This is the third and final part of this essay. The first part dealt with an essay by Donald Kagan, Ave atque vale, which provides a highly summarized history of liberal arts education in the West along with a few hints toward a profound understanding of human knowledge and education and, finally, an assessment of the current sad state of affairs in our universities and research labs. I would even write of the sad state of affairs in the minds of modern Western men, as individuals and as communal beings. The second part dealt with an essay by Peter Augustine Lawler, Defending the Humanities, dealing with a commencement address given by Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic. This third part deals with my personal take on this general topic, being largely an apologia of sorts of the last 25 frustrating and seemingly wasted years of my life, that is, an apologia of my efforts to provide a worldview, which is a somewhat disparaged term I’m willing to take over and use for my understanding of created being and its relationship to the Creator. Modern-day humanists, literary men and philosophers and theologians and historians and others are devoted to passing on a tradition allied with the moral goodness, including freedom, of Western Civilization but they don’t seem to notice that the tradition is itself a phase of Western Civilization which reflects earlier understandings of the explorable, empirical realms of created being. We men of the West inhabit a great work become a lie and we haven’t yet shown the courage and the faith to speak the deeper and richer truths we now see in created being, the thoughts God manifested as sufficient for the story He’s telling.
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What is the human mind? How can we nurture a properly ordered mind? What is the result of our current ways of living, of educating our children and continuing to learn about a complex world when we ourselves become adults, of governing ourselves and earning our livings, of entertaining ourselves and forming our communities of worship. If we are to do all of this and to do it right, we need values, which means we need a story which gives purpose to our individual lives and the lives of our communities.
I’ve written much on this general topic and have recently published an overview of my current understanding of human nature, individual and communal, in the freely downloadable book: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being. This book is part of my efforts to help in re-forming the Christian civilization of the West or perhaps in building the foundations of a new Christian Civilization if we aren’t able to rescue the West which seems to be so rapidly decaying.
So far as I can understand our current situation, I would strongly criticize even the best of the advocates of liberal arts education for the same reason that I criticized the New England colonists for the way they mishandled their relationships with the natives, a mishandling that helped lead to “the war known as King Phillip’s War, a war waged by some of the Indian tribes against the European settlers and some Indian allies,” as I phrased matters in an essay I published in 2009: The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding. The humanists of recent history have a concrete civilization which they understand in so many ways but they haven’t abstracted properly to a level where they can see greater possibilities and also the current need for something far richer and far more complex than what we have inherited.
I would emphasize the best overview of my current understanding of human nature, individual and communal is found in the freely downloadable book: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, but the interested reader can start with the individual essays: Intelligence vs. Intellect, Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?, and Are Communities a Form of Created Being?.
On the most basic level, the problem I have with the defenses humanists make of their way of forming human minds, of viewing reality, of seeking that which is qualitative to accompany the quantitative sought by technologists, is that they are defending a way of organizing and passing on major realms of human knowledge and not dealing directly with the underlying being, the true reality. The great books are simply dust-collectors if not used in ongoing efforts to develop the currently best understanding of Creation. It would seem, certainly to me, that we have learned a lot in recent centuries about this universe, a world in my terms when seen as ordered to God’s purposes, and about the abstract realms of being from which concrete being is shaped, about various aspects and parts of being in this world, such as energy and matter and fields and life and communities. We’ve learned immense amounts about various entities including chimpanzees and tarantulas and men and stars and interstellar gas clouds and the universe itself seen as an entity. This much that we’ve learned hasn’t yet shown up in much of the writings of serious novelists and historians and literary scholars; it has shown up in distorted form in various scientistic works, some written by serious scientists who suffer from narrowness of vision but some written by scientists of wider vision, such as E.O. Wilson and David Bohm, as parts of honest efforts to develop more `exact’ understandings of human being or of being in general. Keep the word `exact’ in mind, I’ll be explaining what it means in this context.
The interested reader can browse a short essay, A Universe is More than it Contains, to see a way in which metaphysics can be altered by a careful analysis even of equations in physics; this principle can also be seen in the claim that a man is more than his physical parts. In other words, it’s not necessarily true that a man needs immaterial parts to be more than `merely’ flesh and blood; physicists have provided us with a possible example where all the parts and regions of a universe can obey the so-called law of the conservation of energy but the universe as a whole doesn’t. The universe is itself an entity not fully defined by its `parts’. (This particular result rises or falls with general relativity which allows a dissipation of radiative energy which is `faster’ than the expansion of space.)
There are a large number of questions which have been raised by modern explorers of empirical reality including historians and creative writers who, if their explorations of reality are valid, have expanded the ways and objects of human thought and feeling. Until we’ve entered the process of forming and answering questions, we won’t really know even what questions we’ll answer in the process of building a new civilization or at least as we enter a new phase of Western Civilization. Here are a few good possibilities which I’ve dealt with in my writings, philosophical and theological and novelistic:
- What is mind?
- Can we speak as if there were a first man or were there some `apish’ creatures of doubtful status? Were Eve’s mother and father subject to divine judgment?
- Can we speak of a first man who had a truly human mind or human moral nature?
- If we lose our faith in categorical thinking, as implied in the above two questions, can we develop new forms of moral reasoning that leave us capable of speaking old truths?
- What can it possibly mean to talk as if the beginning of this expansionary phase of the universe were some sort of true genesis, a true creation, even a creation from nothingness?
- Is there a meaningful way to talk about the beginning of Creation?
- Is there any reason to even want to talk about the beginning of Creation?
- Is randomness really a type of factuality?
These questions, and many more, are more tightly focused than versions from prior centuries. There is a great openness, even a looseness, in the writings of Plato which has disappeared in the writings of modern thinkers. Compare one of Plato’s dialogues to essays by Lord Acton, let alone the writings of Stephen Toulmin or Gregory Chaitin or E.O. Wilson, and we see those modern works as possessing a density of empirical knowledge and a multiplicity of reasoning processes which would probably confuse the ancient thinkers. To be sure, there is great wisdom and insight into various aspects of being in Plato but we need to integrate that wisdom and insight into a world far richer and more complex than Plato could have anticipated, that is, into a greater body of wisdom and insight.
In its understanding of `where’ God is, the world of Aquinas was much different from that of Augustine, let alone that of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. Thousands of years before even those early Greek thinkers, there were intelligent and high-achieving human beings manufacturing weapons and tools and starting to found a complex community at Jericho. Could they have understand that the realm of stars was made up of regions, places? Could they have understood that the realm of stars and of the earth beneath their feet lie within some sort of contingent entity, itself having properties rather than being just the sum total of star-regions and earth-regions? Did they have the same minds as we have, merely missing a body of facts and understandings to fill the empty bins of their minds? Or is it the case that a body of facts and understandings is itself a good part of what we mean by `mind’? Was the mind of Goethe an assembly in which lived the ghosts of Virgil and Shakespeare, Plato and Grotius?
Mathematical reasoning applied to more general realms isn’t just so many silly attempts to quantify what makes a good book or to predict who will win the next election. From the beginning, mathematical reasoning was part of the development of the human mind, most of which development has necessarily occurred in the intellect or communal mind. Euclid, or rather the ideas he organized so brilliantly (and may have added to in the conventional way but certainly in the act of organizing), was an important part of Greek thought, of Greek culture. Euclid wasn’t a separate part; his ways of viewing space and possibilities for movement most certainly affected all of our ways of talking about human development, even moral development. As I’ve said often, created being is created being and even our greatest truths and most abstract concepts are created being at least in the sense that we would not know them if the Creator had not somehow manifested them in such a way as to be accessible to bipedal, featherless creatures.
Is it a coincidence that the human race has developed more abstract ways of viewing spaces than Euclid could have dreamed of just when human communities have grown to immense sizes and to complexities which we can’t yet describe? I think not. The technological development which allowed such an expansion of total human population, including such local communities as Beijing and Mexico City, such expansions of relationships as can be seen in our current political and economic marketplaces, necessarily came with the development of non-Euclidean geometries and other such ways of thought. Many of these fields of mathematics can be used, have to be used in some physical problems, to provide qualitative descriptions when quantification is impossible or difficult or simply beside the point. Created being is created being and our complex and often abstract novels are of a piece with quantum theory and the fresh-water system of New York City. As many have noted in various ways, we have problems made greater by the uneven advancement of various fields of human knowledge and human practice and we shouldn’t ignore the fact that our human feelings seem a little better adjusted to our technology than to our complex and disordered politics. This is a developmental problem not so much different from the boy who grows legs too long for the rest of him on his way to a powerful, athletic build.
Even when quantification is possible and desirable, our problems in greater understandings by way of the humanities, including the sciences in their philosophical activities, can’t be solved before they’re stated in a clear way, even an `exact’ way. The entities involved, or at least their relationships, and their greater context must be understood and perhaps all described in that clear way. The human minds, individual and communal, must be focused more tightly upon the problems currently tearing apart our communities far more complex than we can currently can describe and containing entities and relationships which we also can’t describe, at least not so that the various parties can so much as admit they are describing the same world and the same species of bipedal hominoids.
We need a tighter focusing because empirical reality tells us much about constraints on the concrete being we associate with the physical world while also opening up a greater infinity of possibilities for abstract being and for narratives, including a great diversity of evolutionary and developmental processes. (I remind the reader that concrete forms of being are shaped from more abstract forms of being in my way of thinking.) Along these lines, Pope Benedict XVI wrote of a need for a “more exact understanding of human nature.” He was himself a humanist who had learned much about modern biological and medical sciences during his years of trying to deal with the moral aspects of sexuality and reproduction; even those who disagree with his beliefs might take his general attitude as one worth considering: be open to new meanings brought by new knowledge but don’t jump until you know where you’ll land. He was confident, as am I, that we’ll find the solid landing-spots will leave us in a world describable in terms consistent with Christian faith of a Catholic sort, a sacramental form of Christianity. But faith is faith and the Christian faith tells us a few things, gives us ways to evaluate proposed understandings, and leaves us confident that the world is the work of the God of Jesus Christ and is a good place, though only an embryonic version of a complete and perfect place.
By itself, faith can’t reach exact understandings of human nature or of Creation. Also, as Flannery O’Connor warned, faith can be accompanied by Pious Crap.
Faith doesn’t tell us if Augustine was right in adopting the “fall from a state of grace” understanding of the origins of the human race and in rejecting the idea that we arose within the natural world. Yet, the Christian faith has been entangled with such an understanding become mostly Pious Crap. Science tells us that Augustine was wrong in rejecting a natural origin for the human race. If Augustine was right in seeing those ideas, “fall from a state of grace” and “natural origin,” as being in conflict—at least in a world where natural origin means that moral natures also have evolved and are still evolving—then we should reject the usual understanding of the story of Adam and Eve.
Faith, Catholic or Jewish or Islamic or any other, needs to make peace with empirical reality. We need to establish a rich and complex understanding of Creation, an understanding which will tell us how to see moral order in our greater communal efforts though we as individuals will still need to struggle to find our own ways inside those greater structures of order. The changes can be great. For example, a world in which sexual natures and sexual desires are shaped, at least partly, by developmental processes wouldn’t be best described by reasoning based upon strict categories, such as MALE and FEMALE. It would seem that MALe and FeMAlE and Male-fE are also possible as well as cases in which some are missing some of the characteristics of mature masculinity or femininity. This doesn’t force us into regions of moral relativism, but it does force us into new understandings of human nature and, even if the old rules prove valid, force us to find new ways of loving and tolerating those who don’t fall into the old categories. There are other, far more radical, possibilities which lie open to a courageous exploration of God’s Creation and an honest response to what we discover. What matters most to Christians who have faith that Creation is the work of a all-loving and all-powerful and all-knowing God is that we have to remain open to what that Almighty Lord has done. If God has created a world in which some human beings cannot be strictly categorized as fully male or fully female, then we should deal with this aspect of God’s Providence, though it doesn’t seem so providential to many of us, including many of those who don’t quite fit in the two standard categories.
What is important in these sorts of discussions is the loss of the communal mind of the greatest of all civilizations to date, Western Civilization, built largely upon the foundations of Hellenistic and Roman Civilizations to purposes and uses largely set by Christian beliefs. But it no longer works. We know too much that cannot be reconciled to our traditional understanding of reality, or at least no one has carried out any such reconciliation. Our individual minds have no acceptable communal mind which would be that understanding of reality, of Creation, which reconciles such seemingly abstruse matters as infinities of different sizes, as matter which is also waves of some strange sort, as space and time bound up into a single geometrical structure, as sexual natures not fully male or female, as the commission of crimes up to genocide by way of the technology and administration of a Christian country.
Christians, in particular, are prone to believe, or at least pretend to believe, the traditional story of our journey through this vale of tears while believing, at least implicitly, a different story when receiving medical treatments developed under a different story. (See my essay: Taking the Fresh Fruits and Giving God the Leftovers, which is a commentary, sort of, on one of the poems of Emily Dickinson.) Until we have that one story which can be believed during our worship as Christians, or as Jews, and also believed during our hours as workers and voters and patients and students, we can’t regain morally coherent states of our human being, individual or communal. If we leave behind the Christian story when we enter the hospital, we won’t just think, for example, the Catholic Church and some other churches are wrong in condemning artificial contraception; we’ll not think of our Catholic beliefs at all. We’ve been trained, by Church as well as by political and economic institutions, to think in different moral ways in different contexts. They may not have realized they were doing this, but they were.
Let me wrap up this rather digressive essay by first noting a wise insight by Professor Kagan (see Ave atque vale):
Because of the cultural vacuum in their earlier education and because of the informal education they receive from the communications media, which both shape and reflect the larger society, today’s liberal arts students come to college, it seems to me, bearing a sort of relativism verging on nihilism, a kind of individualism that is really isolation from community. The education they receive in college these days, I believe, is more likely to reinforce this condition than to change it. In this way, too, it fails in its liberating function, in its responsibility to shape free men and women.
But, as I’ve argued in this and other essays, those young students couldn’t possibly develop into morally well-ordered states because their elders, including those calling themselves `humanists’, haven’t done their job of providing those stories and other forms of understandings which would situate those young people in a world of moral-order, a Creation in Christian terms. Adjust the language to Jewish or Moslem or secular-liberal understandings, but the criticism remains the same.