Early in May, I read The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment by Ethan H. Shagan. I thought the analysis was pretty good, but I didn’t like the ‘global’ conclusion:
Enlightenment rationality did not devour the world in its ravenous maw, it was only a subset of the larger project to liberate human judgment. The outcome undoubtedly holds perils: the rights of subjects to formally equal beliefs on every topic from physics to philosophy, regardless of their ignorance, and the rights of subjects to sift and choose which facts to believe, even alternative facts that might seem irrational or poorly attested. But it also enables peace in a diverse society. [In his summing-up, page unrecorded before book was returned.]
There are various issues underlying the complex changes discussed by Professor Shagan. Let me present my current thoughts on this general matter—in a schematic form:
- Beliefs matter. Any human community, at any scale, will have problems if a good number of its members with voting or decision-making powers have beliefs which are not in synch with a presently plausible understanding of reality.
- Any human community, at any scale, will have problems if a good number of its members with voting or decision-making powers have beliefs which are not in synch with the present and past of that community.
- Plausible understandings are becoming ever more complex, though it seems likely that some sort of breather will take place as we deal with various problems which are building to intolerable levels, especially in Africa but also in nearly every inhabited part of the globe.
- Those plausible understandings rely upon very sophisticated knowledge, most of which can be accessed only in highly technical forms—even the best of accessible, `popular’ works are best used as introductions to give technical learners an overview of the landscape before they begin to travel it. I’m referring to good, technical understandings of quantum mechanics (matter and energy), general relativity (time and space), transfinite numbers (infinity including eternity), a stew of complexity and chaos theory and more (self-organizing systems and such-like), genetics and evolutionary theory (human nature including the mind which seeks understanding—at least some minds), psychology in a disciplined form (individual human nature), history of a traditional sort as well as some history run through some mathematical modeling, and perhaps more.
- If there were some way to produce a “spectrum of freedom” to correspond to both the ability to form worthwhile opinions and the willingness to put in the effort to acquire the necessary knowledge and then to contemplate it in a narrow and a contextual way, Shagan’s ‘global’ conclusion might be a good one. Such “spectrums of freedom” might have existed in various parts of Western Civilization before the Modern, Liberal project gathered steam.
- Finally, for now: Can men, or at least most men, be truly free in the context of a homogeneous mass of men? And these men are truly mass men, shaped by large-scale (even global) markets and political forces.
These preliminary thoughts, logically enough, lead to a preliminary conclusion:
In an age of complex and poorly understood problems, the opinions of some are worth more than the opinions of others.
After all, we in the United States have something akin to peace (at least for now) despite the incoherence of many lines of thought which are driving our public policies. On the other hand, the peoples of Korea and Vietnam and Iraq and Iran and Syria and various other countries have paid a big price for the low standards of knowledge and of opinions of our leaders and theirs. The problems of those peoples and the coming problems of the American peoples are being born of and nurtured by the inability and unwillingness of the American citizens to even acquire basic information about those many countries. In most cases, our leaders seem to be as ill-informed and as lacking in thinking skills as most ordinary citizens—all have been formed by American culture and that formation is reinforced by the American educational systems as well as the propaganda of the American ruling elite.