What Can Become a Tradition? Research Time, 01/03/2018

The term ‘resurrection’ is loaded, especially to someone who grew up in a historically Christian culture like me. It’s ironic today, because I want to talk about the resurrection of pagan religion in the West.

It was an illuminating example in a densely brilliant essay by Isabelle Stengers in The Guattari Effect. It extends a dialogue she and Guattari had when he was alive, about what it means to continue a tradition.

Question – Does a tradition need unbroken transmission across all generations from origin to now, if it’s going to be a genuine tradition?

The last several decades have seen a revival of Pagan rituals,
festivals, and genuine devotional religious ceremonies in the West.
Not only in Europe, but among settler cultures in North America
as well. But is it an authentic paganism if the tradition of the
religion was broken, and broken so long ago?

It started with an exchange between Stengers and Guattari about the nature of progress in anything’s development. The first context was how to understand the implications of evolution. If you take Darwinism seriously, you actually have to throw out any talk of higher and lower organisms.

The Medieval way of thinking ordered the world into hierarchies. The classification system in the Great Chain of Being may have been getting more complicated, and all the talk of God never needed to be said anymore. But until Darwin, you still ranked them.

And we kept ranking them after Charles Darwin the person wrote. But you now had this thoroughly materialist way of thinking about life. What does that imply for the reality of rank? Of a scale of “higher to lower” organisms by phylum or species? A chain that you moved up as you developed?

It's gone. Start from this fact – All the species that exist today are genuinely contemporary. This includes the bacteria. Folks typically think of bacteria as the lowest form of life, because one-celled organisms were the first to develop and bacteria are one-celled organisms.

But the bacteria that exist today are bacteria that have gone through nearly four billion years of contingent evolution. They’ve had just as much time as us. So if passage through time means advancement up the great chain of evolution, why are they still bacteria?

Because Earth is not the current place in an evolutionary process of creatures growing more advanced. Earth is a highly entropic system of hydrocarbons that’s had energy pumped into it for four billion years. We are the current era in a roiling chaos of highly complex contingent activity.

Bryozoans have existed for nearly 500 million years. They are
literally bags of microorganisms that live as a fist-sized single
organism. It moves, perceives, eats, excretes, and reproduces
asexually. The Bryozoans of today are utterly different from
the ones that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, except
that they are still bryozoans.

What the hell does this have to do with neo-paganism?

That conception of existence – roiling chaos of highly complex contingent activity – is an incredibly abstract description. Words heavy with very precise meanings expressed generally enough that many other contexts express it too.

Cultures change over time – contingent development in a chaotic world. The competing, older concept is the chain of being from lower to higher forms – progress as advancement in rank. A tradition consists in a common task developing over time. So you continue a tradition by relaying that task – passing it along.

Pagan religions in Europe – Greek, Roman, Celtic, Norse, and Germanic – flourished two thousand years ago. Christianity wiped out all the theology and absorbed pagan customs into its own practice, now seamlessly. New Pagans build their new tradition from archaeological and anthropological research on those ancient religions. They build their own practices from these fragments.

If you think of tradition as a chain, any temporal break ends the tradition. The reconstructed version developed in the late 20th century isn’t authentic to the organic Pagan religions of ancient Europe because of that break. There were no Pagan Yoda figures in hiding until Christianity let its institutional guard down.

But if you understand development as contingent chaos, then temporal continuity doesn't matter. Recurrence without continuity can happen, if conditions develop that make a tradition’s resurrection possible. So authenticity is a matter only of engagement, care, and a spirit of fidelity. You’re no receptacle. You can learn.

Mutual Aid I: Moral Lessons from Evolutionary Theory? Research Time, 25/06/2014

If there is any single notion that all scientists, historians of science, and philosophers of science can agree on, it’s that it is ridiculous to try to derive moral principles from scientific discoveries and interpretive frameworks. There are many reasons why one should never do this. 

But the reason that I prefer to concentrate on in my own thinking is that the movement is much too simple. Moral principles and systems are complex cultural creations that develop over centuries of a community’s physical constitution. Simply extrapolating a scientific principle along a straight parallel into a moral guiding principle is a philosophically awful move. But this move is the conceptual foundation of Social Darwinism. 

Social Darwinism was the largest cultural movement to emerge from evolutionary theory, and it has given the theory a bad name ever since: the notion that the natural order of the world is ruthless competition among individuals, and that it is right and natural to structure human society at all levels that those who can stomp on more people as they rise to the top of society should, because they are able. I have even still found myself discussing this idea with students, who at first seem to consider it seriously. It’s precisely the most dangerous kind of poor thinking that exists: It’s so easy.

A young Charles Darwin, the most unjustly
vilified scientist in human history.

The name itself was an insult to Darwin’s own views about evolution, which were so nuanced, you would almost believe that he was a brilliant scientist who carefully considered his theoretical interpretations and constructions, and meticulously organized his massive collections of observational data. 

I mention this because I’ve started reading some anarchist political philosophy to sort through ideas for the final third of the Utopias project outline. I already have the basic shape of the first two thirds, but this last, purely political section still needs some conceptual work. Peter Kropotkin was the first person I began reading in this regard, mostly because he was the one I’d read before. I was first introduced to his work in my undergraduate degree, in a political theory course offered by Memorial’s political science department. Michael Wallack was the professor, and we were reading Kropotkin in dialogue with selected works of Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse in that last half of that course. So I had some haunting familiarity with his works already.

The full manuscript of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid is actually another work that seems to make something like that illegitimate move from a scientific theory immediately to a parallel in prescriptive moral philosophy. At least, this is the popular account of the book. As I explore it further, I’ll have something else to say. A book doesn’t have the legacy Mutual Aid does without being more nuanced than the idiots who took up Social Darwinism.

Already, Mutual Aid impresses me, at least in providing an alternative conception of how evolution works than the Darwinian mainstream of his time. Darwin did his seminal fieldwork in the tropics, with a booming population of species and individuals squabbling over a lush landscape. Kropotkin did his in the wastelands of Siberia, where a sparse and dispersed population of all creatures helplessly scrounged for whatever occasional scraps of sustenance they could find in the desolation. In such an environment, creatures have to band together for a slim chance to avoid starving to death. Kropotkin’s detailed observations of animal behaviour in these harsh ecosystems were the basis of his biological framework of the evolution of mutual aid. To be continued . . .

Truth Comes in Degrees, Research Time, 28/02/2014

It’s very common in philosophical writing to discuss the nature of an epoch, which is usually framed in terms of what kinds of thoughts were possible. Heidegger continually refers to the modern era as incapable of understanding existence as anything but a resource. Hegel, in his writings on history, described Indians and Africans as having no history because they had no institutions or style of discourse like the Western history book. 

Yesterday’s post ended with Bruno Latour caught in the same situation. He wrote in 1991 that Modernity was dead, a framework of understanding the world whose premises had been shattered. Then in 1992, a book drops from another leading French intellectual with nerdly glasses and wavy black hair defending humanist Modernity in its purest form, and denouncing all critics as anti-democratic fascists, communists, and religious fundamentalists. This situation shows how plural humanity really is. We’re so accustomed, especially in philosophy, to demarcating what was conceptually possible for a culture according to the chronology of its great philosophical works. But the presence of these works doesn’t simply cause a blanket social change even within the discipline of philosophy, let alone the wider culture.

Likewise, the entire fourth chapter of We Have Never Been Modern is all about dealing with accusations of relativism that would fly against Latour’s central thesis that social and political factors always play a role in the construction of scientific institutions, investigations, and discoveries. Despite the presence of books like Latour’s, and others from sectors of philosophy of science like Science and Technology Studies or the affiliated and slightly diverging acronyms, I haven’t seen an introductory philosophy class where introducing ideas like Latour’s don’t result in accusations of relativism from the audience.

In other words, Latour can write all he wants about how sensible it is for us to drop our cultural presumptions that contingency results in pure relativism, and that involvement in human processes for its generation results in pure relativism. I can too, because I haven’t believed in this facile separation of necessary, certain knowledge from contingent, relative opinion in nearly a decade. I can be criticized for making the separation in such blunt terms. But my point is that most people still believe this way.

A frequent reason given for why atheists are mistrusted in wider society (aside from the shrill anger of Dawkins and Hitchens, and Sam Harris’ denunciations of Muslims in Britain that border on outright racism), is that they’re held to be moral relativists. Many people still genuinely believe that you can’t be a good person without having a religion: without having a set of moral rules in whose correctness you believe absolutely, and without believing that a god will punish you for your sins. The discussion of scientific enterprises in these contingent terms often results in the same dichotomy. If you don’t believe in the certainty of scientific knowledge, then you permit the validity of beliefs we now know to be hogwash: racialized eugenics, phrenology, phlogistonic chemistry, Galenic medicine. If there is no God, everything is permitted. If there is no Science, everything is true.

However many times we defend ourselves, I think atheists
like me will always face pressure from people who believe
that you need to believe in a God delivering you
absolute truths to understand moral right and wrong.

The problem with these statements is that people’s moral systems converge, but differ, and if you consider the history of science, there is no straight progress of enlightenment over time. Good projects may flounder, worse ideas may come to prominence: enlightenment is no more inevitable than decay. Latour offers a much more sensible and politically productive way of dealing with this impasse. After all, decay is no more inevitable than enlightenment.

One conservative (and frequently still popular) idea about science is that what we call science is wholly right and true, and what we call pseudo-science, or what gets relegated to the dustbin of science’s history, is wholly wrong. All my intellectual colleagues will describe how crude and over-simplified this idea is. They all hear it from their first-year students — it’s still widely believed. It’s the kind of faith in science that New Atheists have been peddling for decades.

It’s far more accurate, when talking about the history of science, to treat some models of thought as being more true or more false than others. In other words, with complex systems of numbers, truth comes in degrees. Here’s an example. If you think about the history of evolution, the standard hardline evolutionist line is that Charles Darwin was right and more creationist perspectives wrong. But now contrast Darwin with other evolutionists. Denis Diderot postulated an evolutionary account of how life arose (according to some definitions, so did Aristotle). But because they had no empirical research backing up their claims, Darwin was more right than they were. But you can’t throw Diderot on the trash-heap of history, because at least he got it basically correct that life developed through evolutionary processes.

For example, Led Zeppelin's early
records synthesized musical influences
that had never come together before,
but their modern albums sound retro
because— Sorry, wrong Robert.

Now contrast Darwin with empirically-minded theorists of evolution who postulated methods other than natural selection, like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. His vision of the inheritance of acquired traits turned out to be untrue, but he no creationist, and certainly not of the idiotic Biblical literalist stripe with the highest influence today, which even frustrate theologians. But Darwin also wasn’t right either.

Darwin never had a solid idea about the mechanism of carrying the inherited traits. Gregor Mendel’s experiments that systematized how inheritance worked were popularized only after Darwin’s death. The discovery of DNA as the cellular carrier of traits made Darwin’s theory obsolete. Nonetheless, we don’t denounce Darwin as wrong. He was just less right than evolutionary theory that was able to account for inheritance through DNA. And the first theorists of DNA were less right than most evolutionary biologists today. DNA was first conceived as carrying traits simply: that there would be ‘a gene’ ‘for’ big ears, eye colour, or proclivity to heart disease. We have since discovered that our genetic code operates in a complex relationship with protein folding in developmental processes that unfold in terms of contingencies and tendencies. Nonetheless, Watson and Crick’s generation of biologists isn’t wrong; they just held hypotheses that never worked out, because the world turned out to be more complicated.

When it comes to science, the law of the excluded middle doesn’t hold. This is true for morality, history, and all of existence. Either/or is so outdated. I like to keep my logic fuzzy.