, or annual honorary masses in Catholicism, is important because it keeps reminding us, even through the sorrow, of the meaningful influence of these deceased loved ones. This is not a self-deception about the unreality of death, but an artful way of learning to live with it. The grief becomes transformed in the sincere acknowledgment of the value of the loved one, and religious rituals help people to set aside time and mental space for that acknowledgment.

An emotion such as grief has many ingredients. The physiological arousal of grief is accompanied by cognitive evaluations: ‘I will never see my friend again’; ‘I could have done something to prevent this’; ‘She was the love of my life’; and so on. Religions try to give the bereaved an alternative appraisal that reframes their tragedy as something more than just misery. Emotional appraisals are proactive, according to the psychologists Phoebe Ellsworth at the University of Michigan and Klaus Scherer at the University of Geneva, going beyond the immediate disaster to envision the possible solutions or responses. This is called ‘secondary appraisal’. After the primary appraisal (‘This is very sad’), the secondary appraisal assesses our ability to deal with the situation: ‘This is too much for me’ – or, positively: ‘I will survive this.’ Part of our ability to cope with suffering is our sense of power or agency: more power generally means better coping ability. If I acknowledge my own limitations when faced with unavoidable loss, but I feel that a powerful ally, God, is part of my agency or power, then I can be more resilient.

Because religious actions are often accompanied by magical thinking or supernatural beliefs, Christopher Hitchens argued in God Is not Great (2007) that religion is ‘false consolation’. Many critics of religion echo his condemnation. But there is no such thing as false consolation. Hitchens and fellow critics are making a category mistake, like saying: ‘The colour green is sleepy.’ Consolation or comfort is a feeling, and it can be weak or strong, but it can’t be false or true. You can be false in your judgment of why you’re feeling better, but feeling better is neither true nor false. True and false applies only if we’re evaluating whether our propositions correspond with reality. And no doubt many factual claims of religion are false in that way – the world was not created in six days.

Religion is real consolation in the same way that music is real consolation. No one thinks that the pleasure of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute is ‘false pleasure’ because singing flutes don’t really exist. It doesn’t need to correspond to reality. It’s true that some religious devotees, unlike music devotees, pin their consolation to additional metaphysical claims, but why should we trust them to know how religion works? Such believers do not recognise that their unthinking religious rituals and social activities are the true sources of their therapeutic healing. Meanwhile, Hitchens and other critics confuse the factual disappointments of religion with the value of religion generally, and thereby miss the heart of it.

‘Why We Need Religion: An Agnostic Celebration of Spiritual Emotions’ by Stephen Asma © 2018 is published by Oxford University Press.

Stephen T Asma is professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of many books, including The Evolution of Imagination (2017), Why We Need Religion (2018) and his latest, The Emotional Mind: Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition (2019), co-authored with Rami Gabriel.