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.

Empirical Philosophy: Faith in Reason

From the Empirical Archives: How Civilization is Made by Lin Jensen

How Civilization is Made

Lin Jensen

PHOTO: Jim Epler

Originally Published in the August 2012 Issue of Empirical

Hiroshima today
PHOTO: Fernando Nunes

It was 1946 and I was fourteen when I opened a thin little book that began with the following description of a moment in the life of a young Japanese woman:

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning of August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.

*

John Hersey’s Hiroshima altered for good the direction of my life. Toshiko Sasaki was just about to say something to the girl at the next desk, perhaps a simple morning greeting or a comment on the pretty dress she was wearing or a curiosity about a date she’d gone on the night before–but whatever it was she meant to say, it was never said because before she could speak, the world in which such things might be said was incinerated in a flash of immense heat and blinding light. I became an advocate for peace and for the abolition of war because I was never able to put out of mind all the little ordinary things people were doing in Hiroshima the instant the bomb ended a hundred thousand lives. 

PHOTO: Hiroshima Museum, provided by Fernando Nunes

I’d known about the bomb for over a year at the time, ever since it had been dropped. And I knew that something terrible had taken place, but it wasn’t until I read John Hersey’s book that I understood that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was something that should never have happened to anyone, anywhere on the earth. I also somehow knew that the Toshiko Sasaki’s of Hiroshima, the clerks and factory workers, housewives and schoolteachers, the nameless “inconsequential” inhabitants of that doomed city, lived lives that counted for everything that constitutes the best of what builds and sustains a genuine, human civilization.

The conventional view of history postulates a civilization that advances on a colossal scale with grand events: the coming to power of great leaders, wars won and lost, the framing of constitutions, the ratification of treaties, the overthrow of governments, the rise and fall of sovereign nations. It’s mostly a history of the accumulation of power and the use of force, a chronicle of things built up only to be torn down again, things joined only to be divided once more. There’s no question but that these broad historical events exert great influence on human matters. They are the forces that wrench, twist, and dislocate the lives of humans everywhere, but they are not the factors that shape genuine civilization.

Civilization is made by households, its economy carried out on the scale of family and friend, its currency an exchange on the level of person to person. It’s a quality of kindness in human affairs that sustains what little civilization we can manage. I believe the factors that actually shape civilization are acts so random and ordinary that their significance goes unmarked.

*

PHOTO: Corey Leopold

In the Southern California farm country where I was raised the women put up food for the winter months in the manner they’d learned from their mothers and grandmothers. In my family of five—my mother and father, my brother Rowland, my sister Evelyn, and me—we began the process of canning and storing away food from the moment the garden began to yield in spring until we’d exhausted the last remnants of it in the late fall. All the farm families had a garden and orchard, and not much cash. They either planted and harvested and preserved or they couldn’t expect to eat very well when the days shortened and darkened toward winter.

PHOTO: thebittenword.com

The mornings my mother took the canning pot with its bottle rack from a pantry shelf and hauled it into the kitchen, she would never have thought she was doing anything for anybody but herself and her family. And when she scrubbed the pot clean and filled it with water to boil and went to the garden to pick a basket of string beans, she didn’t know such common actions joined with others to sustain whatever sense and decency the world is capable of. She would never have presumed that the rows of jars, neatly labeled and dated, lining the pantry shelves of a winter afternoon, were the orderly makings of a civilization. Yet it is these numberless little acts, this uncalculated responsiveness to the needs of the moment, more than all the dictates of empires and presidencies, that draws us into common community.

We do it best when we don’t know we’re doing it at all. Wiping a kid’s runny nose or sticking a thermometer under a sick child’s tongue are actions taken without self-consciousness of any sort. When I see my townspeople hanging out the wash or raking fall leaves or setting the table for the evening meal or jogging behind a child snuggled up in an infant carrier in the town park, I know that I am witnessing exactly those forces that counteract the divisive ambitions of military and corporate aims.

Civilization only asks of us that we live kindly and now. We are wise beyond our knowing when we do so. It’s not policy or ideology that makes us neighbors; it’s not the defense of state sovereignty or “national interest” that sustains communities. It’s much more a kitchen and yard thing, an elementary school and town park thing, in which we are watchful of one another.

*

PHOTO: thebittenword.com

When the Jensen family had need of more farm acreage and leased a farm further out of town, the contents of the kitchen pantry with all its canned goods moved with us. But in the moving, we inadvertently loosened the seal on a jar of string beans. And when Mother, failing to notice this, served them for Sunday afternoon dinner, we were made desperately sick as a consequence. We we’re all of us so dazed and debilitated by the sudden effects of food poisoning that we were unable to help each other—except my baby sister, Evelyn, who was only a year old at the time and hadn’t eaten any of the beans. Neither Mother nor Father could even make it to the phone to call for help. We crawled into the bathroom and lay on the floor with the ceiling and walls swimming about us, and when one of us had to retch we dragged ourselves onto the rim of the toilet to throw up, and mother, lying where she was, could just reach the toilet chain to flush.

Gradually night came on and the house grew dark. I think it was Mother who took my hand in hers first. I was able to reach my brother with the free hand, and he took Father’s, and Father reached back to Mother. And Evelyn crawled around and over us, supposing, I guess, that it was some sort of game. My mind hovers now above that old farmhouse where it lay surrounded by dusty fields. I see the four of us there on the bathroom floor, a sprawl of stricken flesh, legs and arms askew, joined hand to hand, on a background of faded linoleum.

Struggles of ambition and fear characterize the grand enterprises that populate the pages of what passes for the history of civilization. They are the forces that threaten to strike down everything that is good about us. They may kill us some day. But a single family that remembers to join hands will by small effects sustain kindness and generosity until the very end.

Eventually Mother recovered enough to reach the phone and call Dr. Robbins from his bed to come to our aid. He came, yawning, in the middle of the night, bearing the instruments of diagnosis and treatment he’d been given by his predecessor. He managed to get each of us into bed, and he found something in the kitchen to feed Evelyn and left her asleep in her crib. He said with a twinkle that he could positively assure us we wouldn’t die but that we’d be a few days recovering, and would Mother like him to call our neighbor, Mrs. Reeder, to come by in the morning and give a hand.

Later Mother cried at having to dispose of the jars of string beans she’d worked so hard to put away for the winter, her heart responding to a small error that might have cost her children and husband their lives. She would have cried equally for any family whose economy and lives were threatened by such a mistake. We were in the midst of World War II and Mother would sometimes cry over the radio news. She was never an activist, nor was she one with a conscious mission of any sort. She was too busy making life happen to notice that civilization was flowering in her own kitchen. I followed her one morning to the garden, which lay fallow now, and watched her unscrew the lids of the bean jars and dump the contents onto the compost heap. And when she saw me there, she mopped her eyes dry on her apron and put me to work helping her.

*

PHOTO: takomabibelot

Mr. Mujaku and his wife had an agreement to meet at a certain fountain in a square in Hiroshima in the event that their house was destroyed in an air raid. Mr. Mujaku was at work on the outskirts of Hiroshima when the bomb exploded and Mrs. Mujaku was at home. They both survived the initial blast, but their house was left leaning precariously and the whole neighborhood was being consumed in sudden flames. Mr. Mujaku, realizing how extensive the destruction of the city had been, left work in search of his wife. Finding their house and neighborhood in flames and not knowing if his wife was even alive, he went to the fountain where they’d agreed to meet. He found her waiting for him there.

She’d rescued a few biscuits and some tea from the house before it caught fire. And while Hiroshima lay in waste about them and their very bodies hummed with the lethal radiation that would one day take their lives from them, Mr. and Mrs. Mujaku, in a saving gesture beyond the power of any bomb, sat on a bench by the fountain and drank their tea and ate their biscuits as they’d always done.

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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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December Excerpt: Renewable Ignorance by Herman Daly

Renewable Ignorance

Herman Daly

We are all born pig-ignorant. Upon having accumulated a lifetime of knowledge, we all promptly die. Ignorant babies replace learned elders. Knowledge is a depleting resource; ignorance is renewable. Yes, libraries and data banks grow, but knowledge finally has to exist in the minds of living people to be effective and evolve; unread books, unseen videos, and un-accessed hard drives are inert. They are also subject to destruction by teeth of time: fire, flood, mildew, and moth, as well as that modern bookworm, the computer virus.

Like Sisyphus we push the rock up the hill only to have it roll back down again. Progress is not completely illusory. However, it is three steps up followed by two and a half steps backward. Successive generations repeat earlier mistakes. They also invent new ones. Any solution to a given mistake is usually forgotten within two or three generations and we have to learn it again. But it is not all bad—after all, babies are delightful and happy while old people are grumpy—ignorance is bliss. Life consists of more than knowledge. Life expectancy has increased, so the old know more when they die, leaving the babies with still more to learn.

A massive transfer of knowledge each generation is an unavoidable necessity. This transfer is not automatic. It requires two decisions. The old must decide what knowledge is worth their effort to teach, and the young must decide what is worth their effort to learn. Some knowledge passes both filters and becomes the basis for guiding the future and for discovering new knowledge. Other knowledge fails to pass one or both filters and is lost. Just as the world is always only one failed harvest away from mass hunger, so it is always only one failed generational transfer away from mass ignorance.

What do we know about these two generational knowledge filters? What do they let pass and what do they filter out? I really don’t know the answer, but I have one speculation, taken from E. F. Schumacher’s reflections on Thomas Aquinas and Rene Descartes. Aquinas said that even uncertain knowledge of the highest things is worth more than certain knowledge of the lowest things. Descartes believed otherwise, that only knowledge that had the certainty of geometry was worth retaining, and uncertain knowledge should be abandoned even if it pertained to higher things. These two filters have very different selection biases. In their extreme forms they represent opposite errors of judgment about what knowledge to keep and what to jettison.

Which error are we most likely to commit today? I believe we overemphasize Descartes and pay too little attention to Aquinas. I take Aquinas’ “higher things” to mean purposes, knowledge about right purposes. Lower things I take to refer to techniques–how to efficiently do something, assuming it should be done in the first place. We have overdeveloped our relatively certain knowledge of technique, and left underdeveloped our less certain but more important knowledge of right purpose. The old seem more interested in teaching technique than purpose, and the young obligingly seem more interested in learning technique than purpose. So we develop more and more power, subject to less and less purpose. As physicist S. Weinberg says, the more science makes the universe comprehensible and subject to our control, the more it also seems to render it pointless, and the less our control is guided by purpose.

These thoughts remind me of a public debate I participated in at LSU in the 1970s regarding the construction of the River Bend Nuclear Power Plant near Baton Rouge. I presented economic and safety reasons for believing that the plant should not be built, that there were cheaper and safer alternative sources of electricity, etc. After my presentation, a nuclear engineering consultant from MIT made his rebuttal on behalf of Gulf States Utilities. It consisted entirely of presenting a scale model of the reactor core and explaining how it worked. He never replied to any of my arguments or said a word about why the reactor should be built. But his exposition of technique easily won the public debate. Afterwards everyone crowded around his model pointing to this and that, asking how it worked. “How to” questions of technique totally displaced “what for” questions of purpose. Maybe I needed a scale model meltdown of a reactor core! Maybe I needed a course in public relations. I might as well have been whistling Dixie.

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From the Empirical Archives: The Bucket and Mr. Muir by Randy Larsen

The Bucket and Mr. Muir

Randy Larsen

Originally Published in Empirical magazine in May 2012

John Muir’s father was unsatisfied and had visions of expansion. He moved the family from Fountain Lake Farm, Wisconsin, to a larger tract of land on nearby Hickory Hill. The new land was without accessible water and John’s domineering father had determined a well must be dug and young John would do the digging. The well would be ninety feet deep with all but the first ten feet or so in granite-like, finely grained sandstone. Each morning, after being lowered into the well in a wooden water bucket, John would sit cramped in a space about three feet in diameter and chip away at the sandstone with a mason chisel. It was painfully slow and tedious work.

One night, when the well was about eighty feet deep, it filled with deadly carbonic acid gas. The next morning, John was lowered into the well and immediately began to sway back and forth from the effects of the poison. He was about to lean back against the well wall, fall asleep, and die, when he chanced to look up and see the overhanging branch of a bur oak tree. The oak reminded him of life outside the well. He feebly cried out to his father “Take me out.” As his father began to crank on the windlass, he quickly realized John was not in the bucket. He shouted out in wild alarm, “Get in! Get in the bucket and hold on! Hold on!” 

Somehow, Muir did not remember how, he managed to crawl into the bucket. He was dragged out of the well, violently gasping for breath. Muir says the family’s move to the larger farm and associated need for a new well was the consequence of his father’s “vice of over-industry.” John had protested the move, saying if people lived on smaller tracts of land, they would be less likely to sacrifice happiness for the sake of money. Although he argued “living is more important than getting a living,” his opinion carried little weight, and his family moved to the larger farm and began working the land and themselves tirelessly.

Muir was a hard worker his entire life. He valued focus and dedication. But to Muir, hard work was different than over-industry. Whereas hard work can lead one toward a full and flourishing life, over-industry represents a mindless pursuit that is categorically counter to good living. Muir later recalled: In those days … it often seemed to me that our fierce, over industrious way of getting the grain from the ground was closely connected with grave digging. The staff of life, naturally beautiful, oftentimes suggested the grave digger’s spade. Men and boys, and in those days even women and girls, were cut down while cutting the wheat. . . . We were all made slaves through the vice of over-industry.

Muir’s choice of the image of slavery is telling. Slavery as a metaphor indicates his belief of the insidiousness of over-industry’s effect on freedom. Muir believed the grip of over-industry can be so tight that one can even forget there are other choices. He tended to believe that we—and this is where the metaphor with slavery ends, of course—are not so much oppressed by others as victimized by our own inclinations to conform to societal norms. In this sense, to extend Muir’s metaphor, over-industry fosters a situation where the self is both slave and slave owner.

Some things we learn so slowly. And after having lived fairly free in the mountains of California for some years, Muir returned to an over-industrious life. This time the choice was not in the hands of his father. At the age of 42, Muir chose to marry, raise a family and, for the better part of a decade, work relentlessly though ambivalently cultivating a fruit orchard in Martinez, California.

The record of this time is thin and Muir’s previously lavish journal entries praising Nature became sparse. Instead we read of a husband and father often under great stress. During these days of full-time farm management, the editor of the Overland Monthly magazine asked Muir to write an article about the Sierra. Muir responded: I am lost & choked in agricultural needs & am almost beyond the memory even of literary work so that much as I should like to give you the article you want I am not able or nearly able to do so. Work is coming upon me from near & far & at present I cannot see how I am to escape its degrading vicious effects. Get someone to write an article on the vice of overindustry, it is greatly needed in these times of horticultural storms.

In 1883, his friend from Alaska and former trekking buddy, Reverend S. Hall Young, came to the Martinez ranch for a visit. Young says Muir broke into a “passionate” voicing of his discontent. “I am losing precious days,” Muir told Young. “I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.” Five years later Young again visited Muir and found him still lamenting his situation: I am a horrible example. I, who have breathed the mountain air—who have really loved a life of freedom—condemned to penal servitude with these miserable little bald-heads! (holding up a bunch of cherries). Boxing them up; putting them in prison! And for money! Mon! I’m like to die of the shame of it.

In a letter to his brother David in August 1887, Muir wrote, “I am all nerve-shaken and lean as a crow loaded with care, work, and worry.” Muir wanted to marry and raise children. He found great joy in it. Letters to his daughter Wanda reveal a highly sensitive and even doting father, filled with conviction and love for his family.

But Muir was inundated by what he saw as the trivial, oppressive, and (most worrisome of all) distracting details of farm life. For example, he bemoaned the need to choose between which of a dozen different grape varieties would be best to cultivate. He didn’t see such choices, to paraphrase William James, as a difference that makes a difference.

Muir’s attitude speaks to the relationship between autonomy and freedom of choice described by Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen. Sen distinguishes the importance of choices in our lives from the functional role they play. He suggests that instead of upholding freedom of choice per se as a good, we might ask whether it nourishes or deprives us, makes us more mobile or hems us in, enhances self-respect or diminishes it. In short, do the choices available to us better our lives? Not all choices enhance freedom. In fact, some may impair freedom by taking time and energy we’d be better off devoting to other matters.

Even though choice has a clear instrumental value, in that it helps us get what we want, an over-abundance of choices can have, paradoxically, the opposite effect. Too many choices become time consuming and even burdensome; this is especially true, in a situation like Muir’s, where the choices do not advance a deeper value or help one move toward a flourishing life. Today one can choose from thirty distinct styles of blue jeans or 6000 different TV stations, but passing the afternoon deciding about pants or watching television doesn’t necessarily make our lives better. The essential question for Muir, as it is for us today, is how much of what we might call “life” is exchanged for considering all the options and resisting the inherent temptations. 

A good life is not the same as a complex life; and for John Muir, a man who walked from Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico with only a comb, change of underwear, couple of books, and a plant press in his pack, simplicity was a deeply seated value. Farming life took a toll on John Muir’s physical and spiritual health. It was his wife Louise Wanda who finally released him from the “penal servitude.” Believing the family had ample money, she prepared to sell or lease much of their ranch. In a touching letter, she explained to John that she had seen a devoted husband and father give too much of himself. She urged him to give more of himself to Nature in order to feel strong and at peace and to devote himself to his Nature writing. She ended the letter saying: A ranch that needs and takes the sacrifice of a noble life, or work, ought to be flung away beyond all reach and power for harm. . . . The Alaska book and the Yosemite book, dear John, must be written, and you need to be your own self, well and strong, to make them worthy of you. There is nothing that has a right to be considered beside this except the welfare of our children.

At Louise’s urging, John hit the trail. He visited Lake Tahoe and mounts Shasta and Rainier with his good friend William Keith. During their excursion Muir affirmed his commitment to wilderness preservation. When he saw rampant “commercialism and destruction,” he was appalled to realize that this was happening while he was too consumed with “money-grubbing” to protest.

Camping at the base of Mount Rainier, feeling unwell, unfit, and unprepared, the fifty-year old Muir had no intention of climbing the mountain. Encouraged by a group of much younger men, Muir found himself overcome by enthusiasm. He wrote to his wife, “Did not mean to climb it but got excited and was on top.”

Muir was inspired and invigorated. In the years that followed, he would become the leading voice for the protection of wild places; he would found the Sierra Club and help establish the National Park Service. Galen Rowell once asked Rheinhold Messner, perhaps the world’s most accomplished mountain climber, why the most beautiful mountains and valleys of the European Alps are so highly developed?

“How is it that we Americans have managed to preserve our mountain areas while you Europeans have trashed yours?”

Messner explained the difference in three words, “You had Muir.”

In the 1980’s, the California Historical Society voted Muir the “greatest Californian in the state’s history” (besting President Reagan). In order to be free to dedicate himself to wilderness protection he first had to be free from the vice of over-industry. Later in his life, while wandering in the Sierra, Muir recalled the childhood situation of digging the well on his father’s farm. In his notebook, he scribbled this warning: Once I was let down into a deep well into which chokedamp had settled, and nearly lost my life. What I recall is this. The horror was this. The deeper I was immersed in the invisible poison, the less capable I became of willing measures of escape from it. And in just this condition are those who toil or dawdle or dissipate in the crowded towns, in the sinks of commerce or pleasure.

What saved Muir’s life in this allegory was his vision of Nature. If the “branch of the blessed bur oak” had not reminded him that there was life above, he would not have been able to rile himself and escape the poison. When stuck, one often forgets there are other options.

The well story is more than a metaphor for the role of Nature in living a good life. It is an allegory for the condition of being so enmeshed in toxicity that one can’t even muster the energy to make a decision about getting free. Muir would return to these themes for the rest of his life, exploring and developing them through his writing. The basic formulation is this: There is an inspired life to be lived if we can brush off apathy and inertia, energize ourselves and each other, and allow Nature to remind us of callings above and

beyond.

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