The title of this essay refers to a book I recently published, The Shape of Reality. That book is an effort to move forward in our understanding of created being, perhaps even move forward a little in our understanding of the Triune God of Jesus Christ. That book builds upon my understanding of created being, as having both abstract and concrete forms, and the related understanding that relationships are primary and create and shape more particular forms of being. I borrow heavily, unscrupulously and opportunistically, from abstract mathematics–especially the qualitative reasoning which has arisen in such fields as topology and modern algebra. In the Preface, I write:
Is a man a unity or is he a collection of warring fragments? Or is the proper question perhaps my favorite: Is man some sort of complex being not describable in current terms of discourse? I should qualify my statement of the last possibility, which I believe to the closest to the truth: I think mathematicians working in the most abstract regions currently accessible to the human mind have discovered tools of thought, quantitative and qualitative, which can provide us with superior ways of discussing complex forms of created being. That entire argument is one which can be carried out only by way of a program to show such is the case. This book will be the first step in such a program—unless this step sends me into a brier-patch or over a cliff.
My entire body of writings, including my novels—which anticipated my more disciplined efforts at philosophy and theology, provides the background for what I’ll be writing in the remainder of this essay; that recent book, The Shape of Reality, is an effort to start bringing my work on understanding Creation into a tighter and more accessible focus.
There are times in human history, including the history of the West, when things have gone from great order and prosperity to disorder and poverty—sometimes the decay was pretty quick. As a rule, the common folk got their suffering first but the elite would get theirs eventually, or at least the grandchildren of those elite dominating at the end of that period of order and prosperity. Note that the elite are powerholders and wealth-holders, not necessarily those of greater merit in the senses of talent or accomplishment or moral character. I often note that the prophet Jeremiah claimed a disproportionate percentage of the wealthy and powerful are outright evil; I agree with him, though I think a far larger percentage simply have weak moral character.
In any case, the High Middle Ages were years of relative peace and great prosperity. A quick search will turn up analyses based upon documents as well as skeletal evidence which tells us that childhood death rates during the High Middle Ages (say, 1100-1300) were usually very high because of diseases which could not be handled by the medical techniques of that age. Those who survived childhood were comparable to modern human beings in robustness and size. They were well-fed and lived actively but not in a way particularly nasty, brutish, or short. [“Life is nasty, brutish, and short”, Thomas Hobbes.]
See my earlier essay, A Very Simplified View of the Woes of Christianity—Now and at Two Earlier Times, for a discussion of the beginning of modern liberalism; in terms of my current discussion, liberalism should be defined as something like: the denial of the reality of complex entities and the consequent fragmentation of Creation and of human being. It should be noted that the human organism was arbitrarily—from a purely logical viewpoint—chosen as the `true’ level of human being; if you fragment the universe by denying the reality of complex entities made up of smaller entities which retain their individuality to some extent, then Richard Dawkins has as much right to choose DNA as the `true’ level of human being as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, as well as Locke and Jefferson, had to choose the human organism.
So it was the human mind began to decay by way of a new retreat into some strange region of human schemes of knowledge. Hume had some good insights—though he was even less of a pure philosopher than I am, but it took Nietzsche to ridicule the entire Western intellectual effort for the absurdity it had generally been for centuries. Meanwhile, there was a revival of respect for Aquinas who was the Saint of Honest Responses to Reality rather than the imagined Aquinas who was the Saint of the Philosophical Schemes Which Judged Reality. After years of rejecting Aquinas as another philosopher who spoke gobbledy-gook, I was gently critized for my attitude by Stanley Hauerwas and then re-read Etienne Gilson’s explanations of the thought of Aquinas as well as a few comments by Hannah Arendt and I realized I was fooled because Aquinas was an artist in using gobbledy-gook to speak true wisdom. The best way to understand what he was really up to is to read his commentary on St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Then you can realize that the problems with Western understandings of created being began after Aquinas and not in his writings.
Books can be written upon this decay of the Western mind, individual and communal, and upon the similar decay in the Western heart and the Western hands. What I would point out here is the prolonged nature of the crisis which showed itself in those thoughts of Duns Scotus and the related thoughts of William of Ockham, but undoubtedly were developing before the births of those two men who sharpened some very bad and dangerous ideas to a state of rationalistic brilliance, a brilliance independent of nature because it was meant to be used to judge and evaluate nature and, indeed, all of Creation. The intellectual schemes of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham transcended Creation even as they tended to pull the Almighty Himself into Creation by denying His existence is qualitatively different from that of creatures. This was a brilliance which was but a gloss upon the decay of the human mind and a retreat from Christian ideas of Creator and Creation.
Similar processes of decay were developing and advancing in those other parts of human being: heart and hands. That had to be the case because a human being is, in aspiration and principle, a unity and thus it is that the human mind is what we see when a certain light, call it `metaphysical’ if you wish, is shined through a human being from a specific direction. Heart is what we see when that light is shined from a differently specific direction and we can see hands when that light is shined from a third specific direction. As a rule, decay will make its way into all parts of human being even if it starts in but one. This doesn’t mean that, for example, intellectual decay leads to moral decay of a truly degrading sort but it will lead to moral disorder which will make it difficult for a community to see its way to regrowth any time soon. All important human activities have a moral component, even if it is forms of order describable as `proto-moral’, foundational order such as the peace and obedience to law which can be enforced upon a society by a warlord wishing but to keep his taxes flowing and to be able to leave his realm to his son.
Things were already falling apart in much of the West by 1300 or so—26 years after the death of Aquinas, partly because of factors at play in this year of 2017, including: an excess of so-called elites, a concentration of vast amounts of wealth and power in the hands of a minority of that elite, and a lack of good jobs for the common folk. By 1400 or so, the population of common folk in Western Europe was far less what it had been in 1300—up to a loss of 50% of the population according to some historians or as little as 30% or so according to others. Then the common folk were in a position to bargain for better pay and a greater share of wealth and the elite, in an Invisible Hand (Invisible Mind or Invisible Heart?) sense, realized there were too many of their own sort. Various families and other groups among the elites began to fight it out—such as the House of Lancaster and the House of York waging brutal winner-take-all war (the War of the Roses). In most such struggles, the winner family got the throne or lesser treasure, for a short time, and the loser family was more or less exterminated or at least reduced from an elite status.
We seem to have entered the early stage of a terrible period which may equal or even exceed the 14th century in a horrific devastation of the West, with the common folk bearing most of the suffering.
Let me correct an inadequacy in the above paragraphs. The decay of a civilization is a complex process composed of complex sub-processes. The decay of a civilization isn’t just a matter of politics and economics and the elites who control centralized power in those realms of human communal life, but those sub-processes are very important and will likely become the dominant part of the avalanche once it gets going. Yet, the most important of all the sub-processes is the decay of human communal life; that will lead to recursive interaction with the decay processes involving the inner lives and moral characters, the intellectual and emotional and behavioral make-up, of individuals. As noted above, the West is decaying in mind and heart and hands. Our thoughts and feelings and actions, individual and communal, are increasingly those of a barbarian people and the recursive interactions between individual and communal decay are probably well into that stage of an avalanche.
The astute reader who has kept up with my efforts to write about the shape of human beings, individual and communal, and even The Shape of Reality might already suspect I’m trying to integrate my ways of understanding complex entities into my regular ways of writing. That astute reader would be right and, in particular, I’m interested in producing a better understanding of complex entities as made of other entities, where those `smaller’ entities retain at least part of their own individuality even as they become part of that complex entity. [Anyone who wants to read of my efforts to produce this understanding can read the entire book or can start with three chapters from the concluding part of the book. I published those three chapters as essays: The Knowledge Possessed by a Creature, From the Ideological Frying-pan to the Ideological Fire, and Concluding Chapter from “The Shape of Being”: A Short Wrapup.]
If we imagine a civilization, or even the entirety of mankind, as the surface of a globe, we can eliminate complications and complexities in a useful way by producing maps of smaller human communities which are `flatter’ and simpler to work with—in the same way that maps of, say, the continents allow us to see regions such as European Russia and Spain and all that lies between in enough detail to understand some important matters of recent and even longfar agoway history. Usefully idealizing this mathematical process, we can then produce a new map from that of the pseudo-continent of Europe and examine European Russia and Spain separately and in somewhat greater detail. We can then map Barcelona or St Petersburg in the large to still `flatter’ maps than the ones above and then map neighborhoods of those cities in detail so that individual streets, even small side-streets, and major buildings can be all shown.
The smaller the region, the closer that region comes to being truly Euclidean when we speak of that simple case of mapping the surface of Earth. In mathematics, the functions useful for analysis are easy to work with, nice. Analogically, in carrying out this sort of a procedure for analyzing human being in its communal and individual forms, we can derive concepts and tools which are also easy (or at least easier) to work with. No guarantees of niceness, but a lot better than trying to gain an understanding of a complex and seemingly chaotic mess by using concepts and tools of thought developed in prior ages for application to much simpler forms of human being than what we have now. And are in danger of losing.
The individual human being as we idealize him is a limiting case of that extremely small region of of a manifold of communal human being far more complex than the surface of a three-dimensional ball such as Earth, even allowing for Mount Everest and the Dead Sea set in the Jordan Rift Valley as well as the complex systems of valleys and mesas in all the badland regions of Earth.
We come to a difficult issue, especially when dealing with something so important as human relationships.
I noted in my recently released book that there is overlap, intermingling on the borders of the regions of any manifold which represents a true human community—even the abstract geometrical (that is, topological) representation of a community of two, marriage or friendship or intermingled economies of two countries or whatever, is extremely complex and complicated. One complexity is the ambiguity of boundaries between human beings: individual and individual, individual and communal, communal and communal. When one considers God’s role in all of this, the general model I’m proposing shows itself as complex and complicated enough to be a plausible and perhaps realistic view of reality.
Think of a globe whose sphere (surface of that globe) is made up of regions which are separating in some ways, perhaps the areas shared with nearby regions are tearing apart in such a way that no regions, no human beings smaller than the global community, are complete to the extent they were before such a process of disintegration went into high gear. They have begun to shed communal human being, whether purposefully or not, whether consciously or not; they have damaged their individual human being in the process and the recursive interaction of individual and communal human being is underway. That communal human being which is really disappearing is not only necessary to the health of individual human beings, it is necessary for the very existence of complex human communities. The word `really’ in the prior sentence is important. In fact, I would deny any semi-liberal interpretations of the above claims. I would deny that we are watching freestanding individuals being freed from communal relationships for good or bad—we are watching the destruction and disappearance of human being.
The point of all of this—I can’t say it too often—is that what seems to be, for example, qualitative functions drawn from modern abstract mathematics is true being, abstract being for sure but true being against the claims of the metaphysical foundations of modern liberalism—again, see A Very Simplified View of the Woes of Christianity—Now and at Two Earlier Times for a discussion of those foundations as developed in the decades following the High Middle Ages—the peak of Christian thought to that and perhaps this point, the thought manifested in Thomas Aquinas’s insights into being and into the importance of grounding our thought upon empirical foundations. To be sure, Aquinas compromised his thought by supporting the idea of a mind or soul because he wasn’t confident enough in the stuff God had created to support the opposing idea that a human brain can be the the medium of even the most abstract thought—but he didn’t know how dynamic matter, including the brain, can be. The dynamic nature of matter and the way in which relationships create and shape stuff and thing-like entities tells us of the reality of abstract being.
In somewhat simpler terms, the takeaway is:
If we live in an era or area where there are no plausible such functions involving rich and complex communities and also rich and complex individuals, or when or where such functions are grossly inadequate, then I’m further claiming that human being of that time or place isn’t adequate, either because of a lack of properly developed mind in those responsible for understanding Creation or because of a more general lack of properly developed mind or heart or hands in some probably larger part of the human population.
The simpler sorts of communal human being, such as nuclear and extended families or tribes, can apparently reconstitute themselves pretty quickly—but they aren’t likely to have the characteristics human beings ultimately need and we human beings of the 21st century desire that our lives be as rich as were in the near past. Civilization would have to be rebuilt, as is seemingly happening in China and the Chinese diaspora—though not in a clearly solid or sustainable way.
If you wish to clear up some confusion you might have about my above claims, or wish to be more confused—to good purpose, you might wish to read some of my books, perhaps starting with Four Sorts of Knowledge, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, or the above referenced The Shape of Reality.