The extreme importance now given to opinion (by contrast with conduct) in the estimation of a person’s character has certain consequences. This is not to say that in the past a person’s opinions played no part in such an assessment, and no doubt there are some opinions so extreme or vicious, for example that some whole population should be mercilessly wiped out, that in any day and age one would hesitate to associate with someone who held them. But before, even when someone held an opinion that we considered very bad, we still also assessed the degree of seriousness with which he held it, the degree to which it was purely theoretical, the importance it played in his overall mental life. The holding of such an opinion would not redound to his credit, but if lightly held and with no likely effect on his actual behavior, it would detract only slightly from our view of him. He might still be a good man, albeit one with a quirk, a mental blind spot.

If we take as an example the question of capital punishment, it should be possible for people to disagree without concluding that those who take a different view from their own are morally deficient or defective. I am against the penalty on the grounds that even in the most scrupulous jurisdictions mistakes are made, and that for the state wrongly to execute one of its citizens is a heinous thing, moreover one which will bring the whole criminal justice system into disrepute. If it is argued that the state’s unwillingness occasionally to execute wrongfully will lead to more wrongful deaths by murder than would otherwise have occurred, I would reply that this is a price that must be paid (though I concede that there might in theory be a price too high to be paid, though I think this is unlikely in practice ever to eventuate). A person who declared himself in favor of summary execution without trial of all those with whom he disagreed or otherwise reprehended would probably be regarded as mad rather than bad, at least outside the purlieus of the Taliban.

The extreme importance now given to opinion (by contrast with conduct) in the estimation of a person’s character has certain consequences.

If someone were either for or against the penalty on more deontological grounds, that it was either just or barbaric in itself, I would recognize these as sensible arguments without necessarily subscribing to either, and without giving to them the weight that those who subscribe to them give them. Thus, it should be possible for us to have a discussion on the question, disagreeing but without casting aspersions on each other’s character. It seems to me, however (though I have no strict scientific evidence to prove it) that such reasonable discussions have become less and less frequent, precisely because opinion and not conduct has become the touchstone of virtue.

This naturally raises the temperature of any discussion and inclines participants to bad temper. But there are other consequences too.
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For one thing, the elevation of the moral importance of opinion changes the locus of a person’s moral concern from that over which he has most control, namely how he behaves himself, to that over which he has almost no personal control. He becomes a Mrs. Jellyby who, it will be remembered, was extremely concerned about the fate of children thousands of miles away in Africa but completely neglected her own children right under her own eyes, in her house in London.

What Aristotle meant is that if a regime is unjust, it will regard as good citizens only those who are unjust in the way the regime is unjust. Anyone who refuses to acquiesce in the regime’s injustice will be regarded as dangerous. Precisely the just men and women will be seen as disloyal to the ruling authority and as politically illegitimate. In the early 1940s, Germans who sheltered Jews were bad citizens of the Third Reich, and Russians who circulated books critical of Marxism were unfaithful to the ideals of the Soviet Union. 
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Of course, there were, and always are, degrees of complicity and resistance; just as there are degrees of unjust government. Not everyone trapped behind the Iron Curtain possessed the heroic courage and mighty pen of Alexander Solzhenitsyn; and not every unjust regime descends into the hell of the gulag and the gas chamber. One can’t even say that every political system is uniformly good or bad. Aristotle’s famous teaching about metabole, revolution, describes the transformation of one regime type into another—constitutional democracy into oligarchy, for example. During the transition, which might take some time, the political community will be a mixture. There will be some elements upholding the older regime, while others advance the emerging replacement. Though the moral distinctions may be less clear-cut, the good man will nevertheless seek to defend the moral and free parts (whether of the old order or the new) while resisting the dishonest and despotic elements.

The best American art is often hidden. Sometimes, it conceals itself in pop culture, hiding in plain sight by disguising itself as a commercial product. Think muscle cars, comic books, or the middle seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In these instances, high art dons blue jeans and a T-shirt and mingles with the proles. More often, though, the best American art, and particularly literature, dies from underexposure. Without insinuating itself into a market, there simply isn’t an audience for it. Such was the case with Moby Dick until it was resurrected by D.H. Lawrence in the 1920s. Who knows how many masterpieces have yellowed into dust, unloved and unread, while the cultural machinery of the republic fed off the basest drives of the lowest common denominator?

The writing of Stephen Crane has the somewhat cumbersome fate of being hidden in both senses. He enjoyed massive commercial success at the end of the 19th century with exciting, often prurient works such as Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and The Red Badge of Courage. As celebrated novelist Paul Auster writes in his lush and fascinating new biography, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane, “Once upon a time, almost every high school student in America was required to read The Red Badge of Courage.”
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But Crane’s fortunes have changed. “Now,” writes Auster, “for reasons I find difficult to understand, the book seems to have fallen off the required reading lists.” Just as disturbing for Auster, none of his non-English-speaking literary acquaintances had ever heard of Crane, despite his work once being internationally acclaimed. Crane and his work, Auster tells us, “which shunned the traditions of nearly everything that had come before him, [and] was so radical for its time that he can be regarded now as the first American modernist, the man most responsible for changing the way we see the world through the lens of the written word,” has died a second death. Only a handful of specialists remain to pick over his corpse.

One of the most important reasons emergence has reappeared is science needs it. At the frontiers of research, there is a remarkable new field called complex systems. Drawing insights from physics, biology, and the study of social systems, the theory of complex systems has given scientists a wide range of examples where new entities and new rules appear to emerge from the networked interaction of simpler parts. Colloquially, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

These studies have drawn a new generation of philosophers to re-engage with the ideas of emergence, using the advances in science as a spur to unpack how chains of causation can be closed or opened and run from the bottom-up or the top-down. In these examinations, there have come distinctions like “weak” vs “strong” emergence, as well as those who challenge the need for that split. These are the kinds of issues I want to unpack in this series over the next few months.
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To sum it up for now, when it comes to reductionism and emergence, there are many thorny issues that require scrutiny. What is clear, though, is that the simple picture reductionism offers of a world made solely of atoms can no longer be seen as the only “sober” view of science and its perspective on life, the universe, and everything.