William James has a nice quote in his introductory lecture on Pragmatism, again from Chesterton, in this case his work “Heretics”: “There are some people–and I am one of them–who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run anything else affects them.”
One has to ask: how did the horrors of the 20th century happen, and why are there hordes of seemingly intelligent people who have still not learned the lesson that Statism is tyranny, and that “social justice” in almost all forms is the precise opposite: INjustice by any rational criteria.
We had so many smart people at the end of the 19th century, and beginning of the 20th, especially in England and America, such as John Stuart Mill, Charles Sumner, William James, G.K. Chesterton.
How do such basic philosophical errors as holding to Statist ideologies, and rejecting all the evidence that favors an anti-materialist bias persist in our academic world?
I was watching a waterboarding video last night. The guy thought he could go 15 seconds, but he only lasted 5-6. What this technique does is induce panic that cannot be calmed with reason. It is absolutely primal. It has nothing to do with how you think.
In my view, if one follows the ideational train of modern Communists, what you see is something like this: God does not exist; death is final; morality is an artifact of evolutionary necessity; free will is an illusion; personal autonomy is an illusion; and everything we do and build and think will in the end perish without a trace. This is, in my view, a depressing worldview. Many people, I think, react with the same primal fear and anxiety that our waterboarding victim did.
I myself found it exceedingly depressing, and remember getting dizzy thinking about a world without meaning, where death was final. Darwin started it, by removing God as a necessary “hypothesis”, and of course much of “modern”–by which I would intend to connote Regressive–philosophy is oriented around the creation of meaning in a world denuded of permanent immanent order. That was the work, among others, of Nietzche, Sartre, Foucault, Camus, Heidegger (approximately), and their countless descendents and fellow travellers.
None of these “philosophers” (if you define Truth as what is useful, in the spirit of philosophical Pragmatism, none of these people offered it–with the partial exception in my view of Camus, who did seem to me in the end to be a decent human being–so they were not truly “lovers of wisdom”) really succeeded in creating actionable systems.
Ayn Rand did, and is for that reason still widely read.
Yet, I have issues with all thinkers who begin with the proposition that the world is composed of matter which is necessarily separated from us; really, of which we are composed. It is not necessary to link what I term Physical Materialism with Moral Materialism, but it is a tendency of the system.
What I mean by this is that if you understand the universe as basically a complicated machine, and human beings as small complicated machines, it tends to create a focus on those factors in human life which are material–which are visible. For those who accept the doctrine of Physical Materialism, science is the only means of making any useful truth claims. If everything is composed of matter that invariably obeys knowable laws, and which is separate from our consciousness, then only that is real that can be measured, and measuring is what scientists and scientists alone do. Morality, then, belongs to scientists.
And you see this history over the last several centuries of psychologists trying to decide just who they are, and what they should be doing. Are they scientists? How can you empirically measure the contents of a person’s consciousness? And if you can’t measure it, how can you claim you are a scientists? B.F Skinner, of course, tried to solve this problem by ignoring consciousness altogether, and focusing ONLY on what could be directly measured. This was a logical extrapolation from the basic problem.
Yet, manifestly, each and every one of us thinks. We feel. We make decisions using some combination of thought and gut instinct.
William James, in his excellent book “Principles of Psychology”, delineates three basic approaches to psychology: introspection, empirical measurement, and a combination of the two. In the first case, the psychologist can simply write about the contents of his own consciousness. He can compare his impressions with those of others, to see to what extent there is congruence, which is moving to a blended psychology.
As far as pure empiricism, you can test people’s perception, for example their ability to detect slight changes in weight, or light, or sound. You can measure how they process different stimuli. You can give people drugs, and measure the physiological results. Yet, the subjective results remain instrospective, and only approach empiricism across wide samples, which is an approximation of science, but not yet “hard” in the way measurements of accelleration are in physics.
Getting back to my main point, though, it seems to me that Moral Materialism leads to the rejection of softer notions such as beauty, love, kindness, refinement, and the like. You can’t measure them, so they are not suitable to be relied on in any kind of moral system. What you CAN measure is difference; and you can likewise formulate a “scientific” plan for the eradication of that difference.
The question, really, is “given presuppositions of meaninglessness, what can you hang your hat on”? For people who go through what I term (possibly following someone, I don’t know) “ontological shock” and react by becoming political Leftists, the answer is that you can rely on a visible system that creates visible results, that you define to yourself as beneficial.
The problem, though, is they now NEED this system. They NEED these beliefs. They can’t not have them. They can’t interact with them reflectively and with nuance. They can’t elevate them to some sort of qualitatively higher level, since they have already rejected notions of human perfectibility. We are all animals, after all, living for no purpose, and destined to die and be forgotten.
Yet, the question of how our universe is put together remains an empirical question. It is far from settled, and to the extent we can tell, our best guess is that the universe cannot be understood as existing apart from consciousness. It is NOT out there. It is connected with us.
This is not mumbo-jumbo New Age mysticism, but the reasoned conclusion of one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, John von Neumann, who literally wrote the book on quantum physics, and played a significant role in the development of usable computers.
We know, experimentally, that faster than light communication is possible across, in theory, infinite differences. Since this violates a principle theorem of General Relativity, it falsifies that theory. No one wants to admit this, since Relativity is such a great theory otherwise, that has worked empirically every time is has been put to the test. Yet, the fact remains that we only have two proven models of the universe: General Relativity, and quantum physics. Both work in their domains–big, and small, respectively. But General Relativity is not right about light being a univeral constant, and there are no experimental objections to quantum theory, which to my mind means of the two it should be regarded as the more correct one, pending some third theory that outdoes both (which will NOT be String theory, which to me appears to be a sort temper tantrum in reaction to Bell’s Theorem, which was the mathematical proof of non-locality).
Likewise, I think that Darwinian notions of Natural Selection will in the end need to be supplemented by appeal to some sort of biological field theory, where we posit some sort of information-containing aspect of the universe, which enables functional adaptations to be retained at much higher than random rates.
With respect to the survival of death there always has been and continues to be substantial evidence. We have apparent recording from people who have passed on. We have countless stories of apparitions. We have cases where mediums obtained information that they could not have known any other way.
One good example of this is an English medium who was imprisoned for divulging State secrets in WW2 for revealing the sinking of a British Navy ship before the Admiralty itself knew about it. All the details she provided turned out to be correct. This is one example of many 100’s of recorded examples of people possessing information no cold reader or skillful fraud could have possessed.
I always hear this seemingly logical comment “the plural of anecdote is not data”, but of course it is. When X number of scientist claim to have achieved a certain result, when X claim is made Y number of times in “respectable” journals, then that claim is considered a fact, even if none of the believers in this fact have done the experiment themselves.
Then the objection is raised about repeatability. Scientific results can be repeated. The people who make this claim do not typically follow the logical path of trying to repeat the results themselves, for example by consulting a medium, or experimenting in EVP (trying to capture voices on tape), or “ghost hunting”. Rather, they simply make the claim that it is not proven–meaing, to THEM–and dismissing the whole thing.
Yet, there are a number of cases of deeply commited skeptics doing the honest thing and investigating the evidence themselves, and becoming in the process converted.
I won’t dilate on this further. My core point, here, is that stupid ideas get people killed, and make them unhappy, and that if we are going to use science as the entirety of our truth system, let us at least do that honestly.
The chain of logic that led to so much horror in the 20th century was based, in my view, on erroneous postulates. The sooner that fact is acknowleged, the better off we will all be.
It is not too late to create a good world, one where we can live happily, and in peace.