I’ve just finished reading Norman F. Cantor’s Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization and the ending pages on the decay of the High Middle Ages brought a few ideas into focus. He spoke of the destruction of the Thomistic “cathedral” of thought by the Franciscan radicals, perhaps outright heretics, led by Duns Scotus and William of Occam at Oxford. In a nutshell, those Franciscan theologian-philosophers used mind to deny the importance of mind, to promote will to absolute dominance over mind. Martin Luther acknowledged himself to be an Occamite and he was unusual amongst modern thinkers only in having the understanding of his position and of his chosen state.
This is to say that modern thinkers will their minds to protect them from inconvenient facts and to construct what might be called an alternative world — my view though Professor Cantor would likely have agreed.
It seems to me that this conquest of the Western mind by the Western will explains a lot. We’ve been in a certain process of decay which perhaps is the underlying explanation of the decay in literacy which is the theme of the great historical work by Jacques Barzun: From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present.
Nowadays, what passes for rationality, the rationality best displayed in the bureaucrats of the modern corporations and warfare-welfare states, is mental activity, mind, under the control of a will which sets its goals and determines its paths without paying attention to objective, external reality. It’s somewhat equivalent to isometric exercise pretending to be productive work. I might even add that some of those exercises involve punching and kicking oneself, or any other person within reach.
Despite the misunderstandings that most modern minds have of themselves, so to speak, mind, mental exercise of a meaningful sort, is grounded in reality while will is grounded in models of reality. It’s the mind which can form those models of reality within which will can operate. A simplification, to be sure, and a claim to be denied by minds formed in societies which misunderstand reality in general. For example, Americans of the New England persuasion have had a self-justifying view of reality since at least the time of King Phillip’s War. See The Practical Consequences of Inattention to God’s World for a general discussion of this problem and The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding for a discussion focused on the events of that strange and, as it turned out, genocidal war. What’s strange is that this genocidal war was conducted by Puritans truly wishing to be Christians. They willed to act in certain ways which seemed to lead to moral results. They made the openhearted effort to teach the Amerinds of New England how to be Middle-class Englishmen. Was not to be. It would seem that wasn’t so noble an aspiration to those ungrateful nomads. The Puritans of New England apparently didn’t understand the world, including their fellowmen, and their wills led them astray. Unlike some in the administration of George W. Bush, those Puritans didn’t even will to override reality; those Puritans simply misunderstood reality and tried to use their wills within the realm of their imaginations.
We move on into the future even if only to repeat the past but more so. We no longer even pretend to explore or contemplate objective reality, even through distorting lenses. The world is what we Americans will it to be and we shape our minds and our memories to correspond. I don’t think Americans to be unique in the modern world in this regard though Tocqueville first noted the self-brainwashing component of this American moral insanity way back in the 1830s. Until recently, Americans have been able to get away with morally insane behavior because of the great wealth which came from the soils and subsoils of North America and from the great expenditures of sweat which extracted that wealth. Americans were also freed from some constraints by the long period of poverty and decadence of ancient civilized peoples in Asia, by the efforts of the Europeans to destroy their own continent, and by the various sorts of ill-luck and corruption which prevented Latin America and Russia and perhaps other countries from realizing their potentials.
It is the mind which can understand reality and can direct the development of the human being, including his will. We Americans, men of the West more generally, won’t begin any sort of recovery or reform until we regain a respect for objective reality and the mind which can form in response to it. We need to pay attention to those who’ve developed their minds to deal with reality in creative ways and I don’t mean those who make movies by substituting human actors into comic books. More than that, we Americans need to make an effort to develop mind and minds of all sorts — the minds of problem-solving engineers and morally sane political and the minds of religious leaders as well as minds which speculate usefully and truly about God’s Creation and minds which can make sense of empirical reality and enlarge our knowledge of it.
Those Americans who are most admired will to control what exists, recently making an great effort to control Iraq and Afghanistan. Failures? Don’t worry. We create reality and we’ll go on ordering rounds for the house until the time comes to pay the bar tab and to walk out and face all those gathering in the parking lot who’ve been taught by our murderous activities to hate us. We’ll even print more dollars to pay the tab until the time comes…
We will that day to never come. And, boy are wills well-developed in those who are in the American power-elite. Righteously do they glory in the sheer number of drones in the skies over Afghanistan and the number of American bases in countries most Americans couldn’t even locate on a map of the earth. Someone fails to cooperate and those men and women of powerful wills create a new reality by destroying even so loyal an American ally as Saddam Hussein who played his role faithfully as CIA contract assassin and as Iraqi political gangster willing to suppress radical Islamists and to fight bloody wars against Iran with criminal weapons (such as poisonous gases) supplied by the United States.
We will the countries we invade to be more democratic, more open to feminist values, even with accumulating evidence that Iraq is more democratic than it used to be only in the sense that politicians now have to gain power by stealing votes instead of simply shooting anyone who gets in their way. What an improvement to reward us for our efforts of will. Instead of a class of general criminal rulers, Iraq now is ruled by political crooks with the hands-on murderers hiding in the shadows. Women’s rights? Sure, Hussein’s Iraq was the only country in that region, other than Israel, where women had open access to education up to the highest levels and now women are in danger of losing all rights. But we Americans are pumped-up now after all the good we’ve accomplished by willing so much good around the world.
And don’t worry about the naysayers. We, and our self-adoring media and politicians, will the entire globe to be democratic and open to the advancement of women. We will the world to be what we will and it’s sure responding, just like clay being worked by a master potter.
Some deny that the United States with its political machine system has anything more than a superficial resemblance to a republic or a democracy. Don’t worry. We will ourselves to be free and politically empowered citizens. Don’t listen to those who claim that most years, a long slate of local and state and national candidates won’t contain a single human being who could be trusted around your bank accounts or your teenaged children. The party bosses choose only those candidates we will to represent us in this free and morally well-ordered country.
We make reality, even when another reality seems to be lurking at the edges of our vision. We will what isn’t true and, during commercial breaks, we talk about what we will to exist. Our talking heads on television tell us all the time that reality corresponds to what we will. It must be true. Even if it isn’t true.
Unfortunately for some, Kipling’s Gods of the Copybook Headings are once more catching up to us. Reality threatens to overwhelm our wills any day now. We would be wise to start studying reality and developing minds which can encapsulate that reality, understand it. The problem, of course, is that wisdom is, as Garet Garret told us, “the fumbling substitute for perfect knowledge.” And knowledge is an aspect of human mental activity, a part of the human mind. (See What is Wisdom? for a discussion of wisdom and its relationship to knowledge.) You can’t just will yourself to be wise, let alone to possess the knowledge which is perfected wisdom. You have to possess a substantial body of objective information before you can put it together as wisdom, even if a more perfect form of knowledge is out of reach for now.
Unfortunately only for some? Yes, some of us look towards our impending hardships with a sad acknowledgement that they’re necessary to jolt us toward a state of moral sanity. Some of us would prefer that our fellow human beings form a closer connection to reality even if we have to pay the price as the reality forged by Americans and others in the West is shown to be no more than a looking-glass world, even as we lose much of our wealth and power. Many of us might be struggling to avoid outright poverty before many years go by. Might be? I’ve been impoverished for a couple decades now following my decisions to recover my mind and to write worthwhile books. See Writing Serious Books During an Age of Illiteracy for one of my first entries on my other blog, an apologia of sorts for taking this path in life. On the whole, I prefer my state of poverty to my prior state of morally confused prosperity.