I’m still trying to sketch out better ways to view causation and the human moral situation, ways that recognize both Christian truths and modern empirical knowledge. The first step is to start a refounding of our understanding of our own human nature and of concrete being in general, a refounding based upon the richer understandings of being which have been developed in modern empirical science, especially theoretical physics and mathematics. Most language and concepts currently used to discuss causation and morality and human nature in general draw upon Aristotelian biology, Euclidean geometry, and a naive physics. Historical analysis, literary exegesis, moral philosophy, politics, and other important narrative-based sciences draw upon some understanding of being and currently that means that old and somewhat soured wine of ancient and Medieval science and metaphysics and mathematics.
There’s at least one example of a pre-modern thinker, the poet Dante, having some intuition that something different might be needed to discribe, for example, the path to salvation. At the very beginning of Dante’s Inferno, the pilgrim keeps going straight while the path wanders away. The true path to salvation can move away from us while we move ahead paying attention to less important matters. I’ll invite the reader to think of the path to moral integrity if he doesn’t think in terms of salvation and then I’ll point to a historical analogy oft-discussed by Hannah Arendt. The nice middle-class Germans of the 1930s and 1940s continued to act morally by the rules of earlier decades. That is, they worked hard, advanced in their careers, paid their taxes and other bills, took care of their children, and so forth. To do this, they were processing papers for Jews and others being moved to Warsaw, making chemicals designed to kill human beings efficiently and quickly, manufacturing tanks and fighter-planes, and so forth. What’s still worse is that many Christian leaders encouraged their followers to act in this way.
With our simplifed view of being and our simplistic tools for analyzing narratives, we tend to draw straight lights and to assume straight paths. When those don’t work for even qualitative descriptions, we wave our hands helplessly or perhaps we speak of the complications of reality and maybe of moral freedom. Those complications are real. Moral freedom is real. The problem is that we have no ways of speaking of the full complexity of modern human life in intelligent and literate ways. Philosophers and poets worthy of those titles should be able to give the citizens of the modern world ways to speak of reality and moral freedom.
In other words, we have a frightening lack of richness in most of our current political and social discourse relative to our situations. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has been raising the claim for more than two decades that the lack of meaningful encounter in our public discussions about controversial issues (such as abortion or embryonic stem-cell research or male-female relationships) is due to our lack of a shared moral vocabulary. As I see matters, not those who share my beliefs (I’m a morally conservative Catholic) nor any others have a rich enough vocabulary to express our situation. We default to behaviors and to narratives which assume environments far simpler than the ones we inhabit and relationships far simpler than those of our modern societies. For now, I’ll claim without discussion that this has occurred just because new possibilities have arisen due to the enrichment of the human mind which has developed in response to God’s Creation but this enrichment has occurred primarily in physics, mathematics, and related sciences. We have enriched our moral, social, and political environments but we don’t understand those environments and have done no better than to try to deform traditional ideas developed when the human mind was developed to a lesser understanding of created being and when human societies and relationships were correspondingly simpler. Various thinkers have noted we’ve passed through an age when human technological accomplishments and scientific knowledge advanced even as our moral and political situation decayed. Those two phenomena are linked and don’t occur together as a matter of accident. Our technology advanced because our physics advanced and that was tied to richer understandings of being. The technological advancements allowed huge growths in population as well as huge increases in the specialization of human work and of the complexity of our societies and political entities.
Much of this analysis can be made simpler and more abstract. To understand man’s place in the world and his relationships to his fellow-men requires a preliminary stage in which questions have to be formulated regarding the very nature of time, space, matter, empirical truth, abstractions, and other creatures involved in man’s understanding of being. This is the sort of preliminary metaphysical analyses that Newton and Einstein performed before moving on to their detailed mathematical analyses. Those analyses produced understandings of time, space, etc. that haven’t yet been dealt with by philosophers, theologians, historians, poets, and men of practical affairs.
Let me take one example from the human condition where a more enriched view of being might help us understand our own age and perhaps the immediate future. Such understanding is necessary for intelligent and lasting solutions to our various problems.
The human species is unusual in its radical dimorphism by sex. Solid sociobiological analyses indicate rather strongly that this is due to the heavy price women pay to reproduce including the long gestation period — and even at that the human infant is still embryonic at birth. This is the reason for the much greater maturity of chimpanzees at birth and for months afterwards.
In general, the slow maturing of the human child places a great cost upon the human female relative to the cost (and value) of a single offspring to a female chimpanzee who pushes her young into adult lives after a few years. What does this mean in terms of social organization and in terms of moral relationships between male and female? I don’t know. Look at the changes brought about just by changes in levels of poverty and prosperity. What sorts of invariant aspects are there to human social possibilities or the possible relationships between individual men and women? What sorts of transformations occur when a poor society becomes wealthy and how can those transformations go wrong?
I can give an example of problems created when transformations go wrong, resulting perhaps in twisted social structures and deformed relationships between men and women. When the industrial revolution began to mature, a battle of sorts ensued between the advocates of the banking/investment system currently collapsing and others who were supporting a system of craftsman cooperatives financed by men less greedy than the Morgans or Rockefellers or Paulsons. (See From Cottage to Work Station: The Family’s Search for Social Harmony in the Industrial Age by Allan C. Carlson and published by Ignatius Press for a short discussion of this struggle. As I recall, Quaker investors were prominent in the effort to support that system of craftsmen coops.)
The advocates of centralized finance, stock-markets, etc. won and one result was the devaluation of skills as depicted in the novel Sybil or The Two Nations by the British polician Benjamin Disraeli. Unskilled workers prospered and were drawn out of their rural homes and skilled workers sank into poverty. At first, the budding capitalists drew young men and young women into their factories but a backlash in Western countries led to increased wages for heads of households that allowed women to remain out of factories and offices with their children or the children of others if they had infertile marriages or chose to be ‘spinster’ teachers.
Throughout most of history, Women had economic roles as important as those of men (sometimes more and sometimes less), though generally speaking female foraging was less prestigious than male hunting and farm-wifery less prestigious than farm-husbandry, so to speak. Suddenly, middle-class women of the 1800s and forward had a strange role separated from the mainstream of the economy and the number of such women was increasing. For those with no historical perspective and no understanding of what I’ll call moral and social spaces, the obvious solution was for women to be freed from the home to join the men in the workplaces of modern industrial/financial capitalism. This was a solution to the liking of those industrialists who wanted a larger and cheaper workforce. Eventually, the requirements of this strange form of liberation, that is — joining men in a certain sort of morally unstructured industrial army-life, led to the realization that the home could be invaded by corporations or government agencies offering services to replace those of mothers and grandmothers. The situation grew more desparate, or at least more boring, for most women remaining home.
Even in this summarized view, the situation is extremely complex and quite beyond description in terms of our acceptable language for moral, social, and political discourse. The bulk of human beings played vague and passive roles and we can’t really say what they should have been doing to make their own lives better. We can’t intelligently define the moral possibilities and we default to assuming that all possibilities run parallel to and very near to our current path. There are plenty of smart men and women of various viewpoints who have struggled to make better sense of all of this, to try to determine the invariant or absolute aspects of human moral duties, to try to understand the processes by which modern industrial societies were deformed to their current shape but more generally the general nature of social transformations which could have led to better and more stable results. The results have been unsatisfactory because the understanding of human nature and created being in general was inadequate to the task.
The point I’m driving at is:
Human beings and their environments are shaped from concrete and abstract being well-described in important ways by modern physics and mathematics, yet, we try to describe ourselves and our societies in terms of words and concepts drawn from pre-modern and less satisfactory descriptions of being.
One rationale for defending the humanities and the social sciences against the intrusion of knowledge from the realms of modern physics and mathematics is that the aspects of being which lie in the realms of the humanities and the social sciences are complex in ways that make qualitative descriptions necessary and quantitative descriptions useful in specific cases (such as analyses that can help determine if a recently discovered manuscript is really Aristotle’s lost work on comedy or whatever) but useless or even misleading in general. This is a complex idea summarized in a sentence hard to digest and it’s a complex idea with which I largely agree, except for the underlying belief that mathematics and theoretical physics only deals with the quantitative. Modern physics and mathematics have redefined our understanding of created being and we’re made of that stuff and we live in a world made of that stuff.
Modern physics and mathematics have produced remarkably powerful tools for both the quantitative and qualitative analysis of being, of time and space and matter and of abstract truths. Those understandings of created being in many of its fundamental aspects are the best we have and they are the foundation of our complex technology and the societies we’ve been able to create using that technology, as well as being the foundation of a human mind best attuned to God’s Creation as we can now understand it. Aristotelian biology, Scholastic physics, and Euclidean geometry can’t be used to provide correct descriptions of Created being as we now know it. Why would we think they provide good foundations for understanding of human nature or for literary explorations of that nature? Are we to understand ourselves in terms of a world different from the one we’re born into and the one we inhabit? I would suggest that the great complexity and richness of human nature is built upon the complex being so powerfully described by modern physics and mathematics and those descriptions should be the starting point for constructing our various analogies and metaphors which we use for poetic or scientific or historical understandings of human nature.