Reenchantment

  The book The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman is a classic as far as understanding how the modern materialistic-scientific culture developed.  An insightful analysis of the thinkers Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Galileo and Isaac Newton on the shift in how reality was perceived.   There was a shift from quality to quantity, from "why" to "how."    . M. Adams writes:  "the governing concern was to understand the world in a way that would give humans beings power to manipulate and control things and to remake the environment after their own liking..."

Berman highlights how modern science became the mental framework to see the material world.   He writes, ...we are confronted, then, with a structural totality, or historical gestalt, and that science and capitalism form such a unit."   It is important to understand the momentous shift that took place from the middle ages to the modern world.   This was the 'great transformation' to emancipate humanity from religious and natural limits.  In the process the human being became identified as a self contained individual motivated solely by economic motives. 

Outmoded Concepts

Earlier posts talked about paradigms and how science in the modern world became the lead story.   It is no accident that metahistory books end up writing about the development of science and the effects of those developments.  The lead metaphor was that of a machine.  Robert W. Godwin writes that " science continues to stand upon a number of outmoded concepts that are not the outcome of its methods, but rather, a priori assumptions projected onto reality."  He lists three:
     Determinism draws its central metaphor from the mechanical clock and that all processes on the universe are entirely determined...
     Materialism means that the universe is ultimately composed of stable, individual parts that interact with other parts, all of which are fully external to one another.
     Reductionism is a approach that attempts to account for all of the phenomena of any level of reality in terms of a more simple or basic one.

 The scientific enterprise stripped the world of value and meaning.   These assumptions led to a disenchantment of the earth and a devaluation of the human being.   It left the human being lost, an exile, as Camus described.   The empirical methods of science while useful in many ways sucked the life and soul out of the earth and life on earth because they are immeasurable.

The conceptual views that guided the modern worldview are outmoded. 










 
 

Many Mysteries

There are many mysteries in which humans can contemplate.   The myths that inform cultures are creative narratives that guide those cultures in the fundamental questions:  Where do we come from?  Why are we here?  Where are we going?   

An important insight is that ideas originate from a historical and psychological context.  Ideas don't originate from a vacuum.   I recommend William I. Thompson as a writer that writes about the historical context in a erudite and imaginative way.  In our present materialistic culture, science is the storyteller in many ways.   Science tries to delude us into thinking it is beyond storytelling and myth.   Thompson is the one of the most imaginative at telling us otherwise.  Thompson helps us understand that what we accept as truth is "socially constructed,"  by a group that has something to gain.  

The Big Bang theory is a great example about the power of stories to misguide people into believing an idea that is being shown is wrong.  There is a certain segment of science that offers this as the truth about the origin of the universe.   It is now known by many of us that there are too many anomalies for the Big Bang theory to be a theory that is true.  Here is a link for some background on this.  http://www.cosmologystatement.org/  

A line from Schopenhauer  All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.





 

This blog is a way to share ideas that hopefully can facilitate a more holistic worldview that can transcend the limiting paradigms that hold back human beings from realizing their true nature. 

This writer starts with some fundamental premises: 

The universe is good and human beings are able to experience this goodness.

The modern world is guided by maps (paradigms) that are very limited which leads to suffering.

Here is one book that I recommend that has helped with my questioning. 

A book by Lew Paz, Pushing Ultimates – Fundamentals of Authentic Self-Knowledge comes highly recommended.   What can one learn from this book?  The search for genuine self-knowledge and authentic self-awareness is a difficult path that requires courage and perseverance.  One must learn to question just about everything.  The above book offers many insights about how difficult it is to be able to think for ourselves and the many ways in which we delude ourselves.  He mentions two types of bias he uses throughout the book: “confirmation bias is the mind’s tendency to confirm only data that enhances one’s opinions, and oversight bias is the conscious and subconscious avoidance of information adverse to those opinions.”  (P.33)

The author wants us to increase our "radius of comprehension"  by learning about many disciplines.  He writes at the beginning that "authentic knowledge begins when we probe beyond appearances, beyond ossified traditional belief systems and sterile scientism."   More to come.

What is the truth and why are we called to search for the truth?  That is a mystery.  Aldous Huxley wrote that what us makes human is growing up in a human culture and by the time we are conscious (in our teens) we are enculturated to the culture, usually unconsciously.  We take this for granted and this becomes the truth to us.

So many of us never question this process and just assume that this is the way it is.  We go through life just accepting the consensus.  A few are called to question this consensus reality and become curious and begin the lifelong process of searching for the truth. .  I like the way Joseph Campbell describes this process as a "call to adventure."  We leave the familiar to seek the unknown.  There is a crack in our cosmic egg and this gives us energy to seek alternatives and question the known.  

Seeking

"May we live in interesting times"

I can’t remember who said the statement above, but it definitely seems to be relevant today.  As we look around the world we live in a few observations can be made.  One, the world at large is beset by many problems.  As people look into these problems, they are finding that most of these problems are related.  Two, many of our problems don’t seem to fit into old frameworks.  Old theories don’t seem to explain things.  The maps that guide us into the future seem to be distorted.

The anthropologist A.F.C. Wallace calls these internal maps "the mazeways."  We look around and see old familiar forms falling apart.  One just has to glance at the daily paper to read about the problems.  War, crime, inflation, pollution, unemployment, the list goes on and on.  What is troubling about all these phenomena is that the old, tried and true solutions do not work anymore.  It seems as if old solutions make our problems worse.  In other words, as Korzybski said, "the map is not the territory."  Our internal maps instruct us to act a certain way.  In the past this "way" might have been appropriate, but reality is always changing.  The old ways of thought are good for a time, but as time moves on we may find ourselves rigid, static, and fearful.  Eventually, the evidence becomes overwhelming.  Change is imminent

This is a recurring cycle in history.  A society starts off with new ideas.  These ideas become the vision for the majority of the people. There is a common consensus that all will work out.   The future always looks brighter.  As time moves along though, certain anomalies keep popping up.  People begin fragmenting into different parties.  The synergy so necessary for a healthy society, starts to loosen.  Everyone  perceives their needs to be different from everyone else.  This leads to many breakdowns.  In government, powerful special interest groups become the norm.   The future looks increasingly darker.

In his book The Image of the Future, Fred Polak, a Dutch futurist, wrote that our images of the future play a crucial part in what shapes our society takes.  In healthy societies, the images were positive.  When there were weak images, the culture was decaying.  He ended by saying, ‘bold visionary thinking is in itself the prerequisite for effective change."

With a positive vision of the future, crisis opens the door to understanding.  Problems become opportunities to which we can open to new ways of seeing, to visualize new maps, maps that fit the new territory.  This new territory is much different in many ways.  It will take cooperation in all spheres of life.  In this way humans will be able to work together to solve our many problems.

The above essay is a brief description of the context we are in.  It is a ever-changing world.  We are at a crossroads.  We need a restructuring of the way we tend to view the world.  Humankind is going to have to let go many of its past assumptions.  Failure to change these basic assumptions can only lead to more problems.