I’m writing this essay to set up my responses to Claes Ryn’s essay describing how the moral teachings and traditions of the West could re-establish some sort of peace in our world: The Moral Path to Peace.
I’m planning for now to finish the set-up in this essay, following up on what I wrote in the first essay, Traditional Morality is Dead, Long Live Traditional Morality: A World of Evolution and Development. The theme of that first essay is what the title claims and I’m now going to try to discuss, very briefly, the difficult situation of those of us who believe we need a good understanding of the past and a deep respect for the knowledge and the wisdom of the past to guide us into the future.
We do live in a world of evolutionary and developmental processes. We human animals came to exist, as a species, by way of Darwinian evolution (understood in the modern sense to include Darwin’s solid achievements plus much he guessed at and much he didn’t even guess at), and, as individuals, by way of developmental processes. We are changed and become differently shaped, in emotional and cognitive and neuromuscular ways, by our responses to what lies inside and outside of us; this truth was taught by St Thomas Aquinas and rediscovered by modern neuroscientists as discussed in the book How Brains Make Up Their Minds by the neuroscientist and philosopher Walter J Freeman. A factual truth gained by honest observation and hard thought by a Dominican friar in the 13th century has withstood the test of time and scientific research.
There are other truths which are trickier to evaluate in light of new knowledge of the processes and structures and entities of Creation which is, after all, a manifestation of specific thoughts of God. It’s a little surprising to me, but only a little surprising, that viruses and bacteria and even fungi can manipulate us, changing some fundamental aspects of our feelings and our thinking processes—see The Demonology of Sexual Behaviors and Preferences. It adds a certain richness to modern understanding of what was once seen as demonic possession. Does it change at all our understanding that homosexuality and cross-sex behavior is disordered? It certainly should make us more tolerant of those who don’t meet traditional standards, but I’ve found that, at least in recent years, even clergymen and orthodox Christians who hold traditional views on sexuality are tolerant of those whose behaviors or desires are condemned by the Bible. So, I think it fair to say that new knowledge that, for example, there is a fungal infection which seems to turn women into obligatory Lesbians by way of even one experience, doesn’t force us to change our views on the moral rules of sexual behavior. But it does complicate the story of the human race and should make the self-righteous stop and wonder. If you believe, as I do, that this world is a work of God and then discover there are infections which can make you slower on some cognitive tasks, infections which can make you friendlier and more prone to serious schizophrenia, and others which can change your sexual desires, then we have to ponder the simpler understandings of good and evil and even of God’s relationships to us.
So there are ways in which modern empirical knowledge can be quite disturbing. It greatly damages our established understandings of the world and more—or rather, it forces those who see the world as composed of well-defined regions of light and dark to see something different from that, or forces them to blind themselves. All of Creation can be disturbing when we start to learn things which force us to confront the inadequacy of our existing understandings. Modern mathematicians have found that the old truths hold but the full truth is much greater and includes ways of thought, corresponding well to our physical world in many ways, which don’t obey Euclidean geometry. Infinity has proven to be a multi-headed beast rather than one unapproachable `point’. Randomness is an irreducible fact rather than a matter of magical chance.
The human race has been through changes so deep or extensive, or both, as to destroy the plausibility of the teachings of conservatives (in the true and not Trotskyite/Neocon sense) and traditionalists of other sorts. Augustine was forced to develop a historical viewpoint in which Christianity was separated from its historical environment of the Roman Empire; Rome was seen as yet another ephemeral work of men. In a more restricted domain of politics (and somewhat of economics), Edmund Burke was forced to both defend the political traditions of the British peoples and to reformulate them: the political situation of those British peoples was changing dramatically and the truths gained by hard experience could be saved only by transforming them. Something similar could be said of John Henry Newman’s transformed understanding of Christian thought as something which did change with the times. I make more general claims than Newman, considering changes in our knowledge of Creation or any part or aspect of Creation or, more radically, with the realization that we have seen emergence of new forms of created being. These latter events would be most likely to occur with human communal being though we now know that human individual being is changing rapidly, down to mundane physical matters encoded in simple and easily readable ways in our genes. In fact, anthropologists and geneticists claim we human beings are changing more rapidly than ever before.
It is most certainly true that none of this new empirical knowledge, nor even the new forms of human communal being, argue that the “old truths” are no longer such, but they do argue that we need new ways to live according to even the most absolute and lasting of truths, new ways to understand human nature and this world and even the nature of salvation, and new ways to understand our failures and our sins. Over the past few years, I’ve been working on a project to better describe and discuss the Body of Christ, each of the saved remains an individual and yet is fully the perfect and complete man which is Christ; I’m trying to derive appropriate concepts and words by abstracting from the (largely qualitative) forms of geometry used in the General Theory of Relativity but also in some fields such as the design of machinery.
This is disturbing, though also exciting in that it points to the need for creative thinkers and doers and even feelers and the corresponding possibilities to reach the greatness of Augustine of Hippo, Francis of Assisi, and others who responded—if reluctantly at times—to great change by producing new thought or behavior or institutions to meet the needs of human beings. They used their inherited tradition, added to it, and passed on an enriched and complexified tradition to us.
We need to face up to modern empirical knowledge and stop claiming that it has no effect whatsoever on moral or political or cultural issues. We need to admit the strangeness and dangers in the knowledge that bacterial or viral infections can change the functioning of our brains or other parts of our metabolisms or the realization, at least on my part, that none of the existing ideas on how governments and other centralized institutions can be formed work very well in our huge and hugely complex societies. The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount remain as absolute truths but the political philosophies of Aristotle and the political forms in the American Constitution seem quite inadequate to our truly new world, not yet a brave world because we men of the West in particular haven’t shown the courage to deal honestly with God’s Creation. I begin to see a large number of contingently true ways of thought which no longer correspond to our particular contingencies in the 21st century.
As a final comment: I most strongly propose we should study even thought and behavior and institutions inadequate to our needs but once adequate to some group of human beings. There is much political and moral wisdom even in the parts of the Old Testament which advocate a sort of tribal localism (see 1 Samuel) and probably more wisdom of a political nature in the writings of Aristotle and Plato and Augustine and Dante and so on.