Original navigation scheme for this “secularism” topic. Only the essay below was completed.
Secularism á la MMO
I have been doing a lot of thinking, reading, and talking about organized religion in the past year. Now I feel the need to articulate a clearer, more positive approach to this important element in our lives. Over the coming months I will populate the structure displayed above in the navigation scheme.
Here is a little essay that started on my blog, Mr. Wonderful’s Blog. Kind of got out of hand, lengthwise.
Truth is becoming more important
This may seem like an odd topic, in some ways a self-evident, circular sort of topic, but increasingly the news and the swirl of media about us has very little to do with truth. Mostly it is a mixture of bold-faced lies and whirling wisps of marketing hype. We even have the release of a little book that addresses the issue directly, On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt.
Here is the first paragraph:
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.
I look forward to reading this little book when it becomes available at my local library.
Most of us have practical day-to-day evidence of the importance of truth in our lives. We depend on others to be truthful in their affairs with us. And, it is amazing how small gaps in truthfulness come back to bite. Further, we do not quibble about “truth” vs “Truth” or “The Truth”, nor wonder if truth is permanent, final, immutable. We know that truth is based on best efforts to understand the facts at hand. We applaud a “new” truth that explains newly discovered facts about a situation.
In addition to these day-to-day applications of truth, there are some truths that have been tested so long and so frequently that we consider them to be “facts”, even though, from a purely formal point of view, they remain just truths like any other, subject to revision, or even replacement by a completely new truth that explains the facts more clearly, more comprehensively, more consistently.
We trust in “gravity”. We no longer drink from the Broad St. pump and we get our inoculations though we may never have seen a microbe or virus, or have any real understanding of how these buggies make us sick. We expect that the lights will come on when we flip the switch and yet few of us connect this with the truth that there is a connection between magnetism and the flow of electrons that bring the light. You can easily extend this list with your own examples of truths that you depend on and that are reliably supported by an ongoing stream of facts and experience.
These kinds of truth, the kind that is subject to the challenges of new information, facts, data, as well as the probability that today’s truth may be supplanted by a better truth that explains the same or more facts in a better, simpler fashion, these truths have become commonplace only in the past 250 yrs. This system of truth has brought us the scientific technical advances that make our day-to-day lives so different from the Middle Ages and before. This is the system of truth sometime referred to as the “scientific method”. I prefer not to get bound up in epistemology. To me this is a system of truth that is practical, fact-based, and independently verifiable.
This system of truth will not be the ultimate system of truth. But, for the moment it is the best us humans have come up with.
Nevertheless, it is an enormous advance over the other systems of truth that are driven by revealed truth, the power of one individual or group to declare truth to be what they say it to be and not subject to investigation or challenge. That system of truth is the truth of autocracy and hereditary government and virtually all religions, organized or not. That system of truth frequently declares some text, a revealed text, the Bible, Koran, Torah, and others, to be sacred texts that are literally the revealed word of God. That system of truth continues to plague us as religious intolerance and hatreds, racism, sexism, tribalism, and others that drive human relations. (As a footnote, one need only read the first chapter or so of Tom Paine’s forgotten masterpiece, The Age of Reason, circa 1794-1796, to for all of the commentary required on “revealed” systems of truth.)
Ok, so, having posited that there is a method for determining truth, for developing truth, even as it is an imperfect truth because the method is continually trying to improve the accuracy and reliability of truth, why is truth becoming ever more important?
It is clear that humans as a species are, in the short run, say the next thousand years or so, absolutely the source of both the problems confronting us as a species and the potential source of the solutions.
For the first time in the history of our species, the means to destroy or significantly disrupt human societies has arrived in the hands of individuals.
During the 20th century, an individual, say Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, could inflict death on millions through a state apparatus. More recently, we have seen Pol Pot, Sadam Hussein, among others used new variants of state apparatus to kill large numbers.
But, now, in the last decade or so, nuclear and biological weapons have arrived in a state of such miniaturization, the technologies of production sufficiently locally available, that literally a handful of individuals could float a device into Boston Harbor and render the Beantown, the City on the Hill, and its adjacent multiversities uninhabited and uninhabitable.
In the same moment of time, our societies are threatening to whirl out of control and destroy the environment in which we live. Some portion of humans are living without any functioning civil society. A vast portion of human beings live at a subsistence level. Many live under oppressive state apparatus.
And again, in the same moment we have an enormously productive world capitalism that is more comprehensively reaching every part of the world. Its ability to produce in a stable fashion is unlikely based on past historical evidence. Its ability to produce a reasonable level of economic equality is definitely not in evidence.
And again, in the same moment, we have an emerging world system of scientific and technical production that should accelerate developments in a wide range of fields. However, we have no system, except for the dynamics of capitalism and state apparatus to make decisions about where to invest our human and financial capital.
A quick example is the ongoing disaster of our pharmaceutical industry. How can it be that we need another round of erectile dysfunction drugs (I refer to them as “stiff dick drugs”) when much of the world is still plagued by malaria, tuberculosis, and others? This is not happening because the drug companies are evil. This happens because we have arranged it that way. Here we see the effects of human institutions, markets and government regulations, on the production of universally significant commodities.
This is a good point to return to the proposition, “Truth is becoming more important”. The solution to our problems is to be found in unleashing the full innovative powers of truth. Any time spent on revealed texts, any time in which governments and institutions prevent humans from focusing their energies on developing truth, is time permanently lost in the search for new truths to help us out of the morass we have put ourselves in.
Let me close with an important claim: The most important fields of endeavor for truth are in politics, economics, sociology, law – all of the ways in which we organize human societies.
If we imagined our basket of scientific and technical knowledge today and could imagine a world in which every human being had access to the benefits of just this knowledge, we would have pushed the species ahead by an order of magnitude larger than all of the progress since 1800.
(I want to acknowledge two books that played a role in my thinking for this discussion: Mihaly Csikzentmihaly’s The Evolving Self (NY: Harper Collins, 1993)and Sam Harris’ The End of Faith(NY: WW Norton, 2004))