Paying Attention To The Sky

David Bentley Hart:  “The reductionist project apparently understands itself, and certainly presents itself, as a kind of scientific project. Thus it generates the literature of what Robinson aptly calls “parascience”: a form of discourse whose rather grand, frequently incoherent, and usually irreducibly metaphysical assertions about the nature of the universe, the self, the genealogy of morality, and so on, masquerade as purely scientific claims. This is a literature that systematically blurs the distinction between fact and theory, and between legitimate theory and ideological invention; but it is marketed to readers who for the most part lack the special training needed to recognize when they are being misled, and so enjoys — as Robinson says of the works of Dawkins and Dennett — “the effective authority that comes from successful popularization.”

A great deal of the pleasure that Absence of Mind affords the reader comes from Robinson’s patient deflation of parascientific pretensions. She does not counter the reductionist case with vague appeals to hopeful sentiment, but instead quite effectively demonstrates how much of that case consists in baseless assumptions, ungoverned metaphors, and sheer assertion. In two pages, for instances, she deftly demolishes Steven Pinker’s “statistical” proof that the modern, secular era has been less violent than earlier epochs by pointing out the shoddiness of his method and reasoning.”

We encounter the Pinker piece immediately in this reading selection. There was a time when I used to read Pinker but then the presumptuousness of some of this piece, his “discovery of the human soul” etc came as a complete turn-off. You can read more of how Thomists dispose of his nonsense here. It’s always nice when these guys get their comeuppance. Read on:

Steven Pinker
The adventitious use of the idea of “the primitive” seems always to involve the questionable use of questionable information. In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker debunks belief in the soul, that is, the Ghost in the Machine, as well as the Noble Savage and, in his view the most persistent of erroneous conceptions of the self, the Blank Slate. He takes all these terms to be simple and naive in a degree that is hardly consistent with the seriousness of the philosophic traditions from which they emerged. By human nature Pinker means the genetically determined factors in behavior, which he takes to be highly significant and broadly unappreciated. In his discussion of the notion of the Noble Savage, he offers a graph comparing male deaths caused by warfare in the twentieth century. The graph is presented as evidence that this rate of mortality among Europeans and Americans, as a percentage of deaths, is minuscule beside those reported among various contemporary “pre-state societies” who would have been the primitives of earlier studies.

On the facing page Pinker has noted the errors of Margaret Mead in Samoa and the staged discovery of the “gentle Tasaday.” This is worth noting because two bars on his graph represent two subgroups of the Yanomamo, a society whose violent tendencies were the discovery of an anthropological venture whose reports have also been considered suspect. Since his argument is a rejection of “the image of peaceable, egalitarian and ecology-loving natives,” an argument that would certainly incline him to welcome information to the effect that these pre-stateans are indeed violent, it would be reassuring to see a slightly more evenhanded use of evidence. It would be reassuring also to see some note taken of the susceptibility of such observations to hoaxing and manipulation that has been made so clear in the matter of the Tasaday, the Samoans, and, quite possibly, the Yanomamo, together with an acknowledgment that those who use such observations are susceptible in turn to overvaluing data that tend to confirm them in their views.”

Other questions arise. What is meant by warfare? Would its victims include the millions killed in the regions of Africa from which rubber was taken for use by the armies of World War I? Or are only European and American casualties counted? Does colonialism itself fall outside the definition of warfare, presumably on the grounds that only one side has effective weapons? Should this reckoning exclude the non-male deaths at the siege of Stalingrad or the fall of Berlin? If the point at issue here is how prone societies are to engage in lethal violence, then male mortality caused by warfare is clearly too narrow a category to be meaningful. This is true even putting aside the fact that these pre-state people lack written records, and that traditional narratives of warfare tend to grossly exaggerate the numbers involved in it.

And is it not a little preposterous to make comparisons like this one on the basis of percentages when there are such radical differences in the sizes of these populations? Pinker notes that “two deaths in a band of fifty people is the equivalent of ten million deaths in a country the size of the United States.” Is this a meaningful statement? Any extended family with twenty-five members suffers a death from time to time. Is this in any way equivalent to the loss of five million people out of the whole population? The destruction of ten million people would require a prolonged and determined campaign of violence mounted by societies that were equipped to carry it out — not unthinkable, given the history of the Western world. It would mean that the methods required to engage in violence on such a scale would have to have been in readiness, as we all know they are. Does this reflect at all on our predispositions? More to the point, deaths in a band of fifty could never fall below two percent, while the United States could lose two and a half million people and not exceed one percent, which, by this style of reckoning, would make us the less violent society. And why are we comparing a male war party to the entire population of the United States in any case?

Finally, is it reasonable to debunk the myth of the Noble Savage by pondering any twentieth-century society, however remote and exotic? We can have no knowledge of their history, so we cannot know if what appears to us as primitivity is not dispossession and marginalization. Pinker himself notes that some kind of cultural impoverishment happened among the Tasmanians after they migrated from Australia. I hold no particular brief for the notion of primal innocence, yet neither am I content to see so defective a case made against it. But the point of the graph Pinker uses to illustrate his argument is to make a statement about essential human nature, to tell us what we are, to propose an answer to as grave a query as we can make of ourselves, an answer leveraged against highly questionable data presented as if it had he authority of scientific objectivity behind it.

The Myth Of The Threshold
There is a slackness that is pervasively characteristic of this important conversation. I incline to attribute it to the myth of the threshold I mentioned earlier, the notion that, after Darwin, after Nietzsche, after Freud, after structuralism and post-structuralism, after Crick and Watson and the death of God, some assumptions were to be regarded as fixed and inevitable and others as exposed for all time and for all purposes as naive and untenable, supplanted by a better understanding. Galileo is invoked often.

In denominating any moment in history, whether real or imagined, as the threshold moment, a writer or school is asserting a prerogative, the right to characterize the past and establish the terms in which discourse will be conducted from this point forward. Some transformative concept has obliged us to rethink the world in its new light, assuming pervasive error in previous thought and its survivals. The flood of neologisms into certain disciplines seems meant to signal radical departure.

Since Darwinism is an important model for many writers in this style, one might expect the evolution of culture to have a place in their worldview. But this transformation they describe is like saltation so complete as to have leapt free of genetic inheritance. In culture as in nature there is no leaving the past behind, but to have done so, to have stepped over a threshold that separates old error from new insight, is the given from which these schools of thought proceed, as posture and as method. Triumphalism was never the friend of reason. And the tone of too many of these books is patronizing. Still, however these writers regard their readers, as bringers of truth to those who sit in darkness they should act on their stated devotion to intellectual rigor.

I was educated to believe that a threshold had indeed been crossed in the collective intellectual experience, that we had entered a realm called “modern thought,” and we must naturalize ourselves to it. We had passed through a door that could swing only one way. Major illusions had been dispelled for good and all. What we had learned from Darwin, Marx, Freud, and others were insights into reality so deep as to be ahistorical. Criticism was nostalgia, and skepticism meant the doubter’s mind was closed and fearful. To an age of doubt this ought to have seemed a naive response to any body of thought. But these ideas presented themselves as the last word in doubt, the nec plus ultra of intellectual skepticism.

And so they have been regarded for generations, achieving a remarkable pertinacity through their association with epochal, and oddly immutable, change. There have always been new interpretations budding off from these seminal works, themselves budding off again and again, revisions of various sorts typically announcing with the prefix “neo-” their claim on the world’s attention, and at the same time their undiminished fealty to the school from which they inight otherwise be seen to depart. The prefix “post-” signifies nifies, of course, that they have crossed some sort of threshold, and can therefore make some new claim on the world’s attention.

The schools of thought that support the modernist consensus are profoundly incompatible with one another, so incompatible that they cannot collectively be taken to support one grand conclusion. That they are understood to have done so might reasonably be taken to suggest that this irresistible conclusion came before, perhaps inspired, the arguments that have been and still are made to support it. I propose that the core assumption that remains unchallenged and unquestioned through all the variations within the diverse traditions of “modern” thought is that the experience and testimony of the individual mind is to be explained away, excluded from consideration when any rational account is made of the nature of human being and of being altogether. In its place we have the grand projects of generalization, solemn efforts to tell our species what we are and what we are not, that were early salients of modern thought. Sociology and anthropology are two examples.

The great new truth into which modernity has delivered us is generally assumed to be that the given world is the creature of accident, that it has climbed Mount Improbable incrementally and over time through a logic of development, refinement, and elaboration internal to itself and sufficient to account exhaustively for all the complexity and variety of which reality and experience are composed. Once it was asserted, and now it is taken to have been proved, that the God of traditional Western religion does not exist, or exists at the remotest margins of time and causality. In either case, an emptiness is thought to have entered human experience with the recognition that an understanding of the physical world can develop and accelerate through disciplines of reasoning for which God is not a given.

It is usual to blame Descartes for the error that has been overcome. This is that same Descartes who proposed the pineal gland as the seat of the soul yet is blamed for creating a dichotomy between the mind/soul and the physical body, a dichotomy that has plagued Western thought, if reports are to be credited. A nonspecialist might wonder how this locating of the soul in the deep interior of the brain differs in principle from locating the moral sense in the prefrontal cortex, as contemporary writers do, to demonstrate how free they are from the errors of Descartes. Descartes is another threshold figure, though he is a marker for notions that have been and must be departed from. It is a given that the march of the modern has many stragglers, indeed that any of us, even the very vanguard, might backslide into Cartesianism in some unguarded moment.

James L. Kugel
The prestige of the style of thought and argument that has associated itself with science has had consequences for branches of learning that might seem to have been immune to their influence. A “science of religion,” which has been profoundly affected by the imposition of anthropological models of primitivity on this most seminal text, has had enormous consequences for Old Testament scholarship. I am reading a rather strange book titled How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, by James L. Kugel. Kugel’s thesis is that the Bible was not in its origins a religious literature and came to be regarded as one only late in the period before the Common Era. Be that as it may. He has this to say about the similarities between the flood narratives in the Epic of Gilgamesh and Genesis: “Someone who reads the Babylonian flood story will likely find it interesting, or perhaps troubling (because of its clear connection to the Genesis account).

But any question like `How are we to apply its lessons to our own lives?’ would be greeted by such a reader with incomprehension, or derision. `Lessons? Why it was written by a bunch of Mesopotamians four thousand years ago!’ If that same person then reads what is essentially the same story in the book of Genesis but finds it full of all sorts of uplifting doctrines — well, such a person is either being dishonest or has simply failed to recognize a fundamental facts.’

Elegant Babylonia, Greece to Assyria’s Rome — ancient, yes, and far from primitive. There are no grounds for supposing that a “bunch of Mesopotamians” could have had nothing to tell us, or could have said nothing to interest the biblical writers, for that matter. We are entirely in the habit of finding meaning in the writings of ancient India or China or Greece. We are also familiar with the phenomenon of literary allusion. The Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian flood stories are theodicies, certainly among the earliest examples of this interesting genre. Why does catastrophe occur? What does it mean? The nature of the gods and their expectations of and feelings toward human beings are explored in these narratives.

The biblical flood tells the story again, with changes that make it monotheistic, that make the great destruction God’s response to human violence and not, as in the Babylonian versions, to the intolerable noise we make. And so on. God is loyal to us, but not because he is dependent on us, as the other gods are dependent on human beings to feed them. In other words, reframing the story is granting its given, that humankind can experience devastation, and then interpreting it in a way that radically restates the conception of God and humankind implied in it. Babylonian culture was powerful and influential. The Gilgamesh epic was found in various forms throughout the ancient Near East. It is absurd to imagine that the most dramatic part of it could simply be patched into the Hebrew Genesis and no one would notice the plagiarism. To retell their story with changes would be to defend against its pagan theological implications, and also to address what are, after all, questions of very great interest.

All this assumes that these ancients had an intellectual life, that they had meaningful awareness of surrounding cultures. Archaeological evidence of continuous contact is well established. Kugel is an Old Testament scholar, certainly better informed than I am about the brilliance of Babylonia. But the implication of the passage quoted above is that the Babylonian origins of the flood narrative exclude it from the kind of reading — for Kugel the discovery of “all sorts of uplifting doctrines” — customarily made of Scripture. The low estimate of Babylonia becomes the basis for a lowered estimate of the Hebrew Bible — the modernist declension. Assuming one narrative is without meaning, we may or must assume the other is, too. This conclusion in all its parts is perfectly arbitrary.

Much of the power of an argument like Kugel’s comes from the notion that the information on which it is based is new, another one of those world-transforming thresholds, one of those bold strokes of intellect that burn the fleets of the past. This motif of a shocking newness that must startle us into painful recognition is very much a signature of “the modern,” and potent rhetorically, more so because we are conditioned to accept such claims as plausible. But it often achieves its effects by misrepresenting an earlier state of knowledge or simply failing to enquire into it. In 1622, Hugo Grotius, the renowned early legal theorist and scholar, wrote a treatise titled On the Truth of the Christian Religion. It was translated into English many times, beginning in the seventeenth century. In sections XVI and XVII Grotius argues for the truth of Genesis on precisely the grounds that other ancient cultures had their own versions of the same stories.

These “testimonies of foreigners” show “that the most ancient report was so held among all nations, as the writings of Moses proclaim. For the writings on the ^`Origin of the world’ which he bath left behind, were, for the most part, the same also in the most ancient histories of the Phoenicians…partly, also found among the Indians and Egyptians … and the formation of animals, and, lastly, of man, and that, too, according to the Divine Image, is mentioned: and the dominion given to man over the other living creatures: which you may everywhere find in very many writers.”

I cannot claim to have found so much similarity as he does between Genesis and ancient literatures in general. My point here is simply that where similarities occur they need not be taken to compromise the authority of the biblical text, even if one cannot agree with Grotius that they can be taken to affirm it. To address Kugel’s point more specifically, Grotius is clearly aware of other ancient Near Eastern versions of the story of the Deluge. He says, “Those things which we read of, wrapped up by poets in the license of fables, the most ancient writers had delivered according to truth, that is, agreeably to Moses, viz. — Berosus, in his history of the Chaldeans; Abydenus, in his of the Assyrians, who even mentions the dove sent forth, as doth also Plutarch, one of the Greeks.”" Berosus was a Babylonian historian who flourished in the fourth and third centuries before the Common Era. Abydenus was a Greek historian of Assyria who wrote in the third century BCE. Fragments of their work survive in other early texts.

So there were ancient sources available to Grotius in the early seventeenth century which made clear the Babylonians and Assyrians had flood narratives that paralleled the Deluge in Genesis in some detail. Again, that this is a proof of the truth of Moses’ account, as Grotius argues it is, that it can in fact be cited in defense of Moses, is clearly open to question. But the notion very common in biblical scholarship since the nineteenth century, reiterated by James Kugel, that the existence of these ancient Mesopotamian narratives was a startling modern discovery which must inevitably raise doubts about the meaningfulness of the scriptural Deluge and about the integrity of Scripture in general is clearly false. The decline of classical learning and the mischaracterization of the nature of traditional belief are both factors in contexts like this one. Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of “the modern,” that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.

The Power Of The Intellect To Shallow
The kind of flawed learnedness required to draw attention to the biblical adaptation of the flood narrative in the Epic of Gilgamesh is a classic instance of what William James called the power of the intellect to shallow.’  Again, I mention Kugel because I have his book at hand. This kind of scholarship, tending always to the same conclusions, has dominated Old Testament studies from the middle of the nineteenth century. Kugel’s very flat statement that someone who takes a different view is “either being dishonest or has simply failed to recognize a fundamental fact” is the kind of claim to the intellectual high ground that is perhaps the most consistent feature of the kind of thought that styles itself modern.

The degree to which debunking is pursued as if it were an urgent crusade, at whatever cost to the wealth of insight into human nature that might come from attending to the record humankind has left, and without regard for the probative standards scholarship as well as science should answer to, may well be the most remarkable feature of the modern period in intellectual history.