We of the modern West can’t deal with the complexity of human communities nor with the complex world implied by our modern empirical knowledge. We can’t produce proper `global’ understandings of human being, individual and communal, nor of this world with all its realms only partly reconciled and made coherent at even the `purely physical’ level of matter and space and time.
This is a very important issue in our troubled times, though many have trouble grasping that such seemingly ivory-tower lines of thought are crucial to our survival and prosperity. As I see matters, a civilization is dependent upon an understanding of reality. I would actually turn it around and say that an understanding of reality which allows some sort of substantial ordering of society, even a brutal ordering such as that of the early Assyrians or the Anglo-Saxon warlords in Great Britain, can lead to the development of a more complex human community, perhaps an international community of scholars and perhaps an empire or perhaps that more complete and more perfect community which is a civilization. Order is a sign of the unity and coherence and completeness which is found in any complex and rich entity, such as an individual human being who has risen from the state of simple human animal or a communal human being (community) which has begun to show the signs of being or participating in that completed and perfected civilization which is the Body of Christ.
We in the West had at least a substantial fragment of that sort of civilization and failed to nurture or maintain it, though we certainly value what’s left of our material prosperity even as we cut ourselves loose from any devotion to the God of Jesus Christ or to even pagan versions of truth, from any hard-earned appreciation of higher culture, from involvement in any truer forms of political and social order, and so on.
There are a lot of “so on’s” in this story unless we try to write a prologue which would be a completed and perfected form of all human understandings of human being and of the Creation in which we are born and in which we die and in which we might be reborn. As any historian or student of history knows, history itself has these properties of a manifold of manifolds of manifolds and so on. Each manifold and each level of manifolds has different properties.
What’s left of what we inherited? This is to ask: in what areas have we continued to be something like a civilization so that we can now plausibly aim to put a colony on Mars in this generation? We could also ask: why do we wish to do so? Are we looking for an ET to supply us with the order and a serious if tentative understanding of reality. Are we looking for someone or something to supply us with a brand-new, non-demanding version of what we’ve thrown away? Do we merely wish to find a fable which tells us our current state of decadence is really an admirable state of order?
We have some serious understanding of matter as being somehow formed as a result of `collapse’ (a controversial but useful word and concept for basic understanding) of some strange form of being that we conceive (in the sense of `cognitive perception’) as mathematical forms, the wave functions of quantum mechanics.
We have some serious understanding of spacetime in terms of general relativity and other other gravitational theories (none of which have yet proven to be as truthful or as useful as Einstein’s theory). More generally, we understand spacetime in terms of geometries in which we have local regions which are `parts’ of a globe which is not merely a paste-up of those local regions; local regions and global regions have some shared properties and some different properties. In any case, we understand spacetime not by directly perceiving it—we might have a few tortured seconds of such perception if we were to fall into a black-hole, but we, again, understand spacetime as a sort of `cognitive perception’.
We also have some serious understandings of human origins and of human being as it currently exists and dynamically changes, and very rapidly so for the past 10,000 years or so because of cultural and genetic interactions. These understandings are being absorbed into historical and other understandings, mostly being consistent with early understandings—the ancient books of the Bible had an awareness of the nastiness which seems so shocking in books about evolutionary biology and sometimes condemned by Christians. And, again, we have some sort of a `cognitive perception’ of a human being which is formed by interactions of genes and culture and physical environment, which interactions are so complex as to bring to mind multiple levels of manifolds of high dimension, a high number of independent variables.
We can see the main point I’m making by taking the case of the surface of a sphere and realizing we can understand the geography (or geometry) in small regions by treating those regions as flat regions, plains or planes; we understand more by realizing those flat regions are `glued’ together to make a curved surface of a sphere rather than a larger plain or plane. We can understand far more deeply by realizing the point is that groupings of individual regions (which might be human individuals) form global (or more global) regions which might have different properties than the individual regions or localities, and those local properties might themselves change in response to the formation of global entities.
For example, we can read in histories of mathematics of radical advances are beyond the understanding of even well-educated `non-geniuses’ for years and sometimes generations, but are eventually absorbed into the material taught in mainstream schools or the material which is part of the background intellectual stuff of most residents of a civilization. We teach long-division in elementary schools, but that was considered beyond the capacity of the average college mathematics teacher when such a technique first became possible with the adoption of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system in the 12th century or so. (Few indeed, even among the highly intelligent, could do long-division with Roman numerals.)
To be fair, better quality thinkers seem to often account for these sorts of phenomena in histories and anthropological studies and—most certainly—in historical studies of genes. We see this in the acknowledgment that, for example, the peoples of Great Britain aren’t just a gathering of Welsh and Scots and English with sometimes quaint customs who come together to form a people who are plain and simply the British, but sometimes we have trouble—using existing ways of thought—in avoiding the two false paths: treating communities as simply gatherings of individuals or else studying individual human beings in separate fields from those which study communities, implicitly but not coherently treating communities as having real existence. I am claiming that we can understand this British community of peoples with an explicit recognition of the reality of communities along with proper use of powerful conceptual tools which can be drawn from modern mathematics and physics.
Various problems also arise because a human being shaped to certain ways of understanding the surrounding world and to certain ways of responding to that world can not often be so easily reshaped and sometimes cannot be so reshaped at all in this mortal realm. A village of English farmers in the early 1700s might have been `flat’ in certain ways just because of its comforting homogeneity; forcing or enticing those farmers or their children into cities would cause disruption of a sort which would need healing and reshaping or else you might end up with modern populations of people living in the Cosmopolis but not truly part of it and, even if citizens of a nominally self-governing country, not capable of carrying out their nominal responsibilities, such as evaluating their government’s actions in the international realm. Such has been our situation in much of the West for two centuries or more.
Yet, when we see the reality of communities by realizing the ethnic complexity of Great Britain even before significant immigration from Asia and Africa, we still assume flat models in which, say, Nigerians enlarge that greater community without any problems fitting in, without altering that greater community or being altered by it. When it’s clear that something akin to twisting and deforming is happening—to both immigrants and the host communities and their citizens, we try to complexify the flat model in a manner analogous to Ptolemy and his successors modeling the observed movements of the planets and the sun by adding ever more epicyles.
Let’s try a clean break, one which starts with the conceptual acknowledgment that mathematicians and physicists have given us a wonderful conceptual apparatus for tackling the problem which resulted when the cosmopolitan regions come into being, when peoples of different habits and ways of belief start interacting and sometimes forming new communities. Big warning!—even when the ultimate results are wonderful, after a century or so, that first century can be a time of horrors. When the German peoples entered Romanized regions of Europe, there were some who came in groups simply seeking a better life. The Romanized Celts disappeared in the regions of relatively peaceful immigration as well in the regions conquered by bands of warriors. A matter of great relevance to the point I’m making: much of the horror resulted not because the Germans were all, or even mostly, bloodthirsty and malicious but rather because the Germans were a primitive tribal people who did kill many in a partial conquest and then they tried to take over a region of complex Roman civilization and simply couldn’t do it. That region broke down in many ways and the Dark Ages resulted: disease and famine and violence at various levels. Even when the initial violence of conquest had ended, the original population continued to dwindle and the German population also probably suffered unnecessarily high rates of suffering and death over the next 2 or 3 centuries.
If you take my thoughts seriously, keep this is mind: I’m dealing not with some fancy way of knowing some sort of external world but rather with a way of encapsulating the being which is us and lies around us and flows through us.
Take your choice:
- Thinking is not abstract manipulation of knowledge but rather a shaping of one’s mind in response to the various forms of being which come to us as perceptions or conceptions.
- We encapsulate reality in our own selves.
- To think is to participate in the corresponding being, whether it is the concrete being of a 2×4 used to build a wall or a nuclear particle under investigation or an emotionally disturbed human being under psychiatric treatment, whether it is the abstract being of algebraic structures studied for use in nuclear physics or transfinite sets studied for sheer aesthetic pleasure or some aspects of human being studied because they are us.
From a Christian point of view, the sort of complexity I wish to introduce to our efforts to understand being of all types is a radically consistent understanding of this universe. All of Creation is a sacrament of sorts, a unified and coherent and complete manifestation of a global set of God’s thoughts.