The Peripatetic Philosopher reflects on VALUE of DIALOGUE in these SHADOWY TIMES:

The Value of Dialogue in these Shadowy Times

 JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© May 27, 2018 (Memorial Day in the USA)

It pleases me that REFLECTIONS OF A THURSDAY has generated so much interest.  People have been responding from many perspective, one mentioning that Yuval Noah Harari in SAPIENS (2015) is writing from his cage.  Of course, he is! We all are!  It is why I have written a book on the subject (soon to be released in a 2^nd edition).  That should not, however, discourage us from letting a little light into the cage. 

The young Israeli historian, who was born in 1976, presents the evidence uncovered by scores of paleontologists and archeologists over the centuries regarding the nature of homo sapien, which is Latin for “wise man.”  

There is little doubt that over the past 2.5 million years, just as other animals have evolved, so has man including several homo species variations before homo sapiens came to dominate.  Harari writes:

Our closest living relatives include the chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans.  The chimpanzees are closest.  Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters.  One became the ancestor of the chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

Now, many reading this (which appears on page 5 of SAPIENS) may read no further.  That would be unfortunate.  Homo species of various Latin names, including the familiar Neanderthals, were distributed across the earth.   

Neanderthals settled in the cold climate of Europe whereas our homo sapien species originated from East and Southern Africa.  Harari has a picture in his book of a blond Neanderthal girl 400,000 years ago. 

In that same time frame, homo sapiens developed weapons to hunt big game, whereas most homo species up to that point were scavengers along with hyenas and jackals, and ate plants, berries and insects, and killed small prey. 

The nature of the food supply determined many things including the individual size of the homo species and their muscular construction as well as the size of their brains.  For example, Neanderthals were quite large and muscular with a brain even larger than homo sapiens, but homo sapiens developed language which strengthened the integrity of their primitive community, and allowed them to exchange thoughts, ideas and strategies.  The stimulus for language was gossip, which is what our shadowy society still rides on today. 

Long before Charles Darwin was on the scene homo species were adapting to circumstances.  Harari writes:

On the island of Java, in Indonesia, lived homo soloensis who were suited to life in the tropics   . . . On the small island Flores . . . Humans reached Flores when the sea level was exceptionally low, and the island was easily accessible from the mainland.  When the sea rose again, some people were trapped on the island, which was poor in resources.  Big people, who need a lot of food, died first.  Small fellows survived much better.  Over the generations the people of Flores became dwarfs . . . (They) reached a maximum height of 3.5 feet and weighed no more than fifty-five pounds.  They were nevertheless able to produce stone tools, and even managed occasionally to hunt down some of the island’s elephants – though, to be fair, the elephants were a dwarf species as well.

Once the Cognitive Revolution was well underway some 100,000 years ago, gossip which was mainly about wrong doing, moved into rumor mongering, which in turn gave birth to the press and the 4^th estate, which dominates society today. 

Once the imagination -- homo sapiens demonstrated this quite early -- the insides of these primitive human beings connected with the outside world in imaginative ways.  An ivory figurine was uncovered in a dig of a “lion-man” (pictured in the book) from Stadel Cave in Germany and said to have been created 32,000 years ago.  What makes this fascinating is that the Peugeot Lion on the hood of its automobile appears identical to this earlier “lion-man.” 

TRYING TO MAKE ALL THIS FIT WITH WHAT IS ALREADY THERE

REFLECTIONS OF A THURSDAY was posted somewhat in exasperation.  Sometimes I think we are trapped so deep into our cages that our curiosity, focus and attention is like those ancient ancestors of Java, dwarfed for lack of mental nourishment. 

All history is recent, being no more than 2,000 to 3,000 years old.  In that period, three major religions and cultures sprang out of our imagination: Judaism, Islamism and Christianity. 

For most of my adult life, but mainly in the last thirty years, I have read extensively on all these great religions, and have had an opportunity to visit many of the sites that once their interpreters traveled. 

My life over the last eight decades has seen too many wars without causes, too many attacks on our roots without a rational foundation, and too frequently a retreat into NOWHERE LAND without forethought or reasonable justification. 

As Sir William points out, historian Yuval Noah Harari does not escape of the tag of the cage because in his two books – the second of which I have not yet started – he claims that we will not be the same homo sapiens tomorrow that we are today, suggesting a radical transformation into another species.  It may sell his books, but I don’t think so.

We differ in some ways to poet Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321), but not radically.

Klaus has a problem with Dante and his “Divine Comedy” as well as Dante’s belief system and history.  Yet, Dante essentially invented the Italian language in writing this book.  His Italian was less cumbersome than the Latin, and it lent itself well to a vernacular audience.    

Dante also designed for contemporary society a place called “Purgatory” (or Limbo) that had never been quite brought into fictive focus.  His “Paradise” (Heaven) and “Inferno” (Hell) were peopled with his contemporaries as he scaled the cliffs of that comedy with Virgil, Beatrice, a girl he had loved since he was nine, and St. Barnard. 

Dante’s work was one of the imagination which was not truly appreciated until hundreds of years after its creation.  It spoke then as now to the vagaries of people of every generation. 

Were he not to have been banned from Florence, the city he loved, “The Divine Comedy” likely would never have been composed.  Likewise, had Machiavelli not been ostracized by the Medici’s from Rome, “The Prince” may never have been written, which was a guide to draconian power and authority whereas Dante’s effort was a treatise on the draconian architecture of papal authority, and in the process, loosening the church's hold over the Italian people. 

Dante’s life was on the bubble of the thousand years after Emperor Constantine had decriminalized Christianity in 313 with the Christian faith made the state religion of the Roman Empire in 380.  The year was 1300 when “The Divine Comedy” was published.   

Dante had a problem with the papacy and Roman Catholicism but believed deeply in his Christian God and of Jesus Christ as his savior.  He was alive when the papacy suffered the “Babylonian Captivity” with the papacy moving to Avignon, France with French popes to rule the Catholic Church there for 78 years. 

Machiavelli bridged the 15^th and 16^th century when the Renaissance was in full swing and Roman Catholicism had shifted its emphasis to the humanities which differed with the Christianity that Dante had experienced. 

The Renaissance flourished between the 14^th and 16^th centuries.  Westerners still take pride in its obvious accomplishments.  But the “Golden Age of Islam,” which flourished from the 8^th to the 14^th centuries, supplied much of the intellectual energy of the Renaissance. 

Islam first rescued “The Golden Age of Greece” that had flourished from 300 to 500 BC.  Without this effort, it is doubtful The Renaissance could have built on the works of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. 

Once Rome was sacked in 410, the “Dark Middle Ages” followed until 800 when Emperor Charlemagne of the Holy Roman Empire came to power. 

Moreover, during the “Golden Age of Islam,” people of that faith not only invented the alphabet and numbers, making reading, comprehension and calculations more facile, but were pioneers in engineering, art, architecture, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and many other disciplines, as well as retrieving Ancient Greek poetry, philosophy, drama and science by translating the Greek into Arabic and then into Latin.  A volume of NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND is devoted to this subject (see Kindle). 

What the West is most familiar with is the Jewish Old Testament, and the Christian New Testament.  Like early man was engaged in rumors, and rumors became myths, and myths became beliefs, and beliefs became religions, and religions became Faiths and a gauge to coping, we treat the “Cognitive Revolution” as if it happened only a few generations ago when it is at least a hundred thousands years old. 

We are just in the current iteration of this revolution and just as gullible as our earlier ancestors were with a lot less information. 

It makes little sense for the hubris of the West against the scorn and mistrust of the Middle East in view of our common history.

WHY FAITH, WHY BELIEF, WHY THE OBSESSIVE RETREAT FROM SELF-KNOWING

In the end as in the beginning, man has always been interested in self-preservation.  I say “always” but I’m no longer quite sure.  The Non Sequitur Comic script by Wiley Miller has a person walking off a cliff with his eyes down on his smart phone.  That captures somewhat the essence of our times, that is, being purposelessly oblivious and self-preoccupied.

Now, we have all these new disciplines in neurophysics, neuropsychology and all these other neuroanatomy studies of the mind and its relationship to the intricate circuitry of the brain.  Yet, the irony is that the desultory style of our lives makes one wonder what impact if any these studies and disciplines have in the end.

In all these studies, it is unlikely they will discover the soul although the mind, according to Harari consumes 25 percent of all our energy and is the main factory of the soul. 

Alas, the brain is a very busy place, but some of its circuits are well overused and others appreciably neglected.

This is apparent when it comes to God and Science, material and spiritual pursuits, and yes, faith and beliefs. 

Ken writes eloquently about his faith because it has been there for him in his most trying moments, and has never deserted him no matter how much his reliance on its constant presence.

You can point out the myths that support belief systems, challenge the ideology of their construction, but that does not lessen their spiritual tenacity for the believer.  To believe is to nourish the soul with the energy of a mind that is employed with purpose rather than preoccupied with validation. 

Validation is a hopeless quest because it is other centered when love, which is the foundation of any belief system, is predicated on the belief that we are more than amoeba marking time until we perish.  Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the Double Helix of DNA, attempted to discover the soul, an admitted nonbeliever, and came up with nothing.  He failed because his search was pointless scientist that he was.

Like Ken, I believe in God and am a renegade Irish Roman Catholic.  Again like he is, it was the discipline, the Christian philosophy and ethics of my faith that has guided my life these many decades.  My Catholicism provided me with structure where sincerity, self-awareness and self-acceptance could find a toe hold in my frail spirit, and keep me upright to tool along. 

Proselytizing is not in my nature; nor is rallying others to follow my crusade as it doesn’t exist.  My total effort in writing, and admittedly I’ve not been all that successful, is to introduce others to themselves as belief in God has introduced me to myself.