Since 2006, I’ve been writing books and essays, nearly all of which are available for free downloading on the Internet. My main theme is simply the need to see our world as being the universe in light of God’s purposes for this concrete realm of Creation, which includes the need to see the entirety of Creation by properly disciplined speculation. The world in itself is unified and coherent and complete. Creation can be described in similar terms and so can any entity properly labeled a human person. I’ll also claim that a civilization can be described in similar terms and will deal with that a little more later in this essay.
We can think of these three defining characteristic, unity and coherence and completeness, as signs of a moral narrative and we then see hints of ways to produce a Christian understanding of being in light of both revelation and also modern empirical knowledge. As part of that, we see hints of new Christian forms of politics and economics, new Christian ways to achieve moral order and to tell the stories of these morally ordered communities. We can see hints of new ways to integrate our individual selves into new forms of communities and new ways of forming relationships to other communities. We can see new ways of forming communities in which Christians and non-Christians can fully participate.
The point I wish to drive home is the need to re-establish the foundations of our civilization or to build new foundations for a new civilization. A civilization is essentially the human minds of its members and its entirety, the minds of the individuals and also the communal mind which Jacques Barzun calls the `intellect’. (Here and for the rest of this essay, I’ll ignore the physical infrastructure such as precision manufacturing machinery which, if lost, would take several stages of engineering and manufacturing to recover.) A well-developed human mind is essentially the civilization in which it is found. The decay of our civilization, our moral disorder and other forms of disorder, are the same as our minds, our individuals minds and our communal mind. Our inability to engage in proper politics, our inability to control our habits, our inability to hold together our families and church communities and social clubs, are the external signs of the chaos which is us and our ways of understanding reality and of forming relationships.
A civilization is like unto a world or a moral person: unified and coherent and complete in itself. Can we simply will to instill a better order in our governments and our businesses, in our houses of worship and our family homes? No, we have no viable order to shape ourselves and our communities. The world accessible to man’s exploration and exploitation has expanded greatly. It grew far larger than the prior understandings of that world. Satan hasn’t invaded. We’ve simply failed to recognize the evidence of how large and complex the world is. We try to deal with this world now known to be immensely large and extraordinarily complex in terms of intellectual systems better suited to a world of villages, low levels of technology and scientific knowledge, slow transportation, and slow, low-capacity communication.
We can’t move forward before we develop a new view of our empirical world and all that we might speculate or believe to lie beyond that world. The stuff of stars and of human bodies and of spacetime is what God uses to tell the story which is the world. The relationships involving all that stuff and the entities made from it are the relationships of that story and tell us much about our relationships to God. We need to have a greater understanding to guide us as we develop more focused understandings, as we try to work out the problems of our political and religious communities, as we try to figure out how to safely feed and entertain ourselves and our children. But it’s necessarily an iterative process in which we, some of us in any case, concentrate on those more specialized viewpoints. What the specialists learn feeds into the greater understanding of human history, of the world, of all Creation.
We should take `understand’ in the widest sense, the sense which takes in all of human knowledge and plausible speculation. We need to have a narrative that includes a very fundamental understanding of this universe’s explosive expansion 15 billion years ago. That narrative should also consider dinosaurs and mastodons and apish men. It should consider abstract algebra and biochemistry and bridge design. It should consider the various ways of making music in Vienna and Bogota and the jungles of Brazil and Nigeria as well as the hills of Arkansas and the steppes of Mongolia. It should be willing and able to make judgments about the relative worth of those various ways of making music. It should make some sense of the human liking for symmetry and for certain color combinations. It should make sense of nuclear families and extended families and tribes and New England towns and Asian cities and Nigerian medical societies. Again, it’s an iterative process because the greater understanding has to develop from more specific understandings of concrete being and particular entities and specific stories. That greater narrative will be the shape of our minds and much of the contents of those minds as well as our communal minds.
The poet and farmer Wendell Berry has told us that if we find a moral way to make our livings, we’d know how to solve our ecological problems. I’m expanding this idea greatly to claim that if we find a way to make sense of all that we know or believe to exist, we’ll also know how to restore moral order to our various communities and how to make our livings and how to set priorities on technological and scientific research as well as better defining what serves human needs in the development of mines and the construction of factories and transportation systems. We’ll know how to feed ourselves and our children, how to entertain ourselves, and how to properly care for our property. We’ll know how to re-form our civilization or how to develop a new one and we’d know in the process of doing so.
Arguably, our largest political communities, nation-states, are currently the most morally chaotic of our institutions and are causing a variety of other forms of decay and chaos. I’d claim, and have claimed, that we Americans desired, in a unformed and childish way, to become the citizens of a large nation-state with high moral standards and have failed to follow the proper path of growth and development. We certainly learned the art of nurturing self-esteem, a trait we elders criticize so freely in the youth. Rather than being a virtuous people capable of examining our actions and evaluating their practical and moral effects, we patted ourselves on the back whether we were sending money to tsunami victims or devastating Baghdad — such an attack on a city is fully and undeniably a war-crime in terms of Christian just-war teachings. We let our politicians and bankers and industrialists get out of control, after all we got a share of the borrowed money, and then accepted what they did as part of our efforts to, above all, feel good about ourselves.
We never matured, not as individual citizens and not as a country. We have formed ourselves into a mob marching to the primitive beat of modern pop music. Our American mob is collectively at the moral level of a self-righteous 13 year-old. Such a mob can produce some ugly and bloody scenes when it controls, or its leaders control, as much fire-power as the U.S. armed forces can deliver. A different set of ugly scenes of poverty can be produced when those leaders control the world’s reserve currency. Those leaders are more ruthless than the rest of us, less inhibited in criminal behavior, but they too are part of the herd. They too are us.
Clearly we don’t yet know how to develop into a community on the scale of the United States and seem to have forgotten how to develop into smaller scale communities. We will eventually develop into a community far larger than even the U.S. or China — the Body of Christ. If we don’t yet know how to develop a coherent political entity on a scale seemingly indicated in the modern world, we have to realize that we’ll have to pay the price of retreating and letting ourselves be guided by our developing minds and especially that communal mind which doesn’t yet exist. The processes of such developments will not be, could not be, centrally planned and controlled but they need to be conscious unlike the workings of a pure Darwinian process, more conscious than the workings of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. What does that mean? First of all, we need to intend what is most important, where I use `intend’ in the Thomistic and biological sense of being a step forward in a growth process. More than that? I don’t know but I’ll learn by participating in the development of a new civilization or the re-formation of Western Civilization, a development which includes the development of our individual and communal minds.
Having said all that, I’m going to point to an interesting discussion which doesn’t go far enough, though that’s a weak criticism when we’re exploring a world which seems different than we and our ancestors assumed in recent centuries. Ralph Hancock has posted the essay Prospects for the Democratic Nation-State: What State Are We In?. There are also two responses. Aurelian Craiutu has posted the essay: Loving the Democratic State Moderately. Daniel McCarthy has posted the essay: From the Nation State to the New Church.
I have one major criticism of Mr. Hancock’s essay and this is what my essay has led up to. He is concerned with the fundamental problems in the political institutions of a civilization melting down (to re-form or to be replaced?) in terms of that civilization’s own understanding of its mind: something that is labeled `reason’ has to struggle to gain control over something that is labeled `passion’. Modern neuroscientists have shot down such a model of human nature. In any case, Mr. Hancock suggests — quite properly — that we need a more humane, less technocratic or rationalistic, understanding of `reason’, but such a suggestion is reasonable as stated only if we say within the general limits of the Western tradition — a behavior not found in the founders or re-founders of civilizations. Instead, and at the very least, we need to develop a radical re-understanding of the human mind as I’ve suggested starting with my early weblog entry: Hellenistic Metaphysics is Too Small and found also as Chapter 44 in the great mass of my weblog writings available for free download: Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2011.
In those writings, I try to develop an updated Thomistic understanding of the human mind. Part III, The Human Mind as a Re-Creation of God’s Creation has more than 50 chapters dealing mostly with the mind. There are chapters which contain my responses to an important book, How Brains Make Up Their Minds by Walter J. Freeman, neuroscientist and philosopher and admirer of St. Thomas Aquinas. I also try to deal with the important insights of the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer about the inordinate effectiveness of human thinking when it deals with knowledge found in a form which human beings have been selected to deal with — his book is Adaptive Thinking. In other parts of my book, I include chapters dealing with the stuff of our world and our resistance to accepting empirical reality and with the nature of a universe. Many chapters deal with the moral narratives which can emerge even when we honestly allow for the inordinate importance of class structures and criminal conspiracies in politics. Yes, even in the United States.
Another way of stating my criticism of nearly all current efforts to understand our problems and move forward: they assume a way of thinking and try to impose it upon a recalcitrant reality when they should be learning how to think from that reality which, after all, was created by God. At least we Christians believe so and I would move on to explicitly claim that all of Creation is the manifestation of thoughts of God, thoughts He wished us to share with Him, thoughts which we should use to shape our minds and become better images of the Almighty. God’s mind and imagination are beyond human understanding, but He gave us a world where we can share His thoughts and also His creative freedom, learning how to be like God, how to share His life one day. But we learn no such thing if we continue to bring our human systems of thought to our exploration of reality. Gauss and Riemann and Einstein found that the greatest of thinkers hadn’t provided what they needed to understand space and time and they responded properly to a world a bit more complex than could be assembled from Euclidean instructions. We are learning, very reluctantly, a similar lesson about human nature and human history, about the nature and history of human communities.
Maybe I’ve done a good job. Maybe I’ve made a good first effort in a major move forward into a new understanding of Creation and the Creator. Maybe not. At the very least, I’ve shown the large scale of any plausible effort to make that move towards an understanding of a well-ordered human race in a Creation which is well-ordered. It’s not nearly enough to criticize our failed and failing institutions in terms of the ways of thought of a civilization which has itself failed to produce an adequate understanding of Creation in light of vast piles of undigested and partially digested empirical knowledge and in light of all the possibilities and dangers which have risen with modern technology and the sheer size of human communities. Framing the criticism in slightly modified terms maybe helps a little to understand what’s going on as the building falls down upon you but it doesn’t help you to rebuild before it falls or to move elsewhere and build anew.