I’m reposting an essay originally published on September 21, 2009. First, I’ll make a few comments.
I seem to fall into a line of thinkers, Tocqueville to Hawthorne to Melville to Henry James the Elder to Mark Twain to Flannery O’Connor with the British guy Graham Greene joining in. This line of thinkers have tried — quite in vain — to warn Americans about the attitudes and beliefs which have held Americans down in fever-swamps when we thought to be soaring with eagles. In fact, we should made something very good of our historical situation because, in fact, these swamps are a small area in a great land of opportunity, a wealthy marginal region of an aging civilization. Can’t get much better than that if we’d been willing to work hard to reinvigorate an exhausted West, but we Americans seem to have had other priorities.
The United States was given a pretty good start towards greatness by one generation of leaders with greater moral stuff than any other generation we’d otherwise seen. Since those early years of the Republic, we’ve been lucky to have even a few such men in public life and those men of integrity have often been mercilessly attacked by the gangsters who flowed towards the opportunities of a powerful and centralized government and also by their even more despicable sycophants and fellow-travelers.
I’ve spoken of these issues in various places and from various viewpoints, historical or philosophical or theological or political or… For now, I just wish to say that we who act, by choice or necessity, in complex communities of men form our selves, including our moral characters, in response to all of that complexity which is — things get worse and more interesting — known only in a fuzzy way. If we would be morally well-formed men of our times, we have to form our moral habits and behaviors and thoughts in response to our best knowledge of human history, human philosophy, human theology, and other fields of abstract knowledge and also in response to the best of our technology, our practical crafts, our arts and our literatures.
The Disembodiment of Knowledge in Modern America: Originally Posted on September 21, 2009
Human knowledge is embodied knowledge, embodied in the relationships of brain-cells to one another and groups of brain-cells to one another as well as being embodied in the habits of our muscles and peripheral nerves and also in our clothing and our houses and our tools and machines, in our ways of making our livings and of governing ourselves or being governed, in our ways of worshiping God and paying respect to human excellence. A fuller description would take a large book without even attempting to speak of particular realizations in concrete human beings and their communities, though it’s actually a multitude of particular realizations which allow us to abstract properly to a wider view of human possibilities. Even when it comes to our own efforts to improve our practices and artifacts, we don’t know much about human possibilities until we study what we’ve done and what others have done.
Much of our knowledge is embodied in the form of communities and their practices and attitudes, within political or economic marketplaces and within the parts of our lives we live in our smaller and more private communities. Our community relationships include the ways in which we entertain ourselves, the ways in which we sing or tell stories. They include our ways of raising children or caring for the elderly in our families or in our larger-scale communities. Certainly, a human being or a human community can be the very embodiment of falsehoods which can even be held strongly in the face of conflicting evidence from reality. A human being or a human community will necessarily be an incomplete or insufficiently rich embodiment of Creation since we’re finite beings exploring God’s manifested thoughts, but even the simplest of human beings is a character in a complex group of overlapping and overlaying stories.
I’ve rejected the modern separation of the knowledge of concrete and abstract realms and I’m trying to follow some of the implications. In a sense, I’ve returned to the ancient view in which “to know your wife” is to be physically intimate with her. Knowledge of your wife is inseparable from marital relationships. Take this not as an argument that marital, or other human relationships, are purely physical in a reductionistic sense but rather a denial that there is a dualism between concrete being and abstractions. The purest of loves is driven by hormonal flows, even maternal love is painfully intensified by the flows of hormones as a newborn is put to the breast of her mother. Concrete being is particularized but is shaped from abstract being which I regard as manifested truths. Concrete and abstract stuff is a manifestation of thoughts of God. Much of concrete being can be understood, at a first shot, as the thoughts of God as story-teller while the abstract being can be understood as the thoughts of God as mathematician and physicist, as chemist and biologist, but as a Creator not as a student of what already exists.
Human knowledge is the result of human explorations of being in its concrete and abstract forms and the struggles to make sense of it. It is our approximations to the thoughts of God. We human beings were given the gift of a freedom to shape our thoughts to encapsulate God’s revelations, those which He manifested in Creation and also the few revelations about His transcendent Being. That freedom also extends to the shaping of the human parts of the world, the parts of the world which can be labeled ‘non-human’ over which we exercise proper and improper forms of stewardship as well as the ‘human’ parts such as human political and economic structures. We can embody not only tentative knowledge which will eventually be proven wrong or prove to be in need of enrichment of some sort, we can even embody inconsistent knowledge. It might be an effort to combine two incompatible ways of thought or to justify an incompatibility between a way of thought and a way of living. An example which has elements of all of the above might be seen in the case of those Christians who claim to accept some form of evolutionary theory, man evolved from a more primitive sort of ape, and then also claim to accept an interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve as being a fall from a state of grace — presumably something like a state of spiritual and moral purity. We rise as physical beings but started high and fell as spiritual and moral beings — not very plausible.
Currently, the political and social and moral discourse of modern Americans and most other human beings — in fact, discourse in all matters important, is at the level of sulking 8 year-olds speaking, and often yelling, at each other from the safety of their own poorly formed minds. This is partly a reflection of the low moral and intellectual caliber of those who dominate the public marketplaces of ideas in an age of decadent barbarism but it’s also a reflection of the state of human knowledge at the level of our entire race. If we try to see human knowledge as some sort of coherent whole, we are most likely to fail, for we’ve fragmented our knowledge, composing a discordant polyphony made up in many of its parts of screeches and howls and the random noises of mechanized human communities without a moral purpose and without a sense of beauty or truth, without a sense of the truth and beauty embodied in God’s Creation, in the stars and mountains, in the equations which describe certain aspects of those stars and mountains and the interrelationships of those creatures with the rest of Creation, in a Bach cantata or a Gaelic air, in a two year-old girl who’s such a remarkable mix of grace and clumsiness. We see the clumsiness and the incompleteness often enough ugly in a brutal way and we interpret it as a variety of oppositions between mere matter and higher entities, between the practical and the ideal, between God and Satan, failing to see the world as a story being told by an all-powerful and all-loving God.
Knowledge is embodied because we are creatures of a particular and concrete universe. What we can know truly is embodied, even the most abstract of mathematical truths is drawn from particular relationships within this world of embodiment. The processes of human knowledge-making involve eyes and hands, feet and hearts, brains most of all. Human knowledge isn’t true knowledge as much as it’s a dynamic movement towards true knowledge so long as we respond honestly and courageously to God’s Creation. Truth is embodied and so is beauty, however much they are also incomplete and dynamically developing towards the truths and beauties which are the end result of the story which God is telling in this concrete world. (Progress is clearly not guaranteed but seems to be real on a large enough scale.) If there was a fall, it came as God Himself shaped unblemished abstraction into concrete and bleeding forms of being which He uses to tell a story in which we play a part, as do the stars and flu viruses and giant squids, but this is a fall with a moral purpose of creating a world which is really a story in which the main event is the self-sacrifice of the Son of God as an act of pure love for His Father, an event in which we play a subsidiary role but one in which we gain a chance for a share in divinity.
If there’s a fall in which man played a direct role, it’s an ongoing fall consisting of man’s indulgence in the human temptation to separate being into components which are at odds with each other. Matter vs. spirit. Brain vs. mind. Body vs. soul. The practical vs. the ideal.
We’re at a crisis point now, where the dominant country, the United States, seems to be actively opposed to reality, despising the embodied beauty and truth of God’s Creation as not being good enough for us Americans and any others decent enough to be like us. It’s been said that the United States is the first country to move directly from barbarism to decadence without passing through a state of civilization. I’d claim that Americans bypassed the state of civilization because, led by those such as Emerson who thought to create ideals more wonderful than what is embodied in this Creation, we decided to try to implement our so-called ideals rather than to study reality and to try to do better within that reality. Hermann Melville thought Emersonian thought to be a spiritualized materialism and feared many, perhaps most, Americans shared this morally diseased outlook of Emerson and Thoreau. Melville was close. Far too many Americans are deeply diseased in this way including nearly all of our political and intellectual and religious leaders going back to at least the leaders of the New England Colonies during the King Phillip’s War — see The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding for a discussion of the need to properly deal with particular and concrete realizations of human ways of life to be able to form abstract ideas of better possibilities. I would suggest one change to Melville’s formulation: this Emersonian-American way of thought is not so much a spiritualized materialism as a nightmarish replacement for all that is embodied in a material world. If the world won’t be what we Americans want it to be, we’ll still act as if it were truly what we want it to be. That strategy was remarkably successful in many ways for more than three centuries, but reality is now biting back.
We can see the American disrespect for reality in the claim made by that anonymous figure in the Bush II government that they would make reality rather than study it. We can see this disrespect for reality in the words and actions of the Kennedy and Johnson government figures in their waging of the Vietnam war where it was most important to get on board, to sign on to the dream that the United States could shape South Vietnam into a real country, an exotic outpost of the United States. We can see it in the more recent wars against Iraq where the fact that American soldiers were in place, in a far-away country, killing Iraqis and being killed by Iraqis means that those Iraqis — at least some — are evil men intent on destroying us because we’re so wonderful. Start a war by invading a country on false pretenses and then convince yourself that the fact you’re killing citizens of that country means they’re evil and deserved to be killed. This is actually another symptom of the same disease that leads us to declare that a movie that’s esthetic and moral trash must be good if Americans like it. By such paths, we traveled from a barbarism with at least some respect for the works of Western civilization imported from Europe to a decadence that respects only transactions in public marketplaces, transactions that typically represent only the satisfaction of cheap and uneducated desires. We admire the athletes of football and boxing and make fun of the athletes of ballet and opera. We admire what would have been admired by the proletariat who filled the Colosseum of ancient Rome and despise what satisfied the tastes of the 18th and 19th century men who put the final touches upon this civilization we’ve dismantled that we might build whorehouses from the stones of grand cathedrals and make bombs that destroy cathedrals and the surrounding cities from the knowledge gathered by great men of science.
It’s hard to imagine that a large population of a seemingly sophisticated country could be so detached from reality, so convinced that truth is found in their imaginations shaped to mirror their desires and even their career plans. Decades ago, some thinkers had predicted collapse of the Soviet Union because the all-important apparatchiks wouldn’t be able to function because of the strain caused by the conflict between reality and official Soviet views of reality — this is more plausible than the view that Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall by planting the seeds that grew into the military bean-stalk currently reaching for the stars. Americans seem to be oblivious to this conflict between reality and their thoughts and feelings. The United States is collapsing, the West is falling at least partly because the United States failed in its role as a new and energetic region which could have created a new phase of Western Civilization. After all, civilizations don’t survive as truly stable entities, they evolve in place or re-develop in formerly marginal regions. It was our turn here in the United States and we had better things to do than to nurture a new civilization.
As the ruins crumble around the globe, Americans remain oblivious to reality, choosing to believe they can solve a problem of excessive debt by creating more debt, that they can make the world love them once again by waging wars on all continents and building hundreds of military bases around the world, even in regions where we’ve not yet started shooting. We think to encourage creativity by setting children and young adults in front of sheets of paper or — still worse — in front of computers when those children have little knowledge of reality and few skills for responding to reality.
I’m offering a way forward, a worldview which explicitly recognizes the unity and coherence and completion of this world and can be used to embody a plausible human knowledge of that world in a civilization not yet born and in the human beings who will inhabit that civilization. We can hope the next civilization will be an embodiment of the best of modern empirical knowledge, that is, that it will be an embodiment of that knowledge in tools and political practices, in forms of music and in goals for scientific research, disciplined to a morally responsible view of God’s Creation and man’s proper place in it. (Of course, it might be multiple civilizations in different parts of the earth or it might be that mankind will sink into a permanent barbarism.)
We’re a long way, lots of long days of work away, from such a civilization, but it seems to me that it’s time for men and women of moral integrity to recognize how much has been lost and to start the various tasks of building a better future, one that will likely be seen by no one currently alive.