Our Shattered Society
…… as long as experimental science
is not firmly established,
there will be no surer guarantee of the truth
than universal assent.
Nay, truth will as a rule,
be this very assent.
We may note, by the way,
that this is one of the causes of intolerance.
The man who does not accept the common belief
prevents it,
while he dissents,
from being utterly true.
Truth will regain its entirety
only if he retracts
or disappears.
— excerpt The Two Sources of Morality And Religion by Henri Bergson p. 199
A hallmark of this society is the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. We have assented together to allow every individual to think and express as he/she pleases. By contrast to antiquity we have reached a place on our journey as a society where there is so little consensus, so gossamer the agreement on what is real and what we should do — that our nation is broken epistemically into subcultures using distinct vocabularies and art forms; into larger groups one wanting to protect nature and the other wanting to convert nature into its market value. It can hardly be said that we are “a people.” What are the consequences of unlimited freedom to think and express what seems reasonable to the individual?
There is so little agreement that representative government is paralyzed, unable to address manifest problems, to meet public needs by measured legislation. There is innervating conflict between “right” and “left.”
Universal assent is crucial to the survival of a society. Enough of us must be persuaded that certain fundamentals are “true” to allow concerted action for the common good, for the individual good. Are not these two dimensions of life the opposite sides of the same coins?
Now we have a chief executive who is intent upon anchoring truth by loyalty to himself. This amounts to the beginning of terror. Assent or disappear.
We find ourselves in the depths of a very dark wood.
4 thoughts on “Our Shattered Society”
Bergson almost seems as if he is calling for civil disobedience on a dystopian scale.
“Truth will regain its entirety only if he retracts or disappears.”
Or perhaps IS disappeared by others. When is the line crossed where the existential question morphs into the reality of chaos and revolution? Is there a moment in today’s culture when we say, “Enough” and sweep aside the rhetoric of polarization to take up the action of violence against those who we deem as hell bent against any progress towards a more decent world? And if the winds of change lead us down this path, do we who believe in the sanctity of human life descend to the level of the lowest of the low by obliterating those who we are certain would destroy us through their own greed, ignorance and inaction? These are questions I ponder again and again. I do not have an answer, but still, we must continue to ask these questions or perish through our own lethargic response.
I think that it is the other way around. Until the advent of science and the wide spread dissemination of its benefits during the twentieth century the guarantor of truth was that everyone you knew, literally everyone in the community believed that “____” was so. An outlier who persisted for any reason was eliminated from the stage one way or another. His/her presence was a threat to the peace and stability of the community. This dynamic explains the demise of Socrates, Jesus, and a host of others that we know of who lived before us. There are certainly a larger number of those whose names and stories we cannot know.
This straightforward approach to grounding truth began to change with the industrial revolution. Factual evidence, grounding in the disclosure of critical reason became accepted more and more beginning with the Enlightenment and gaining momentum with the Industrial revolution. Thus in our Bill of Rights every individual is granted the legal right to think/speak as they will. No longer does church/state have a monopoly on truth, the Priest as representative of the gods/the God regularly reinforcing what you were raised to believe. However this is not an unambiguous movement forward. There is no longer any common grown shared between all of us that is adequate to provide traction for treating the ills that trouble society, even partial solutions to the problems that admit of the simplest of solutions. We are in gridlock. Our differences of opinion so palpable, that we are no longer sure of how to define a crime in the case of the President of he country, or even if the term “crime” ought to apply.
Society is not going to descend into chaos, the effect of fundamental disagreements. Violence will be forth coming to impose order, and most likely from those inclined already toward violence.
I am sure that violence will not emerge from those who desire progress toward a more decent and habitable world. If it comes, it will come from those who believe that any means justifies the maintenance of power by their man and their party.
On a related and more philosophical note, a friend who happens to be a physicist told me last night that any statement that is not anchored in empirical (measurable) reality is just talking nonsense. He sincerely believed that all metaphor, all figures of speech are terms not to be taken into account. I heard his statement as an example of the discipline of science having run amok, becoming a sterile scientism, with no room left for poetry or any of the arts which use metaphor point to meaning, beauty, and …. truth.
Your physicist friend has an interesting and (at least to me) clearly limited perspective. Science itself is rooted in the realm of dreams. If the icons of invention and innovation had not asked themselves the ubiquitous question of “What if…..” we would not have moved beyond the nomadic tribes of 100,000 years ago. Those who have the inspiration to think beyond the confines of standard behavior bring us both arts AND science. One cannot happen without the other and a person who believes they exist only in separate chambers of reality is not pragmatic or scientific, just stuck.
Science is a focused employment of reason to achieve control of nature to the benefit of human kind. The language of scientific development entails a one to one relationship between symbols and the reality to which they refer. Math is the quintessential language of science, and is supremely successful if what you want is to achieve a cleaner, more efficient internal combustion engine, or a better artificial insulin. My friend he has unwittingly allowed the language and logic of the laboratory to become in his mind the only language game, or a discourse that handles reality better than all the others. The philosophical term for this theory of truth is the identity theory of truth. A proposition is true when a fact is identical with the proposition.
According to this theory statements about morals, comedy, politics, garden design, etc. simply cannot be true since there is no identity between the proposition and a referent.
Your comments upon the heart of science which is curiosity and discovery is indeed no different than the synthetic thinking of any artist. I agree that the arts AND science interpenetrate.