The Peripatetic Philosopher shares another excerpt:

  WHY EMBRACING A

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 21^st 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."