Why You Shouldn’t Believe Anything You’re Told – 1.2
1.2 Contemporary Forms of Idealism: theometaphysics
As I was driving down the A1 in December 2009 I listened to an episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze which sparked the thoughts that produced this essay. The programme employs a number of prominent commentators to discuss contemporary ethical issues. The participants on this occasion were a mixture of people with expertise in science, philosophy, theology and politics including ex-cabinet minister Michael Portillo and eminent stem-cell researcher Lewis Wolpert. Part of the discussion analysed the possibility of being morally neutral as regards science and was I assume (I didn’t hear the start of the programme) linked to the furore that developed in relation to the alleged manipulation of data by climate scientists at the University of East Anglia. What intrigued me was that Professor Wolpert seemed to believe that his values did not interfere with his science. In the same programme Mr Portillo gave the impression that being political could separated from being moral. I find such beliefs in these well informed and highly influential people very surprising, as it is questionable whether they fit with the facts. This essay is an exploration of the continued popularity of these views and why we should view them with suspicion.
My argument is that such perspectives are related to the uncritical use of ideals. Idealism has an ancient heritage which I believe is correlated with people’s need for control and security in a world that is threatening and difficult to predict. A belief in the existence of absolute truth regularly accompanies methods of dealing with the world quite probably related to its capacity to bolster feelings of certainty and safety. I am reminded of a 1995 tv programme presented by the biologist Richard Dawkins in which he expresses incredulity in reaction to the views of believers in ‘creationism’ from Alabama, USA. What he didn’t speak about was that such idealism is not limited to the views of ordinary Americans, but is present in the views of professional scientists who are also prone to make-believe; it is just that their fantasies are usually more mathematical than biblical. Idealism is everywhere, entangled in our culture and too often heavily disguised as science.
From my position there are three ways of looking at the world that provide ideals: religious or theological; philosophical or verbal logical, what used to be called metaphysical; mathematical or numerical logical, often partnered by scientific, which when all rolled up together form the basis of absolute truth in our knowledge. These methods of identifying the truth of things attract apostles who investigate their potential in the search for the definitive meaning of life. The importance of these three techniques of truthfulness varies in relation to the problems people are confronted with; nowadays we tend to tackle problems scientifically thus mathematics is pre-eminent. These true forms of knowledge all have one thing in common: they are idealistic. Let’s take the scientific idolization of mathematics as an example.
Mathematics is an approximation to the facts; it is a tool to aid the measurement of weight, height etc. The problem is that if studied with little reference to the facts, on what is called the ‘pure’ level, it can produce systems of analysis that have the entrancing possibility of providing truths or proofs; it can be used to calculate certainties. However, these certainties don’t actually exist: Pythagoras’ triangle is an example: it is a triangle that exists only in the human mind where perfection is possible – an example of a Platonic form. Real triangles, made by engineers, cannot emulate such feats of precision. Engineers deal in approximations not proofs. Proofs are dreamed up in the minds of people I call truth-finders, they are ideals.
Such ideals in themselves are not a problem, they are just games. They do however have dangerous side effects because they lead to very beguiling outcomes: they offer the prospect of certainty. Certainty is very appealing on the personal level; it can offer us solace in a life full of pain and danger. In addition, it has utility in the competition for survival. Privileged groups recognise the benefits of truths as tools for continued domination and employ experts in the search for ideal forms of knowledge such as theologians, philosophers and mathematicians, the truth finders, to justify their right to govern. Certainty, as Plato pointed out, offers stability. Stability is extremely attractive to elites in the battle to retain their position at the top: I have a God-given right to rule; I earn millions in bonuses because the market has judged me the best. Those in charge have an interest in reinforcing their authority by getting truth-finders to transpose their views into certainties, which by definition cannot be questioned and in time come to be seen as given, natural, logical. Ideals can be used as tools for domination; they are what might be called knowledge technology.
My essay is an exploration of ideas that dispute the belief in the possibility of being exact, other than in the truth-finding territories of religion, formal philosophical and mathematical logic. The notion of objectivity as knowledge that is rational or correct is examined. In relation to my argument that nothing outside of religion, philosophy and mathematics is stable or truthful, then it is only in these areas of analysis that objectivity really exists. However, as we know, it’s use is not restricted to idealism as a tool for truth-finding: many scientists or lawyers for example would claim objectivity in their method and judgements. In this sense to be objective is not to be tainted by human values, the opposite of subjective. I want to suggest that this is an ideal state of existence impossible to achieve by real people, developed by truth-finders to support their view that stability in the form of absolute truths exists beyond the religious, philosophical and mathematical horizons. Consequently, I would dispute the possibility of anyone being objective about sensory experiences and that we can somehow ever dissociate ourselves from our values, even when acting as a scientific truth-finder like Lewis Wolpert; the noisy influence of prejudices can be turned down or up, but never silenced. The latter, objectivity, is an occurrence that happens only in religious, philosophical or mathematical utopias. Relatedly, being moral is being political is being scientific, because, as with other perspectives available to us, they are interconnected. However, such a view of the patterning of knowledge is not very palatable because it is disturbing for people’s peace of mind and has the potential of de-stabilizing the networks of social influence used by elite figurations!
I have tried to plot a pathway through the webs of social influence that have patterned certain aspects of European history using a model taken from Auguste Comte and Norbert Elias. However, I want to condense Comte’s approach by amalgamating two of the his three fields of human knowledge: theology and metaphysics. The latter is in turn modified to include both forms of pure logic; verbal and number (philosophy and pure mathematics). As far as I can see they are just different species of a common genus – idealism. Hence, I want to use the term theometaphysics to represent the confluence of ideals of a supernatural or formal logical status. This rejects the argument that the attempts at transforming theometaphysics from Descartes onwards were anything truly radical, suggesting that these were just re-branding exercises in response to the onslaught from secularizing forces such as business-oriented figurations and their allies, which demanded a greater emphasis on mathematics.
This re-branding of metaphysicians is I suspect partly an attempt protect vulnerable forms of truth and its acolytes (theologians and verbal logicians) from the rise in influence of more material forms of knowledge such as science and its ideal partner, mathematics. Nevertheless, philosophers are part of a discipline that owes its raison d’etre to idealism – if they move too far along the continuum towards realism, they turn into scientists. Philosophers owe their status to their forebears as successful truth-finders, whose style of analysis dominated formal discourses on knowledge in the past, and still heavily influences our discussions today: the discussion on The Moral Maze being just the tip of the iceberg. My belief is that since the 17th century and probably as far back as the Renaissance, their status has been under threat from what were then called natural philosophers or what we now know as scientists, who because of their involvement with the factual world, have a tendency to being anti-idealist.
Hi Peter and well done !!!
Dave
Thanks Dave you are my first offical visitor which seems approapriate. Hopefully, I will see in the next couple of days – we’ve just received 2 inches of snow this morning.
Peter