I got to thinking the other day, as I often do. I was thinking about this idea that God has a plan for our lives, that everything is unfolding the way it is supposed to. Me, my gut tends to reject this basic idea. I think the afterlife is highly ordered and just, but what happens here is a bit like going down a mogul slope. If you keep your balance and your strength, you can have a lot of fun, but most of us get knocked on our asses, and the main virtue of this is that you can grow from it. A random universe and this one, though, would look quite similar.
Anyway, though, there was at one time the “music of the spheres”. There was Thomas Aquinas explaining to us that science and religion are perfectly compatible, since all forms of order uncovered are simply manifest evidence of God’s presence. (I think that was Aquinas: I listen to Teaching Company stuff a lot, but I was not and never could have been a philosophy student formally).
Coincident with this order was a teaching, Christianity, that saw in life the possibility of transcendence, if lived correctly. To submit to Church teaching was not only to understand how the universe worked, but also the purpose of life.
If you deduct God–or any sort of transcendental order beyond mere physical “laws”–from this, though, you get order without meaning. You get math describing gravity, predicting chemical reactions, and creating smart machines. You do not get a reason to live.
Is it better to feel you understand the universe, and find life devoid of intrinsic meaning; or to fail to understand the universe, but feel empowered and vital? This is, I will note, a different question than “is it better to be sad and wise, or dumb and happy?” Ultimately, we all find ourselves submitting in the end to some version of the scientific myth and method, so the first question depends upon premises which can be questioned. For example, is any doctrine which rejects ANY, of many, possible explanations for any visible phenomena scientific? Of course not. Scientists are agnostice. They are not in the business of proving anything. They are in the business of describing and predicting.
What got me on this line of thought is that I think many people need, emotionally, answers, even bad answers, as to how things work. Free markets are intrinsically fear-inducing to a certain class of people, most particularly those who have spent their whole lives in the comfortable knowledge that the answer to Question 8 was C, and that it could not have been otherwise, for anyone who read the textbook, and did Exercise 17.1. Duh.
I was told the other day that the purpose of the Federal Reserve was to maintain the value of our money, to avoid inflation and deflation, and to create full employment. Something like that. The details don’t matter, since it is a patent lie. My thought was: and how does it actually work? You just regurgitated what you were carefully spoon fed by someone with an agenda–an “expert”–but have done so without a shred of understanding.
Socialism, for these people, serves the need for order. They want tyrants to be in charge, since that way, they think, the economic system will be orderly. They value order over freedom. They value order over meaning.
But even here, is that an accurate statement? Based on the historical record, it is virtually impossible to call any socialist experiment a success. They do not foster an engagement with life, but a disengagement. They do not foster hope, but rather a dull and dismal existence that shades into a welcome death after a shortened life.
What is order? How is it defined?
As I argue constantly, the order that matters is that of the formally chaotic system, from which order flows as an emergent property of a system in motion.
Consider Lao Tzu’s famous “uncarved block”. As I pointed out in my Goodness Sutra (on the other site) the language can probably be better translated as “unchopped forest”. This is a metaphor for a chaotic system.
Consider the difference between 100 trees planted in rows, ten by ten, and the same 100 trees allowed to plant themselves. What is the difference in order? Visibly, obviously, to the human eye the block is more orderly. But surely this looks like idiocy from the perspective of the plants? At a minimum, can we not assume that it is not necessary to assume that simply because that pattern appears orderly, that order is in fact present? Some of the sites may be unsuitable.
I’ve been debating this with myself all day, and it’s one of those things like Scandinavia. I can see both sides, and arguments for both sides.
I’m tired. This post is not finished, but it will have to do for now. I’m sure I’ll have more to say after a while.