Guarding Ourselves from the Mystery with Secularism

Change is happening all the time, and always against the backdrop of something changeless. That's why Truth is both revealed as always-known and recapitulated as ever-new. We understand something to be absolute and eternal, yet how that gets creatively expressed can be brought to light in many forms. There are as many ways to manifest Truth as there are people to bear it. The problem these days there are less who can handle the Truth!

So instead of surrendering to the self-mastery that Truth requires, we chase shadows of Truth that may have some partiality to it while manipulating us further from it. At best we can find merit with the impulse towards something beyond oneself. David Walsh notes that,

“each generation begins with the same faith in the goal for which it seeks and struggles to explain its inspiration to itself. The fact that none of the accounts becomes definitive does not signify failure. In each of them living contact is made with the source of the movement that underpins them. By straining toward the transcendence of reach we gain a greater sense of its reality.”

We may not know what we need, but we know somehow we're not going to come by it through what we want. We may aim for the peak experiences of everyday life as the final goal, when those were only unveiled to get us beyond our material selves. Instead, we scatter about chasing states and erecting idols who can inhabit them for us. How many human relationships have been invested with such a burden too heavy to bear? How many ideologies have been fabricated by political leaders to create the illusion of paradise on Earth as a pursuit? Since we are restricted to our material selves, we can't do anything but to institute happiness through secular goods unto ourselves and others. Despite these utopian impulses, “we are not made to attain a paradise within time.” Moreover, if we remove human weakness, are we “also removing human beings as well?” The point to what draws us deeper to the horizon of the inexhaustible mystery of transcendence was never to put our finger on it in this world, but to point us toward the goal that is beyond all finite characterizations. “If we focus too insistently on the attainment of our final fulfillment in the here-and-now, then we will distort the meaning of all lesser goods.”

As finite beings we must work within our pregiven limits or we will just fall prey to endless choices of incoherent self expression. “In every moment we remain free, although never utterly free of all direction.” The secular modern project ensures that is our right as autonomous human beings buffered from anything but our reasoning selves. We think we create our own meaning! And yet, the “illusion that we could from a superior vantage point critique all positions had proved a cruel self-deception.” And by thinking “we could see through all things we ended by no longer having anything to see.” We are free to respond to existence and the order that it is given, but we can't create existence. “Our freedom is a drama enacted between the poles of certainty and uncertainty.”  

“The more we respond to the glimmerings that at first attract us faintly, the more they become beacons of light irradiating the path before us with unanticipated intensity.” We are never completely autonomous, as grace will always impel in ways we will never fully understand. We can always reject it in defiance and to assert our autonomous will, but ironically that only will restrict our true freedom even more so.

Change will happen, but for it to be true progress (or transformation for ourselves and our loved ones), it always must happen against the backdrop of some ultimate standard. Otherwise, it is just change, but to what ends? “When there is no divine judge to measure our actions, then all restraints we choose to impose are merely arbitrary: everything is permitted. ... What enables us to judge the gap between ideal and reality is that we continue to possess the reality of the ideal.” But we can't force this ideal as gods, as that will only reduce us to less than persons. We must see through our manipulation of truth, to be available for the Truth that was available in the beginning!

As Walsh says,

“Not being gods, we can acknowledge God and receive from him the gift of participation in the divine life. Once freed from the impossible burden of providing our own meaning to ourselves, we can accept the surpassing divine outpouring of reality. By accepting the gift of transcendent life as our goal we have at the same time received the gift of meaning within this life.”

* All quotes are from David Walsh's excellent book Guarded By Mystery. I can't recommend this book highly enough!

I Don't Trust You, And I Won't Verify Why

Science is powerful tool, but today it appears to be threatening to certain segment of society. If you have a poor narrative that you live by, and the data doesn't speak for it, then the data gets tossed out. Now for that matter, the baby gets tossed out too. After all, science was created by some privileged European dudes. So what do they know? They never suffered victimhood or belonged to disenfranchised tribe. 

So retro-elitists like Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton should have known better what wokeness would have come to light in 2020. But instead they focused on concepts like observation, skepticism, making hypotheses, and testing & experimentation. So much for these twits.

But without error correction to our ideas, we are doomed to failure. Error correction is the basis for science, as well as everything we do. We all have biases and misinformation, so being vigilant through scientific tools is necessary to break away from what we believe to be true to knowing what we don't know.  

But there is one area where the postmodernists may have a point on the shortcomings of science: once we leave the harder sciences (STEM) and move to the softer sciences (social sciences), it is harder to determine causation. We have now entered the territory of studying the human being in all his or her magnificent glory interacting within society, and when it's all said and done, it can be a cluster f--- to figure us out. 

Here we find the power of science is in isolating variables and finding one key relevant factor that changes the game. We now know that the more Trump speaks, the more people get infected with Covid. Or maybe that is just a correlative. But never mind, facts fit narrative so it must be true!

The reality is the challenges we face in society involve massive multi-variable systems. Not to mention, science has little to say of the moral, ethical or spiritual sense of what guides our inner selves. So if free will can't be isolated to a variable, then what good is it to the scientist. 

“The problem with science is that without rules that generalize from experience, we have nothing more than a catalog of data, but inductive evidence can never tell us with certainty that our generalizations are correct” (Manzi). So we gotta start with some ideas—which means you can never remove the scientist from the science. This was Polanyi's big point: all knowing is personal. 

And as we move from physics, to biology, to human behavior, causal density increases significantly to the point where we land on a mass of (almost) free willing persons within multi-complex systems. And at that's when the scientist is going to have to make a stand somewhere—and where some reliable tacit knowledge (through tradition and experience) is going to have to be invoked where trail and error has no place.

That's also why error correction can't stop with the science, but must be part of the process of the scientist themselves. We must always be aware of the intelligibility and coherence of the converging principles he or she is working from. Otherwise, we can be left with skewed data (flawed by omission more than commission) shoehorned into a correlated narrative that may be counter to reality.  

Still, where the postmodern woke go wrong is we will always need to trust the tools and the tooler, as long as we verify too. We need to make sure the thesis/conclusion is cohesive and non-contradictory while the person proposing it is worthy of belief in their proposal. And while science is never the end of the story, it can scaffold us closer to a higher truth. But without the tools of science all together, we can easily regress to impulsive idiots.

“When we do science, we reject the Aristotelian idea of “essence,” but when we think about what we love, essence is everything. So, we need to think strategically while remaining aware of our ignorance, and we need to exploit the power of trial and error while remaining aware of the essence of what we are trying to protect.” — Jim Manzi