HABITS AND THE HEART

HABITS AND THE HEART


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 2, 2013

REFERENCE:

This is another excerpt from “Meet Your New Best Friend” that will be published as a second edition later this year.

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Two pivotal and opposing ideas have much to do with where we find ourselves today, and why we feel so confused, perhaps even lost. One idea is that man is a thinking being, superior to Nature’s instinctive creatures. This gives man a sense of identity with a Supreme Creator, a feeling of divinity, “made in the image and likeness of God,” clearly separate and superior to Nature.

With the advance of science and the explosion in technology, certitude of a Supreme Creator has diminished. There is a sense that the dust will never settle; that modern life is best defined by its loses:

· The rise of agnosticism,

· The confirmation in Darwinian theory that we are wholly a part and not separate from nature and the animal kingdom,

· The recognition that our political and cultural traditions are flawed and not universally valid,

· The inability to come to grips with cultural pluralism and accept the peoples of the world as they are.

The other idea is that the modern world and its technological majesty is equal to the challenges of the future without any subjective dalliance into the mystical or metaphysical. American educator John Dewey and current futurist Alvin Toffler represent part of an army of defenders of modernity.

Dewey’s commencement address at Smith College in 1890 touches the feelings of modern man. “Science,” he said, “had expelled God from Nature, and Nature in ceasing to be divine, ceases to be human.” Toffler sees us in The Third Wave (1980) of history. The first wave was the Agricultural Revolution, the second wave the Industrial Revolution, and now we are in the third wave the Technological Revolution. He announces nothing will be as it once was putting an exclamation point to Dewey’s declaration.

Such defenders choose to see the march of science as inevitable; that the intellectual and moral crises of the modern world presents more opportunity than danger, more gain than loss, more good than bad.

Ambivalent man, knowing not which way to turn, counters by discovering a remarkable capacity to continually reinvent himself. One instrument of reinvention is for man to run from nature and himself, to deny the reality of his confusion. Self-escape is a matter of habit and the heart. This has given way to the divided self, which is so prominent today.

The 17th century English poet John Donne aptly expresses the process of separation and individuation. Donne lived in a world where the ties of kinship obligation were already loosening. Pilgrims cut themselves loose from British tyranny and their feudal village obligations and colonized America. Individualism, a word actually coined by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th century, was the driving force of these early colonizers in the 17th century. Four centuries later, individualism remains the primary American driving force in context if not in content.

Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America (1835):

“Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends (which) leaves the greater society to look after itself.”

We are now witnessing a further progression of that withdrawal, the withdrawal from family and friends into the crippling torpor of self–estrangement and self–negation. “We have met the enemy,” as cartoonist Walt Kelley’s Pogo reminds us, “and he is us!”

What we see, especially in America, is that man has separated himself from everything, from God, country, culture, state, community, family and friends, from his roots. Left is the naked self in an alienated world. That world defines itself in terms of progress, or what succeeds, not what fails, what is gained, not what is lost. It is the world of technology. God, too, has come in for quite a bashing, replaced largely by apathy or nonchalant agnosticism.

Creationists, who have every right to believe as they do in the literal word of the Bible, can find scant support as the Darwinian imagery of survival of the fittest strikes a more responsive cord with progressives.

“Making it” is the new god, while faith has taken a tumble. Man has lost his power to believe, and with it the ability to see beyond his narrow purpose. He can’t distinguish what he wants to believe from what he should believe. Like a stranger in a crowd, urban Americans manage a passable existence only because they don’t know what to believe. If they knew what to believe, they would be beating down their neighbor’s door to share their discovery. Instead, they encapsulate themselves in walled prisons with eight foot fences, double dead–bolted locked doors, electronic surveillance security systems, and cell phones programmed to call “911” at a moment’s notice.

As the German sociologist Max Weber has reflected, “The magic has gone out of the world, and with it, the spiritual certainty of man.” The disenchantment of the world has progressed to the disenchantment of man. Modern man ignores this, however, as he gambles everything on science and technology to make matters right:

· The miraculous cure,

· The fail–safe strategic weapons system,

· The life–enhancing drug,

· The happiness pill.

But is this likely? With the death of the magical, can the burden of man’s authenticity be so shifted?

Science and technology are treated interchangeably as if the same thing, but they are not. Science is about discovery. Technology is about harnessing science, or about power and control. Science has no agenda. It explores the unknown as an end in itself, while technology always has a definite agenda: that is, to convince, you, the consumer to buy what it has to sell.

What science and technology have in common is little sense of conscious constrain or, indeed, of ultimate consequences. Were this not so there would be,

· No planet threatening nuclear arsenals,

· No world wide depletion of natural resources

· No faulty and out of balance ecosystems.

Technology demonstrates the baser instincts of man, an appetite for more, more control, power, influence, more of everything including money. Technology is short term, expedient, application oriented, bottom line responsive.

Science is long term, impractical, intuitive and responsive only to its own contemplative lights. With such differing agendas, ironically, many scientists and their respective institutions of research have climbed into bed with technologists so that it is hard to tell one from the other. The English poet Matthew Arnold depicts this dilemma as “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.”

Belief, which is so crucial to life, is not a product of intellect, but of the human heart. The heart cannot be manufactured. Technology can kill the heart, but never create it.

Everything is false here. Science scoffs at those who claim to have a soul. Spirit is given short shrift. If the soul exists, scientists persist quantify it!

Meanwhile, technology builds its elaborate systems outside of man, not inside him. Like another uniform or hair shirt, technology creates a world that looks good, but doesn’t necessarily feel good, because it fails to touch man’s inner life. Without that spark, without enchantment in man’s nature, his soul shrivels and dies. He may have everything and nothing at all, for he is on automatic pilot, existing, not living. God is dead to him and the magic of God that once was so critical to his nature is gone as well! Man feels as if part of a global village wandering in space and going nowhere.

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