Why do science-minded, fact-based people continue to imagine the cosmos and the stuff that makes it up as Galileo and Darwin did, rather than as Bohr and Heisenberg did? It's understandable, I suppose, because it's easy enough to imagine the Galilean/Darwinian cosmos, and not so easy to imagine it as Bohr and Heisenberg. The first does not offer a challenge to our common sense understanding of the world, while the second challenges it profoundly.
Sure, science fiction attempts to help us imagine all the weird stuff that seems to be associated with the new physics, but the medium is the message, and "fiction' seems to play a larger role than 'science', and so it's all dismissed as an entertainment.Time travel and worm holes and multiverses just become vehicles to expand the idea that the Darwinian logic extends into every dimension of reality. We just assume that if there are other beings in the universe, they must be as cruel and rapacious as we are. The whole cosmos is the Wild West filled with savages, but who are these savages but figments, projections of our worst selves? When premoderns looked to the heavens, this was not what they imagined inhabited it. Why we assume they were wrong is central to our civilizational pathology.
Our cultural elites are split between two factions, sometime occupying the same person. On the one hand, there's the kind of Liberal that wants to be nice and for everybody to get along, who wants to keep everybody safe, and for nobody's feelings to get hurt. And the other hand, there the faction that believes that whatever is nice or civilized about humans is a fragile membrane that cannot successfully contain who we really are–irrational, instinct driven savages. Isn't this the picture that pevails in about 85 percent of stuff that appears in pop culture? Aren't the most interesting characters those men and women who are brash, unconstrained by rules or convention, who are street smart, who trust their instincts, but most of all get things done despite all the impediments that civilization puts in their way?
Isn't the basic contradiction in the Liberal imagination? That we want everybody to be nice while we are incessantly bombarded with the message that the whole Liberal "nice" culture is a lie Liberals tell themselves to avoid facing the dark truth that at root we all wish we could unleash or inner Genghis Khan if we could get away with it. That we only act nice because we want others to act nice toward us, that there is nothing inherently moral about being nice; it's just safer.
And so is it surprising that because our popular imaginations are conditioned by this diet of psychopathic pursuit of sex, power, and wealth, we elect a guy president who so purely exemplifies it. Isn't he really the paradigm of what the culture celebrates as the best kind of human being–the dominant bull, the alpha accountable to no one? Isn't this desire to be disinhibited really at the heart of Trump's success–that he is unapologetically what deep-down TV and movies tell us that we all want to be–that we all want to "break bad"–but that we are all too timid to do it? Certainly Trump believes that he is not constrained by any such timidity, and that makes him the superior human being he thinks himself to be.
And do 'nice' secular Liberals have any argument that he's wrong? Isn't his behavior and success a rebuke of any attempt to postulate that traditional morality is anything more than the rules masters impose on their slaves? And do the slaves have any argument to make to their masters that they, too, should be obligated to follow those rules? I don't think so.
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This dilemma is vividly described in Manvir Singh's September New Yorker article entitled in the online version: Are Your Morals too Good to be True? His basic conclusion is yes because there's no basis in evolutionary theory to justify moral behavior as anything more than humans setting rules for getting along. This was for Singh an appalling discovery, and his account of his failed search to justify human moral behavior rather moved me. There was a sincerity and honesty and vulnerability about it. Here is an intelligent, sincere, young man born into a Sikh family who leaves that behind in a search to find a 'scientific' foundation that justifies his desire to be an honest moral actor. He can't find it.
How does one exist in a post-moral world? What do we do when the desire to be good is exposed as a self-serving performance and moral beliefs are recast as merely brain stuff? I responded by turning to a kind of nihilism, yet this is far from the only reaction. We could follow the Mentawai, favoring the language of transaction over virtue. Or we can carry on as if nothing has changed. Richard Joyce, in his new book, “Morality: From Error to Fiction,” advocates such an approach. His “moral fictionalism” entails maintaining our current way of talking while recognizing that a major benefit of this language is that it makes you likable, despite referring to nothing real. If you behave the way I did in grad school, going on about the theatre of morality, you will, he suggests, only attract censure and wariness. Better to blend in.
Intellectually, I find the proposal hard to swallow. The idea of cosplaying moral commitment for social acceptance would surely magnify whatever dissonance I already feel. Still, a decade after my first meeting with Moshe, experience forces me to acknowledge Joyce’s larger point. It’s easy to inhabit the fiction.
So if you accept that human behavior and aspiration can only be intellectually explained within the constraints of evolutionary theory, there you are. Morality just boils down to doing what others expect of you, of doing what's necessary to get along. Any other explanations are fictions, and maybe the best we can do is act as if the fictions were true. And living the fiction is ultimately what he choses to do. In the article's final graf he says–
Tressed, turbanned, and teetotalling, I am, at least by all appearances, still a good Sikh. I have become a teacher, a husband, and a father to a new baby daughter. When she smiles, a single dimple appears in her left cheek. Her existence feels more ecstatic and celebratory than any ideology I could have conceived, and I hope that she’ll one day grow up to be empathetic and aware of others’ suffering. I have moral intuitions, sometimes impassioned ones. I try to do right by people, and, on most days, I think I do an O.K. job. I dream on.
Singh is a good man who cannot justify his desire to be good in any other terms. But if I were to ask him if he has any intellectual basis to argue why Trump should behave any differently than he does, or John Gotti or Genghis Khan, he would not be able to. All he's got is that their behavior anti-social; it's better to cooperate. But anti-social by whose social standard? Each of these 'villains' follows a code, and each was deeply admired by others who shared that code. Singh has no basis to argue that Trump or Genghis Khan is amoral, only that their codes are different from his.
"So fine," Manvir, Trump might say to him. "If you want to wear a turban, and abstain from alcohol, you know, whatever. Be a loser. I don't care. But if I want to grift and lie and cheat–and if I can get away with it,and not only that, get elected president–it's pretty clear whose morality is superior and whose inferior.
Now Singh's dilemma is one that any honest, intelligent person going through our high schools and universities must confront if they care at all about what it means to be a good person. His is the standard belief system of most students I've taught over the years, unless they're among the very few who are still practicing within some faith tradition.
But for most of these kids, like Manvir, science has obsoletized religion. Sure, some might get into meditation or Wicca or some other religious practices as a hobby or entertainment, but all that isn't likely to affect the way they behave at work. They're all bright, nice, well-socialized kids who want to live a good life, but they have no ballast. They have not place to set their feet. If they go to work for Enron or Wall St, they'll adapt to the Enron or Wall St culture. That's what they do. They adapt. They go with the flow. There's no reason for them not to so long as they can embed in new culture where everybody thinks the same thing.
So that's the crux of the problem: unless you are an extraordinarily thoughtful person with a genuinely philosophical temperament willing to ruthlessly examine your presuppositions, you become unconsciously inured to the values and imagination of the culture world you live in. And in America today, as elsewhere, the only broadly accepted discourse that has legitimacy for educated people is defined by the nihlistic presuppositions of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. This is Singh's real dilemma. He cannot think outside what the the TCM defines as legitimate, and so he is forced to pretend that his behavior has intrinsic moral value even though deep down he cannot persuade himself it does.
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So what has this got to do with 'rescuing Aristotle? I've been struggling with a way to take up Hart and Taylor in a way that will engage most readers here. The material can be pretty dense and it requires background that I cannot assume most readers have. And it's complicated by the dilemma that what at root I want to subvert the basic presuppositions of the culture world that defines reality for us–whether we think of ourselves as Liberals or Conservatives. I don't want anything to do with either, and yet it would be easy for Liberal-leaning people to see me as Liberal or Conservative-leaning people to see me as conservative. I am not interested in shoring up what's left standing of a rickety Liberal Order. Liberals and Conservatives will continue their feuding, and I will ally myself tactically with whichever side is less cruel and foolish, but strategically, I am more interested in the development of something truly, vitally new.
So I pretty much reject the philosophical presuppositions that almost all contemporary Liberal/Conservative public discourse assumes. But I'm sensing a shift. It's feeling like those presuppositions have gotten throttled recently in such a way that it opens up an opportunity, if not a need, to rethink things.
But the quality of the thinking I'm interested in is civilizational–not sectarian or cultish. Any crank can cook up some new thing whether its neopaganism, scientology, or whatever's in the New Age crockpot these days. This kind of thinking is civilizationally incosequential. The TCM easily coopts them in rendering them consumer choices–as hobbies, or entertainments, as something you do with your private time that poses no threat to the dominating influence of the TCM.
So I'm not interested in the kind of thinking that can be so easily coopted by the TCM, nor am I interested in going off the grid. I'm interested in the kind of thinking that will, over time, radically reshape the grid. In other words, I want to ally myself with those far smarter and more knowledgeable than I who want to challenge the fundamental assumptions that legitimate the TCM. These are presuppositions that, when push comes to shove, a Christian Nationalist like Russell Vought shares with Techno-Capitalist nihilist like Sam Altman. Each are in their different ways captives of the TCM.
So, I am not interested in finding a way to coexist with the TCM; I am interested in doing what I can to subvert it. And I want to do this by making the case that something better is possible, and to find this better, we don't have to start from scratch. In fact, it's already very much a part of our cultural infrastructure, even if it's mostly dormant and forgotten.
Hence "rescuing Aristotle", when Aristotle is the metonym for the prevailing metaphysical imaginary that shaped Western and Middle Eastern civilization until the Scientific Revolution. The goal is not to reject science or scientific method, but to re-situate it in a bigger, more coherent and rational cosmic picture. Once you change the prevailing cosmic picture, you change pretty much everything, and unimaginable things become imaginable. This is not a religious project, but a philosophical one. It should be persuasive because it makes better sense of the world than the toxic nonsense that we've all been brainwashed by the TCM to accept instead.
Coming: Rescuing Aristotle.2: Day 1 of Hart's colloquy among the gods.
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