From the Empirical Archives: Good Idols and Bad by John Cobb, Jr.

Good Idols and Bad

John Cobb, Jr.

Originally published in the November 2012 issue of Empirical

The word “idol” is rarely used in a positive sense. But if we define “idols” very carefully, in the way theologians typically do, then, I believe, we can hardly do without them. So, despite the risks, we may need good idols in our struggle against the bad.

The term commonly refers to a statue that is treated as if it were itself divine. In the Hebrew tradition and its offspring, there has been great fear that making physical objects around which prayer and worship are centered leads to worship of the object itself. On the other hand, many in these traditions find help in having something to look at that leads them to think of the spiritual reality it represents. This is an interesting issue, but not the meaning of “idol” in my title.

One way of defining “god” is as some person-like entity that, unlike us, is immortal. A god is supposed to have powers far greater than ours. If a number of such beings are held to exist, one speaks of “polytheism.” If one supposes that just one such being exists, we capitalize “god” and speak of “monotheism.” Those who deny that there are any entities of this kind are called “atheists.”

Another way of defining “god” is as that to which one is most committed, what actually gives shape to one’s life, or, in the extreme instance, what one will die for. If we approach matters in this way, atheists are rare, but we may still distinguish polytheists from monotheists. Many people organize their lives around more than one such god. They may at times subordinate everything to attain the sexual partner of their choice, at other times they may be chiefly concerned with their honor, and then, at still other times, they may be ready to give their lives to the defense of their nation. Some may experience deep conflict as a result of these diverse commitments. Others may clearly subordinate everything to one goal, such as honor or wealth.

If one organizes life around a unifying goal, it makes a large difference what this goal is. Through most of human habitation of the Earth, the most common “god” has been the tribe. In more recent centuries, the tribe has morphed into the “nation” and then the “nation-state.” In the modern world, the dominant religion has been nationalism. Tribalism and nationalism have played a large role even within the monotheistic religions that trace their origin to Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But these have also been critical of giving supreme loyalty to a single tribe or nation. They have given us the idea of “idolatry” as treating some inferior reality, usually some real but limited good, as if it were the highest one, or treating a part as if it were the whole.

Note that tribalism and nationalism are, at one level, great goods. The human species would not have survived if each individual had sought only his or her individual good. Devotion to the well-being of the larger group develops self-sacrifice and heroism as well as ordinary virtues essential to the ongoing life of the community. Most of the time, idolizing the tribe or the nation works for the good. Still, they are not the “good idols” we seek.

The obvious problem with nationalism is that the interests of diverse nations can easily come into conflict. It is then the most committed nationalists of another nation who become the greatest threat to one’s own. They are the ones most willing to risk their lives to get for their own people what your nation also needs or desires. This kind of idolatry is encouraged in almost all nations, and those who reject it are typically called “unpatriotic” and often condemned and persecuted. Nevertheless, making a god of one’s nation leads to enormous death and destruction.

If devoting oneself to one part of the whole over against other parts of the whole leads to horribly destructive conflicts, then the answer seems to be to devote oneself to the whole. Sometimes that is called “pantheism.” Sometimes pantheists attribute to the whole a unity that is not apparent to others.

The problem with simply devoting ourselves to the whole is that the vast majority of the whole seems so utterly unaffected by us and indifferent to us. On the other hand, if we attribute to it a unity, especially a unified experience, it becomes possible to interact meaningfully with it. We may, for example, attribute to it a direction or goal that we can share. Nevertheless, most of what we know about stars and galaxies seems quite disconnected to us in any way that inspires devotion comparable in strength to the devotion inspired by nation states. This kind of pantheism avoids idolatry, and that is very much to its credit, but because the whole is so remote and unknowable and seems so indifferent to what we do, pantheists easily fall into polytheism.

That is, for practical purposes they are likely to order their lives around particular goods.

This is where the quest for good idols comes to the fore. Can we find something in the universe that inspires our devotion in such a way that serving it serves the whole? Can something so represent for us the whole, or the inclusive good of the whole, that singling it out as the object of our devotion or the organizing principle of our lives works for the inclusive well-being of all? This would be idolatry, but it would be good idolatry.

Something of this sort takes place in many forms of Buddhism. Buddhists know, of course, that the totality of things is very complex indeed. But they believe that in its ultimate depth all things have Buddhanature. Fully to realize this cuts against our ordinary perception and conceptuality. But they believe that this liberates from illusion and evil. The knowledge that others have achieved this liberation encourages and guides the quest. For most Buddhists, Gotama is the supreme embodiment of this enlightenment. Often a physical representation of Gotama or of one of the other enlightened ones helps to focus the mind.

The Buddha images can, of course, become idols in the common sense of having divine nature or power falsely associated with them. More often they lead the mind of the devotee to the one that they represent. In official Buddhist teaching the Enlightened Ones, the Buddhas, remain human beings. But in the popular imagination, and even in highly regarded Sutras, they often take on superhuman characteristics.

They function as gods. And this can lead to superstition and cultic behavior and other marks of bad idolatry.

Nevertheless, on the whole, deep reverence and emulation directed toward an enlightened one is what I am calling “good idolatry.” The limited object of devotion is transparent to the deepest reality of all things. Such devotion aids in freeing one from the bad idolatries to which we are so likely to succumb.

I am not saying that all Buddhists are free from bad idolatry or that Gotama cannot function as a bad idol. I am saying that Buddhism has found a way of checking these bad idolatrous tendencies. Much of its teaching attends to individual Buddhas and their wondrous attainments in such a way as to draw others into the quest for existential realization of what is truly real universally and detachment from the bad idols that lead to so much destruction.

Buddhism shows us that deep feelings, even idolatrous feelings, toward concrete particulars can, in carefully formed instances, play a positive, rather than a negative, role in human life and history. There are good idols.

We could examine each of the great religious traditions to see that all have in fact offered us idols that can function in beneficial ways. Many judge that Buddhism has been the most successful. The remainder of this essay will examine the Christian case.

For mainstream Christianity, the deepest truth about the world is that its existence is given originally and continuously by God. This God is immediately present to every creature, and the aims and purposes of each creature are derived from God. In the human case, the creature is challenged to conform its purposes to God but is also capable of serious distortion, even rebellion.

Past rebellion has distorted the situation for all. God forgives and loves and seeks to renew the human capacity for forgiveness and love. God affirms and loves every creature. We are called to receive that love and, in turn, to love others. Thus the reality works against affirming any part over against other parts. It opposes idolatry.

Nevertheless, Christians attribute to Jesus a unique place in this reality. The word “revelation” is central for many Christians: Jesus “reveals” God. In itself that affirmation does not make an idol of Jesus. But it can easily lead to heaping on Jesus characteristics that belong only to the God Jesus reveals and calling for directing toward Jesus the feelings and attitudes that Jesus showed to be appropriate toward God.

There is no doubt that Jesus functions for many Christians as an idol. And even a cursory reading of history shows that this has often led to a very destructive idolatry. People have been tortured and slaughtered in the service of this idolatry. All too often, instead of evoking devotion to the one who loves everyone and everything, devotion to Jesus has often led to enmity to those who do not share this devotion. This has been a much more serious problem with Jesus than with Gotama or other Buddhas.

Nevertheless, there is much in Christian teaching that checks the bad idolatry that is so near at hand. This begins with Jesus’ own teaching. Many students of Christian history hold that Christian teaching quickly shifted from the teaching of Jesus to teaching about Jesus, and its glorification of Jesus led directly to bad idolatry.

Paul is often singled out as responsible for this shift. But in fact Paul’s teaching is not really, or at least not necessarily, idolatrous. Paul calls for people to participate in Jesus’ faithfulness to God, a faithfulness that led Jesus to the cross, dying for the sake even of sinners and enemies. The God to whom believers are then faithful is the God who loves everyone and everything. This centering on Jesus and his faithfulness may be idolatrous, but it is, or can be, a good idolatry.

Bad Christian idolatry has been closely related to the idea of “incarnation.” The idea is that God revealed Godself in Jesus by actually being in him. God is said to be enfleshed in Jesus. Many Christians have come to believe that the heart of their faith is expressed as “Jesus is God.” Their God then becomes this particular being. They often suppose that what is required for salvation is to acknowledge the deity of Jesus. Too often, the affirmation that Jesus is God leads to attributing to Jesus preexisting ideas of God. 

Instead of clarifying and revising the understanding of God by the life and teaching of Jesus, the understanding of Jesus is reshaped by ideas of God that have developed in other contexts. An important example is the understanding of divine power. If we understand God in light of Jesus, we will understand that God’s power is persuasive, healing, and enlivening. Divine power works in the service of love. If, on the other hand, we bring to our understanding of Jesus, notions of God’s power developed in other contexts, we will suppose that Jesus was in fact always in control of whatever happened. The appearance that he was the victim of the religious and political powers of the time is only that–an appearance.

Issues of this sort have been central to the development of Christian theology. Christians agreed that they found God in Jesus. For some this meant that Jesus was God in human form. He was not really a human being like the rest of us. For others the incarnation meant that Jesus was a real and full human being in whom God dwelt in a unique fullness. For them Jesus showed that God is present in creation and in us all.

Given the piety of the time, it is somewhat surprising that in council after council, Jesus’ full humanity was reaffirmed. This is a profound check on the forms of idolatry that emerge so easily from Christian teaching. All agreed, of course, that God was present in Jesus. But if the presence of God in Jesus enhanced rather than diminished his humanity, then Christians can affirm that God is in all people and indeed in all things without displacing their creaturely integrity. The understanding of God can be enriched in this way without the destructive effects of bad idolatry. Jesus functions as an idol, but he can function as a good idol that breaks the hold of bad idols in those who focus their devotion on him. Many people today suppose that they have outgrown the need for idols of any form. Perhaps some have. But idolatry has never before had so thorough a control over the Earth. And never before has the enormously destructive effect of a victorious idolatry been so manifest. The habitability of the planet Earth is now at stake.

The principle idol is what the King James translators of the Bible called “Mammon.” Jesus is quoted there as saying that we cannot serve both God and Mammon. Recent translators have replaced “Mammon” with “wealth.” This makes clear the real, and immensely urgent, issue of our time. Should we continue to organize our national life and the global system as a whole in the service of wealth? Or should our “god” be more inclusive? Serious Buddhists and serious Christians (as well as serious humanists and those who make the Earth itself their idol) necessarily call for a more inclusive object of devotion. For some, that may be the universe as a whole, Buddha-nature, or God as such. But for most, this shift away from the god, wealth, will be aided by such good idols as Buddha (Gotama) and Christ ( Jesus).

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From the Empirical Archives: The Resurrection of God

The Resurrection of God

John B. Cobb, Jr. 

Basel, Germany, where Friedrich Nietzsche had taught just prior to writing that God had “died.”
PHOTO: Patrik Tschudin

Originally published in the September 2012 issue of Empirical

I

If you are literal-minded, the title of this essay won’t make any sense. Anything that could literally “die” would not be God. And what has not died cannot be “resurrected.” But Nietzsche taught us to speak of “the death of God” meaningfully by transposing this “death” onto the field of human imagination and sensibility. Among intellectuals in the late modern world the idea of “God” was losing all credibility.

From the Empirical Archives: Resurgence of Purpose

Resurgence of Purpose

John B. Cobb Jr.

PHOTO: Charlie Nguyen

Originally Published in the August 2012 Issue of Empirical

I

Voting is a nuisance. It is no fun. We are not paid.

Why bother?

You might answer that it is our civic duty, that democracy won’t work if people don’t exercise their right to vote, or that there are important issues at stake. But what if I don’t care about civic duty or democracy and the issues at stake don’t affect me personally? Will you tell me that I should care? Isn’t that just your bias or arbitrary value? Is there any reason to think your values are any better than mine? If I aim to maximize my personal convenience, pleasure, and comfort, are you in a position to tell me that there are “higher” purposes? Why regard some goals, aims, or purposes as better than others?

Today the more highly educated we are, the less likely we are to believe that some purposes are higher or better than others in any neutral or objective sense. This is not an accident. Whereas for many centuries a major function of education, both in the East and in the West, was to clarify our place in a meaningful world, we are now taught that the world in itself has no purpose or meaning. Our teachers emphasize that values differ from culture to culture. They tell us we are free to attribute any value we want to nature, but only if we recognize that this attribution is arbitrary. In itself, the world is without value.

According to this now intellectually dominant understanding, we can have any purposes we choose. We are, in this way, wonderfully free. If we choose to sacrifice our lives for our nation, that’s fine. But if we choose to seek wealth at the expense of our nation, that is fine, too, as long as we get away with it. There is no “higher” point of view from which to say that one goal is better than another.

In this view, educators should not try to impose any particular values or purposes, and research should not be influenced by the values of the researcher. All this should be value-free. Those who are socialized by value-free education are not likely to take values seriously. Only facts are important.

Of course, all agree that the occurrence of purposes is one of the facts to be considered. When we are hungry we are likely to form a purpose to get food. No one denies that people have purposes of this sort. And, indeed, when education avoids favoring some values over others, it is values of this sort that become primary. Value-free education encourages us to give priority to the values that are treated most seriously by economists. Insofar as life has a purpose, it seems, this is to satisfy one’s desires, whatever they may be.

Meanwhile, what research is done is determined by what someone will pay for. The university as such takes no position on what should be studied. Individuals may have other purposes in mind, but the default reason to study is that a college degree is likely to improve one’s income. When no “higher” values are taught, money reigns.

The earlier liberal arts model functioned differently, and it still plays a role. The liberal arts were designed to raise consciousness about one’s purposes and to enrich one’s values. Often colleges promoted service to the community, along with cultivated tastes.

However, today, even in those institutions that call themselves “liberal arts colleges,” confidence that some goals and purposes are really better than others has declined. The ethos generated by the research universities has affected them. They tend to present themselves as offering excellent pre-professional education. Students select them because their graduates are well paid.

There are other institutions that have not backed away from instilling purposes they regard as higher than private economic gain. These other values are central in the instruction of religious communities. At one time these communities adapted the purposes they taught to those that seemed grounded in universal experience and insight, but now they are told that there is no objective basis for evaluation. They are thrown back entirely upon their own authorities. As a consequence society is increasingly polarized between ethical nihilism and sectarian authoritarianism. The appeal to reason has lost out both in secular universities and in sectarian communities.

How did this come about? Why has “progress” led, on the one hand, to meaninglessness and ethical nihilism and, on the other hand, to arbitrary confessionalism?

Are the reasons for this change such that honest people must accept the consequences? Or have we made wrong turns that need now to be corrected?

PHOTO: Richard Smith

II

We can begin the story of the role of purpose in our intellectual and cultural history with Aristotle. He showed that there are four kinds of questions that we can ask about anything. He called them the four “causes.” Since today “cause” almost always means what Aristotle called the “efficient cause,” we will do better to speak of four types of explanation, of which only one has to do with what makes something be what it is, that is, with its efficient cause.

In addition to asking what makes something happen or have the character it has, we commonly also ask: of what does something consist? For example, in addition to asking how a particular lamp stand was manufactured, we may want to know whether it is made of pottery or metal or wood. Aristotle called this the “material cause.”

One can further ask about pottery, metal, or wood, of what are they composed? When we push the question far enough we come to what later Aristotelians called “prime matter,” which has no form. Thomas Aquinas taught us to think in terms of “Being Itself ” or “Being as Such.” Today, many people think “energy” is the best answer to the question of what do pottery, metal, and wood, and everything else, ultimately consist. Scientists do not press the question that far, but they are certainly interested in the analysis into molecules, atoms, and subatomic entities. Aristotle’s “material cause” remains important.

The matter or energy, of course, always comes in some “form.” Otherwise it is simply potential. Only formed “matter” is actual. The lamp stand may be made of wood, but it is not a lamp stand until the wood is given a form. An electron and a proton are both units of energy, but neither can exist until the energy has the form that distinguishes it as an electron or proton. Modern science devotes much of its attention to the mathematical formulae which are actualized in the form and behavior of scientific objects. Aristotle’s “formal cause” is central to the scientific enterprise.

Aristotle’s fourth “cause” is the “final cause.” Why, to what end, does something occur? This is the quest for a reason in the sense of a purpose, something that makes sense of the entity or occurrence. One goes to the grocery store in order to buy food. A house is built in order to provide a home. For Aristotle it was evident that purpose plays a large role in explaining what happens and what has come into being.

For him, this is not the case just with human actions and artifacts. It is true also of natural objects. A heart exists in order to pump blood through the body. If we ask again–“why?”–the answer is that this keeps us alive. The function of a bodily organ satisfactorily explains it.

At a popular level we continue to ask all four types of questions. Three of them remain important for science and the intellectual elite. But the “final cause,” the “why” question, is no longer part of science or scholarly thought generally. How did this change come about?

PHOTO: Hermes

III

Aristotle’s work shaped the science of the medieval period. This employed all four of Aristotle’s “causes.” However, it often focused on final causes, seeking the reason of things in terms of their function in the complex workings of nature and history. This focus on the purpose of things inhibited sustained and systematic attention to the other three “causes,” especially efficient causes.

Even today this overuse of final cause occurs in popular culture. When there is a calamity, a victim often asks, “Why did this happen to me?” The answer may be in terms of karma or of punishment for past misdeeds. For example, if a middle-aged man is diagnosed with cancer, he often asks “Why?” Of course, if he has persisted in smoking after frequent warnings, the answer that he is suffering the consequences of his actions is not pointless. But scientists rightly note that the quest for an answer of this kind is often irrelevant and distracts from serious investigation of efficient causes.

Modern science arose in reaction to this excessive interest in final causes. It held that the study of nature must leave out altogether any explanation in terms of purpose. Ordinary thinking usually considers three sorts of “reasons” for occurrences: necessity, chance, and purpose. Modern science allowed only two reasons: necessity and chance. Excluding purpose contributed to its rapid advance.

The world studied by science in the early modern period was the world of nature. The exclusion of purpose from that world did not extend to human beings and their artifacts. Scientists did not question that they were acting purposefully when they studied nature more deeply. They talked about their purposes. Some of them made great personal sacrifices to pursue the truth to which science led them.

Rene Descartes systematized the emerging understanding of reality. There were two worlds: the world of nature and the profoundly different world of the human mind. The world of nature was best understood as matter in motion. Even the motions of animals were obedient to the laws of mechanics. On the other hand, the human mind was guided, at least ideally, by the very different laws of logic. Human purposes played a large role there. That there were no values inherent in nature in no way implied that right and wrong, better and worse, were arbitrary judgments with respect to human actions.

This worldview freed the nature studied by science from political and religious concerns. It liberated scientists to pursue the evidence and develop revolutionary theories. Nevertheless, from the beginning, it was conceptually unsatisfactory.

If the world consists of two radically different kinds of things, matter and mind, how do they relate? Physicists assumed that the material objects of which nature is composed are pushed and pulled by other material objects. This mechanical model worked well for many purposes. But the human body, which was understood to be part of this nature, appears to be responsive to human purposes. I decide to type a sentence, and my fingers respond to that decision. How can this be? Can I really believe that my purposes have no effect on my body?

PHOTO: John Abella

There is another puzzle. The natural world is said to consist entirely of matter in motion and we gain knowledge about it only by sense experience. But when philosophers examined rigorously the information we receive in this way, they found that we do not see stars and stones, only lights and colors. David Hume pointed out also that, we do not see efficient causes, only successive patches of color. The world of objects, supposedly studied by science, is not known through the only means that the worldview associated with science allows.

What is truly astonishing is that, despite these quite serious problems, this worldview has survived so long and still has so deep a hold on our universities and cultural leaders generally. We owe this survival and continuing advance of the worldview, first and foremost, to the even more astonishing success of the science associated it. We owe it, secondarily, to the work of the most important philosopher of the modern world–Immanuel Kant.

Kant saw that Hume was correct that our senses do not lead us to an objective world in which efficient causes reign. Since the truth of science could not be doubted, and this truth could not be supported by experience, Kant’s task was to find another foundation. He did this by one of the most astonishing moves in intellectual history. He attributed the creation of the world we know as “nature” to the human mind.

Kant posited that the human mind by its very nature inescapably organizes the sense data in just the way that the worldview associated with it understood them. This worldview is, then, not one among others, but the one inescapable worldview. For example, the efficient causation that Hume could not find in sense experience exists inescapably in the world the mind constructs.

Strange as Kant’s proposals were, they were widely accepted. They allowed science to proceed without changing its worldview. For all practical purposes, the natural world remained matter in motion.

Kant’s dualism was somewhat different from that of Descartes. There is now the creative human mind, on one side, and the world of nature that it constructs, on the other. But it continues the exclusion of value and purpose from nature.

Kant thus reinforced the dualism of Descartes that had cleared the way for modern science. But he intensified also the importance of the moral sphere in which motivation and purpose played a central role. Whereas Hume, in principle, left no place for purpose anywhere, Kant defanged that threat. In the new philosophy that built on his work, nature remained wholly purposeless, but ethical issues brought purpose to the fore in human affairs.

Darwin administered to purpose the coup de grace. He did not intend this or know that he had taken this step. But, in principle, his demonstration that human beings are part of nature undercut both the Cartesian and the Kantian dualisms. Now human beings were seen as part of the natural world that is devoid of value or purpose.

There were occasional efforts by evolutionists to avoid the total exclusion of purpose by arguing that, when human beings are absorbed into nature, it should be acknowledged that nature has properties that had previously been denied it. Typically this move led to the teaching that purpose plays a role not only among humans but also among the other higher animals. However, there was little disposition among scientists in general to make changes in their basic principles. These continued to exclude purpose from nature. Science implicitly, and often explicitly, took on the project of showing that human purpose like everything else is explained by the motions of matter.

IV

My broad claim is that this modern worldview is crumbling. Its exclusion of human purpose from any role in what happens in the world is, strictly speaking, unbelievable. When a scientist or philosopher denies any role to purpose, hearers will pay no attention unless they think the speaker is speaking purposefully. But the purposeful denial that purposes have any role to play is unconvincing. More broadly, human beings cannot live as if their purposes had no effect on their thoughts and actions.

This common sense objection is supported by developments within science. Despite their reluctance to acknowledge a fundamental break with the past, leading biologists are increasingly using language that is far removed from matter in motion. The most prominent instance is “information.” This term retains connotations of mental activity open to purpose. It is very difficult to think of information as just another expression of matter in motion.

A major battleground, both for advocating the modern worldview and for critiquing it, is evolutionary theory. Darwin’s great contribution is “natural selection,” and this cut decisively in favor of the modern purposeless world. His insight has become a permanent contribution that is not in question.

The members of a species are not all identical. Some succeed better than others in coping with the environment: in getting food, keeping safe from predators, securing mates, and so forth. These have more offspring; so their distinctive characteristics become more common in the population. Darwin showed that it is this “natural selection,” rather than any overarching purpose, that determines the direction of evolution.

Darwin left open the causes of the variability from which the selection is made. He thought sexual selection played a role, and he was open to the Larmarckian idea that physical changes brought about by animal behavior can be passed on to the next generation.

But this openness to a role for animal behavior was problematic for hardnosed scientists. Animal behavior appears to be purposeful. Evolutionists committed to a purposeless nature have favored explanations that do not attribute any distinct role to the actions of animals. The discovery of the determination of animal forms and behavior by genes gave them a great opportunity, and for some years they advanced the cause of removing purpose from the world.

The dominant “scientific” theory is based on random mutation of genes. “Random” does not mean that in the wider scheme of things efficient causes cannot be found. For example, cosmic radiation may cause genetic change. The point is that the genetic changes do not occur for the sake of changing the organism. No purpose is involved.

Most random changes work against the flourishing of the organism. Accordingly, those genes are not widely reproduced. But occasionally the change improves the ability of the organism to survive and reproduce. In that case, the new genetic pattern becomes established. Generally this is a change within a species. Occasionally changes of this kind lead to the emergence of a new species.

V

This theory of natural selection from random mutations undoubtedly describes a way in which evolutionary change can take place. But it has not been demonstrated that in fact all changes have taken place in this way. Indeed, biologists know that they have not. No step in evolution is more important than the emergence of the nucleated cell. This kind of cell, which is the basis of all the more complex forms of life, did not arise by genetic mutation.

Lynn Margulis showed that the ancestors of the nuclei and other elements in the nucleated cell were free-standing bacteria. The nucleated cell is the result of one bacterium absorbing others but not digesting them. This process is an example of what Margulis calls symbiogenesis. Although initially her idea was rejected by a community of scientists, who found it troubling, it is now part of mainstream biology.

Margulis’ research was primarily on bacteria, and she provided evidence for other evolutionary developments taking place as a result of symbiotic relations of bacteria with other organisms. There are indications of symbiogenesis among more complex organisms as well. Despite this evidence, the dominant community resists any further compromise of its theory. To allow the activities of organisms to play a role in evolution opens the door to a role for purpose–a door orthodox evolutionists want to keep shut.

The role of animal behavior in evolutionary change is evident in other ways as well. For example, if the supply of the food on which a species has subsisted in some locale gives out, some member of the species may discover another way of obtaining food. Other members, observing this success, imitate. The change of eating habits is likely to favor some mutations for which the environment would not otherwise select. That genetic change takes place in this sequence is hard to deny.

The exclusion of purposeful action from a role in evolution becomes even harder to justify once human action is regarded as fully part of the nature that is studied. For thousands of years humans have been part of the environment that selects which organisms will reproduce. The development of new species of domestic plants and animals cannot be explained apart from purposeful human activity.

VI

That animal purposes play a role in evolution does not mean that animals other than humans change behavior for the purpose of influencing the evolutionary process. An animal’s purpose is typically to find food or escape a predator. Living things aim to preserve their lives and their offspring. To live and to live well may not be conscious as an overall aim, but it pervades the biosphere.

The scientific program of explaining everything in terms of chance and necessity requires that what we ordinarily regard as purposeful action be fully explained by chance and necessity. The apparently purposeful action of animals must be treated as entirely “instinctive,” with the assumption that the instincts are determined by the genes.

Success in reducing all animal behavior to genetically determined instinct is far from complete, but its difficulty pales by comparison with the project of showing that all human behavior can be explained by chance and necessity. Yet this goal shapes much of the study of the human brain and its relation to subjective experience. The older physiological psychology was directed to this end, and it influences contemporary neuroscience as well.

An important sign that, in principle, this program is collapsing is that neuroscientists are less inhibited than the earlier physiological psychologists about recognizing an interaction between subjective states and brain states. There is no doubt that brain states affect subjective experience including purposes. Scientific investigation has demonstrated this again and again. But there is also a great deal of evidence that subjective experience including purposes affect brain states. For example, careful and extensive studies have shown how disciplined meditation, certainly a purposive process, affects brain states. Reluctance to acknowledge the equal value of this evidence reflects the continuing power of the modern worldview to which science allied itself. The increasing openness to study this evidence open-mindedly is a sign that, despite its enormous continuing influence, in principle, the materialist worldview has collapsed.

Meanwhile the global ecological crisis has brought forth intensified feeling for the nonhuman world. Tens of millions of sensitive people are convinced that human beings are part of a nature that existed long before human beings appeared on the scene. Their purpose to protect and serve it is not experienced as arbitrary. It is felt to be conformal to reality.

A corner has been turned. Those who would retain the exclusion of purpose and value from the world are increasingly on the defensive. The role of final causes throughout the world of living things can again be recognized as good science. The sensibility of an important, creative avant garde of society strongly affirms this kind of thinking. It demands a hearing even in the hallowed halls of the value-free university.

Perhaps the resurgence of purpose will open universities to reflection on their purpose. Perhaps it can restore concern for right purposes to the center of education. A civilization heading toward collapse cannot afford either confessional authoritarianism or ethical nihilism. We need to learn again to align our purposes with the wider purposes of both the human community and the natural world.

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From the Empirical Archives: On the Importance of Being Radical by John Cobb

On the Importance of Being Radical

John Cobb

PHOTO: Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, Netherlands

Originally Published in the July 2012 issue of Empirical

Is it bad to be “radical?” Often one hears the statement that so-and-so is a “radical” as a reason not to pay attention to what he or she says. To label people as “radicals” may be a way of warning others that they are dangerous. It has much the same effect as calling them “communists” or “terrorists.” This fear of radicals is not without reason. They do propose new ideas that undercut some of those to which most people are attached. They question the need for institutions and practices that others consider essential and beneficial. From the point of view of those who are benefited by the status quo and those who think that things are going well, radicals are dangerous.

When the modern period began in Europe, Christian institutions and beliefs were very well established. A few brave modern people raised radical questions that undercut the authority of Christian institutions and the credibility of supernaturalist Christian teachings. Some of these radicals paid dearly for their efforts. Christian institutions and beliefs did not disappear, but they changed drastically. The change in their role in Western societies has been even greater. The work of radicals has led to the replacement of Christian societies by secular ones. Modern scientists were often in the lead in advancing radicalism of this sort.

What is less noticed is that radicals are just as threatening in other aspects of society. Political organizations, governments, professions, academic disciplines, and educational institutions resist and oppose their work just as religious communities often did. Sadly, this is true also of modern sciences that profess to be fully open to evidence. In all these contexts, radicals engage in just the questioning that is not wanted. While modern culture celebrates the work of the radicals of earlier times, it is no more hospitable to contemporary radicals than were the established leaders of those earlier periods.

Many of us, at one time or another, have been irritated by people raising questions of a theoretical nature in a group whose job it is to deal practically with a problem. The zeal of radicals to go deeper simply slows us down in getting our work done. Not all radicals have good judgment about when and where to raise their questions, and for many people the answer to the question of when and where radicals should seek attention is: never and nowhere. It is easy to understand and even sympathize with those who abhor radicals.

But modern society has needed radicals as much as earlier. A century ago a few voices were pointing out that American society was rooted in racism and sexism. The vast majority of Americans dismissed such talk as “radical” and therefore irrelevant. They were right that it was radical. But these radical voices finally forced themselves into the public consciousness. More and more people recognized that the call for radical change had truth and righteousness on its side. There is still a lot of racism and sexism in American society, but they are no longer supported by law and official thinking. The work of radicals has changed society radically. Even many who were once irritated and even angered by them are now grateful for their work. Today the most glaring problems in American society are economic. Accordingly, this is the area most in need of radical investigation.

We need radicals to go to the roots of these problems. This could lead us in a variety of directions. The financial sector now dominates the economy; so we could focus on how this has gained so much power. The increase in inequality in the distribution of income and wealth has grown very rapidly. Radicals ask for the deepest reasons for this development.

Einstein was a radical in science. He is standing in this photograph with Lorentz in 1921.
PHOTO: Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, Netherlands

Some of the reasons that radicals will find are grounded in political power and personal acquisitiveness. But there are strictly theoretical contributions to these evils. There is a good deal of synchronicity between economic teaching and governmental and global practice. Accordingly, one place to apply radical analysis is the dominant economic theory.

Let’s take a simple example. The discipline of economics is founded on the assumption that bigger is better. It is supposed that the more economic activity takes place, the better off people are. Economists take their role to be showing how to make the economy grow. From time to time radicals have asked whether growth is the right goal for the economy, but within the academic departments of philosophy, the question has not been seriously discussed. Those who have tried to do so have not been well treated.

Asking that question is threatening to the discipline of economics as it has long been constituted. On the other hand, failing to ask it out of respect for the current authorities has the same kind of effect as failing to ask about racism or sexism out of respect for the existing authorities of an earlier day. The global growth of economic activity on a finite planet is responsible for such serious problems as global warming. If the economics guild continues to silence those of its members who raise this question because it is “radical,” the danger to human life is increased.

The crucial question is simple, but radical. Is growth a final good in itself ? Or is it good only insofar as it improves the human condition? If the latter, should we not investigate how the increase of economic activity, guided by the principles of standard economics, is actually affecting the human condition? That is a “radical” thing to do. It is also empirical.

To be empirical is to pay close attention to the facts. That is, itself, a “radical” thing to do. In some cases, the facts will not support the patterns of thought of many people, perhaps not those of any of us. Science at its best calls on us to accept the facts even when we wish they were otherwise. For example, many people prefer to think we are fundamentally disconnected from all other living things and, for a long time, science supported that idea. But the evidence for evolution became overwhelming. However unsettling the truth may be, it remains the truth, and many of us hold to the radical idea that we should affirm the truth and adjust our way of thinking to it.

I have spoken of “science at its best.” Sadly, science is not always at its best. Modern scientists like to point to one particularly dramatic example of failure at this point: the case of Galileo. It is often presented as an instance of science vs. religion, but it was in fact a matter of a new development in science that opposed the scientific consensus of its day. The church supported this consensus.

The best science of the medieval period was based on Aristotle. The church shared the scientists’ respect for Aristotle. Aristotle thought that heavenly bodies were fundamentally different from the Earth. The scientists who followed him were persuaded by his arguments. Galileo used a new technology to introduce evidence that did not fit into this understanding of the universe. The scientists who represented the scientific consensus of that day refused even to look through the telescope. They wanted to silence Galileo’s radical challenge to established science. Modern scientists have liked to condemn the resistance of late medieval Aristotelian scientists to the evidence provided by Galileo. They often imply that this was a failing of medieval scientists that modern science overcame. Sad to say, modern scientists engage in the same kind of practice even today. They strongly resist attending to evidence that does not fit into their worldview. To point this out is to be a “radical.”

Charles Darwin
PHOTO: Ed Uthman
ART: Joseph Boehm (1885)

For example, most modern scientists are committed to a worldview in which events in the physical world can be affected only by other events in the physical world. There is an enormous amount of evidence that physical events are in fact affected by what happens in human subjective experience. That my hands type one set of words rather than another certainly seems to be affected by my thinking. That mental activity plays a role in bodily behavior is not only common sense but also has an immense amount of evidence in its favor. But the metaphysics with which modern science is closely associated says that it is impossible. Accordingly, such affirmations are rejected by most scientific guilds as impossible. Most scientists refuse to look at the evidence. This exclusion of a great amount of evidence is not science at its best.

Asking science to open itself to evidence that does not fit into its worldview is a radical act. It is as difficult for modern scientists to do this as for Aristotelian scientists to accept the evidence provided by Galileo. One reason for this difficulty is the commitment of scientists to what they call “empiricism.” This empiricism was shaped by philosophers and scientists in the early modern period. It affirmed the view that the only access to the world external to the individual thinker is through the sense organs. For practical purposes, scientists and philosophers limited themselves to what could be seen or touched. We can call the resulting idea about how we know anything about the world “sensory empiricism.” Scientists found that it was possible to agree on a great many things when they limited themselves in this way. They celebrated the “objectivity” of science. They often identify “science” as such with the body of theory that developed out of sensory empiricism.

This magazine is certainly committed to “empiricism,” in the broad meaning of this term. We must begin all our reflections in experience. In order to explain our experience, we may have to posit some things we do not experience. Indeed science does this in spades. These days scientists tell us that most matter and most energy can never be experienced at all. They call them “dark.” But these theories, and all our theories, should be tested again and again in experience.

There is no question of the crucial importance of experience. However, we need to ask more radically about it. When we do so, we find that it includes much more than the deliverances of the sense organs. In fact scientists have to assume a great deal that they cannot derive from sense experience.

I limit myself to one example. Much of science is engaged in explaining how things come to be through time. Causality is usually understood as the impact of the past upon the present. But vision and touch give us only the present. Of course, we assume that we see things following one upon another. But that assumption requires something other than the immediate delivery of visual or tactile experience. We have to remember the previous visual experience in order to see that there is a change or motion.

"Galapagos Islands"
PHOTO: Michael R. Perry

If this point is not immediately clear, take a little time to think about it. Focus on what you are seeing in a single moment. It will be a complex pattern of colors. Now you are very likely to think that you see changes taking place. But if you limit yourself entirely to what is given you through your eyes this is not quite true. In the new moment you are seeing a slightly different pattern of color, but you are no longer seeing the previous one. Without memory, you cannot compare them. You do not see the change. We do not see or touch memory.

Puzzles of this kind have long been formulated by philosophers but they have rarely been taken seriously by scientists. If one does take them seriously, one is pushed to a more “radical” empiricism, one that examines experience as a whole with greater care and sees the interrelationships of its ingredients. William James contributed this term: “radical empiricism.” Our actual experience is one of constant change. It is not wrong for science to talk about changes in the world based on experience. What is wrong is to claim to limit itself to the objective world as known only through sight and touch. Science does not do this. It cannot do this. Unfortunately, it does not attend to the contribution of other aspects of experience, and it gives support to a very truncated view of reality.

Those who build their understanding of reality on what contemporary science offers tend to devalue value. The reality of our experience is that it is profoundly value-laden. We have hope and fear, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, enjoyment and misery, and so much more. We are constantly involved in questions of better and worse. Scientists may acknowledge that such feelings occur, but modern scientific orthodoxy insists that they have no effect upon the world. The world is value free, and science is supposed to be value free. Now research universities are supposed to be value free as well – which means that their only value is money.

Radical empiricism is another matter. For it, feelings, beliefs, sensory experiences, memories, anticipations, bodily experience, and intellectual activity are all equally real and very much bound up together. We can, of course, abstract certain sensory experiences from this whole and concentrate upon them. Much can be learned in this way. But when this limited aspect of knowledge is given special privilege and all the rest is disparaged, we are in serious trouble.

The real world, the world of the radical empiricist, is much richer. It calls forth concern and commitment as the purely “objective” world does not. It opens us to fresh approaches in economics and in physics, and in everything else as well.

In 1955, it was "radical for Rosa Parks (1913-2005), because of her skin color, to insist on sitting in the front of a Montgomery, Alabama bus.
PHOTO: USIA

Earlier I mentioned the overwhelming evidence that evolution has taken place and that the human species emerged through evolutionary processes. But radical empiricism opens us to an understanding of evolution quite different from the one to which sensory empiricism, with its purely objective world, has led us. One example is the explanation of the emergence of new species. Standard academic teaching that fits the narrowly scientific worldview is that all the variations in plants and animals among which natural selection operates are caused by random mutation of genes. Lynn Margulis disagreed, saying that at least some of them occurred by symbiogenesis, that is, by diverse organisms combining. She gave as her most important example the emergence of the nucleated cell. She said this did not come about by random mutation of genes but by one bacterium swallowing another and not digesting it. Her idea was long rejected, even ridiculed, because it did not fit the standard model. But the evidence finally forced its acceptance. Sadly, despite this important realization, and even though Margulis provided evidence of the role of symbiogenesis elsewhere as well, the standard account of evolution has not been modified to make a place for it. Radical empiricists, in contrast, are completely open to the evidence.

More broadly there is a great deal of evidence that purposive actions on the part of animals, especially human beings, play a large role in evolution. But mainstream evolutionary theory ignores the effects of the action of animals on evolution because this would give an opening to acknowledging a role for some sort of purpose in evolution.

The exclusion of purpose from evolutionary theory is one of its sacred principles. We find evolutionary biologists vigorously denying that purpose plays any role in the world for the purpose of maintaining ideas that do not have empirical support. Radical empiricists do not see why we should ignore the evidence for the role of the purposes of the evolving animals, especially human beings.

PHOTO: Harley Pebley

Late Medieval science allied itself with Aristotelian philosophy and gave much too large a role to purpose. Modern philosophy allied itself with materialism and denied purpose altogether. Wouldn’t it be better for science to pay attention to the evidence, all the evidence, instead of being enthralled by its companion philosophy? Let’s join radical empiricists and this magazine in the truly open-ended quest for truth.

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The November Issue

Have you seen the November 2012 issue yet? 

Here is the Letter from the Editors to acquaint you to our mission and purpose of the magazine. 

For those of you who are new to Empirical magazine, we want to emphasize, as we have in previous issues, that we believe a new sense of the term "empirical" is required as we move forward in the twenty-first century. Unlike the purely physical, sense-based empiricism that was the darling of the old twentieth century positivism, we embrace the type of "radical empiricism" that was promoted by William James and Alfred North Whitehead. (It was James who actually coined the term.) 

The death knell to the old positivistic approach was actually sounded as early as the seventeenth century by the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, who knew that on this basis, neither practical life nor science as most people think of it-i.e., an inquiry into the truth-were possible. On the basis of sense impressions alone, we cannot know there is such a thing as causation, a foundational principle to science and practical life. Nor can we know that there are bodies, minds (other than our own), or even a world outside of our thoughts. George Santayana pointed out that the problem was really worse than Hume had imagined, saying that on Hume's view, we're caught in a "solipsism of the present moment," where all we know is what we're sensing right now in any given moment. We cannot know that we even have continuity of our own minds from one second to the other. But even bad ideas sometimes have their value and have to play themselves out before they're roundly rejected. 

Science went on about its business as if Hume had never come to his skeptical conclusions. Especially within the realm of Newtonian physics, this materialistic approach had real value. Then, with the advent of electromagnetic, relativity, and quantum theories, everything changed. 

Nineteenth-century idealists had offered another model for thinking of our relationship to the world by suggesting that we are ourselves individual minds that are an extension of an original and universal mind. But using this theory, philosophers paid little attention to science. 

James and Whitehead, however, scientists themselves, sought another path. They offered a radical form of empiricism that embraces science and its central principle that our beliefs should stand up to tests in the world of experience. But the idea of experience should not be limited to mere sense impressions (narrowly defined as the data that comes to us through the five physical sense organs). Memory, for example, is an inheritance of experience from one moment to the next that does not come to us through the five physical senses. Feelings of the "withness of the body," as Whitehead termed this feeling of the experiences of our own bodies, are other examples of experience beyond that given by the five physical senses. Experience, it turns out upon deeper reflection, has a much broader basis than earlier empiricists had thought. 

As is often the case, there were ulterior motives that drove many materialists to insist, despite the evidence available to them, that we should restrict ourselves to the five physical senses. One reason was that they wanted to distinguish themselves as better truth-finders than those who worked in the much greyer areas of the humanities, including religion. This approach worked well within the realm of Newtonian mechanics, but has not worked so well when applied to the more complex relationships of quantum mechanics, biology, and human psychology. 

One of the positive ramifications of a radically empirical approach to understanding our world, therefore, is that the humanities, including religion and spirituality, is brought back to the table of discussion with the sciences. Empiricalmagazine honors this radically empirical tradition, in part, by bringing together the voices of artists, scientists, philosophers, theologians, Buddhist writers, psychologists, social workers, architects, short-story writers, poets, photographers, and many others. The truth is too complex for any one, finite approach to have the one and only answer. All of life is a call to be open to the many voices of experience. We learn from those voices. We develop a better-rounded worldview through being open and sincerely listening to those voices. 

In the November 2012 issue of Empirical, you will again find a wide range of voices reflecting the experiences of our age. We are honored to include in our pages, for the first time, the voice of award-winning economist and author Herman Daly. He has written something that should have appeal to both ends of the political spectrum-an idea for ending the Federal Reserve Bank and the International Monetary Fund in one fell swoop. His idea involves "Nationalizing Money" as the title tells us, thereby taking the power of printing money away from the Fed and putting this power into the hands of elected officials who should be held accountable by the electorate. 

Investigative journalist Emanuel Stoakes brings us a reflective update on the war in Syria, and he includes some background on how the problems arose in the first place. 

Randall Auxier builds off of a Machiavellian theme as he discusses "Three Kinds of Soldiers." In particular, he relates this discussion to the highly debated death of an officer in the US Army, Colonel Ted West­husing. Auxier does not so much present a case for or against the official story that Westhusing's death in Iraq was a suicide, as he uses the occasion of this honorable man's death to discuss the relationship of ethics to soldiering, and more particularly, the relationship of ethics to aspects of the Iraq War. 

Historian Mustafah Dhada looks at the rise of neoconservativism in the US, and asks "America: Have We Crossed the Rubicon?" Dhada, who himself contributed to the constitution of his native Mozambique, challenges us through a suggestive inquiry into whether the US Constitution has been circumvented in a range of areas including elections, the censorship and control of media, and corporate influence over our elected officials. 

In the realm of religious thought for this issue, philosopher and theologian John B. Cobb Jr., co-founder of the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California, (along with David Ray Griffin), has written "Good Idols and Bad." While noting that some people may have moved beyond idols entirely, as they claim, idols still serve an important role in religious people's lives around the world. Some of these idols, he suggests, are better for us than others. Drawing from his role in Christian-Buddhist dialogue, Cobb points to ways that the Christ idol is sometimes misrespresented and put to harmful uses, but argues that this need not be the case. In an age dominated by the idol of money, Cobb urges us to reconsider the liberating power of discovering the Christ within, comparing this to the Buddhist idea of discovering the Buddha Nature within. 

Scott Bontz, who works at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has contributed an article on the Land Institute's work with the development of perennial crops. His article helps us to understand the connections between annual crops and soil erosion, and helps us to appreciate the fragile nature of the good top soil we need for farming. 

Ian Dees reports on a new religion called Kopimi. Dees helps us understand that the Kopimists, emerging in this high tech era, have strongly held ethical views that at first may seem counterintuitive. They argue for the free distribution of information around the globe, and against copyright protections. Dees helps us see the ways in which copyright protection law sometimes does not serve the public interest, and is often unreasonable. 

Rounding out this issue, we have an article in the arts by Richard Jones on the Canadian actress and director Tara Browne, whose Diversity Face Films puts a spotlight on diversity issues. As Jones tells us, "with seven ethnic streams jockeying for position in her DNA-Austrian, British, Scottish, Hawaiian, Philippine, Spanish, Chinese-she could hardly avoid the mantle of diversity." We also have an "NBA Preview" by our own Empirical Senior Editor, Dan O'Brien, and recipes from Sandra Stoakes and our Editor-in-Chief, Tara Grover Smith. 

As usual, we bring you the best in fiction and poetry, too. This month, Finn Kraemer has provided us with a compelling short story about a father and son on a hunting trip called "In My Father's Silence." We have poems on "Cycling" by Travis Laurence Naught, and "What I'd Ban," and "Molar" by Carol V. Davis. Last but not least, you will find the beautiful photography you've come to expect and enjoy from photographers around the globe. 

Have you subscribed yet to ensure you haven't missed a single issue? One of our fans says:

I've been looking for a magazine with this kind of range and diversity for a long time. Until Empirical came along, I could only find magazines that either had a fairly narrow focus in their own specialist field, or else felt random and directionless. Your focus on radical empiricism (an approach I share) as the "connecting theme" gives it a great focus without limiting the scope at all. 

--Simo Sakari Aaltonen, subscriber from Finland

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"The Importance of Being Radical" by John B. Cobb Jr

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING RADICAL

by John B. Cobb Jr

Is it bad to be “radical?” Often one hears the statement that so-and-so is a “radical” as a reason not to pay attention to what he or she says. To label people as “radicals” may be a way of warning others that they are dangerous. It has much the same effect as calling them “communists” or “terrorists.” This fear of radicals is not without reason. They do propose new ideas that undercut some of those to which most people are attached. They question the need for institutions and practices that others consider essential and beneficial. From the point of view of those who are benefited by the status quo and those who think that things are going well, radicals are dangerous.  

Rosa Parks, PHOTO: USIA

When the modern period began in Europe, Christian institutions and beliefs were very well established. A few brave modern people raised radical questions that undercut the authority of Christian institutions and the credibility of supernaturalist Christian teachings. Some of these radicals paid dearly for their efforts. Christian institutions and beliefs did not disappear, but they changed drastically. The change in their role in Western societies has been even greater. The work of radicals has led to the replacement of Christian societies by secular ones.  Modern scientists were often in the lead in advancing radicalism of this sort.

What is less noticed is that radicals are just as threatening in other aspects of society. Political organizations, governments, professions, academic disciplines, and educational institutions resist and oppose their work just as religious communities often did. Sadly, this is true also of modern sciences that profess to be fully open to evidence. In all these contexts, radicals engage in just the questioning that is not wanted. While modern culture celebrates the work of the radicals of earlier times, it is no more hospitable to contemporary radicals than were the established leaders of those earlier periods.

Many of us, at one time or another, have been irritated by people raising questions of a theoretical nature in a group whose job it is to deal practically with a problem. The zeal of radicals to go deeper simply slows us down in getting our work done. Not all radicals have good judgment about when and where to raise their questions, and for many people the answer to the question of when and where radicals should seek attention is: never and nowhere. It is easy to understand and even sympathize with those who abhor radicals.

But modern society has needed radicals as much as earlier. A century ago a few voices were pointing out that American society was rooted in racism and sexism. The vast majority of Americans dismissed such talk as “radical” and therefore irrelevant. They were right that it was radical. But these radical voices finally forced themselves into the public consciousness. More and more people recognized that the call for radical change had truth and righteousness on its side. There is still a lot of racism and sexism in American society, but they are no longer supported by law and official thinking. The work of radicals has changed society radically. Even many who were once irritated and even angered by them are now grateful for their work. Today the most glaring problems in American society are economic. Accordingly, this is the area most in need of radical investigation. We need radicals to go to the roots of these problems. This could lead us in a variety of directions. The financial sector now dominates the economy; so we could focus on how this has gained so much power. The increase in inequality in the distribution of income and wealth has grown very rapidly. Radicals ask for the deepest reasons for this development.

Some of the reasons that radicals will find are grounded in political power and personal acquisitiveness. But there are strictly theoretical contributions to these evils. There is a good deal of synchronicity between economic teaching and governmental and global practice. Accordingly, one place to apply radical analysis is the dominant economic theory.

Let’s take a simple example. The discipline of economics is founded on the assumption that bigger is better. It is supposed that the more economic activity takes place, the better off people are. Economists take their role to be showing how to make the economy grow. From time to time radicals have asked whether growth is the right goal for the economy, but within the academic departments of philosophy, the question has not been seriously discussed. Those who have tried to do so have not been well treated.       


Asking that question is threatening to the discipline of economics as it has long been constituted. On the other hand, failing to ask it out of respect for the current authorities has the same kind of effect as failing to ask about racism or sexism out of respect for the existing authorities of an earlier day. The global growth of economic activity on a finite planet is responsible for such serious problems as global warming.  If the economics guild continues to silence those of its members who raise this question because it is “radical,” the danger to human life is increased.

The crucial question is simple, but radical. Is growth a final good in itself? Or is it good only insofar as it improves the human condition? If the latter, should we not investigate how the increase of economic activity, guided by the principles of standard economics, is actually affecting the human condition? That is a “radical” thing to do. It is also empirical.

To be empirical is to pay close attention to the facts. That is, itself, a “radical” thing to do. In some cases, the facts will not support the patterns of thought of many people, perhaps not those of any of us. Science at its best calls on us to accept the facts even when we wish they were otherwise. For example, many people prefer to think we are fundamentally disconnected from all other living things and, for a long time, science supported that idea. But the evidence for evolution became overwhelming. However unsettling the truth may be, it remains the truth, and many of us hold to the radical idea that we should affirm the truth and adjust our way of thinking to it.

"Galapagos Islands" PHOTO: Michael R. Perry

I have spoken of “science at its best.” Sadly, science is not always at its best. Modern scientists like to point to one particularly dramatic example of failure at this point: the case of Galileo. It is often presented as an instance of science vs. religion, but it was in fact a matter of a new development in science that opposed the scientific consensus of its day. The church supported this consensus. 

The best science of the medieval period was based on Aristotle. The church shared the scientists’ respect for Aristotle. Aristotle thought that heavenly bodies were fundamentally different from the Earth. The scientists who followed him were persuaded by his arguments. Galileo used a new technology to introduce evidence that did not fit into this understanding of the universe. The scientists who represented the scientific consensus of that day refused even to look through the telescope. They wanted to silence Galileo’s radical challenge to established science. Modern scientists have liked to condemn the resistance of late medieval Aristotelian scientists to the evidence provided by Galileo. They often imply that this was a failing of medieval scientists that modern science overcame. Sad to say, modern scientists engage in the same kind of practice even today. They strongly resist attending to evidence that does not fit into their worldview. To point this out is to be a “radical.”

For example, most modern scientists are committed to a worldview in which events in the physical world can be affected only by other events in the physical world. There is an enormous amount of evidence that physical events are in fact affected by what happens in human subjective experience. That my hands type one set of words rather than another certainly seems to be affected by my thinking. That mental activity plays a role in bodily behavior is not only common sense but also has an immense amount of evidence in its favor. But the metaphysics with which modern science is closely associated says that it is impossible. Accordingly, such affirmations are rejected by most scientific guilds as impossible. Most scientists refuse to look at the evidence. This exclusion of a great amount of evidence is not science at its best.

Asking science to open itself to evidence that does not fit into its worldview is a radical act. It is as difficult for modern scientists to do this as for Aristotelian scientists to accept the evidence provided by Galileo. One reason for this difficulty is the commitment of scientists to what they call “empiricism.” This empiricism was shaped by philosophers and scientists in the early modern period. It affirmed the view that the only access to the world external to the individual thinker is through the sense organs. For practical purposes, scientists and philosophers limited themselves to what could be seen or touched. We can call the resulting idea about how we know anything about the world “sensory empiricism.” Scientists found that it was possible to agree on a great many things when they limited themselves in this way. They celebrated the “objectivity” of science. They often identify “science” as such with the body of theory that developed out of sensory empiricism.

This magazine is certainly committed to “empiricism,” in the broad meaning of this term. We must begin all our reflections in experience. In order to explain our experience, we may have to posit some things we do not experience. Indeed science does this in spades. These days scientists tell us that most matter and most energy can never be experienced at all. They call them “dark.” But these theories, and all our theories, should be tested again and again in experience.

There is no question of the crucial importance of experience. However, we need to ask more radically about it. When we do so, we find that it includes much more than the deliverances of the sense organs. In fact scientists have to assume a great deal that they cannot derive from sense experience.

I limit myself to one example. Much of science is engaged in explaining how things come to be through time. Causality is usually understood as the impact of the past upon the present. But vision and touch give us only the present. Of course, we assume that we see things following one upon another. But that assumption requires something other than the immediate delivery of visual or tactile experience. We have to remember the previous visual experience in order to see that there is a change or motion.

If this point is not immediately clear, take a little time to think about it. Focus on what you are seeing in a single moment. It will be a complex pattern of colors. Now you are very likely to think that you see changes taking place. But if you limit yourself entirely to what is given you through your eyes this is not quite true. In the new moment you are seeing a slightly different pattern of color, but you are no longer seeing the previous one. Without memory, you cannot compare them. You do not see the change.  We do not see or touch memory.

Puzzles of this kind have long been formulated by philosophers but they have rarely been taken seriously by scientists. If one does take them seriously, one is pushed to a more “radical” empiricism, one that examines experience as a whole with greater care and sees the interrelationships of its ingredients. William James contributed this term: “radical empiricism.” Our actual experience is one of constant change. It is not wrong for science to talk about changes in the world based on experience. What is wrong is to claim to limit itself to the objective world as known only through sight and touch. Science does not do this. It cannot do this. Unfortunately, it does not attend to the contribution of other aspects of experience, and it gives support to a very truncated view of reality.

Those who build their understanding of reality on what contemporary science offers tend to devalue value. The reality of our experience is that it is profoundly value-laden. We have hope and fear, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, enjoyment and misery, and so much more. We are constantly involved in questions of better and worse. Scientists may acknowledge that such feelings occur, but modern scientific orthodoxy insists that they have no effect upon the world. The world is value free, and science is supposed to be value free. Now research universities are supposed to be value free as well – which means that their only value is money.

Radical empiricism is another matter. For it, feelings, beliefs, sensory experiences, memories, anticipations, bodily experience, and intellectual activity are all equally real and very much bound up together. We can, of course, abstract certain sensory experiences from this whole and concentrate upon them. Much can be learned in this way. But when this limited aspect of knowledge is given special privilege and all the rest is disparaged, we are in serious trouble.

The real world, the world of the radical empiricist, is much richer. It calls forth concern and commitment as the purely “objective” world does not. It opens us to fresh approaches in economics and in physics, and in everything else as well.

Earlier I mentioned the overwhelming evidence that evolution has taken place and that the human species emerged through evolutionary processes. But radical empiricism opens us to an understanding of evolution quite different from the one to which sensory empiricism, with its purely objective world, has led us. One example is the explanation of the emergence of new species. Standard academic teaching that fits the narrowly scientific worldview is that all the variations in plants and animals among which natural selection operates are caused by random mutation of genes. Lynn Margulis disagreed, saying that at least some of them occurred by symbiogenesis, that is, by diverse organisms combining. She gave as her most important example the emergence of the nucleated cell. She said this did not come about by random mutation of genes but by one bacterium swallowing another and not digesting it. Her idea was long rejected, even ridiculed, because it did not fit the standard model. But the evidence finally forced its acceptance. Sadly, despite this important realization, and even though Margulis provided evidence of the role of symbiogenesis elsewhere as well, the standard account of evolution has not been modified to make a place for it. Radical empiricists, in contrast, are completely open to the evidence.

More broadly there is a great deal of evidence that purposive actions on the part of animals, especially human beings, play a large role in evolution. But mainstream evolutionary theory ignores the effects of the action of animals on evolution because this would give an opening to acknowledging a role for some sort of purpose in evolution.

The exclusion of purpose from evolutionary theory is one of its sacred principles. We find evolutionary biologists vigorously denying that purpose plays any role in the world for the purpose of maintaining ideas that do not have empirical support.  Radical empiricists do not see why we should ignore the evidence for the role of the purposes of the evolving animals, especially human beings.

Late Medieval science allied itself with Aristotelian philosophy and gave much too large a role to purpose. Modern philosophy allied itself with materialism and denied purpose altogether. Wouldn’t it be better for science to pay attention to the evidence, all the evidence, instead of being enthralled by its companion philosophy? Let’s join radical empiricists and this magazine in the truly open-ended quest for truth.

PHOTO: Harley Pebley

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