{"id":92631,"date":"2017-05-22T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2017-05-22T11:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=92631"},"modified":"2017-05-19T12:45:42","modified_gmt":"2017-05-19T11:45:42","slug":"escaping-the-iron-cage-of-hopelessness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/05\/escaping-the-iron-cage-of-hopelessness\/","title":{"rendered":"Escaping the Iron Cage of Hopelessness"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cSpecialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

— Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIn this frightful round of unchecked means, nobody knows any longer where they are going, purposes are forgotten, and ends are overtaken.\u00a0 Human beings have set off at astronomically high speeds toward nowhere.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

— Jacques Ellul, Presence in the Modern World<\/em><\/p>\n

22 May 2017 – <\/em>In a previous article<\/a> I argued that those who think science can solve our major social problems \u2013 in particular, world destruction with nuclear weapons and the poisoning of the earth\u2019s ecology and atmosphere \u2013 were delusional and in the grip of the myth of science and technology.\u00a0 These problems were created by science when it became untethered from any sense of limits in its embrace of instrumental rationality.\u00a0 Once it became wedded to usefulness and the efficiency of technical means, it lost its original aim: the search for truth. (Obviously this doesn\u2019t include all scientists.)\u00a0 In embracing means as ends, it produced an endless loop of means justifying means that has resulted in what Weber called an \u201ciron cage.\u201d\u00a0 Concomitantly, the ideology of pure objectivity and impartial innocence was joined to elite state power and the capitalist profit motive where it was supported and instantaneously and completely applied to technical applications, including nuclear, biological, chemical and \u201cconventional\u201d weapons; bio-engineering; GMO foods and people; eugenics and cloning; \u00a0and chemical\/oil production, etc.\u00a0 It is indisputable that if our planet is incinerated or slowly destroyed through toxic pollution that modern science with its Faustian \u201cprohibition to prohibit\u201d will stand indicted, if anyone is left to make the case.<\/p>\n

Albert Camus warned us long ago:<\/p>\n

And even though we do it in diverse ways, we extol one thing and one alone: a future world in which reason will reign supreme.\u00a0 In our madness, we push back the eternal limits, and at once dark Furies swoop down upon us to destroy. Nemesis, goddess of moderation, not of vengeance, is watching.\u00a0 She chastises, ruthlessly, all those who go beyond the limit.<\/p>\n

Ostensibly rational, the illogical logic of modern science has resulted in a mystifying double-bind that denies human freedom and leads to widespread despair and hopelessness.\u00a0 Many people feel trapped by this deterministic ethos, while others fail to see that the cause of our problems can\u2019t be their solutions.<\/p>\n

In this essay I will explore the possibility of a path out of the seeming impossibility of escaping the cul-de-sac of our spiritually disinherited and disenchanted condition.<\/p>\n

Max Weber argued that modern rational capitalism was informed by a religious impetus of inner-directed worldly asceticism derived from Protestant Christianity.\u00a0 In essence, modern capitalism was a religion.\u00a0 Likewise, modern mainstream science, despite the discoveries of quantum physics, rests upon a materialistic presupposition that is a self-contradictory act of faith that it denies to others.\u00a0 Committed to determinism, this materialistic scientific world view offers no basis for its truth claim since what is determined cannot be disputed when it wasn\u2019t freely chosen. To espouse a position that was predetermined is to choose nothing. \u00a0In essence, such science is also a religion that, like capitalism, serves no end but its own regeneration.<\/p>\n

Is it any wonder that so many people feel trapped on an endless merry-go-round that contradicts their felt experience and their hopes for a better world?\u00a0 They look around and see a mad world of war and lies and science run amok. The physical scientists tell them that everything started with a bang and will end with a bang or a whimper of one sort or another and that\u2019s how it goes since when did people so puny think they were anything but specks in a vast cosmos of meaningless gas that will devour them in a few billion years, give or take a year or so.\u00a0 The psych folks tell them they are the products of their brain chemicals and neurotransmitters and must submit \u201cfreely\u201d to chemical treatment if they know what\u2019s good for them and want to be happy.\u00a0 The social scientists insist that all knowledge is socially conditioned and relative and therefore everything they think and feel is also relative and so they are lost souls forever wandering in a world of relativity where true wisdom is impossible and the difference between right and wrong is a relative choice that has no basis in any \u201creality.\u201d\u00a0 And of course the power elites and media play with their minds in endless games of mind control as they insist the only real truth comes through screens that they control.\u00a0 Mind and body warped, so many people stumble through their days like the living dead in search of some exit from their pain and confusion.<\/p>\n

Or to say it differently.\u00a0 Science \u2013 both physical and social \u2013 has resulted in the systemization of doubt and the embrace of the relativity of thought and knowledge.\u00a0 The modern predicament is such that whereas in former times people felt that their knowledge was fact or truth and that it was \u00a0grounded in a physically palpable reality, we have been exposed to systematic doubt and the suspicion has grown that all the various standpoints are limited and \u201crelative.\u201d\u00a0 While not consciously espoused by the majority of people, this doubting worldview permeates social life as a vague insecurity and uncertainty.\u00a0 It may be left to intellectuals to circulate such relativizing ideas, but they have become part of the cultural air we breathe. For people today in a scientifically based society, faced with the relativizing of all knowledge and every eternal verity, the question of how to understand their deaths, and thus their lives, has become acutely problematic.\u00a0 Uncertainty has undermined people\u2019s wills as they have forgotten they are free.<\/p>\n

The question that modernity forces us to ask is this: once knowledge is seen to be relative; old cosmologies are transformed by science; symbol systems and religions are seen as the products of humans\u2019 own creativity; reality is understood to be socially constructed; once these developments take place consciously and unconsciously, how then can people understand their lives and deaths and find the confidence to live in peace and harmony with the earth and all living creatures?<\/p>\n

Tolstoy put it this way: \u201cScience is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: \u2018What shall we do and how shall we live?\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

In order to make our way out of this maze, we might contemplate the underlying presupposition that \u201ceverything is relative.\u201d\u00a0 That, of course is an absurd position.\u00a0 Everything can\u2019t be relative when the statement \u201ceverything is relative\u201d is an absolute statement.\u00a0 Joined to that, one can muse on the self-contradiction of materialistic determinism and perhaps glimpse an escape from the iron cage, the prison, the closed room, the garbage pail, or the no-exit – so many terms that our best writers have used to describe the modern condition.<\/p>\n

Rudolf Steiner did that as follows in The Philosophy of Freedom<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of the world.\u00a0 For every attempt at an explanation must begin with the formation of thoughts about the phenomena of the world.\u00a0 Materialism, thus, begins with the thought of Matter or material processes.\u00a0 But, in doing so, it is ipso facto confronted by two different sets of facts, viz., the material world and the thought about it.\u00a0 The materialist seeks to make these latter intelligible by regarding them as purely material processes.\u00a0 He believe that thinking takes place in the brain, much in the same way that digestion takes place in the animal organs.\u00a0 Just as he ascribes mechanical, chemical, and organic processes to Nature, so he credits her in certain circumstances with the capacity to think.\u00a0 He overlooks that, in doing so, he is merely shifting the problem from one place to another.\u00a0 Instead of to himself he ascribes the power of thought to Matter.\u00a0 And thus he is back again at his starting-point.\u00a0 How does Matter come to think of its own nature?<\/p>\n

But these are intellectual exercises and are therefore probably not very helpful to the average person.<\/p>\n

Tolstoy maintained that for the modern person death had no meaning because civilization was based on progress \u2013 an \u2018infinite\u2019 progress \u2013 which according to its own internal logic should never come to an end.<\/p>\n

On this road of progressiveness everything is provisional and indefinite and so individual death seems like a failure and meaningless because it marks an end.\u00a0 But what then, asked Tolstoy, is the meaning to our lives?\u00a0 Are they meaningless means to meaningless ends?<\/p>\n

Materialistic science can only answer in the affirmative. A negative affirmative. But for most people this doesn\u2019t satisfy.\u00a0 They sense the truth that we live by faith \u2013 scientists do, religious believers do, atheists do, agnostics do, everyone does \u2013 faith is the water we swim in; it is our element. It is what impels us to get out of bed in the morning.\u00a0 But getting out of bed in the morning is a choice, a judgment.\u00a0 It is not inevitable.\u00a0 We do it in faith that the day will be meaningful and worth meeting.\u00a0 We encounter others in good faith and hope they do the same with us.\u00a0 This awareness of the faith dimension of life is a daily human experience that points beyond itself and is a source of hope, even when confusion reigns.\u00a0 While modern science and philosophy have largely attempted to treat all things, including people, as objects to be controlled by subjects, most people encounter others in daily life not as Its, as in Buber\u2019s I-It, but as Thous, as in I-Thou.<\/p>\n

Where have I come from?\u00a0 Why am I here?\u00a0 Where am I going?\u00a0 These are life\u2019s basic questions that science answers with nowhere, no reason, and nowhere in that order.\u00a0 Such answers are attestations \u00a0of a faith in nothing, what is usually called nihilism.<\/p>\n

The psychiatrist R.D. Laing maintained that the key to a sane world is for people to truly regain experiencing their experience and not to make-believe.\u00a0 He felt that most people had become estranged from the roots of their being.\u00a0 He put it thus:<\/p>\n

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one\u2019s mind, is the condition of the normal man.\u00a0 Society highly values its normal man.\u00a0 It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.\u00a0 Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.\u00a0 Our behavior is a function of our experience.\u00a0 We act according to the way we see things.\u00a0 If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive.\u00a0 If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves\u2026.<\/p>\n

There is everything to suggest that man experienced God.\u00a0 Faith was never a matter of believing.\u00a0 He existed, but of trusting, in the presence that was experienced and known to exist as a self-validating datum.\u00a0 It seems likely that far more people in our time experience neither the presence of God, nor the presence of his absence, but the absence of his presence\u2026.The fountain has not played itself out, the frame still shines, the river still flows, the spring still bubbles forth, the light has not faded.<\/p>\n

But between us and IT, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete.<\/p>\n

Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.<\/p>\n

So what can we do to break through this mystification of experience that has resulted in a double-bind that has trapped us?<\/p>\n

I say nothing, at first.\u00a0 We are so busy doing and thinking our doing is the solution to our problems.\u00a0 We must stop the world we know by first not doing and by simply being in the presence of Being.\u00a0 We must develop a contemplative discipline of allowing the awareness of our egocentric thinking to reveal to us the arrogance of our confused belief that we can coerce others and the natural world to do our bidding and that every problem has a solution.\u00a0 The grotesqueness of nuclear weapons is the physical manifestation of that willfulness.\u00a0 For the magician, the applied scientist, and the technologist all wish to conquer reality with techniques from the outside rather than being open to the truths that Reality (that we are in and is us and that goes by different names \u2013 Being, the Tao, Logos \u2013 all names for the unnameable) might reveal to us.\u00a0 \u201cTo \u2018know\u2019 reality,\u201d writes Alan Watts, \u201cyou cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, feel it.\u201d\u00a0 So the first thing we must \u201cdo\u201d is to do nothing so we may heal our divided minds; otherwise we are spinning in a vicious circle, \u201clike everything else which the divided mind attempts.\u201d<\/p>\n

This seems self-evident to me and \u201cdoing\u201d this should be our first \u201cact\u201d of dissent \u2013 our break-out (by breaking in) \u2013 from the reigning consensus that underlies the violent and sick condition of the world today.\u00a0 James Douglass, author of the ground-breaking book, JFK and the Unspeakable<\/em>, says this perfectly in Lightning East to West<\/em>: Jesus, Gandhi, and the Nuclear Age<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u00a0What we know \u2018out there\u2019 as the most resistant evil reality to be transformed, is in reality \u201cin here\u201d in its primary being.\u00a0 The precise nature of that correspondence, or identity, between inner and outer worlds is the mystery which Jung was attempting to describe with his theory of Synchronicity, whereby outer events can be increasingly recognized as unifying correlations of a profoundly traveled inner way.\u00a0 Once we begin to see this profound interpenetration of inner and outer worlds in a oneness of reality, the insoluble enigma of the world of evil gives way to the edge of the unifying mystery of Oneness, or of Love, a mystery that we cannot fully understand but which we can in fact move into with our lives and participate in to the extent of experiencing an ever-more-united world in Reality.<\/p>\n

I think if we can see the big picture by \u201cdoing nothing,\u201d we will have taken a major step toward a solution, or at the least an insight into how we can act to resist the evil that is occurring in the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cSeeing through\u201d is to diagnose \u2013 dia<\/em>, through + gignoskein<\/em>, to know, perceive \u2013 which can allow us to see through to the roots of world problems. Without a deep comprehension of the causes of these problems, and how so many of our solutions have failed because they are based on false premises, we will get us nowhere.\u00a0 \u201cThe way one sees through the situation changes the situation,\u201d writes Laing.\u00a0 Then, \u201cas soon as we convey in any way\u2026what we see or think we see, some <\/em>change is occurring even in the most rigid situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think we can agree that we are in a \u201cmost rigid situation\u201d as the nuclear weapons await discharge, countries and people are destroyed by U. S. war-making, the environment is poisoned, elite capitalist crooks line their pockets at the expense of everyone else, etc.\u00a0 Many of us convey this again and again, seemingly to no avail.\u00a0 Perhaps this is because we are missing the forest for the trees in our understandable haste to remedy it all.\u00a0 I suspect this is so and scatter these thoughts like breadcrumbs in the hope they may suggest a way home.\u00a0 \u201cConveying\u201d my thought experiments in the hope \u201csome\u201d change occurs in the process.\u00a0 First, in me.<\/p>\n

The word spiritual has acquired a bad name with its embrace by New-Agers et al. with its association with magic and out of the world mumbo-jumbo.\u00a0 So I use it reservedly.\u00a0 But if we look to those so many hold in such high regard for their fight against violence and injustice – e.g. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, to name but two \u2013 it is apparent that their \u201ctruth-force\u201d and \u201cnon-violent resistance\u201d were rooted in a spiritual understanding of the human condition.\u00a0 We don\u2019t need to get caught up in words, for they have a way of missing the truth.\u00a0 Gandhi said God was truth and truth was God.\u00a0 King equated God with love.\u00a0 Truth, God, Love \u2013 do the words matter?\u00a0 Did not these men grasp the deepest dimensions of our problems? Didn\u2019t they understand the root causes of hate and violence? \u00a0Didn\u2019t they see the Tao?\u00a0 Didn\u2019t they see that the way we conceive existence through our deterministic and instrumental sciences is a reflection of our violent world?\u00a0 Didn\u2019t they realize that we can\u2019t force change on anyone from the outside without doing violence and that the only way forward is to move the world through love and truthful resistance?\u00a0 Didn\u2019t they tell us that freedom is our birthright and is indivisible, and when you deny existential freedom you are lost in despair?<\/p>\n

Despite the question marks, these are rhetorical questions.\u00a0 Don\u2019t our deepest experiences confirm their truth?<\/p>\n

Let me end with James Douglass\u2019s words, for it seems to me they ring true, despite being far outside the reigning scientific paradigm and \u201ccommon sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is there a spiritual reality, inconceivable to us today, which corresponds in history to the physical reality which Einstein discovered and which led to the atomic bomb? Einstein discovered a law of physical change: the way to convert a single particle of matter into enormous physical energy.\u00a0 Might there not be, as Gandhi suggested, an equally incredible and undiscovered law of spiritual change, whereby a single person or small community of persons could be converted into an enormous spiritual energy capable of transforming a society and a world? \u00a0I believe that there is, that there must be, a spiritual reality corresponding to E=mc2 because, from the standpoint of creative harmony, the universe is incomplete without it, and because, from the standpoint of \u00a0moral freedom, humankind is sentenced to extinction without it.\u00a0 I believe that the human imperative of our end-time is that we discover the spiritual equation corresponding to Einstein\u2019s physical equation, and that we then begin to experiment seriously in its world-transforming reality while there is time.<\/p>\n

We must experiment in truth, for time is running out.<\/p>\n

_________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely.\u00a0 He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a previous article I argued that those who think science can solve our major social problems \u2013 in particular, world destruction with nuclear weapons and the poisoning of the earth\u2019s ecology and atmosphere \u2013 were delusional and in the grip of the myth of science and technology. These problems were created by science when it became untethered from any sense of limits in its embrace of instrumental rationality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-spirituality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}