In the first section of my favorite book, The Illusion of Technique by William Barrett, we watched as Wittgenstein became disillusioned with Russell’s attempt to capture all of human experience and truth in a system of abstractions, represented by p’s and q’s. There must be more to truth than these abstractions, Wittgenstein thought. Rather than try to eliminate the ambiguity, which was what Russell wanted to do, Wittgenstein realized we have to embrace the ambiguity. Not just p’s and q’s, but the everyday experience of our common language, thereby establishing the basis of most American education in philosophy today.
Barrett finishes this section of the book wondering where Russell ever got the idea that this abstraction was possible. And that is where I left off in the last blog post.
The Doctrine of the Two Worlds
The second section of The Illusion of Technique is called “Being.” In it, Barrett focuses in on another European nobleman, who, like Wittgenstein three centuries later, was interested in philosophical exploration. This man, sitting in his apartment, wondered how we could find Truth. It couldn’t be from our senses, he believed, as it was obvious that our senses were faulty, and all too often provided us misinformation. And yet our senses were our only medium to the outside world, the real world that we inhabited, but couldn’t fully explain.
He looked around his apartment, doubting his sense of his surroundings, doubting all that he saw. The fire, the bed, the window, the chair he seemed to be sitting on – none were bedrock, all were the offerings of his unreliable perception. So, he systematically catalogued his doubts, and eliminated them one by one. At last, he came down to the only thing that it made no sense to doubt. He was thinking, and he knew he was thinking. To doubt that was madness. This, he realized, was the bedrock he was looking for. If we know we are thinking, then we must actually exist. Cogito, ego sum. I am thinking, therefore I must exist.
This man, Descartes, assumed that there was not one reality, of which he and his perceptions were a part. He assumed that there were two worlds, one which was real, outside of our perceptions, not contingent upon our appreciation of it. This would become known as “objective reality.” The other world was our inner world, made up of all of our sensations, reactions, perceptions. This “subjective world” was the world we lived in intimately, but our understanding of it was clearly not reliable.
He then proceeded to outline how we might venture into the real, the objective world, and, by staging carefully regulated, highly controlled observations, we might be able to say something meaningful about reality. Through careful scientific method, we might be able to touch objective truth. Barrett calls this assumption the “Doctrine of the Two Worlds.”
What’s the big deal?
For many readers, this may not sound like an assumption at all. Isn’t this the very nature of reality as we know it? This is the learned truth offered to us throughout our education. No one ever presented it to us as an “assumption.” There are, absolutely, two worlds, one objective and real, “out there,” and one subjective and unreliable, “in our heads.” Science is the process of testing our measurements of the objective world and posing theories of what these observations said about how things worked, and why they were the way they were.
We know, as a “given” handed to us at every stage of our learning, that science involves the exploration of and the attempt to understand objective reality. And we know that our subjective reactions to this world are, by their nature, unreliable and dangerous. Our perceptions can’t be trusted. The last 400 years of Western thought argue that we are dangerous to the truth.
That’s why we learn to conduct science in such a way as to guard against the undue influence of our subjective natures on the thing we are studying. We know, from Descartes’ time till today, that the subjective can not be trusted. If we want to study a social phenomenon scientifically, we can’t just go watch what happens, then talk to the people involved and finally draw our own conclusions. That, says the common pejorative, is “just subjective.”
That isn’t the way science is practiced under the Doctrine of the Two Worlds. All you will have done is to generate subjective impressions, mere perceptions, for which there is no proof of validity or reliability. Scientific truth requires measurement of the underlying objective reality. Our reactions to that reality are dangerous to the truth. Any decent participant in an eighth grade science fair understands this. What’s the problem?
The problem
For the purposes of these blog posts, one big problem is that, if there are two worlds, one concrete and formidable and one misty and evanescent, it is pretty obvious that our moral values arise out of the mist. If we were looking for a way to make a case for the moral values that we experience in the Box, the experiences that keep us from “giving in” or “giving up,” then we are at a dead end.
Why should the third of the women in the world whose dignity and rights are disrespected be treated differently? Well, not because of any compelling scientific truth, but just because we would prefer the world to be that way. The oppressors of those women see it differently, so it is their perception against ours. And whose perceptions are better, if there are Two Worlds?
Do you want to have a public policy arena that condemns the falsehoods of the tobacco industry, that makes polluters morally culpable, that makes facing climate change before it is too late a moral imperative?
Should everyone have a right to healing when they are sick, and clothing when they are cold, and shelter against the storm, and comfort against their fears? Really, an actual “right” to these necessities, not just a privilege that they can buy in the marketplace, and then only if they can afford it.
Don’t you see, almost daily, moral failings in our private and in our public lives that require that we act? Not because we have some misty, “feel good” perceptions, but because the world ought to be ordered in such a way that those moral shortcomings must be addressed by the community?
If so, then you need to be able to reject the second-class status that the Doctrine of the Two Worlds gives to your moral priorities. You need a worldview that makes moral truths and scientific truths the same kind of thing. One world, one idea of truth.
And the search for how that might be leads us right to the weirdness of high energy physics.
Thursday, April 23, 2015
Thursday, April 16, 2015
The Illusion of Technique
What if there is only one world, not two? Not “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” but just one thing, existence itself? What some people call “Being.”
OK, a big question, and not one we can just barge right into. So, let’s get some help from my favorite book.
“The Illusion of Technique”
In 1979, my wife bought me a book called The Illusion of Technique, by William Barrett. She thought it looked interesting. She was very right; it changed my life.
For many years, I made the students in my Social Ethics class read this book. Not an easy task! It is long and dense. Many students thought it had the enlightening qualities of a paving brick. But I assigned it, nonetheless. Each semester, two or three students were able to gain from it what I did, and that seemed a good return on the effort I demanded of the class. Then, it went out of print. I considered excerpting it, but could never really find key passages that would teach what Barrett had to teach. So, I lectured on the book’s contents, instead.
William Barrett was an interesting character. A literary editor, a philosopher, a historian of ideas, a thoughtful popularizer of complex intellectual matter. (He introduced Zen Buddhism into the US.) A one-time Marxist, later a devout Catholic. His most famous book is Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy. Written in 1962, it is still in print and used in colleges across the country as an excellent introduction to its topic.
In 1979, he published The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization. It is an “intellectual history,” a history of ideas, how they developed and how they interrelate. He wanted to investigate the ideas that brought forth the potential for moral free will in humans.
The book is divided into three parts: Technique, Being and Freedom. What follows isn’t a completely faithful review of the book, but more of a restatement and exploration of the themes Barrett presents.
Technique
In the first part of the book, Barrett is interested in the quest of Ludwig Wittgenstein to find an intellectual home. Wittgenstein was an early-20th Century European who wanted to pursue the life of the mind. He cast around for the best place to do this, and landed with Bertram Russell in Cambridge. Russell was, at that time, working on a monumental project, to be able to reduce all human truths to abstract theorems. (We now call this practice Natural Logic.) Only by eliminating the ambiguity of ordinary language, Russell believed, could you find ways to characterize important human truths through irrefutable logic. This, we are led to believe, was a fitting project for Wittgenstein to help with.
We can hear echos of our earlier discussions here. What Russell wanted to do was eliminate the uncertainty that is so obviously a part of conversation in common vernacular. How can we know, for sure, that something is true, if our only way to express such proofs is through our inherently uncertain everyday language? But, thinks Russell, if we can strip away the ambiguity, by using p’s and q’s instead, and just deal with the underlying abstract truth of statements made, we will have access to The Truth, unarguable and final. What a grand exploit!
The truth is in the ambiguity
But this idea, that all human experience can be successfully abstracted to p’s and q’s, and that all of the truths that are revealed by human experience can be tested and evaluated by mathematically-precise logic, proved unsatisfying to Wittgenstein. He began to think that the important truths that humans could know could not be extracted from the ambiguity, that the truths might very well be in the ambiguity itself!
That is an amazing idea, isn’t it, that far from truth being something we distill from our experiences, by boiling off all of the impurities of our everyday lives, that truth might exist inside of, maybe even because of the complexity and ambiguity of our experiences. Not so hard to understand – would your feelings for a loved one survive this kind of harsh stripping away of your experiences of that loved one? Or is the truth of your feelings bound up in and inseparable from all of those experiences?
Wittgenstein argued that, instead of using abstractions like p’s and q’s, serious philosophy should turn to the words themselves, becoming a major part of what we have come to call “the Linguistic Turn” in Western Philosophy. Open any text on what today is referred to as “analytic philosophy,” the style of philosophical inquiry taught at most American universities, and you will find Wittgenstein all through it.
Barrett finds this an extraordinary moment. Here were two of the greatest minds of their culture at odds about the very nature of truth-seeking and the validity of truth statements. On the one hand was Russell, who believed, had faith, in the perfectibility of his enterprise, nothing less than the ability to express, irrefutably, the sum of all human truths. On the other was Wittgenstein, who saw that there was a level of uncertainty that was inescapable in our search for truths, that powerful truths might only be found by diving into, not avoiding, the ambiguity of how we express those truths.
Mystery
Barrett uses this moment to raise the issue of “Mystery,” the region of the unknowable. (Mystery is a concept we will be coming back to over and over again in these postings.) What Russell believed was that all things were knowable, given sufficient inquiry. Hence, no Mystery. Everything was, ultimately knowable, nothing was “unknowable.”
Wittgenstein accepted the limits of inquiry and yet still searched for truth among the uncertainty. The notion of Mystery doesn’t make truth-seeking impossible. It just makes it more complicated, and us less sure of our results. We have already seen the implications of this uncertainty inside the Box.
If you bought into the concept of imperfectibility in the earlier posting, you are kind of stuck accepting the notion of mystery. After all, it seems logical that if human endeavor is not a perfectible enterprise, then there ought to be limits to what we can know for sure. Let me remind you of the temptation to hear “we can’t know everything” as “we can’t know anything.” Of course, we have proved that we can know an astonishing amount about the truths of science and human relationships. We are great at knowing things. Mystery merely says that we can’t know everything.
Russell did not accept the notion of mystery. The idea that something worth knowing was beyond human ability to actually know was unthinkable to him. To Russell, all things were, ultimately, knowable.
What an extraordinary thing for Russell to believe was possible. Yet, this acceptance of perfectibility is widespread in American culture. Today, our elected representatives keep promising us the complete solutions to our problems. All you have to do is blah, blah, blah, and everything will be perfect. We explored this in two of the earliest postings, on the limits of measurement.
But this must be a relatively recent phenomenon. Our ancient ancestors, struggling with hard lives and imminent danger, were happy to survive, thrilled to thrive, but hardly expecting to achieve perfection. Somewhere between then and now, we started believing in the promise, the illusion of our techniques. Where, asks Barrett, did Russell get this amazing assumption, that all knowledge could be expressed perfectly in an abstract language?
OK, a big question, and not one we can just barge right into. So, let’s get some help from my favorite book.
“The Illusion of Technique”
In 1979, my wife bought me a book called The Illusion of Technique, by William Barrett. She thought it looked interesting. She was very right; it changed my life.
For many years, I made the students in my Social Ethics class read this book. Not an easy task! It is long and dense. Many students thought it had the enlightening qualities of a paving brick. But I assigned it, nonetheless. Each semester, two or three students were able to gain from it what I did, and that seemed a good return on the effort I demanded of the class. Then, it went out of print. I considered excerpting it, but could never really find key passages that would teach what Barrett had to teach. So, I lectured on the book’s contents, instead.
William Barrett was an interesting character. A literary editor, a philosopher, a historian of ideas, a thoughtful popularizer of complex intellectual matter. (He introduced Zen Buddhism into the US.) A one-time Marxist, later a devout Catholic. His most famous book is Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy. Written in 1962, it is still in print and used in colleges across the country as an excellent introduction to its topic.
In 1979, he published The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization. It is an “intellectual history,” a history of ideas, how they developed and how they interrelate. He wanted to investigate the ideas that brought forth the potential for moral free will in humans.
The book is divided into three parts: Technique, Being and Freedom. What follows isn’t a completely faithful review of the book, but more of a restatement and exploration of the themes Barrett presents.
Technique
In the first part of the book, Barrett is interested in the quest of Ludwig Wittgenstein to find an intellectual home. Wittgenstein was an early-20th Century European who wanted to pursue the life of the mind. He cast around for the best place to do this, and landed with Bertram Russell in Cambridge. Russell was, at that time, working on a monumental project, to be able to reduce all human truths to abstract theorems. (We now call this practice Natural Logic.) Only by eliminating the ambiguity of ordinary language, Russell believed, could you find ways to characterize important human truths through irrefutable logic. This, we are led to believe, was a fitting project for Wittgenstein to help with.
We can hear echos of our earlier discussions here. What Russell wanted to do was eliminate the uncertainty that is so obviously a part of conversation in common vernacular. How can we know, for sure, that something is true, if our only way to express such proofs is through our inherently uncertain everyday language? But, thinks Russell, if we can strip away the ambiguity, by using p’s and q’s instead, and just deal with the underlying abstract truth of statements made, we will have access to The Truth, unarguable and final. What a grand exploit!
The truth is in the ambiguity
But this idea, that all human experience can be successfully abstracted to p’s and q’s, and that all of the truths that are revealed by human experience can be tested and evaluated by mathematically-precise logic, proved unsatisfying to Wittgenstein. He began to think that the important truths that humans could know could not be extracted from the ambiguity, that the truths might very well be in the ambiguity itself!
That is an amazing idea, isn’t it, that far from truth being something we distill from our experiences, by boiling off all of the impurities of our everyday lives, that truth might exist inside of, maybe even because of the complexity and ambiguity of our experiences. Not so hard to understand – would your feelings for a loved one survive this kind of harsh stripping away of your experiences of that loved one? Or is the truth of your feelings bound up in and inseparable from all of those experiences?
Wittgenstein argued that, instead of using abstractions like p’s and q’s, serious philosophy should turn to the words themselves, becoming a major part of what we have come to call “the Linguistic Turn” in Western Philosophy. Open any text on what today is referred to as “analytic philosophy,” the style of philosophical inquiry taught at most American universities, and you will find Wittgenstein all through it.
Barrett finds this an extraordinary moment. Here were two of the greatest minds of their culture at odds about the very nature of truth-seeking and the validity of truth statements. On the one hand was Russell, who believed, had faith, in the perfectibility of his enterprise, nothing less than the ability to express, irrefutably, the sum of all human truths. On the other was Wittgenstein, who saw that there was a level of uncertainty that was inescapable in our search for truths, that powerful truths might only be found by diving into, not avoiding, the ambiguity of how we express those truths.
Mystery
Barrett uses this moment to raise the issue of “Mystery,” the region of the unknowable. (Mystery is a concept we will be coming back to over and over again in these postings.) What Russell believed was that all things were knowable, given sufficient inquiry. Hence, no Mystery. Everything was, ultimately knowable, nothing was “unknowable.”
Wittgenstein accepted the limits of inquiry and yet still searched for truth among the uncertainty. The notion of Mystery doesn’t make truth-seeking impossible. It just makes it more complicated, and us less sure of our results. We have already seen the implications of this uncertainty inside the Box.
If you bought into the concept of imperfectibility in the earlier posting, you are kind of stuck accepting the notion of mystery. After all, it seems logical that if human endeavor is not a perfectible enterprise, then there ought to be limits to what we can know for sure. Let me remind you of the temptation to hear “we can’t know everything” as “we can’t know anything.” Of course, we have proved that we can know an astonishing amount about the truths of science and human relationships. We are great at knowing things. Mystery merely says that we can’t know everything.
Russell did not accept the notion of mystery. The idea that something worth knowing was beyond human ability to actually know was unthinkable to him. To Russell, all things were, ultimately, knowable.
What an extraordinary thing for Russell to believe was possible. Yet, this acceptance of perfectibility is widespread in American culture. Today, our elected representatives keep promising us the complete solutions to our problems. All you have to do is blah, blah, blah, and everything will be perfect. We explored this in two of the earliest postings, on the limits of measurement.
But this must be a relatively recent phenomenon. Our ancient ancestors, struggling with hard lives and imminent danger, were happy to survive, thrilled to thrive, but hardly expecting to achieve perfection. Somewhere between then and now, we started believing in the promise, the illusion of our techniques. Where, asks Barrett, did Russell get this amazing assumption, that all knowledge could be expressed perfectly in an abstract language?
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
One World Or Two?
I have been trying to avoid too much self-consciousness as I write this blog. But where my ideas are taking us, at this point, is such a departure from “the norm” that I am somewhat concerned that I will lose you, the reader, along the way. After all, in the next few postings, I am going to ask to you to let go of 400 years of Western thought. Hang in there!
Are moral truths objectively true?
OK, I believe that there is Right and there is Wrong. We call this a sense of “righteousness.” But I refuse to consult any of the available Rulebooks offered to explain which is which. I stay in that Box, struggling to orient my life to the belief that my sense of righteousness is not an illusion. Is this enough to offer people as an underpinning of the pursuit of the Good?
It sounds like a truism: scientific truths are our bedrock. Science allows us to measure reality and make conclusions that we can use to work wonders. What we measure, based upon careful scientific study, can be both “valid” and “reliable.” These are the gold standards of measurement we teach our students studying for doctorates in science. A valid measurement, we tell them, is one that has a high congruence between the measurement results and what is “really out there.” And a reliable measurement is one that returns close to the same results every time we use it. Good science requires measurements of high validity and high reliability. You are pretty sure that you are measuring something that actually exists, and you get pretty much the same results every time.
Is this scale valid and reliable?
An example: If I were to stand on a scale, and it said that I weighed 50 pounds, we would question the “validity” of the measurement. A highly valid scale would return a value that was close to my actual weight, what is “really the case.”
If I stood on that same scale many times, and every time it said that I weighed 50 pounds, we would know that we have a highly “reliable” scale, but we also would question its validity.
On the other hand, if the scale returned results that were very different from time to time, but on average were much closer to my actual weight, then we would have a more valid measurement, but with some problems with reliability. Ideally, we want a scale that, time and time again, returns readings that are pretty close to past readings and which hover in a narrow range around my actual weight, highly reliable and highly valid. This is what scientists mean when they say that they have measured the Truth.
Applying “science” to public proposals
We will, in future postings, argue for establishing public policies that are aimed at achieving the Good. We will want to know that we are right in that which we pursue. If we want to know that the beliefs to which we try to orient ourselves as we live our lives in the Box are “real,” we would want some mechanism to measure them, with validity and reliability. Only then could we be “sure.”
And isn’t that, after all, the sine qua non of public debate, to hold claims to the test of scientific truth? At least, that is what I had been taught for many years.
Truth or merely opinion?
But this quest, for a “scientific” basis for policy proposals, gets murky when we talk about Right and Wrong. If I make the claim that “Position X is morally right,” I am doing one of two very different things. I may be stating merely my opinion, my subjective feelings, about this proposition. Or I may be stating what I believe to be “the Truth.”
But how can this be the Truth? After all, we are told, truth is a matter of objective analysis, not of subjective sensation. “Moral truths” may be powerful ways to express our folkways or our tenets of faith, but they can’t and shouldn’t be confused with scientific truths, which are testable against objective reality. Conventional wisdom says that, ultimately, moral propositions are either accepted as true because they are the subject of Revelation (a reversion to our roots in Traditionalism) or they are mere opinions, nothing more than subjective perceptions.
The currently common view is that moral truths and scientific truths are of a different order. They are not alike in kind. And therefore, they must be treated differently. Public policy might be motivated by our moral “sense,” but it must be based upon hard science.
If we live in a world that is divided into the “objective” and the “subjective,” into the real world on the one hand and our mere perceptions of that world on the other, moral truths are not going to be seen as compelling. If we are looking for the answer to the question posed earlier, “Why try to pursue the Good?”, we reach a dead end. Assuming we aren’t willing to rely upon Revelation, the best we can say is that “Many of us believe this to be a Good thing to do.” Not a very satisfying nor a potent statement.
What if we don’t live in a world divided into two realms, objective and subjective? Yes, I know that that is heresy, that everything you have read since 10th grade has assumed this duality to be the foundation of modern thought. But, lets see what happens if we let go of that certainty. What if there were only one world?
Are moral truths objectively true?
OK, I believe that there is Right and there is Wrong. We call this a sense of “righteousness.” But I refuse to consult any of the available Rulebooks offered to explain which is which. I stay in that Box, struggling to orient my life to the belief that my sense of righteousness is not an illusion. Is this enough to offer people as an underpinning of the pursuit of the Good?
It sounds like a truism: scientific truths are our bedrock. Science allows us to measure reality and make conclusions that we can use to work wonders. What we measure, based upon careful scientific study, can be both “valid” and “reliable.” These are the gold standards of measurement we teach our students studying for doctorates in science. A valid measurement, we tell them, is one that has a high congruence between the measurement results and what is “really out there.” And a reliable measurement is one that returns close to the same results every time we use it. Good science requires measurements of high validity and high reliability. You are pretty sure that you are measuring something that actually exists, and you get pretty much the same results every time.
Is this scale valid and reliable?
An example: If I were to stand on a scale, and it said that I weighed 50 pounds, we would question the “validity” of the measurement. A highly valid scale would return a value that was close to my actual weight, what is “really the case.”
If I stood on that same scale many times, and every time it said that I weighed 50 pounds, we would know that we have a highly “reliable” scale, but we also would question its validity.
On the other hand, if the scale returned results that were very different from time to time, but on average were much closer to my actual weight, then we would have a more valid measurement, but with some problems with reliability. Ideally, we want a scale that, time and time again, returns readings that are pretty close to past readings and which hover in a narrow range around my actual weight, highly reliable and highly valid. This is what scientists mean when they say that they have measured the Truth.
Applying “science” to public proposals
We will, in future postings, argue for establishing public policies that are aimed at achieving the Good. We will want to know that we are right in that which we pursue. If we want to know that the beliefs to which we try to orient ourselves as we live our lives in the Box are “real,” we would want some mechanism to measure them, with validity and reliability. Only then could we be “sure.”
And isn’t that, after all, the sine qua non of public debate, to hold claims to the test of scientific truth? At least, that is what I had been taught for many years.
Truth or merely opinion?
But this quest, for a “scientific” basis for policy proposals, gets murky when we talk about Right and Wrong. If I make the claim that “Position X is morally right,” I am doing one of two very different things. I may be stating merely my opinion, my subjective feelings, about this proposition. Or I may be stating what I believe to be “the Truth.”
But how can this be the Truth? After all, we are told, truth is a matter of objective analysis, not of subjective sensation. “Moral truths” may be powerful ways to express our folkways or our tenets of faith, but they can’t and shouldn’t be confused with scientific truths, which are testable against objective reality. Conventional wisdom says that, ultimately, moral propositions are either accepted as true because they are the subject of Revelation (a reversion to our roots in Traditionalism) or they are mere opinions, nothing more than subjective perceptions.
The currently common view is that moral truths and scientific truths are of a different order. They are not alike in kind. And therefore, they must be treated differently. Public policy might be motivated by our moral “sense,” but it must be based upon hard science.
If we live in a world that is divided into the “objective” and the “subjective,” into the real world on the one hand and our mere perceptions of that world on the other, moral truths are not going to be seen as compelling. If we are looking for the answer to the question posed earlier, “Why try to pursue the Good?”, we reach a dead end. Assuming we aren’t willing to rely upon Revelation, the best we can say is that “Many of us believe this to be a Good thing to do.” Not a very satisfying nor a potent statement.
What if we don’t live in a world divided into two realms, objective and subjective? Yes, I know that that is heresy, that everything you have read since 10th grade has assumed this duality to be the foundation of modern thought. But, lets see what happens if we let go of that certainty. What if there were only one world?
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Faith
“Religious existentialism”
We can’t accept the notion that our experiences of the Good are meaningless, just a narrative our brains tell us to keep us busy while they run our lives. Nihilism is no answer.
And I find secular idealism insufficient to support my sense that we are called upon to act to change the behavior of others in favor of the Good.
What happens if, when you find yourself in the Box, you orient yourself in the other direction, towards faith? This is the existential moment. And this is the source of hope. In this position, I must accept that life is not perfectible, but I can also believe that it does have meaning, even if I can’t be certain that that meaning exists or what that meaning is. This is the position of the “religious existentialists” who most of you never read in college: Kierkegaard, Bullman, Tillich, Borowitz. (Not your fault – most philosophy professors only assign the atheistic existentialists.)
I can not be perfectly Good, but I can orient my life to a source of the Good. I can seek and possibly find some ground for Goodness. And I can therefore, standing on that ground, begin a dialogue on what it means to lead a Good life.
Small “r” religion
Will I know for sure that my orientation is Right? No. We have already seen that the human condition, because it is not perfectible, must always involve uncertainty. Therefore, it is impossible to be certain I am right; all I can do, in this existential moment, is to seek out experiences of meaning and strive to orient myself to them. These experiences of meaning, this intrusion into our every day lives of transcendent meaning, is probably what most people mean when they call a moment in time “holy.” This is what William Barrett, in The Illusion of Technique, means by the “religious hypothesis,” that we can adopt a view that says “there exists meaning to life.”
I find, in the Box, an opportunity to orient my life to this small notion, that there exists meaning, and that that meaning transcends the material. I call this “small ‘r’ religion.” (You could call it spirituality, if you like. But we aren’t going to be talking about crystals.) I have no certainty of what that meaning might be, but most of the time, I feel its intrusion into my life, it is consistent with my everyday experiences, and I choose to orient my life to it.
Temptation
If you are like me, there are days when, sitting in the Box, holding on to that fragile faith is just too damn difficult. Why bother? I am probably a fool, teaching other fools how to explore their foolishness. There are days when I am tempted to “give up.” Days when I have done a poor job of responding to my calling, when I have made abundantly obvious to myself that I am imperfect, days when the corruption of the systems in which we all operate mediate against the Good. In these times, I wait for the weakness to pass, or I reach out to others to borrow some of their strength. Usually the faith returns. But there are those days. . . .
One might be tempted by secular idealism. But I have to reject it. If there is Good, there must be a ground for this Goodness. If we reject faith in transcendence, if we deny small “r” religion even in our minimalist definition, then the only available home for this ground is the material world. To be Good must be something that is producible out of our biological and social conditions, nothing more. Values are, then, either nature or nurture. So, secular idealism wishes to be idealistic, without acknowledging a transcendent basis for the moral priorities of that idealism, but comes up short, as its secularism provides only dust as a basis for its idealism.
If, at the existential moment, you answer that there is no transcendent ground for these values, then you’re going to adopt either a nihilistic position or call yourself a secular idealist. The first gets you no where, stuck with “No Exit.” The second does not take you much further, as you try to establish the validity of your moral values through materialism alone.
The inevitability of uncertainty
As we will see in later postings, post-modernism says that there is no privileged position from which to be certain that you can judge behavior. How, then, can we be sure that there is a ground for those values that we think transcend culture? We are now back in “the Box” on Figure X. (If you are just joining the blog, you will find this Figure in earlier postings.) We can not know for sure, we can not be certain that there are transcendent values, but we believe there are. That belief is consistent with our experiences. We hold that belief as an article of faith. We can’t be certain, but we can orient our lives to that belief.
(Remember, if you believe that life has meaning, and that you know exactly what that meaning is, then you aren’t actually on that path towards faith, or even in the Box. You are back down the path towards fundamentalism, where certitude over meaning takes you. You have “given in.”)
In a post-modern world, uncertainty is inevitable. Therefore, doubt is unavoidable. The challenge of the Box is to attempt to maintain one’s faith in a transcendent source of Goodness, while avoiding the temptation of “giving up” to Nihilism or “giving in” to fundamentalism.
Leading an imperfectible life empowers our will, but for that we pay a price of never-ending uncertainty. That is why our lives lived in the box are a constant struggle to orient ourselves to faith.
So, I find that I am a religious person, that I have faith. Most of the time. But faith in what? Ah, another problem. There always seem to be problems. In fact, I can’t know for sure what it is that I have faith in. It is a complete and ineffable mystery. I can’t tell you what I believe is contained within transcendence. I can only tell you that transcendence exists, and that my experiences of the Good are real and grounded. And that is what I have faith in.
We can’t accept the notion that our experiences of the Good are meaningless, just a narrative our brains tell us to keep us busy while they run our lives. Nihilism is no answer.
And I find secular idealism insufficient to support my sense that we are called upon to act to change the behavior of others in favor of the Good.
What happens if, when you find yourself in the Box, you orient yourself in the other direction, towards faith? This is the existential moment. And this is the source of hope. In this position, I must accept that life is not perfectible, but I can also believe that it does have meaning, even if I can’t be certain that that meaning exists or what that meaning is. This is the position of the “religious existentialists” who most of you never read in college: Kierkegaard, Bullman, Tillich, Borowitz. (Not your fault – most philosophy professors only assign the atheistic existentialists.)
I can not be perfectly Good, but I can orient my life to a source of the Good. I can seek and possibly find some ground for Goodness. And I can therefore, standing on that ground, begin a dialogue on what it means to lead a Good life.
Small “r” religion
Will I know for sure that my orientation is Right? No. We have already seen that the human condition, because it is not perfectible, must always involve uncertainty. Therefore, it is impossible to be certain I am right; all I can do, in this existential moment, is to seek out experiences of meaning and strive to orient myself to them. These experiences of meaning, this intrusion into our every day lives of transcendent meaning, is probably what most people mean when they call a moment in time “holy.” This is what William Barrett, in The Illusion of Technique, means by the “religious hypothesis,” that we can adopt a view that says “there exists meaning to life.”
I find, in the Box, an opportunity to orient my life to this small notion, that there exists meaning, and that that meaning transcends the material. I call this “small ‘r’ religion.” (You could call it spirituality, if you like. But we aren’t going to be talking about crystals.) I have no certainty of what that meaning might be, but most of the time, I feel its intrusion into my life, it is consistent with my everyday experiences, and I choose to orient my life to it.
Temptation
If you are like me, there are days when, sitting in the Box, holding on to that fragile faith is just too damn difficult. Why bother? I am probably a fool, teaching other fools how to explore their foolishness. There are days when I am tempted to “give up.” Days when I have done a poor job of responding to my calling, when I have made abundantly obvious to myself that I am imperfect, days when the corruption of the systems in which we all operate mediate against the Good. In these times, I wait for the weakness to pass, or I reach out to others to borrow some of their strength. Usually the faith returns. But there are those days. . . .
One might be tempted by secular idealism. But I have to reject it. If there is Good, there must be a ground for this Goodness. If we reject faith in transcendence, if we deny small “r” religion even in our minimalist definition, then the only available home for this ground is the material world. To be Good must be something that is producible out of our biological and social conditions, nothing more. Values are, then, either nature or nurture. So, secular idealism wishes to be idealistic, without acknowledging a transcendent basis for the moral priorities of that idealism, but comes up short, as its secularism provides only dust as a basis for its idealism.
If, at the existential moment, you answer that there is no transcendent ground for these values, then you’re going to adopt either a nihilistic position or call yourself a secular idealist. The first gets you no where, stuck with “No Exit.” The second does not take you much further, as you try to establish the validity of your moral values through materialism alone.
The inevitability of uncertainty
As we will see in later postings, post-modernism says that there is no privileged position from which to be certain that you can judge behavior. How, then, can we be sure that there is a ground for those values that we think transcend culture? We are now back in “the Box” on Figure X. (If you are just joining the blog, you will find this Figure in earlier postings.) We can not know for sure, we can not be certain that there are transcendent values, but we believe there are. That belief is consistent with our experiences. We hold that belief as an article of faith. We can’t be certain, but we can orient our lives to that belief.
(Remember, if you believe that life has meaning, and that you know exactly what that meaning is, then you aren’t actually on that path towards faith, or even in the Box. You are back down the path towards fundamentalism, where certitude over meaning takes you. You have “given in.”)
In a post-modern world, uncertainty is inevitable. Therefore, doubt is unavoidable. The challenge of the Box is to attempt to maintain one’s faith in a transcendent source of Goodness, while avoiding the temptation of “giving up” to Nihilism or “giving in” to fundamentalism.
Leading an imperfectible life empowers our will, but for that we pay a price of never-ending uncertainty. That is why our lives lived in the box are a constant struggle to orient ourselves to faith.
So, I find that I am a religious person, that I have faith. Most of the time. But faith in what? Ah, another problem. There always seem to be problems. In fact, I can’t know for sure what it is that I have faith in. It is a complete and ineffable mystery. I can’t tell you what I believe is contained within transcendence. I can only tell you that transcendence exists, and that my experiences of the Good are real and grounded. And that is what I have faith in.
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Why secular idealism is insufficient
Secular idealism defined
So, you have been reading these blog postings, and you have decided not to “give in” or “give up.” In other words, you are not willing to accept that there is some perfectible path for you to walk, but you also aren’t willing to give up entirely on leading a “Good” life, so you will reject nihilism. Where does that leave you?
One very popular option is “secular idealism.” In fact, I think that the majority of my friends and colleagues would think of themselves as such. Secular idealism is the belief that there is meaning to life, that there is a way to lead a Good life. Hence, idealism. But it is also a rejection of the notion that the source of that Goodness is somehow transcendent. Therefore, secular.
This is a comfortable position for many people. They are able to respond to their own experience of right and wrong, and maintain the importance of pursuing the “right” and eschewing the “wrong.” But they don’t have to put up with the falderal of Religion. They neither have to believe in a God, nor follow the practices of any organized Religion. “I can,” they believe, “be Good without God.”
And if my goal in life were to be a Good person, and to raise Good children, and to someday die knowing that I had increased the Goodness in the world, then this might be sufficient.
But what if you choose to make claims against the world that it, too, must be Good? What if you want not only to describe your own behavior, but also prescribe and proscribe the behavior of others?
A world of hurt
For instance, one third of the world’s population lives in societies where the safety, the dignity, the rights of women are systematically denied. Ought we to comment on this? Ought we to act to change this? Back in an earlier posting when we talked about “the cultural determination of meaning” we visited this same problem. If you think that “all values are a function of culture,” then you are in no position to criticize the cultural norms of others. If they treat their women as second class or worse, as chattel, well, that is their culture, and who are we to criticize? To criticize such norms would be to assume that our values had a privileged position over their values. But if values are merely creations of culture, then we have no such privilege.
Go ahead, then, and cut off your young daughter’s clitoris. I certainly wouldn’t do that, but I am not in a position to say that you ought not to do it either. If my idealism is not grounded in something other than the secular, materialistic world, then I am estopped from proscribing this behavior. Secular idealism helps me to lead a Good life, but it prohibits me from demanding Good behavior of others.
And well you shouldn’t, I can hear some of you say. Really? Have you seen no behavior in the world that you would want to condemn? Willful polluting of people’s drinking water? Corporate greed resulting in lay-offs of thousands? Overtly racist government policies? Kleptocracy in countries with people struggling with poverty? War mongering for private gain? Human trafficking? The mass slaughter of innocents? Nothing rises to the level of outrageous, immoral behavior that must be stopped? Forcible mutilation of a young girl’s genitals is awful, but who am I to judge the behavior of others?
Now, I admit that, as a professor of public health, I am probably quicker to condemn the positions of others. It is part of the nature of public health to focus on human rights and the implications of those rights for health policies.
But all, or at least almost all, of us have a point at which we would want to curtail the immoral behavior of others. All , or at least almost all, of us would shout to warn the person who was about to be run over by a car, as we discussed in “Does the urge to care come from culture?” (February 24, 2015) And wouldn’t you all condemn the behavior of the person who urged you not to shout, so as to be able to watch someone die?
A transcendent ground
Here is the problem. If you are a secular idealist, you have no ground on which to base your condemnation. You might have your values that help you lead your Right life, but that gives you no position to act to stop another from acting Wrongly. In order to make transitive statements about the behavior of others, you need a transcendent source of Right and Wrong to act as the foundation for your advocacy.
And the world desperately needs such advocacy. The Wrong feels like they are winning in so many spheres of our world. I feel a calling to react, to act to stop them, to stand up for the Right. Yes, I condemn female genital mutilation. And I condemn the miserable way that a third of the women in the world are treated. They have rights that are being violated. Natural rights. Rights that are inseparable from their basic dignity as human beings. Inalienable rights that seem self-evident. And that must be grounded in some transcendent reality.
I never set out to be a religious person. But for decades, I have been following the Path With Two Questions, and whenever I end up back in the Box, I recognize that this calling to righteous action that I experience is, in fact, very real, and to answer it requires me to accept that I believe that there are some moral values that transcend time and place, that transcend circumstance and culture, that are fundamentally compelling. In the reality and substance of that experience of transcendence I have faith.
And in that existential moment, I find religion.
So, you have been reading these blog postings, and you have decided not to “give in” or “give up.” In other words, you are not willing to accept that there is some perfectible path for you to walk, but you also aren’t willing to give up entirely on leading a “Good” life, so you will reject nihilism. Where does that leave you?
One very popular option is “secular idealism.” In fact, I think that the majority of my friends and colleagues would think of themselves as such. Secular idealism is the belief that there is meaning to life, that there is a way to lead a Good life. Hence, idealism. But it is also a rejection of the notion that the source of that Goodness is somehow transcendent. Therefore, secular.
This is a comfortable position for many people. They are able to respond to their own experience of right and wrong, and maintain the importance of pursuing the “right” and eschewing the “wrong.” But they don’t have to put up with the falderal of Religion. They neither have to believe in a God, nor follow the practices of any organized Religion. “I can,” they believe, “be Good without God.”
And if my goal in life were to be a Good person, and to raise Good children, and to someday die knowing that I had increased the Goodness in the world, then this might be sufficient.
But what if you choose to make claims against the world that it, too, must be Good? What if you want not only to describe your own behavior, but also prescribe and proscribe the behavior of others?
A world of hurt
For instance, one third of the world’s population lives in societies where the safety, the dignity, the rights of women are systematically denied. Ought we to comment on this? Ought we to act to change this? Back in an earlier posting when we talked about “the cultural determination of meaning” we visited this same problem. If you think that “all values are a function of culture,” then you are in no position to criticize the cultural norms of others. If they treat their women as second class or worse, as chattel, well, that is their culture, and who are we to criticize? To criticize such norms would be to assume that our values had a privileged position over their values. But if values are merely creations of culture, then we have no such privilege.
Go ahead, then, and cut off your young daughter’s clitoris. I certainly wouldn’t do that, but I am not in a position to say that you ought not to do it either. If my idealism is not grounded in something other than the secular, materialistic world, then I am estopped from proscribing this behavior. Secular idealism helps me to lead a Good life, but it prohibits me from demanding Good behavior of others.
And well you shouldn’t, I can hear some of you say. Really? Have you seen no behavior in the world that you would want to condemn? Willful polluting of people’s drinking water? Corporate greed resulting in lay-offs of thousands? Overtly racist government policies? Kleptocracy in countries with people struggling with poverty? War mongering for private gain? Human trafficking? The mass slaughter of innocents? Nothing rises to the level of outrageous, immoral behavior that must be stopped? Forcible mutilation of a young girl’s genitals is awful, but who am I to judge the behavior of others?
Now, I admit that, as a professor of public health, I am probably quicker to condemn the positions of others. It is part of the nature of public health to focus on human rights and the implications of those rights for health policies.
But all, or at least almost all, of us have a point at which we would want to curtail the immoral behavior of others. All , or at least almost all, of us would shout to warn the person who was about to be run over by a car, as we discussed in “Does the urge to care come from culture?” (February 24, 2015) And wouldn’t you all condemn the behavior of the person who urged you not to shout, so as to be able to watch someone die?
A transcendent ground
Here is the problem. If you are a secular idealist, you have no ground on which to base your condemnation. You might have your values that help you lead your Right life, but that gives you no position to act to stop another from acting Wrongly. In order to make transitive statements about the behavior of others, you need a transcendent source of Right and Wrong to act as the foundation for your advocacy.
And the world desperately needs such advocacy. The Wrong feels like they are winning in so many spheres of our world. I feel a calling to react, to act to stop them, to stand up for the Right. Yes, I condemn female genital mutilation. And I condemn the miserable way that a third of the women in the world are treated. They have rights that are being violated. Natural rights. Rights that are inseparable from their basic dignity as human beings. Inalienable rights that seem self-evident. And that must be grounded in some transcendent reality.
I never set out to be a religious person. But for decades, I have been following the Path With Two Questions, and whenever I end up back in the Box, I recognize that this calling to righteous action that I experience is, in fact, very real, and to answer it requires me to accept that I believe that there are some moral values that transcend time and place, that transcend circumstance and culture, that are fundamentally compelling. In the reality and substance of that experience of transcendence I have faith.
And in that existential moment, I find religion.
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