Acts of Being

This short article, Conformists may kill civilizations is about an effort to find, in archaeological and evolutionary biological terms, a way of speaking of the odd fact that the residents of a once successful but collapsing civilization will go on acting the same way they, or their ancestors, did when that civilization was prosperous and growing. It’s hardly surprising that those who’ve studied the mindlessly habitual behavior of Mayans as their civilization was being destroyed by environmental damage would see the likelihood that most human beings are conformists who don’t even see the need to act differently from their habitual ways. As we can see in the current financial and political disasters of the United States and some European countries, even those who are as aggressive as wolves are still sheep in the sense of conforming to once successful models of behavior even as the evidence grows that fundamental change is needed.

Banks are only one of many institutions which are failing and responding by trying to do what hasn’t worked lately but to maybe do it more intensely and more efficiently. There are schools, churches at various levels of organizations, government at all levels in the United States, publishers of newspapers and also publishers of books. Schools are particularly important since they’re responsible for teaching the susceptible many to march along in a herd and for doing what they can to restrict the development of those inclined to think on their own. I remember learning in fifth grade that I had to watch The Monkees if I wished to be able to talk with my classmates during recess.

In the modern West, especially during the American dominated years following World War I, innovators haven’t been particularly valued unless they produced new products and services for an increasingly passive citizenry, passive in an intellectual and spiritual sense. This, of course, has led to a frightening homogenization of speech patterns, entertainment habits, professed political beliefs, etc. across large swaths of the earth’s surface. This wasn’t a new phenomenon, but rather a maturation of a problem which Tocqueville saw when he came to the United States in the 1830s and observed the new man of the liberal democratic masses, but the loss of a coherent European cultural foundation to Western Civilization, as Frenchmen and Germans and others moved in herds to commit a sort of continental suicide, unleashed Americans to create that bottom-up totalitarian society that Ray Bradbury wrote about in Fahrenheit 451. As political crises and economic crises reinforced each other in the 1930s, it became obvious that what had been good in the West was being lost. And it also became obvious that the established elite had no desire to open up the system to innovators. The masses showed a liking for men of the moral caliber of Hitler and Roosevelt and Churchill, exploitive and cruel men who had no solutions but to form the herds into ever greater herds, aiming perhaps at one herd upon Earth.

But there are deeper matters than those which most label as ‘politics’ and ‘economics’. A complex economy and a sophisticated political system are structures built upon a foundation of ideas about reality, ideas made manifest in the truly great literary works of a civilization — not the genteel ones produced by trained writers during periods of decadence but the works like The Iliad and Don Quixote and Moby Dick, the raw and powerful works exploring our relationships to some significant aspects of Creation. Those sorts of works, along with some more abstract works about Creation and its Creator, such as Plato’s dialogs and Augustine’s The City of God and Nietzsche’s explorations of the mindlessness and soullessness of the post-Christian West, shape our ideas of time and space and matter and movement and human nature. We’ve not yet seen the Augustine of the modern world who can help us to make sense of the desires of that pretty young woman and also of the exotic physics which lies behind MRIs or even old-fashioned solid-state electronics, unless I’m that thinker or someone else who’s being ignored by the mainstream.

Shakespeare was at least of comparable importance to William the Conqueror and Henry VIII in the creation of England as we know her. At a time when England was still a collection of local cultures, Shakespeare provided a call for the residents of those local cultures to join some hitherto non-existent herd of Englishmen. The jingoism of the drama Henry V made Cecil Rhodes and the other British empire-builders possible. Arguably, Shakespeare was himself riding a powerful wave and another might have done that work if the Bard of Avon had never lived or had decided to preach something other than a self-righteous English nationalism. In the United States, we had Emerson’s and Thoreau’s glorification of a certain selfishness and self-centeredness which Melville labeled as a spiritualized materialism, and that suited us Americans fine. We don’t even want to be responsible for our children or our elderly parents and Emerson provided a pseudo-rational justification for the public school system and eventually the Social Security system. The counter-culture crowd seems to think of Thoreau as one of them, but he and his teacher were perfect philosophers for a nation of crooked bankers, brainless machine-politicians, and ordinary citizens who tolerated such because they hoped to win that odds-against lottery to join the ranks of the exploitive. On the whole, we Americans, and perhaps all modern citizens of the modern liberal democracies, revealed ourselves as having that trait Tocqueville feared he saw in us: we have never met a fact that we can’t ignore if it’s inconvenient to our purposes. Even if that fact threatens to kill us, we’ll ignore it rather than revise our understanding of reality.

For reasons I’ve not yet discovered, Melville created an Emersonian hero in Captain Ahab who had the guts to attack Creation and to try to get past what wouldn’t respond to his desires. Captain Ahab strove to attack the Creator rather than sitting in a Cambridge study and whining. Americans over the years since Emerson have been a mix of the two, brutal but squeamishly looking away from their own actions and the actions of the harpooners they send out against God’s creatures. I should note that there are some serious Southern thinkers, alive and dead, who have seen this moral disease as located in the New England soul. They’re more right than wrong, but the disease seems to have spread throughout the West because it’s the perfect mind-set for conformists, self-justification presented as philosophy. The American attitude was showing clearly during King Phillip’s War as I discussed in The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding. Puritan thinkers failed to properly abstract from their own morality with the result that they associated their ways of thought and of life with absolute truth. This is to say that their concrete ways provided a false abstraction of human nature and human possibilities, but a very convenient abstraction. Men of the modern West can be willfully ignorant and culpably stupid while speaking in grandiose moral terms.

We need new ways of thought, respecting the past for what we best understand it to be, but responding to a changed world and we need to start at a fundamental level where physics and mathematics have enriched our understanding of time and space and matter and movement and the nature of thought. Those new ways of thought won’t save the West in the short-term. If the West continues its collapse into barbarism, those new ways of thought won’t lead to any obvious signs of a new civilization before the next election of an American President. Between the end of the High Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, Europeans suffered through a century of stupidity and disease and famine and brutal violence.

The spiritualized materialism which Melville diagnosed in the thoughts of Emerson and Thoreau is founded upon a poisonous but powerful way of thought that can be described with equal strangeness as an idealized particularism. United with the conformist tendencies of the majority of human beings and financed, so to speak, by the spectacular prosperity of economic and political forms which encourage conformism of a sort which can be labeled a decentralized totalitarianism, we end with a mass of humanity in the modern West which is remarkably resistant to reality. They are frightened by change, but that’s a normal human response which I also feel. More importantly to those of us who are puzzled by the ongoing repetition of what’s not working, conformist man is blind to the need or even possibility of true change.

In 2008, I put samples of three novels on this website for free download. I’ve now made the entire manuscript of Corporate Sex available for personal use. This book is under a somewhat restrictive Creative Commons license which is included with the manuscript. See Unpublished Novels for a description of the book and for the download link.

Mind over matter. Willpower. Free-will. Those sound good when you wish to think of yourself as being in charge. The problem is that ‘yourself’ then becomes some entity which is an agent separate from the human organism and somehow in control over that organism. As I’ve argued repeatedly in my various writings, we are organisms who shape ourselves by responding to created being as we encounter it. Once our encounters with created being were mostly at levels in which our apish ancestors had evolved. A man of the 21st century has a richer environment. He is in contact with far more human beings and is exposed to knowledge about outer space and also alien human cultures. A small businessman who keeps his own accounts is exercising skills which were at the level of a specialist scholar in the early Renaissance. A teenager who plays around with the statistics of his favorite athletes is showing skills unimaginable to the men who built the pyramids of Egypt. We have built somewhat powerful minds by proper responses to created being and by finding ways to build our knowledge and skill base up so that we can teach to children what would have been too difficult for any but the greatest thinkers of the Medieval world.

We human beings aren’t some sort of immaterial mind-stuff or soul-stuff which is inside a flesh-and-blood body. There is no will controlling our organic selves the way a pilot controls an airplane. This airplane, our body, largely flies itself if only because decisions to move often have to be made too fast for the brain-regions which engage in planning and abstract thought. If the higher regions of our brains really controlled the immediate movements of our bodies, the human race would have long ago ended as so many meals for cave-bears or large cats. The higher regions of our brains inhabit, so to speak, more abstract regions, including the past and the future. The mind-like aspects of a human being contribute by understanding created being at abstract levels, allowing us to build powerful computers and to engineer the attributes of material almost down to the individual atom — nano-technology. We can reshape our moral habits over time and we can form social relationships with those we never see and with whom we share only a dedication to Gaelic music or a set of professional credentials. Western Civilization is breaking down in some ways that are frightening to me but it’s also still growing more complex and is entering ever more complex relationships with other cultures and with the non-human parts of God’s Creation.

In recent postings, I’ve been arguing that we need proper sorts of abstract thinking to deal with our practical problems, but we need to understand what abstract thinking can do and what it can’t do. The mind can be seen as a pilot of sorts, but the human body isn’t just a plane. It flies by ingrained habit and responds to what’s happening around it, before that mind is even made aware that there’s a storm or a mountaintop ahead. Part of the task of a mind is to create a narrative explaining what has happened and those who think their minds or wills to be in control are often fooled into taking those narratives as memories of their planning or decision-making. Decisions are made too fast for the regions of our brain which control abstract reasoning and rational planning. See the article The Scientist and the Stairmaster for a discussion of the mind’s lack of direct control over our body’s level of fatness. Will as you will, the belly is likely to win. The lesson isn’t that it’s useless to go on diets or to exercise, but rather that each human being has to work with his own bodily traits and his own environment. We don’t have the sort of will which would allow us to pick up an instructional manual for a recorder and just tell our fingers to do what our mind wishes them to do as it reads the notes and the fingering, nor do we have any inborn knowledge or instincts to help us act properly in this period a bit different from, say, the decades around 1900, when the West went through a period of creative ferment which we’ve never transcended and have not really understood.

It takes a bit of thought to analyze a complex situation and then lots of practice to execute any plans you’ve developed. Then, you’ll be ready for those times when you must act fast and for keeps. As responsible citizens, we may decide to learn about Western Civilization so that we can figure out if we really are in a state of decay and then try to think of ways to improve the situation. We don’t have the will to just say, “I’m going to start reading Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence,” and then plow through it, understanding it and responding to his claims and his presentation of the history of the West over the past five centuries. It’s not a work for a mind formed by public school textbooks or the sorts of books usually found on bestseller lists in this age.

Let me say a little more about that book because it speaks to the issue at hand. That masterpiece, published in 2000 when its author was 93, is still more complex than War and Peace and perhaps longer as well. It tells the story of the decay of the West largely in terms of the decay in literacy and — by implication — abstract reasoning. When we read such books — and use the references to find other worthwhile books, we discover there was a time when a well-educated man was supposed to be skilled in proof techniques of Euclidean geometry, but some of those men kept up with advancements in mathematics and physics and other difficult subjects on their own time. A man such as Jonathon Edwards, the Puritan theologian of the mid-18th century, was said by one historian of ideas to have had a profound understanding of Newtonian physics. On his own time, driven by interest or a sense of duty to keep up with important advancements in human thought, that Puritan divine studied Newton’s writings and other serious, difficult works.

Developing your mind is little different from dieting or training for a marathon. It takes sustained effort. Why would we wish to study demanding works of science or history or literature after escaping from the grind of school? Perhaps because a well-developed mind is itself a good, perhaps more of a good than the memories of 20 Sunday afternoons of watching football? I’m not saying that all should be spending their weekends and evenings reading intellectual works, but I am saying we need intellectual and moral and spiritual leaders who are willing to work hard reshaping their minds in active and openhearted response to Creation. We can also respond to Creation by playing music rather than always listening to recorded music, by joining the community theater rather than watching movies on television, by joining a religious community rather than watching services on television. Once upon a time, even some public leaders read serious books or engaged in scientific work. Calvin Coolidge was very well educated and multi-lingual and was said to read classics in Latin or ancient Greek, as well as works in various modern languages, while he was in the White House. Benjamin Franklin was not only a wealthy, hardheaded businessman, but also a highly regarded amateur scientist, not only conducting experiments in electromagnetism but also working on the conceptual or theoretical level in that field.

Why did modern man lose interest in developing his mind unless he was being paid to do so? Isn’t Western Civilization still getting more complex in many ways? Doesn’t empirical knowledge continue to pile up? Without those active, self-driven responses which may take the form of studies or experimentation or perhaps the organization of a musical group, the mind is no more than a poorly organized brain. The belly, so to speak, will rule. This is to say that a man without a mind well-developed to his context will be something like an apeman with a noticeably well-developed prefrontal lobe allowing much more sophisticated planning than his cousin the chimpanzee, but he isn’t going to be able to understand, for example, the relationship between the United States and China, let alone be able to evaluate possible ways of improving that relationship. He won’t be able to understand the assaults on his liberty and the liberty of his children in the form of seemingly beneficial programs. One who did understand was the Austrian Franz Jaggerstatter, recently beatified by the Catholic Church and perhaps on his way to canonization as a saint. Jaggerstatter was beheaded for refusing to serve in the army of Nazi Germany, even in the medical corps. Earlier, he had withdrawn from the fraternal and charitable groups and activities in which he’d participated because he saw that the Nazis were using those groups and activities to form the Austrians into a subservient herd of sorts.

Let’s return to the belly. Did that belly somehow change during this age of diabetes and obesity? Did it suddenly develop a taste for more sugar? Or was that belly like the pilgrim of Dante’s Inferno, a traveler who kept on going straight while the path changed? The path curved away. The belly continued to crave the rare opportunity to indulge in a hive of honey, only that opportunity isn’t rare nowadays. A large jar of honey, as many cookies as you can carry, gallons and gallons of ice-cream to fill the trunk of your car, await you at your nearby supermarket.

Did that brain somehow change during this period when some human thinkers suddenly discovered that time and space are particular examples of abstractions and that matter is frozen energy? Did it change during this period when understanding human moral nature became not a matter of understanding a static listing of virtues and vices but rather a matter of trying to grasp a mountain of facts about DNA and brain-cells and billions of years of evolution, not to mention new reasoning skills dealing with frightening subjects such as chaos? Did our brains become suddenly dysfunctional so that they could not make good decisions as did the brains of the prior century or two of remarkable prosperity?

No. We human beings of, say, the 20th and 21st centuries are like that pilgrim in Dante’s poem, continuing to interpret reality in terms of immediate impressions and models of created being which see concrete being as absolute and objective and abstractions as mere formalisms, though we and our modern cultures have been shaped so much by the abstractions of modern physics and mathematics, history of human thought and languages, literary exegesis, and engineering projects which are beyond the understanding of any one man.

Let’s return to the belly again. If you wish to gain some control over your weight in the modern world, you should come to an understanding of the strength of your will and the tendency of your body to make fat. You should also understand modern food technology, your body’s handling of additives or different forms of sugar or fat, and the seductive layouts in certain aisles at the grocery store. You should step back and understand your own habits and schedule and the habits of those you live with or socialize with. This is possible only by way of abstract thought and a bit of work. The effort will be similar to that of writing a novel or an historical narrative.

But maybe there are still better reasons to come to an understanding of modern empirical knowledge, of your environments, and of your own mind. Maybe there are still better reasons to further develop your mind.

In this article, I’m continuing my efforts to deepen and enrich my moral self-understanding as an American born in the middle of the 20th century. These efforts run parallel to my studies of modern empirical knowledge, including the seemingly arcane mathematics used in physics, and my assumption is that normal processes of mind-shaping will result in a more or less natural use of that knowledge in these moral analyses and also in my related literary efforts. This is to say that I hope to acquire a reasonable facility with the enriched understanding of fundamental aspects of created being which has been developed in modern mathematics and physics and to integrate that understanding into my understanding of created being in its other aspects.

As I’ve discussed before, a prominent historian, Carroll Quigley has claimed that the economic system of Western Civilization nearly collapsed twice before and new forms of economic organization were found so that West could return to a robust health — see Ways of Thought in the Modern West. Those collapses don’t seem to me to have been brought on by decay processes, though there was some moral and cultural decay which occurred as part of those processes. It seems to me that the very expansion and success of the West created conditions more complex and more abstract than the earlier forms of thought and feeling could handle. Those who accept the usual understanding of ‘abstract’ should be at least a little surprised by this prior statement but I intend it to be taken more or less literally. In my way of thought, the abstract is a different level of being from the concrete but is also part of Creation and not some unexplainable formality separate from concrete reality. I think the West reached a state of complexity centuries ago which indicates that abstract being is more directly a part of our technology, our politics, our art, our philosophy, and so on. During those two earlier periods of near-collapse, our ancestors needed to respond and to develop more powerful minds that could generalize from the concrete up to a more abstract level. The results were impressive, but the advancement of technology and of our understanding of fundamental aspects of created being have accelerated and we’re in worse shape than ever. The remainder of this article is an effort to show how I clarified, somewhat, my own ideas upon this subject because of recent contemplations upon a nasty event in New England history — the war known as King Phillip’s War, a war waged by some of the Indian tribes against the European settlers and some Indian allies.

The details of the war aren’t at issue here except for a general background understanding. My interest lies in an important stream of thoughts and attitudes which was part of the minds New England European colonists which showed itself during the period of King Phillip’s War, a stream which I think to represent a failed intellectual maturing process on the part of highly educated and intelligent men in confrontation with alien cultures. Instead of moving towards a proper abstraction that would have allowed a defense of their own culture but also an understanding of the human good in a different way of life, the European settlers raised their particular way of life to a self-righteous ideal. A conflict of cultures was seen as a war between God’s servants, the White settlers, and Satan’s slaves, the Indians. This stream, which may have been nascent in Puritan thought from the time they first stepped into that wilderness region of the New World, developed fully during the lead-up to the war as the Puritan leaders dealt with the growing resistance of the Indians to the expansion of settled ways of life.

I’ll mention one other relevant complication — the Puritan leaders were also blind to a problem that was affecting their relationships to the Indians who were baptized and living lives superficially similar to those of the European settlers. Those baptized Indians were strange creatures who had been stripped of the externalities of their native culture without truly becoming what the Puritan preachers wanted them to be — English Protestants. Rather than preaching the Gospel and letting it take, or not take, an Indian shape, the Puritans tried to shape those Indians into inferior images of themselves.

This historical mess indicates we’d reached the point centuries ago where we needed to develop the language and concepts and mental tools to deal with the multiple levels of reality created by a world become far more complex than can be handled by the physical perceptions and simple models of reality held by an English mind of the early Enlightenment. As the human mind has encapsulated more and more of the richness and complexity of Creation, we’ve created not only powerful technologies but also forms of social and political relationships which make promises of wonderful possibilities even as they threaten our freedom and our flesh-and-blood relationships and much else. How are we to develop the possibility of richer and more profound moral thought and discourse? How are we to regain control of our individual lives and, by doing so, reshape the West into a morally well-ordered civilization?

I’d suggest that we start by familiarizing ourselves with the tools developed by Gauss and Einstein and Heisenberg and so many others, tools which deal with a reality in which time and space and matter are different from what Plato or Augustine or Aquinas or Kant thought them to be. From there, we can build up layers of understanding which correspond to complex things and even living creatures, especially those complex creatures called human beings. To be sure, some moral philosophers and theologians and novelists have made steps towards a recognition of the world as described by modern empirical knowledge, but we’re far from a true integration of scientific ‘facts’ and ‘theories’ into our general ways of thought.

Let me return to the bloody mess known as King Phillip’s War. I rely upon the narration and discussion of events which is found in the book The Name of War: King Phillip’s War and the Origins of American Identity by the historian Jill Lepore, but I’ll simplify matters by considering only two fairly well-defined groups:

1. American Indians who wished to continue a nomadic existence that was being disrupted by the spread of White settlements, and

2. white settlers who were spreading rapidly, especially through the river valleys, and were disrupting the nomadic patterns of life by clearing forest, letting domestic animals take the food of wild animals, filling in blueberry bogs, etc.

The first group was made up of tribes led by that man who was called King Phillip by the settlers, a man who saw that the Indian way of life was endangered by the very existence of the European settlements. King Phillip apparently wasn’t prejudiced against Europeans as individuals. As was generally true with nomadic American Indians, he was biased against settled cultures and not the individuals from those cultures and was very generous from his standpoint in trying to integrate captured Europeans into the Indian way of life. Since the Indians had no written language and the transmission of their oral histories was disrupted, we don’t know too much about how most of them viewed matters but there was fairly wide-spread support for King Phillip’s war against the White settlers and many of the Indians fighting with the White men or standing on the sidelines did so because they considered King Phillip, his followers, and his allies to be more immediate enemies than the Europeans. The Europeans, with a few notable exceptions, saw the conflict as one between good and evil.

What’s of interest to me in this situation is the apparent lack of intellectual detachment, the lack of abstraction from their particular situation, on the part of the European settlers. There is the appearance of abstraction in the highly literate writings of the Puritan intellectuals but that was really an idealization of a particular and concrete human culture. That is, they idealized a set of beliefs and ways of life not even held by all Englishmen, seeing those beliefs and ways of life as human norms for all times and places. True abstraction generalizes from the particular and specifically recognizes the possibilities of other particulars, in this case, of other ways to realize the moral good in human lives. The sort of pseudo-abstraction I call idealization seems to be common among modern thinkers, beginning at least with Kant’s raising of the Newton’s speculative and empirical view of time and space to the status of metaphysical truth. The Modern Age may well be an elementary school of sorts, a place for learning, or failing to learn, how to think in terms of proper abstractions that we might have a greater understanding of Creation, but we men of the West are not doing well outside of physics and mathematics and technology.

We’ve advanced in our technology very noticeably, allowing the development of, for example, ways of getting at natural resources deep underground and of fashioning them into useful artifacts or processing them for use as fuels. Our technology has allowed an explosion of the human race and a confusing complexity of political and social and moral relationships. We no longer understand ourselves or our societies and we are, in that sense, “lost in the Cosmos.” It’s better to think of us as children in a situation where adults are needed. We need richer and more complex understandings of human morality at the level of our modern complexity of community and political life and also at the level of an individual navigating through this modern mess. And then we need to mature according to those understandings, but I’ll stick to the learning part of this process for now. After all, the implementation of what we learn, if we learn it, is done by way of lots of small-scale experiments in ways of life and ways of thought. It’s not possible to write an authoritative manual for good forms of human life in the 21st century, but it is possible to explore possibilities in the flesh or in fictional narratives.

Those who abstract only by idealizing their particular beliefs and ways of life will remain trapped by their prejudices, country yokels come to the big city and seeing no choices but to give up their ways of life fully or to react against the surrounding confusion by withdrawing into self-righteousness and maybe outright hatred. Only he who learns to abstract up to higher levels can truly see the viewpoint of others and see the goodness in multiple cultures which are in conflict even when he decides that he’s morally bound to side with one. For example, someone might see the goodness in the nomadic life of the New England Indians while deciding that a larger, more settled population is morally preferable to a nomadic society of the few.

Some of the Puritan leaders of New England during the period of King Phillip’s War were very well-read in Newton and all were well-read in the Bible and classical literature and Calvinist theology, yet they proved incapable or unwilling to ascend to a higher level of abstraction during the conflict with King Phillip and the tribes which followed him into war. Staying bound in their own concrete manifestation of Christianity and Western Civilization, they failed to see their position was not one of good and God-centered men fighting against a Satanic enemy but rather that of somewhat good and would-be God-centered men fighting to expand the domain of one manifestation of the Christian West. The enemy wasn’t Satanic but rather barbaric and nomadic. A suitable amount of competent abstract thought on the part of the European settlers of New England would have allowed them to see the true good they were defending but also the good the nomadic Indians were losing. A truer and more just peace might have been obtained even though I doubt the war could have been avoided.

Is it now possible for the West, as a civilization, to achieve greater competence in the abstract thought necessary to understand our complex selves and our complex civilization? We seem about to needlessly destroy our own civilization because of the same sort of self-righteous blindness which led the New England settlers to misunderstand their conflict with King Phillip and his followers. The New England founders dug a rut of sorts and we Americans seem to have traveled that rut in the ensuing three and a half centuries. We’ve even managed to idealize that rut into the path of truth and righteousness.

Americans, perhaps most human beings of the Modern Age, don’t perceive what’s inconvenient to their desired worldview. This is hardly a new observation — Tocqueville was puzzled by this trait back in the 1830s and others since, including Hawthorne and Melville and Solzhenitsyn and Ray Bradbury have at least spoken of this problem. Perhaps Tocqueville in Democracy in America, a book mostly complimentary to Americans, and Solzhenitsyn in his critiques of the West including the forward to the abridged edition of The Gulag Archipelago, were the most direct in their observations. Solzhenitsyn was forced into a renunciation of his almost unqualified high opinion of Americans by one specific spree of systematic criminal behavior committed by the U.S. Army according to agreements involving Roosevelt, Churchill, Truman, and Stalin — see Operation Keelhaul for a summary discussion of the brutal betrayal of many Soviet refugees and even some descendants of refugees from prior generations. All the betrayed human beings were tricked or forced back to the Soviet Union where they were sometimes sent into slave labor camps and sometimes executed right in front of the Allied soldiers. Solzhenitsyn was forced to realize that Americans had been able to walk away from their crimes and to wash their own memories of the horrors they’d participated in.

Maybe, we should be careful in condemning the young soldiers who were probably confused about what was going on, but we have to place full responsibility upon the older and more experienced American and British participants in this crime, including chaplains and medical personnel and senior officers and State Department officials, who would have known pretty well what was happening. They kept their mouths shut in the same cowardly manner as the nice middle-class Germans who served Hitler rather than risking punishment or loss of respectability. Yet, we still have to ask even of those young soldiers: how many of them were paying enough attention to be suspicious at least when they saw the brutal executions of ex-POWs whose crime had been to be captured when Stalin had ordered them to fight to the death? Did they remember what they’d helped to do or had at least witnessed?

What frightens me about talking to those just older than me, Vietnam veterans, is the small percentage who were observant enough to notice, for example, the almost total lack of Viet Cong or North Vietnamese soldiers in the villages invaded by American troops. Some were deeply disturbed to find themselves fighting teenagers and old men who were fighting in front of their family homes and others either didn’t notice the suspicious demographics, if that’s a proper word for the age and sex distribution of corpses. Still others just echoed the government line that these people defending their villages were commies who didn’t place any value on human life. They deserved to be shot down because they were trying to kill Americans who were only there to help the Vietnamese. Those who wish to read an account from a Washington perspective of an awakening awareness of the criminal nature of the war against the Vietnamese people can get hold of a copy of In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam by Robert S. McNamara and Brian VanDeMark. This book speaks about some of the policies set in Washington which led to American soldiers waging war upon Vietnamese civilians and also speaks of the willful ignorance of those managing the war when McNamara was able to confirm by his early access to the libraries of Kennedy and Johnson that the facts of a criminal war were sitting right in front of them during their many meetings where government officials crossed items off their to-do lists and worked towards their career goals before heading home in their nice cars to their nice homes with their nice families.

The sheep can’t be deemed totally innocent but the primary blame belongs to the shepherds. Our moral and spiritual leaders, our so-called thinkers, clergymen and philosophers, theologians and poets, have refused to pay attention to the world around us. Empirical reality has created problems to our established moral views to be sure and it’s just when empirical knowledge threatens to be inconvenient that we human beings are strongly tempted to misperceive or ignore even the most obvious of facts. We need to pay attention most intensely just when empirical reality is most bothersome or most painful.

In fact, empirical knowledge seems to always come into conflict eventually with any set of ideas, political or economic, scientific or philosophical, technological or domestic. The Creator’s thoughts lie always above and beyond us and those thoughts are best seen by way of human thoughts and human behaviors which are active responses to Creation and which prove to be appropriate responses. Even those few doctrines which we Christians claim to be revealed truths have had to be reinterpreted under the pressure of changing understandings of empirical reality. For example, we believe God has promised a resurrection into life without end for those who belong to His Son, Jesus Christ. He didn’t give us detailed instructions and we should pay more attention to modern biology, including evolutionary theories, as part of the process of understanding those promises of resurrection. After all, our inherited understandings of those promises were partly drawn from (often misunderstood) doctrines of pagan philosophers. For example, the idea of the immortal soul came largely from Plato though there’s no reason to believe that Plato’s ‘immortal soul’ had anything to do with individual human beings.

To see truth, we first must pay attention to the things around us, to reliable histories of the West and of our own particular parts of it, to the best knowledge gathered by physicists and chemists and engineers, to the needs and desires of those around us, and to other aspects of empirical reality. In these early years of the 21st century, our environments include the abstract domains of modern mathematics as well as our best views of the space-time regions when the universe first expanded out from an extremely dense state. The environments of anyone who reads regularly or even watches decent documentaries on television also extend to ancient Egypt and to the highlands of Kenya.

Pay attention and think if you would ascend towards some plausible view of the nature and meaning of Creation and all the individual creatures it includes.

Right now, we Americans are paying a price for not paying attention because our economy has been gutted by the various criminal activities, domestic and foreign, of our government and big-business leaders. This isn’t the place to discuss those details and there are others far better informed about the details than I am. I’m merely pointing out that we could have stopped this disaster years ago as it was developing but we didn’t pay attention. As for me… I haven’t voted for a major party candidate for President of the U.S. since 1988 and few other major party candidates for any political office in these past two decades. I even turned in a blank ballot once when there were no acceptable alternative candidates. For what it’s worth, I also gave up any hope of ever receiving significant Social Security or Medicare benefits back in the late 1980s. These problems with our political and economic systems were not so hidden except to those who were willfully blind.

In any case, a morally well-ordered society, and all the attendant practical advantages, comes into being by actions that can only be proper if they are in response to a properly perceived world, a world to which we pay attention.

We need to develop a healthy fear of what passes for education in the current age because that form of mental development is, in fact, little more than deformation of the pliable student into a trained monkey. To speak first of abstract thought, book-centered learning is best done by minimal years spent on basic reading skills followed by supervised — but, ideally, flexible — courses of individual reading interspersed with perhaps gatherings for discussion or problem solving and then — most importantly — writing and problem-solving exercises which are critiqued by the teacher and any assistants he designates. In response to those who might object that such a program is best-suited to the needs of the intellectually talented, I can only ask — why torture other students and waste resources on the pretense that we can develop the higher-level intellectual talents of those students who have no such talent? Why not give those students the education they need, basic literacy skills combined with apprenticeships in law or journalism, engine-repair or computer programming? Don’t force anyone but let them gravitate to what suits their inclinations and then let them gravitate elsewhere with no more demands than serious effort in return for the use of valuable resources. As it is, we have a bastardized educational system that kills enthusiasm in potential mechanical geniuses or musical geniuses as rapidly as it kills enthusiasm in potential physicists or language scholars. [We also have put ourselves in a position where it's going to be hard to finance any serious educational system for all of our youngsters, but I'll pass by that problem in this article.]

It’s enthusiasm that most concerns me here. It’s a sign of wonder, of a young human creature who’s fascinated by numbers and symbols, by reading and writing stories, by producing wonderful sounds with that guitar or piano, by taking apart an engine to see what the insides look like, by building walls or cooking delicious pot-pies, by caring for children or caring for horses and cows. Stop thinking of that child as a generic six year-old piece of human flesh. Stop thinking of that child as a future doctor or mother.

Is this practical? Probably not, but we need to see some sort of clear image of paradise so we can build a better shantytown. In any case, I wish to concentrate upon that one aspect of the human being, that one admirable aspect not well-developed in our incompetently utilitarian age — the sense of wonder at what lies around us, seen and unseen. This is a sense of wonder common to Gore Vidal and Duke Ellington and Richard Feynman and Bill Elliot — the Awesome Bill from Dawsonville who never saw a car engine he couldn’t push harder. In response to the legitimate needs for mental, moral, and spiritual development, we tend to ignore that sense of wonder, in fact, to kill it that the student might be more readily molded to the needs of the educational bureaucracies and the other bureaucracies of the modern world. In other words, we don’t educate so much as we try, at best, to train a higher-quality monkey.

Provide opportunities and see which ones the child responds to. And it’s likely that a given child will respond to specific opportunities with different levels of enthusiasm. And those specific responses will change as he matures. The child whose visual systems mature slowly may be late in taking to reading, but he may turn out to be a great scholar of the languages of ancient India. In the meantime, let him play with the dog and nurture his sense of wonder with walks through the woods. Avoid the stupid and cruel assumption that there’s some sort of standard schedule of physical and mental development to which all children should conform.

It’s that sense of wonder which is important, a sense of wonder which often starts out so poorly focused. It’s that sense of wonder that might lead that child to become a truly educated human being rather than a trained monkey. What is a truly educated human being? It’s what might become of that girl who bloodies her toes practicing ballet steps. It’s what might become of the boy who insists on taking machines and electronic devices apart to see how they work. It’s what might become of the boy who has become obsessed with numbers and symbols at a young age. It’s a good mechanic who knows how to deal with customers and suppliers as well as the historian who can talk properly at a conference or when he’s negotiating entrance to the archives of a hostile government.

Some men of greater wisdom have claimed that true education has little to do with particular stocks of knowledge and is instead a developed capacity for learning. I’ll broaden that claim:

True education is what results in the capacity to respond confidently and appropriately to God’s Creation.

In terms of traditional Christian teachings about virtue, the opposite, the incapacity to respond confidently and appropriately to God’s Creation, is the sin of sloth. In more recent centuries, sloth has been somewhat officially redefined as mere laziness or idleness, mere inactivity. In fact, many human beings who are guilty of the traditionally defined sin of sloth have busy schedules, even if many slots in those schedules involve shopping or submitting passively to being entertained. Sloth is a lack of faith in the goodness of Creation more than a mere laziness.

The opposite of sloth is a disciplined capacity to wonder. The opposite of sloth can involve hours spent staring at the stars in a clear winter sky or hours dreaming of a life lived in Colonial Massachusetts. Somewhere, Jacques Barzun pointed out that the successful creators are those who know how to properly loaf. To loaf in a sense of wonder is to learn how to align your thoughts with those of our Maker. It’s to learn how to enter into His creative acts, His acts-of-being. It’s also to prepare for periods of more active learning and of the production of a book or a drawing for a new type of plumbing system, periods in which a more conventional discipline becomes necessary.

In terms of Christian salvation, I’m advocating education as a path of preparation for participation in the life of God. It’s the capacity to wonder and to respond properly to the object of wonder which might make us creatures capable of enjoying life without end.

Ten years ago, I’d read a book about the modern understanding of human color vision: A Vision of the Brain by Semir Zeki, a prominent neuroscientist. This book also provides a summary of the history of theories of color vision. Recently, I realized this subject provides a good example of why there is no knowledge problem from a philsophical viewpoint, that is, why epistemology isn’t a valid field of study — at least to a follower of the empirical methods of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Think of a bright red object, perhaps a child’s ball. Put it in the direct sunlight of a July day and you see a bright red ball. Move it to the shade and you still see the same ball with the same bright red color, though it’s now reflecting a very different set of light-waves. Helmholtz and one or two other great scientists of the 1800s pointed to this fact and noted it disproves the usual theories of color vision — that we perceive colors directly. As late as the 1960s by my personal experience, perhaps to this year, elementary school children were being taught that three primary colors are mixed to produce all other colors. All those colors, especially the primary ones, were treated as having objective and absolute existence.

The theory of the absolute and objective nature of colors survived despite the inconvenience of not being able to deal with that simple counter-observation that the same object reflects different light-waves under different conditions, yet we usually can see that same object as being the same color. In the middle of the 20th century, Edwin Land, an expert in film-technology and founder of Polaroid Corp., thoroughly disproved the theory by showing that without context, without a chance to consider contrast with surrounding areas, we see no colors where there were films of the brightest of reds or oranges. When we’re able to contrast one region with another, our eyes and brains work to produce a colored vision of the world by some biological equivalents of complex mathematical calculations comparing wavelengths of neighboring regions in the world around us. The resulting brain-states generate that useful and often wonderful illusion of a world of color.

Why would the blind processes of evolution produce such a marvel? Our color vision seems to be adapted to the task of allowing us to recognize the same object, say a ripe apple, under various lighting conditions. There is, thus, an immediate sense in which our color vision does help us discern truth, but the colors mislead us by seeming to present themselves as objective aspects of the world. They’re actually codings of a sort, codings of some very complex aspects of reality which give us useful information as we go about our lives. Those codings are embodied objectively in brain-states but the corresponding colors can’t really be found in the external world.

This entire issue helps us to see the legitimacy of epistemological considerations from a neuroscientific and physiological angle, but leads us to understand why epistemology isn’t legitimate as a philosophical enterprise. In principle, we can know the objective truth which lies behind the color vision our eyes and brains produce. We can see, if only by way of formulas and visual simulations, the true wavelengths of light emitted by that bright red ball under different conditions and can even see the brain-states which are the objective foundation of this subjective vision of a colored world. We can also see DNA unraveling and stars exploding billions of years ago, near the beginning of this expansionary phase of the universe. We can control industrial processes by seeing the ‘true’ colors of hot metals being forged and we can see inside the skull of a child so the surgeon can plot out his strategy for dealing with a life-threatening epilepsy. True knowledge problems involve the acquisition of knowledge in a world which is remarkably transparent to the efforts of hard-thinking and hard-working human beings.

In Ways of Thought in the Modern West, I discussed the views of the historian Carroll Quigley who summarized the fundamental Christian philosophy, methodical realism, in these words:

The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

It’s not easy to be truthful, especially if you raise the stakes and define ‘truthful’ in an active and not just a passive sense. To be truthful in a fuller sense means that you don’t just sit still and try not to lie, you go out and play an active role in this communal process by which the truth unfolds. We can transcend our perceptual and cognitive limitations in many ways, attaining a more complete and less biased understanding of our world by proper use of our brains and these opposing thumbs which allow us to make some remarkable instruments. Problems of knowledge are particular, practical problems which can, at least in principle, be solved in somewhat final ways rather than being part of the open-ended understanding of created being and the story which God is telling with that created being.

More than a year ago, I wrote some articles on the relationship between Thomistic existentialism and Jamesian pragmatism as developed by William James himself and further developed in recent years by two neuroscientists, Gerald Edelman and Walter J. Freeman. There is a great overlap between Thomistic existentialism and Jamesian pragmatism in the initial steps of responding to our environments and trying to make greater sense of those environments. There is a major difference in the assumption of any Thomist that there is something to be made greater sense of, a rational something that serves God’s purposes. As you perceive more, you come to understand a greater whole which has objective existence, a world. Eventually, you might even come to perceive and understand a still greater whole, all of Creation.

This process of perception and understanding starts with our immediate environments. Following Einstein, we can now perceive a physical universe, unified and coherent and complete, but that universe can be seen as raional in a fuller only with a trust in the goodness of it all, a trust that has to rest upon a faith in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-trusting Creator. With that faith, the physical universe becomes what I call a world, unified and coherent and complete in a greater sense as it is directed to the purposes of the Creator.

This trust in the goodness of what lies around us explains the Thomistic denial of epistemology as a philosophical enterprise. A follower of the empirical and existential methods of St. Thomas has to have faith that things are true. This means he has to accept that perceptions of things can be used to form legitimate and true knowledge without any epistemological angst. I’ve extended this faith with the further claim that truths are thing-like, and this is a faith that rests upon the belief that all contingent beings are manifestations of particular thoughts which God freely chose for Creation. It’s not a Pollyanna faith that we can trust our immediate perceptions or our intuitions. A system of thought based upon Thomistic principles can certainly recognize the legitimacy of epistemology if it’s seen as an empirical study of man’s problems in acquiring valid and unbiased information from the world.

I discuss the good and bad in pragmatism as developed by William James and his followers in these articles: What is Mind?: Pragmatism and Thomistic Existentialism and What is Mind?: More on Pragmatism and Thomistic Existentialism.

Americans who claim to be traditionalist Catholics are fighting on two sides holding irreconcilable views on the most fundamental of questions, such as “What is man?” and “What is truth?”. Most seem oblivious to the battle though they stand in the middle, one sword in their right hands to slash at their own left sides and one sword in their left hands to slash at their own right sides. This is perhaps most clear in politics where there are those devout Catholics who freely collaborate with the welfare bureaucracies of the modern nation-state and those who freely collaborate with the warfare bureaucracies. Traditionalist Protestants and Jews are probably in a similar situation but I’ll restrict my analysis to Catholics for a reason I’ll make clear later. I’ll also be concerned not with politics but with the cause of the intellectual incoherence of Catholics, especially those most convinced they’re full of the wisdom which could restore the West to an earlier state when profound speculative thought and artistic energy and moral seriousness were as common as good work in theoretical physics or bridge-construction.

How have traditionalist Catholics chosen to think about the core truths of their heritage? I consider that core to be pretty small — a few moral truths and the revelations codified in the ancient creeds such as those of the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon. The answer to the question is: Traditionalist Catholics have chosen to think about their heritage of core truths by carrying forward entire complex and complicated theological and philosophical systems with all their baggage of wrongful or incomplete empirical and speculative knowledge ignoring all the evidence that that knowledge is no longer plausible in light of what we know about created being.

John Henry Newman tried to tell his fellow Catholics that even the most absolute of truthful statements must be constantly restated to remain true. Any attempts to speak truths in terms of the words and concepts of past ages will actually deform those truths. But the American historian Carrol Quiqley had even greater insight when he defined the basic Christian philosophy of moderate realism: “The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.” (See Ways of Thought in the MOdern West for a discussion of Professor Quigley’s views and their relevance to our current situation which might be the beginning of the end-game — the collapse of at least one phase of Western Civilization.)

If we Catholic Christians restate our inherited truths in terms of our current knowledge of God’s Creation, then we can actually make sense when speaking to believers and non-believers alike. Newman was no coward when it came to speaking about his Catholic beliefs, but he’s taken seriously, and has always been taken seriously, by modern intellectuals of all stripes. But, as I said above, there’s more which comes out in Quigley’s statement. It’s hardly surprising that truth in the realm of mathematics unfolds through many refuse to see that there is much of our non-mathematical thinking that uses ancient mathematical knowledge and could be enriched greatly by more modern discoveries. It does seem surprising, at first, that even revealed truths can also unfold in time through that same communal process. There are plenty of examples, valid and invalid, which can be drawn from modern Catholic beliefs, but I’ll choose a technical example in line with the general thrust of my work.

The writers of the Old Testament books spoke both powerfully and vaguely about God’s vastness. To the extent they had an idea of infinity, it was an intuitive idea of ongoingness, either of counting ({1,2,3,…}) or of measuring distances (paths). There were efforts at times, perhaps climaxing in vague speculations by St. Augustine of Hippo, to speak of God of transcending even that ongoing sort of infinity, but serious discussion of different sorts of infinities became possible only in the late 1800s when Cantor saw what was implicit in the calculus and number-theory — the infinity from counting and that from measuring distances are different sizes. The number of points in a line is so large than they can’t be mapped onto the integers. Cantor’s work didn’t settle the issue for a while. Cantor himself wondered if it was rational to speak of different sizes of infnity and many mathematicians attacked the idea as insane. As it turns out, the very concept of ’size’ seems to be, at best, contextual and has to be generalized. At least from the creaturely viewpoint, the fundamental relationship is relationship. That is, if we try to match real numbers, which correspond to points on a line, to integers, can we get an exhaustive mapping? The answer is no. There are many real numbers left over. So mathematicians and mathematical philosophers know some things about infinity which are fundamental to the abstract aspects of created being. Just because Christian theologians and metaphysicians have failed to deal with modern language, we run into a language problem, so I’ll retreat to ’size’ words to point out that presumably God is at least as large as the absolute infinity of modern mathematicians which is far beyond the sort of infinity dealt with in Aristotle or Aquinas. We should shake our heads when a modern professor or textbook uses Aristotle’s inadequate concepts of infinity to prove statements about causation and the Prime Mover.

Yet, many traditionalist Catholics, including theologians and philosophers, talk and act as if that process of truth unfolding ended during some Golden Age which preceded our current age with its very large opportunities and problems, including many in intellectual domains. Having separated themselves from the current understandings of created being, it would be hardly surprising to learn that traditionalist Catholics adopt incoherent positions on political and social and moral issues. After all, if you remain willfully ignorant about the best knowledge your age has about time and space and matter and relationships, you’ll hardly be capable of thinking about the complex entities which grow up alongside that knowledge and because of that knowledge. For example, despite the best instincts of some Catholic thinkers, including most modern popes, freedom inside a complex civilization doesn’t sit well with traditionalist Catholics.

We make simultaneous sense of personal or local-community freedom and a complex society that functions well to provide for its members only when we can accept, at least intuitively, the ideas associated with ‘chaos’, ‘evolution’, ‘development’, and — the mother of them all — ’self-organizing systems’. The tools of thought acceptable to most traditionalist Catholics are those which correspond pretty well with Euclidean geometry and Aristotelian metaphysics. Those are the tools suited to construct simple schematics and to analyze the corresponding hierarchical systems. They are mental tools more compatible with top-down control than with freedom. They recognize simple relationships and those have to be imposed upon a messy world, messy to those not willing to deal with the world on its own terms. Those tools allow for the build-up of complicated systems by adding ever more entities and relationships to those schematics, but that’s not good enough. It’s akin to trying to write a Shakespearian drama by scribbling millions of pages filled with the vocabulary and grammatical structures of a six year-old. The retreat of traditionalist thinkers into a ghetto of pre-Enlightenment ideas has put us Catholics into this ridiculous situation where the purely physical aspects of our human beings inhabit a richer and more complex world than do our moral and social and spiritual aspects.

My main reason for writing of Catholic thought in this matter was not that I’m Catholic myself but rather that Catholic thinkers had founded Western Civilization and then had dominated nearly all domains of the intellect for centuries and I want to put forward, in a blunt way, the reason for the loss of that dominance. The period of founding and Catholic domination of the intellectual aspects of Western Civilization extended from at least Augustine of Hippo (circa 400AD) through the early Renaissance (circa 1500AD). You can hardly go a page in a history of thought during that period without encountering a variety of priests and monks, many of them canonized saints — holy as well as smart and creative. And then Catholic thinkers, starting with priests and monks, began to disappear from the mainstream of Western thought. What happened?

There’s a simple story behind this situation, though there are many subtle aspects which could be analyzed if we were to come to a better understanding. I’ll first repeat Professor Quigley’s summary of the Christian philosophy of moderate realism: “The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.” The Catholic Church forgot this, and Protestants never knew it because Luther and Calvin lived and worked after the onset of memory lapse. If moderate realism is the outlook best suited to Creation, then we can go a little further and claim the process of truth unfolding starts with an openness to the world around us, an openness that is at first a wonder at the glories of physical reality and a respect for the things which are true. Catholic thinkers turned from those glories of God’s world, preferring to study and re-study human systems of thought which contained a lot of empirical and speculative knowledge but that knowledge was frozen in time, a time I put during the Renaissance though Etienne Gilson, who certainly knew the history of human thought better than I, put the time of freezing, or retreat into an intellectual ghetto, during the horrors of the French Revolution (circa 1790). The general pattern is what counts. Catholic thinkers weren’t driven out of science and political thought and literature. They, like the non-Catholic and anti-Catholic thinkers of the Modern Age, encountered new questions, new problems and opportunities. Having no canned answers for those questions, Catholic thinkers threw what my Grannie called a snit-fit, taking their ball and going home where they put up ghetto walls to protect themselves against a world which didn’t behave correctly according to their favorite manuals of acceptable and proper thoughts.

So long as Catholic thinkers were more respectful of God’s Creation than of inherited systems of thought, so long as they tested inherited thoughts and their own new thoughts against the evidence of God’s Creation, they dominated the thought of Western Civilization. When they retreated from their responsibility to make sense of Creation, the intellectual initiative in the West passed to those thinkers who were increasingly non-Catholic or Catholic in a way that allowed them to separate their work as explorers of God’s Creation from their faith. Outside physics and biology and history, the result has been decay and a general sense of incoherence. A collection of vaguel related entities now stands where a world should be.

Why do we resist changes in our beliefs about our selves, the world around us, and our relationship to God? Americans in particular, for all our claims to honesty about facts and our claims to have a hardheaded respect for reality, find it difficult to accept empirical evidence that we’re not quite the creatures we think ourselves to be, that the universe isn’t nearly the place our ancestors thought it to be.

Why do so many seem to recoil, for example, from the possibility that the immaterial parts of a human being are inalienable from the material parts evolving over the millions of years, evolving further over the millenia-length lifetimes of civilizations, and then developing in particular forms over lifetimes? Often, I’ve heard claims that it’s hard to believe in such a ‘materialistic’ view of the human being, which seems to reduce mind-like and soul-like aspects to ‘mere’ material aspects. My response would be simply, “We won’t understand any aspects of human nature until we understand the bodily foundations.” Just acknowledge the basic facts, then learn a bit of what physicists and mathematicians have discovered about the nature of being and of abstractions. Then, we’ll be able to speak intelligently about immaterial aspects of being, such as relationships. I’ve found no need to wave hands and speak of mysterious entities attached to human beings once I began to understand modern empirical knowledge, once I brought down my barriers against the reality of God’s Creation. Aquinas told us to do that centuries ago, to learn the wisdom of God by studying the creatures of God, but even Catholics who claim to highly honor him have no real understanding of his basic claims, of his methodology endorsed by Pope Leo XIII in the encyclical Aeterni Patris, choosing instead to turn his speculative arguments into revelations of unimpeachable truths. To many Catholics, being ‘Thomistic’ means that we pronounce his conclusions about God’s Creation, based upon empirical knowledge circa 1340, to trump any conflicting conclusions based upon somewhat more recent empirical knowledge.

Take, for example, the soul. The loss of an entity we can’t see or hear or detect would seem to be little more than the loss of an entity which filled in some gaps in our knowledge. We have filled in those gaps in recent centuries with better and more complete knowledge of time and space and matter and of abstractions tied to physical reality. We have learned a lot by studying God’s Creation in disciplined ways and we have learned that the stuff of this physical universe has properties which fill in those gaps in a more natural way. If you wish, you can even think of matter as being frozen ’soul-stuff’, but it’s better to simply acknowledge that modern science has taken the ancient idea of the ’soul’ from us. Modern science has also given to us the opportunity to re-unite our mind-like or soul-like aspects with our embodied and particular natures. In other words, unlike Plato and perhaps Aristotle, unlike even Aquinas, we have ways of understanding our mind-like and soul-like aspects in terms of our human bodies. We have the possibility of seeing our human natures in a more unified way by grounding our mind-like or soul-like aspects upon our bodily natures. This opportunity is tied to the contingent nature of not only our particular universe, but also its fundamental structures of time and space and matter. We have discovered in the past century or so that it’s not just life but the universe itself that has developed from a vague and chaotic state to its current specific and somewhat organized state. What we’ve learned about the evolution of life fits in with those more fundamental discoveries about time, space, matter, and the nature of the abstractions which form many of our thoughts. The universe is consistent across its parts, stars evolving much like chemical processes do on the surface of at least one planet, some of those processes becoming self-sustaining life and some not.

Some would hold on to traditional ideas without even daring to reconcile them with modern knowledge of God’s Creation. These men take the technology and reject the knowledge underlying that technology, choosing to believe many fantastic things that were plausible in earlier centuries but no longer. They simply ignore inconvenient possibilities and even inconvenient facts of the most obvious sort and remain wedded to the ideas which were pushed into their heads when they were young.

Others can accept the technology and also the underlying knowledge — to the extent it helps them to break free of those aspects of moral and political and social traditions which they find inconvenient. This shows in those who would use evolution and other matters of modern knowledge to attack traditional religious beliefs but can somehow miss seeing that convenient knowledge is tied to politically inconvenient knowledge about such matters as genetic differences in ethnic groups which have evolved in different environments and as a result of different responses of their ancestors to those environments.

This ability to accept only an edited version of our knowledge of reality was first noticed, so far as I know, in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and was also discussed by Solzhenitsyn in the forward to the abridged version of The Gulag Archipeligo. Various writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hermann Melville, and Ray Bradbury have also discussed forms of intellectual or moral psychosis in essays, such as Hawthorne’s introduction to the first edition of The Scarlett Letter, or displayed such behavior in novels, such as Moby Dick and The Confidence Man by Melville and Fahrenheit 451 by Bradbury. Like Captain Ahab from Moby Dick, we can say our means are sane, it’s our ends — including our understanding of what it all means — which are insane. In Christian terms, we know how to confirm our opinions against all evidence but we don’t know how to listen to God speaking through His Creation. Most believe that we have truth in our minds, while I believe that we are born with basic mental abilities which can shape themselves to truths found in God’s Scripture and in His Creation, but only if we direct ourselves to such a task.

What seems interesting to me is my optimistic view of the possibilities of the human mind. I’m optimistic just because of my view of the human being as a peculiar sort of ape which evolved by natural processes in this physical universe. Because our minds have evolved at the species level and then have developed at the individual level, we can encapsulate knowledge — even wisdom — found in a Creation far greater than we are. We can learn to think as our Creator thinks. Our minds can be, in a sense, the entirety of Creation rather than simply what lies inside our skulls. Natural processes have brought about a set of mental capabilities which are retrospectively understandable and also remarkably powerful. Those mental capabilities are totemic in men who are hunters-gatherers, allowing men to put themselves in the place of the animals they hunt, imagining themselves to be fleeing human hunters and anticipating the actions of those animals. In a sense, our minds haven’t changed in fundamental ways, but the modern mind has shaped itself, in some, to knowledge of a greater Creation while that early mind was shaped to knowledge of a local environment of, say, deer and blueberry bogs. While our ancestors imagined themselves to be that mammoth fleeing them, a more recent human being named Albert Einstein imagined himself to be moving along with a ray of light or traveling in various accelerating or non-accelerating elevators. The second set of imaginings were possible because Einstein’s ancestors had evolved the capabilities of anticipating the actions of animals. In both cases, the human mind functioned well just because it was, so to speak, sent out to encounter a reality greater than we can find inside ourselves — until that very reality is encapsulated in our minds.

To accomplish such feats of imagination or the bodily feats of an athlete, the brain needs interfaces to the external environments and to the other parts of the same body, regions of the brain which hold those models of our bodies or models of our greater selves which exist across spans of time and space. Those mental processes have allowed a ’self’ to come into being by way of brain activities which are being researched intensely.

Most of us have seen pictures of a homunculus in our brain, reflecting the nervous system resources devoted to specfic bodily regions, so that fingers are outsized on that little human being in our brain, more so in a concert pianist or a watchmaker. The brain shifts resources if we lose our sight so that our hearing and touch become more important. When that happens, that cartoonish fellow in our brains loses his eyes and grows elephant ears and still larger fingers. That cartoonish fellow is our main contact with our physical environment and not just a funny drawing in books about the brain.

There’s a far more complex and more mysterious process occuring in the human brain which I’ll describe for now as a modeling of the self as an entity with a somewhat continuous existence in smaller or greater regions of time and space, depending upon the culture and the individual. We construct ourselves and those constructions are us to our conscious awareness because those constructions are the interfaces between our embodied selves and other parts of reality. This isn’t a doctrine of solipsism but rather one of a creature born into and adapted to a world of developmental processes, a world in which evolution of a family line and development of an individual occur as a result of lucky or unlucky, effective or ineffective, responses to opportunities and dangers. Our animal awareness and our self-awareness are interfaces between physical and cultural reality and our bodies and our more abstract selves.

See Staking Your Faith on Gaps in Empirical Knowledge for a short discussion of the way in which we form our sense of self in light of fairly recent discoveries that some, perhaps all, out-of-body and near-death experiences, are seemingly caused by disruptions to those systems which construct our senses of ’self’.

I’ll interject a warning here, one based upon other recent discoveries about the brain which I’ve discussed a number of times in my blog entries. Research indicates our embodied selves often make decisions, at least certain types of easily studied decisions, before the regions of the brain associated with self-conscious regions become active. This indicates to me that our self-consciousness has little to do with our current lives. I think our self-consciousness plays a major, potentially dominant, role in shaping our greater beings and their actions for the future. That ’self-conscious’ self isn’t the human being, but rather a part of the human being. In a simplistic but useful way, I could say the ’self-conscious’ self is a set of brain processes which serve certain needs of the human being.

The human mind evolved in specific settings, starting with that general setting we know as our immediate physical reality. Even some of the most fundamental truths built into our brains are not necessary truths but rather truths dependent upon certain contingent properties of our empirical world. For example, young infants show a strong belief in the continuity of the existence of physical objects. Such a belief has to be qualified in a scientifically advanced society. Nuclear physics, gravitational theory, quantum mechanics, evolutionary theory and various other theories of self-organizing systems and selectional processes, have all cast doubt upon the stability or even the continuity of existence of material entities or even entire classes of entities. The large degree of continuity of existence we observe is actually due to our position as short-lived, medium-sized creatures in a fairly cool but not frigid universe.

Yet, our experience of the continuity of existence is real and was real to our ancestors. Brain processes assuming such a reality allow us to avoid reasoning each time about the likelihood that cliff in front of us will still be there when we return this way next year. Our belief in the continuity of existence of most things is so strong an instinct that even death was seen as something to be explained away. We think our selves must surely have existence beyond death. In early stages of the evolution of the human mind, there even seems to be a belief in some sort of life after death for the animals a hunter kills and eats. Hunters in many cultures will pray for forgiveness to the spirits of that animal.

Those beliefs in life after death weren’t irrational, even if the motivations seem obscure to modern thinkers, but we need new ways of thinking about the human race, about the individual human being, about death, about the human mind, about the possibilities of life after death. We need to honestly confront the modern empirical knowledge that indicates rather strongly we humans are the result of billions of years of evolution, that the foundations of human nature are flesh and blood. We Christians in particular need to take the knowledge which comes from studying God’s Creation and make sense of it in light of our Christian faith.

We can do that because our minds, being open and creative responses to at least some significant part of Creation, are not bound by the limitations of the present ideas of the human self and what it can be aware of, what it can know. If we could somehow see our ancestors walking around the plains of Africa 100,000 years ago, it’d be hard to guess from their behavior that they would give rise to creatures which could fly to the moon, could probe the secrets of nature, could travel into the abstract regions of greater and greater infinities, could explore forms of narration not strictly limited by ordinary human sense of time and space, could even become aware of a transcendent God. The facts of the matter lead to a narrative explanation in which human accomplishments are possible just because the human mind is an evolved entity which seeks the only true sort of understanding for a creature — an ability to take in the world around that creature so that fundamental aspects of reality become basic components of thought and more complex aspects are constructed from those basic truths by proper forms of reasoning. Those forms of reasoning are themselves derived from our inborn mental capabilities shaped by our responses to various sorts of experiences.

We oppose the idea that the human race has evolved and is part of a physical system of evolution and development because we wish to hold on to an idea of a more stable and more permanent self. We insist on seeing our ‘true’ selves as existing above the flux of events, because other possibilities, more in tune with our current empirical knowledge, are psychologically threatening to us. We want our thinking processes to have absolute validity. We want ourselves, once born, to have absolute existence. Consequently, we reject, in various ways, more reasonable understandings of the human race which indicate such views of ourselves are irrational.