The Englightenment Delusion

Pray what was that man’s name,–for I write in such a hurry, I have no time to recollect or look for it,–who first made the observation, “That there was great inconstancy in our air and climate?” Whoever he was, ’twas a just and good observation in him.–But the corollary drawn from it, namely, “That it is this which has furnished us with such a variety of odd and whimsical characters;”–that was not his;–it was found out by another man, at least a century and a half after him: Then again,–that this copious store-house of original materials, is the true and natural cause that our Comedies are so much better than those of France, or any others that either have, or can be wrote upon the Continent:–that discovery was not fully made till about the middle of King William’s reign,–when the great Dryden, in writing one of his long prefaces, (if I mistake not) most fortunately hit upon it. Indeed toward the latter end of queen Anne, the great Addison began to patronize the notion, and more fully explained it to the world in one or two of his Spectators;–but the discovery was not his.–Then, fourthly and lastly, that this strange irregularity in our climate, producing so strange an irregularity in our characters,–doth thereby, in some sort, make us amends, by giving us somewhat to make us merry with when the weather will not suffer us to go out of doors,–that observation is my own;–and was struck out by me this very rainy day, March 26, 1759, and betwixt the hours of nine and ten in the morning.                                                               --Lawrence Stern, Tristram Shandy Ch XXI

 

Our narrator seems to have both (and paradoxically) an obsessive and a cavalier attitude regarding the origin of certain historically significant observations—observation which we (or at least he) could call emerging truths. Stern is both observing and mocking the new state of emerging knowledge, this Enlightenment sally into the territory formerly held by ignorance in which each new truth stakes its claim under the authorial flag of its discoverer. It may be only the role of ego in conquest that is being mocked here, but it may also be that Sterne understood that the enterprise itself, even in the early days of its success, was not precisely what it took itself to be. In Stern’s time, it was widely believed that progress in knowledge, wherever it was made, genuinely shrunk the territory of ignorance and that continued advances in the realm of knowledge would, eventually, eliminate the territory of ignorance altogether.

Two and a half centuries later, that claim feels quaint. Just as each scientific instrument designed to shrink the universe—from the first hand-held telescope to massive  infrared, radio contraptions we now have—have only served to make the universe bigger and bigger until its size, at one point merely unimaginable—has become yet one unimaginabilty nested inside or perhaps bumping along side an infinite number of other equally infinite spaces, so our conquest of knowledge in general has served only to increase our ignorance—or, more precisely our knowledge of our ignorance. We know both more and far far less than we ever did.  

I say we used to plant our flags on every new tidbit of truth conquered by understanding. But that’s not quite true. We still do it. Our attitude has not kept up with our experience or our observations. As we are becoming increasingly ignorant, as our only real knowledge is the ever growing knowledge of our ever growing ignorance we fail to adjust or attitude the realization that what we already don’t know has accumulated to the point where we can reasonably surmise that there is a vast territory of reality we can never subsume to knowledge.

And this is where we started before the blip of the enlightenment delusion.

MORE GUNS!

Threeman the One I'd Sailor

The parent, child and holy ghost, the ego id and superego, the I and the reptilian brain and the prefrontal cortex. The rule of threes.

How much of our perception of the world comes out of the war between the reptilian brain and the prefrontal cortex? How much comes out of those two parts (on the one side) and the singularity of the first person nominative singular pronoun?

One “I,” two brains. One I to rule unruly both. Two selves warring from which to produce a single unity. One I’d sailor.

Even God is three: Parent child and holy ghost. Freud claimed that the self was three, ego, id and superego. All these overlapping threes.

I sometimes think I’m most myself when I’m deepest in love. But that is when I’m least human, if human is what separates me from the other fauna of earth. I’m least in my reasoning brain. I say I can’t control myself. I must be my pre-frontal cortex, myself must be my reptilian brain. My ego can’t control my id.

If I am my I, I am not myself (said Alice). Myself am not I. But if my I is something I own—if it’s mine, it isn’t me. Nothing I own is me.

But that’s just words. That’s just the language and the structure of my language, which so often fails to organize being as being really is—assuming there is (which I doubt) any organization of language that would be able to map it. To me that is the fundamental fact. There is reality, which even to name “reality” is to misrepresent, and there is language which (among its several tasks) represents it, maps it, grids it.

Which tells me I have it wrong but doesn’t help me get it right. Who am I, myself? And who are you?

Laughing at Evil

Evil itself provides no challenge whatsoever to God—the existence of or the belief in. This may seem like a small, semantic point, but I think it’s actually big and essential. Evil implies God. This is not to say that God is evil but that evil cannot exist if God does not. Without God, “evil” is just a hyperbole for events that leave us feeling very sad or very scared. We may want to say “for events we can’t understand,” but without God these events are perfectly plain—whether they be the extermination of millions or the torture and slaughter of a single child, a hurricane that wipes out a whole tribe or the man-caused heat that burns a living planet to the ground. Without God there are only things we do or things that happen. Such events are in the total calculation of the universe random events, no different than the formation of a star via the coalescence of gasses or the massacre of a tribe of termites by a tribe of ants.

But I do not believe that humans can experience “evil” events this way—as meaningless. And I don’t think that this is because we find these events really really sad. The truth is that the murder of a child doesn’t just feel incomprehensible—it is incomprehensible. Despite the fact that, without God, it is easy to comprehend, it is experienced as something that should not have to have happened. It is experienced with the same deep affect which accompanies (although I’m saying this backwards) the literary form known as tragedy, which Aristotle famously characterized as “pity and fear” but which I would think better understood with that italicized phrase: It should not have to have happened. Of course with the murder of any individual child or with any “evil” or “tragic” event, looking at immediate causes, we can always see ways it might have been avoided. Every individual event is contingent and therefore, in theory, avoidable. Pulling back, however, we have to see that from what we know about the universe such events in general are unavoidable. Given the moral and physical structure of the universe, such events must be possible, and therefore, to paraphrase Derrida, whatever can arrive must arrive.

The question we are left with is whether the moral structure of the universe is really an amoral structure—which is to say, does not exist at all. Put another way, we are asking whether our reaction to Oedipus the King or the murder of Sally Jones is something we should take seriously or ignore, something we should believe in, or something we should pass off as an illusion founded in the chance wiring of our common circuitry. It seems to me the burden of proof is on those who contend that the profound experience of injustice or tragedy is not to be taken seriously, that whenever we are tempted to say or feel it should not have to have happened, this is mere apophenia, we are imposing a Darwinian impulse onto a random set of data—that our reaction to such events is in fact so out of proportion to the events themselves that any truly rational species peering down at us through their telescopes would be laughing.