In light of the recent attacks in London, I think that it is important to get a more in-depth perspective to understand how we got to this point. I believe that the following excerpts from Consilience can be an aid:
All movements tend to extremes, which is approximately where we are today. The exuberant self-realization that ran from romanticism to modernism has given rise now to philosophical postmodernism (often called post-structuralism, especially in its more political and sociological expressions). Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis of the Enlightenment. The difference between the two extremes can be roughly expressed as follows: Enlightenment thinkers believe we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing. [p.40]
Complexity is what interests scientists in the end, not simplicity. Reductionism is the way to understand it. The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science. [p.54]
Scientist as a rule do not discover in order to know but rather, as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed, they know in order to discover. [p.56]
To be highly successful the scientist must be confident enough to steer for blue water, abandoning sight of land for a while. He value risk for its own sake. He keeps in mind that the footnotes of forgotten treatises are strewn with the names of the gifted but timid. If on the other hand he chooses, like the vast majority of his colleagues, to hug the coast, he must be fortunate enough to possess what I like to define as optimum intelligence for normal science: bright enough to see what needs to be done but not so bright as to suffer boredom doing it. [p. 58]
Although seemingly chimerical at times, no intellectual vision is more important and daunting than that of objective truth based on scientific understanding. Or more venerable. Argued at length in Greek philosophy, it took modern form in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment hope that science would find the laws governing all physical existence. Thus empowered, the savants believed, we could clear away the debris of millennia, including all myths and false cosmologies that encumber humanity's self-image. The Enlightenment dream faded before the allure of Romanticism; but, even more important, science could not deliver in the domain most crucial to its promise, the physical basis of mind. People are innate romantics, they desperately need myth and dogma, and scientists could not explain why people have this need. [p. 61]
...The mindscape is now under active exploration but still largely unmapped. Scientific discourse, the focus of logical positivism, comprises the most complex of mental operations, and the brain is a messy place at best even when handling the most elementary of ideas. Scientists themselves do not think in straight lines. They contrive concepts, evidence, relevance, connections, and analysis as they go along, parsing it all into fragments and in no particular order. Herbert Simon, a Nobelist who has devoted part of his career to the subject, says of the complexity of concept formation: "What chiefly characterizes creative thinking from more mundane forms are (i) willingness to accept vaguely defined problem statements and gradually structure them, (ii) continuing preoccupation with problems over a considerable period of time, and (iii) extensive background knowledge in relevant and potentially relevant areas."
To put it in a nutshell: knowledge, obsession, daring. The creative process is an opaque mix. [p. 64]
...young scientists have the best ideas and, more important, the most time. [p.69]
Scientists have been charged with conquering cancer, genetic disease, and viral infection, all of which are cellular disorders, and they are massively funded to accomplish these tasks. They know roughly the way to reach the goals demanded by the public, and they will not fail. Science, like art, and as always through history, follows patronage. [p.93]
The key is to educate the public so that they can understand the macro problems and shift their focus from reaction to preventative pro-action.
Belief in the intrinsic unity of knowledge -- the reality of the labyrinth -- rides ultimately on the hypothesis that every mental process has a physical grounding and is consistent with the natural sciences. The mind is supremely important to the consilience program for a reason both elementary and disturbingly profound: Everything that we know and can ever know about existence is created there.
The loftier forms of such reflection and belief may seem at first to be the proper domain of philosophy, not science. But history shows that logic launched from introspection alone lacks thrust, can travel only so far, and usually heads in the wrong direction. Much of the history of modern philosophy, from Descartes and Kant forward, consists of failed models of the brain. The shortcoming is not the fault of the philosophers, who have doggedly pushed their methods to the limit, but a straightforward consequence of the biological evolution of the brain. All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental processes in particular suggest that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive. Because these two ends are basically different, the mind unaided by factual knowledge from science sees the world only in little pieces. It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to darkness. For thousands of generations people lived and reproduced with no need to know how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal identity and ritual, more than objective truth, gave them the adaptive edge. That is why even today people know more about their automobiles that they do about their own minds -- and why the fundamental explanation of mind is an empirical rather than a philosophical or religious quest. It requires a journey into the brain's interior darkness with preconceptions left behind. The ships that brought us here are to be left scuttled and burning at the shore. [p.96]
Epigenesis, originally a biological concept, means the development of an organism under the joint influence of heredity and environment. Epigenetic rules, to summarize very briefly my account in the previous two chapters, are innate operations in the sensory system and brain....Typically emotion-driven, epigenetic rules in all categories of behavior direct the individual toward those relatively quick and accurate responses most likely to ensure survival and reproduction. But they leave open the potential generation of an immense array of cultural variations and combinations. Sometimes, especially in complex societies, they no longer contribute to health and well-being. The behavior they direct can go awry and militate against the best interests of the individual society. [p. 193]
At this point my imagined analysts, by plumbing the irrational in human affairs, will have traced an Ariadne's thread of causal explanation from historical phenomena to the brain sciences and genetics; hence they will have bridged the divide between the social and natural sciences. Such is the optimistic forecast shared nowadays by a small number of scholars on both sides of the divide. It is opposed by at least an equal number of critics who find it philosophically flawed, or if not flawed at least technically too difficult ever to achieve. All my instincts tell me it will happen. If the union can be achieved, the social sciences will span a wider scale of time and space and harvest an abundance of new ideas. Union is the best way for the social sciences to gain in predictive power. [.193]
The world economy is a ship speeding through uncharted waters strewn with dangerous shoals. The esteem that economists enjoy arises not so much from their record of successes as from the fact that business and government have nowhere else to turn. [p.198]
Both the known and the unknown, the two worlds of our ancestors, nourish the human spirit. Their muses, science and the arts, whisper: Follow us, explore, find out. [p.233]
The life of the Kalahari band, optimally comprising fifty to seventy members, is intensely communal and cooperative. Because the group must move several times a year with all their possessions on their backs, individuals accumulate few material goods not essential to survival.
Ownership is limited to an individual's clothing, a man's weapons and implements and a woman's household goods. The band's territory and all its assets are not owned individually but communally, by the whole band. [p.235]
We are all still primitives compared to what we might become. Hunter-gatherers and college-educated urbanites alike are aware of fewer than one in a thousand of the kinds of organisms -- plants, animals, and microorganisms -- that sustain the ecosystems around them. They know very little about the real biological and physical forces that create air, water, and soil. Even the most able naturalist can trace no more than a faint outline of an ecosystem to which he has devoted a lifetime of study. [p.236]
The empiricist view in contrast [to transcendental thinking], searching for an origin of ethical reasoning that can be objectively studied, reverses the chain of causation. The individual is seen as predisposed biologically to make certain choices. By cultural evolution some of the choices are hardened into precepts, then laws, and if the predisposition or coercion is strong enough, a belief in the command of God or the natural order of the universe. The general empiricist principle takes this form: Strong innate feeling and historical experience cause certain actions to be preferred; we have experienced them, and weighed their consequences, and agree to conform with codes that express them, and suffer punishment for their violation. The empiricist view concedes that moral codes are devised to conform to some drives of human nature and to suppress others. Ought is not the translation of human nature but of the public will, which can be made increasingly wise and stable through the understanding of the needs and pitfalls of human nature. It recognizes that the strength of commitment can wane as a result of new knowledge and experience, and behavior that was once prohibited freed. It also recognizes that for the same reason new moral codes may need to be devised, with the potential in time of being made sacred. [p.250]
...Most [of those who are investigating the same] agree that ethical codes have arisen by evolution through the interplay of biology and culture. In a sense they are reviving the idea of moral sentiments developed in the eighteenth century by the British empiricists Frances Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith.
...The primary origin of the moral instincts is the dynamic relation between cooperation and defection. [p.251]
And the pace can be confidently predicted: Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false. [p.256]
Successful religions typically begin as cults, which then increase in power and inclusiveness until they achieve tolerance outside the circle of believers. At the core of each religion is a creation myth, which explains how the world began and how the chosen people -- those subscibing to the belief system -- arrived at its center. There is often a mystery, a set of secret instructions and formulas available only to hierophants who have worked their way to a higher state of enlightenment. [p.256]
The understanding and control of life is another source of religious power. Doctrine draws on the same creative springs as science and the arts, its aim being the extraction of order from the mysteries of the material world. To explain the meaning of life it spins mythic narratives of the tribal history, populating the cosmos with protective spirits and gods. The existence of the supernatural, if accepted, testifies to the existence of that other world so desperately desired.
Religion is also empowered mightily by its principal ally, tribalism. The shamans and priests implore us, in somber cadence, Trust in the sacred rituals, become part of the immortal force, you are one of us. As your life unfolds, each step has mystic significance that we who love you will mark with a solemn rite of passage, the last to be performed when you enter that second world free of pain and fear.
If the religious mythos did not exist in a culture, it would be quickly invented, and in fact it has been everywhere, thousands of times through history. Such inevitability is the mark of instinctual behavior in any species. That is, even when learned, it is guided toward certain states by emotion-driven rules of mental development. To call religion instinctive is not to suppose any particular part of its mythos is untrue, only that its sources run deeper than ordinary habit and are in fact hereditary, urged into birth through biases in mental development encoded in the genes.
I have argued in previous chapters that such biases are to be expected as a usual consequence of the brain's genetic evolution. The logic applies to religious behavior, with the added twist of tribalism. There is a hereditary selection advantage to membership in a powerful group united by devout belief and purpose. Even when individuals subordinate themselves and risk death in common cause, their genes are more likely to be transmitted to the next generation than are those of competing groups who lack equivalent resolve. [p.257]
There is a certain amount of irony in this position in that those who are fundamentally religious are forced to disagree with the conclusion because it is contrary to dogma and doctrine.
The symbol-forming human mind, however, never stays satisfied with raw apish feeling in any emotional realm. It strives to build cultures that are maximally rewarding in every dimension. In religion there is ritual and prayer to contact the supreme being directly, consolation from coreligionists to soften otherwise unbearable grief, explanations of the unexplainable, and the oceanic sense of communion with the larger whole that otherwise surpasses understanding.
Communion is the key, and hope rising from it eternal; out of the dark night of the soul there is the prospect of a spiritual journey to the light. For a special few the journey can be taken in this life. The mind reflects in certain ways in order to reach ever higher levels of enlightenment until finally, when no further progress is possible, it enters a mystical union with the whole. Within the great religions, such enlightenment is expressed by the Hindu samadhi, Buddhist Zen satori, Sufi fana, Taoist wu-wei, and Pentecostal Christian rebirth. Something like it is also experienced by hallucinating preliterate shamans. What all these celebrants evidently feel (as I once felt to some degree as a reborn evangelical) is hard to put into words, but Willa Cather came as close as possible in a single sentence. "That is happiness," her fictional narrator says in My Antonia, "to be dissolved into something complete and great."
Of course that is happiness, to find the godhead, or to enter the wholeness of Nature, or otherwise to grasp and hold on to something ineffable, beautiful, and eternal. Millions seek it. They feel otherwise lost, adrift in a life without meaning....They enter established religions established religions, succumb to cults, dabble in New Age nostrums.... [p.260]
Why not -- at least for some -- have a cult of knowledge dedicated to the elimination of doctrine and dogma?
For many the urge to believe in transcendental existence and immortality is overpowering. Transcendentalism, especially when reinforced by religious faith, is psychically full and rich; it feels somehow right. In comparison empiricism seems sterile and inadequate. In the quest for ultimate meaning, the transcendentalist route is much easier to follow. That is why, even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart. Science has always defeated religious dogma point by point when the two have conflicted. But to no avail. In the United States there are fifteen million Southern Baptists, the largest denomination favoring literal interpretation of the Christian Bible, but only five thousand members of the American Humanist Association, the leading organization devoted to secular and deistic humanism. [p.261]
Interestingly enough, personality typologies indicate that the American population is evenly split between Thinkers and Feelers. One wonders why the Feelers seem to dominate. I suppose it is a result of the Culture being structured around consumption and consumption is driven -- once you get past basic needs -- by feeling. So even those who are Thinkers, rely on the Feeling Culture for their livelihoods.
I posted this today because I believe that the response to 9/11 was driven almost entirely by feelers, rather than thinkers. There was a lesson to be learned and it behooves us to be aware of it in the aftermath of the latest bombings in London.
In my opinion, this book is important enough in these times to be placed in the public domain -- maybe with some sort of voluntary compensation by readers to the author.
Matt Holbert
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