Vico and the Barbarism of Reflection

It is the nature of all developmental accounts that there will be fewer at the high end than at the base; in the case of morality, more sinners than saints. Given that fact, a belief in a moralizing punitive God could be expected to have a beneficial effect on many people’s behavior; providing as it does, a panopticon for the soul.

According to studies involving getting people from various cultural backgrounds to play an economics game with opportunities to cheat one’s opponents, hunter gatherers cheat without a conscience if they are playing against someone they do not know, while those people who believe in a moralizing God were much more honest with regard to strangers. We have evolved to play relatively nicely with family members and people we know well. Beyond about 150 people, known as the Dunbar number, explicit rules become necessary. Larger communities have a military advantage – big armies generally beat small ones – so human beings had to make an adjustment to living around people whose names one might not even know. Belief in a moralizing God who judges you and keeps an eye on your behavior is helpful in that context and most larger societies have developed such a belief.

In Lawrence Kohlberg’s terminology, this moralizing God is applicable to those who are at the lowest, pre-conventional level of moral development. Such people are more or less amoral. They refrain from acting badly only out of a fear of punishment, not because they have a conscience per se. Morally, the reason why someone does or does not do something is crucial.

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The Barbarism of Reflection

Let’s Wait for God 2.0

Giambattista Vico thought the dominant point of education should be to foster creativity and imagination. What a heaven that would be. He aligned poetry with the human soul and considered rationality to be a mere element of it and not the most important at that. He was worried that applying the scientific method to humans would be dehumanizing, as indeed it often is. Recently, an academic podcast guest said that he could not possibly believe that cats and dogs have emotions merely by observing them. When he told his friends the result of his scientific examination, that those animals do in fact have emotions, they replied, “D’uh. We could have told you that!” The academic insisted that such intuitive knowledge was no good at all. While meditating, an image came to mind of the academic strapping his wife to an examination table to find visible signs of her love for him. Vico, on the other hand, would like to include, as contributors to knowledge, “sense perception, rumor, myth, fables, traveler’s tales, romances, poetry and idle speculation.” Better to deal with someone with emotional depth than the robotic mode of being of the self-made autist.

Vico coined the phrase, translated into English, as the “Barbarism of Reflection.” In Vico’s cyclical view of history, this occurs during a period like the Enlightenment when science and rationality prevail and claim to offer a path to a perfected society. First religion is discarded and then morality, based as it is on religious principles. Man plans to make himself in his own image, throwing off the shackles of social institutions and using freedom of speech and thought to question them all. Equality and democracy must reign, not unchosen bonds of family and flag. Each man must be free to explore his random desires and anyone who questions that should be put to death, or at least imprisoned and canceled. Man becomes a wolf to man.

The Misanthropy To Beat Them All

In praise of Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles are thoughtful meditations on the nature of human existence. They are easy to read and fun to use in an ethics class for that reason. One of the stories is named after the Sara Teasdale poem, There Will Come Soft Rains. Apparently written in response to the German ground offensive of WWI in 1918, and during the flu pandemic, the poem states that nature, in the form of birds, frogs, and trees would not notice our absence. And “Spring itself,” barely so. The implication is that human beings lie outside nature, although “Spring” seems to have some dim sense that we exist. There is no mention of God, who might be presumed to miss us. Teasdale had apparently developed the nihilistic view that the universe cares not at all about our actions or existence from reading Charles Darwin, starting in 1913. This is the same erroneous notion that Richard Dawkins likes to promote. It is a view that pushes human beings outside the universe, which is incorrect since parents are in fact part of the universe, and they generally love and care for their children. Human babies are so dependent on mothers that they would all die without this beneficent parental orientation. The problem is not with human beings, the universe, or nature, but with atheism which leads to moral nihilism if followed consistently, as discussed below. It is not only human beings who lose their intrinsic value and significance under atheism, but nature, too. Crude materialism reduces “nature” to mechanistic forces blindly ramming into things in deterministic fashion. Without a telos, in the manner of Aristotle’s Prime Mover, attracting creatures to ascend from their potential form to their actual form via moral aspiration, drawn to the perfection that God represents, things happen at random, teleologically speaking, with no underlying meaning.

Unlike Darwin, modern and up-to-date evolutionary theory, as seen in Perry Marshall’s Evolution 2.0, sees living cells and organisms engaging in horizontal gene transfer, transposition, epigenetics, symbiogenesis and hybridization. The levels of intelligence and teleological (purposeful) behavior is truly astounding.

It is human poetry that teaches and reminds modern man to see “nature” as something beautiful and worth preserving. Primitive man did it instinctively, but we moderns frequently have to work at recovering and maintaining such a vision. It is partly a matter of how much time we spend indoors. Put in the right context; by the sea, in a forest, hiking a mountain, we can fairly easily appreciate natural beauty once again.

Robert Sapolsky is Determined to be Wrong

Interviews with Robert Sapolsky after the publication of Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will reveal that the author of Behave, a book that approaches morality and behavior from a strictly scientific point of view and which is worth reading, reveal that Sapolsky is not wise. No one is more familiar with the contents of Behave than him, yet he has decided that his current life mission is to tell unsuccessful people that they are unlucky. That’s it. Rather than telling them how they might improve their situation, Sapolsky believes in determinism. Biology has determined who will succeed and who will fail, and the failures are supposed to be made to feel so much better about a successful person telling them that they never had a chance in the first place. That sounds like gloating and condescension, as much as anything else.

Science can be of some use in thinking about the human condition, but its point of view excludes too much that is human, let alone the divine, to offer a complete picture. Tarot cards too offer interpretative lenses through which to contemplate one’s life, and scientific research can sometimes offer vantage points to do the same. The scientific stance, however, is not sufficient and Sapolsky’s strange lack of wisdom provides evidence of this.

Here is the link to Robert Sapolsky is Determined to be Wrong. Please leave comments at the Orthosphere, since Voegelinview does not permit this.

Robert Sapolsky is Determined to be Wrong