If you read the comments of most conservative on-line sites you will pretty soon encounter someone talking about conservative reason vs. liberal emotion. The idea is, of course, that the commenter sees the world through the cold light of day, but liberals see it through the fuzz of their passions, silly things.
This tendency is also evident in Jonah Goldberg's Suicide of the West, where he compares his Lockean individualism against Rousseau's collectivist and romantic General Will, not to mention President Trump's populist nationalism. I have reviewed Jonah's book here and here. The idea is that reason and rational thought are real-world, while post 1800 Romanticism is fantasy.
Of course our liberal friends think that their "our democracy" culture is nobly and truthfully going along with bending the arc of history towards justice in accordance with "science" whereas the racist sexist homophobic white supremacists like you and me are all trapped in the superstitions and oppressions of the past.
But I am here to tell you that they are all wrong, and I am right.
Here is what I believe. We humans, along with all other living things, got where we are today mostly on the strength of our instincts, our emotions, our "affect." On top of this pile of instinct is our particular human quality of conscious thought and reason, which is, of course, very powerful. But here is the thing. We humans developed reason, scientists say, in order to manage our relationships. We tell stories to define ourselves and we use reason to put those stories together. So reason is a human artefact, not the key to the universe. The remarkable fact about this is that reason, that we developed to assist our lives as social animals, can also be used in our modern science to build a theory of how you can make so-called "electrons" release so-called "energy" in the form of so-called "photons" in a device we call an "LED lamp" and let there be light.
But here is the thing. All this science and theory that, e.g., tells us how to build an LED lamp that uses our knowledge about the universe to create light, does not tell us what the universe IS. Or what it MEANS, if anything. The whole question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything is just as much a mystery as it always has been. In fact, my little joke is to say that our modern knowledge, which enables us to create energy from nuclear fission -- i.e., from our current theories about the nature and the physics of so-called "sub-atomic particles" -- has deepened the whole mystery about the meaning of life, the universe and everything.
I mean, if the universe is really as big as we think it is, what on earth is going on out there? The questions multiply without limit.
In the old days humans solved the mystery of how the world works through the notion of spirits. There were spirits in every tree and animals, and they were the hidden something that ran the world. Then we decided that a God created the world, set the rules, wound the whole thing up like a clock, and set everything in motion. Now we believe in a Big Bang in a blinding flash of light followed by "inflation" followed by expansion and condensation of stars and formation of galaxies, etc. Jolly good story, I'd say. Did you know that our Milky Way galaxy has completed about 13 revolutions since the Big Bang? I know: is that all?
I believe in the central dogma of Immanuel Kant, who said that we cannot know "things-in-themselves," but only appearances. In other words, we humans receive sense impressions and them process them in our minds to make sense of the sense impressions. We create a theory of the world. It may be a theory of spirits, of a theory of a creator God, or a divine mechanical watchmaker, or a Big Bang. The nature of the theory depends on our accumulation of knowledge so far, and each of the theories works pretty well for its time. But that is all.
Now you may have noticed that people with sophisticated minds -- such as Jonah Goldberg -- tend to put a lot of faith in their minds and the knowledge they have accumulated in those minds, and tend to view with alarm the primitive nature of the ordinary deplorable in the street. Reality is reason and knowledge, according to these folks, but humans are tribal. What's a sophisticate to do?
I'll tell you: Be very careful. That is my advice to the sophisticated. Because the truth is that we none of us have much of a clue what we are doing.
Right now, for instance, a lot of people are thinking that we can extend human life significantly, and live for a couple hundred years, avoiding the disease of ageing. These are the same sort of people that are deeply worried about increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 0.035 to 0.040 percent of the whole.
But on my view, ageing is not a disease, it is part of the program, to kill off the old 'uns and make way for the young 'uns, and thus the whirligig of genes brings in his mutations, which I understand that scientists believe to be a vital part of our survival.
And here's another thing. I was at the Detroit Institute of Arts today looking at all the pictures. The thing about art is that it is all about the response to the art. And if you ask me, in the centuries since the birth of modern science, art has become rather frenzied about what it all means. Used to be that artists created fairly calm and ordered art about spirits, gods, magnificent aristocrats, or even good Dutch bourgeois housewives. Not any more. Artists seem to be in a frenzy about what it all means and trying to figure out if the world is upside-down or right-side-up.
It is as if the artists of the world are running around trying to rebuild a Map of Meaning from the shards and crystals they find all around them.
But what they all seem to agree upon is that it is feelings, emotion, "affect," the response to the world that really matters. Not reason.
And that is something to think about. Or better yet, feel.
This tendency is also evident in Jonah Goldberg's Suicide of the West, where he compares his Lockean individualism against Rousseau's collectivist and romantic General Will, not to mention President Trump's populist nationalism. I have reviewed Jonah's book here and here. The idea is that reason and rational thought are real-world, while post 1800 Romanticism is fantasy.
Of course our liberal friends think that their "our democracy" culture is nobly and truthfully going along with bending the arc of history towards justice in accordance with "science" whereas the racist sexist homophobic white supremacists like you and me are all trapped in the superstitions and oppressions of the past.
But I am here to tell you that they are all wrong, and I am right.
Here is what I believe. We humans, along with all other living things, got where we are today mostly on the strength of our instincts, our emotions, our "affect." On top of this pile of instinct is our particular human quality of conscious thought and reason, which is, of course, very powerful. But here is the thing. We humans developed reason, scientists say, in order to manage our relationships. We tell stories to define ourselves and we use reason to put those stories together. So reason is a human artefact, not the key to the universe. The remarkable fact about this is that reason, that we developed to assist our lives as social animals, can also be used in our modern science to build a theory of how you can make so-called "electrons" release so-called "energy" in the form of so-called "photons" in a device we call an "LED lamp" and let there be light.
But here is the thing. All this science and theory that, e.g., tells us how to build an LED lamp that uses our knowledge about the universe to create light, does not tell us what the universe IS. Or what it MEANS, if anything. The whole question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything is just as much a mystery as it always has been. In fact, my little joke is to say that our modern knowledge, which enables us to create energy from nuclear fission -- i.e., from our current theories about the nature and the physics of so-called "sub-atomic particles" -- has deepened the whole mystery about the meaning of life, the universe and everything.
I mean, if the universe is really as big as we think it is, what on earth is going on out there? The questions multiply without limit.
In the old days humans solved the mystery of how the world works through the notion of spirits. There were spirits in every tree and animals, and they were the hidden something that ran the world. Then we decided that a God created the world, set the rules, wound the whole thing up like a clock, and set everything in motion. Now we believe in a Big Bang in a blinding flash of light followed by "inflation" followed by expansion and condensation of stars and formation of galaxies, etc. Jolly good story, I'd say. Did you know that our Milky Way galaxy has completed about 13 revolutions since the Big Bang? I know: is that all?
I believe in the central dogma of Immanuel Kant, who said that we cannot know "things-in-themselves," but only appearances. In other words, we humans receive sense impressions and them process them in our minds to make sense of the sense impressions. We create a theory of the world. It may be a theory of spirits, of a theory of a creator God, or a divine mechanical watchmaker, or a Big Bang. The nature of the theory depends on our accumulation of knowledge so far, and each of the theories works pretty well for its time. But that is all.
Now you may have noticed that people with sophisticated minds -- such as Jonah Goldberg -- tend to put a lot of faith in their minds and the knowledge they have accumulated in those minds, and tend to view with alarm the primitive nature of the ordinary deplorable in the street. Reality is reason and knowledge, according to these folks, but humans are tribal. What's a sophisticate to do?
I'll tell you: Be very careful. That is my advice to the sophisticated. Because the truth is that we none of us have much of a clue what we are doing.
Right now, for instance, a lot of people are thinking that we can extend human life significantly, and live for a couple hundred years, avoiding the disease of ageing. These are the same sort of people that are deeply worried about increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 0.035 to 0.040 percent of the whole.
But on my view, ageing is not a disease, it is part of the program, to kill off the old 'uns and make way for the young 'uns, and thus the whirligig of genes brings in his mutations, which I understand that scientists believe to be a vital part of our survival.
And here's another thing. I was at the Detroit Institute of Arts today looking at all the pictures. The thing about art is that it is all about the response to the art. And if you ask me, in the centuries since the birth of modern science, art has become rather frenzied about what it all means. Used to be that artists created fairly calm and ordered art about spirits, gods, magnificent aristocrats, or even good Dutch bourgeois housewives. Not any more. Artists seem to be in a frenzy about what it all means and trying to figure out if the world is upside-down or right-side-up.
It is as if the artists of the world are running around trying to rebuild a Map of Meaning from the shards and crystals they find all around them.
But what they all seem to agree upon is that it is feelings, emotion, "affect," the response to the world that really matters. Not reason.
And that is something to think about. Or better yet, feel.
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