Godless Honour and the Descent of Reason

According to conventional thinking, the primary weapon in the quest for godless honour, as it were, is the sword of Reason. We’re living in the afterglow of the Age of Reason, when the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, the colonization of the Americas, and the rise of merchant capitalism fueled the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions in Europe.

As they worked out the nature of objectivity, early-modern “natural philosophers” or scientists used that newly-minted weapon against the purveyors of religious dogma and superstition. The Scholastic theologians had at their disposal only a degraded form of reasoning which they cobbled together from their records of ancient Greek philosophy and which conserved the traditions and authority of the Church and of the feudal system. They presupposed metaphysical prejudices such as the Great Chain of Being in which humankind is positioned midway between divine spirits and nonliving materials.

The advantage of the medieval speculations and myths is that they reassured the non-intellectual masses and prevented them from sinking into despondency when faced with the squalidness of their material conditions and with natural catastrophes such as the Black Death, which might have suggested the world is absurd.

However, the religious worldview was arbitrary, having had no connection to reality apart from the presumption that our self-serving hopes and intuitions couldn’t steer us wrong. Thus, this worldview had to be inculcated by totalitarian theocratic regimes. The evident cultural relativity of religions should suffice to undermine confidence in any religious brand. More than that, the complacency fostered by the static and reassuring religious visions of the meaning of life and of our place in the universe was eventually overridden by real-world forces of liberalism and technological progress.

One of those forces was reason or at least a new, “positive,” objective kind of reason, as Auguste Comte put it. But what exactly was this progressive power of reason?

Scientific Reason

In place of philosophical and religious speculation and fantasy, scientists deployed mathematics and experiments.

Some early-modern scientists such as Copernicus and Kepler were inspired by Pythagoras and surmised that if the point of human reference could be transferred from the Earth to the Sun, perhaps the universe is fundamentally geometrical and “objective” in its structure.

But the more obvious advantage of mathematics was its cultural neutrality. Math is an artificial, universal language that abstracts from the biases of our natural languages, from the metaphors, intuitions, and parochial experiences that define our mundane ways of life. Numbers, equations, and abstract symbols would uncover the world’s objective nature, on the assumption that objectivity is manifested precisely in the rest of the world’s disturbing indifference to our ways of life.

To think mathematically, therefore, is to place us on the universe’s level of inhumanity, by ignoring or bypassing our preferences and presumptions. Whereas in everyday life we want to know why things happen, because we’re used to socializing so that we presuppose some intention behind events, scientists would ask only how nature works. However elaborate it may be, the world that conforms to mathematical order may be perfectly pointless.

Experimentation, too, is a method that circumvents human biases and the illusions of subjectivity: rather than be immersed in endless, cultural debates, the scientist tests a hypothesis by checking the data and letting the world disconfirm or support the proposal. In case that scientist acts in all-too human fashion and fudges the data, the experiment is repeated by an independent scientist so that we may have multiple attestations of the facts.

Reason in this case is a matter of designing the experiment and of explaining the observations that follow. Rather than deferring to tradition or to authority figures, scientists would trust their senses. A model or theory could either account for the results of the experiment or not.

Eventually, however, due largely to Descartes, Galileo, and Newton, the world in so far as it was objectively described was understood to be a giant machine, the operations of which could be represented by natural laws. Thus, scientists dismissed supernatural and theistic narratives, focusing on simpler explanations that added to knowledge of how precisely the great machine works.

The Deeper Irrationality of Nature

What was curious about this rise of objectivity is that it seemed to vindicate Renaissance humanism. Remember that the Scientific Revolution was fuelled by an emergent enthusiasm for our human potential. Instead of praying to divine beings that may not even exist and instead of being content with a stagnant society, we began to think we could solve our problems and improve our conditions from one generation to the next.

We could use our understanding of nature to progress, by inventing technologies that replace the inhuman wilderness. As Francis Bacon said (still beholden to the outmoded religious trappings), we could reestablish Adam’s “Empire of Man over creation.”

In short, the leaders of the Renaissance were anthropocentric and optimistic about our potential. But as an indispensible means of achieving the goal of human-centered progress, the Scientific Revolution was methodologically nihilistic and even anti-human. Although the hope (and early deistic expectation) was that scientific knowledge would enhance our well-being, there was no guarantee of such advances.

On the contrary, by grappling with nature’s inhumanity and by suppressing their intuitions, wishes, and other small-minded biases to let nature’s physical order speak for itself, as it were, scientists had to demote human nature. Just as the biblical God expelled sinful humankind from Paradise, the scientist excluded Mind and Culture from the sphere of objective reality, in distinguishing between primary (physical) and secondary (subjective) qualities.

The secondary qualities are those we take for granted in our mundane affairs, as we talk of right or wrong and good or bad, but our normative and faith-based ways of thinking and experiencing are illusory in view of the broader world’s absurd indifference to those values. In so far as we’re defined by our ideals and our naïve presuppositions, we too must be unreal; our subjective, personal identities are either part of nature’s machine or they’re mere confusions or phantoms of imagination.

What, then, is left to motivate science and technology? Why shouldn’t we say scientific objectivity was a repudiation of Renaissance humanism rather than a fulfillment of it? These questions came to a head in the early twentieth century when positivist philosophers realized that by declaring the only meaningful statements are those that can be scientifically verified, positivism itself, that very criterion of meaningfulness must be illusory or semantically “negative,” that is, faith-based, subjective, and noncognitive.

A second development mooted that embarrassment, namely the scientific overthrow of the mechanistic picture of nature. From relativity theory and quantum mechanics, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and chaos theory, we learned that the real world doesn’t conform, after all, to our more grandiose instruments of reason. Paradoxically, as scientists improved their understanding of nature with the rigors of math and empirical inquiry, they learned that the world is as irrational as it is counterintuitive.

Nature’s lack of order and its fundamental arbitrariness, indeterminacy, nonlinearity, and chaotic unpredictability don’t prevent science from improving our living-standard, since the objective irrationality could itself be systematically explored and scientists and industrialists applied that self-destructive understanding to produce empowering technologies. Quantum mechanics, for example, is foundational to computers, smartphones, the internet, GPS, and MRI.

But quantum reality is absurd. Instead of understanding how quantum events happen, physicists use statistical reasoning to bypass Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle about the inherent arbitrariness of quantum fluctuations, and to track relative probabilities of different outcomes. Einstein’s theory of spacetime, too, is absurd since it predicts the existence of black holes in which natural order is negated.

The Descent of Reason

In short, scientific reasoning undermined itself. To be sure, science has elaborated on what the real world objectively is in all its counterintuitive monstrousness, in its mockery not just of our simpleminded wishes and intuitions, but of our arrogant, even authoritarian conceit that we could overpower the universe with reason. Rather than falling from the sky, it turned out that reason is only a human capacity and is therefore closer to our cultural illusions than to natural reality.

Rationalists like Aquinas, Spinoza, and Leibniz adopted the ancient philosophers’ anthropocentrism in assuming the principle of sufficient reason, according to which everything must have a cause or reason. In so far as the “things” in question are defined by our necessarily simplified conceptions, the principle is tautological, but its thrust is that however alien the universe might seem to our sensibilities, we can understand the phenomenon by humanizing it, by figuring out how it came to be in our all-too human ways.

Whether a thing’s cause as understood by us is entirely real and objective rather than at least partly an imposition of human mentality was open for debate. In maintaining that we rationally justify our beliefs by appealing strictly to what we perceive, empiricists such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume widened the gap between primary and secondary qualities, increasing intellectuals’ skepticism about our knowledge of the ultimate causes of our observations.

With reason, then, we came to understand in full how alien the universe is to every human conception, including our most rational ones. This seems fitting since just as the universe will one day extinguish our species and all life, the secularist’s rational worldview, as our best reflection of nature’s monstrous order, negates itself and monstrifies us.

Here is the end of the humanist’s blithe confidence in secular progress: the Age of Reason has led to the depths of our hypermodern skepticism, alienation, and apathy. No longer trusting in mass religions — assuming we’re educated and we appreciate the upshot of scientific theories — we retreat to our infantile pursuits as automated, indoctrinated consumers.

We wallow in our grotesque, insignificant culture wars, longing for authoritarian rule after forgetting the lessons of the Second World War. We fall for the technocratic professionalism of Democrats and neoliberals like Bill Clinton or Tony Blair, Barack Obama or Justin Trudeau, even as those professionals prove to be phony and their policies are as savage as those of the conservatives who are at least more upfront about the bestial impact of their social Darwinism.

Despairing of the charade of international law and of the plutocratic effects of “globalization” (of the relaxing of nations’ protectionist laws to allow for maximum penetration and exploitation by transnational corporations), we long to be rescued by outsiders like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, or by other strongman leaders such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Jair Bolsonaro, Benjamin Netanyahu, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, or Viktor Orbán.

Just as the concept of rational competence has been undermined by the late-modern portrait of nature’s strange irrationality, we may expect our political leaders to be as crazy and amoral as a quantum fluctuation or a black hole.

From Objectivity to Horror and Awe

The last pretense to fall before this two-edged sword of objective reason should be the secular humanist’s faith in progress. It’s possible that like physical energy, social progress is conserved so that we eliminate poverty, disease, and hunger only by sweeping under the rug greater dangers such as nuclear or biological war, just as we inflate the middle class with New Deal regulations only by consigning the barbaric conservatives to the fringes from which they plot their revenge by an astroturfed backlash.

In any case, having put aside the vainglorious conceptions of reason along with fantasies of gods and of a supernatural afterlife, we should wonder whether there’s some more fitting way of relating to reality other than by attempting to dominate it with a scientific map of all the physical ins and outs. Notwithstanding certain mathematicians’ pining for platonic Heaven, scientific reasoning has become a pragmatic business of formulating models that have only such and such relative theoretical and practical advantages.

These models are simplifications, because as the philosopher Immanuel Kant explained, our very interest in understanding phenomena, not to mention the methods we bring to bear are only human vanities. We can clarify our assumptions, test our predictions, and put our models into practice, but by doing so we can only ever confront a toy version of reality. As precise as they are, our artificial languages overgeneralize too, if only by presuming that there’s an objective world order to be understood or that confronting nature’s irrationality won’t prove more counterproductive than the ancient rationalizations of theocracy.

When we’re confident in our grasp of how some natural process works, we experience that process through the filters of our concepts and our models. Our generalizations are like portals through which the world appears in a way that makes sense to creatures like us.

What transpires, then, when we don’t understand what’s happening, when the world seems sublime, awe-inspiring, or terrifying, or when we lose the assurance that our concepts are perfectly fit to the facts?

Then the universe in its undifferentiated wholeness sneaks through the filter of our rationality and we’re struck with something like a mystical or an existential experience. We encounter the world then not as effete Lords of Creation but as dumbstruck, humiliated animals.

Theoretical physicists are still after a Theory of Everything, a theoretical framework that fully explains and links together all the physical aspects of the cosmos. Hitherto, scientists have increased their understanding by analyzing the whole, by breaking nature down into isolated parts that could be explained while bracketing each part’s relations to the others and to the whole.

To that extent, scientific models are idealizations, since they assume an unreal or artificial state of affairs. Even General Relativity is an idealization since it’s a theory of space and time, not of everything else, whereas space and time aren’t really isolated from the rest of the universe, such as from the quantum level.

Now the goal is to figure out how the puzzle pieces fit back together. It’s doubtful the TOE would be a scientific theory, since science explains by naturalizing (as well as humanizing), by showing how one limited thing was brought about by another limited thing.

We would expect that an explanation of the whole of natural existence would posit preconditions that are themselves limited and that would therefore require explanation. See, for example, Lawrence Krauss’ infamous account of how the universe emerged from “nothing,” where that nothing turned out to be a limited kind of physical thing after all, the field of quantum fluctuations.

The TOE would have to “explain” things ultimately in self-evident terms, which would make the “theory” a faith-based, theological story rather than a reductive account.

Perhaps our existential dread of pondering the extent to which the universe necessarily slips through our cognitive grasp is the more authentic mirror of nature, our theories and models and technocratic politicians and corporations that exploit the infantilized herd being so many mirages that distract us from the self-effacing truth.

To know the universe isn’t to occupy any epistemic high ground or to have some advantage over reality. To know it fully, rather, is to see through the attempt to know anything, to feel that the world isn’t really made up of the objects, processes, or other subject matters captured by our cognitive nets like so many fish from the deep. The whole of reality isn’t the passive referent of any theory or working model.

Even that phrase, “whole of reality,” is only a vacuous placeholder like “God.” Traditionally, this is indeed where myths step in, to pick up the pieces left by the dissections and disfigurements conducted by rational explorers. The religious myths are fictions that ward off existential terror and disgust, when we realize the smallness of even our mightiest collective endeavours.