Many discussions posted to the Internet during 1994-97 centered
around the difficulty of learning the lessons of history,
specifically, the recurrence of nihilism (relativism, radical
skepticism) and determinism (fate) in cultures. Nihilism and
determinism never produce good consequences in cultures, yet they
keep coming back after their defeat.
Megasthenes, ambassador of Seleucus I to Chandragupta Maurya, startled the Greek world, about 300 BC, with a book on India. ‘There is among the Brahmans,’ said a suggestive passage, ‘a sect of philosophers who... hold that God is the Word, by which they mean not articulate speech but the discourse of reason’; here again was that doctrine of Logos which was destined to make such an impress upon Christian theology.
The Greek version of Logos that Plato developed was
Heraclitus’s and it is difficult to say that Plato, Philo or St.
Paul improved on the original. Another difficulty is that “the
world” back then was literally the Earth and immediate vicinity.
There was no real conception of the immensity of space (perhaps we
still do not have a real conception). Creation through the action of
the Word does not necessarily mean creation ex nihilo of
existence, it may well simply mean how our neighborhood and neighbors
came to be and definitely includes the conception of humans as loci
of creative energy. As Pope John Paul II said in his Centisimus
Annus, we are co-creators of all. I am sure that this conception
of humans as co-creators, and of the Word (or Logos), corresponds to
a deep aspect of reality. A motivator for moral nihilism is the
concept of Finality in any spatio-temporal direction. If all of human
thought and achievement will not survive the Big Crunch or the Heat
Death of a finite universe, the door is wide open to meaninglessness
and purposelessness in a world filled with cold, empty scientific
rationalism and debilitating skepticism of theology.
The downfall of Greek democracy resulted from the path taken from
wealth and skepticism to relativism and nihilism. History does in
fact repeat itself, as it is in America and Western Civilization
right now. Affluence itself is the primary culprit.
No absolute truth can be found, said Protagoras, but only such truths as hold for given men under given conditions; contradictory assertions can be equally true for different persons or at different times. All truth, goodness, and beauty are relative and subjective; ‘man is the measure of all things.’
[Sophists] applied analysis to everything; they refused to respect traditions that could not be supported by the evidence of the senses or the logic of reason; and they shared decisively in a rationalist movement that finally broke down, among the intellectual classes, the ancient faith of Hellas. Their role in the deterioration of morals was likewise contributory rather than basic; wealth of itself, without the aid of philosophy, puts an end to puritanism and stoicism. The announcement of the relativity of knowledge did not make men modest, as it should, but disposed every man to consider himself the measure of all things; every clever youth could now feel himself fit to sit in judgment upon the moral code of his people, reject it if he could not understand and approve it, and then be free to rationalize his desires as the virtues of an emancipated soul.
But Athens had ruined itself by carrying to excess the principles of liberty and equality, by ‘training the citizens in such fashion that they looked upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty, impudence of speech as equality, and license to do what they pleased as happiness.’ - (Isocrates, Areopagiticus 20).
Education spread, but spread thin; as in all intellectual ages it stressed knowledge more than character, and produced masses of half-educated people who, uprooted from labor and the land, moved about in unplaced discontent like loosened cargo in the ship of state.
[Pyrrho’s] opinions were basically three: that certainty is unattainable, that the wise man will suspend judgment and will seek tranquillity rather than truth, and that, since all theories are probably false, one might as well accept the myths and conventions of his time and place. Neither the senses nor reason can give us sure knowledge: the senses distort the object in perceiving it, and reason is merely the sophist servant of desire. It is foolish, then, to take sides in disputes, or to seek some other place or mode of living, or to envy the future or the past; all desire is delusion. Even life is an uncertain good, death not a certain evil; one should have no prejudices against either of them. Best of all is a calm acceptance: not to reform the world, but to bear with it patiently; not to fever ourselves with progress, but to content ourselves with peace.
‘Nothing is certain,’ said Arcesilaus, ‘not even that.’ When he was told that such a doctrine made life impossible he answered that life had long since learned to manage with probabilities. A century later a still more vigorous skeptic took charge of the ‘New Academy,’ and pressed the doctrine of universal doubt to the point of intellectual and moral nihilism. When [Carneades of Cyrene] set up shop for himself he lectured one morning for an opinion, the next morning against it, proving each so well as to destroy both; while his pupils, and even his biographer, sought in vain to discover his real views. He undertook to refute the materialistic realism of the Stoics by a Platonic-Kantian critique of sensation and reason. He attacked all conclusions as intellectually indefensible, and bade his students be satisfied with probability and the customs of their time.
Ultimately, Zeno and Chrysippus hoped, all those warring states and classes would be replaced by one vast society in which there would be no nations, no classes, no rich or poor, no masters or slaves; in which philosophers would rule without oppression, and all men would be brothers as the children of one God.
The parallels are so close, will we ever break this recurring
cycle of nihilism?
In and Out of Nihilism
John Henry Newman has a list of attributes of those who are turned to
the transcendent source of coherency, those who have broken from the
cycle of both nihilism and determinism. This list is anathema to the
dissolute and all “right-thinking” New World Order economic
and diplomatic lieutenants:
The elite are not really serious today; they simply exhibit a
debased, simpering form of irony. I agree with Newman’s
conclusion: “Thus the present age is the very contrary to what
are commonly called the Dark Ages; and together with their faults of
those ages we have lost their virtues.” The fruits of
Enlightenment ended up being quite dark.
Thomas Molnar writing in The Church, Pilgrim of the Centuries
(1990), indirectly addresses the debilitating effects of general
affluence:
Has [the Church] ceased believing in the faith that formed it - with the immediate consequence that artists feel a void they cannot fill with their personal ideologies? Not only artists, but the whole society feels the void too; there are no models to admire and to imitate, no ideal which would bring out the best, no force to counter boredom and degredation.
Well, can our personal ideologies ever rise to the sacred?
Obviously not, personal ideologies must be a manifestation of
self-idolization. They are attempts to “create” a world
around us, a world that the idolator pronounces “good,” in
the role of creator. All they are doing, however, is pronouncing
themselves good, which is the whole thrust of modern
education’s “self-esteem” emphasis. Yawning emptiness
arises from such manufactured, unearned “self-esteem,” such
a feeling of being cheated, that the urge to destroy the cheaters
eventually fills it. No possible inspiration to art can be found
within such a self-idolator, only inspiration to animal sentiments,
dirty or ephemeral.
I recall from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Relentless Cult
of Novelty” article:
Nothing worthy can be built on a neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts and culture as a whole. Indeed, something greater than a phenomenon confined to art can be discerned shimmering here beneath the surface - shimmering not with light but with an ominous crimson glow.
So maybe I was overly harsh when I said the Enlightenment has
resulted in a new dark age; it’s not so dark after all,
it’s lit by this crimson glow. Perhaps the radiant light of
knowledge that the Enlightenment promised to bring humanity, turned
out to be the torch light of the death-worshipping Nuremburg rallies.
We certainly know now, that the attempts to create rational utopias
on Earth, arising from Enlightenment thinking, have produced more
genocide, murder, torture and slavery in sheer numbers of individual
humans this century alone, than the combined total produced in
religious wars and intolerance throughout the whole of history.
So many individuals settle for being mere buoys floating on the
waves, believing that any direction in life is the same as the next.
They settle for an animal existence, fleeting material pleasures of
the moment being all that is hoped for, while waiting to die
meaninglessly. In the direction they are looking, mud is all they
see, so they attempt to sacralize it due to Molnar’s “pagan
temptation.” Patrick Buchanan, the only recent Catholic
presidential candidate, speaks laughingly against the
“dirt-worshippers.” His stump speeches routinely work in a
very optimistic message to voters, he tells them: “Sursum corda;
lift up your hearts.” He is not looking at the mud, he is
looking at the stars.
Molnar continues: “...we have become accustomed to adore the
modern idols, mainly technology and economism. We do not imagine that
anything can be realized outside the channels cut by these
two.”
I periodically have the following argument with individuals; I
maintain that transcendental ideals, as expressed in religious and
philosophical thought, precede aesthetics, which precedes politics,
which precedes economics (with technology spread throughout the last
three). They argue exactly the opposite hierarchy, always placing
economics at the head, and simultaneously placing the survival of the
species ahead of survival of the individual. They never can see that
this is a utopian recipe for disaster, no matter how rationally put
my arguments are, because we are dealing with metaphysical
presuppositions, articles of faith that are decided pre-rationally.
Arguing with a dogmatist is as bad as arguing with a nihilist.
James McAllister writing in Beauty & Revolution in Science
(1996) notes how our historical placement changes the metaphors we
use for ourselves:
Physiologists have tended to describe human beings in terms of the most successful physical theories of their own epochs. Mary B. Hesse attributes to Norbert Wiener the observation that ‘there have been three stages in the scientific description of human beings according to what was the most typical machine in use during the period - first, in the seventeenth and eighteeth centuries, clockwork mechanisms described by analogies from dynamics; then in the nineteenth century, heat engines described by analogies from thermodynamics; and now communication devices described by analogies from electronics.’ Neurophysiologists in the 1940s were accustomed to likening the nervous system to a telephone switchboard, by inspiration from information theory. In the 1950s, the nervous system was interpreted as a feedback mechanism like a thermostat, by inspiration from cybernetics. In the 1970s, neurophysiologists took to likening the nervous system to a central processing unit, by inspiration from computer science.
I think this correlation occurs because, as a species, we are
always trying to turn ourselves inside out, to externalize concretely
what is in us. We produce the theoretical and technological systems,
then turn around and say, yup, that’s us.
Without a living tradition, moral philosophy cannot rationally link
past and future, the generational bootstrap is gone. When the
generations raised on liturgical Catholicism, instead of syrupy
“Kumbaya”, are gone, the bootstrap to the great peak of
meaning in Western Civilization during the Renaissance will be gone.
Once gone out of living tradition, it is gone for good. The moral
philosophy of future generations cannot start from scratch, there is
no starting point other than tradition, so where will it come from?
We are back to reading Alasdair MacIntrye by the light of the
Ominous
Crimson Glow.
James Buchan, writing in Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money
(1997) points out that money has the same solvent effect as
nihilism:
The Age of Money, which came after the Age of Faith - the God of the Seventeenth Century that dislodged the God of the Middle Ages - has plunged the world into the most perilous instability. Money, far from being the harmless arena of human emulation as its apologists hold, is a great destroyer. Because money is eminent desire, there is no satisfaction in the external world unless it is conveyed in money, until the world is possessed in monetary garb... because money is all power and potential, the external world is a poor thing and may be altered and exploited without compunction. To say that human beings must accept those losses, and live among their parasites - learn to love sparrows and magpies and no other birds, hold cockroaches to be the only insects - in a world of perfect artifice is the final idolatry: that money is our ineluctable destiny, not merely our life, but our death as well.
And with the patenting of all human genes, all life will come
to be monetized, we will own all other life but we will not own our
selves. A paradox of destruction.
Scientific Nihilism or Determinism?
The really and truly strange thing about the Modern Attack, is that
since the Big Bang creation ex nihilo theory (and its
corollary the Big Crunch or Heat Death formula) gained popularity in
the 60s, along with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum
mechanics (nothing’s there until measured), an unholy scientific
dogmatic trinity that I would summarize as - from nothing to
nothing via nothing - the scientific worldview (official Reason)
has proceeded from materialism to idealism. Nihilism (no meaning, no
purpose, no free will, no consciousness, no existence) is idealism,
not materialism. Materialism is Newtonian mechanics, deterministic,
and this is still how most scientists and the general public thinks,
but this is not the official scientific worldview. Reason has
proclaimed that appearance, idealism, nothingness, is all there is,
just random activity with no material foundation whatsoever. The
first attack spawned by the Enlightenment was materialist, the
current attack is idealist.
The view I have seen expressed, coming out the science classes in our
modern universities, is “We are genes and environment, nothing
more, it is irrational in the extreme to speak of free will.”
Our educational system can be little more than a string of factories
producing servile students with this deterministic teaching.
It’s pretty standard historical consensus - at least history
written prior to the fictional revisionism of the past generation -
that Platonism was the dominant influence from the Stoics of late
ancient Greece, through the neo-Platonist’s as formulated by
Plotinus, through Augustine up until the rediscovery of Aristotle by
Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Aristotle was the dominant
influence with the Skeptics or Epicureans of late ancient Greece,
then went into hibernation in the Christian West, but flourished in
the Muslim Mideast with Averroes and Avicenna. Between Aquinas and
Galileo, Platonic and Aristotelian influence were both in full play
amongst the Renaissance humanists, contributing to the peak of
meaning at that time, in my opinion. With the rise of inductive,
materialist science, Aristotelian influence gained the upper hand,
until this century with the rise of QM and General Relativity. Now,
at least, physics and cosmology have returned to Platonic idealism,
the idea that mathematical formulas are more real than the phenomena
they are describing, as Stephen Hawking put it, ‘what breathes
fire into the equations?’ The most interesting times in
conceptual history, are when both modes are in equal play amongst
theologians, philosophers and intellectuals.
From the Profane to the Sacred
When the discussion turns to the idea of “image” preceding
the movement of ideologies, I am reminded of Alan Gowans’s
language. In On Parallels in Universal History Discoverable in
Arts & Artifacts (1972), he focuses on “taste is
determined by ideology” and that to spread ideologies, art takes
on the forms or “images” necessary to implant
presuppositions in a population’s consciousness. He says:
...Ideas can only develop in minds already accepting their presuppositions; and these presuppositions cannot be forced in, nor picked up by chance observation. Or more succintly, to be absorbed and acted upon, truths must seem self-evident.
He says the function of art and architecture is to create images
of conviction and persuasion. This insight led to discussions of the
function of cyberspace in “carrying ideology” and
“directing worship.” As Alfred North Whitehead wrote:
“Philosophy is either self-evident, or it is not philosophy. The
attempt of any philosophic discourse should be to produce
self-evidence.”
I am interested in developing the knowledge of: 1) how we can learn
what design processes cross the line from “the profane” to
“the sacred,” and 2) how we can learn to penetrate the
transcendental realm, the mechanism of how we recognize the sacred,
how we distinguish it amidst the welter of our mundane sensory
experience. It was the movement from the ‘immanence’ of
nature in Pagan and Eastern religions towards the
‘transcendence’ of medieval Germanic/Thomistic
Christianity, bolstered by the Renaissance humanistic infusion of
Greek and Roman conceptual and aesthetic leftovers, that allowed
‘economic man’ to come into being. The movement from
immanence to transcendence is what allowed science to develop and
flourish because it desacralized nature, allowing us to learn from
and fashion it. The ‘New Age’ movement is a move back
towards immanence, away from transcendence, this harm the concept of
‘economic man,’ which is so central to the success of
capitalism.
In reality, if archetypes are turned towards truth, then even though
they may be approaching truth from all directions, there will be at
least some compatible logic at the borders of the meanings of
the archetypes. If, on the other hand, archetypes are turned away
from truth, then “each system of archetypes will define its own
mutually incompatible logic.” Systems of archetypes that are
turned away from truth can still have the appearance of rationality
to those who subscribe to coherence theories of truth (the Quinian
stance), though not the reality of rationality. Systems of archetypes
that are turned towards the truth, even if only striking a
tangentially glancing blow, will contain a shred of potentially
discoverable rationality, at least to those who subscribe to
correspondence theories of truth (the Kantian stance).
Nietzsche’s Nihilism
Nietzsche’s philosophical program was socialist in essence,
Nietzsche cared deeply about humanity, he wanted future generations
to find an antidote to the nihilism and mediocrity he had lived in
all his life. He decided, very much like Machiavelli, to advocate
drinking to the dregs the radical skepticism always present to the
analytical mind of every age, by giving free rein to the Will to
Power. Only after probing down to the very origins of authority and
justice and coming up absolutely empty, could anyone in the future be
expected to rediscover humanity’s ground, the wellsprings of our
vitality, the source of meaning and existence. Nietzsche fully
expected the development of multi-generational attempts to build up a
reflective aristocracy of top-rank minds, in order to build
resistance to the cancer of nihilism. Nietzsche fully expected his
writings to result in our own interesting discussions, the honing of
the antidote, and the spreading of it amongst the humanity he cared
so much for. We are performing up to snuff for him. He gave us 200
years to rise out of nihilism, starting in 1888. He thought we’d
come out the other side around 2088.
There are times in history when a set of ideas, specific worldviews,
if you will, are so widely accepted among the intelligentsia as to
seem self-evident. Such ideas were embodied in the Declaration of
Independence; these ideas are no longer self-evident, and they
stopped being self-evident starting in Europe after the Napoleonic
Wars, long before Nietzsche. By the time Nietzsche hit on the theme
of nihilism and subjective idealistic epistemology, he already had
lived it all his life. His genius was to capture the essence of it in
language so compelling, that his epigoni were blinded to all other
possibilities. The refugees from contaminated Europe after WW I,
brought this destructive conceptual package to America, resulting in
FDR’s reign of socialistic error.
Hegel captured the essence of Western Culture just as it began to
fall apart, never to fully reconstitute itself, no matter how many
“awakenings” or “revivals” followed in the
successive years. Hegel was misinterpreted badly by those on the
right like Max Stirner and Nietzsche, and was even more
misinterpreted by those on the left like Marx and his derivatives and
Heidegger and his compost-modern fellow travelers. See Hegel: A
Biography (2000) by Terry Pinkard for a more accurate picture of
what Hegel attempted. The strains of thought attempting to rise above
these conceptual sinkholes, were unsupported and weak, drowned out by
the rational authority of a nihilistic science that posited a
universe devoid of purpose and meaning, and by a humanistic
intellectual clique that posited a universe devoid of transcendence
and truth. The old ideas of the unique human’s conscious free
will gave way to the far easier ideas of random activity or
historical determism. We are still in their destructive grip.
Contra Historical Revisionism
The Australian historian Keith Windschuttle has an essay entitled
“The Real Stuff of History” in The New Criterion
(March 1997). It is a tonic to see someone champion truth in history,
the fact that only one thing actually happens at once, regardless of
how many perspectives there are; and champion the incalculable role
of the individual in shaping history, in direct opposition to
academic historians’ vogue of attributing history to
quasi-deterministic forces out of the control of individuals. He is
an important voice in the academic wilderness providing reasoned ammo
against the pervasive use of the word “inevitable” when
making prognostications of how the future will unfold.
When it comes to the recent rise of quasi-determinism, which was not
“inevitable,” the French, as usual, come in for some heavy
blame. This rise was not due to some mysterious historical force like
class struggle, or geography, or climate, or genetic factors, or
memetic transmission laws, but due to individuals, who can be named
and held responsible for the messes their ideas have made of our
contemporary world.
Windschuttle begins with Fernand Braudel’s conceiving of his
famous book The Mediterranean (1949) while being held in a
German prisoner of war camp.
For the Frenchmen of his generation, this event, coupled with the German occupation of Paris without a shot being fired, plus the subsequent collaboration of France with the Nazi regime, was a source of humiliation and anguish. The concept that most assisted Braudel to distance himself from these events was that of the ‘longue durée,’ the structuralist view of history. Over the course of the longue durée, what did a transient event like the fall of France matter?
It is interesting to note the French response to cultural
humiliation at the hands of the Germans was to deemphasize the role
of the individual in history, essentially the socialistic response.
When the Germans, on the other hand, responded to cultural
humiliation at the hands of the French during and after the Sun
King’s reign, they glorified the individual, initiating the
powerful Romantic movement that still captivated Ayn Rand many years
later. Back to Windschuttle:
In the wake of the war, [English] historians were keen to [modernize and] bury the last vestiges of the Victorian emphasis on the heroic individual, especially the chauvinist accounts of imperial heroes like Clive of India or Gordon of Khartoum that had dominated school textbooks as late as the 1930s.... Modernization also meant taking on board the work of the fast-growing field of economic history which had found that politics, especially in democratic societies, was more a matter of economic management than had previously been appreciated. Up to the 1960s, anthropology and sociology were still intellectually respectable and some historians felt their own work should be more integrated with these and other social sciences. Braudel showed them how all these aims could be pursued. One of Braudel’s most enthusiastic fan clubs was formed by the generation of Marxists who came to prominence in the 1960s, especially in Britain.
No surprise to see English Marxists fall in with
quasi-deterministic French socialists, they’re still at it. Note
that Windschuttle correctly points out that anthropology and
sociology have long lost their intellectual respectability. The
notion of “economic management” being important in the
history of democratic societies was taken to the extreme in The
Sovereign Individual (1997) by Rees-Mogg & Davidson. I guess
these fads have to reach reductio ad absurdum before
self-correction can occur.
The academic Left of the 1960s... preferred Braudel’s insistence on the irrelevance of individual action. To [Louis] Althusser, individual men and women have no part in shaping their world. They are merely the bearers of roles that are defined for them by the ‘social formation,’ little more than robots programmed by the prevailing capitalist ideology. ‘Men do not make history,’ [Braudel] wrote in the final passage of The Identity of France, ‘rather it is history above all that makes men and absolves them of blame.’
Well, isn’t that special? No wonder O.J. can bump his wife
off, and the Menendez brothers can bump their parents off with
impunity, heck, they’re just subject to historical or social
forces, no blame can stick. The connection is crystal clear.
In the wake of the failure of the attempted student revolutionary movement of 1968, and the attendant recall of Charles de Gaulle and election of Richard Nixon, this kind of historical determinism became a comfort blanket for the academic Left. There was no longer any need for a radical to be politically active since activism could make no difference to the great determining structures. All that remained was to study, theorize, and debate the nature of the structures themselves. This was an agenda perfectly suited to the academic world of seminars, conferences, cafes, and bars, and to the careers, tenure, and promotions that have focused their minds ever since. By the 1980s, the tenured radicals had dropped Marx and Althusser... but retained their structuralist baggage. Many looked to alternative gurus, notably the former French Marxists Jean Baudrillard and Jean François Lyotard, who preached postmodernism...
Truth hurts, and Windschuttle’s account here of how our fine
educational system ended up in its current conceptual sewer is very
painful. My tax dollars are going to universities which are bent on
destroying the very possibility of successfully launching extropic
cultures.
Then Windschuttle talks about the writing of history itself, and why
recent historians have taken to simply writing fictional stories
embedded with thinly veiled political ideologies, instead of trying
to get their facts straight and placing us within the individuals
living during a given historical time in a given culture.
The Dutch historian Peter Geyl emerged in the postwar academic world as one of the most widely read commentators on the discipline. In particular, his books Napoleon: For and Against (1949) and Debates with Historians (1955) were influential in establishing in the postwar mind the notion that there could be no final truths in history. In 1961, Geyl’s book on Napoleon was favorably acknowledged by the English historian E.H. Carr, author of What is History?, one of the most influential commentaries on history writing ever published. It was a required text in virtually every course on historical method in the English-speaking academic world for the next twenty years. Carr repeats Geyl’s argument that history is ‘an unending dialogue between the present and the past.’ Different ages take different perspectives. The best we can hope for is a continuous debate. While he says that historians should base their writing on facts, the real stuff of history is not truth but interpretation. Carr was the author of a massive ten-volume study of the foundation of the USSR between 1917 and 1929 but, until his death in 1982, had remained a closet Marxist.
The massive Soviet penetration of our history departments,
especially in the departments that churned out history teachers by
the bushel, should come as no surprise to those who remember the
communist axiom that those who would shape the future must control
the past. It is also obvious why Nietzsche, who wrote from the
right, was picked up and sanitized by the left who have never had a
lick of respect for the truth. Nietzsche asked for this misbegotten
adoption, which would’ve repulsed him, by being too clever by a
half in pushing Western civilization further into nihilism, faster,
in order for it to discover an antidote to nihilism quickly, by
emphasizing interpretation over truth himself. “Oh, the tangled
webs we weave...”
But when truth is thrown out the door, then lies and propaganda
walk in, such as denying the Holocaust ever took place.
One of the consequences of the relativist position is that it cedes some degree of credibility to anyone with an even vaguely coherent perspective, no matter how vile it might be. The consequence of the position that there can be no absolute truths is that there can be no absolute falsehoods either, so refutation (‘prove the falsehood of’) is beyond reach.
All too true, but there is a proper method of history, if the
notion of truth is not thrown out.
For every corroboration, there increases in geometric proportion the probability that this event actually occurred. Since we live in a finite world, there comes a point where it is impossible for any scenario to exist in which the Holocaust did not occur. Every fact can itself be a conclusion and every conclusion can itself be a fact in someone else’s explanation.
Windschuttle then dares to skewer the whole premise of
multiculturalism, the notion that all cultures deserve equal
consideration. We wouldn’t even be examining the history of
other cultures if it weren’t for Western civilization’s
interest in them. Other cultures didn’t record their own
history, they saw no reason to.
History is an invention of Western culture, dating from ancient Greece in the fifth century BC, and since then its practice has been confined almost entirely to the West. Yet for all this time, there have been two traditions of history contesting the field. One derives from the first genuine historian, Thucydides. In the Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (1990), John McManners has argued that in the implications of Christian belief there are encouragements to writing history in an austere, uncommitted fashion, with wide cultural concern: ‘Firstly, there was the conviction that everything men do or think matters intensely and eternally, as coming under the judgment of God; secondly, there was the concept of a creator entirely distinct from his creation, ruling the universe by general laws, whose ways are inscrutable, and who gives men the gift of freedom. Hence the obligation to treat seriously and with reverence all men and the social orders they build, to study everything, to explain without partisanship, insisting on the logical coherence of all things.’ From the fall of Rome to the Renaissance, the idea of history was kept alive in the industry of those many Christian monks whose chronicles of church and state were imbued with ideals of this kind.
Other cultures did not have such ideals, did not take the
individual seriously. The notion of the importance of the individual
was a Western idea.
Christianity, however, bore an additional dimension that in the last two centuries has produced a second tradition within history. Christianity has held that, while the achievements of man are due to his own will and intellect, they are also beholden to something other than himself, the realizing of God’s purposes for man. From this perspective, men are the vehicles through which history occurs but history has a direction and a purpose decided by a force beyond man. This Christian concept of history also contained the idea of fulfillment. It is this second Christian tradition that has formed the basis of those theories of history that conjure up great impersonal forces and undercurrents which purportedly determine the destiny of mankind.
This split within Christianity between the two traditions is
mirrored in the split between ascetic Christianity, essentially
entropic in nature, and joyous Christianity, essentially extropic in
nature. The tension between the rival traditions within Western
civilization helped forge the pluralism and ideal of toleration that
underpins notions of liberty, freedom and capitalism, and is a unique
reason why none of those notions arose anywhere else on earth.
Windschuttle sums up by emphasizing the individual’s role in
history, an extropic formulation:
Rather than human affairs being impelled by great impersonal forces, political history reveals our world to be made by men and, instead of being ‘absolved of blame,’ men are responsible for the consequences of their actions.
Nominalism
Thomas Hobbes wrote in Body, Man and Citizen that: “True
and false belong to speech, and not to things... The first truths are
arbitrarily made by those that first of all imposed names upon
things.” He picked up this idea from another Englishman, William
of Ockham who formulated the philosophical position of nominalism.
Martin Luther learned nominalism from his mentor, and incorporated
its destructive tenets into the Protestant Revolt, which is why
mainstream Protestantism has become desacralized and enfeebled.
Nominalism devolved to idealism and phenomenalism, thence to its
natural end-state of radical skepticism or scientific nihilism.
Correspondance to reality (in science, this would be verification
through technological implementation of theory) is the viable
approach to knowledge, “being” must be presumed or no
knowledge is possible. Karl Popper’s irrational principle of
falsification is scientific nonsense, it is
Epicurus-Lucretius-Ockham-Machiavelli-Hobbes-Locke restated; more
idealistic nihilism. See David Stove’s devastating critical
attack on Popper, Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists
which was originally published in 1982 and has been republished as
Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific
Irrationalism.
About nominalism, a friend posted this quote from a book by Louis
Bouyer:
No phrase reveals to clearly the hidden evil that was to spoil the fruit of the Reformation than Luther’s saying that Occam was the only scholastic who was any good. The truth is that Luther, brought up on his system, was never able to think outside the framework it imposed.... What, in fact, is the essential characteristic in Occam’s thought, and of nominalism in general, but a radical empiricism, reducing all being to what is perceived which empties out, with all idea of substance, all possibility of real relations between beings, as well as the stable substance in any of them, and ends by denying to the real any intelligibility...
This nominalist poison became today’s subjectivism as
personified by the incoherent post-modernism, which dogmatically
utters the absolute truth that there are no absolute truths. Also,
nominalism cleared out Reason from God, so that God could create
utterly arbitrarily; this is the root of the crazy idea that random
chance in evolutionary theory could possibly ever produce
intelligibility.
Recently, I ran across an analysis of Leibniz’s same point by
the philosopher Etienne Gilson. Writing in his book Thomist
Realism and the Critique of Knowledge, Gilson correctly hacks
varieties of Popper’s “evolutionary epistemologies,”
or “critical realisms,” to pieces:
We have now examined several types of critical realism and in each instance have come to the conclusion that the critique of knowledge is essentially incompatible and irreconcilable with metaphysical realism. There is no middle ground. You must either begin as a realist with being, in which case you will have a knowledge of being, or begin as a critical idealist with knowledge, in which case you will never come in contact with being.
What Gilson refers to as the “critical idealist,” I
refer to as the “smug nihilist.” Being and truth are, of
course, different aspects of the same ontological primitive.
Unless you begin with a care for truth, you will never have
knowledge, you cannot begin with knowledge itself and get anywhere at
all. You begin down a path of critical reasoning utterly
dependent on granting the authority to produce legitimate criticism
to various individuals, an obvious self-selectional solipsistic
sinkhole.
Reilly Jones
© 2001