More or Less
Inertia, Newton tells us, is a fundamental principal of the universe: Objects in motion stay in motion and objects at rest stay at rest unless they are acted upon by outside forces. The world/universe/cosmos he described, with a variety of additions and refinements, was the basis of physics and defined a fundamental epistemology (for the scientifically literate) for over two hundred years until it was knocked sideways by Einstein, Heisenberg, and Gödel in the early 20C.
Now, I have only a general grasp of relativity, uncertainty, and indeterminateness and I recognize that the vast, vast majority of folks couldn’t care less about them. Almost all humans (including particle physicists outside their laboratories) live happily in a Newtonian world where things are as they seem and fancy-dancy theories of modern physics could just as well be metaphysics for all the difference they make in ordinary lives. We might acknowledge that these models of the universe are “true,” but we just don’t care.
I’ve talked elsewhere about the pitfalls of labels and categories (e.g., “conservatives,” “popular,” “empires”); they’re often semi-deceptive approximations of our experiences and interactions with other people and situations. I’ve talked about how our current political discourse is driven not by fact and truth, but by feelings. I’ve talked about how there is real distance between “what actually happened” and what many of us remember as “history.” Whether in science of history, we seem to live by the 80-20 rule. We’re not too concerned with whether our understanding of the world is entirely accurate (or “true”), so long as it makes do for us in our daily lives.
It may seem ironic, but, actually, it’s entirely consistent that the same modernity which spawned all these labels and rubrics and models to help us make sense of the world arose intertwinedly with the increased complexity of the processes, institutions, and piles of information which surround us. Of course, religious beliefs have been part of humanity for thousands of years. Even if simpler, the life of a hunter-gatherer was replete with unexplained phenomena. Our modern world has provided explanations for many of these (e.g., weather, illness), but has, in parallel, built systems, institutions, and mechanisms (e.g., money, bureaucracy, medicine, technology) that remain outside the mental grasp of the vast majority.
So the underlying need for religion and science as modes of understanding the world remain, despite our strides over the past few millennia. They’re coping mechanisms. They may be more refined and precise and characterized by scientific language than the way ordinary people have understood their world for thousands of years, but that’s part of the illusion. Attributing thunderstorms to Odin, or tsunamis to the wrath of Neptune or a person’s illness to a mis-balance of their four “humors” worked for most people even after more nominally rational explanations were available. Even today, religion is widespread and superstition is deeply embedded even among the most modern and sophisticated. It’s not for nothing that Marx referred to religion as the “opiate of the masses.” For many, organized religion continues to serve that role, providing a coherent world-view (including a rationale for fatalism) that enables adherents to maintain a mental equilibrium with the vagaries of a life that remains (for many) still too “nasty, brutish, and short.” Even for ‘modern’ folks, a generic belief in science serves the same purpose: an epistemological system that gives comfort and assurance that, even if it doesn’t provide all the answers immediately, it has a theory of how all will be revealed in due course.
Lately, many have decried the deconstruction of our shared social picture of reality. Political polarization has engendered epistemological silos, from which each end characterizes the other as being built on “fake news” or some other form of mythology. Of course, each is an approximation of reality and it’s quite difficult for folks who espouse one perspective or the other to contemplate that the other folks’ view is no further ‘off’ than the one they hold. One can go back to Plato and other Greeks of that era to see that the question of whether there actually is a “reality,” and whether it can be accurately perceived by humans are not well-settled questions. On top of this philosophical disorientation, we have to add an understanding that interpretation (whether of “reality” or history) is always flavored by the mental capabilities, psychological parameters, and ethical values of the perceiver/interpreter. In other words, we need to tread cautiously before decrying others’ characterizations as definitively false.
At a social/political level, this means (as I have noted previously) that all segments of a political society need to stretch their brains (and hearts) to try to understand the mentality of others without too much judgmentalism. More broadly, it means that if we are to avoid the continued profound differences in human outlooks on the world from hardening into destructive epistemological silos, we need to stretch our imaginations to find new ways of looking at and characterizing the world; acknowledging that neither rational modernity nor religious outlooks are complete and satisfactory.
Alternatively (and more likely), we can continue to muddle along, rather like the famous story of the group of blind people grasping at different parts of an elephant. Newton, Heisenberg, Mohammed, Zoroaster, Aristotle, HWSNBN, and others have each grasped part of the beast and each of us have to construct our own version—more or less.
Inertia, Newton tells us, is a fundamental principal of the universe: Objects in motion stay in motion and objects at rest stay at rest unless they are acted upon by outside forces. The world/universe/cosmos he described, with a variety of additions and refinements, was the basis of physics and defined a fundamental epistemology (for the scientifically literate) for over two hundred years until it was knocked sideways by Einstein, Heisenberg, and Gödel in the early 20C.
Now, I have only a general grasp of relativity, uncertainty, and indeterminateness and I recognize that the vast, vast majority of folks couldn’t care less about them. Almost all humans (including particle physicists outside their laboratories) live happily in a Newtonian world where things are as they seem and fancy-dancy theories of modern physics could just as well be metaphysics for all the difference they make in ordinary lives. We might acknowledge that these models of the universe are “true,” but we just don’t care.
I’ve talked elsewhere about the pitfalls of labels and categories (e.g., “conservatives,” “popular,” “empires”); they’re often semi-deceptive approximations of our experiences and interactions with other people and situations. I’ve talked about how our current political discourse is driven not by fact and truth, but by feelings. I’ve talked about how there is real distance between “what actually happened” and what many of us remember as “history.” Whether in science of history, we seem to live by the 80-20 rule. We’re not too concerned with whether our understanding of the world is entirely accurate (or “true”), so long as it makes do for us in our daily lives.
It may seem ironic, but, actually, it’s entirely consistent that the same modernity which spawned all these labels and rubrics and models to help us make sense of the world arose intertwinedly with the increased complexity of the processes, institutions, and piles of information which surround us. Of course, religious beliefs have been part of humanity for thousands of years. Even if simpler, the life of a hunter-gatherer was replete with unexplained phenomena. Our modern world has provided explanations for many of these (e.g., weather, illness), but has, in parallel, built systems, institutions, and mechanisms (e.g., money, bureaucracy, medicine, technology) that remain outside the mental grasp of the vast majority.
So the underlying need for religion and science as modes of understanding the world remain, despite our strides over the past few millennia. They’re coping mechanisms. They may be more refined and precise and characterized by scientific language than the way ordinary people have understood their world for thousands of years, but that’s part of the illusion. Attributing thunderstorms to Odin, or tsunamis to the wrath of Neptune or a person’s illness to a mis-balance of their four “humors” worked for most people even after more nominally rational explanations were available. Even today, religion is widespread and superstition is deeply embedded even among the most modern and sophisticated. It’s not for nothing that Marx referred to religion as the “opiate of the masses.” For many, organized religion continues to serve that role, providing a coherent world-view (including a rationale for fatalism) that enables adherents to maintain a mental equilibrium with the vagaries of a life that remains (for many) still too “nasty, brutish, and short.” Even for ‘modern’ folks, a generic belief in science serves the same purpose: an epistemological system that gives comfort and assurance that, even if it doesn’t provide all the answers immediately, it has a theory of how all will be revealed in due course.
Lately, many have decried the deconstruction of our shared social picture of reality. Political polarization has engendered epistemological silos, from which each end characterizes the other as being built on “fake news” or some other form of mythology. Of course, each is an approximation of reality and it’s quite difficult for folks who espouse one perspective or the other to contemplate that the other folks’ view is no further ‘off’ than the one they hold. One can go back to Plato and other Greeks of that era to see that the question of whether there actually is a “reality,” and whether it can be accurately perceived by humans are not well-settled questions. On top of this philosophical disorientation, we have to add an understanding that interpretation (whether of “reality” or history) is always flavored by the mental capabilities, psychological parameters, and ethical values of the perceiver/interpreter. In other words, we need to tread cautiously before decrying others’ characterizations as definitively false.
At a social/political level, this means (as I have noted previously) that all segments of a political society need to stretch their brains (and hearts) to try to understand the mentality of others without too much judgmentalism. More broadly, it means that if we are to avoid the continued profound differences in human outlooks on the world from hardening into destructive epistemological silos, we need to stretch our imaginations to find new ways of looking at and characterizing the world; acknowledging that neither rational modernity nor religious outlooks are complete and satisfactory.
Alternatively (and more likely), we can continue to muddle along, rather like the famous story of the group of blind people grasping at different parts of an elephant. Newton, Heisenberg, Mohammed, Zoroaster, Aristotle, HWSNBN, and others have each grasped part of the beast and each of us have to construct our own version—more or less.
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