The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding

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.