EXCERPT -- The Worker, Alone!

EMBRACING A PARADIGM SHIFT

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

© May 4, 2015

“The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by the problem solving.”

—Thomas S. Kuhn, American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science

There is a discernible contrast between the reality of the worker’s life today and its historical antecedence. The worker is at once a collection of atoms living its own conscious life “for itself,” and at the same time the unconscious agent of change. Since workers are not, in fact, free, but could not live without the conviction that they are, it is better that they understand what goes on as they do, than to seek to subvert such common sense beliefs.

“Happy ignorance” rules the head if not the heart of most workers. Even so, there is movement against the grain, now a slight tremor but rapidly building. The focus of this natural fault line is apparent — the worker, alone!

“Great men” do not move workers from their epicenter, but “important people” do appear when discontinuity leads to shock waves of catastrophe. These people are less important than they may suppose, but neither are they shadows. They embody the strengths and weaknesses, the passions and dreams, the nightmares and madness of their times. They step out of the darkness and display wisdom. They appear when rhetoric is reduced to rubble. Wisdom is not a matter of pedigree or credentials, not a matter of accumulated knowledge or experience, wisdom is a way of thinking creatively unencumbered with the known or with what has worked before.

Given this, the deciding factor when it comes to going against the grain takes courage.  Evidence of this courage was displayed by professional baseball player, Curtis Flood when he sued Major League Baseball for the right to collective bargain for himself.

When Flood came to Marvin Miller, Director of the Players Association of Major League Baseball, he could see the athlete’s mind was made up. “I told him,” recalls Miller, “that given the courts’ history of bias toward the owners and their monopoly, he didn’t have a chance in hell of winning.  “More important than that, I told him even if he won, he’d never get anything out of it—he’d never get a job in baseball again.”

Flood asked Miller if it would benefit other players. “I told him, yes, and those to come.”  He said, “Then let’s do it!”

Flood won, he was, as Miller predicted out of baseball, and professional athletes have been basking in Flood’s courage ever since.

To put “the worker, alone” in perspective, permit this brief excursion. The working man’s faith in ideas has controlled his lot far more than he might believe. Belief is the most powerful motivator known to man.

In the Western world, workers once had a deep commitment to an ancient faith, Roman Catholicism. That faith has eroded in the last 500 years, with some insisting workers have become amoral. Closer to the truth, workers have changed. They have adapted to stress and accelerating demands not always wisely perhaps, but inevitably. Change is never born in the void.

Religion for centuries played its part in the persistent pursuit of the spiritual truth treating secular truth as if the enemy as specialization became increasingly dominant, which required people to be educated and enlightened and to live in the “now” as opposed to a focus on the hereafter.

The Church argued it, alone, understood the “inner rhythms,” the silent march of things. Only those who understood this “truth” knew what could or could not be achieved, what should or should not be attempted. The “Doctors of the Church” believed they alone held the key to secular success as well as spiritual salvation.  Omniscience belonged to God alone, and they were His agents. Only by immersing ourselves in His Word dare we hope for wisdom.

Against this cultural inculcation, another truth emerged, empirical or practical wisdom. This is knowledge of the inevitable: of what, given our world of order, could not but happen; or conversely, of how things cannot be, or could not have been. The rare capacity for seeing this we call a “sense of reality.” This has been the domain of science and the scientist.

There is hostility against believers today in the United States, especially among young people, the so-called “millennials.” They see people of faith as judgmental, hypocritical, old-fashioned, or simply out of touch, according to social commentator David Brooks. Yet, between the doubters and the believers, Brook’s writes,

“There is a silent majority who experience a faith that is attractively marked by combinations of fervor and doubt, clarity and confusion, empathy and demand.”

Why should it be any different for faith? Is this not the age of ambivalence?

Spiritual and secular truth, truths of the heart and mind, spirit and reason, religion and science, have been warring with each other for centuries. Men of God insist the human intellect is but a feeble instrument when pitted against the power of divine forces; that rational explanations of human conduct seldom explain anything. Secular truths are inadequate if only because they ignore man’s “inner” experience. A high value is set on family life and on the superiority of the heart over the head, the moral over the intellectual. Notice as economics evolved to competition as opposed to cooperation, theology devolved to science, while the heart and the head no longer experienced comfort in the same body.

By the curious supposition of secular humanists that the 21st century represents life after faith, the rhetoric used continues to sound less like liberation and more like defeat.  It would seem that the language they choose to use betrays their emotional agenda as the talk centers on the “death of God” and the “loss of faith,” and not on the rebirth of reason and the achievement of truth.  Read Voltaire or Nietzsche, Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris and you will find ethical, philosophical and scientific arguments against belief but little clarity on what these humanists advocate. 

Men of science stand apart. They hold that only by patient empirical observation can reliable knowledge be obtained; that this knowledge, even then, is always inadequate and incomplete, but that it must be sought.

The solitary thinker draws a gloomy picture of the impotence of the human will against the rigid laws of the universe. Yet men of science display the same vanity of human passion as they attempt to uncover its mysteries, while failing to comprehend much less explain the bases of their irrational actions and feelings.

They aspire to reduce man to a manageable lot, to a condition of predictability, where passionless man can no longer be frustrated, humiliated or wounded. Men of science have a near metaphysical belief in logical detachment, whereas the religious have an equally metaphysical belief in supernatural detachment.

Doctors of the church and men of science represent the spiritual and secular half of the same whole. Both long for a universal explanatory principle, composed of the bits and pieces of the furniture of the universe, which may be reduced to a single unifying design. From their respective vantage points, the quest for a unifying theory of the universe and a quest for the “Holy Grail” appear to be equally elusive.

They are men, like all working men, and therefore their personal and professional lives are inescapably a tangled web of unresolved issues, conflicts and savage battles between their gifts as thinkers and their passionate ideals; between what they are and what they purport to be. If you have any doubt how human men and women of science are, read Brenda Maddox’s “Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA” (2002) and “The Double Helix” (1968) by James Watson.

The humanness of scientists is illustrated by Mario Livio’s “Brilliant Blunders” (2014), where he traces the great scientific blunders of such leading lights as Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle and Albert Einstein, all of whom are known for their great discoveries. 

David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers in “When Science & Christianity Meet” (2003) ask the question:

Have science and Christianity been locked in ethical combat for the past 2,000 years, or has their relationship been one of existence, encouragement and support?  

Both views have been vigorously defended, and both have been rejected as oversimplification of the clearly human conflict through the ages between faith and reason, fact and value, longing for immortality and the assertion of reality coherence.  The Christian focus on existence is said to be outside of time whereas the focus of science, in contrast, is inside of time.    

Science consists of facts and theories, which are born in different ways. Facts are true or false, which are discovered through experimentation, whereas theories are free creations of the human mind, intended to describe our understanding of nature, or in my case, human nature. Theories are tools and need not be precisely true in order to be useful. It is easy to argue against theories based upon one’s own experience, but it is much more difficult to argue against facts, which in science can be replicated and therefore corroborated.

At no time in history has there been such a gathering of scientists with such powers of insight — with the uncanny ability to probe and differentiate — as now, and yet, on balance, never have so many displayed such palpable ignorance! Society is lost because too often theories are treated as facts by scientists as well as laymen, which is unfortunate. Einstein concurs. He writes, “The more one chases after the quanta, the better they hide themselves.”

Could it be that man seeks too much, that he overestimates his capacities? If only the most gifted of men displayed a little humility and realized that conflict is natural and harmony artificial, and paradise on earth is not the absence of struggle but its requisite.

From the beginning of recorded history, workers have struggled to find truth, failing to realize truth, outside of nature, is relative. What is truth to you may not be truth to me. Religion has been at the forefront to carry workers on this journey. This has unwittingly devolved and turned intimacy into contractual matters to be litigated. David Brooks writes,

“There must be something legalistic in the human makeup, because cold, rigid unambiguous, unparadoxical belief is common, especially considering how fervently the scriptures oppose it.”

Religion and science combine to be “apostles of despair.” Both speak with the same angry irony, both are deeply skeptical of each other’s powers. They have lost faith with faith. 

Organized religions seem hardly religious at all smitten by modernity, struggling to remain relevant somehow thrown off their stride by dynamic progressive change, when man, himself, has essentially not changed at all, and therefore needs what religion has always provided, which is a sanctuary from contemporary madness.

Could the cause be our dwindling religious inheritance over the last two centuries that accounts for the gradual disintegration of the bildungsroman as a life ideal?   Is Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov representative of a universe of growing tragedy and depravity in which evil and suffering are not eradicable accidents but deeply woven into the texture of our being?   

Religious leaders appear out of gas, pusillanimous warriors.  They fail to see that spiritual need (theology) and secular demand (science) are complementary forces. Einstein put it succinctly, “Science without religion is tame, religion without science is blind.” The clergy seem less certain of their role in postmodern society than the average worker does of his.  A disconnect between them has resulted.  Could it be that the church is more interested in its survival than its mission?

When illiteracy was the norm in Europe through the first thousand years of the Christian era, magnificent cathedrals were built to capture the imagination of the faithful in compensation for this limitation. The clergy reign supreme even over monarchs and princes.

With Gutenberg’s invention (15th century) of movable type in printing, followed by Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible, (16th century) literacy spread like a rash across Europe. The Bible was translated into indigenous languages, literacy flourished, and common cultures were born. Feudalism and the peasant class was eroding, while capitalism and a market economy was driving people off the land and out of guilds into factories and crowded cities.

Nation states evolved as national cultures grew out of common languages and values. Kingdoms and empires became disenchanted with the temporal authority of the Church. Meanwhile, the Catholic collective conscience of feudalism was now threatened with the Protestant individualistic conscience of capitalism.  

This led to breakaway sects such as the Puritans (17th century) who left their known European society to embrace the unknown in the New World in order to freely practice their faith. A new society was taking root on the American continent.  The American and French Revolution (late 18th century) were fought in quest of individual political freedom, and economic and social justice. America had a series of wars with Great Britain, but ultimately established a republic as a constitutional democracy and a new nation-state. The French went through a Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, and experienced great instability.

Stepping into that instability was Napoleon Bonaparte, declaring himself as Emperor. The Napoleonic Wars (early 19th century) followed until a confederacy of European nations defeated him at Waterloo in Belgium. Fifty years later, the American Civil War (late 19th century) led to the Emancipation Proclamation, liberating Negro slaves from bondage, and inaugurating the Industrial Revolution. Factories, machines, steel mills, railroads and a plethora of inventions signaled a new day. It also marked the rise of the secular and decline of the spiritual. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman captured this sentiment with his statement, “God is dead!” God wasn’t dead. He just changed His uniform.

Believers simply moved away from religious doctrine to a secular belief system placing a higher value on ritual and religious practices than on traditional formal tenets of religion.  This proved as true for Catholics as Protestants.

Nietzsche died (1900) in the dawn of the 20th century, the most violent century in the history of man with WWI, WWII, the atomic bombing of Japan, the annihilation of six million Jews, the Korean War, Vietnam War, and a number of other wars across the globe.

The Austro-Hungarian and Persian empires were split up, the reparations of the Versailles Peace Treaty after WWI was felt to be so extreme by the Kaiser’s Germany that the treaty opened the door to Adolf Hitler and Nazis Germany, and WWII.

An explosion in technology followed WWII, including space exploration, and the boilerplate for the Information Age (21st century), which has become inadvertently an anxious age, an unconscious age, and an age seemingly in total retreat from the spiritual self. This has resulted in man’s self-estrangement, making him less the master of his fate and more its prawn. Rather than find a new connection with these iterative changes, the Church has relegated itself to the role of ritualistic entertainer, which has left man sensing abandonment.

Religion as distraction has continued to foster the “should be” qualities worshippers’ desire. There is a certain irony to this, a manifest dishonesty and deception. It is an expedient design. It has not always been so.  Religion had vitality in the 16th century when a single cleric, Martin Luther, went against the grain of the dominant figure of the culture of the time, The Holy See of Rome, His Holiness, Pope Leo X, to post his 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg chapel. This was unprecedented. Here a young cleric was putting his career and comfort in jeopardy for what he believed. He had little support, and was immediately labeled a heretic. Some called him a madman, pointing out the emotional character to his temperament.

He was all alone. He made no apology for his act as he believed his regeneration could only come from within, and that the source of that inner life was concealed in his immortal soul.  The enormity of this act is difficult to comprehend today. Clearly, it was not motivated by self-interest, or to justify disobedience to the Holy See. It was an act of conscience and conviction, not deviance, an act with a complete willingness to accept the consequences. As an individual, he stepped outside the obedient rank and file and declared himself one with his Creator. Scripture revealed to Luther a loving God, not the God he was programmed to worship. This loving God bestowed on sinful man the free gift of salvation through faith alone. The church’s liturgical dogma necessitating good works to attain salvation was revoked. Luther’s theology went against the grain of accepted Roman Catholic teaching, and cut to the core the hypocritical practice of selling indulgences.

Earning indulgences was proclaimed as a way to avoid Purgatory, and to go straight to heaven upon death. Indulgences were created originally to award believers for their good works.  But the affluent, who had little time or felt little inclination to do good works, bypassed the process by buying indulgences. Indulgences were sold wholesale the way scalpers sell tickets to rock concerts today. The practice was ludicrous, but no one did anything.

The Roman Catholic Church was the most powerful force in Western Europe, indeed, in most of the civilized world. It condoned the practice of selling indulgences presenting a blind eye to the activity until one man, Martin Luther, demonstrated the courage to take on the entire Roman Catholic establishment, by going against the grain.

With that single heroic act, Luther set the chain reaction which would release the worker from “The Dark Ages” of corporate dependency on Holy Mother Church, and plant the seeds for a growing individualism. Western man’s mindset and disposition was thus to undergo radical restructuring.  What is most remarkable about this is that Martin Luther was not a saint, not cast in the mold of the “great man,” not even an especially “learned man,” a man with many of the psycho-sexual flaws of modern man, a man who made the same foot prints as his contemporaries. He was neither a demigod nor a scoundrel, only a man of intense passion and focus. But he was a man of substance whereas shallowness ruled his day as it does ours.

Like workers today, Luther’s contemporaries immersed themselves in the medium of the mundane. Life was taken for granted with the many living in feudalistic dependence on the church, which was quite corrupt at the time, dictating the terms of that dependency.

Being so other-directed, the individual fails to see the absurdity of his dependence. His consciousness is so clearly interwoven with the flow of things that he cannot separate himself from them or their demands.

When workers are caged in standards of truth and falsehood, of reality and the ideal, of the good and the bad, of the central and the peripheral, of the subjective and objective, of the beautiful and the ugly, of movement and rest, of past, present and future, of one and the many, they are kin to the time of Martin Luther.

These are the basic presuppositions of man throughout the ages. Martin Luther could not analyze his predicament from an external vantage point because with change there is only inner resolution. So, the question might be asked, was Luther more conscious of his times than his contemporaries as change agent?

My sense is that he was not, that is, until he visited Rome and saw the corruption first hand. The posting of his 95 theses was to my mind an impulsive act consistent with his temperament, a ways of atoning for his raging distemper. The superficial dominate every age and mask the disturbing tremors few acknowledge unless or until they are shocked into awareness.

Wisdom abhors the superficial. It burrows through “the way things are.” Wisdom is not scientific, but a sensitivity to the circumstances of the times. It is felt!