I’ll be writing articles on some aspects of politics and the history of government which interest me and doing so in terms of my concepts of created being. I’ll concentrate on American politics and will cover some interesting phenomena often seen as indicative of conspiracies. These articles will reflect both some of my reading of authoritative histories and also my take on ongoing events. I’m not putting myself forward as an expert in these fields but I’m trying to develop ways of describing and analyzing complex real-world entities which have both concrete and abstract aspects and I’m looking for interesting aspects of human moral life to provide specific descriptive problems. There seem to be a variety of such aspects to be had in studying and contemplating what seems to be an ongoing political breakdown in the modern West, and, in particular, a somewhat florid development of problems present in American politics from the founding of the United States. These problems often present themselves in the guise of conspiracies to many concerned people, because of a lack of understanding of what was possible and what actually happened in American history. To anticipate a little: when the world grows increasingly complex and most human beings insist on seeing that world in simple terms which were probably wrong to start with, very strange things can happen. This is a problem for our understanding of politics and history as well as for our overall understanding of Creation.
Again will I remind my readers that I consider concrete being to be shaped from more abstract forms of being but I also consider concrete entities, such as a human animal, to contain yet the various forms of abstract being which come together to form a man. A man is, in a manner of speaking, frozen soul and the soul remains in all its phases even if the dominant phase of a human animal at birth is ice. It takes the proper circumstances and the proper responses by a man to develop the fullness of human nature. But I don’t like that way of talking about the abstractions which remain with even the most concrete forms of being and this is one reason to start a discussion of specific problems which involve the abstract aspects of human nature, particularly the ways in which human beings form relationships with each other, with our non-human fellow-creatures, with the world as our complex set of environments, and with our Maker.
If created being comes from one set of truths manifested by God on the other side of the Big Bang — so to speak — then we can enrich our understanding of man, even in his moral and political aspects, by applying to our study of human nature what’s been learned in modern physics and mathematics, as well as other fields of empirical study. But the previous sentence will produce a distorted view of my intentions in most minds just because we have the false idea that there are different, incompatible sorts of (vaguely defined) being and, separately, some forms of abstract truths which correspond to human fields of study. And so it is that I’m struggling to find good ways to talk about these issues. This struggle has quietly and contemplatively increased in recent months as I’ve been trying to find the time to write a summary work (possibly multiple volumes) on my worldview and also have been reformatting two ten year-old novels which deal with many of these issues. I plan to publish these novels on the Internet, perhaps one within a month or so. In fact, I’ve been thinking I might turn my dwindling, middle-aged energies towards works of fiction because rereading these older novels has convinced me that I worked out many of my ideas by writing the sorts of moral narratives I wish to deal with in these writings on politics.
Moral narratives are appropriately for exploring the nature of man, who is, after all, a physical creature. To my way of understanding Creation, physical creatures are (ultimately) shaped from the truths God manifested for His Creation and still ‘carry’ those truths in their very flesh and blood. Consequently, we can come to better understand man, and other creatures, by coming to better understand some mathematically describable aspects of created being, including that fundamental creature: spacetime. Human experience indicates that mathematics, while not capable of describing the totality of created being, is sometimes capable of leading the way towards new ways of describing that totality.
However we get to a more complete description, the various ways in which we understand men and stars have to come together in some sort of narrative of Creation and that narrative has sub-stories such as that of man responding to God’s revelation as carried in the Bible and also God’s revelations as carried in the workings and stuff of His Creation as accessible to the human senses and mind. If I succeed in any substantial way in this task, that success will be found in the entirety of my writings, novels as well as books and articles on philosophical or theological matters.
What we need to provide intellectual foundations for a new phase of human civilization is to re-imagine, from the bottom-up, the meaning of Creation and the role played by human beings in Creation. I can point to a philosophical/theological work with a similar goal: Summa Contra Gentiles by St. Thomas Aquinas. That work was likely intended to present the beliefs of Christians to Muslim and Jewish scholars in such a way that they could see that Christian thought is consistent with the rationality of Creation as seen by the human eye and understood by the human mind. The goal of Aquinas was to show that Christian revelation could be reached in that bottom-up way, not as a lock-tight logical proof, but as a ‘proof’ in the older sense: a testing of coherence and consistency. He seems to have set out to work in the other direction, from an understanding of God developed from the Bible, in his other major compendium, Summa Theologicae.
Man is part of that Creation which is a particular work of God and reflects decisions which could have been otherwise. God could have brought into being not only a different Creation but even a different intelligent, God-seeking race in a Creation and a universe much like ours. The human race might have been an apish race with somewhat different characteristics. Speaking of just one characteristic: human beings have different tendencies towards being individuals vs. social beings. We could have had more of a leaning towards individualism or more towards social bonding. The particular range we occupy in this individual-social spectrum and the particular statistical spread of individuals over that spectrum are empirical matters. Men could have been different, in this aspect and others, but we are what we are, largely as a result of the hundreds of millions of years of evolution of living creatures on earth. More than that, we are what we are because of the characteristics of spacetime in our world, because of the properties of matter and fields, because of abstract mathematical truths, and so forth. We are creatures shaped from and shaped in response to the various sorts of being, abstract and concrete, in Creation.
There are two extremes that most thinkers fall into when they have stumbled into some vague understanding of the nature of being. Some, you might call them reductionists, think that all properties of more complex beings can be derived, in principle, by accumulating layers of more complex and complicated assemblages of the basic things — whatever they might be. Some, usually they take the form of dualists or more extreme preachers of multiple forms of incompatible being, think that a man is so different from a puddle of the chemicals that compose his body that surely he becomes a man because something thoroughly different from physical being is accidentally attached to his flesh and blood.
Can a man be explained by understanding the various ways of assembling that puddle of chemicals? Can a man be explained by separating his bodily responses from his spiritual or moral responses?
Is there another way? Let me propose that we can build another way of viewing created being, including human nature, by borrowing three major insights from modern empirical science:
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Concrete stuff, by which I presently mean matter and energy and fields and spacetime, seems to have been shaped from some more abstract stuff. So far as quantitative aspects of concrete being goes, this implies some serious truth in the radical version of Pythagoras’ claim that stuff is made of number. Not describable by number, but made of. For now, I’ll only say there are more aspects to concrete being than those which can be measured or even described by qualitative mathematical methods and I’m contemplatively playing around with ways of describing the multiple ‘flows’ of abstract being into concrete forms but I’m not yet ready to describe a good way of viewing this ‘flow’.
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Relationships are primary and bring substances into existence. See A Christian view of Einstein’s and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality for a short discussion of the issue. This insight might well prove to be the same as the first.
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At the top-level, the universe can be seen as a narrative, morally well-ordered in my opinion. Moving downward, classes or species of complex entities evolve, perhaps over time-spans which are immense by human standards, and individual complex entities develop over their lifetimes. This points to the possibility that human moral relationships, including political relationships, are products of evolution and are not derivable from metaphysical systems of thought — unless those systems are constructed to include the evolutionary aspects of human relationships.
What is…is. Our job is not to define what we think is but rather to accept what is, as we can determine from the best of human knowledge, and understand it by creating proper words and concepts and molding them into proper structures of thought. We can then follow our Creator by using those words and concepts and intellectual structures to tell proper stories in imitation of His acts-of-being or acts of creation.
Specifically, if we are to understand human moral nature, human political activities, etc., we need to take account of the three characteristics of created being I listed above — and maybe some more — and to start shaping our minds to created being as it is and not as Hobbes or Plato thought it to be, or Hamilton or Jefferson or Lincoln for that matter. (The greatest of these thinkers, certainly Plato, understood much about the metaphysical problems I’m tackling though pre-modern thinkers were missing the very interesting insights to be gained from modern empirical knowledge.)
This will involve a great deal of work over more than one lifetime and will, in fact, produce along the way the possibility of educated men and women in future generations who possess wide learning and deep culture in such a self-shaping way that they will be very similar to the liberal thinkers of traditional Western civilization though having a library including Einstein, Cantor, Pelikan, Kafka, and other modern thinkers who’ve contributed to a great, but still largely potential, enrichment of our understanding of Creation.
We should also realize that the very process of creating a greater system of knowledge from the totality of human traditional and modern knowledge will itself open up new possibilities for human moral life, including our lives as members of societies and as citizens of political communities.