In this time of social lockdown I have been listening to some online services at a nearby church and I was intrigued by one particular sermon series that was trotting out a very familiar spiritual motif. Quoting from my blog post about this motif, I said that this series promotes....
....a pattern where we find some Christians agitating for a spiritual revolution that supercharges what they regard as the rather humdrum, mediocre & unempowered work of a target church. The proposed remedy is that individuals must proactively seek an experience of "the Baptism of the Spirit". Given that many people in the church may already lay claim to having had the Baptism of the Spirit, sometimes more generic and vague terms such as the "touch of God", an "encounter with God" or an "infilling" may be used. However, when one analyses what is actually being promoted one finds that it has less to do with spiritual experience per se than it has in trying to cast spiritual renewal into a quasi-gnostic philosophical mold by asserting a sharp distinction between the initiates and non-initiates of some kind of inner spiritual light.
There are shades of gnosticism & fideism here: As I have remarked many times before, the
kind of philosophical dualism which I believe underlies the series filters Christian reality through the cliché of a heart vs head dichotomy. In this context one often hears (as I have heard during this series) about the need to
submit the profanities of the intellect to the ineffable and sacred revelations
found in sublime experiences of the divine presence. It’s a caricature of the left brain vs
the right brain contention and yet I would set against this the proposal that conscious cognition, which is the A to Z of experience, is likely to straddle both the left and right hemispheres of the
brain.
As Kenneth Clark once expressed, we are still the offspring of the romantic movement, the movement which rebelled against the apparent primacy of the mechanical and the intellectual, a primacy which grew out of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Human feeling, instincts and sensibilities found themselves floundering as they ran up against the implications of automation and the automaton: Our industrial machine culture is haunted by the suspicion that humans too (along with their their natural context) are just another application of unfeeling mechanism, albeit a very sophisticated application*. This was the backdrop for the mysticism of the romantics as they attempted to re-establish the primacy of human feeling and the sublime mystical atmosphere that one senses to be at the heart of nature.
But industrial
wealth and its concomitant science is evidence of the success of the mechanistic and intellectual take on reality. The third person perspective in which scientific accounts of reality are framed was and is vital intellectual fuel for the
progress of industrial wealth and knowledge. This wealth and knowledge is overwhelming evidence of the fundamental truth and place of mechanism in our world. This
paradigm has loomed large in our society and its obvious success in providing
wealth and knowledge have given it an almost intimidating authority; in fact given the spiritual egocentricity of humanity it can be frightening; spiritual humanity have become strangers in their own cosmos.
The
scientific project which illuminated the cosmic place of mechanism put an end to the temple of the Ptolemaic
universe, a temple where man was manifestly at the centre of divine purposes. Unsurprisingly, then, it would only be a
matter of time before the suspicion that humans were themselves just (complex) mechanisms
would lead to the human organism being put under the intellectual microscope in an attempt to
arrive at a mechanical account of humanity.
But in spite of the successes, the fallacy of hope in illuminating human nature with science and ushering in a golden age of reason and human social
progress proved to be illusory. Something was missing.
***
Technology and science have become victims of their own overwhelming success. Their amazingly effective third person narratives have redirected the attention of many thinkers away from the obvious. That is, they have lost sight of the fundamental basis of those narratives; namely that they have their origins in the first person perspective of conscious cognition: This perspective is always implicit in science as the scientific observer and experiencer of those observations which necessarily provide the evidence of science's third person theories. In short scientific data always leads back to a consciously cognating observer experiencing observations and joining the "data dots" of experience with theoretical accounts. But in the heady stratosphere of a breathtakingly successful and heroic techno-scientific project, the authenticator & cornerstone of all science, namely the first person perspective, has become almost invisible. The inner story of human consciousness has not only been marginalised but in some cases even been outright denied existence by those who have been overwhelmed by the trick that successful science has played on their minds and they have failed to see what is in front of their noses.
There is a subtlety here that may have fazed the consciousness deniers: It is conceivable (and not impossible in my view) that a complete third person narrative explaining the human mind in terms of its "material" constituents of particles, fields and dynamical equations may eventually be arrived at. Although this has not yet been achieved many strides in this direction have been made and just the prospect of a complete "material explanation" of humanity might easily be taken to imply the absence of consciousness..... a third person account of humanity may become so complete as to leave the false impression that there is no room for consciousness; like the God of the gaps the consciousness of the gaps has apparently been crowded out of the third person perspective, apparently dehumanising the human.
But look again: The apparent absence of conscious cognition in the third person scientific account is simply down to the fact that this account is made from the stand point of an observer-experiencer who is external to first person and who therefore will not (by definition) experience the experiences of the first person. All the external observer is able to see of another person are the patterns and behaviour impressed on the material dynamic. But in the final analysis the third person observer has, of course, their very own first person sense of conscious cognition. In effect, then, we have the mind of an observer giving an account of another mind in terms of the observers own first person experiences and theories. As I have remarked in the introduction of my book Gravity and Quantum Non-Linearity the third person account of humanity is written in terms of the human observer's conscious cognition and this is reminiscent of the way a computer language compiler can be written in the self same language it compiles.
For me it is obviously axiomatic that the third person can only experience the first person as a dynamic configuration of matter, matter which has to be appropriately configured before it generates the qualia of conscious cognition. Matter is the common medium by which first persons are able to become aware of one another and above all successfully communicate. But the two accounts of the first and third persons have to be brought together as a complementary whole; either account does not exclude the other. Both solipsists and consciousness deniers are working with a partial apprehension of reality.
***
As society has become more complex and dependent on technological artifacts it is the third person language which rightly takes up most of our time; after all, a society is about cooperation & communication and communication demands that shared material medium controlled by universal laws. But the downside is that the vocabulary of the first person with its qualia of conscious cognition is apt to become marginalised, buried and perhaps even lost; at best relegated to the counselling rooms in a society dominated by the mechanical and the intellectual. In the face of the kudos and power of science's third person perspective, a sense of alienation has set in. The essence of core humanity, namely its conscious cognition, is in danger of being swamped like the lives of the slaves in Turner's painting (see below). In a burgeoning technical culture our well meaning reactionary Christian preachers are like those wallowing in the waves as they fight to restore the life. & dignity of humanity. Their response is typical of the romantic response which seeks to reaffirm the special and divinely ordained place of humanity. I understand this response completely, but when it tips over into irrationality, fideism and quasi-gnosticism it is reactionary & misguided. For them the third person becomes at best a spiritually inferior companion and at worst a blockage to sublime gnosis. But reactionary preachers can themselves be equally if not far more authoritarian and intimidating as the science status quo. In fact sometimes they are even prepared to invoke fear with the threat of divine displeasure if their views aren't followed through.
The backdrop of industrial society places huge demands on the human intellect to handle the third person narratives that cover science, technology and the business of day to day running. But the protest by romantics is prone to overcompensating extremes as it tries to escape the apparently alienating external world by its retreat into the depths of the inner life and its mysteries. The romantic reaction is especially a protest against those who even go as far as to deny that the conscious inner life has any substance or meaning beyond the third person perspective of material configuration. The gnostic protest against "intellectualism" and the latter being contrasted over and against sublime inner experiences is the stock-in-trade of Christian romanticism. But the creation wasn't created by a demiurge but by God himself whose omniscient omnipotence has provisioned his rational creation with the facility to generate conscious cognition when the right dynamic conditions are met.
As Sir Kenneth Clarke said in his Civilisation episode The Fallacies of Hope:
We've a long rough voyage ahead of us and I can't say how it will end because it isn't over yet.. We are still the offspring of the Romantic movement and still victims of the fallacies of hope.
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