Philosophy

We’ve seen that multicultural society is brutish and irrational because accepted concepts of what life is about don’t begin to do it justice. So how can reason, civilization, and other good things be restored?

Basically, it’s nonexistent. As suggested in my last post, in order to reason about things we need to be able to identify them. We need to sort out experience and apply concepts to it that tell us what things are and what they mean. The problem is that the ability to do so depends on experience, and in the case of things that are complex and subtle—human and social relations, for example—on social experience or tradition. Multicultural society denies the authority of every particular tradition, since to make one tradition authoritative would slight all the others.

Reason, I suppose, is the ability to form reliable judgements about the world and what we should do. As such, it involves a great many things:

1. Perceptiveness with regard to the world around us and our own states (pleased, regretful or whatnot).
2. The ability to notice similarities and differences, and what things go together and don’t go together.
3. Memory.
4. The ability to apply appropriate concepts that summarize the results of the foregoing: that is, to recognize things for what they are.

In the absence of an explicit common understanding of what a good life is, and in the face of a government that has taken on responsibility for the whole of human life, from the rearing of children to the relations between the sexes to the validity of communal loyalties, the people responsible for persuading us that everything makes sense have decided to base public authority on freedom, choice, individual autonomy and the like. That’s what liberal political philosophy is all about.

I’ve been reading a book, The Suicide of Reason, about the tendency of multicultural consumerist liberalism to disarm itself in the face of Islam. The problem the author sees is quite simple: in the West we’re into what he calls reason—that is, we view orderly satisfaction of individual preferences as the highest goal.

People are impressed by science, and rightly so. The problem is that they are convinced that science will eventually account for everything, so much so that they think it’s irrational to appeal to any basically different way of accounting for facts about the world.

Enlightenment was supposed to make everything perfectly clear. It has done so by ignoring everything that can’t be made perfectly clear, acting as if such things don’t exist and can’t possibly exist. How though is that enlightenment?

In my last entry I suggested that materialist science can’t deal with all realities, even all important realities. It can’t give an adequate account of “importance,” for example, and if you can’t sort out what is more and less important you can’t deal with anything at all. In other words, materialist science can’t even make sense of itself.

An obvious problem with a materialist understanding of the world is that we have subjective experience and can’t begin to imagine what a materialist explanation for subjective experience would look like. What do atoms and the void have to do with our sensation of redness, as opposed to redness as a wavelength of light, type of event in the brain, or behavioral tendency (e.g., a human tendency to say “that’s red”)?

Alexander says his views on architecture are based on “a conception of the world in which the air we breathe, the stones and concrete our city streets are made of—all have life in them … This is not merely a poetic way of talking. It is a new physical conception of how the world is made.” (p. 425)

I’ve just finished reading The Phenomenon of Life, the first volume of Christopher Alexander’s four-volume work The Nature of Order.

Truth and beauty enable us to place and orient ourselves in a world that is larger and more full of things that are worthwhile and interesting than the closed system of resources, desires, technology and formal logic that modern thought presents. That’s why contemplation is basic to the good life.

Mathematics and beauty seem to give us something to admire that is independent of us and somehow ideal or spiritual. People have therefore thought that they point the way to transcendent goods and suchlike. An objection to that way of thinking is that mathematics and beauty are purely matters of form and don’t tell us anything substantive. 1 + 1 = 2 may be a wonderful timeless truth but it doesn’t show the way to a better life except instrumentally, through better bookkeeping and the like.

Plato suggests mathematics and love of beauty as doors to the transcendent. Most mathematicians are Platonists, I think—they believe mathematical objects exist independently of human thought and action and even physical reality—but mathematics today is too closely connected to measurement, analysis and prediction of natural phenomena, and the tendency to resolve it into arbitrary axioms and formal logic is too strong, for it to serve the educational function it did in Plato’s time, at least for most people.

Liberal society says it leaves the question of ultimate goods up to its members. That’s not possible, since every choice implicitly defines what is worth choosing and thus what is good. Every society, like every human being, thus accepts a definition of the good that is as specific and comprehensive as its system of habitual choices. Liberal society attempts above all to promote maximum equal satisfaction of individual preferences.

John Milbank has a nice clear article for popular consumption on the Church as an organic union of divine and human aspects. The piece goes into nominalism, voluntarism, William of Ockham and what not else, and explicitly says that the mixed and organic nature of the Church should serve as a guide to secular as well as church polities. If he wants to call such views “socialism” and take a swipe at Margaret Thatcher it’s OK with me, we all have our quirks.

Melanie Phillips gives a pop version of objections to attempts by scientists and their hangers-on and popularizers to claim that something like modern natural science can explain everything.