Relationships of a more abstract sort, such as those in politics and economics, are not so much different from concrete relationships as we might think. Not so much different as we’ve led ourselves to believe. Those concrete entities which are more complex, such as a man or a rhinoceros, are made of substances which have a variety of internal and external physical relationships with well-defined biological and mathematical aspects. For example, there are the various ways in which carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen molecules combine to form a seemingly endless array of organic chemicals.
How does the magical jump occur when a complex biological organism, a man or a wolf, takes on the role of a moral and social being? Can we isolate this magic by proper use of our powerful mathematical tools? We sometimes optimistically assume such a role for mathematics in our efforts to understand concrete being and its relationships. Then at some point we confront some very complex entities or events which leads to a general retreat to either waving our hand in a spasmodic way and claiming that the magic occurs and man isn’t ‘just’ a physical animal or we say that man is ‘just’ an animal and morality is only what hides from us our condition of enslavement to our own genes.
We do our best to skirt around the modern confirmation of the suspicions of a minority of pre-modern thinkers (including almost St. Thomas Aquinas) — man is a physical creature living in a physical universe but we should also take seriously our own feelings of limited but real freedom and our own moral feelings of guilt and longing. This is not to say that everything reduces to the physical but rather that the physical, concrete, and particular world we inhabit is the manifestation of an entire spectrum of forms of being which range from the purely abstract manifestations of the truths God chose for Creation to the flesh and blood of human creatures. I’ve used something of a sound-bite phrase to convey the idea:
Matter is frozen soul.
The physical is more than a reductionist or dualist might imagine. Man isn’t a soul attached to a flesh-and-blood animal. Rather is man a flesh-and-blood animal with attributes which imply strongly that flesh-and-blood, carbon and oxygen and hydrogen, can’t be dismissed as no more than objects to the perceptions of immaterial entities.
Concrete, particular things and living beings are shaped from more abstract forms of being. We need to ask: what are the possibilities of describing this world, in both mathematical and narrative ways, once we expand our understanding of created being? (I include the biological as a special sort of narrative.) I can say that a great range of possibilities have opened up in front of us because of the vast expansion in recent centuries in empirical data and in the knowledge sometimes generated when good abstractions are drawn from that data. I’ve said that created being is created being is created being. Specifically:
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Abstractions accessible to the human being are also part of created being.
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Concrete manifestations of being are shaped from more abstract forms of created being.
We have no need for souls, not because physical reductionists are right but rather because our flesh and blood has already soul-like characteristics as does the flesh and blood of rattlesnakes and baboons. We human beings are unique because of our complex brains. We can respond to our environments or even the entire Universe or even the entirety of Creation in such a way that we shape our minds to what God has created, encapsulating various realms of created being in the very shape of our minds where I consider the ‘shape of a mind’ to include not only the underlying shape of the human brain but also the relationships of the entire human being to what lies outside of him. For those who like to have a hint of the end of the argument — the strongest and most important of those relationships is the one we Christians call charity, love of a self-giving sort. Plato wrote of this relationship as did St. Paul and St. John and others in the New Testament.
So it is that I say we draw abstractions from empirical data — those abstractions are part of the being shaped into the empirical entities connected to that data and we can explore empirical reality to discover the abstract forms of being from which concrete things are shaped and which are yet present in concrete things.
For the remainder of this article, I’ll write as if our only way of accessing abstract being is mathematics. It’s a major way for sure especially when we consider general forms of mathematical reasoning, call it ‘qualitative mathematics’. In any case, there are even some mathematical aspects to narrative. The easiest example is the great variety of metaphors drawn from traditional Euclidean geometry for describing our paths through life. Those paths are getting more complicated as human life grows more complex and as we learn more about Creation. We now seem to be traveling through regions of abstract relationships which mostly confuse us. Our moral and social analyses can benefit from modern geometries, even the differential geometry used by Einstein to describe curved spacetime.
For now, I’ll assume that the mathematical aspects of concrete being are shaped from abstractions mostly but not entirely different from those used to shape the narrative aspects of created being. This is partly a matter of levels. Go to a very, very, very abstract form of being and it might be what all forms of reason, narrative and mathematical, are shaped from. Go far enough down the evolutionary tree or bush or whatever and you find a some multi-cellular creature that lived hundreds of millions of years ago and is the common ancestor of tarantulas and men. This is a weak and ultimately misleading analogy, but it can help us to purge ourselves of some dangerous delusions about the nature of being and mind.
I’m thinking that we can gain some perspective of the evolutionary and developmental pathways of human communities by trying to deal with those complex and sometimes terrifying events which give some sign of having been shaped by groups of conspirators. We can learn much from analyses of conspiracies or, more generally, events which have the air of a conspiracy, such as the murder of a powerful leader or a build-up to a war that later proves to have been not only unwinnable but also unjustified except for the benefit of a few who might well be conspirators.
Physical scientists, mathematicians and physicists as well as biologists, have learned a lot about empirical reality by studying pathological cases, though it may be easier in those fields to identify a true pathology. Some conspiracies, pathologies of a moral or social or political or economic sort, are undoubtedly real and not just the nightmares of feverish and fearful minds. Has there ever been a lack of sophisticated criminal activities in history when vast amounts of wealth and power were at stake? This doesn’t mean that all the theories about the murder of John Kennedy are true, but it does mean that we should consider the powerful interests endangered by some of the policy changes President Kennedy was said to be considering — ending the Cold War with Russia and disarming Europe (possibly with the aid of Pope John XXIII), dropping sanctions against Cuba and stopping plots to overthrow Castro, ending the oil-depletion allowance, withdrawing from Vietnam. We should realize there were investment bankers who lost fortunes in Cuba and maybe were threatened with further losses in the Texas oil-fields and the harbors being built by American engineering firms in Vietnam, intelligence operatives and generals and admirals who saw shrinkage of their little empires and career prospects if the Cold War ended, and various ideological nuts who wanted to wage war upon all of not-American humanity. Would they have hesitated to kill one man who endangered them?
I’m proposing we approach the study of the evolution and development of human communities by studying the socio-pathological acts of many a politician and general and investment banker. I’m proposing we start thinking of these creatures and their conspiratorial groups as being parasites and cancers and various sorts of infections in the bodies public, the entities which currently exist in the general movement towards the Body of Christ — a movement we Christians have to believe to be real however much we may realize that Body won’t form in this mortal realm. Far too many think that these conspiracies, if they exist, must be mystical and supernatural, run by mighty wizards or demons or Jesuits or Freemasons. And so it is that many who think in more mundane terms consider it a sign of mental instability to ask if the CIA, the Secret Service, various investment bankers, and their politician allies might have killed John Kennedy. Or to speculate they might have destroyed Richard Nixon after he ordered Richard Helms, director of the CIA, to bring the files on the Kennedy murder and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Helms refused to follow the direct orders of the President in this incident which appeared in the White House tapes just before the CIA-trained criminals, such as E. Howard Hunt, began to appear on the White House payroll. And why was it that Ronald Reagan spoke out so strongly during his 1980 campaign for the Presidency against the Trilateral Commission and other banker-funded initiatives to influence public policy and then, after one meeting with David Rockefeller, loaded up his cabinet with members of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations?
The fact is that we know some criminal conspiracies have worked — such as the bankers’ conspiracies run by Cecil Rhodes or J.P. Morgan. Sometimes, they’ve destroyed their own members or the country of their members. We can think of the conspiracies to gain control of most of southwest and central Asia which were first suggested by one of the most brilliant and unstable descendants of John Adams — Brooks Adams who was active in the latter decades of the 1800s and a little while into the 1900s. There is no guarantee that conspirators will be successful or even rational in their efforts.
So let’s put this issue in terms I’ve used in discussing being:
Are conspiracies a matter of being at abstract levels (such as those described by mathematics and theoretical physics and metaphysics) or rather a matter of being at the concrete level of particular entities and the narratives formed as those entities evolve and develop?
Are conspiracies a result of a brokenness at a deep level of Creation, an abstract level from which concrete being is shaped? Are conspiracies the result of a radical defect in Creation caused, perhaps, by a fall from grace of the ancestors of human beings? Or perhaps a radical defect caused by God withdrawing from His own work?
Are conspiracies rather a matter of concrete structures and entities sometimes forming wrongly, a matter of those wrongfully formed structures and entities doing damage to other entities in the context of a particular world of evolution and development? Even better formed structures and entities could sometimes engage in such destructive behavior. Conscious entities could even act in such destructive ways believing themselves to be serving a greater good. In the context of such a radically social animal as man, socio-pathological acts would be Darwinistically bad, to speak simplistically. In this way of thinking, conspirators could even destroy a host organism of great promise, such as the bankers and politicians might be doing to the United States.
I’ve already given my answer above. I’m going with the second option, choosing to regard conspiracies, in the context of the Body of Christ under formation, as being invasive acts by parasitical organisms or by cancerous bodies which grew from inside the (relatively) healthy communities developing, oh so slowly, into the Body of Christ.
If we take the path of thought I’m suggesting, we would consider conspiracies, by implication — sin in general, as being wrongful shapings or movements of a sort similar to the misshapings which result in biological entities such as parasites and infectious organisms and cancers. I’ve chosen conspiracies as a focus of my discussion partly because of their importance in the modern world since at least the formation of Tammany Hall by Aaron Burr and partly because they are a fairly well-defined phenomenon, so long as we take the rational view that they’re simply the result of powerful men acting in small and organized groups for their own presumed good and against the common good. (I’ve noted that a conspiracy can aim at the common good, but I’ll ignore that possibility to avoid unfruitful complications in this discussion.) So a small group of men developing a silver-mine in an uninhabited region wouldn’t be a conspiracy but it was a conspiracy when businessmen and public officials acted to ‘help’ the Apache tribes by providing welfare programs of a sort which allowed them to steal the silver-mines discovered after the Apaches had been forced onto land originally considered to be bare of resources.
The Bible is sometimes ridiculed because it contains a number of stories in which disease is presented as a result of sin or of a spiritual invasion of the human being. Maybe we should have stepped back and considered the not so implausible suggestion that sin, and spiritual disease in general, is the same phenomenon as biological disease. I would deny they are the same phenomenon at the concrete level but would suggest they are similar wrongful developments shaped from the same abstract being.
One of my guiding rules is:
Grace doesn’t destroy or replace nature. Grace completes and perfects nature.
This is certainly consistent with my proposal that evolutionary processes bring into existence new forms of social and political community as well as the related proposal that development processes shape specific communities. The presence of evolutionary and developmental processes in human history implies we should learn from general thinking processes which have produced spectacular results in biology. And it implies we’ll see many defective or inadequate or unlucky social groupings, some of them being promising social organisms which weren’t able to defend themselves against parasites and cancers and infectious agents, such as conspiratorial groupings.
At the same time, I remain committed to the idea that we can better understand many of these issues by proper use of the mathematics developed to explore and describe matter and time and space. In fact, I’ll now backtrack a little on my above discussion of human communities as being formed by forces analogical to those of biology. Internally, groupings of human beings will be like organisms but those organisms, and the greater communities or even long-lasting civilizations we form, will be like the stuff of this universe. The classic statement of general relativity due to John Wheeler is:
Matter tells space how to shape itself and space tells matter how to move.
I think there to be an analogous but much more complex statement to be made of the ‘matter’ of human moral and social and economic and political groupings. Matter of both sorts evolve (family lines of galaxies or groupings of animals) and develop during the lifetime of an individual (the Milky Way or Japan) but those evolutionary and developmental processes take place as that matter moves within complexly shaped spaces. (I also think that even the understanding of our moral development as individuals would benefit from concepts borrowed from the modern theories of spacetime and matter.)