at the behest of a general feeling I was getting from the content and timbre of not a few of the emails.
And I made it clear that we needed to do some etymological dismantling before I began.
I was specifically recalling a class I had taken that cited in detail, the castle theory of history. A theory we can talk about later. It's also known as ubiquity. There is even a book called Ubiquity. Good stuff. Can I move on here? The main thrust of the talk was about competing epistemologies.
As a lazy, whiny, self-pitying, self-indulgent, and weak-willed lay-historian of the bar stool variety I enjoy asking the paralysis inducing questions like "What's it all about?"
In my "research" I think that it is fair to say that we have seen the rise of one form of epistemology and that one form of epistemology is meant to bestow absolute metaphysical primacy upon the empirical, the quantifiable and what is quantifiably demonstrable and it completely and totally rejects any and all realities outside the ontological plane of the physical universe.
I made it clear that the beginning of this kind of epistemology, kind of goes back to William of Ockham who confused ideas which inhabited the intellect, with the subjective images that inhabited the imagination. And now we have a competing idea because (and this is who I subscribe to - and I'm not saying you have to) Aquinas in the Summa makes it very clear that images only capture things in their singularity but ideas capture things in their universality.
(Side Note: Someone actually wrote to me quoting Jodie Foster from the movie "Contact" whose character in the film cites Ockham's Razor, which this person quoted to me so as to prove that "my theory of history" was too complicated, so a simpler "theory" had to be "more correct". Clarification: I wasn't describing a theory of history, I was just describing...HISTORY and COMPETING IDEAS...I swear...)
So where was I?
Why is that Important?
Well, it's Important Because If Ockham didn't make that distinction IDEAS were just impressions on the imagination from sense perception and this epistemological confusion lead Ockham to reject universals.
So he ended up having to deny the objective Character of God, which was a self-evident cornerstone of society for hundreds of years - but - If you look at the word for faith in the New Testament, it is Pistis which means "Proof", especially evidentiary proof. But Ockham can't make any kind of evidentiary claims to faith because he has denied the objective character of God, so he was left to conclude that faith is blind.
This new epistemology came to be known as Nominalism which led to the bifurcation of epistemology into what is quantifiably and empirically demonstrable and what is believed. So what we're dealing with is the belief, and it is a belief, that ALL things quantifiable, all things empirical represent the totality of reality.
So everything that defies quantification (for example: GOD, the good, the soul) are relegated to impotent and ambiguous subjectivism.
This epistemological rigidity underpins SCIENTISM, which is the belief that the universal imposition of science upon all fields of inquiry is somehow a desirable thing and the modern mind, chronocentric as it is, considers this imposition favorable.
And this is the kind of epistemology that we have seen the rise of, especially in the last hundred years.
But it is very dangerous when it's extended beyond its legitimate fields of application because science becomes a rigid template to which even the most complex of entities like man, must conform. The scientific outlook also acknowledges no moral master, it gives no assent to moral or aesthetic judgements.
Look at Anton Shugur in No Country for Old Men.
If you want to see the consequences of this.
"Call it"
"But it doesn't make any sense, it's still you, you're the one flipping the coin."
"I got here the same way the coin did."
Chilling.
BF Skinner, a disciple of this, well he was a behavioralist which is a direct descendant of nominalism said that it "dehomunclises man." He meant it in a good way.
And Dennis Diderot, compiler of the encyclopaedia, the enlightenment thinker himself wanted to represent, in his own words - "gnostic doctrines, presented as revolutionary doctrines." And the enlightenment was the crucible for all modern sociopolitical utopian movements.
And all of these movements demonstrate clearly, the dangers of scientism in the context of governance because science invariably becomes an oppressor because the scientifically regimented state must jettison the concepts of freedom and diginity because they are unquantifiable.
Do I really need to cite examples of this?
William Golding, whose optimism was rivaled only by other utopianists of his day wrote after World War II
"I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head."
So the citizen in the scientifically regimented state becomes little more than an amalgam of behavioral repertoires whose every thought feeling and idea is the product of external stimuli and from this scientistic vantage point the populace's motivations can be calculated and systematized thereby allowing those few conditioners who are accountable to no moral master to develop economic and technological stimuli that can produce the desired patterns of mass behavior and such a societal model is known as technocracy which is a society (in classical political terms) in which technically trained experts by virtue of their specialised knowledge are in the dominant political and economic institutions.
Aldhous Huxley called it the scientific dictatorship, the rule of scientism. And by science I mean the modern form of science, which is very Faustian.
Thought Experiment:
If I was to ask you to group the following four things into two groups of two, how would you group them?
1. Science
2. Religion
3. Magic
4. Technology
Most people make the Magic/Religion, Science/Technology combo. I did. But the fact is that Modern Technology has more to do with Magic and Science has more to do with Religion.
This guy explains it better.
Science before the rise of nominalism acknowledged the existence of universals.
This goes back to Protagoras - man is the measure of all things
actually it's Gnostic - man facilitates his own salvation through his own cognitive powers
actually it's Promethean - man is the arbiter of his own moral precepts through technology, a technique, a craft
actually it's Luciferian - Man is God without God, he'll resculpt morally himself.
See Genesis Chapter 3 for details regarding this.
You guys have enough moralising here?
Now get me off of these folding chairs my Mom just sent me a text message.
