Those who’ve read some of the writings on my blogs, Acts of Being and To See a World in a Grain of Sand, will likely realize I’ve been dealing with this project of creating a worldview on a somewhat disorganized basis, that is, I was writing as ideas came to me, sometimes addressing a few moral issues, than a theological belief, then a modern understanding of a basic mathematical or physical entity — such as ‘random number’ or ‘universe’. My store of ideas is now large enough to move on to an effort to write a more systematic work which will start with a summary volume and then will move on to a more detailed discussion of created being in its various levels along the spectrum from abstractness to concreteness. Along that path, I’ll deal with some theological issues since divine being, God who is His own Act-of-being, is the source of created being in both its abstract phases or levels and its concrete phases or levels. As Aquinas pointed out, we learn God’s wisdom by studying His creatures. (I understand ‘wisdom’ in this context as something like perfect knowledge, but that’s another issue.)
For now, I’m playing around with some ideas about created reality at the narrative level, the level where created being is shaped to fulfill some purposes — need I write “moral purposes”? — of the Creator. Within that narrative, men form political communities. Remembering that human nature evolved at the species level over billions of years and that a particular human nature (human being) develops over the course of his life, we have to ask how human relationships could be any different. Human relationships must also evolve at some ‘species’ level and develop in their individual instances, including those often complex and multi-layered relationships which are ‘political’.
How is it that Plato or Aristotle or Hobbes or Rousseau or Marx could tell us how we should organize our political relationships when those are actions and aspects of human beings who are creature of a developing world of empirical processes? I don’t wish to attack either pre-modern thinkers nor even those who did their work when the modern enterprises of gathering empirical knowledge were well under way. I do wish to encourage a different attitude towards our efforts to understand political or other aspects of human nature. Likely it is that the evolutionary tree of political species is highly complex if less so than the evolutionary tree of life on earth. Likely it is that there are more such political species than there are recognized nations. Likely it is that new species will come into existence as we move forward. Likely it is that species of political systems are parts of complex environments and can’t even be understood apart from those environments. Likely it is that the work has hardly begun on understanding the branches and nodes on that tree of political species.
Let me be true to character. I’ll digress…
The human mind as we know it seems to have come into being in relatively recent times. In the creation of Judaism as a coherent monotheism, the creation of Hinduism as a coherent philosophical polytheism, and the creation of Greek philosophical/scientific thought — all in the sixth century BC or so, we see the first clear signs of human abstract reasoning. As the human mind developed, human civilization became more complex. Prior to the development of higher-level abstract reasoning, the technologies of earlier civilizations, such as the development of building techniques in Egypt, seem to have followed ad-hoc experimental pathways and weren’t organized by theory. Apparently, the pyramids were built to proportions corresponding to ‘mystical’ numbers because earlier pyramids were built to greater heights relative to the lengths of the bases and those pyramids collapsed, killing workers and supervisors alike. As biological evolution is said to operate by blind experimentation of a sort, so early human technology operated by experimentation with poor vision. Now, we can see more clearly, but I’ll note that truly new technology — such as quantum computing devices — still must be developed in part by clear-sighted analysis of half-blind experimentation. The world is not a tinker toy device and we must acquire empirical knowledge by experience of some sort.
We’re told by some great thinkers of earlier centuries that governments are monarchies or oligarchies or aristocracies or democracies. Those thinkers lived early in the development of the human mind and also early in the exploration of possible forms of political organization. Why would we think that men barely in the childhood of human abstract thought, such as Aristotle, could provide us with a complete catalog of political possibilities? Why would we think such a catalog could exist since many human social and economic possibilities had not yet appeared. Why would we think that our belief in such an existing catalog would do aught but trap us in ruts? It seems to me that any effort to discuss the current political mess of the United States in those terms of monarchies and oligarchies and aristocracies and democracies is akin to discussing the nature of elephants in terms of tree-trunks and snakes and ropes.
But preliminary and simplistic ideas were necessary in physics and in political thought as well. Physicists moved on to shape their theories to understandings of created being which were themselves shaped by established theories or known holes in established theories, all founded ultimately upon various sorts of empirical knowledge including the so-called intuitions encoded in our brains by evolutionary processes. Political scientists and philosophers, those who deal with human nature in any of its aspects, need to pull off a more difficult project since human political organizations aren’t mathematical objects but rather real-world entities which come into being by the actions of the same creatures who study them.
Most political thinkers of past centuries wrote as if they had some sort of mystical access to a realm of absolute truth. On the other hand, some political thinkers of recent centuries, have seen the dangers of systematizing done badly or too early and seem to have rejected — perhaps implicitly — the possibility that theory can be properly shaped to the empirical reality of even a narrative of morally ordered or disordered events. I say this acknowledging that a proper political theory or historical theory may not look to be such if one thinks in terms of ideal structures inhabited by men and women who follow faithfully the rules set down by political philosophers. A more proper theory might have a narrative structure abstracted from the particular narratives of human history. Is that a theory as we currently understand it? Was the story of Adam and Eve perhaps an early version of this sort of narrative theory? In my opinion, that story speaks of an awakening of moral self-awareness, but in a highly abstract way that is sometimes classified as mythical, perhaps because we can only classify early attempts to produce abstract narratives as standard myths. In other words, the story of Adam and Eve might well have been a very conscious literary construction similar to the narratives found in the writings of Plato or even Nietzsche.
In my way of looking at things, traditional thinkers were struggling to develop more powerful conceptual tools but their thought wasn’t rich enough to handle the real world for a simple reason I’ll be mentioning often as I move on to various writings: God, our Creator and Lord, has a richer imagination than men, certainly a richer imagination than the apish men who were our ancestors. We have to learn the results of God’s thought by studying His Creation. Even when the implications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity were played out by both mathematical development and empirical discoveries, the human mind had to stretch greatly to encapsulate those aspects of this universe. When quantum theory was being first developed, the most open-minded and creative of physicists could hardly believe what they were discovering. Could the greatest of ancient historians or poets have believed that mankind would one day number in the billions, that a man would step on the moon, that old age would be pushed back to the eigth or ninth decade of life?
Let me repeat a speculation I’ve developed over the past few years and stated in my most recent posting, Theology, Physics, Philosophy, and Politics as follows:
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The components of thing-like being arise by local processes which allow the possibility of some substantial freedom.
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In this world, certain patterns exist at a global level, including the fundamental structure of space-time. Local entities will respond to those global aspects of this world as they — so to speak — grow up into the world. The local entities will change themselves to somewhat encapsulate what they respond to. Over time, some entities will achieve some sort of success by a combination of proper responses and luck. Other entities will fail. Over time, complex environments will also develop.
It seems to me that all forms of thing-like being in its various and sundry aspects should follow this abstraction. We should be able to develop in political thought (social and moral thought in general) conceptual tools which follow this model as do some of the conceptual tools of physics. We should be able to develop a set of theories and discover a body of empirical knowledge (or reorganize existing knowledge) so to make use of this model of thing-like being in this universe. As quantum mechanics deals with the domain of things arising from processes with substantial freedom and general relativity deals with the domain of larger-scale structures, so we need to be clearer about theories of human nature, including theories dealing with man’s political activities (the realm of freedom) and his political organizations (the realm of contraints imposed by large-scale structures). The unity of this world comes from those larger-scale structures, the shape given to space and time by gravity, just as unity of the human race comes from the larger-scale structure of the Body of Christ shaped to conform to its Head, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Political science and political philosophy should follow physics not in adopting specific types of mathematical analysis but in engaging in both exploration of empirical reality at the emerging thing-like level and at the structure level to which the things must form themselves by response. That formation by response will take place over generations in a way analogous to biological evolution. We should not assume that we have a catalog of either individual human actions or human political organizations (or more generally — any human community). We must act and we must study and contemplate our own actions if we are to understand human nature. We must have hope in the future and faith in God while still realizing that we can’t achieve a perfect polity, or any other sort of perfect human community, because new forms of community do arise in history and these give rise to new possibilities which might well be proper parts of the Body of Christ which is the perfect human community.