C4CC(8): Our Asophic society (1)

This chapter is simultaneously the one that I was most proud of (as it contained pretty much the only original thinking in the book, the neologisms ‘asophic’ and ‘apathistic stance’) but also the one that I would most revise if writing it again. Part of me would just say ‘read McGilchrist!’ The issue that I’m critiquing is essentially what McGilchrist would call a runaway left hemisphere. McGilchrist is what I am currently working on - more on that in due course.

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“People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians etc., to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them, that doesn’t occur to them.”

“We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered the problems of life remain completely untouched.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Exponential growth in a finite environment is a predicament that we face. That growth, on which our society has depended for nearly three centuries, will come to an end in the very near future. In the face of that predicament we still have many choices to make, some of which will ease the pain of transition, some of which will make everything worse. Making the right choices will draw on our reserves of wisdom. The deep problem of our time is that we have become blind to wisdom, and as a result we are making the wrong choices and meandering aimlessly along the road to hell.

In his hugely influential work After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre begins with a fable which goes like this: imagine that there is a great crisis and catastrophe and the responsibility for this catastrophe is placed upon science. This leads to a jihad against science and everything to do with science, and as a result of this hostility all the institutions which have kept science going in our civilisation for the last two or three hundred years have been destroyed. A hundred years later people have got over their fit of rage at the scientists and some monks start trying to gather together this understanding of the world which had existed before all the riots and rebellions, and so they gather fragments. Here is a fragment about “Phlogiston Theory”. Here are Newton’s theories about absolute space and time, here are Einstein’s theories, but all you have are fragments. What MacIntyre says is: imagine these monks trying to fit these fragments together, but without any overarching sense of how they fit – as if they have a jigsaw puzzle but without the box, any idea of the number of pieces, or even of how many puzzles there are. The overarching understanding within which science gained a meaningful context has been lost.

Now MacIntyre’s argument in this book is that this is exactly what has happened to our understanding of virtues – courage, prudence, temperance, self-control. These were the values governing Western civilisation from before the time of the Ancient Greeks, all the way through to 1600AD, before science became so dominant. His argument is that because we have started to worship science as a society, all the forms of knowledge and understanding which are embedded in virtue theory have been lost. We still have the language of morals but because we have lost the overarching vision we don’t know what to do with the language. Slowly the language has broken down. We still talk about things being good and bad, we still think it is good to be courageous, it is bad to be wicked, but the vision of human life which that language was designed to support and describe, has been lost. So we are now living in a time “after virtue”. We who live in Enlightenment era civilisations no longer have a sense of what humans are growing towards and the language which we have inherited from the previous few thousand years of Western civilisation, all of which assumed some aim of what it was to be a flourishing human being, no longer makes sense because we no longer have an idea of what it means to be human.

According to Aristotle, the most important virtue is phronesis, which is the virtue of judgement, sometimes translated as prudence, or thought of as practical wisdom. It is the ability to choose the wise course of action, to choose what is right. In the great medieval synthesis of Christianity with the thought of Aristotle, there was a division between scientia (knowledge) and sapientia (wisdom). Scientia, science, was the understanding of the natural world, reading the book of nature; sapientia, wisdom, was reading the book of God. Prior to the scientific revolution, scientia was not seen as particularly important, sapientia was what gave life. What has happened in our society is that this order of priorities has been reversed. Sapientia, wisdom, which used to be the aim of contemplation and cultivating an understanding of the world, a fully human life, this has been lost. We have become frenetically anti-phronetic as a culture. We have abandoned any notion that judgement is important; moreover, we have forgotten that we can teach judgement, that we can teach children for example how to choose between right and wrong. Systematically we have abandoned all the things which used to support the structures of our society.

H G Wells once said that, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” You wouldn’t normally give a four-year-old boy a set of matches to play with. You wouldn’t give him a gun; you wouldn’t give him a flame thrower. Yet our society is exactly in that state. We’ve developed these tremendously powerful and scientifically destructive toys and we don’t know what to do with them, because we haven’t been taught. We have lost our capacity to choose, we have lost the virtue of phronesis. In other words, we have lost the power of control over our toys. How has this happened?