Nostalgia for the Absolute Read online

  Damaged by catastrophe, living under the palpable threat of self-destruction through atomic weapons and the seemingly insoluble problems of overpopulation, famine, and political hatred, men and women began looking, literally, outside the earth. The Flying Saucer—whose appearance in the mind’s eye Jung had precisely foretold—represents an infantile but perfectly understandable wishfulfilment. Incapable of coping with his own circumstance, man hopes desperately for benevolent, all-seeing surveillance, and in the extreme case, for help from outside. The space creatures will not allow the human species to wipe itself out. Being infinitely more evolved then we are, the space creatures will bring answers to our desperate dilemmas. Humanity may well have suffered apocalyptic breakdowns before this. Somehow, we are told, the species survived and the spiral of progress began anew. Our space guardians no doubt played a salutary role in these previous cataclysms; witness the spoors of their visitations; witness man’s homage to such supernatural helpers as recorded in religions, mythologies, and primitive art. Just before our lunatic politicians press the thermonuclear button, some galactic personage will step out of his UFO and look upon us with severe, but finally therapeutic, melancholy.

  The Western sense of failure, of potential social-political chaos, has also caused a revulsion against the ethnic and cultural centralism which marks European and Anglo-Saxon thought from ancient Athens to the 1920s. The assumption that Western civilization is superior to all others, that Western philosophy, science, political institutions, are manifestly destined to rule and transform the globe, is no longer self-evident. Many Westerners, the young especially, find it abhorrent. Appalled by the folly of imperialist wars, outraged by the ecological devastation which Western technology has entailed, the flower child and the freak-out, the Symbionese liberationist, and the dharma bum have turned to other cultures. It is the traditions of Asia, of the American Indian, of the black African, which draw him. It is among these that he finds those qualities of dignity, communal solidarity, mythological invention, involvement in the vegetable and animal orders, which Western man has lost or brutally eradicated. In this quest for innocence there is often a legitimate impulse to reparation. Where the colonialist father has massacred and exploited, the hippie son seeks to preserve or to make good.

  Yet, powerful and ubiquitous as they are, these great reflexes of fear and compensation in the damaged sensibility of the West, seem to me a secondary phenomenon. The return to the irrational is, first and foremost, an attempt to fill the emptiness created by the decay of religion. Beneath the great surge of unreason there is at work that nostalgia for the absolute, that hunger for the transcendent, which we observed in the mythologies, in the totalizing metaphors of the Marxist utopia, of man’s liberation, in Freud’s scheme of complete sleep of Eros and Thanatos, in Lévi-Strauss’s punitive, apocalyptic science of man. The absence of a commanding theology of a systematic mystery such as was incarnate in the church, is equally graphic in the fantasies of the UFO spotter, in the hopes and panics of the occultist, in the amateur adept of Zen. That the search for alternative realities through the use of psychedelic drugs, through a dropping out from consumer society, through the manipulations of trance and ecstasy, are directly related to the hunger for the absolute is obvious—though the particular dynamics of the relationship, notably in the case of narcotics, is more complex than was at first supposed. And I ask only in passing—does it have genetic correlates? Does it reflect the actual destination of the educated elite, particularly in France and England in the First World War? The sleep of reason crowds this emptiness with nightmares and illusions.

  For this, I believe, is what the post-religious or surrogate theologies and all the varieties of the irrational have proved to be—illusions. The Marxist promise is cruelly bankrupt. The Freudian programme of liberation has been only very partially fulfilled. The Lévi-Straussian prognostication is one of ironic chastisement. The Zodiac, the spooks, and the platitudes of the guru will not still our hunger.

  One further alternative remains. The foundation of personal existence on the pursuit of the objective scientific truth: the way of the philosophic and exact sciences. But has it a future?

  DOES THE TRUTH HAVE A FUTURE? V

  In the four preceding talks, I have argued that the gradual erosion of organized religion and of systematic theology, particularly of Christian religion in the West, has left us with a deep, unsettling nostalgia for the absolute. Together we have looked briefly at some of the principal attempts to satisfy this nostalgia, to fill the vacuum of personal faith and to attempt to fill the great emptiness left by the erosion of religious practice. I have called these attempts “mythologies” in order to underline their own pseudo-religious and substitute quality. But I hope that I have also stressed their rational character, the rational splendour of such great constructs of analysis and explanation as we find in Marxism, in Freudian psychology, in the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Whatever their metaphoric and even mystical attributes, these are monuments of reason and celebrations of the ordering powers of rational thought. In my fourth talk, I said something of the irrationalities, superstitions, infantile escapism, surrender to hocus-pocus, which are so striking, so disturbing, a feature of the current emotional climate and life-style.

  In this argument, the great absence has, of course, been that of science. It was precisely the belief that the natural sciences would fill—indeed more than fill—the emptiness left in the human spirit by the decay of religion and supernaturalism, which was one of the major forces bringing about this decay. To the philosophers of the Enlightenment, to the agnostic and pragmatic thinkers of the nineteenth century, the rise of the sciences—mathematical, physical, social, applied—was causally and logically inseparable from the decline of religion. As the ancient darkness of unreason and credulity receded, the light of the sciences was to shine forth. The “impassioned countenance” of scientific discovery, to borrow Wordsworth’s phrase, would replace the childish mask of the gods and serve as a beacon for human progress. Indeed, as Auguste Comte and Marx argued, religion itself would be recognized as having been little more than a pre-science, a naive, anthropomorphic attempt by the human species to understand, to grapple with, the natural world and its many enigmas. By moving from the spurious explanations of theology and the sterile techniques of ritual to genuine scientific understanding, man would not only achieve immense material gains, he would satisfy the cravings of the human spirit and of the human soul for truth. Seen in this perspective—a perspective which extends from Jefferson and the Humboldts to Darwin and Bertrand Russell−science would, in a way far surpassing that of revealed religion, satisfy man’s aspirations for order, for beauty, for moral probity. “The truth”, we are told (John 8, 32), “shall make you free.” But can science assuage the nostalgia, the hunger for the absolute? What, today, is the status of the classical concept of truth?

  The disinterested pursuit of the truth in a sense which Descartes or Sir Karl Popper understand it—as subject to falsification, to experimental proof, to logical constraint—this pursuit is not a universal. I know this is an unfashionable thing to affirm, but the disinterested hunt for abstract truth is culturally specific; its history is relatively brief, it has a geography of its own. It is an Eastern Mediterranean phenomenon which in turn energized the Western intellectual and scientific tradition. Why did it originate where it did (in Asia-Minor, in Greece, somewhere around the end of the seventh, or perhaps the start of the sixth century B.C.)? This is a very difficult question, possibly related to factors of climate, of protein diet, of a masculine-dominated kinship system in which men were predatory and had a dominant questing role. Perhaps there would not have been pure, speculative thought without slavery, without the fact that men had leisure, to give their will and energy and ambitions to problems not immediately related to economic and personal survival. In other words, the pursuit of truth is, from the outset, a pursuit. It has elements of the hunt and of conquest. There is a characteristic mom
ent in one of Plato’s dialogues when at the end of a very difficult, logical demonstration, the disciples and the crowds standing around, give a literal “Haloo”, the cry of the hunter when he has cornered his quarry.

  Through the scientific-technological revolution which came to dominate Western social and psychological consciousness after the sixteenth century, the entire conception of truth assumes both a more special rigour and an almost unexamined moral obviousness and authority. The mathematical, the logical, character of propositions embodying the truth greatly increases the attributes of abstraction, of neutrality, of impersonality. Men begin feeling that the truth is somewhere “out there”. It’s an awkward phrase, it’s hard to explain, but I think we all know what we mean: as if it were out of the reach of our hand and had an existence of its own.

  When Kant tries to explain how the human brain organizes perceptions of cause, of space, of time, what he is, in fact, doing is saying, look, we live in a world which Newton has explained, and we have had imprinted in the human mind, these primary categories, as he calls them. We might call them searchlight beams, ways of understanding the universe so that we somehow get it right. At the same time both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment made it an axiom, quite undebated, that human prosperity, human dignity, the moral excellence of the individual man, the splendour of society, can only benefit from the determination of the truth and from the constant discovery of new truths.

  The promise which we find in the Gospel, that the truth shall make us free, became a cardinal article of secular rationalism and of political liberalism. You find it in a very moving way inscribed to this day on public libraries all over the United States. It is a crucial Jeffersonian moment of trust. Pursue the truth, get it right, and you will be a more complete, a freer human individual. The scholar, the scientist, were the benefactors of mankind whose often bizarre, seemingly private labours must be underwritten by society. The jokes about eccentric great scientists falling down a well when they are looking at stars, or Archimedes being so busy with an abstract problem in Algebra that he doesn’t notice that the city has fallen and he is about to be killed, go right back to the beginning of Greek philosophy and they are deeply suggestive. They are jokes about human genius being strange and bizarre. But they never put in doubt the essential excellence of the pursuit of the disinterested fact and discovery. From the Renaissance through to the late nineteenth century, we find it an axiom that human progress is totally enmeshed with the pursuit of facts and with the application or expression of that pursuit in the arts, in the humanities, in the sciences, and in technology.

  There are from the beginning, it is true, strong dissenting voices. The mystical tradition, which I might call the part of Asia inside Western man, has from the time of the Gospels on right to modern times, always insisted on a vision of truth beyond rational grasp, beyond logic, beyond experimental control or refutation. It is said, somewhere there is a “truth higher than truth”, of immediate mystical revelation. The churches have fought back. They have said that the truth is in their keeping. It is revealed to man by divine intervention. The long struggle of the Catholic church, for example, against Galileo is the struggle of a revealed total image of the universe against the threat of change, against fragmentation. The Renaissance church was very shrewd in believing that the new astronomy would unsettle and hence expose to arbitrary challenge the very concept of proof and of truth. They saw that once a Galileo had been at work, an Einstein, as it were, might come and say to Galileo, you too are wrong. And it is this unpredictable instability of the searching mind which the church felt as a profound menace to human order and human happiness.

  The subtlest attack on the notion of truth has actually come in modern times. It has been propounded by a group of philosophers who are usually called the Frankfurt school. They lived and worked in the German city of Frankfurt and around an institute of sociology at Frankfurt University in the years immediately preceding and following the Second World War. Some of the names we associate with this movement are those of Marcuse and Ardorno and Horkheimer. They say something profoundly unsettling. Their argument goes something like this. Objectivity, scientific law, truth-functions, indeed logic itself, are neither neutral nor eternal but express the world view, the economic power-structure, the political ideals of the ruling class, and, in particular, the bourgeoisie in the West. The concepts of an abstract truth, of an ineluctable objective fact, are themselves weapons in the class struggle. Truth, in their explanation, is in fact a complex variable dependent on political social aims. Different classes have different truths. There is no objective history, they claim, but only the history of the oppressor. There is no history of the oppressed. Logic is a weapon of the literate bureaucracy as against the intuitive sensory modes of speech and feeling among the less-well-educated masses. The enshrinement of scientific laws, whether Newtonian, Darwinian, or Malthusian, reflects a conscious investment in intellectual and technological control over society.

  The anarchic pastoralism of today’s counter-culture movements, which we touched on in the fourth talk—the visionary abdication of the drop-out, the utopias of the alternative technology, the revolt against science—so prominent among many of our gifted young contemporaries, all these embody strong elements of these three lines of attack—mystical, religious, political-dialectical. They remind us of Blake’s anti-rationalism, of his repudiation of sequential discourse and logic in the name of egalitarian and anarchic commitments. They tell of his famous attack on Newton as having somehow split and rendered dry and inhuman the magic of the rainbow. Today these forces against the truth which were once scattered and diverse, are powerfully joined in a general, political, moral attitude.

  But there is also, and I think far more worryingly, for the first time in the Western tradition, an incongruence, a coming out of phase, between truth and human survival, between the rational pursuit of truth and contrasting ideals of social justice. It is not only that the truth may not make us free, but that it may destroy us.

  Let me give three examples in an ascending order of immediacy of risk. And the first one, I immediately admit, is deliberately remote. In a great leap of human imagination, as great as any accomplished by poets, artists, musicians, philosophers, a group of thermodynamic thinkers between the late 1840s and 1860s worked out what we know as the second principle of thermodynamics—the principle of entropy, of the run-down of the universe. Let me quote from Bertrand Russell:

  The second law of thermodynamics makes it scarcely possible to doubt that the universe is running down, and that ultimately nothing of the slightest interest will be possible anywhere. Of course, it is open to us to say that when the time comes God will wind up the machinery again: but if we do say this, we can base our assertion only upon faith, not upon one shred of scientific evidence. So far as scientific evidence goes, the universe has crawled by slow stages to a somewhat pitiful result on this earth and is going to crawl by still more pitiful stages to the condition of universal death.

  Now you may rightly say, look, don’t worry about things billions and billions of years hence which we cannot even imagine. I agree with you. But I’m not quite sure that the argument is that simple. What fascinates me is how near does a date have to come in order to begin worrying us? The decay of the solar system, the problem of the decay of our galaxy: At which point would the human imagination suddenly have that most terrifying insight that the future tense runs into a wall, that there is a reality to which the future tense of our verb “to be” cannot apply, in which it will have no meaning whatever? When will these walls of entropy, of the heat-death of the universe, as it is called, press in our sense of an eternal possibility of life?

  The second example comes much nearer home and is obviously more realistic. Evidence is accumulating that it is very hard for man, particularly for so-called developed, highly skilled and technologically equipped man to endure long periods of peace. There is considerable disagreement on the nature of the pressures which bui
ld up inside us. One image I have heard used—and it is suggestive—is a quite simple one. When you do not exercise a muscle, a strongly trained muscle, for a certain length of time, acids, a kind of poisonous toxicity, actually accumulate in the fibres. Everything begins to ache, to decay, to torment the body. One has to get moving, one has to use it again.

  It does look as if great forces of ennui, of boredom, build up inside complex social systems and strain for a violent release. In that case war would not be a kind of hideous stupidity of the politicians, an accident, which the sane mind could surely have avoided. No, it would be a kind of essential balancing mechanism to keep us in a state of dynamic health. And even as we say this we know that it’s an horrendous absurdity, because we are now at a point where, if we pursue this line of thought, we come up against wars from which there is no survival, no second chance, no repair of the equilibrium of the body politic.

  My third example of the kind of truth which is dangerous to the survival of society is yet more present, yet more immediate. Here I have to proceed with very great care, if only because I have no professional competence whatever. You and I are rather bewildered by the charges and counter-charges flying in the camp of genetics—the whole argument about race and intelligence. There are those who tell us that some races are destined never to achieve a certain level of the intelligence quotient, or a certain level of intellectual performance, whereas other races have, as it were, an inborn advantage in the many departments of intellectual achievement which today determine the power structure of the world. Other scientists say, do not listen to that rubbish. I.Q. is a Western-organized test, it is itself a piece of blackmail against other kinds of cultures and skills—these are Nazi theories parading under pseudo-scientific respectability. The argument gets more and more bitter. And it is extremely hard for the layman to arrive at any clear picture of what is being said and what kind of evidence is being offered. So let me put a hypothetical point—and may I beg you to underline the word “hypothetical” with three red pencils at least. Suppose it emerges that the guess of a number of scientists is right: that environment, however excellent, however carefully handled, accounts for something like 20% or less of a human being’s endowment and future chances, and that 80% or more of what you and I are is programmed genetically and by racial inheritance. Suppose this were true—what do we do with that kind of knowledge? Because all sorts of political and social consequences could follow at once—in terms of education, of access to political power, to economic skills—do we close the door? Do we say, all right, we are not interested in your results, we do not even want to know them. Society has not reached a point of wisdom, of sanity and balance, in which it can handle that kind of dynamite. Stop your research. We won’t finance it. We won’t accredit your laboratories. We won’t give degrees for theses written in that field. (These are not journalistic suggestions. They are being put forward now by very serious, humane, and profoundly worried scientists, sociologists, and academics.) Or do we say, on the contrary, all right, go ahead, pursue your research to whatever end of truth it leads to. And if the end is totally unbearable in moral terms, in terms of human hopes, of equity, of social coherence, the devil with it— that’s how the universe is built, and we simply cannot stop researching. I repeat, this is not a fantasy problem. It is upon us right now. And it is only one of a number of dramatic instances in which the ancient tradition of going after the facts at any price is beginning to come up against walls of absolute social danger and even impossibility.