I am moved to one of my infrequent posts by a recent appeal here on Substack, by Steve Kirsch, for dialogue on the Covid response.
I obviously completely agree with that. But Steve’s condition has a name, coined by Emile Durkheim in the 1890s - anomie. Webster: “social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values” or “personal unrest, alienation, and uncertainty that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals”. Steve certainly wants to fix the Covid stuff and most likely also the future of civilization, but like many of us, and especially of his peers, on a very fundamental level he is, I believe, motivated to resolve the apparent breakdown of a paradigm which he considers not only beneficial or indispensable to society, but also part of his identity.
Science is a rather abstract concept and not coincidentally, but what we are talking about here is not, I would suggest, science as such but the role of rationality, encompassing, but not limited to, scientific enquiry, in public governance. We believe that shared norms of honest enquiry can lead to efficient outcomes. It is a bit of a heroic assumption looked at historically, but at the very least it is a persistent myth which, aspirationally, seems to have a lot going for it.
Let’s unpack this a moment. What is the content of these norms, which we may call the governance paradigm of the Enlightenment?
I would suggest it presupposes civility, humility, a willingness to acknowledge error, a shared commitment to honest enquiry, a belief that while good men and women may differ in their insights into the truth, that truth is nevertheless one and everywhere the same, it is not purely subjectively constituted and therefore anyone can and will arrive at it if they merely persevere in good faith and in accordance with these values.
The objectivity of truth, and especially of social truth, has been roundly questioned over the last century in particular, and understandably so. I am not minded to engage here in a philosophical defence of these notions, which is unnecessary for our purposes. This Enlightenment model is also not the only theory of the public space. There are those who view it as a theater of conflicts between social forces which are inevitable, at least given how we got here, and the art of governance to consist in finding peaceful mutual accommodations. This, also, is scarcely more than aspirational, although in periods of economic expansion some already wealthy countries have somehow made it work. And there are those who view the political process as still Hobbesian in its essence, a sort of feudality (to borrow the expression of von Clausewitz) “continued by other means”.
Doubtless it is all of these things, in differing proportions over time and place. We certainly have no right to be astonished that at any given moment the Enlightenment model does not carry the day, but we have every right, at least within the domain of its reasonable application, to believe that it should, and there are undeniably also social norms to that effect.
If we wish, though, to strengthen these norms, or even return to them assuming they are not merely an idealized version of the past (which to some extent they certainly are), we need to return to the values which underlie them and revisit the historical circumstances in which they arose, which led to the historical outcomes we observed and notably the economic and cultural ascendancy of what we (carelessly) term the West and its civilizational model, badly wounded for sure, in need of introspection and self-criticism beyond any doubt, but to which I, at least, remain attached.
The condition sine qua non of this ascendancy was the material rape of Africa and the New World. This needs to be acknowledged. What would have happened in the absence hereof is most open to question. Nevertheless, this was, from a European imperialist perspective of course, no more than fortuitous timing. It was not the origin of European culture and civilization, which flourished in the Renaissance at a certain distance from it, Italy and Germany, in particular, being scarcely involved other than through the Habsburgian link. We mostly owe the thought-world which we inherited from the Renaissance to thinkers of classical antiquity largely conserved during the Dark Ages in the Middle East and North Africa by Jews, Muslims, and Sabians, and which slowly filtered back into Europe through Spain and Byzantium.
The soil into which this fell had been dominated by the secular power of the Catholic church and the monastic institutions, which underpinned the legitimacy of the feudal order. The ecclesiastical establishment had wandered far from the ecstatic religion of the first Christians, but that tradition was still to be found in the canon and was occasionally rediscovered. This conformist, not to say stultifying, official form of religion existed alongside folk traditions conserved from much earlier strata - nostratic and pre-classical, residues of non-Christian cults and of Gnostic Christianity which existed in classical times, and the pagan or shamanic admixtures of the arriving peoples - the Goths, Huns and so on. This ecstatic religion was either ignored or, if necessary, suppressed by the church and often it was Christianized but retained archaic characteristics. In any case, it never died out but neither did it in any way characterize the official practice of the church.
Dissatisfaction with the latter mainly took a philosophical form in the Renaissance, though it was not divorced from considerations of temporal power. The Protestant Reformation rent the Western church in two but prior to the conclusion of the Council of Trent in 1563 there were important movements for reform within the Catholic church itself. Eventually the Jesuitic wing, allied with the Habsburgs, prevailed, but more liberal elements (for want of a better term) in Tuscany and Venice gave them a run for their money. The philosophical basis for the challenge they brought to traditional Catholic beliefs was found in the general enthusiasm of the age, reflected everywhere in the extraordinary art that has come down to us, for the rediscovery of classical learning and the belief in a more golden past. The spiritual notions which challenged the official thinking of the church were appealing because they could not be divorced from it. In hindsight we now know that the Hermetic writings ultimately drew their inspiration from Hellenistic Egypt and a milieu which profoundly influenced a number of the New Testament authors and early Christians. In later periods, the influence was reciprocal. This is why these texts could be read, by patristic writers as well as by Renaissance thinkers, as almost a clarification of what was of key importance in the Christian religion.
This lofty synthesis of religious thought, read through the Renaissance lens, similarly appealed to those who still hoped to restore the unity of the church in the wake of the Reformation. It displayed one significant feature, however, which was to prove portentous - its association with magic, an association which, curiously, was to lead to the emergence of Western science and of the characteristic institutions of modern science, of which the most exemplary was the Royal Society, founded in London in 1660.
Frances Yates has told the story in her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, published in 1972. The culture of the Royal Society was modelled on the dispassionate search for a truth written in nature and discernable to honest enquiry in which the Hermetists believed. The Hermetic project did not succeed in the way that its most fervent defensors had hoped or imagined, but it did give rise to a framework for dialogue apart from the wars of religion and based on a transcendent concept of man and his place in nature. It could not prevent (and perhaps even precipitated) the Thirty Years War, but it still pointed the way to the model of peaceful coexistence represented by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and, as such, it is central to the governance of the modern state and (ultimately) of international society.
The details do not matter, but the utopian Hermetists not only believed in an underlying oneness of nature, but also of religion, since they were committed to an idea of religion which was experiential. Honest enquiry was as much as guarantor of uncovering spiritual truth as of truth of any other kind, and just like scientific truth, where this notion is still largely held to today, spiritual truth was one, meaning that all differences of opinion between honest men were just differences of perspective, ultimately susceptible of resolution based on further experience, even if this resolution could only be phenomenological. This audacious ecumenical project was later taken up by the Theosophists and by mystics of various sorts, and has always been indissociably associated with a science (or what at least was claimed to be a science, even if many might disagree) of the unknown and unseen, resulting from a spiritual imperative which, for whatever reason, imposes itself to women and men everywhere. Science of any kind is (or at least was) a very spiritual matter.
I don’t mean in this essay to propose any solution to the problem with which we began, other than to insist on the fact that the myth, if such it be, of Enlightenment, rational, governance relies not only on shared values but on the existence of a “hidden Brotherhood” not unlike that evoked by the Rosicrucians or (in a less hidden form) by Francis Bacon, to which true seekers, devoted to the public weal, of every nation belong, not by choice or election but by virtue of drives placed in the human soul which we ignore at our peril. Science can be done alone in a laboratory, but governance through science is a selfless and social undertaking, relying on an individually irrational commitment to ones fellow man. It is this that is in crisis, and it is here that dialogue is needed the most urgently.
We do not disagree on the need for, or efficacy of, Covid measures based on science or facts: we disagree based on a disintegrating propensity to actually care, on an increasing unwillingness to sacrifice selfish interests for the public good (as the reader will note, an ironic twist on the propaganda), on a loss of faith in the transcendent object which is truth.
This is the dialogue that we most fundamentally need to have.
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