Refuting "It," Thus

or, Why I am not a Rationalist

(for Russell Blackford)

Every time we use English (or whatever tongue we may speak) we participate in an enchantment. Under the casual, even flippant definitions currently in use by today's Rationalist Avengers, you could even say that we participate in a religion: in speaking and writing we constantly invoke supernatural entities with apparently unbounded power and presence. The "it" of "it is raining." Is there anything it cannot do, anywhere it cannot be, anything it cannot know? And yet this "it" has no actual discernible existence. It is a phantom, one that we can't stop talking about.

This presents a problem for the insistence, prominent of late, that one can discern the beliefs and dispositions of a mind based upon the texts it uses. Are we all, then, "barking mad?"

English, in particular, is also constructed so that we are dedicated to expressing a particular ontology, or metaphysics, wherein we distinguish between an actor and an act in any given observation. That is to say, in the world, at any given moment, there are discrete "things" that can be found "doing" (or not doing) certain activities, or "having" certain properties. In linguistics this is called subject-predicate structure.

The "it" in "it is raining" is a bookkeeping trick devised to split the event of "raining" into subject and predicate, so it is grammatically expressible. The antecedent of "it" is the rain itself. The antecedent of "it" in the the phrase "it is hot today" is "hot." Translated: rain is raining. Hotness is hotting.

We can avoid the phantom "it" that is raining, and the silly redundancy of rain raining and hot hotting by saying instead "rain is falling," or "rain falls." But what we still have not avoided, and cannot avoid so long as we persist in speaking grammatically, is the division of the rain event into our noun-verb clause, which our English grammar will not allow us to abrogate.

To say, then, that "rain is falling" is to denote a "thing," rain, that has the property of falling or not-falling at any given moment in time; the connotation is that there "is," on a sunny day, "rain not-falling." We might ask, without necessarily meaning to lapse into the idiom of the koan, what is the nature of rain when "it" is not raining? (Or, to borrow an example from philosopher Suzanne Langer, where does the red glow of hot iron "go" when we cool it down to room temperature?)

That language involves reification (at least in English) isn't any kind of deep secret. The noun spell, as in something a witch or wizard might place us under, has the same root as the verb "spell" that indicates we are constructing words. The very act of making words, or employing language, is an enchantment--we're just so accustomed to doing it (we're such accomplished magicians!) that we cannot see what we are doing for what it is.

***

There's an objection to this line of thinking, and it's not a bad one. One is likely to hear it expressed today in terms of an air disaster: if all the apparent world is just a collection of dreams and illusions, in what do we place our confidence when we book seats on a 747? But the argument is much older than jet planes. Sam Johnson said it most pithily, responding to Bishop Berkekey's "immaterialism": I refute it thus!

Or did he? Note what Johnson did not say. He did not tell Boswell, in words, that Berkelean idealism can be falsified by a palpable action in the physical world, such as stone-kicking, which has the clear and reliable effect of moving the stone a certain predictable distance (calculable by Netwonian means), and raising a blister or bruise on one's leading toe. He didn't really say anything at all. He refused discourse altogether, choosing to answer outside of language, outside of the spell. His "thus," here, bears a family resemblance to the Sanskrit concept "Tat," a cognate of our own "that," indicating Being or "suchness." In Wittgensteinian terms, of that which he could not speak, he passed over in silence. But the refutation was still made, and we remember it today, even if often misunderstand it.

***

The spell that today's rationalists and naturalists choose to cast upon themselves has its own special name: the Ionian Enchantment (coined by physicist Gerald Holton , and employed, without irony, by such prominent a figure as biologist E.O. Wilson, in his book "Consilience.") In Wilson's words, the Ionian Enchantment is "a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws." I don't relate this fact to belittle or diminish this particular spell, merely to observe that it is one. In more vernacular terms, the Ionian Enchantment is referred to as reductionism. As its defenders and practitioners are quick to point out, reductionism works--if by "works" we mean that our airliners go from place to place without incident, with enough reliability to make it a worthwhile endeavor.

But this is a definition that is built into the question. Within it is embedded the supposition that technology makes our lives better. How do we know? Because it manifestly makes our lives "better," where "better" is defined as the thing that technology does.

I do not write against jet planes as such. I am not mounting a Luddite argument, which after all would be the same as the technocratic argument, just backwards. Rejecting technology wholesale is the same as embracing it wholesale. In neither case do we ask any hard questions about value, or meaning. Returning for a moment to the Richard Dawkins quotation that I cited in a prefatory posting, he writes (I have substituted one word):

If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of metaphysicians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference? Even the bad achievements of scientists, the bombs, and sonar-guided whaling vessels work! The achievements of metaphysicians don't do anything, don't affect anything, don't mean anything.

The word I substituted was "metaphysicians," for "theologians." The latter are simply a subset of the former, and it's important here not to get distracted by questions of Christian theology. Metaphysics is something we all have to contend with, being the study (or lack thereof) of the phantoms in our language that I began this post discussing. So long as we use language we are committing to some kind of spell. Are we to be the enchanters or the enchanted? An active examination of metaphysics would favor the former option. The philosophy of reductionism strongly militates for the latter. Ever since the logical positivists of the early 20th century, who strove to trade only in "verifiable" assertions, metaphysics has been said to be moribund. If something is not demonstrable true, argued the positivists, it is meaningless--a position we might characterize as fully enchanted, since it confuses statements about the world--language--for the world itself. "The map for the territory," in Korzybski's analogy. Once we jettison metaphysics, the map-making ends, and we must get by with what we have, however tattered, or inaccurate, whatever the distortions of its projections.

Dawkins' brief against theology, above, is a perfect totem for this view. It is an epic feat of question begging: if there were no technology, there would be no technology, and, since we begin from the stance that a world without technology would be terrible, wouldn't that be terrible? It's harder to parodize Dawkins' view of theology, since he himself isn't very clear what theology is. To Dawkins, theology is a long and pointless exercise in the generation of false and groundless truth claims, thankfully obviated by the discovery of science. But if we recognize that theology is a subset of metaphysics (without, it is important to remember, actually endorsing any particular theological stance, Christian or otherwise), it becomes something slightly less pointless, and far more essential: it becomes the stance from which we order the world around us.

Remove "the achievements of theology" from history, then, and see how many of "the achievements of scientists" are left standing. We would surely "notice" the absence of Newton (there go all the 747s). The loss of Descartes, and Bacon, would inflict a terrible blow on scientific methodology, making medical science all but impossible. We would also lose the Universal Rights of "Man," which first appeared in our history in a theological context. (Those rationalist philosophers, such as A.C. Grayling, who like to argue that contemporary science and ethics are of a direct lineage back to the Golden Age of Greece, where Abrahamic theology has never been more than a harrying, antagonistic influence, are not so good at connecting the dots on this score). This is not to say that our modern naturalistic worldview could never have emerged had it not been for our European theological past. But neither have we any grounds for saying with any certainty that it would. We cannot know; the histories are inseparable, and there are no covering laws of cultural evolution that demonstrate a path from an alternate Point Then to Point Now.

***

In many cases the theological influences on naturalism are quite stark. This is something that comes into more visible relief only when we compare the metaphysics of naturalism and Abrahamic theology, as contrasted with non-dualist metaphysics, such as we find in East and South Asia (Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism) and in countless "spirit" religions in pre-Christian Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Alan Watts has observed that the naturalist view of the Cosmos as a machine is simply Deism with God removed--the "fully automatic model." But this model is neither neutral nor objective. God was not simply the last bit of residue obstructing a clear view of reality. The fully automatic model retains all the features of the Abrahamic model save the supernatural elements, most notably the dualistic separation of man and nature. This has led to a perceived hostility of "nature" toward those who inhabit the world (us), such that the modern scientific "enterprise" treats the Cosmos as something suspect, to be controlled if not outright dominated--and as though we were not part and parcel of this very same natural world. As though, in fact, we had some other origin, and some purpose at odds with the (base, nefarious) purposes of nature. It is a palpably Christian, teleological way of looking at things.

The dualism of "us" versus "our environment" runs through all the sciences (even, ironically, environmental science), and we see it nowhere more clearly than in our apparent inability to treat anything as "sacred" except our own, inevitably transient, concerns: chiefly, food, property, longevity, physical health. These are the implicit ends of Dawkins' defense of technology, above. And they are not in themselves bad things; but for how much longer can we quarantine them from the reality of our placement in the wholeness of the world? Modern agriculture and transport, in particular, have brought our planet to the brink of cataclysm. It's unbearably sick, today, as no one who concerns herself to pay attention can deny. Computers are interesting, and useful, but was the world a worse place before their development, a less "meaningful" place? How do we reconcile their inherent obsolescence, and disposibility with the relative fragility of our environment? On what altar is all of our technological development to be placed, when it has not shown the slightest signs of being harmonious with the actual world we inhabit? Has anyone in the party of the Ionian Enchantment even paused to ask these questions?

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In economic terms, this kind of fragmentation affords us a special bucket labeled "externalities." Externalities are just a polite code-word for pollution, which is to say they were never all that external to begin with. They were a bookkeeping trick, and a fairly stupid one, even in economic terms, for being so penny-wise and pound-foolish. What is the point of being rich, when all one has to spend one's money on is poisoned water and air, ravaged vistas, and the increasing impossiblity of avoiding the din of our own endless chatter? We have to suspect again, that some kind of spell is in effect, an enchantment that "where we shit" and "where we eat" are two separate, ontologically distinct domains. It is a rather foolish thing to believe, and while we may forgive ourselves this foolishness as an inescapable side effect of our being human, it might, we hope, move us to adopt a kind of compassionate humility that would restrain us from casting other people's delusions as so much more ridiculous than ours. To invite another koan, Kettle, Unblacken Thyself!

[I cannot resist quoting, for example, eminent rationalist philosopher A.C. Grayling, [via Quodlibeta], reminding us of how craven, dim, and ill-mannered are those religious adherents who deign to walk the same sidewalk as respectable citizens (my emphasis):

Of course the point is that Beale-Polkinghorne and their tuppence-halfpenny religious publishers wish to get as much of the respectability of the Royal Society rubbed off on them as they can. This is the strategy adopted by the Templeton Foundation too, of sidling up to proper scientists and scientific establishments and getting their sticky religious fingers on to respectable coat-sleeves in the hope of furthering their agenda - which, to repeat what must endlessly be repeated in these circumstances, is to have the superstitious lucubrations of illiterate goatherds living several thousand years ago given the same credibility as contemporary scientific research.

Whatever the merits of Grayling's position, dressing it up in the language of the caste system would not seem to be lending it any support.

***

There is nothing wrong with Dawkins, Grayling, or anyone else, putting forth that something works on its own terms, be it science, rationality, naturalism, or reductionism. The problem arises when we pretend there is no longer any possible conversation about what those terms are, or could be; that we have no ability, let alone duty, to evaluate--assign value to--the language and ideas that underlie all formal thought. Rationalists argue that this should only be done on a rational basis. Steven Pinker, for example, writing at edge.org (in support of biologist Jerry Coyne's recent jeremiad against "accommodation" of religion,) writes, paradoxically:

Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it.

But can one submit reason to reason? Can one justify use of reason, on reasonable grounds? Can reason, in effect, be both premise and conclusion? This is the place where logic meets the mobius strip, the ouroboros, and "turtles all the way down." Reason itself relies on first principles, of which we are often only dimly aware (and often seem "arbitrary" from other vantage points). It has no independent power to anchor our symbolic understanding of the world absolutely or objectively. To fail to see this is to give up the chase too soon. This sort of meta-rationalism leads Pinker down some very strange rabbit holes, as when he writes, later in the passage:

Moral systems depend on factual beliefs, informed by psychology and biology, about what makes human beings suffer or prosper.

And here we reach into our bag of consolation prizes. To not see that prosperity, or any other moral good we might imagine, can be multiply--perhaps even infinitely--defined, is to come again under the full weight of the rationalist enchantment--to fail to see that we can participate in that defining process, and find out just how much dynamism there is still to be experienced in this life. Or, we can continue along being court stenographers to a dying world.