Quantum Non-Linearity: Gentleman's Disagreement

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Gentleman's Disagreement

Going on Arni Zachariassen's report here of the debate between Rowan Williams and Richard Dawkins it sounds as though it was a very civilised affair indeed. This is a breath of fresh air.

In contrast, I can't help feeling that the politicisation, polarisation and primitive savagery we see nowadays on both sides of the debate is in good part down to the growth of fundamentalism; and Christian fundamentalism has its fair share of the blame here: Disagreement with particular Christian fundamentalist "jot and tittle" doctrines provokes charges of compromise, heresy, paganism, apostasy, siding with a conspiracy and even of being an emissary of Satan. Posts where I have touched on fundamentalist extremism can be found here:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/07/evidence-of-hams-religious-extremism.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/07/faith-test.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/06/cloistered-academics-vs-punks.html

Trying to sum up my thinking here: It seems to me that the paranoiac and hysterical Christian fundamentalist overreaction that we are seeing today has its roots in the sixties when Christianity started to face some fundamental challenges and was quasi-disestablished.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: I think that the essay to be found at this reference sums up the mood and impulse of fundamentalist Christians in the USA (in particular).

The Cross, The Flag and American Idolatry

http://tpjmagazine.us/adams29

But then again this precipient fascism is the inevitable result of the Christian group identity and its associated world-view. Or what happens when it is seriously under threat, and its self appointed cultural hegemony is thus challenged.

Christians place a great deal of significance in history as a presumed objective "fact".

But history is essentially a dream - the dream of reason. As long as humankind believes in this dream and seeks to acquire and maintain an historical identity, he remains unconscious of the fact that he is a bridge between the cosmic realms of heaven and earth. Within the dream man's hopes will always focus on a future utopia that is progressively manifested as a kakatopia, a psychotechnological intensification of hell on earth (have you read the "news"?) His only escape from this fatal circle is to wake from the dream and realize a cosmic, mythic, and fundamentally timeless identity.

Time, distinguished from space, sequentialized into history, intellectualized into units of hours, minutes, and seconds, and further abstracted into money, loses its psycho-bilogical significance.

The source of this misunderstanding is to be found in the orthodox Christian doctrine of the presumed uniqueness of Christ, which alone gives meaning to all other events. From the Chist-"event" to the hoped for Secnd Coming, in the Christian view, ALL human activity takes place in unrepeatable units, "redemption" being possible only by relation to the presumed unique Christ-"event". This doctine is absolutist and terrifyingly single-minded. It breaks from the everywhere traditional view, common to most world cultures, that time is cyclic and that the meaning of human existence is related to certain recurring cosmic patterns.

The anti-ecological force of the Christian "world"-view lies in its assertion of a significance for humans SEPARATE from that of the World Process. That Nature is lacking in either soul or intrinsic intelligence.

This anti-ecological presumption is most notable in the response of right-wing Christians to the obvious fact that human activity is THE primary cause of global warming, climate change and the destruction of the biosphere.

Paraphrasing and extending Joyce: History is the (collective) nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.; 2:11 PM, February 26, 2012
Timothy V Reeves said...: Hello Mr. Smith!

(If you’re not going to give yourself a name, I’ll find one for you.)

Thanks for the link. Yes, there is definitely is a cause for concern here: The attack on Obama, for example, goes well beyond sensible political criticism and starts to plumb the depths of fanatical conspiracy theory. I’m very concerned for America and its intellectual health, especially as we in the West (at least in the UK) look to it for leadership.

True, there is a prima fascia case for a link between Christianity and Nazism – Nazism quickly found a place in the hearts of the Lutheran north Germany. (Lutherans also seem to have a fondness for YEC). However, I don’t think it’s as simple as that: The homunculus ID movement makes much of the connection with Hitler and “Darwinism” (sic). Also, let’s not forget Christians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Dutch family of the Ten Booms who held out against Nazism; and there were others. So basically I am cautious about making a simple link between Hitler and Christianity or between Hitler and atheism. I have to admit that I haven’t studied the subject to do it any justice.

I don’t see a necessary connection between a Christian world view and fascist bigotry. For example I would hardly call Rowan Williams or Arni Zachariassen (to whom I have linked) bigoted – both are people of faith and reason. We must also recall here that many who identify with “New Age” ideas can be rather wacko and also prey to conspiracy theories. In fact William Thompson touches on the subject of New Age extremists in his book “At the Edge of History”.

A lot of it seems to be down to the sort of person you are: As far as I can see Rowan Williams and William Thompson are both very reasonable and intelligent people (and I admire them both). But Williams and Thompson can’t stop fanatical interpreters of either Christianity or New Age.

As I haven’t studied your works on the nature of history I find your comments here difficult to grapple with. I have to confess that being of a mathematical bent I find that I am completely unable to cope with a time that I can’t measure in units. It would be a great loss if I couldn’t think of things in a mathematical way. God forgive my infirmity of mind.; 1:28 AM, February 28, 2012

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Gentleman's Disagreement

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION