[This essay is a lightly edited chapter from my upcoming book, The Shape of Reality, a book which should be posted on my weblog by the end of March and maybe the middle of March.]
From 2006 to the present, I’ve been writing about the need to make peace with empirical reality. This is not simply a matter of a one-time adjustment when reality reveals itself as different from, usually richer and more complex than, the inherited worldview of a particular human being.
Unfortunately, it turns out that most human beings aren’t very good at making even limited adjustments in their understanding of their environments, however defined. Even most of those with minds capable of learning difficult material and difficult ways of handling that material are not really very good after their initial education or training at handling material, difficult or easy. If new knowledge doesn’t fit into the slots formed in their minds during their youth, it is often ignored even at the cost of great incoherence.
So, what happens when a culture—far worse, an entire civilization—falls into a disorder connected to—perhaps even partly caused by—a collapse of the communal mind of that culture or civilization? We need new thoughts or new ways of behavior and even new attitudes but all we get from the intellectual and religious and cultural and political leaders of the West is great confusion and little in the way of plausible suggestions for fixing our problems so that we can avoid the collapse of the West. Of course, there are some in those leadership categories who aren’t inclined to respond properly since they’re busy looting the resources under their stewardship; we’ll ignore those in this discussion.
There are various short analyses and short comments I’ve read about this situation: the collapse of a civilization and the general failure to do what’s necessary to save it or at least to pave a reasonably smooth road into a new civilization. In The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, Carroll Quigley wrote about the formation of human instruments of a new or reformed civilization; over time, these instruments become self-serving human institutions which will struggle, through institutional means as well as the efforts of their individual members and supporters, to survive even at the expense of a struggling civilization or a new civilization struggling through birth. In a similar vein—if you think about it, a great scientist once shot down the idea that scientists are so purely disinterested in their own ideas or institutions or other interests:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. [See the article on Max Planck.]
So, even scientists hold on to their already formed worldview or parts of it, even when confronted by solid evidence they need to change their understanding of reality and maybe even some of their fundamental ways of thinking. Yet, science, for reasons well beyond the scope of this book, is self-corrective in certain ways that are substantial though also limited—scientists also draw upon worldviews outside of science and outside of its self-corrective processes. Young scientists can move on to new modes about thinking about some particular aspects or parts of this universe. There is no evidence whatsoever that scientists will `rise above’ the moral disorder of their age or even perceive, for example, the takeover of a once promising country by human beings with the moral character of gangsters. As I’ve noted before, scientists and engineers have helped to develop some of our horrible—outright evil—technology, nuclear bombs and lasers that permanently blind enemy soldiers and bombs that suck the lungs out of anyone nearby so they suffocate with their lungs hanging out of their mouths. It’s true that they have also participated in the great rise in standard of living, that they have performed magnificently in exploring reality. This is no more than can be said for the blue-bloods of the northeastern United States. Read histories of the industrialization of the United States and then histories of the American part in the opium trade in China and you quickly find some families appearing in both; you will find comments (ironic?—hard to tell in the context of American thought) that these ambitious people, founders of American industry and finance, weren’t dedicated to crime but rather to getting a good rate of return on their invested capital and time. Scientists, as communities look for funding for work they enjoy and have been trained to do.
Why can these things happen? The moral failings of scientists, individuals and communities, are likely due to the same phenomenon that Planck referred to in the short quotation above. Scientists are early on indoctrinated in an instrumental ethics, a good one, that regulates how they do science, but it says nothing about the moral goodness or evil of their goals. Some of the physicists in the Manhattan Project realized after the first bomb was ready to be dropped that there were deep moral issues in creating and deploying and using such a weapon; too late—at least from some hundreds of thousands of Japanese as well as the moral characters of many human beings, they tried to raise the issues. More recently, there seems to have been some well-meaning medical researchers who were surprised to discover that some think there are moral issues involved in use of the flesh of human embryos, whether aborted or grown in the laboratory. Those scientists thought the only moral issues centered around their accepted duty to heal some terrible medical problems.
We all form worldviews and usually lay the foundations of moral character as children and adolescents followed by a basic intellectual structure in our later adolescent years into our adulthood. Most human beings seem capable of building at this basic level but once and then their brain is set in its connections or their mind hardens or whatever. Yet, to refer to the scientists discussed in the above paragraph, all of us have holes in our worldview and nearly all of us have minds to rigid to truly see those holes when confronting others who don’t have those holes—this isn’t to take a position on those issues, but only to point out that there are issues to be resolved in the best-intentioned of weapons development and medical research. This rigidity, at least in the case of those who are properly leaders or science or religion or politics or other fields, can be at least partially eliminated by the type of thinking I’ve recommended in this book, thinking which acknowledges the importance of abstract being and forces us—regarding important issues—to step up a level from our particular viewpoints and interests.
What happens when human communities begin to disintegrate, as the West is currently doing? What happens when the individuals and communities inside a civilization or a major religious community find their own children rejecting their beliefs and taking up with ways of thought and feeling and behavior forbidden not long ago, maybe not even so much explicitly forbidden as not even thinkable? What happens when those people find themselves and their children under pressure to live in ways which are in conflict with their beliefs?
Many will struggle to hold on to their seemingly outmoded beliefs, but I’m going to concentrate upon another group, those who struggle instead to make new sense of reality. If we look at recent history, during the various periods of turmoil, only a very small percentage of human beings engage in that second struggle but many follow some of those who propose new ideas, Lenin and Mussolini and Hitler and Gandhi and Mao and Martin Luther King, Jr and others. The phenomenon occurs in mathematics and science as well as we can know from the above quotation from Max Planck but I’ve already claimed that science can be self-correcting over as little as a generation or so. Such a controversial idea as infinities greater than that of {1, 2, 3,…} can be absorbed by those just learning their multiplication tables at the time though perhaps not by those already tenured professors.
I’ll make a few general comments on the difficulties encountered in politics and economics and philosophy and theology and many other fields without the self-corrective processes of science. They lack those institutional processes of self-correctiveness for various reasons including the fact that they involve much more than mathematics or most sciences entangled concrete and abstract being. The individuals in those fields outside the ones labeled `science’ in modern discourse also tend to have different attitudes toward knowledge than do those inside the privileged realm of modern `science’. They don’t explore newly exposed lands so readily. They aren’t nearly so appreciative of new information as are scientifically-minded human beings. let alone the scientistically-minded thinkers who carry a sci-fi attitude into their feasts upon the pictures of the outer planets, the discovery of planets around other stars, the search for and discovery of one god-particle or another, the discovery of Neanderthal genes in living human beings, and so on.
All of this new data, sometimes processed into forms plausibly labeled as `information’, is good stuff; it’s good stuff that tells us much about God’s Creation as are the new discoveries about mathematics which has led to serious contemplations about the very nature of mathematics, contemplations which are one of the main inspirations of the worldview I’m trying to communicate in this book.
Let’s consider the reformation of an existing worldview or changes so substantial as to bring about a new worldview. First of all, we have to realize that most human beings are not capable of doing the sort of work I’m doing, that of constructing a new worldview—just as I’m not capable of leading or administering a country or an army or a corporation. It would be a world of turmoil if too many were inclined to the sort of work I’m doing. It would also be a world lacking in important practical accomplishments, such as many of those which have led to our high standards of living and made it possible and necessary to think about these abstract issues. Because of this division of talents and responsibilities, most human beings will absorb a worldview and many of its parts and aspects—such as general attitudes—from their surroundings. This is still a matter of genius by the standards of simpler phases of human history, let alone the standards of non-human species. In the end, propaganda doesn’t work because human beings might be willing to accept political and moral nonsense, especially in the context of a prosperous society such as the United States decreasingly is, but they do pay attention to their human and purely physical surroundings. This is what has so badly damaged membership in and strong belief in Christianity, whose institutions were the first to go out of synch with the modern world and its mountains of data only partially digested into information which is itself less fully digested into knowledge.
Now it has become obvious that our political communities are also out of synch with the best current understanding of those parts and aspects of this world which can be explored and analyzed by those labeled as `scientists’—in premodern terms science is simply any disciplined study and can include literary analysis and musical composition and old-fashioned homemaking. In fact, nearly all human communities, even families and ethnic social clubs and sports associations, are out of synch with this confusion of data and information and knowledge which has destroyed our inherited understandings of even our universe, let alone our world (the universe as understood in light of moral order), let alone our Creation.
At least in the current situation of ongoing decay in the United States and the West as a whole, a worldview and its plausible variants decay into a multitude of ideologies of various sorts but most being implausible and ugly in various senses—moral and aesthetic and intellectual and political and so on.
This process started centuries ago. Our current ideologies, New Left and Neoconservative and transhuman and trans-sexual and so on, are the ugly ideologies of the West, no more than the fragments and decay-products of the worldview of Western Christian civilization rigidified in recent centuries: the ideology of the nation-state as the center of human life or the overlapping ideology of the free-market as an absolute good are but two of those fragments or decay-products—two of the more plausible fragments at that, largely because they can be more easily integrated into a better and more complete worldview. What I refer to as the single worldview of Western Christian civilization (as it emerged from the wrongly vilified Medieval Period) was actually a spectrum of closely related variants; I’ll ignore this complication as being unimportant to my main points.
I’ll point to an interesting example of what I think to have been a promising political component to a better Western worldview: the American Old Right. The Old Right was largely non-ideological, in the sense I use it, because it was a mixed community of some who might nowadays be labeled as `paleoconservatives’ and of various sorts of morally conservative libertarians and even some who were inclined to old-fashioned village or local socialism. Despite the radical and incompetent (or perhaps dishonest) attacks upon the Old Right, it never congealed into an ideology as was happening in a very gradual way at first to New Deal liberalism and to certain branches of conservatism in the 1950s or so. As for the Trotskyites rebranding themselves as Neoconservatives, but keeping the taste for perpetual revolution itself rebranded as national security wars or wars to infect other countries with the American (corrupt, political-machine) political system, they are a strange and ugly story unto themselves.
So, how would I summarize my understanding of our current situation? I’ll provide a mercifully simplified rendering of my complex understanding of recent intellectual and political history.
The Christians of the post-Medieval West, or Modern West if you prefer, failed to respond honestly and courageously and with faith in the Creator to the problems and opportunities raised by modern mountains of all that data and information and knowledge which came from exploration of the Earth’s surface as well as the exploration of mathematical ideas and history and the behavior of light and so on. The worldview of the West began to decay into various strange and ugly ideologies, fragments of a badly deformed Western Christian worldview. These fragments ranged from:
- Western Catholic theology deformed as papal supremacy and Roman centralism of a degree certainly not recognized until after—not surprisingly—certain popes in way over their heads faced the loss of secular power. Not surprisingly, these exaggerated claims on behalf of the ecclesiastical descendant of the leader of the Apostles has resulted in various huge and unnecessary losses to Western Catholic Christianity.
- An implausible version of Christianity in the politicized form of reactionary aristocracy or monarchism.
- A still less plausible version of Christianity mixed with liberalism and concentrated by the Enlightenment into bloody and revolutionary democracy.
to the opposite extreme (by some understanding of `opposite’):
- Economic determinism of socialist and capitalist types.
- Scientism allied with technocratism.
And, yes, I do consider Marxism and runaway capitalism as being found near the worship of science and technology on this spectrum of nasty and unsustainable ideologies.
All of the above systems, which I would describe as corrupted by idealism or human ideas raised above empirical evidence, are closely related to good communal forms: Christianity or free-enterprise economies or science and technology. This would have to be the case because they are all fragments, decay-products of variants of Western Christian civilization (or communities inside of that greater community). It’s not that they are directly decay-products of that great civilization. Rather is it the case that a set of closely related worldviews at the foundation of Western Civilization decayed into a set of closely related ideologies. As the decay continued, those closely related ideologies fragmented and continued to decay, producing new ideologies that were thoroughly psychotic—detached from reality.