Journo for Burdo
[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]
Below are the 4 most recent journal entries recorded in the "burdo" journal:[<< Previous 4 entries]
|
03:36 pm
[Link] |
What is the meaning of the world we live in?
The particular thinking of the Western world has come to dominate the public spheres of the planet we share: political, legal, economic, and educational structures everywhere bear a resemblance based on common inheritance. This is not only because such structures have been imposed by the successful countries of Europe and America, but also because those structures have proven to be the most successful (where success is the control and the mastery of nature). But what is the nature of this system, and thus its meaning?
Recently I have been reading a short book called "Foolishness to the Greeks" by Lesslie Newbigin, which has an interesting analysis of modern Western culture (as part of addressing the question of what a genuine missionary encounter with it would entail). The author identifies a fundamental, two-fold feature that underpins the paradigm we live in: that public facts are the only knowledge with authority, and we individually have the right to choose our response to these facts.
Our plausability structure
Firstly, a useful note. Our sense of what is real is, to a large extent, a function of the society in which we live. It is almost impossible for an individual to deny steadily the reality of things that society regards as real, or to affirm the reality of things that society regards as illusions [1]. This prevailing set of beliefs has been called the 'plausability structure' of the society, dissent from which is regarded as heresy - which simply means making one's own decision rather than accepting the given tradition. In modern Western culture, though, pluralism rules and each of us is required to be a heretic, to make personal decisions about ultimate questions.
Sovereignty of human reason
Heretics were rare or a minority until post-medieval Europe. That is, until the Enlightment placed individual human reason at the centre of the human experience. Since all humans were endowed with reason [2] to weigh their perception of the world in sober rationally, all had the right to make that judgement individually [3]. But what was human reason to judge?
Public facts
One of the triumph of the scientific age was to turn the speculation of philosophy into the certainty of publically held and verifiable facts. Facts were impartial and impersonal and could be held to account. Galileo extorted that all things should be measured, or made measurable. Measurements are by essence public and comparable, or able to be made so (and any unable to be made public are discarded). New instruments and patient observation began to yield books of data that led to publically verifiable hypothesises in the fields of natural science. By Newton's time the nature of our world was revealing itself as a material, mechanical universe governed by natural laws of cause and effect. Observed, repeatable evidence was the fuel of these discoveries, and the public nature of these facts essential to the enterprise [4].
Crucially, the purpose of events or objects had no place in the investgation. Rather, to discover the cause of something was to have explained it. Understanding simply meant to take the object apart to see how it ticks, not to ask what does it mean [5]. Such knowledge was power. To know how the world ticked was also to know how to change the way it ticked. The success of the Enlightenment was that in discovering the workings of the world, it brought about (apparent) mastery of the natural world [6].
Private values
An offshoot of the success of this enterprise based on public facts, is that values have retreated. To value something, to declare it 'good' or 'right', is to consider it against its purpose. For example, to consider a watch 'good' it must be considered against a purpose of keeping time; likewise to declare the action of saving an endangered species 'good', it is implicit that the continued existence of the species fulfills a purpose. In a more complex case, to consider a person's actions 'right' is not to compare them against a law (they are merely a shorthand) but against the purpose of the law. To do otherwise is always to obey the letter of the law and not the spirit, and history abounds with examples of the difficulties of the written law to fully encompass its own purpose.
Values can not be weighed against public facts because values can not be measured: to measure requires a ruler or a scale. Moreover any concept of good or bad must be considered against a concept of purpose, and purpose was ignored in the collection of public facts. Purpose is a private value, while facts must be divorced from personal commitment. Pluralism is the result, in which values are privately held and every individual has the right to rationally decide their own values. Without any universal public values as reference, no one person's values can be considered better than any others. The notion of 'better' would require a standard value to compare them against, and none exist, because values do not fit into the framework of knowledge that has come to dominate Western culture [7].
A ready example is the abortion debate: does an unborn life have equal rights to its mother? The facts of the matter are fairly firmly established, but this has not diminished the debate in the slightest because no universal standard of human life allows society to give a firm answer. The facts alone are not sufficient to decide the case, and values are not universal. Such a value is instead a private matter for each rational individual to decide. And each decides differently, so that it is the loudest or most passionate crowd that impresses its values upon the whole [8].
So we live in a culture with a separation between the public world of facts and the private world of values. The 'plausibilty structure' for our society is that there is no generally acknowledged plausability structure. Except of course, the belief that public facts are the only knowledge which has authority. This alone must be accepted without dissent (only the facts themselves can be challenged, and only using the appropriate means). In this framework, only value-free facts are truly valuable. But facts are based on measuring, so only that which can be measured is able to have authority in the public sphere.
Turning the microscope on ourselves
Scientific investigation is naturally reductionist. The collection of facts extends beyond the 'face-value' of things and dissects them into components down to the smallest elements. A tree is observed as roots, trunk and leaves, and these elements in turn observed down to the basic chemical reactions of photosynthesis, osmosis, etc.
But the subject of analysis soon extended beyond the natural world around us to the human enviornment and ourselves. The retreat of values amidst the dominance of facts gives us potential for science without morality. Every aspect of the human condition is fair game for such analysis. Science moved from physics to chemistry to biology to society: one discipline taking people as a bag of organs, another discipline taking workers as cogs in a machine. People's lives became reduced to parts and analysed like everything else [9].
Division of labour
An example which has been a factor in creating the form of the society we live in today is the division of labour. Work was once the domain of a household. Once analysed and broken down, productive human activity ceases to be a craft and becomes mere labour and activity, and workers become interchangeable, and the workplace becomes part of the public sphere. With work split into separate elements, bureaucracy grows to manage the result, using impartial rules to govern public operation. Like the split between facts and values, a split emerged between public work and private relationships, between the workplace and the home. Urbanization, social disruption, and alienation are results of this new conception of working society [10].
That is not to say that an inevitable link exists between a quest for public facts and the social results of the division of labour mentioned above. It is more complex than this simple telling, but this example touches on the impact of the modern worldview.
Human rights
Fundamental to the story so far has been the sovereignty of human reason and the right to choose an individual response to public facts. Values retreat to the private sphere because every human has an inaliable right to personal freedom of belief. The dominance of public facts would not be possible without conviction of the triumph of human reason and the freedom of all individuals to choose.
But the individual right to reason and to freely exercise it is nothing without other human rights, such as the rights to life, liberty, and happiness (or 'property', which was the original third right after life and liberty) [11].
Government guarantees rights
Relationships have been moved from a central place in the public sphere, to be replaced by rights. But rights are traditionally a matter of relationships. Any right is nonsense without a (second) party to guarantee that right. In the pre-modern era rights were a matter of relationships, with hierarchies of duties and reciprocal rights. Lords, knights, workers, etc all existed in dutiful relation to each other, and every right they enjoyed came out of these relationships. When the Enlightenment declared certain rights as inaliable to all humans, it required an equal party to guarantee rights equally for all. This second party was the state; it is the national government which guarantees the rights of all its citizens [12]. As our rights increase so does the scope and power of government [13].
Government is not content to merely guarantee the inaliable rights of its subjects. It also has the ability to act on the knowledge gained - the great power obtained from the public knowledge seems wasted unless acted upon. But to act requires purpose: facts can never lead to action unless a purpose is recognised.
Doctrine of Progress
The enlightenment mostly solved this dilemma by advocating a particular public meaningfulness: progress. Both technological progress and social progress. Trading the happiness of people today for the future happiness of a better world tomorrow. Youth replace age as our most valuable citizens because they are the hope of tomorrow. Education becomes a state responsibilty: to impart the public facts into these citizens (values are also taught, but purely subjectively). The wisest among us are no longer our elders but our youth, because they are the leaders and guides of the future.
But even progress is not quite sufficient as a goal: the progress needs a specific direction or else amounts to change for change's sake. But with no grounds to judge one purpose over another the various manipulators of society (education, policy, etc) simply judge by whatever idea they hold with the most force, or which justification is most persuasive. Purpose is needed even though purpose is not part of the plausability structure. So ideas of stability or growth or happiness become the benchmarks, but merely as a matter of policy or conviction, easily changed by circumstance or theory.
The need for purpose
It is central to this essay that purpose and thus values are pluralistic in our society: everyone is free to rationally choose their own. But at the same time core areas of society demonstrate that purpose cannot be divorced from human endeavour. Science itself is a purpose, a valued thing engaged in with zeal. Social progress is impossible without purpose, and very few believe that society could not be better than it is. Education and government are either entirely conservative or inauthentic without purpose for the change and growth they encourage. Such ideas have been felt within philosophy but no sure answer has been raised because the nature of the 'plausability structure' seems to forbid it. Only impartial facts can be valued for knowledge, yet without purpose even the collection of such facts is meaningless [14].
Meaning of existence
Certain insights require a paradigm shift. From the position of earlier knowledge, the later knowledge seems remote and disconnected, as though separated by a chasm. It takes great insight to breech this chasm. But once over, the earlier knowledge fits within the new paradigm comfortably: looking back there is a bridge. Thus Einsteinian physics and Newtonian physics.
Because it is not that our existence is meaningless. Looking too closely at anything we eventually see nothingness, and thus many have concluded that there is nothing to see. But meaning is not obtained by looking lower but looking higher. Not by moving our observation from society to biology to chemistry to physics to sub-atomics to the "raw, naked, force" and emptiness of the smallest elements of our material universe. The fact that physics explains all chemistry does not remove chemistry from study: by aggregating the bundles of physical energy into chemical compounds we find new information. Likewise although all biology can be explained in chemical terms, this does not exclude the study of biology from providing great insights. Just as the purpose of a car is better obtained by moving from study of its parts to study of the machine as a whole, so also we draw closer to finding the purpose and meaning of our existence the higher up this chain we go.
But we are inside the universe, and have no capacity (sensory) to look up fully, or to look at it from beyond the final chasm. Metaphysics is mere specuation as to the nature of the 'whole', but the fact the whole exists is not speculation.
Postscript: God's purpose is personal
Purpose is personal, and remains so unless communicated. The missionary encounter with the West (which is the subject of the book) thus concludes that testimony is the only available avenue for faith. The nature and limits of public facts prevents rational individuals from building up toward faith from such a starting point: it is a chasm ahead. Testimony is the only way, even though it is ill-suited to the current plausability structure because personal experience and revelation are not measurable and are not open to scrutiny as public facts. Indeed, having read this you will weigh the truth of my assertions (against publically-held facts, or personal values) and then make use of your individual right to reason to decide your reaction to this essay. This is the nature of the world we live in.
Notes
[1] Quoted from the book, p.54.
[2] If all humans are equal in having rationality (and sufficient rationality to weigh the world) then there is something fundamental to us that makes this so. Many Enlightenment thinkers were Deist, and a creator certainly creates confidence in human reason as fundamental human trait. If we are merely a few mutated genes away from other species then those genes must hold that rationality, or else other speices are also as rational as us, or else we can not be confident in thye fundamentalness our own rationality.
[3] Placing human reason at the centre of was an old idea, going back to Plato. But it often seems to have been somewhat implicit that only for those of similar education, which in practice often meant at least bourgeious, usually European, and generally males.
[4] Note, that rationality requires the sober weighing of facts, so for example an irrational experience of revelation (or love, inspiration, etc), should be weighed by reason after the experience is ended and the mind returned to 'normal', denying the experience legitimacy of knowledge in itself, except as an emotion.
[5] So, for example, to understand a tree meant to divide it into its major parts and see how each part effected the others. And then to cut up each part and do the same. There is the possibility of misuse of language in this, misuse of the word 'purpose'. The question might be asked "what is the purpose of the leaf?" but only in the sense where 'purpose' means 'function': what is the function of the leaf as part of the organism. To consider the 'purpose' of the leaf only entailed examining what it did (ie what it caused), instead of also what its intention is. The leaf does not grow because it is the intention of the tree (or the tree's designer) that it should have leaves. The leaf grows because a series of chemical reactions continually add molecules together.
[6] Climate change is but one example of how our mastery of nature has been merely 'apparent', restricted to certain domains. Chemical warfare is another example of what this mastery can entail.
[7] This seems to provide the easy answer to the question the essay poses. Given that meaning is inextricably linked to purpose, and that purpose has been removed from the public sphere, the possibilty of a universal meaning for our culture is also removed - our plausability structure and thus our society is by its nature meaningless.
[8] It would be difficult to live in society without some generally abided conventions of what values are better, but in the West it is the commitment of the adherents rather than any innate good of the values themselves that brings them to dominate the public sphere. Though no value is secure - because only facts have secure authority - certain values may still become widespread. One such commonly held value is of human happiness and quality of life. Another common value is the idea of progress, and a third is to use money as a way to value all things, with the result that the accummulation of money becomes a value to itself. Although purpose is removed from the plausability structure, purpose is essential to human behaviour and so it is still visible everywhere, but always at the discretion of the individual's rationality and right to choose their own purpose.
[9] With appropriate values such knowledge may have only been for the good. But with values retreating into the private sphere, there is no ethical restraint on the use of public facts, or the form of mastery that the knowledge enabled. Indeed two of the common public values mentioned in [7] (to value progress, or to value all things by money) require a certain form of use of the knowledge: development and economic growth.
[10] This paragraph summarises four short pages of the book. Its not central to the essay but interesting in its own right, so I've expanded on it in an addendum below.
[11] Curiously the essential human rights encapsulated in the cry of the French Revolution ("liberte, egalite and liberte") are at odds with each other. If everyone is truly free they will never be equal. To create equality requires creating restrictions on the freedoms of all. And fraternity is essentially relational, which is a restriction on individual freedom and a break in equality (unless everyone is in equal relationship with each other, which is impossible).
[12] As an aside, corporations in some way have begun to offer something almost like rights, but perhaps only because of their particular influence within the legal-justice system. Insurance is a better guarantee of the right to property than protection offered by government security. But such rights require a financial relationship with the corporation, and that contract is still guaranteed by the government courts.
[13] The right to happiness is the most difficult of all, drawing as it does from entirely personal values.
[14] A hypothesis is a necessary preliminary to the collection of facts, since the selection of facts demands some way of determining relevance. A single observation contains an enormous amount of sensory data: purpose selects what data is registered by the observer.
Addendum: more on the 'Division of labour'
Although dealt with only briefly, due to being non-essential to the argument of the book, this section was quite interesting. I've tried to summarise Lesslie Newbigin's points below.
A traditional craftsperson governs the creation of a completed product. By dividing the production process into small parts shared among many workers, each worker no longer holds any vision in the final product: his or her contribution is more likely repetitive rather than purposeful.
Hannah Arendt's book "The Human Condition" is quoted as dividing human activity into three: labour, work, and action. Labour contains the necessary activities to survive, endlessly cyclical with no lasting result. Action is the activity involved in mutual interaction among people ('politics' in all its forms, including all communication, etc). Work is what outlasts us, what we contribute to the world (be it poetry, an artifact, laws, etc). But the economic order we live in with its unending cycle of consumtion and production focuses everything on labour (consumption now joining our biological needs) with action reduced to keeping the cycle going. Purposeful work has little place.
The rise of this economic order draws from the rise of the marketplace. With labour divided, the market is required to join everything together again. It also provides a way to value everything in a world without values. But markets are not concerned by human purpose, with one exception. The fundamental force in economic theory is covetousness. Although economics grew out of moral studies it has no place for morality. People are reduced to self-interest.
Another consequence is the removal of work from home to the factory (or office). A deep divide emerges between the public world of exchange and the private world. In the public world a person is just a cog, only in private are they fully-fledged individuals. Moreover, for the first century of the Industrial Revolution it was men who worked. Thus men were the producers and shared the public sphere, women were the consumers and stayed in the private sphere [presumably becoming the custodians of (family) values as well]. Feminism is in part a revolt against these distortions (and hence a modern rather than traditional issue).
A further consequence is urbanization, the concentration of workers into factories, and of factories into cities. In traditional rural, family-based communities a single identity encompasses work, leisure, family relationships and religion. The mulitplicity of human networks in the city splits a person's identity even to the point where he/she has no real relationships. Identity is also a matter of choice. Alienation, anxiety and uncertainty result.
Finally bureaucracy becomes essential to govern the whoel enterprise. Its justice is to treat each individual as anonymous and replaceable. To introduce personal relationships into the bureaucratic process is simply corruption. But the rule of nobody (as bureaucracy tends toward) is the experience of tyranny. Moreover, bureaucracy interprets human behaviour using models derived from natural sciences, which eventually destroys personal responsibilty.
|
|
05:47 pm
[Link] |
East coast trip '09
Its a little too soon after the all the travels in Africa and Asia and Australia, but with a wedding on we were off again, to Montreal and New York. This makes five Jazzfests that Zosia and I have seen together.
Montreal McGill ghetto - a great place to stay
McDaniel family
A small child is about to be eaten by an escaped stage prop
Jazzfest is all about the acrobatics
Regular crowds at Jazzfest
30th anniversary, parade at the Jazzfest
Yankees stadium (while a game was on)
Liam time
Reading with Liam
...burning bright /In the forest of the night
Polar bear at the Bronx Zoo
African safari
Peek-a-boo
|
|
11:50 am
[Link] |
Zanzibar island, Tanzania
This group of photos is from Zanzibar, where after a couple of days of lounging in the Indian Ocean we explored the island.
An illegal slave pit, used after the British banned slavery on the island
The beach nearest the slave pit
One of the sultans - as well as being involved in the slave trade - turned his plantations over to spice farming, rather than simply importing it from India and Malaysia to sell to the Europeans. When the sultanate crumbled, his plantations were split into tiny plots, but each still has a wild variety of spices, of which perhaps a third are pictured.
cardomon
clove
tandoori
tumeric
cinnamon
nutmeg
Wearing a palm frond pat
On this site was the slave market. When David Livingstone prodded the British into action and it was banned, an Anglican church was built over the site
Walking through the streets of old Zanzibar
Portugese fort from 1600s was turned into an ampitheatre
Port of Zanzibar, gateway to exploration of East Africa
|
|
09:10 am
[Link] | Saying farewell to some of the World Vision staff at Bergville
Some friends dropped by from Canada, Australia and London so we took them on a picnic in the mountains at our backdoor
..including to the top of a kilometre-high waterfall, where we discussed safety issues concerning taking photos of people looking over the edge
Then to London, naturally to a pub, to share a pint with a Londoner and a German
And cake
"We want the finest cake in the world, we want it here and we want it now"
Fitting bookend to our South African stay: the head of Nelson Mandela
And a quick stop in Hong Kong before the final, final flight home
Where at night, a light show
|
[<< Previous 4 entries] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
burdo's journal