[MD] Hume's Fork

[david buchanan]

Steve and y'all:

It might be a bit shocking to us in the 21st century, but back in those days the distinction between "sacred" and "self-evident" didn't count for much. During the enlightenment period John Locke, for example, construed rationality as a gift from God and it was God's grace that allowed us to understand the nature of evidence in the first. I mean, people forget that Newton was a very religious dude and so was Descartes. Rationalism, despite the name, has always been associated with the notion that understanding the laws of nature is the same thing as understanding the mind of God. This goes for Kant, Hegel and Royce as well as many others. But all this started crashing down about 100 years ago. In 1910, people like Picasso, Einstein and James were overturning this world view. All at once, it seems, art, science and religion were undergoing a Copernican revolution. Linear perspective, Newtonian mechanics and Cartesian dualism were all challenged in a way that no longer admitted the kind of essentialism hoped for by enlightenment thinkers. 


Pirsig's defense of these rights is not predicated on their essential nature or their endorsement by "Nature and Nature's God". He puts them in the framework of evolution and then claims they are better than previous social level conventions for practical reasons. He says the aim of these principles is to protect the process of intellectual evolution from social level conventions or even from overly static intellectualizations. These evolutionary moral principles even work to protect the scientific process itself. Where would science be without religious freedom and freedom of thought and speech? Which reminds me...


A BBC's radio show, "Thinking Allowed", recently did a program on "Disenchantment". The scholarly guests pointed out that this evacuation of magic from the world is commonly attributed to science and the scientific revolution and the secularization of society that went with it but, they said, this is a kind of myth. (Keep in mind the religiosity of thinkers like Descrates, Newton and Locke.) The disenchantment of the world, they pointed out, actually began within religion. The Inquisition's persecution of "witches", for example, was basically a movement against magic by the Catholic Church. At the time, Catholicism was the only kind of Christianity in the Western World but that would soon change for similar reasons. At that time, most church goers, which meant most people, were illiterate peasants. Going to mass, which was conducted in Latin, was an almost purely aesthetic experience wherein concepts and propositions played a very limited role. In that context, going to church meant witnessing an act of ritual magic in which wine and bread were trans-substantiated into the blood and flesh of Christ and by partaking in this ritual cannibalism you could participate in his divinity. People like Martin Luther and the puritans protested against this form of magic. It was the puritans who came up with the notion that man's duty on earth was to live soberly, rationally and productively. It was this religious impulse that sets up the kind of Protestant work ethic that makes capitalism possible. Max Weber famously showed that capitalism worked much better in Protestant nations than in Catholic nations. So when you examine the actual historical record, it does not comport with today's conventional wisdom wherein science and rationality and capitalism are almost exclusively associated with secularism and are often pitted against religion. What the record actually shows is that all of these inheritances come straight out of religion.