Two Views of the Universe

 

Imagine two little boys growing up in their father's household.  The older boy enjoys the company of his father.  He runs up to his father and hugs him when he gets home from work.  He listens to his father even when he's getting disciplined, or when his father tells him to do things he doesn't want to do.  He'll complain about things to his father sometimes, and even object to discipline, but the connection is always there.

 

The other little boy likes to play by himself in his room.  What he wants is to be in complete control of things.  His father has given him lots of toys, but the toys are all that he's interested in.  He's gotten very good at a number of games that he plays with the toys, but they're all play-by-yourself games, and don't involve either his brother or his father.  When his father tries to get his attention by bringing him a new toy, the kid just grabs it and slams the door closed. 

 

This image came to my mind while I was reading Edward Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics:  A Contemporary Introduction.  Assuming you know nothing about this topic, let me explain it briefly.

 

In the Middle Ages, say 1000 to 1400 A. D., the Roman Catholic Church developed not only theological doctrines, but an entire philosophy that explained to the best of their knowledge what the world was about.  They started with ancient Greek philosophers, primarily Aristotle (384-322 B. C.), and modified his thought to be compatible with Christianity.  Although this work was done by many scholars over centuries, it is generally conceded that it reached its epitome with St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A. D.).  Broadly speaking, the philosophy (as opposed to theology) was known as scholasticism.

 

Metaphysics (from the Greek "beyond physics") is the study of being, the most fundamental aspects of reality.  Scholastic metaphysics is therefore what Aquinas and his cohort thought about the fundamentals of reality. 

 

This topic is virtually unknown today except by specialists, and not many of those, either, which is why I've gone to the trouble to explain it to you.  The reason is that, with the advent of modern thought, people like Francis Bacon (1561-1626), David Hume (1711-1776) and others intentionally discarded scholasticism in favor of other ways of thinking about reality, most of which favor the powerful methods of quantitative science, which reduce everything to mathematical models. 

 

Everybody agrees that the scientific and industrial revolutions have made huge differences in our ability to feed, clothe, and care for ourselves—by and large, positive differences.  If tomorrow, all physical signs of scientific advancements since 1700 vanished, the vast majority of people on earth would die within weeks, leaving only a few survivalists and primitive hunter-gatherers. 

 

Modern thought is sometimes summarized under the title of the Enlightenment.  In this view, the West suffered under the repressive domination of the Church, which stifled intellectual progress, until a few brave souls (e. g. Bacon, Hume, etc.) threw off the chains of darkness and led us into the light of knowledge that we didn't have to concern ourselves with God, and that our own intellects can take us wherever we want to go.  C. S. Lewis satirized the arguments sometimes made in favor of the Enlightenment in a book about his intellectual conversion to Christianity, The Pilgrim's Regress.  His pilgrim, who refers to God as "the Landlord," encounters a Mr. Enlightenment, and asks him, "But how do you know there is no Landlord?"

 

Mr. Enlightenment replies, "Christopher Columbus, Galileo, the earth is round, invention of printing, gunpowder!!"

 

When John asks how this non sequitur applies to his question, Mr. Enlightenment answers "Your people . . . believe in the Landlord because they have not had the benefits of a scientific training."

 

Whether or not you realize it, everyone growing up in the U. S. has had a "scientific training" simply by existing in the modern world and unconsciously absorbing its assumptions that surround us like the air we breathe.  One of these assumptions concerns what is "real," and I won't stop to define that further, because it means just what common sense means by it. 

 

One commonplace notion in which the scientific worldview diverges from scholastic metaphysics is the question of which is more real:  your body, or the atoms from which it is made?  The modern tendency is to think that atoms, or ultimately quarks, are what physical reality consists of, and everything else is, if not illusion, at the most secondary and not as important somehow. 

 

Feser shows that scholastic metaphysics is not in conflict with scientific knowledge, because modern science is highly limited in the things it can explain using its methods.  Essentially, modern science has no metaphysics, so although it is practically useful, it's no good in discovering the ultimate foundations of reality. 

 

On the other hand, scholastic metaphysics says that once the atoms are in your body, you, as a substantial being, are more real than the atoms, which now have only a virtual existence in you.  To quote Feser, "The level of basic particles is in no way privileged.  The particles are not somehow 'more real' than the substances of which they are parts.  On the contrary, it is the substances that are more real insofar [as] the particles, like every other part, exist only virtually rather than actually in the whole."

 

That little fragment uses scholastic vocabulary that may seem mysterious.  But if you read the rest of the book, you can appreciate the grand intellectual structure that scholastic metaphysics is. 

 

What good is it today, though?  In a word, sanity.  I learned about Feser's book from an online talk by Mary Harrington, who found it invaluable in understanding why modern thought has led to situations such as the transgender movement that previous generations would have considered simply crazy.  Such things are the final workings-out of perverse logic set in motion by the abandonment of the (formerly!) common-sense notions about reality that scholastic metaphysics upholds.

 

You can now guess which little boy is which.  Clearly, the one playing alone in his room should at least talk with his brother—and maybe his Father as well.

 

Sources:  Mary Harrington's First Things lecture "Our Crisis is Metaphysical" is available among other locations at https://firstthings.com/our-crisis-is-metaphysical-2026-d-c-lecture/.  Edward Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics:  A Contemporary Introduction (2014) is published by editiones scholasticae and distributed in the U. S. by Rutgers University.  The quotation from The Pilgrim's Regress is from pp. 24-25 of the Wade Annotated Edition (ed. D. C. Downing), published by Eerdmans in 2014. 

The Medieval Wisdom of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil”

Back in 2000, when the founders of Google were discussing ways to express their core philosophy, Paul Buchheit (employee No. 23) suggested “Don’t be evil.”  At the time, he was simply trying to contrast the way Google did business with the less salutary practices of some of their competitors.  Nobody dared to disagree with the principle of not being evil, so the phrase was adopted and down to today remains one of Google’s official core values.  Along the way it has acquired another phrase, so the complete statement is “Do the right thing; don’t be evil.”  In promulgating this notion, Google has (perhaps unwittingly) taken a stand on the side of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and countless other ancient sages against much of what today passes for acceptable moral principles.  It would surprise me, however, to discover that more than a few Google employees are aware of this.

Many of them, in fact, would probably subscribe to the notion that no one should impose one’s moral principles on another person.  Even Google doesn’t explicitly recommend their “do good, avoid evil” principle for everybody; the most they are saying is that Google employees will try to live up to it.  If you like doing evil, fine, just don’t go to work for Google.  But as physicist Anthony Rizzi points out in his book The Science Before Science, the advice to not impose one’s moral views on another, is itself a moral view. 

If I see an adult male in a shopping mall beating up a two-year-old, and I rush to intervene, and the man says, “Leave us alone, you’ve got no business imposing your morality on me,” I could respond with, “Sir, that itself is a moral principle which you are trying to impose on me.”  (What I would really do is call the cops, but that’s another matter.)  And in any event, as Rizzi points out, no one consistently acts as though all moral principles are simply matters of personal preference, even though they may give lip service to the idea in academic papers, for example.  If the chair of a philosophy department read a paper by one of his philosophers claiming that all morality is relative, and called the author up one day and said, “Because all morality is relative and I don’t like your looks, I’m reducing your pay by half,” I seriously doubt that the philosopher would calmly accept this as a logical consequence of his own philosophical position.  So even if some people say morality is relative, on matters that affect them personally they usually don’t act like they really believe it.

So where does that leave us?  It begins to look as though there really may be some objective moral principles “out there” so to speak, independent of whatever we say or think about them.  And behind them all, at the head of the logical chain of reasoning where first things must always be, stands the principle embraced by Google:  “Do the right thing; don’t be evil.”  You can’t derive that principle from anything else.  It is one of those self-evident statements that can’t come from another more basic notion.  As it stands, of course, it needs development before it can help you live your life.  But all other moral principles can be logically derived from what Rizzi calls “the first principle of ethics”:  do good and avoid evil.

Ah, but what is good and what is evil?  In a thousand-word column, I obviously can’t do justice to that question.  The short answer is, good is that which fulfills one’s purposes, and evil is the absence of such good.  One reason there is so much evil in the world is that, while every person does what seems good at a particular time and place, what seems good at the time may not really help one to fulfill one’s purposes.  It may seem good to an alcoholic to take one more drink, even if it’s the one that makes him so drunk he gets in his car and causes the death of another driver.  It’s not always easy to figure out what the true good is, which is one reason why ethics can get complicated—so complicated that the analytically-minded tend to throw up their hands and say it’s all hopeless. 

But it’s not hopeless.  Most people figure out what good to do, and what evil to avoid, with a good bit of success every day.  The lapses happen when our emotions or our hasty judgments lead us astray.  It requires just as much thought and attention, if not more, to be a good person as it does to be a good engineer.  But the technical and the ethical sides of engineering start from different foundations.

When Mr. Buchheit hit on “Don’t be evil” to guide what would become one of the greatest corporations of the twenty-first century, he was saying more than he knew.  Neither Google (through whose facilities this blog appears, by the way) nor any other firm can completely live up to their core principles, including that one.  But having it out there to shoot for is a start.  And in having that core principle to live up to, all the Googleites are following in the footsteps of medieval thinkers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, who clearly saw that the first logical step in being good is to admit there are such things as universal moral principles, and that the one to start with is “do good and avoid evil.” 

Sources:  Anthony Rizzi is a practicing research physicist at the Institute for Advanced Physics at Baton Rouge, Louisiana (www.iapweb.org) and author of The Science Before Science:  A Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century (IAP Press, 2004).  Of all books that I’ve read about scholastic philosophy (which is the term for the type of philosophy done in the High Middle Ages by St. Thomas Aquinas), Rizzi’s does the best job of defining terms and explaining concepts in ways that the average non-philosopher can understand.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on Paul Buchheit and “Don’t be evil.” 

Are You Mediated?

Every now and then a book comes along that is hard to classify, but pulls a lot of disparate things together and explains them in a remarkable way.  Mediated is such a book.  The answer to the question of the title is yes, almost certainly you’ve been mediated.  Especially if you’re reading this blog.

Thomas De Zengotita is an anthropologist by training who teaches in New York City.  His book describes how the ubiquitous electronic media of the twenty-first century has made fundamental and far-reaching changes in human behavior and thought.  There’s enough material in the book for dozens of blogs, so I’m going to restrict myself to one little piece of it:  how we deal with our manifold options of spending mediated time versus time in old-fashioned reality.

Let’s start back in the thirteenth century, with St. Thomas Aquinas (although the roots go back to Plato and Aristotle).  Aquinas was the most famous of what are called the “scholastic” philosophers, and scholastics were known for making distinctions.  One of the more significant distinctions he drew was the one that separates the process of thought (what Aquinas called the “intellectual power”) from the processes of sensing, which Aquinas termed the “sensual power” (not in the modern connotation of “sensual,” but meaning just “pertaining to the senses”).  Now, sensing—meaning touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight—goes on in what we now call “real time.”  Once you aim your eyes in a given direction, what you see is not under your control, generally speaking.  But what you think about what you see is.  Using your intellectual power, you can think about things present, things past, or things to come, and swap these around at your will.  So as long as humanity has had the ability to think, we have experienced something in addition to “real time”:  what De Zengotita calls “unreal time.”

Unreal time was restricted to the human mind until modern media came along:  first analog means of recording and playing back experience (the phonograph, motion pictures) and ways of experiencing real time in another location (radio, television).  And of course it wasn’t long before recorded experience began to be broadcast so that the media brought you a kind of hybrid of real time and unreal time (e. g. “recorded live”).   Early forms of media such as novels and radio dramas still required some active thought (or imagination, which is a different but related thing) on the part of the listener.  But a few days ago I saw a banner outside the Texas State History Museum advertising a 3-D IMAX presentation of an animated film about flying dinosaurs.  It’s hard to imagine anything that would leave less work to the imagination than being surrounded by giant pterodactyls which appear to be flying directly at your head.

De Zengotita’s writing style reminds me of the late Catholic writer Walker Percy, whose Lost in the Cosmos was a similar unclassifiable work that was part social criticism, part personal essay, but highly readable and thought-provoking because of its original point of view.  In Mediated, De Zengotita strenuously refrains from moralizing or prescribing “solutions to the problem,” a trope which he says has become almost required these days.  But he wants us to think about the consequences of spending a larger and larger part of our time in mediated unreal time:  playing online games, cruising the web that so easily takes us from one non-sequitur to the next almost-unrelated site, and watching representations of all kinds that train us to expect to be flattered by increasingly customized and personalized treatment (count how many times you see the word “my” this or that in ads, and even software labels such as “my computer”).  One day, as he was in conversation with a techie type discussing the potential problems that could arise from spending too much time in mediated unreality, the man turned to him and said, “What’s so great about reality?”

If you are a secular humanist like De Zengotita says he is, maybe raw reality really is just one of an increasing number of options we have now, and it’s hard to answer the techie’s question.  But for people who believe in a God who created both reality in general and us in particular, the real has a prior call on our attention over anything we cobble together ourselves.  I realized an aspect of this over a year ago when, as a part of a retreat I was planning, I voluntarily gave up listening to my car radio.  My listening habits were fairly typical:  NPR, a classical music station, and a low-power AM station broadcasting Relevant Radio, an evangelistic effort of the Roman Catholic Church.  But the freedom to think my own thoughts during commutes came to be more valuable to me than whatever background interruptions the radio brought to me, and I haven’t gone back.  On long commutes to Austin, I sometimes play recordings of interviews with authors by former NPR correspondent Ken Myers, who has established a subscription radio network of sorts called the Mars Hill Audio Journal.  (Mars Hill was how I learned about Mediated, as a matter of fact.)  But the key to my approach to my car audio in particular, and increasingly media in general, is that I try to stay in charge whenever possible.

That means I try to avoid simply killing time by bombing around on the web.  If I get on the web I try to make sure that I know what I’m looking for—a journal article, maybe, or the definition of a word, or a review of a particular movie.  Because if I just take at random one of the thousands of little dangling baits that nearly every website hangs in front of you, I know I will eventually end up seeing something I regret, simply for the time wasted if not for the dubious nature of the content.

Am I still mediated?  Unquestionably.  But at least, after reading De Zengotita’s book, I’m aware of my mediated state and can try to do something about it.  And those of us who work in the media—everywhere from blogs like this to the most advanced techies at Google working on things we may not see for years—should all find out what being mediated is, and make up your mind whether you like it or not.

Sources:  Thomas De Zengotita’s Mediated:  How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It was published by Bloomsbury in 2005.  For more information about the Mars Hill Audio Journal, see http://www.mhaj.com.