C4CC(10): Our Asophic society (3)
Last of this chapter - with my key punchline ‘science has nothing to say…’ - and last post for about ten days as I’m off on my next sabbatical trip, catching up with friends in London and then going on a Franciscan retreat! See you in about a fortnight.
~~
We can think of our reasoning ability, our logical processing ability, as being like a blanket spread over our emotional understandings. If the emotional understandings change, then the shape of the reason will follow it. Our emotional life is the bedrock and our reason flows over the top. There is a wonderful book by Martha Nussbaum, an American philosopher, called Upheavals of Thought, where she goes through great classical literature describing how this happens. It is something which is very much a current interest of contemporary philosophy and neuroscience – but it is not a new insight. The philosopher David Hume once said that “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Our reason is a tool and it rests upon our emotional constitution – and our emotional constitution is concerned with values, with what is perceived as important. Some things are perceived as more important than others, and we react differently due to those emotional differences.
The discernment of correct values and virtues is essentially the study and development of wisdom, sometimes called emotional intelligence, what Aristotle called phronesis – practical judgement – and that centres upon an awareness of, and education of, our emotions. Our decisions are based around our notions of what is good – for ourselves, for our families, for our friends and neighbours, perhaps, in the most enlightened, for humanity as a whole. Those notions of what is good are informed and shaped by particular traditions and histories, particular ways of teaching values and virtues. In most societies the passing on of wisdom is conducted through the rites and practices of religious faith, the telling of stories and sharing of rituals that embody and express a particular way of viewing the world and asserting a particular pattern of value. True wisdom depends upon a reintegration of our emotional lives and our rational intellect.
The origin of our frenetically anti-phronetic society lies in the political assertion of science at the expense of Christianity. The dominant ideology has systematically repressed religious perspectives – religion in general and Christianity in particular – and as a consequence, our inherited tradition shaping our sense of right and wrong has become impoverished. All of the accumulated insights about right living that are embodied in such traditions have been repudiated – not because they have been shown in themselves to be false, but because they are a part of a world view which is seen as intellectually moribund.
This has taken two specific forms. The first is to say that scientific truth is the only truth, and that is an outlook called positivism. This approach took shape in the nineteenth century but it is implicit in much that goes on for a hundred years before then. Positivism argues that only things which can be established by reason or by empirical proof and investigation are valid knowledge. Anything else is rejected. Hume, who in other ways is quite sensible, says: “If we take in our hand any volume, of divinity or school metaphysics for instance, let us ask: Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” That is the voice of positivism, and when positivism says that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge, it is radically constricting our capacity for true wisdom. If the serious questions facing our civilisation are ultimately questions of value, then the apathistic stance can produce nothing to say on this subject. Clearly it is very good at providing the raw material on which that development operates, but it is – by definition – silent on how to make the decision. For what does science have to say about value? What can it say if it is built around emotional distancing? The root problem of our time is the way in which the over-emphasis upon science in our culture has crippled our ability to see clearly and exercise a proper discernment and wisdom in our lives.
The other way of over-emphasising science is to say that scientific truth is the most important truth, to say that what we gain from these processes of scientific investigation is more important that anything else. Scientific knowledge and awareness, compared with the knowledge and awareness that can come through understanding poetry or art or great fables and stories, is utterly trivial. In fact narrative is the most important way in which our understandings are formed. Our way of telling stories to each other is the means by which our emotional bedrock is formed. This is why the common recognition that science has too important a place in our cultural life has only been able to be voiced at the margins of society, amongst the poets and playwrights – those whose scientific credibility is not strong. The mythology of Faust developed when the scientific revolution was taking off, and it captures the truth: Faust sells his soul to the devil in order to gain some scientific knowledge and only realises at the end that it was a bad bargain. Similarly, the legend of Frankenstein expresses the same truth, as do any of the myriad stories with a white-coated mad scientist, crying out “I’m going to discern the truth of the world”, and terrible consequences follow. These all describe the consequences that come when science is given more value than it deserves, and life becomes damaged or destroyed. As the story has developed in the telling, the scientist is replaced by a monster, then by a robot, and eventually by computers and 'Terminators'. In each case what is missing is the emotional core, the ability to exercise a human judgement.
Simply put, science is trivial. It can act as the robot helper, collecting samples and sifting evidence, but on the question of wisdom, of what we are to value, of how we are to live, science – the scientific method and the culture which it has fostered and within which it is passed on – science is silent, and can never speak. Although an awareness of the value of the apathistic stance is an important part of a wider wisdom, the converse is not the case. The apathistic stance does not, indeed cannot on pain of self-undoing, recognise the value of a wider emotional wisdom – for the assessment of what is wise or unwise requires an emotional engagement, an abandonment of the apathistic stance itself. This is a moral blindness, and our scientific culture is systematically blind when it comes to questions of morality. I therefore call our society asophic because it is blind to wisdom. Science's technological genius is providing us with tools, but the way that science has been taken up in our culture has removed our ability to see what to use those tools for. Our sense of what is right, our sense of what is of value, our sense of what is human and what is humanly important – these have all been ravaged by the dominant culture, like crops consumed by a plague of locusts.
Science has nothing to say about wisdom. It cannot help us to determine what it is that we most value, or how to distinguish between different values. Our delusion that it can is the fatal flaw of our civilisation, with a single great consequence: we have forgotten what it means to be wise. Our scientific endeavours must be made subject to wisdom, both intellectually and practically – it is only in this way that we will be able to deal with the problems we now face.