Christopher Hitchens Smears Bishop Berkeley

In recognition of the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, Slate invited the 'liberal hawks' from among its regular contributors to answer the question, "Why did we get it wrong?"

Christopher Hitchens' answer: "I didn't." The main thrust of Hitchens' defense of his support of the war is that, despite the intelligence failures before and during the war, the administration's criminal mismanagement, the degradation of the United States' moral, legal, and indeed strategic international position due to our government's embrace of torture and human rights abuses — the international community still faced a failed dictatorship on its way to implosion, the fallout from which would have been far worse without an American presence in the country.

This case rests on the supposition that, on balance, the outcome of the actual intervention in Iraq in 2003 is better than the outcome of likely counterfactual scenarios that would have played out at a later date, under more competent leadership, and under more credible international auspices, which in turn rests on the assumption that the immediate need for intervention in 2003 outweighs the obvious (in hindsight) benefits of a delay. I'm unpersuaded. But fair enough; Hitchens' case is the best that can be made for the pro-war position at this point.

What's completely unfair, shocking, out of bounds, and offensive, is Hitchens' slandering of George Berkeley. To wit:

There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it's not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn't count, and we are not involved.

Hitchens is getting at a widespread, gross simplification of Berkeley's epistemology and metaphysics. So, let's get Berkeley right. What motivates Berkeley's philosophy is a worry about the concepts of quality and substance among Locke and his contemporary empiricists. The empiricists held that substances are the imperceivable substrates that manifest primary qualities (size, shape, volume, etc.) and secondary qualities (color, taste, tactile features, etc.). Substances exist, they argued, but qualities exhaust the objects of our acquaintance. Against this picture of the world, Berkeley thought, "If all we're ever acquainted with are sensible qualities, then why bother positing the existence of substances at all? They do no explanatory work, and thus violate sound Occamist principles by unnecessarily inflating our ontology."

So he cut physical objects out of his ontology, leaving only perceptions of them and perceiving minds behind. To be is to be perceived, according to the Berkeleyan maxim. And it really works out to an elegant system. There is no mind/body problem left to worry about, because there are no bodies.

Contrary to the common understanding of him, Berkeley is not a solipsist. He does not hold that objects cease to exist the moment you turn your back on them or otherwise stop personally perceiving them. There has to be some overarching principle correlating all perceptions, not merely in order to avoid solipsism, but also the worry that if perception is reality, then there is no meaningful distinction between veridical perception and hallucination. For Berkeley, it's God who does the work of separating true perceptions from false and coordinating the true ones, and keeping the world going while we sleep. (Berkeley might not have perceived the curvature of the earth and the fact that one side of the globe is sleeping while the other's awake; still, in his system, the whole earth exists.) But there are other possible, God-free answers to that dilemma. Kant's proposal that the objective validity of veridical perceptions is guaranteed by the nature of pure reason, is one way of secularizing Berkeley. But there are others.

In any event, maybe there are some woolly-headed peaceniks who think that if we put on blinders and earplugs and refuse to look at the problems of Iraq, that they'll just go away. But pace Hitchens, Berkeley wouldn't have been one of them. To adopt the parlance of our times, Leave Berkeley alone!