PARADIGM SHIFT IS SO RARE
JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
© February 5, 2017
REFERENCE:
This is another excerpt from “THE
VELVET GLOVE & IRON FIST”
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 often despite itself. 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 is alone!
"Great men" do not move
workers from their epicenter, but "important people" do appear when
discontinuity leads to shockwaves of catastrophe. These people
are less important than they may be supposed, but neither are they shadows.
They embody the strengths and weaknesses, the passions and dreams, the nightmares
and madness of their times.
These individuals 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, but a way of thinking unencumbered with the known or
with what has worked before. Something
within urges the individual on when he knows it is at great risk to himself and
his security, something that others see as courageous or foolhardy, but
something he sees only as something he must do.
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.
THE TANGLED WEB OF RELIGION,
SCIENCE, HISTORY AND CHANGE
To put this 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 pursuite of 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, emerged another truth, empirical or practical wisdom. This is
knowledge of the symmetry and mystery of Mother
Nature. This truth exists beyond
human suspicion, conjecture and consciousness. The rare capacity to unlock this
truth has been the domain of scientists and science.
There is a lack of religious empathy
for believers in the United States today, especially among young people, the
so-called, "Millennial." 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 intellect. Notice that as economics evolved to
competition as opposed to cooperation and theology devolved to science, 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 to describe this phenomenon sounds less like
liberation and more like defeat.
It would seem that the language humanists choose to
use betrays their emotional agenda as their efforts seem to center more on the
"death of God" and the "loss of faith" instead of on the
rebirth of reason and enlightening truth.
Read Voltaire and Friedrich
Nietzsche, or more recently, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, and you will
find ethical, philosophical and scientific arguments against faith, belief and
religion, but little clarity on what these humanists actually advocate.
Political science scholar Michael Walzer in The
Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (2015)
argues that to summarily reject the religious specter is to be haunted by its counterrevolution.
He asks the question, why do
secular revolutions beget these counter religious revolutions? What is there
about religion that critics of religion fail to understand about these
movements?
The book examines what befell
Ben-Gurion's vision in Israel, Jawaharlal Nehru's in India and Ahmed Ben
Bella's in Algeria.
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 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
tangled in a web of unresolved issues, conflicts and savage battles between their
gifts as thinkers and passionate ideals; between what they are and
and what they purport to be. If
you have any doubt how human men and women of science may behave, read Brenda
Maddox's "Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA" (2002) and "The
Double Helix" (1968) by James Watson.
You will see pettiness not much above sixth graders in grammar school.
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 moral
combat for the past 2,000 years, or has their relationship been one of
conscious coexistence, encouragement and support?
Both views have been vigorously
defended, and both have been rejected as oversimplification of the clearly
palpable human conflict between faith and reason, fact and value, the
irrational longing for immortality and the rational seeking reality coherence.
Christianity bridges existence with a focus outside of
time whereas the focus of science, in contrast, is within the limits 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 associations of
facts and fantasies, 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 — and yet, on balance, never have so
many displayed such profound 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,
struggling as it does to remain relevant, while somehow being thrown off stride
by dynamic progressive change, while man, himself, has essentially not changed
at all, and therefore needs what religion has always provided, which is
sanctuary from contemporary madness.
Could the cause be our dwindling
religious inheritance over the last two centuries that accounts for the gradual
disintegration of one's spiritual education as the guiding force to a life
ideal?
Is Dostoyevsky's novel, The
Brothers Karamazov (1880) 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 fainthearted 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."
