"Surely, much of what we today regard as good and useful, as well as much of what we would call knowledge and wisdom, we owe to science. But science may also be seen as an addictive drug. Not only has our unbounded feeding on science caused us to become dependent on it, but as happens with many other drugs taken in increasing dosages, science has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison. Beginning perhaps with Francis Bacon's misreading of the genuine promise of science, man has been seduced into wishing and working for the establishment of a age of rationality, but with his vision of rationality tragically twisted so as to equate it with logicality. Thus we have very nearly come to the point where almost every genuine human dilemma is seen as a mere paradox, as a merely apparent contradiction that could be untangled by judicious applications of cold logic derived from a higher standpoint. Even murderous wars have come to be perceived as mere problems to be solved by hoards of professional problem solvers. As Hannah Arendt said about recent makers and executors of policy in the Pentagon:
" 'They were not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being "rational" . . . They were eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them; that is, they were eager to discover "laws" by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be . . . [They] did not "judge" they calculated . . . an utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality [became] the leitmotif of the decision making.'
"And so too have nearly all political confrontations, such as those between races and those between the governed and their governors, come to be perceived as merely failures in communication. Such rips in the social fabric can then be systematically repaired by the expert application of the latest information-handing techniques - at least so it is believed. And so the rationality-is-logicality equation, which the very success of science has drugged us into adopting as virtually an axiom, has led us to deny the very existence of human conflict, hence the very possibility of the collision of genuinely incommensurable human interests of of disparate human values, hence the existence of humans themselves.
"It may be that human values are illusory, as indeed B. F. Skinnner argues. If they are, then its presumably up to science to demonstrate that fact, as indeed Skinner (as scientist) attempts to do. But then science must itself be an illusory system. For the only certainly knowledge science can give us is knowledge of the behavior of formal systems, that is, systems that are games invented by man himself and in which to assert truth is nothing more or less than to assert that, as in a chess game, a particular board position was arrived at by a sequence of legal moves.[I went through one of A. S. Eddington's essay which made the same point a few years back.] When science purports to make statements about man's experiences, it bases them on identifications between the primitive (that is, undefined) objects of one of its formalisms, the pieces of one of its games, and some set of human observations. No such sets of correspondences can ever be proven to be correct. At best, they can be falsified, in the sense that formal manipulations of a system's symbols may lead to symbolic configurations which, when read in the light of set of correspondences in question, yield interpretations contrary to empirically observed phenomena. Hence all empirical science is an elaborate structure built on piles that are anchored, not on bedrock as is commonly supposed, but on the sifting sand of fallible human judgement, conjecture and intuition. It is not even true, again contrary to common belief, that a single purported counter-instance that, if accepted as genuine would certainly falsify a specific scientific theory, generally leads to the abandonment of that theory. Probably all scientific theories currently accepted by scientists themselves (excepting only those purely formal theories claiming no relation to the empirical world) are today confronted with contradicting evidence of more than negligible weight that, again if fully credited, would logically invalidate them. Such evidence is often explained (that is, explained away) by ascribing it to error of some kind, say observational error, or by characterizing it as inessential, or by the assumption (that is the faith) that some yet-to-be-discovered way of dealing with it will some day permit it to be acknowledged but nevertheless incorporated into the scientific theories it was originally thought to contradict. In this way scientists continue to rely on already impaired theories and to infer "scientific fact" from them.
"The man on the street surely believes such scientific facts to be as well-established, as well proven as his own existence. His certitude is an illusion. Nor is the scientist himself immune to the same illusion . . . "
As Hanna Arendt derived from her reading of the Pentagon Papers, such faith in scientific method and logicality well outside of where it can honestly be applied is hardly just a habit of the common Person. This denomination of scientistic faith is the real faith tradition of most of us with college credentials or merely an exposure to media, even those who deny some of the most well established science, such as the science of human caused climate change and it more than has its match in lawerly and, especially judicial arrogance which uses the same framing but with even very good science available to it, will dispose of both science and evidence and reality, though they will go through a charade of logicality, such as Alito does, a going through motions which some of his younger fellow "justices" seem to not feel they need to go through as a charade. The habits of scientific method, the pretenses of modern educated thought to follow logicality in the decadent state of eutrophic "enlightenment" culture are, perhaps like those matters that Arendt notes are the object of public lying:
The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts, that is with matters which carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are; factual truths are never compellingly true.
This pose of logicality, of scientific thought which, Weizenbaum notes that science is very much like a game in which the method is to follow the human made rules of the game. The pretense is that there is no other means of arriving at reliable truth that should be consequential in human law. No wonder the Supreme Court so breezily lies about the nature of the Bill of Rights, misrepresenting when it doesn't totally ignore the legislative record of the 14th Amendment in their games of "originalism" and "textualism", the necessity of the Voting Rights Act in such a decadent intellectual environment which, nevertheless, poses as if it has all of the presumed virtues of both science and logicality while pursuing the most raw and ruthless of power and oppression.
A Note: In what I said the other day about the role that cinematic and video fantasy and sci-fi play in such things as the crackpot idea that Biden and NOAA can control the direction of a hurricane, talking more about it, it occurs to me that the "science" in sci-fi often, maybe typically presents science and technology as ultimately powerful, either now or in some past long ago and far away or in some maybe even human future. It is omnipotent and omniscient. You can add that to the list of gods of materialism, I suppose. That so many more People imbibe that non-reality than have much of a familiarity with real science and entirely more than who have any real knowledge of the actual limits of science is certainly not a trivial matter when it comes to the gullibility of up to millions of us to such delusions. The insistence that such a thing could not have any significant effect strikes me as being just as absurd as the belief that science and technology have such ridiculously claimed powers now.
In my feckless youth I worked my way through Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. All I remember about it now is Hari Seldon, the Mule, (those names, I mean) and that it ended well. For decades that was pretty much my measure for a science fiction story: was the ending essentially a good surprise.
I mention this because I watched the first season of “Foundation” on Apple TV+. I don’t recommend it. It is, however, all I know of the story Asimov put into three books so long ago; all I remember, anyway. The premise of either story is that science and reason, in the form of “psychohistory,” Asimov’s invented humanities subject that’s better because it’s science!, will predict the future, and save humanity if, as the TV show puts it, they just trust (have faith) in the plan. As discerned by Hari Seldon.
Hari Seldon is essentially a Biblical prophet as understood by a fundamentalist (i.e., predicting the future, not telling the people of his day the truth of God's word and deed), except Hari is "scientific" rather than "religious," and that makes all the difference (like any "true" prophet/religious figure, Hari is rejected in his age, but his followers swear fealty (faith; trust) to him and are, centuries later, rewarded for their faith. Or I guess their great-great-great grandchildren are. Like I said, it's been awhile.).
You know already where I’m going with this.
It’s not religious, you see; it’s science! And that makes it better! And true! Seldon, in the book, even anticipates the Mule, who is presented as the unpredictable factor that upsets all calculations; except he doesn’t, and he even was predicted by Sheldon’s calculations (psychohistory applies mathematics to history and psychology (I think Asimov was too early to consider sociology, but that’s closer to what he meant than psychology), so it’s true and can be trusted (i.e., you can put your faith in it). Which sounds one helluva lot like religion to me.
Which is doubly funny because Asimov was such a public atheist. Not of the Hitchens/Dawkins/Sam Harris variety (that came later), but pretty happily dismissive of religion in favor of the religion ("DON'T CALL IT THAT!") of science. At least, science as he championed it. And one thing the TV show works in is an entire sub-plot that revolves around a religion resembling nothing extant today, but involve a pilgrimage and a mystical vision (if you literally survive to finish the pilgrimage) which is vouchsafed to an "intelligent robot" (i.e., an android, thought nothing of Asimov's creation, since he'd never allow a robot to be religious, or a mystic, for that matter) but not to her master, the Emperor, who she has served for 11,000 years (I won't go into the complexity of the Emperor's person, it's a distraction here). He goes on the pilgrimage but winds up inventing a vision, when in fact he saw nothing (it's a minor plot point about his character, but we don't like him anyway, so, again, it's not really important). I mention it because Asimov would never have included this in his books or, if he did, it would have marked the decline of human civilization (as I recall the trilogy, it's about the collapse of galactic order and restoration of same, though I seem to recall an empire arose from the calamity Seldon predicts, and then falls again as humanity achieves a better system for providing for the general galactic welfare. It was the '50's, optimism ran high and was expected to go on forever. I could be wrong about that, as the Empire is what's predicted to fail by Seldon on the TV show.) Anyway, decades after the books the world has changed so much the TV version has to include several planets with major religions on them (as usual, all planets are basically one gigantic city, where everyone lives the same life under the same rules. There are at least two planets depicted as the habitat of a handful of people (relative to the size of habitable planet with the gravity and environment of Earth) with one religion per planet, a religion which dominates the culture. Basically planetary religious communities; even the home planet of the Empire is described as a planet sized city. It's the usual weakness of multi-planet science fiction stories: the planets all have one environment, one landscape (desert, forest, ocean), and no hint of complex flora, fauna, or human cultures (think of the varieties on this planet alone; hell, in one state of the Union alone).
But the dominating factor is that Hari Seldon has figured it all out, through mathematics. And that is more accurate a statement of humanity's future and direction than any word of any god; because Science!
But science may also be seen as an addictive drug. Not only has our unbounded feeding on science caused us to become dependent on it, but as happens with many other drugs taken in increasing dosages, science has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison. Beginning perhaps with Francis Bacon's misreading of the genuine promise of science, man has been seduced into wishing and working for the establishment of a age of rationality, but with his vision of rationality tragically twisted so as to equate it with logicality. Thus we have very nearly come to the point where almost every genuine human dilemma is seen as a mere paradox, as a merely apparent contradiction that could be untangled by judicious applications of cold logic derived from a higher standpoint. Even murderous wars have come to be perceived as mere problems to be solved by hoards of professional problem solvers.
Yeah, that. I've been reading, with perplexity, comments by Noam Chomsky about Ukraine. Chomsky is, to me at least, the ultimate "professional problem solver." Tom Wolfe describes, in his less than scholarly work on evolution, how Chomsky came up against a linguist who found a tribe in South America whose language utterly destroyed Chomsky's work on the "language acquisition device" and even Chomsky's theory of a "deep structure" to language. I pause to note this became, in Continental philosophical circles, "structuralism," and it was based in French anthropology and the notion similar "deep structures" were found in human cultures across the world. Structuralism led directly to deconstructionism, which used the insights about these "structures" to actually batter the structures (metaphorically, of course) into pieces. The discovery of this tribe's language did the same to Chomsky. His reaction? To deny the legitimacy of the evidence; to simply reject it as irrelevant to his carefully reasoned out theory. I mention this because Chomsky is applying the same reasoning to Ukraine. His latest thesis is that the US is blocking Ukraine from negotiating a settlement of the conflict with Russia. Following the latest news from Ukraine, where Russia bombed a children's playground in retaliation for a bomb set off on the Crimea bridge (Putin made that connection, not US journalists or government officials), I find it hard to understand Chomsky except as a "professional problem solver" who can't let facts get in the way of his theories. Chomsky is also extremely "scientific." At least he thinks he is. Then again Richard Dawkins presented his "selfish gene" theory as based in science; and yet most geneticists find it was rational as a Christian ecstatic in a worship service engaging in glossolalia. Chomsky wants to apply "cold logic" judiciously to get Ukraine to stop destroying Russia's army; or something. How Ukraine is responsible for doing anything but driving an invading force from its borders is beyond me. If Ukraine decides to go to Moscow and topple Putin by force, that would indeed be problematic. But the solution to the Ukraine conflict is a matter of simple logic: Putin needs to withdraw even from Crimea, and stick to the borders of his country; because nobody is invading those, or seems to want to.
It's not lost on me that Hannah Arendt describes the fictional science Asmiov created and made the salvific center of his novels about civilization. From what I know of human history, Asimov wasn't the student of history or culture he imagined himself to be.
Probably all scientific theories currently accepted by scientists themselves (excepting only those purely formal theories claiming no relation to the empirical world) are today confronted with contradicting evidence of more than negligible weight that, again if fully credited, would logically invalidate them. Such evidence is often explained (that is, explained away) by ascribing it to error of some kind, say observational error, or by characterizing it as inessential, or by the assumption (that is the faith) that some yet-to-be-discovered way of dealing with it will some day permit it to be acknowledged but nevertheless incorporated into the scientific theories it was originally thought to contradict. In this way scientists continue to rely on already impaired theories and to infer "scientific fact" from them.
This is what Chomsky is described as doing, by Wolfe: insisting theory leads to facts, not facts to theory. That is the argument ultimately employed against religion: that it is theory creating facts, and the theory itself is based on a human need for understanding, or a human fear of the unknown. Gods, in this reasoning, either make the unknown known, or explain human existence and even human history. Except it's when religion tries to explain human existence, or human history, that it goes wrong.
Christianity has been battered and pounded into simplistic explanations of the future that have led to three schools of millenialism, based on the expectation of a literal millenia in which all human life is redeemed on earth; or all but destroyed on earth; or there is no millenia at all, but history comes to an end because it reaches the goal, the telos, which God all along intended. All of these schools of thought betray a common horrors: that human existence is simply a means to an end, that the God of Abraham is as indifferent to human existence as the Gods of Greece ultimately were. It rips the very heart out of the entire Biblical witness, to reduce human history to a means to an end (the Final End!). Whether the millenia is the peaceable kingdom or the nightmare of Apocalypse (which doesn't really mean "war to end all wars really and finally," but "revelation."), either way humanity is just a puppet in the show, just something existing as God decides the play is finally done, the cake finally baked, and it's time to close up shop and do something else. That idea is so antithetical to the Hebrew Scriptures and the gospels and letters of the New Testament it's a wonder it isn't widely discarded as the worst of any of the heresies. And yet we like it, because it is so fully human.
God, the old saying goes, causes it to rain on the just and the unjust. And we hate that. We want the unjust to be punished, and to be punished NOW! Witness all the bleating on Twitter and the Internet for the DOJ to arrest Trump NOW!!!! Why? What will Trump's criminal trial do for those people, really? Satiate them? Placate them? Please them? Frankly people that fervid about the fate of a stranger worry me; they have their own individual problems to work out. But in that situation is the truth of the Biblical witness: God is not human. God is Creator; but God wants a relationship with humanity, in fact has one, and it cannot wholly be on God's terms, or humanity is a cipher and a puppet and human existence is meaningless except as God deigns to give it meaning. If that were the case, we wouldn't need to argue over the existence of hell; we'd already be in it, and death would just be a sweet release.
Hardly sounds like a religion, does it? Certainly a reasonable analysis, though I don't present it as the final word or the Full Authority or even as a Grand Unified Theory. Because religion is not about fear nor about explanations. Religion is about other people. From the stories of Abraham to the book of Revelation, the consistent witness of the Christian scriptures (if there truly is one; Biblical theologians worked long and hard to find a "biblical theology," and couldn't. Who am I to say they were wrong?) is that what we can most learn from God's wisdom, is to take care of one another.
It's really that simple. And I think it explains why we turn Christianity (at least) into a structure for imposing our will on others, from the "Doctrine of Discovery" to the idea that only right-wing fundamentalists should have their voices heard in the American electorate. The consistent thread there is power, and the exercise of it. "God made us the boss!," the people sing in Bernstein's Mass. "God gave us the cross/We turned it into a sword/To spread the word of the Lord!/And it was good, brother/(and it was good, brother!)/And it was GODDAMNED GOOD!"
That's a fair summation. You won't find any support for that in the letters of Paul or the words of Jesus or even the Acts of the Apostles. But human beings seem to love power above almost everything else. Well, some human beings do. Some don't seek it at all; some seek only to be servants, only to be first by being last, only to live through humility and caring for others. Sometimes we call these people saints. And if they aren't perfect in their saintliness, according to "our" ideas of perfection, we have people like Christopher Hitchens to criticize them, to curse the darkness rather than light so much as a candle. And that's what religion is: a human endeavor that is often all too human, and not nearly as seeking after the divine as we think, or know, it should be.
Seeking God is hard, because Jesus tells us the best place to find God is in the wilderness; or among the poor; and those are places we don't want to be, generally, and people we don't want to be among, generally. Mostly because the wilderness is not full of the splendor of human efforts at civilization, and the poor are reminders of a system that is unjust and unfair and rather than face that, we blame the poor and put them out of sight so we don't have to reflect on poverty and injustice and our own comforts and what they cost others. They don't have to cost others, but we think it's a zero-sum game and if I give you something of mine, I lose and you gain, and who wants to do that? It isn't, of course, a zero-sum game; or it doesn't have to be. Empires are zero-sum games. They exist only so long as goods can flow from the edges to the center, where the wealth is enjoyed an horded. And when the frontiers can no longer support the center, the center cannot hold, and mere anarchy is loosed once again upon the world. Or is it? New Orleans during Katrina was supposed to have descended into anarchy. All the pundits said so, in their safe locations far away looking down on the drown city at sea level. But anarchy didn't happen; and it didn't happen again in Houston under Harvey, although to be fair our image of Houston is of mostly white people (it's actually the most ethnically diverse city in the country), and of New Orleans, we think mostly of blacks.
The zero-sum game assumption is the same as the assumption that science or mathematics, or the combination, will finally solve our human problems and lead us out of despair and into paradise. And what is that except a religious vision? And is that even a sound one? Again, we accept it was "Christian," but should it be? I bring it up because I'm actually reading a book on it that starts with the word "Paradise" was it came into the Greek from Farsi (? I'm not clear on this point, whether it's fairly described as "Farsi" so far back, or if it was another tongue at the time), and originally meant merely "a walled garden." You can safely conjecture from that how much the word's meaning changed, and why. If I finish the book and think of it, I'll try to report on what I've learned. But my point here is that we make assumptions and think we stand on solid rock, when the sands are shifting beneath our feet and we deny that because it's easier no to look down, not to notice the sands that are rising like the seas.
We're always looking for a solid foundation. We should be looking, instead, for wisdom. And what we can do for one another.
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