We are neither apes nor angels; neither mere organisms nor disembodied spirits passing through nature from a pre-natal to a post-mortem eternity. Nor are we flesh and spirit combined in percentages to be determined by our propensity to romanticism or realism about humanity. No; we are embodied subjects. It is this that I want to explore in the present chapter. Like the last chapter, it is haunted by the mystery of intentionality.

Intentionality accounts for the distance between the organism H. sapiens and the human person. More specifically, full-blown, shared intentionality, creating a community of minds, a public space, an explicitly shared world, is the key to our distance from nature and our status as individuals facing a common world populated by objects and subjects that are intuited as being other than ourselves and as having hidden as well as manifest properties. Our exploration of embodiment will eventually lead to a suggestion as to how we arrive at the notion of “physical” objects that have an existence, a reality, properties, that lie beyond our experiences – at the idea of an object as a thing-in-itself. I hope this part of the inquiry will address lingering doubts about the reality of the profound gulf between ourselves and beasts; between humans who have world pictures and beasts that are wired into, or attuned to, an umwelt, an environment.

The distinctive intentionality of human consciousness involves two fully developed partners. The first is a subject or self which has – even “owns” – its experiences; and the second is the object of those experiences, encountered as something in-itself, distinct from the experience and, indeed, from the subject of the experience. This form of intentionality is able to develop from a first-order level of the experience enjoyed by most higher animals to secondary and higher-level intentionality unique to humans.

Higher-level intentionality has many manifestations. The most obvious are signs that have been deliberately generated in order to be “about” something that a subject wants to share with other subjects: individual gestures and a thousand verbal and non-verbal sign systems.

Seeing Ourselves has been motivated by the hope that philosophy might do justice to our human nature and by the possibility that it might one day open up a way of thought that matches the profundity of religion. A particularly inspiring example in western philosophy is Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher who seems to have been poised on the cusp between religious and secular thought. He did not separate God from Nature, and denied that the deity was a transcendent, providential agent who intervened in history. Consequently, he has been accused of being both an atheist and a pantheist, as both godless and (to use the German Romantic poet Novalis’ phrase) “God-intoxicated”. He was expelled from his Jewish community for “abominable heresies”.

There is a deeply moving passage at the beginning of his unfinished Treatise on the Correction of the Understanding:

US Trade in Goods and Services With Nafta Partners, 1989–2017

Lack thereof?

One of the most important, and persistent, critiques of the NAFTA, which has already been touched on several times, is that it lacks a robust institutional structure. However, the NAFTA is not without governance institutions. Indeed, the NAFTA as a whole can be considered a set of institutions, since the rules it establishes, the trade it frees through tariff liberalization and the affirmation of concepts such as national treatment around a host of issue areas are by definition forms of governance.

In fact, until it was recently rediscovered and popularized as behavioural economics, the niche discipline of institutional economics focused on the impact of the “scaffolding” of both formal and informal rules in structuring the behaviour of economic decision-makers. This analytical approach to the study of institutions has included everything from the theory of the firm (its organizational structure) to how legal institutions structure the long-term macroeconomic performance of countries and regions (Coase 1937; Williamson 1998; de Soto 2001). As Douglass North writes,

Under these terms, the NAFTA certainly qualifies as a set of institutions. However, when critics of the NAFTA argue that the agreement lacks enough of an institutional structure, they are, first, talking about the design of “formal” institutions and, second, whether they pool enough sovereignty within them to act as the arbiters of disputes around a broader set of rules. The domestic rule of law is, of course, enforceable via the state’s monopoly over the exercise of coercive power. This volume has already noted in several places the ways in which enforcement power between states is less readily found, among them the discussion of foreign direct investment and the historical absence of the rule of law governing flows.

PROLOGUE: ON THE PHILOSOPHICALLY EXAMINED LIFE

We have highlighted aspects of our nature often overlooked or even denied in secular thought. Given that we are neither apes nor angels, neither mere organisms nor pure spirits temporarily lodged in bodies, how shall we think of ourselves? How shall we live in the light of what we know, or might come to know, of our nature? More to the point, where shall we find meanings sufficiently enduring and profound to withstand knowledge of our own mortality and the certain loss of all that we love or value?

Rejecting religious responses to these questions does not mean that we can ignore the questions themselves. Or, come to that, ignore religion: a humanism that chooses not to think seriously about something that has played such an important role in human history must be impoverished. While we may live outside the interrogative grasp of these questions for much of our lives, we know that they are awaiting us. At times of grief, suffering, and fear we may be engulfed by them. We should therefore engage with them even, or especially, when they are not interrogating us.

Contemporary philosophy rarely aspires to teach us how to live. As a doctor who has cared for many seriously ill patients, I can report that philosophy of the kind that figures in the pages of this book rarely has much to offer people in extremis or in daily life. Even so, I would like to think that a rich sense of the mystery of our nature is an essential basis for secular living.

There is a danger hereabouts of endorsing the claim, ascribed by Plato to Socrates, that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. The Platonic idea that knowledge (of a philosophical nature) increases one’s moral worth should be questioned, not the least because, measured against Socrates’ criteria, most lives (including many that are truly admirable) pass without examination. Kant’s confident assertion that “in all men, as soon as their reason has become ripe for speculation, there has always existed and will continue to exist some kind of metaphysics” does not correspond to any kind of population-based observation.

SUPERNATURALISM, NATURALISM AND EXTRA-NATURALISM

There is an assumption – prevalent among humanists and indeed many secular philosophers – that if we are not hand-crafted by God in His own image, we must be understood as the product of processes observed throughout nature. The claim is seductive given that naturalism, like humanism, is opposed to supernaturalism: since they have a common enemy, so the unspoken argument goes, humanism and naturalism must be allies.

As it turns out, naturalism proves to be a false friend. While it may have once liberated us from dogmatic religion and all the political and social powers that came with it, it is itself an alternative intellectual prison. Consistent naturalism leads to a denial of our agency: we are organisms acting out a biological script. In short, it is as anti-humanistic as religious belief. If the latter sees us as fallen, the former sees us as unrisen – which scarcely seems much of an improvement.

Clearly, we cannot proceed without specifying what is meant by “naturalism”. It is, as Barry Stroud has pointed out in his beautiful paper “The Charm of Naturalism”, a term with a range of meanings. A commitment to naturalism, like a commitment to world peace, is unlikely to meet much opposition until one gets down to terms and conditions.

At one extreme, there is the reductive, scientistic naturalism exemplified in D. M. Armstrong’s assertion that “the natural world contains nothing but the entities recognized by physics”. This is hard-headed indeed: the world is the natural world; the natural world boils down to the physical world; and the physical world is the world according to physicists – an exsanguinated realm of quantities and patterns described by laws and equations. Less austere, is the claim that the natural world is the world as revealed by the natural sciences. In the case of human beings, the most relevant sciences are the biological sciences: scientism takes the form of biologism, whose classic statement is by the nineteenth-century philosopher and physiologist Ludwig Buchner: “The researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings”.

The NAFTA has assumed a larger-than-life persona during the course of its nearly three-decade-long existence. In its narrow economic persona, it is a shallow preferences agreement, with ambition restricted to the exchange of goods, services and investment. In its political persona, the NAFTA is the quintessential political football: kicked around by politicians and routinely invoked by people who have not read it as supporting their point of view.

In the NAFTA’s earliest days as a political football, proponents such as President George H. W. Bush claimed the NAFTA would generate countless US export jobs, solidify Mexico’s place as a well-governed consumer of those exports and drive a global effort to pave streets with gold. Critics, of course, thought the NAFTA was going to end civilized life as we knew it. There is not much gold pavement anywhere, and the debate about whether we are nearing the end of civilized life goes on. However, it was not as though the NAFTA lacked any ambition. Knitting three economies comprising US$8.4 trillion in 1994 was bound to generate plenty of political hyperbole. President Trump is not well known for offering evidence to support his assertion that the NAFTA is the “worst agreement ever negotiated”, but some factual latitude can be extended to the 45th president, in part because so much of the debate around the NAFTA has been devoid of real fact. The reality is that the set of measures upon which we can claim the NAFTA had a direct impact is fairly small, partly because of the relatively shallow stage of integration the NAFTA represents.

Politicians want to be able to claim that their economic initiatives have created jobs. Moreover, they and those who vote for them are not necessarily moved by abstract statistics about how many widgets cross the border. Consider, for example, the NAFTA Commission’s joint statement from April 2012, which reads, in part:

After nearly three decades of the NAFTA as a political “piñata for pandering pundits and politicians”, what has changed with the agreement’s “modernization” in the form of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (Pastor 2011: ch. 1)? Much like the incessant debates about the merits of the NAFTA itself, one’s assessment of the USMCA, or the way in which it came into being, depends on your point of view. If the NAFTA was indeed the “worst agreement ever negotiated”, as President Trump frequently opined, or one is fundamentally opposed to trade liberalization, then renegotiation and replacement with the USMCA are not a positive outcome. If genuine “modernization” of the NAFTA was one’s goal, and by “modernization” one hoped to deepen trilateralism through greater cooperation, liberalization and institutionalization, the USMCA will also disappoint. Finally, there were also those who recognized the political potency of contemporary anti-trade populism and hoped simply to maintain the status quo.

Of the three camps, those hoping to preserve the “status quo” have the most to cheer about. The NAFTA was not formally scrapped, as the Trump administration had initially threatened. Moreover, the USMCA effectively updates the NAFTA by including topics and disciplines not considered in 1994, a number of which were the subject of the NAFTA’s never completed built- in agenda. Table 8.1 comparatively lists the table of contents, or topics, for the NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (prior to US withdrawal) and the USMCA. There are certainly major differences between the NAFTA and the USMCA: 34 core chapters in the USMCA (not including annexes and side letters), compared with just 21 for the NAFTA. Even when topics covered mirror each other, such as chapter 4’s rules of origin, the USMCA text is several orders longer than the original NAFTA; however, as noted elsewhere in this volume, the extra length is not necessarily an improvement.

However, what is abundantly clear is that the genetic material of the USMCA can be traced to the NAFTA’s architecture. Although the NAFTA itself proved hard to update, amend or complete via its many working groups, trade negotiators from all three NAFTA countries continued building upon the foundation put in place by the NAFTA in other negotiations.

The discussion in Chapter 2 of what the NAFTA is and what it is not skirts a larger set of questions about what North America is. That sounds like a debate for a different book, but is not inconsequential here, since the answer to that question has fuelled the politics of the NAFTA itself. In the context of trade, North America is most simply expressed as the three parties to the NAFTA. Yet, geographically, North America is quite a bit broader. According to the National Geographic Society, the continent of North America

Moreover,

Neither Panama nor Greenland is part of the NAFTA, nor is the Caribbean. For a short time after the NAFTA’s completion, in 1994, the Free Trade Area of the Americas initiative contemplated the extension of NAFTA-like trade rules to most of the Western Hemisphere. Yet even the FTAA would not have included Cuba (democracy was a condition of entry) or Greenland, a semi-autonomous part of Denmark.

Within each of the NAFTA countries, for example, we can point to numerous examples of “regionalism” affecting domestic politics: the US Civil War and its long-term impact on the American South; Canada’s challenges with threatened independence by Quebec or with western alienation; or Mexico’s struggles with restive parts of its underdeveloped southern states. Each suggests a social, political or economic distinctiveness at the subnational level important for understanding the function of the larger polity. That all three have unique experiences with federalism suggests they remain in the midst of a grand experiment with how to knit large geographies and diverse populations into a cohesive national structure.

In the last chapter we reflected on the mind-boggling complexity of our relationship to our bodies. While there is a fundamental sense in which those bodies are objects among the other objects of the world, on all fours with tables, chairs, pebbles, and clouds, they are also the basis of our being viewpoints on what-is and hence upholders of a world in which objects are located. The lived stereoscopy of our bodily awareness underpins our intuition that objects have an existence in themselves independent, or truly outside of, ourselves as perceiving subjects inhabiting a world populated with such objects.

We have left much business unfinished, some of which can be gathered under the headings of “selfhood” or “personal identity” and “agency”. I will delay discussion of these concepts until we have further explored their hinterland in order that our investigation might be conducted at the right depth. The present chapter is devoted to our mode of being in – and out of – time. This might seem a long way from our topic of humanism but in fact it lies at its very core. Our unique relationship to time is the basis of the extended subject that is the self and the conscious human agent. As such it is central to our distinctively human being.

I am conscious that the previous chapter and what I will have to say in the present may be hard going for non-philosophers. Stick with me, however – and take heart because the remaining chapters will be easier to understand. The burden of the present chapter is that persons are extended in time in a manner that is fundamentally different from the way that material objects (including organisms) are located in time. Indeed, our entire mode of being in time is unique to human beings. The phenomenology of human time is a vast topic. Mentioning just two names from what in the UK is called “continental” philosophy – Husserl and Heidegger – will be sufficient to those who are familiar with these names to indicate the importance of the topic as it has flowered in philosophical discourse.

The liberalization of international trade has always been associated with social, political and economic disruption. Indeed, such disruptions are the very source of much popular opposition to liberalization. The moment humans began trading with one another, anxieties were provoked about the impact of exotic foreign wares on everything, from local culture and politics to, of course, economic activity (Irwin 1996: 11–15). These anxieties have periodically, but regularly, spilled over into the kind of populist, anti-trade xenophobia infecting modern debates about trade. This chapter begins with a short discussion of how embedded the politically, economically and socially disruptive qualities of trade liberalization actually are. In part, this chapter will argue, there has always been a connection between trade and both labour and the environment. However, it was the NAFTA that permanently situated labour and environmental issues as meriting consideration in the governance of regional and global trade.

Yet having labour and the environment on the agenda has produced uneven results. The NAFTA’s side agreements on labour and the environment may have started it all, but these same agreements are also emblematic of the uneven treatment and impact of labour and the environment on global trade. Indeed, the NAFTA side agreements were initially afterthoughts, born of the politics of the day and – much to the mutual chagrin of people on different sides of the debate around the nexus of trade, labour and the environment – designed more for show than substance. The result was that the labour half of the side agreements quickly went dormant while the environmental half survived and become more robust than their authors intended. In other words, few were entirely happy with the side agreements. Finally, this chapter will note the significant, but also surprising, degree to which the importance of labour and the environment was affirmed in the NAFTA’s successor, the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement.

Winners, losers and spillovers

There are few certainties in life, but there are two that students of international trade can commit to memory: (a) trade liberalization creates “winners” and “losers”; and (b) the “winners” are broadly distributed and the “losers” are highly concentrated.

While it is not accurate to say that Seeing Ourselves: Reclaiming Humanity from God and Science begins with answers and ends with questions, this would be true to its fundamental intention. My aim is the relatively modest one of clearing away certain misunderstandings about our nature that stop us addressing philosophical questions to which we need answers. While I say “relatively modest”, this aim may still seem to be wildly ambitious, in view of the domination of the collective conversation by views which I oppose and the numerous platforms they have. The task is analogous to cleaning the Augean stables while the horses are still evacuating their capacious bowels. Be that as it may, the most important question is: “What kinds of beings are we?”

Full disclosure: I am a secular humanist and a patron of Humanists UK (previously titled the British Humanist Association). It will be evident in what follows that I see this stance as a point of departure rather than of arrival. Humanism, for all its virtues, still lacks a philosophy that can compete in profundity with the religious beliefs it aims to displace.

Paramount among the many drivers to Seeing Ourselves are three beliefs. The first is that the work of humanism does not consist solely of – the admittedly important – tasks of distancing humanity from religious belief, highlighting the damage caused by religious institutions and the prejudices they validate, and challenging the ubiquitous hard power and soft influence they have in public life. Humanism has yet to develop a sufficiently clear idea of the “human” that the “-ism” is about. While anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, historians, and many other thinkers, researchers, and scholars, in the sciences and the humanities, hold up secular mirrors to ourselves, they often fall short of inquiry at the most fundamental level.

Philosophy can – or should – make a decisive contribution to the endeavour to understand what kinds of beings we are, even if (as is too often the case), this takes the form of correcting the errors of other philosophers. It has perhaps contributed less than it should. In part this is down to an entirely honourable commitment to rigour, that has made philosophy often rather technical and encouraged philosophers to approach problems piecemeal.

We may acknowledge the harm caused by institutionalized religion, with its power to amplify hostilities between human groups, and recognize that doctrines spread across 200 or more faiths are not imaginable by, never mind believable to, many, and still conclude that a human life without institutionally acknowledged transcendent meaning is impoverished. The personal meanings we find in our lives are parochial and transient. We often look back on them with wonder and even dismay, finding that we are indifferent to the things that we valued so much, and how we passed through, rather than arrived at, goals that were so important to us. And we acknowledge how the objective significance of our lives may have to humanity as a whole – “making the world a better place” and so on – seems unlikely to cancel deficiencies in our subjective experience. And, finally, when we envisage our place in a Godless universe, we hardly cut much of a figure. We seem to be the products of purposeless mechanisms that did not intend us. We are not here because we are needed or wanted. As the physicist Steven Hawking expressed it: “[T]he human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate sized planet, orbiting round a very average star in the outer suburbs of one among a billion galaxies”.

Thus, our self-image in the mirror of natural science; how we look when seen as pieces of nature. A primary purpose in writing Seeing Ourselves has been to highlight the extent to which we are not just pieces of nature, to describe the extra-natural nature of humanity and of the human world we have built. I have rejected the assumption that, if we are not supernatural beings, separately hand-crafted by God and uniquely related to him, we must be mere organisms; that persons are at bottom beasts. Yes, we are made of matter, but we are not just pieces of matter; yes, we are animals but we are not just animals. We are unique beings in the universe, as should be evident from the fact that, uniquely, we speak of “the universe”; or, more generally, have a world picture that transcends any kind of umwelt that other creatures may be immersed in.

Spaghetti Bowl of Commitments by the 12 Trans-Pacific Partnership Signatories