The Miracle of Intelligent Selection of Events

Do miracles happen? Is the notion of the miraculous still useful, after the Scientific Revolution? I think so, contrary to the strawman originating, perhaps, from David Hume’s criticisms of natural theology. Hume misconceived of miracles as violations of natural law, defining “natural law” as an inductive generalization that’s based on observations of mere correlations between events. We perceive loose patterns in the world and add causal connections via the imposition of instinctive expectations or heuristics (cognitive rules of thumb) onto the more open-ended data. We thus naturally simplify the world’s infinite complexity to make rational sense of it, as opposed to wishing the world operated according to the gratuitous, occult dictates of divine commandments. Natural laws are thus opposed to religious dogmas, for example, in that the former are based on the brain’s interpretive mechanisms, whereas the stem from strategies for social domination.

This Humean view is right as far as it goes, but it’s not sufficiently atheistic. There are no objective natural laws, since “law” in this case is euphemistic. There are regularities which we understand according to our models which simplify and idealize to further such pragmatic ends as our interest in exploiting apparent natural processes. But all laws are social agreements, given atheism rather than deism or theism. Strictly speaking, there are no natural laws and thus there can be no violations of them. Thus, the notion of a miracle as a violation of a natural law is useless. Here, though, is a worthwhile notion of a miracle: a miracle is an anomaly that astonishes or terrorizes those who appreciate something of the strange event’s significance. Notice that this definition is consistent with the foregoing account of natural order. Again, there are perceived regularities which are understood in light of our subjective and social resources, including our cognitive rules of thumb and experimental models. The regularities themselves are objective, as are the data that inform our models, but the way we understand and explain the phenomena are largely anthropocentric. Even scientific understanding, which bypasses the crude anthropocentrism in the metaphors implicit in natural language, inherits the animal’s prejudice for the utility of working tools or traits. The chief standard for scientific explanations is their workability in the civilized project of taming the natural world. Like all gross, bullying demonstrations of power, technoscience will likely prove to be self-destructive. In any case, we become accustomed to the regularities we observe, because we’re in terror mainly of what we don’t understand. Anomalies, then, are those natural events which are rare and which we don’t understand. Some subset of anomalies is, further, miraculous, because a philosophical suspicion of its cosmic importance subverts the predominant way of life.

There have been at least three miracles in this viable sense. First, there was the proto-physical event that sparked the universe’s creation from quantum weirdness rather than from any intelligent design. Virtual nothingness proved to be unstable and so particles popped spontaneously into being. Then the seed inflated and evolved into spacetime which fragmented into the galaxies of solar systems we see today. Second, life developed from nonlife. At one time, physical processes occurred despite there being no one to wonder at them. Some such processes created a rudimentary form of biological life, and that life form complexified by natural selection and by other such evolutionary means so that organisms acquired various body types, including senses and brains for interpreting the environment. Third, some organisms developed also a vision of how the world should be and boldly sought to modify how the world naturally is, according to that ideal.

The Miracle of Artificiality

Let’s focus on the third miracle, which is the miracle of artificiality, of art and of all other idealistic contrivances. Part of this miracle is present in the way the natural patterns of some system persist despite interference from the system’s environment. This is why working explanatory models are ceteris paribus, why they include some humble recognition of the model’s limitations or partiality. The model is about a special occurrence that “tends” to happen but that may or may not actually happen, depending on the circumstances. In the laboratory, those circumstances are controlled for, so the phenomenon can be studied in isolation and in its pristine form, whereas in the wild, factors which aren’t covered by the model can intervene and prevent the causal relationship from materializing. There are, then, possible outcomes, one of which speaks, as it were, to what we think of as nature’s structure, to some signal or meaningful bit of information, whereas the other outcomes are so many confounding noises. Only a theory of the totality of the universe would bypass the need for this distinction between system and environment, between the part and the whole, in which case the places of every part would be understood according to their interrelations that make up the whole of everything; more precisely, the whole would be understood as a unity with no divisible parts.  

As to why one possibility is realized rather than another in nature, this is typically accidental. At least, there’s no intelligent direction or choice as to when the effect follows the cause as dictated by a scientific idealization. Peripheral conditions may or may not impede the unfolding of some segment of natural structure. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, depending on which way the wind is blowing. Mystical rationalists such as Plato like to think that nature’s mathematical structure is objectively ideal, that some natural developments are closer to the Good than others. But if there’s no Mind responsible for nature, there can be no such purely objective good, neither in a moral nor in an aesthetic sense. What there can be is the potential for a meeting between the observed and the observer, which is bound to strike the latter as having one value rather than another. For example, from an artistic perspective, some natural outcomes may seem beautiful, not disappointing. Many physicists and mathematicians like to think that the universe’s structure is simple and that simplicity rather than baroque complexity is aesthetically appealing. Regardless, that sort of value is partly objective and partly subjective, in the Kantian respect.

After eons of natural pseudo-selections of physical and chemical outcomes, due to the accidental arrangements that sometimes emerge, the third miracle occurred: the arrival of the intelligent selector. When a self-aware creature understands how the world works, considers several alternatives, favours one as ideal and tries to achieve that ideal, we seem to have a peculiar supplement to the indifferent shuffling of elements by various forces and circumstances. Prior to the evolution of persons and of self-awareness, possibilities were indifferently realized by brute undead nature, although order in the form of causality did develop. What we add to the flow of mindless order in the universe are our preferences for certain possible worlds and the ingenuity to actualize them. In particular, we prefer those worlds that reflect our values; we try to achieve what we call the good.

We can see what’s involved here by considering this miracle in light of an interesting discussion of our cosmic insignificance, called “Do we matter in the cosmos?” The author of that article explains the intuition that life must be meaningless, given the unimaginable vastness of time and space, by pointing out that even if values must be subjective, significancecan be objective as in the case of information or of causal power, and compared to what the universe contains, our ability to influence the course of cosmic events is vanishingly-small. So a transient creature that leaves no mark on the universe’s evolution at large might as well not have been, from the astronomical perspective. By contrast, a godlike being, such as a member of a Type III civilization, on Kardashev’s scale, which member would control a galaxy’s energy rather than the energy of a whole star or the energy that reaches its home planet, could conceivably impact the entire universe. Cosmology would be incomplete without reference to such a godlike being that alters the course of galaxies.

With this in mind, we can appreciate the miracle of even Type I artificiality, including the artificiality of our modest deviations from the indifferent, natural course of events, because a Type III civilization must pass through the weaker stages. Thus, we may be contributing to the rise of a godlike generation that will be cosmically significant in the sense that its decisions will be literally consequential even from the least parochial perspective that would recognize the major turning points in the universe’s development. Even if our species will be extinguished before we’re able to graduate to Type II or III status, the universe is so vast, encompassing hundreds of billions of galaxies and untold billions of years in its total duration, that some intelligent species somewhere and at some time will likely acquire that godlike power, in which case we can marvel vicariously at that miracle which likely occurs. (We can even speculate, with Nick Bostrom, that that miracle has already happened, that the universe has already been intelligently redesigned, and that what we perceive as nature may be only a simulation running in that superpowerful species’ computer.) In any case, one way to express this idea of the miracle of intelligent selection of events is to say that the miracle is of the birth of gods which we’ve been naively worshipping for millennia, missing the point that theistic religions have only been foreshadowing transhumanism and the rise of technoscientific godhood, which ironically would vindicate those ancient speculations.

Even if we lay that aside and focus on intelligent selections that are cosmically inconsequential, we’re still faced with a virtually supernatural affront to nature. Even the most short-lived artificiality, the weakest, most low-tech re-engineering of the wilderness or the most humdrum action that’s meant to realize an ideal rather than to follow animal norms has the distinction of being anti-natural. When we act with resentment against nature’s monstrous indifference to the life that emerges in it, we have the significance of being cosmically novel. We rebel against nature, by learning how it works and by devising techniques for imposing extensions of ourselves, namely our machines, cities, and cultures, onto the undying wilderness. Even should we fail in the end to overcome nature’s onslaught, even should we succumb to the lethality of outer space or the tragedy of our biologically-programmed death sentences, the least consequential action that nevertheless proceeds from intelligent disgust with the way the world is which differs from how it should be, objectively transcends nature by being intentionally opposed to how most of the universe operates.

This kind of existential opposition is different from an insane person’s delusion. When the latter intends to destroy the whole world merely by blinking hard at it, for example, we don’t credit that doomed scheme with miraculous audacity, because the scheme is irrational. But when our opposition proceeds from knowledge of the natural facts and when it implicitly or consciously is meant to alter those facts according to a plan that transcends what mindless nature alone can do, our efforts are monumental. This is because those efforts then have a reasonable chance of succeeding, albeit perhaps vicariously or indirectly and in the long run, but also because they target something of the essence of all of nature. We aim to slay the cosmic dragon whenever we act not as preprogrammed animals or physical objects, but as persons, autonomously, intelligently, imaginatively, and with deep-seated horror for nature’s indifference, amorality, and ominous evolution towards a state of oblivion in which even the gods would perish.     

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Reason, Faith, and the Authentic Self

In a society dependent on technoscientific progress, the conflict between faith and reason is liable to be underestimated, due to a rationalist bias. Faith or intuition will be interpreted as an inferior form of cognition, the assumption being that knowledge is the ultimate goal of both science and religion or art. But this rationalist interpretation understates the magnitude of the conflict.

Reason versus Faith

Reason has mostly been a weapon we’ve deployed against obstacles in the social and natural environments: we devise hypothetical models and test them to discover regularities we can exploit. The problem is that the regularities we find in most of the world are perfectly inhuman. The more we exercised reason to know what nature is and how it works, the more we had to doubt our intuitions and our comforting self-image. To take the most glaring example, the natural world we observed, measured and modeled got larger and older, the more objectively we examined it. We once thought we were at the center of a universe that consisted only of our solar system, and that the universe began only “days” before our arrival in the animal kingdom, just several thousand years ago, as the biblical Creation myth speculates. Now we know the universe is unimaginably larger and older than that, consisting of trillions of galaxies and having begun billions of years ago. And that’s just the observable universe. Natural reality includes dark energy and matter, which dwarf the universe as we experience it. Plus, there may be a multiverse which dwarfs even that vaster universe.  

In fact, the smart money is on meta-cynicism. Anthropocentrism has been proven wrong at every turn, and so we can induce that the end of human knowledge will be some supremely negative form of self-effacing anti-humanism. If you want to picture the most rational worldview, you should begin by imagining a monstrous form of objectivity, such as the kind we attribute to the baddies in science fiction, to the indifferent aliens or to the cold and calculating robots. This objectivity devours every precious illusion, including all the life-preserving myths and fairytales that nurture our pride in the human enterprise. But objectivity doesn’t stop there, as indicated by its postmodern, deconstructive phase. Reason embarrasses the life-affirming emotions and intuitions, but it eventually turns on itself so that science and knowledge in general become de-sentimentalized. Knowledge turns out not to be a tool or a weapon, after all, but something like a black hole that negates everything in its path, finally devouring itself. Reason is for understanding the world, but in standing under or apart from phenomena, as we learn to detach from them to see them as they really are, we learn to do the same for ourselves. As a result, the Cartesian divide is undone and the posthuman vision is of a natural universe of amoral, inhuman processes that can’t exactly be affirmed as such, since reason ultimately reveals the world to be indifferent to meaning, truth, value, and other such anthropocentric illusions. The universe as we objectively present it to ourselves is utterly inhospitable, a source of horror or anxiety for enlightened creatures. 

The honourary saint of Reason is thus the devil, beginning with Prometheus or the serpent of Eden whom the Gnostics revered as the first skeptic and truth-teller, because he subverted the shaky divine order as it was naively intuited by the animal slaves that adhered to Yahweh’s commandments. The serpent warned Adam and Eve that their creator was tricking them and holding them back, whereas they had the power to investigate and to exploit natural processes to their advantage. But Reason as symbolized by the nay-saying serpent turned out to be cursed, since the cost of knowledge is death, the banishment from the paradise that the world seemed to be when we encountered it in our innocence as a young species. (We still perceive the world to be a magical paradise when we’re children and don’t know better.) The mythical character Satan became the cynic who challenged Yahweh with doubts as to whether Creation was as magnificent as it seemed, as in the Book of Job. In the New Testament, the devil is demonized, because Christianity began as a barbaric, anti-intellectual form of Judaism that obliged everyone not only to moderate our behaviour but to think as children and to banish ungodly thoughts, to avoid everlasting punishment. Failing those superhuman feats, believers merely had to worship Jesus in a cult of personality to be saved from original sin and from the other flaws of Creation, in a new world to come at the cataclysmic end of time.

Early, radical Christianity thus stood for faith against reason, for delusional happiness that’s opposed to the civilized project of our becoming godlike masters of nature, thanks largely to our rational powers of inquiry. But Christianity was coopted by the Roman Empire and thus came to serve the secular interests that terminate in barely-conceivable, posthuman nihilism. Thus, Christian theologians developed systematic arguments for theism and for the Church’s compromised social policies. Christians thought they could prove their doctrines by citing this or that biblical passage, taken out of historical context in the familiar, pseudoscientific (literalistic) manner. With its dubious claim to offer an all-embracing system for submitting to God, Islam compounds this twisted rationalism so that the self-annihilation practiced by Islamist terrorists is indeed a fitting symbol of the nihilism inherent in any attempt to rationally justify a worldview. Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism likewise make their peace with reason, offering arguments, explanations, and systematic analyses in their theologies, although Hinduism and Buddhism are more up-front about the nihilistic consequences of enlightenment. Nirvana, for example, is a state of mental nothingness that happens after the self is extinguished, that is, after the thought routines are allowed to come and go un-anchored to any mythical underlying ego.

The Zen Buddhist explicitly criticizes reason’s role in our suffering, since reason is supposed to serve the illusion of a self that stands apart from the world in an objective mindframe. Instead, says this Buddhist, we’re all already enlightened and have only to be shocked into recognizing the mystical truth that hides in plain sight. But this criticism of reason is misplaced. The illusions of ego are sustained by faith, emotion, and myths, not by objectivity. As I said, reason eventually devours itself and bridges the Cartesian divide, leaving us with the horrific monism that drives so-called enlightened mystics from all the world’s religions to madness and to act out as sociopathic narcissists who tyrannize their flocks. There’s also the experience of metaphysical oneness, achieved through meditation and a conditioning of self-consciousness, but this form of enlightenment should be impossible without the preparatory work of instrumental rationality, which guides the practitioner to seek to dispense with delusions and to meditate as a means of achieving the goal of awakening to reality.    

But to return to the main theme, if rational inquiry ends in posthuman (anti-humanistic) nihilism, religious faith and the artist’s trust in her muse are conservative preferences for a happy way of life that’s undignified and insufferable from the enlightened viewpoint. This is the post-Nietzschean scope of the clash between reason and faith. Through technoscience, reason brings death to all living things, as the haphazard evolution of organisms gives way to the intelligent design of machines. But reason also brings the death of the humanist’s self-image, since the enlightened soul learns to view herself as the rest of nature “views” her, as a pointless triviality. By contrast, faith, that is, the set of intuitions and sentiments that drive most religions and artistic expressions is a precondition for a way of life that seems worthwhile to the one living it. To live “well,” without stultifying self-consciousness as informed by inhuman objectivity, you need to believe in yourself, your nation, and your species. You need to trust the mega-fictions (noble lies) that bind us together in our overpopulated oases from the undead wilderness.

When God “died,” after the old myths lost their power to enchant, thanks to the Scientific Revolution’s shake-up of the Western power hierarchies, the demonization of reason likewise lost its force. But reason is essentially demonic and the enlightened few are well-conceived of as alien interlopers, although the popular astrotheological conspiracy theories aren't rationally compelling. What’s paramount is the foreshadowing symbol of power elites as cold-blooded lizard demons. Those most affected by inhuman reason are merely clever primates, biologically speaking, but psychologically and ethically these rationalists are on their way to a posthuman outlook, in which case they might as well be the Illuminati aliens or David Icke’s reptilian demons. No one’s proved that the privileged few who capitalize on technoscience are extraterrestrial monsters, but we do seem to intuit that our destiny is to become such pitiful creatures. We feel we’re heading towards a certain future and we project our fear in the form of a sci-fi myth.

Personal Authenticity: the Meeting of Reason and Faith

What, then, is at the root of this clash between reason and faith? What are the processes that pull us in such opposite directions? Reason likely evolved for limited purposes, but once unleashed by self-consciousness, as in ancient Greece, the Buddhist reformation of Hinduism, or the Scientific Revolution, reason in the sense of unflinching objectivity seems to be a self-destructive, countervailing force, empowering our clever species to annihilate all life. When we objectify, when we demystify the world and see past our prejudices and projections, we become as monstrous as the godless universe we behold. Reason unites us with reality, not in some blissful transcendence or lame relation of semantic agreement, but by laying waste to the fictions that separate us from the world of lifeless facts, by skewering our naïve self-image and automating our behaviour as we lose confidence in our unconscious, gut reactions or irrational sources of inspiration. We who live under Reason’s shadow seek proof and quantified evidence to force the conclusion, and we will ourselves to perform our duty; we thus turn from subjects into objects, mirroring the lifeless phenomena that flow according to natural “law” which is no law at all, the anthropocentric metaphor notwithstanding. Natural events are forced, just as rational inferences are necessitated by the “laws” of reason which reduce to the pragmatic interest in discovering reliable instruments to increase our power. As texts on critical thinking attest, the ultimate value of logic is its reliability in helping us succeed in instrumentally rational (pragmatic) terms; that is, logic is more likely to get us what we want than, say, mentally disordered, delusional thinking.

Faith, intuition, emotion, and unconscious inspiration also evolved to fulfill limited evolutionary functions. But again, in their advanced forms, these are brakes on our rational union with the nothingness inherent in nature. A familiar example is religious fundamentalism. The fundamentalist is caught up in a cultural backlash, in a degrading tribalism that’s wholly explainable in ethological terms, in which case the fundamentalist has reverted to a subhuman way of life. Religious faith dictates all manner of outrageous lifestyles to prove tribal loyalty, typically rationalizing patriarchal or otherwise tyrannical systems in a sordid con that exploits our existential fears. While pretending to celebrate our alleged transcendent spirits, the fundamentalist’s cult solidifies an earthly power structure that operates according to natural rather than supernatural principles. But more tellingly, fundamentalism, or literalistic religious belief, is condemned for its stubborn irrationality, its blinkered opposition to technoscientific progress, and its physical destruction of modern civilization in the case of religious terrorism. The fundamentalist is supposed to fail to appreciate Reason’s myriad improvements to human life, such as the medical technologies that increase our lifespan or the countless engineered products that elevate our living standard, such as the automobile and the internet.

This latter point about regression, though, is analytically short-sighted. Notice how livestock are cared for in the interim before they’re slaughtered. We’re happy in our artificial retreat from the animal’s struggle in the wilderness, in that we’re self-empowered and don’t have to fear an early and violent death around every corner. But that narrow happiness blinds us to the greater event unfolding—which is the annihilation of life in general on behalf of machines whose objectivity more nearly matches the undeadness of physical reality. The consumer’s bliss is a distraction, like the addict’s fleeting pleasure which allows the underlying disorder or vice to destroy her. In secular liberal society, we’re all more or less feminized and infantilized, and we rationalize the degradations that accompany our techno empowerment, because we reason that we’d much prefer modern civilization, with all its costs, to the so-called state of nature. If, however, we lose our inner selves in our struggle for status and civilized pleasure; if our urge to seem normal rather than deviant in our competitive dominance hierarchies turns us into mediocrities, while the sophisticated power elites lose their humanity in turn, due to corruption and thus an onset of sociopathy; if happiness is construed as requiring extroversion and materialism, which destroy the inner life and surrender the individual’s power to large corporations which exploit technoscience to enslave the mass of consumers with pharmaceuticals, fast food, and other addictions, then that conservative defense of so-called advanced or developed society rests on an illusion. Instead of distinguishing ourselves from nature, we rational, modern consumers are caught in the grip of a natural retrenchment that uses animal pleasures to mollify us so that the unholy work might proceed.

In either case, then, pure reason or pure faith leads to disaster. Objectivity poises us to snuff out the anomalies of life and self-awareness, while faith enthralls us to delusions, preparing us to be manipulated in a religious fraud or tainting our happiness with dishonour. This latter point, though, opens up the possibility of a paradoxical intermingling of reason and faith which we should call existential authenticity. The enduring problem with irrationality isn’t that it stands in the way of rational progress, since as I’ve said and as has been recognized since the Romantics and the Frankfurt School, that progress is an illusion. Instead, the problem is aesthetic and ethical: irrationality in a species with a gift for discovering the truth is a disgusting waste and a mark of shameful cowardice since the philosophical and scientific truth happens to be unpleasant.

Take, for example, the infamous geneticist, Francis Collins, who excels as a scientist even while he fervently espouses evangelical Christianity. Collins’ explanations of the compatibility of his commitment to scientific methods of inquiry and his subservience to anachronistic dogma and faith-based revelation are notable only for their lameness. Collins writes, “But reason alone cannot prove the existence of God. Faith is reason plus revelation, and the revelation part requires one to think with the spirit as well as with the mind. You have to hear the music, not just read the notes on the page. Ultimately, a leap of faith is required.” The notion of a “leap of faith” is an allusion to Kierkegaard, but no Christian has read Kierkegaard deeply, who goes on to write such boilerplate as this:

For me, that leap came in my 27th year, after a search to learn more about God's character led me to the person of Jesus Christ. Here was a person with remarkably strong historical evidence of his life, who made astounding statements about loving your neighbor, and whose claims about being God's son seemed to demand a decision about whether he was deluded or the real thing. After resisting for nearly two years, I found it impossible to go on living in such a state of uncertainty, and I became a follower of Jesus.

That passage is just evangelical propaganda which follows a template as opposed to being evidence that Collins has wrestled, in “fear and trembling,” with the intolerable absurdity of religious faith, with the facts that the leap subverts the comforts of Christendom and that Christ-like individuals must be outcasts who are paralyzed, like Jesus on the cross, by the knowledge that the paradoxical meeting of God and mortal creatures would have to be appalling.

According to the Christian myth, wayward humans executed God, but God used their sin as the mechanism for our redemption, since God’s death became a sacrifice to save us from spiritual death. But that tidy bit of systematic theology, which Kierkegaard would have called Hegelianism, misses the point that religion isn’t supposed to be rational, that the spiritual life can’t be reconciled with secular concerns. On an existential reading, which assumes that reason and faith are at odds and that that conflict produces in anyone with intellectual integrity the pains of angst, horror, or awe, the essence of Christianity isn’t that God literally became a human male at a particular moment in history. Instead, it’s that God’s stay on earth would be untenable, which is why the character Jesus didn’t fit into Jewish or Roman society, why he was ironically executed in horrific fashion, and why his followers soon betrayed his absolutist principles and settled for the compromises of institutional Christianity which rationalize the anti-spiritual exigencies of worldly empires. The long history of the Church’s abuse of power is itself striking proof that faith and reason are at odds, since the Church lost its faith when, thanks to the delayed end of time, the Jesus cult had to live with and thus to excuse the merely rational (and thus typically amoral) affairs of politics and business.

By contrast, personal authenticity would involve an agonizing blend of reason and faith.We would have to understand the unsettling truth that religions are all wrong when taken literally, and that nature isn’t how we would prefer it to be, which is why the ancient animists pretended nature is full of life and why we likewise can’t abide the wilderness, given its manifest indifference to life, but replace it with cities and cultures. Yet we’d also have to resort to faith or to some form of irrationality, to avoid suicide or debilitating anxiety or depression. Contrary to Jung, the psychological ideal isn’t personal wholeness or the unification of all elements of the personality, but the honourable struggle to improvise some beautiful tragedy in the wake of nature’s attempt to undo the anomalies of life and consciousness. 

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Prophets of Woe

Woe to men, for you shall be replaced by machines and shall lose your manhood.

Woe to women, for you shall have no men to shelter and comfort you in the wasteland to come.

Woe to children, for their cuteness promotes their self-love, and they lack the reason to see that love is a puppet string.

Woe to consumers, for you’ve sucked the earth almost dry.

Woe to advertisers, for you’ve made an art of deception and manipulation, and are cursed to wander as cynics in a herd of dupes. 

Woe to movers and shakers, for you’ve moved to outer space, making aliens of yourselves, and have shaken the peasants from their slumber, endangering your material foundations to which they tend.

Woe to environmentalists, for you love wild animals that wouldn’t hesitate to eat you for breakfast.

Woe to Americans, for your time has nearly come to join the legions of peasants in other lands whom you’ve squeezed and exploited since the end of the Second World War.

And woe to anti-Americans, for your sanctimonious rage betrays the ugly American within you.

Woe to liberals, for there’s no longer faith in your worn-out myths, and you’ve become scholastics idling until the next renaissance.

Woe to conservatives, for your talk of old-fashioned utopia is a smokescreen for a return to the primitive state wherein the dominators succumb to the temptations of godhood, are swiftly corrupted by their power, and drag their slaves down with them.

Woe to you professional philosophers, for your title is an oxymoron: a lover of knowledge must cower in angst rather than adjust to the horrors of nature to make of philosophy an academic field of study for charlatans, pseudoscientists, and bored young transients in colleges that have turned into mere businesses.

Woe to the gods, for they’ve failed to grace us with their existence.

Woe to monotheists, for you have poor taste in fiction.

Woe to optimists, for you dishonour the multitudes that have fallen.

Woe to pessimists, for you waste your life in grief.

Woe to Hollywood, for your creativity is as bankrupt as that of the Chinese market you seek to plunder with remakes and superheroic trivialities, which market is a giant, ravenous copying machine.

Woe to the computer, for digitization drains the value from that which is encoded, and the internet and the smartphone erase the humanity from their addicted users.

Woe to pornography, for it proves that sex is a ridiculous spectacle.

Woe to sex, for its pleasures must be kept secret to preserve the sophisticate’s illusion of superiority.

Woe to the large, for it is comprised of myriad small things and is at their mercy.

Woe to the small, for it is confined within the behemoth and is blind to the latter’s grandeur.

Woe unto the earth, for once it has killed off the wise apes, there shall be none to cry foul at its monstrosity.

And woe to dabblers in prophecy who pilfer the language of the fictional Jesus, which has become a cliché.

Is there anything worth saying in a world that has lost the ears to hear? Has the prophet still a reason to step atop his stump to be heard above the rabble’s noise? Is prophecy even possible in such a new-fangled wilderness? Prophecy, the inspired telling of deep, subversive truths, is for those seeking knowledge, but knowledge itself has become old-fashioned. The great loves now are for power and entertainment.

Postindustrial Westerners are divided into those who know science and those who don’t but who use its applications. Physicists are the scientists who identify what things ultimately are, and most no longer pretend to understand their theories, since physics is mainly a tool for tinkering with the machine of the military-industrial-entertainment complex that is our high-tech civilization. Having dispensed with metaphysics along with religious myths, after the positivist purification early last century, physicists usually see themselves as calculators, adjusting their equations to spit out useful predictions. But since understanding requires myths that resonate with intuitions and emotions, and scientists are professionally objective, the world that’s been reduced to physical properties has thereby been deprived of sense or meaning. Life for the technoscientist who idolizes physics and who prizes personal integrity is thus necessarily absurd.

As for the multitude of ignoramuses, they’re content to be entertained since they’re untroubled by the Faustian impulse to strive to learn the inhuman truth and thus to condemn themselves to unhappiness.

For those two reasons, the aspiring prophet is irrelevant. The ultimate secrets of existence might be recorded somewhere and would be lost in an avalanche of cat videos on the internet or in a polluted sea of unreadable scientific or philosophical journal articles. We no longer want to know the ultimate truth, and perhaps the world has thereby spared us by releasing us from that Faustian curse. Or perhaps we do unconsciously understand our predicament, and we lack merely the counterproductive inclination to obsess over a mental disorder—the love of knowledge—for which there’s no cure.

Why, then, do outsiders continue to harangue the masses for following conventions or for failing to fulfill their potential? Why criticize society, biting the hand that feeds you? Why does the wolf howl at the moon? Prophets were once widely believed to have divine authority, when the masses were more desperate for answers, thanks to the absence of a middle class under the ancient theocratic regimes. In modern secular societies, ranting is at best an art form, an expression of tolerated madness. Just as alcohol and nicotine are sanctioned by capitalism, modern art used to function as a pseudoreligion that distracted secularists from contemplating the calamity of God’s metaphorical death.

However, art in that sense is itself dead, having been slain by scientism, postmodern cynicism, and shallow consumerism. Art has been commodified or been reduced to claptrap for scholastic liberals who need to gossip around the water cooler to pretend they have something elevated to live for, something besides their animal pleasures of food, sex, possessions, and the like. We enslave and eat animals on a holocaust basis, so we can’t ourselves be mere animals—not without our incurring an experience of life-altering horror. Rather than having much impact, then, even the most visionary secular rants and prophetic speculations, such as those disguised in popular novels and movies, are soon lost in the data glut. None originating within the last century will be read centuries from now in a new Bible for naturalists. Again, this is partly because (1) technology alters society at such breakneck speed and on so many levels, (2) our attention span is shortened by our need to multitask to keep up with computers, and (3) our post-religious focus on nature is detrimental to any interest in morality or in how society ought to be changed, that we must content ourselves with being passive spectators as society transforms with no one at the helm.

But there’s another reason for the persistence of dark philosophical reflections on the state of popular culture. The majority of so-called humans is, and has always been, spiritually inferior to an elite assortment of horrified outsiders. When, therefore, that which is popular oozes into the mental space of an ethically superior being, that purer individual is bound to feel disgusted, and if that pollution is virtually omnipresent, as it is in the Western monoculture, the elite soul may lash out, not in the hope of changing anything but just to express reactionary contempt. His or her rants are the verbal equivalent of sneering.

Moreover, the capacity for intellectual condemnation must be exercised or it will atrophy. The Buddhist will say that that critical faculty should indeed go to waste, because it’s one of the ego’s illusions. Alas, the power of technoscience has put a premium on reason, not on direct experience. Scientists have taught us not to trust our intuitions, however comforting they may be. Thus, the self is no illusion since it’s a natural construct, and if nature is generally an illusion, words have no meaning and Buddhism is a game. If the only goal is to end suffering for the sake of inner peace, the Buddhist can have no objection to a drug-induced coma or to suicide. In any case, there’s no such thing as immediateexperience; all experience is interpretive, since it’s processed by the brain and by the mind’s representations.

A display of disgust, then, may be more or less useless or even counterproductive, but the difference between the philosophically-ignorant masses and the enlightened few is real, not imaginary. The mob’s adoration of conmen and strongmen, while it ostracizes the genuine spiritual elite is historically obvious. The social dynamics of forming dominance hierarchies that celebrate amoral power as a means of maintaining social stability, while demoting deviants to omega status are manifest. So maintaining that differences in social control are insignificant, because all egos are equally impermanent is a sad strategy for preserving a semblance of inner tranquility. Moreover, it’s far from obvious that equanimity should be the supreme response to nature’s monstrosity. A lobotomy could just as easily create inner peace. Indeed, Buddhism fails to contend with the possibility of nature’s heroic undoing of itself via human enlightenment.   

“Woe unto the world,” says the outsider. That is the outsider’s function, to be cast out and to report back from the fringes. How does the shiny, happy world appear from the outer darkness? Like a sinister joke. Few know they should be laughing, because few have an inkling of the ultimate question. The joke that’s on all of us is that irony rules over all things in the absence of any human-centered ideal. When we think we’re socially progressing, we’re adopting a self-destructive ideology (secular humanism) that enables us to perpetrate our greatest atrocities so that we come to embody nature’s inhumanity. Most of what we do in our artificial oases backfires, since we must compromise in adapting to the norms of civilization. The greater the population, the lower the cultural standards and this mass production of mediocrity saps the strength of the spiritual elite.  

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Freud and Nietzsche: Psychiatry between Existentialism and Scientism

Art by Andrew Baines

In The Denial of Death, the anthropologist Ernest Becker defends and broadens Otto Rank’s view of psychotherapy. Rank was one of Freud’s colleagues who broke with Freud, like Jung. Jung and Rank both interpreted psychological problems in spiritual and philosophical terms, whereas Freud clung to a narrower, sexual theory of mental dynamics. For Rank, the human mind is torn between opposite tendencies, towards separation and greater individuation, on the one hand, and towards union with a collectivity, on the other. This is an absurd, dangerous foundation for personal growth, because it threatens the person with the fate of being forever internally conflicted and with the anxiety of oscillating blindly back and forth between the poles. For example, a person might demonstrate her ego’s distinctiveness with displays of conspicuous consumption, while pretending to worship a deity that demands humility and submission to its greater power. The opportunity for what Becker called “heroism” is found in creative solutions to this existential predicament of having an unstable mental structure, stemming from the trauma of separation at birth, and of being propelled by the fear of the final separation at death. Art, love, and a mystical hope for cosmic reunion with a divine being that somehow encompasses all natural things are Rank’s recommendations for avoiding the stalemate of neurosis, of failing to learn how to unlearn past experience or to find a balance between the desire to stand out and to fit into a greater whole.

Freud from Nietzsche

Becker’s presentation of this theory emphasizes its existential aspect, and indeed Rank’s ideas are much more plausibly universal than Freud’s positing of infantile sexuality. But Becker’s criticism of Freud neglects Freud’s direct connection with existentialism. Freud, after all, was aware of Nietzsche’s writings, although he professed to having avoided reading them in depth, even while Freud’s work betrays his familiarity with several Nietzschean themes (as well as with Darwinism). As a relevant Wikipedia article says, “in the 1890s, Freud, whose education at the University of Vienna in the 1870s had included a strong relationship with Franz Brentano, his teacher in philosophy, from whom he had acquired an enthusiasm for Aristotle and Ludwig Feuerbach, was acutely aware of the possibility of convergence of his own ideas with those of Nietzsche and doggedly refused to read the philosopher as a result.” However this may be, Nietzsche must have rubbed off on Freud. This study, for example, summarizes what the two approaches share:

(a) the concept of the unconscious mind; (b) the idea that repression pushes unacceptable feelings and thoughts into the unconscious and thus makes the individual emotionally more comfortable and effective; (c) the conception that repressed emotions and instinctual drives later are expressed in disguised ways (for example, hostile feelings and ideas may be expressed as altruistic sentiments and acts); (d) the concept of dreams as complex, symbolic "illusions of illusions" and dreaming itself as a cathartic process which has healthy properties; and (e) the suggestion that the projection of hostile, unconscious feelings onto others, who are then perceived as persecutors of the individual, is the basis of paranoid thinking. Some of Freud's basic terms are identical to those used by Nietzsche.

The Christian psyche famously provided Nietzsche with his case study in repression and paranoia, just as Nietzsche demonstrated his “genealogical” form of explanation in his account of master-slave morality. Instead of dictating principles or arguing systematically, Nietzsche sought to undermine various philosophies and perspectives by purporting to trace their psychological causes back to either “noble” virtues or to unheroic, “weak” acts of self-deception. For example, instead of celebrating the will to power, a Christian might passive-aggressively cloak her predatory instincts with a show of false humility. Logicians typically regard Nietzsche’s whole approach as resting on the genetic fallacy. Moreover, his philosophy seems self-contradictory, since he presupposes the universal truth of his metaphysics of power, even while he maintains that knowledge depends on perspective and that all truth-claims are surreptitious attempts to overpower others. All living things are beasts, for Nietzsche, and beasts have no sound basis for believing they’re in touch with objective, nonpragmatically-construed reality. Reasoning is a sham, and displays of power are the only demonstrations that matter in that they testify to the greatness of heroic individuals who distinguish themselves from the prosaicness of the herd mentality.

In any case, Freud does add much to the structure of Nietzschean thought: whereas Nietzsche’s arch concept is power, Freud’s is sex. But while Nietzsche’s corresponding image of people as animals led him to write only aphoristic or literary appraisals, Freud’s single-minded interpretations were in the service of his drive to pioneer a science of the mind. Freud reduced every desire or impulse, every conscious or unconscious image, every mental or social event to a sexual cause originating in the Oedipal or castration complex. Whereas power is vague and can take myriad forms, sex is concrete and objective. The Id or unconscious may be irrational, but if it desires sex with the mother, expressions of that desire can theoretically be confirmed, because the sex act provides a benchmark for comparisons. Thus, in a dream a cigar might unconsciously symbolize a penis. Likewise, had Nietzsche identified a particular powerful act as all-important in human relations, as Freud had done in Chapter Four of Totem and Taboo(a prehistoric killing of a father figure, or alpha male), Nietzsche’s thought might have taken on the power of a science. However, like the phony spirituality of Christian religion, psychoanalysis is only pseudoscientific in the Popperian sense of being unfalsifiable. You can posit an infantile, unconscious sexual urge to explain any action, but the merit of that explanation isn’t tested in practice. Indeed, in so far as the applications of psychoanalysis testify to its power, the theory fails the test of being technoscientific, because the analyst-analysand relationship is typically endless. The talking never ends, because the imagination can always conjure new sexual fantasies and interpretations of events in the person’s formative years. Moreover, the theory is awkwardly implausible: sexual impulses are hormonal and the relevant hormones are released in puberty; thus, children have no sexual desires. 

Becker’s existential psychology would likewise be unfalsifiable, since you could just as easily trace any decision or action to a response to some universal fear, such as the fear of death or of standing out as an independent individual. However, existential psychology has the merit of being more plausible than psychoanalysis. Children do learn about death at an early age and they certainly are frustrated by obstacles to their attempts to further their bloated self-interest. The existential condition of being condemned to realize that we’re mortal and fragile creatures with the potential for creative transcendence does plausibly distinguish human mentality from most other animal forms.

Nietzsche against Freud

Ernest Becker

Meanwhile, psychoanalysis can be criticized on Nietzschean grounds. Psychoanalysts may pretend to be interested only in instrumental, value-neutral evaluations of their success or failure in technoscientific, medical terms. Their ostensible goal is to allow the patient to vent unconscious longings, while preserving enough of the ego’s illusions to help sustain a profoundly dishonest society that reflects the absurdity of our mental foundations in our infantile urges. But psychoanalysis is little better than a cult of personality, like the cult that pervades North Korea. Although psychoanalysts don’t necessarily worship Freud, their theory of the mind is just the handiwork of that amoral genius who strove first of all not for truth but for power, going as far as to steal some of Nietzsche’s methods while ignoring the existential insights that would undermine psychoanalysis if they were more widely known. Becker likewise shows that Freud was ruthless in serving his “personal immortality project,” as Freud attempted to outlive his biological death by creating an institution that would survive him while bearing the marks of his preoccupations. More importantly, the pretense that psychoanalysis is scientific is itself an exercise in self-deception and thus fails the existentialist’s test of demonstrating the primary virtue of personal integrity. For Freud, the mind is always at odds with itself, because the social forces informing the Superego are bound to clash with the infantile urges of the unconscious Id. Thus, there will always be work for the psychoanalyst and Freud’s immortality is secure. Freud’s pessimism is thus a subterfuge, covering for his animal urge to overpower others by imposing his peculiar reconciliation with the prevailing Victorian mores onto patient and therapist alike, not to mention on wider Western culture which has absorbed Freud’s scientistic version of Nietzsche’s thought.

While existentialists, too, are often pessimistic, they hold out simple honesty and responsibility as practical ideals, and it’s relatively easy to distinguish between those who know and are true to themselves, and those who lie compulsively to others and to themselves. To be sure, psychoanalysis admits of a difference between mental normality and pathology or neurosis. But the absurd foundation of the human psyche, the idea of which psychoanalysis inherits from existential philosophy via Freud’s engagement with Nietzsche’s writings, conflicts with the therapeutic goal of curing the patient. This is evident from Becker’s discussion of the existential undertones of Freudianism, in which the point emerges that there is no firm line between mental health and disorder. So-called mental normality is already the beginning of neurosis. We’re all trapped by the existential paradox in which we try to immortalize ourselves, to preserve our ego by one illusion or another while simultaneously wishing to merge with a greater totality such as a god or a culture. For Becker, neurotics are merely failed artists, lacking the genius to transcend their greater awareness of life’s absurdity, which enhanced understanding prevents them from automating their social interactions. Thus, for example, the neurotic will be incapable of fulfilling his sexual function as a member of our species, but will cling to perversions to lessen the resulting anxiety.

Becker attempts to divide mental health from disorder in a revealing way, saying clumsily at one point, “But somewhere we have to draw the line between creativity and failure, and nowhere is this line more clear than in fetishism” (240). Thus, he criticizes Rank for being

so intent on accenting the positive, the ideal side of perversion that he almost obscured the overall picture…Routine perversions are protests out of weakness rather than strength; they represent the bankruptcy of talent rather than the quintessence of it…In fact, we might say that the pervert represents a striving for individuality precisely because he does not feel individual at all and has little power to sustain an identity….If, as Rank says, perversions are a striving for freedom, we must add that they usually represent such a striving by those least equipped to be able to stand freedom. They flee the species slavery not out of strength but out of weakness, an inability to support the purely animal side of their nature. (232-3)

This is supposedly because perverts or fetishists were deprived of a certain upbringing which might have established a secure sense of their body, “firm identification with the father, strong ego control”, and “dependable interpersonal skills.”

Art by Albert Carel

Of course, there are differences between normal and abnormal sexual behaviour, although Becker’s analysis here is rendered dubious by his inclusion of homosexuality as a perversion that supposedly has ingenious or somehow inferior “motives” (232); instead, this abnormal sexuality is likely in part genetic. In any case, what Becker doesn’t justify is his value judgment. Even if fetishists were weak in being unable to carry out their species role of sexually reproducing with routine indifference rather than with creative flourishes, why should that weakness necessarily call for a cure? This is like saying that normal people lack the “strength” to murder without being burdened by a conscience. Whether our species ought to continue is an empirical question, not one with a self-evident answer. So the average sexual reproducer’s “strength,” fostered by a certain upbringing shouldn’t necessarily be encouraged. At least, Becker only presupposes that the weakness in question represents a failure. If it turns out that our species eventually destroys the planet’s capacity to sustain life, the “failure” of the perverts who resist normal sexuality would have to be reinterpreted as tragically heroic rather than ignominious since the value assignments would be reversed.

Whatever the merits of Becker’s discussion of this particular point, psychiatry is notorious for being unable to sustain its distinction between mental health and disorder, without resorting to spurious appeals to mass opinion. In fact, there are two sources of this difficulty. One is, as I said, the universality of the existential condition which renders us all clueless puppets in the big picture, an assumption Freud takes over from Nietzsche. The other source is the scientism which Freud adds to Nietzsche. Psychiatrists in general must be instrumentalists rather than righteous in their evaluations if they’re to retain the esteem that’s due to practitioners of a science. Engineers are interested only in doing what works, given some presupposed goal, not in figuring out which goals are right in the first place. Thus, if psychiatrists are medical doctors curing the mind rather than the body, they must likewise presuppose the social functions that enable them to target deviations as requiring their professional attention.

In so far as psychiatry is still informed by Freudianism, the discipline is caught between existentialism and scientism, between recognizing the absurdity of our situation, which calls for an artistic or a religious response, and feeling compelled to fit into a power hierarchy and seeing technoscience as the best instrument to secure the therapist’s elevated status and to establish a certain social order. Nietzsche’s revenge against psychiatry is that he has the resources to heal the doctor, to diagnose the phony neutrality of a pseudoscience as a disguise for a power play, and to recognize the source of the absurdity of that play in the existential condition which calls for decidedly nonscientific solutions.

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Life as a Dream: The Secular Myth of Objective Truth

Art by Erik Johansson

Is life is but a dream, as the nineteenth century nursery rhyme assures us? Liberals, humanists, and naturalists insist that now more than ever, with the rise of fascism in Europe, Russia, and America; with the strange convergence of alt-right grievances with postmodern cynicism; and while demagogues, charlatans, and agnotologists in politics, advertising, and the corporate media are spreading doubt, spin, and propaganda, we should stand up for truth. However, this conflict between so-called rationalists or critical thinkers, on the one hand, and hillbillies and con artists, on the other, is a tempest in a teapot. Those who take the long view are invited to understand how truth died with God shortly after the Scientific Revolution, several centuries ago.

The concept of truth had already been suspect for millennia, when divine reality was thought to transcend human comprehension. What we took to be mundane, worldly truths, such as that the desert is hot during the day or that a normal human face has two eyes, a nose and a mouth, were mere illusions compared to mystical “truth,” the latter being ineffable and at best experienced as awe in moments of heightened awareness. Gods were only posited by our imagination, based on a lack of data (and on a noble lie developed by psychopathic power elites for the sake of pacifying the human herd of betas). Scientists collected the data, thanks to advances in technology, mathematics, and epistemology, and the gods were accordingly replaced with atoms and physical forces. Natural reality is measurable whereas the gods weren’t, but atoms and forces are likewise beyond our understanding in that they’re wildly counterintuitive.

The only thing we can fully understand is ourselves. Everything else must be simplified in the telling of them with concepts and models which idealize and which rest on falsifying metaphors that would humanize the inhuman. The proper subjects of knowledge are us and our societies; reason evolved to enable us to understand only minds and cultures with which we’re intimately familiar since we identify with them. The stories we tell about ourselves aren’t simplifications, since we’re identical with the subjects of those narratives, not with our brains as such. When we seek to understand the wider world, however, we either project human categories onto nature, as occurs in theistic religions and in folk conceptions, or else we effectively exchange the pursuit of truth with that of power.

In the epistemic context, anthropomorphism is philosophically unforgivable, however socially useful might be the gratuitous shrinking of outer reality so that it seems to fit within the human scale. Socrates sacrificed his life for the principle that truth matters more than our comfort. Instead of flattering ourselves with delusions that hold society together at the cost of confining us to an animal mode of life, we should search for a higher calling according to our position in the ultimate, metaphysical scheme. Unfortunately, Plato’s teleological picture of nature is a rehashing of the folk prejudices, losing the human interest of the transparent personifications in popular religion, in exchange for pseudoscientific respectability afforded by the philosophical discourse. Instead of angelic or monstrous spirits flitting about and deciding how events unfold, there are supposedly levels of being, including Forms and their material copies. In any case, scientific naturalism renders such interim philosophical tales obsolete. What isn’t well-appreciated, though, is that the very notion of truth is also outdated. 

Power and Truth, Measurement and Agreement

On the contrary, says the scientific realist as opposed to the pragmatist, science has proved a million truths, as can be seen from the power of the myriad applications of scientific theories. Functioning and indeed astonishing technologies stand all around us and that success would be impossible were there no systematic difference between scientific models and religious dogmas, for example. Indeed, there must be some such difference, but a scientific vindication of the commonsense concept of truth isn’t it.  

To be sure, we can try to make sense of the success of technoscience by positing happy semantic relations between natural facts and the symbols that scientists use to explain them. But that old-fashioned way of understanding where we are is awkward in light of the content of the scientific picture. Science shows us events occurring within or because of alien dimensions that we can measure and predict despite the stubborn fact that no one in the least understands those events. We can detect changes in the subatomic world, for example, and can take advantage of those forewarnings by devising models that work, in that their parts correlate with the facts, within the parameters that interest us. We can then exploit those correlations with machines that apply the lessons that are implicit in the models. But a scientific statement can be useful without being true. More precisely, the statement’s utility can be as mysterious as the inhuman reality of nature that scientists discovered to the detriment of all exoteric dogmas. We can say the theory is useful because it’s true, whereas a religious myth is false, but in light of the anti-human content of that very naturalistic theory, calling the theory merely true is itself dogmatic. Talk of truth now, after science has shown us the monstrous scale of the universe and the inhuman logic of quantum reality, is akin to chanting a mantra to ward off some fear.

But haven’t I just presupposed a truth, namely that the universe is very large rather than small? No, because the intuitive concept of size is meaningless for astronomical purposes. What does it mean to say that our universe is enormous if the whole of it may fit into what would seem to outsiders like a miniscule seed or near-singularity subsisting within a black hole embedded in a parent universe, as the physicists John Wheeler, Lee Smolin, and Nikodem Poplawski have theorized? Again, the concept of physical size makes sense in the context of measuring things that pop up in the field of ordinary human interaction. Thus, thousands of years ago, hunters would have called a bear large rather than small, to signal the urgency of the threat, and a baby is called small rather than large, in which case "large" connotes danger and “small” connotes helplessness and preciousness. Statements that employed such concepts were never merely true or false. Instead, the concepts comprise the mental HUD (heads up display) we developed (during what Yuval Harari calls the cognitive revolution, about 70,000 years ago) to interface with the environment after the perception of the latter has already been put together and pre-interpreted by the brain. And that evolutionary, biological story of how experience arises shouldn’t be thought of as true. Instead, that story is powerful, meaning that it achieves certain purposes. Likewise, religious narratives achieved alternative purposes. It’s just that we Western Faustians, as Oswald Spengler called us, care more about individual power than social harmony.

Take another example of scientific “truth”: global warming. Scientists agree that our planet is warming as a matter of fact, due largely to relatively recent human activities. We can model the mechanisms involved and can use the models to predict what will happen next if we respond this way or that to the threat. But is it truethat the earth is warming? To say that this is true is to say that our concepts are adequate to the facts such that there’s a correspondence or agreement between the former and the latter. And that is a hangover piece of anthropocentrism. Far from there being an agreement between the neuronal firings in our head or a sequence of linguistic symbols, on the one hand, and the facts we’re supposed to be speaking about, on the other, our attempts to understand reality are laughably outmatched by nature’s alienness.

Again, what does it mean to say that the earth is warming, when the interval that interests us is trivial compared to the sun’s lifespan? Yes, the planet’s climate has changed from year to year over the last several decades (mere decades!), and the trend is toward greater warmth, but talking about warmth in relation to the sun is as absurd as saying that it would be a little chilly on Pluto. The concept of warmth is suited to the mundane discourse in which we compare fractional differences in comfort depending on whether we’re wearing a jacket made of polyester or one of leather. Talk of global warming isn’t adequate to the task, as is suggested by the film Sunshine, which depicts the sun as a majestic god that enraptures an unlucky astronaut before roasting his every atom. No, what we would need is a concept that grasps at an intuitive level the unimaginable timespans and temperature fluctuations involved in the sun’s relation to this planet. In the distant past, the Earth was much hotter, which allowed animals to grow to monstrous size. (And that evolutionary statement about the dinosaurs is also a gross simplification and thus isn’t well thought of as merely true, because our concept of life is laughably inadequate due to our ignorance of life’s relation to the universe as a whole.) Likewise, one day in the distant future the sun will engulf our planet in flames. But there’s no word that encompasses the wild variations in the sun’s overall relationship to Earth. So our focus on the years that concern us is as arbitrary as a mayfly’s noticing just the changes in its puny environment that affect its 24-hour life cycle.

It bears repeating that measuring isn’t the same as understanding. A measurement can be more or less accurate, but accuracylikewise isn’t the same as truth. If you’re aiming for the middle of a dart board and you hit that target, your throw measures up to the standard and achieves your goal, but that doesn’t mean the throw agrees with the middle of the board. The numerical values on a thermometer are as anthropocentric as the linear divisions on a dart board. The decimal system suits us because we have ten fingers and toes and we attribute superstitious importance to ten as a complete figure; for the same reason, we mourn a baby’s loss if it’s born with only nine digits. Moreover, arithmetic presupposes that members of a type are interchangeable or that the differences between them are negligible—which they may be, for our purposes. When the Nazis assigned numbers to Jewish prisoners in their concentration camps, Allied soldiers were horrified by the inhumanity, but when we hold out a thermometer to measure the temperature and the reading says 30 degrees Celsius for the second day in a row, no one’s offended by this neglect of the untold variations in the factors that determine those temperatures. If you pick three apples from a tree, and then three more from another tree, you ignore the differences between the trees, the apples, and the other parts of the orchard, because your concept apple already simplifies so that many different things can count as the same for your purposes, and all that matters at the moment is that you have two groups of three things. The groups are reduced to being the same in that abstract respect. But that abstraction isn’t natural, just as there’s no such thing as a perfectly round circle or straight line in nature. No two apples are exactly alike and no two environments or temporal slices of an environment are remotely the same despite their having the same temperature according to a device we set up out of self-interest.

If a mayfly could judge its environment, assigning categories and drawing distinctions, and its judgments enhanced its fitness or achieved its mayfly goals, we would say that its judgments are, at best, true for the mayfly. The mayfly’s model of the facts would be so primitive and shockingly ignorant, from our comparatively godlike perspective, that we could only condescend to that aquatic insect and regard its worldview as having mere subjective truth. But ideal subjectivity isn’t the same as semantic, objective truth. The latter kind of truth is the agreement between a set of symbols and a real state of affairs. For Kierkegaard, subjective truth is inner authenticity, meaning the choice of how to live that remains “true” to your inner being. This integrity or faithfulness to your private thoughts and feelings is obviously not the same as the relation of semantic correspondence. You can express your authentic self even in a hostile or indifferent world, in which case the feeling that some statement is true for you, in that it coheres with your inner identity, needn’t agree with anything outside yourself. On the contrary, subjective truth can be tragic in that there may be a palpable disharmony between the self and the facts, as the real world extinguishes the self and consigns it to oblivion.  

Natural and Artificial Languages: Tools for Different Purposes

You might be thinking that even if ordinary concepts from natural language don’t agree with reality, since they’re too self-serving, scientists use more precise, artificial languages, including arcane mathematical concepts that may indeed encompass nature’s strangeness. But an artificial language like physics or chemistry has as little to do with a natural one like English or Cantonese, as subjective truth has to do with the objective kind, with the alleged agreement between certain statements and facts. Natural language is a tool for facilitating social relationships and thus its concepts ooze with anthropocentric metaphors and projections. The point is to enable us to read each other’s minds or to manipulate each other so we might dominate a social hierarchy. By contrast, artificial language is a device for providing us with power over nature.

When we speak of size or of warmth, we’re expressing ourselves so that the standard ought to be Kierkegaard’s ideal of subjective authenticity. Instead, most of us are self-deluded and so we concoct various mesmerizing fictions, including Plato’s tale of universal teleology or the semantic conceit of truth as agreement between us and the world. We take the expression of our comfort, when we say we feel warm in this jacket, for a statement that has as its objective meaning that it somehow latches onto reality, that it captures or mirrors a fact. This notion of semantic truth made sense in our ancient animistic period when we personified the whole world, believing that living spirits were at the root of everything so that we could imagine our self-expressions did indeed reflect wider reality. But after science revealed nature’s monstrous complexity and its strange lifelessness, or its undeadness, our self-expressions are merely grotesque if we presuppose that they satisfy anything outside themselves, that at their best our statements harmonize with anything in nature we didn’t create.    

An artificial language, such as the math used in a physicist’s equations is a set of tools for measuring and predicting, not for understanding. There is no hope a person will understand anything in nature unless she becomes as alienated from all she holds dear as is the universe alien to her intuitions. To understand something is to grasp its meaning. Nature has no meaning. Meaning is a product typically of human foolishness, so we understand only ourselves and our cultures. The rest is fit only for power differentials and for edifying existential reactions such as angst, horror, and awe. A scientist’s technical, abstract concepts, then, are at best only foreshadows of the machines that will harness the part of natural reality which informed the scientist’s model. The technical concepts are part of the blueprint for the technology with which we try to gain a foothold in the inhuman outer world. We have indeed overpowered much of our planet, at least when our Faustian efforts are compared to those of other species, most of which we’ve decimated or enslaved. But the conceptual instruments we use to develop the weapons in our struggle against natural processes don’t agree with anything. Instead, these concepts are techniques for preparing for our conquest of the modeled part of nature. The equations and definitions and laws divide and conquer their subject matter, just as a scientist will lay an animal on the dissection table and measure its innards to perfect the model of that species. That model doesn’t allow us to understand the creatures we torture, enslave, or consume; the point instead is for us to dominate them as though we were gods. A diagram of the layout of an animal’s internal organs doesn’t agree with the biological reality. On the contrary, the diagram is convenient because it inevitably simplifies, leaving out details that don’t interest us. The diagram is suitable only for certain purposes and those purposes usually presuppose the ideal of human dominance of the planet.

Like an accurate measurement, a natural law will correlate with the facts, but correlations are cheap and they don’t add up to truth. A thermometer is a device that registers changes in the environment and displays them in a useful fashion. Instead of meaningful agreement, there's causality, a mechanism connecting the tool to some natural process. Likewise, Newton’s law that force equals mass times acceleration is an arrangement of technical concepts that puts us in contact with a certain natural order. If there’s a semantic relation involved, it’s adequate only for our parochial purpose of dominating natural territory like crazed apes running amok, wearing lab coats. We will likely all be dominated by nature in the end, when our species is extinguished and all traces of our accomplishments will be undone as the galaxy evolves as a whole. Thus, to speak of the truth even of a natural law is unbecoming. The law enables us to measure the course of stars and planets, and to reach the moon by spaceship, but we don’t thereby understand anything, nor is our attempt to overpower nature wise.

Our best statements aren’t true in the sense that they agree with what they’re supposed to be about. The statements afford us some ultimately meager power which nevertheless naturally corrupts us, since we’re animals and that vanity may be the mechanism by which the wilderness counts us as being unfit to endure the variations it’s bound to pursue according to its alien agenda, as it were. Our technological success tempts us to overstep the bounds of ethics, to presume we can be realists whose discourse is objectively valid, that science agrees with reality, that there are realities named by our symbols so that we’ve put our finger on the world once and for all, or that we’re progressing towards that end. Again, this is an embarrassing lapse for alleged naturalists and humanists. The problem is that the Scientific Revolution began with the Renaissance during which early modern Europeans became engrossed in their potential for progress. The early humanists were highly optimistic about the powers of reason. But humanism needn’t amount to childlike glee in our secular abilities. Indeed, humanists can be misanthropic:we can be students of human nature, dismissing dogmas which held us down, but lamenting our fate in the existential context. Late modern humanists should know better than to parrot the exoteric dogma of semantic truth or to fall for the myth-laden explanation of technoscience’s great successes. We succeed not because we agree with nature, but because we’re predatory and psychopathic enough to aim to dominate it, but are also hapless and deluded so that instead we'll all be crushed and Mother Nature won't even have broken a sweat.

If Life is a Dream, which makes for the Best Story?

Bury, then, the anthropocentric notion of objective truth, with the theistic fictions. But is there a more fitting way of speaking philosophically about how we best relate to the world, besides the humdrum business of pragmatism? Perhaps our thoughts and utterances aren’t just instruments, but artworks, and perhaps all of nature consists of things created and destroyed, as the field of becoming. This metaphysical picture shouldn’t be thought of as true or false, for the above reasons. Instead, think of it as a poetic bet that honours the power of technoscience while not indulging in any anthropocentric delusion. At a minimum, as Heraclitus said, things in nature come and go. We too came and will go. Things everywhere are created and destroyed. Our technologies are creations of clever mammals created by a planet created by a star created by gravity acting on a nebula that was created by atomic and subatomic shenanigans. This means that aesthetics should take priority over semantics when we evaluate our judgments. Our worldviews are creations made of ideas. They are all therefore fictional, and the fictions can be more or less useful for various purposes, which is where aesthetics meets with pragmatism. But it’s not just our worldviews, our models, theories, philosophies, and myths that are works of art. Our reactions to the world that add up to the themes of our life are also our handiworks. Moreover, our perception of the world is a figment of the brain that interprets the inputs of the five senses. Put all this together and life becomes very like a dream, like a play or set of scenes that seems normal when stitched together but that unfolds strangely when viewed from a critical distance.

As the philosopher Kant pointed out, we think we understand the world because we’re aware only of how the world seems to us as we help to shape it with our basic categories and sensory modes. Other species might bring different mindsets to the task of making sense of a reality that ultimately eludes all our grasps. Our perceptions are collective hallucinations; the transductions may be mechanically guaranteed, but the concepts and logic we use to understand the sights and sounds are evidently detached from reality and tainted by our complaisance. We judge the neo-fascists as dupes and trolls, and we presume we liberals and critical thinkers are superior since our worldview is reality-based while theirs is a set of memes spun by a propaganda machine such as Breitbart or Fox News. This division may work for partisan purposes, but not for philosophical or spiritual ones. Ultimately, we are all dupes and monsters. We are predators that pretend to be passive observers who know what’s happening in the real world. We’re playthings of unfathomable natural powers that squeeze us even when we applaud ourselves for seeming to dominate the wilderness with our toy machines. And the sign that a worldview is reality-based is that it drives the contemplator to awe and to terror, not that it motivates him or her to espouse any sentimental notion such as that we all have equal rights. We’re all perfectly equal only in sharing the fate of being worm food. That fate could inspire us just as easily to attempt to be freeloaders, as to having empathy with others. Considering that life is a joke and our so-called reality is a dream world conjured by the brain and by the egotism and shortsightedness that drive mass culture, we might just as easily decide to outcompete and dominate weaker, more deluded players than to pursue gentler, socialist causes.    

All this would be so were there no aesthetic standards in addition to the delusional ones of morality, mass religion, and partisan games. If life is a dream, the question is which lives provide for the best stories. Which fictions are best as works of art? The problem with Donald Trump, for example, isn’t that he’s a psycho clown. We’re all psycho clowns in having to read the tea leaves supplied by our brain, to make any sense of what turns out to be a wholly alien and monstrous wilderness from which we hide under the circus tents of our self-serving, typically-ludicrous cultures. No, the problem specifically with Trump is aesthetic: his lies are dull, because his vocabulary is literally childish. That’s it. That’s enough reason to dismiss his whole life and his claim on your attention. Trump is boring to connoisseurs with good taste in life-fictions.

You’ll say this can’t be so, since the spectacles of Trump’s power plays are evidently riveting in that they hold much of the world’s attention through the mass media. Trump does hold our attention—like a train wreck. We consume news of the neo-fascists by rubbernecking, as we use these particular clowns as canaries in the coal mine. We search for signs of our civilization’s downfall as we learn that we can be pitiful enough to fall for fascism even after the catastrophic ends of the totalitarian regimes of the last century. We have little historical memory, precisely because social media entrances us with spectacles of the moment. The internet was supposed to bring everyone together in common knowledge; instead, the net ghettoizes us as we settle into our sub-niches. And technoscience should have been powerful enough to inform us of certain elementary facts of our nature and our past, but we’re as easily fooled by demagogues as were the ancients who worshipped their rulers as divine.

The phenomenon of Trumpism is important and it deserves our attention, but Trump himself makes for a dismal story. However greater the stakes were in his life, as he reckoned with billions of dollars whereas most people deal only with thousands, his deeds were unheroic and so as a protagonist he doesn’t attract the well-read viewer’s attention. His life story isn’t a book we should want to read, because we shouldn’t want the catharsis we’d achieve by identifying with Trump as a character. True, Trump became president of the United States, which is ordinarily heroic, but if Trump burns down the government he’s supposed to lead, the way he burned down his companies and conned his previous partners and investors, he’ll have reduced the presidency to his tawdry level and so spoiled the genre of American politics. More precisely, he’ll have given the game away, revealing the conflict between the psychopathy of all American presidents and the equally cold-blooded group-think of the American deep state.

In any case, this is how we should begin to evaluate life. Instead of congratulating some lifestyles for being based on truth and reality, while condemning others as fraudulent, we should be searching for inspiration as artists and as consumers of life-as-quasi-art. Not all social constructions and fictions are equal, just because nature laughs in all their faces. Some tales are original while others are clichéd and hackneyed; some resonate with your emotions and so help you be subjectively true to your inner self, while others seem mean-spirited or otherwise small-minded and function more like traps than like opportunities for mind-expansion or for testing the merits of your thought palaces. Life is but a dream—and we should be thankful that we lack the vantage point for taking in the cosmic whole, that we must content ourselves with fantasies and games to distract us so that we needn’t continually ponder the absurdity of our existential situation. Thank the strange heavens for killing off the gods of our babyish religions and for awakening us to the embarrassment of that secular fairytale of objective truth. 

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