Soul of Man Under Scientism: Part 3

How science, or perhaps more so the reporting of scientific breakthrough, blocks us from a clear understanding of our humanity amidst forms of ‘progress’ that are largely illusory

Finding the least inadequate words

Those who propose science as some kind of definitive answer to the supposedly outmoded concepts of religion are operating from the shallowest imaginable grasp of how language works, what a conceptual framework is, what reason is and how all these phenomena can be made to operate together to create the appearance of an absolute set of foundations where nothing of the kind exists. As with all forms of positivist definitions, all these responses really offer is abstract reasoning based on constructed, often tautological logics. 

Scientists speak of ‘objective facts’ and ‘objective reality’, when in truth their own discipline has already begun to indicate that there may be no such phenomena, that the only ‘reality’ may be that apprehended by the subjective intelligence at a particular, fleeting moment.

Starting from what it is claimed has already been established, science extends its edifices of logic along lines of what looks like progressive thought. But most of the time the logic is simply elongated out of an internal coherence, to create an impressive-looking thread of development. The more fascinating the understandings appear to be, the further we get from the original point of embarkation, thus further weakening the link with reality. Such explorations are interesting — even vital —but, couched in a language that is inexact, may frequently acquire the semblance of something they are not. 

Quantum mechanics, for example, rapidly approaches a new understanding and definition of reality that may render redundant everything we imagine we ‘know’ from Newtonian physics. When all is said and done, the only ‘reality’ may be consciousness, the capacity to experience phenomena that have no objective existence. 

Peter Wilberg, in his 2008 book The Science Delusion, argues, after Martin Heidegger, that science is the chief religion of the modern world. Wilberg believes that ‘God’ is no more or less than a synonym for ‘consciousness’, and that this is the only ‘reality’ of earthly existence. He describes as ‘quasi-religious myths’ such concepts as dark matter, gravity, the Big Bang and even the very idea of matter itself. His assertions at first glance appear implausible or worse, until you begin to see that, unlike most scientists, he is as vigilantly insightful about the nature of words and concepts as he is about science. Science, he says, is becoming an ‘immaterialistic worldview’, which is to say that, like religion, it deals in things that exist as potential ­— passive potentialities, perceived only subjectively. Matter, he declares, is ‘no more than a mental concept constructed to account for potential tactile dimensions of subjective, sensory experiencing’. Moreover — the point we’ve been chewing over — the idea of science as a dispassionate pursuit of definitive, objective knowledge is fallacious because the very intelligences doing the pursuing are themselves necessarily subjective. Scientists, meanwhile, remain in self-sealing bubbles of thoughts that distract them from what the rest of us think of as reality, or at least distort their view of it.  

Wilberg compares scientific theories to framed pictures, in which everything is taken into account except the frame that prevents the image becoming a pure perspective on reality. By ‘framing’ things, science cuts its subjects off from reality.  He cites Einstein’s warning about ‘concepts’ which, though useful in ordering things, can lead us to forget that they are merely concepts, not ‘a priori givens’. Science, then, substitutes conceptualisations of reality for ‘rea’l things, and then pursues linear paths of logic to create trails of knowledge that make sense by themselves but not necessarily otherwise. Wilberg also believes that the methodologies of modern science in effect preempt the outcomes of experiments and research, because every question is predetermined by the frameworks of particular scientific theories or models and every mission to discover something postulates the outcome in the terms of the prevailing theory. Hence, as it were, science follows tramlines it has set down in the past, and therefore suffers from a diminished capacity to encounter the unexpected or have its thinking changed by developments. Of course, most of the preceding sentences contain paradoxes and contradictions that are semantically all but unavoidable without creating exigent loops of elaborate quasi-mathemathical preciseness that exclude no permutation, like one of the funnier sections from Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt. 

Cumulatively, of course, the discoveries of science have changed the way we live in the world, and largely for the better. But this has done nothing to alter the relationship between any one of us and the great questions of existence.  

The increasingly prevalent idea that science and progress is changing everything to do with how we ought to see ourselves is, for each of us in the deepest part of his humanity, an illusion that comes to us by word-of-mouth, a rumour of encroaching human omniscience that really adds nothing to what I or you truly know, but at the same time steals our hope of attaining whatever it is we truly desire. 

We sense that there are men elsewhere for whom such developments mean something fundamental, and so we too can briefly or intermittently feel reassured. But even these men — were we to seek them out — are likely to be fundamentally unchanged by the isolated ‘progress events’ to which they have access, for they are human too. The discovery events on which they build their careers are existentially speaking taking them nowhere.

Every day, we pick up a newspaper or turn on the radio and hear about some new development or achievement over nature or ignorance. And in some part of our minds we become a little more convinced that this breakthrough shows that the human race has taken over the role it once allotted to God. Very soon, we think in some part of ourselves, we may be able to describe ourselves as the creators of ourselves! But underneath this exciting and fleeting impulse, another understanding silently insinuates itself: that all of this ‘progress’ is, for me at least, futile, that it all must lead nowhere rather than somewhere. Strangely, in spite of my superficial sense of satisfaction, I realise at some deeper level that it does not promise to rectify my incompleteness or heal my woundedness. The victory is somehow distant from my needs. It is not merely that the flowering of such ‘progress events’ will occur mostly after my departure (though this is true too) but that they appear to offer superficial balm to the wounds of my humanity, and the inevitability of my death. They do not strike me as real answers to any question I have. I feel, therefore, no real sense of personal triumph. Something has been added, yes, but I’m not sure what, or what exactly it has been added to. It is just another episode in the serial narrative of man’s progress towards omnipotence, a story with no conceivable end, within the terms of the overall logic, except apocalypse. My life, man’s life, will still end in the earth. 

But the problem is not so much with what science says, or lays claim to one day discovering, so much as the assumptions which arise from reductive, sensationalist or ideologically motivated reportage of science in our mainstream cultures, which distort the meaning of such developments in such a way as to undermine existing understandings in ways that lack any reasonable foundation.  It has to do with a speculative narrative about the future, which impose on the present determinations that are unsupported by the scientific facts, pre-empting both the question of the supposed inevitability of certain forms of ‘progress’ — because they are ‘progressive’ — and priming expectations as to what may and what ought to happen. 

Scientists, by and large, understand each other’s codes and shorthands, and therefore — even while seeming to lack awareness that they are codes and shorthands — are capable of seeing through linguistic confusions and ambiguities to the actual meaning of a new discovery in its place or ‘frame’. The same is not true of the average layperson. Every day, moment by moment, we receive information that adds to our sense of humankind moving inexorably towards omniscience and omnipotence, and do not realize that, although most of us have done nothing to further this objective, we feel entitled — indeed obliged — to insinuate for ourselves some sense of achievement from it. Largely, if not entirely, this is an illusion. Not only are most of us uninvolved in any advancement of human knowledge or control of reality, but the process of progress itself is usually not as we understand it. A new frontier in science is announced, and the popular media extrapolate from this a judgment concerning, perhaps, the most fundamental nature and situation of man. We receive this judgment and feel changed or even bound by it, and yet have almost no understanding of the nature of the advance that has been made, which is usually described in the most cursory and approximate fashion, using a mixture of scientific jargon and everyday language. Yet, a warm glow of satisfaction suffuses each of us who hears, because mankind, which includes us, has made another giant leap forward.  

By the time we receive the information, it has already been subjected to a series of reductions. Science requires to maintain its own languages in order for its practitioners to communicate with one another in a manner that preserves meanings in relatively sterile conditions, so as to enter into questions which of their nature are far too complex for the vocabulary of popular discussion or comprehension. Herein lies the risk of perhaps the most serious reduction. The words which science employs to interpret phenomena so they can be worked on by different scientists are by definition not the ordinary words by which humans in their workaday situations understand quotidian reality. Scientific words take things out of the realm of everyday understanding, and thus remove them from any prospect of verification according to criteria that are not of the instant scientific process. Hence the initial reduction of verbalising in a hodgepodge of everyday language and usually crude attempts at presenting mathematical or scientific formulae for a general audience, when the scientific words become translated into a language of the everyday, almost invariably by people who are not scientists and have their own ideological ideas about what they would like science to be saying to the world. 

A few years ago, I noticed a clear-cut example of this syndrome in the reporting of details of a new book co-written by the eminent scientist Stephen Hawking. The book, The Grand Design, was hailed in the media as declaring God redundant once and for all.  ‘Hawking outlines idea of God's redundancy in latest book’, declared, for example, the headline in The Irish Times, a newspaper for which at the time I wrote a weekly column.

As a longtime student of Irish Times headlines, I found this construction most interesting. Had the context been virtually any other — politics, sport, finance — there would have been quotation marks around the word ‘redundancy’ — in order to distance the newspaper from the idea that it was indicating editorial agreement with the proposition in question. Here, because the issue at hand was ‘God’s redundancy’, there appeared to be a certain sanguinity about presenting what was at best no more than the opinion of a scientist as an authoritative statement by someone who might popularly be understood as proposing definitive views on the matter. Why? Because religious faith is not something requiring to be recognised as having a rational status comparable to that of science, and because Stephen Hawking was (he has since died) the kind of scientist with whom no rational-minded person should seek to argue.  The headline was therefore weaponising Hawking’s reputation for ideological purposes. Had Hawking questioned, for example, the opinions of a fellow scientist like Richard Dawkins, the headline would likely have incorporated a distancing device along the lines of, ‘Hawking claims Dawkins’ views “redundant”’ or, perhaps, ‘Hawking says Dawkins is “wrong”’. 

But perhaps because the Irish Times is a ‘secular’ newspaper edited by ‘rational’ people, such strict adherence to the house style might here have suggested that Hawking’s reported pronouncement was being treated with skepticism, and that just wouldn’t do. The use of the ambiguous phrase ‘the idea of’ (God’s redundancy) sought to fudge the issue somewhat.  An ‘idea’ can, in theory, be right or wrong, but anyone could immediately intuit what the headline was saying: ‘There you have it — the oracle has spoken’. 

Since Hawking could at most be deemed to be offering another opinion on a subject that has taxed the greatest scientists and philosophers of every age of man, it was unlikely that any such conclusion could be held up as definitive. But such is the authority acquired over a lifetime by a scientist with the stature and reputation of Hawking that his words and thoughts — even when loosely expressed — can have a profound influence on culture, including upon bystanders who may have but the crudest understanding of the nature of his work. 

This kind of thing surfaces in the media virtually every day nowadays. It is as if, all the time, the legacy communications media are seeking to carry out a role that nobody has allocated them: to evangelise for a new form of ‘rationalism’, and to dissipate in the population any residual forms of thought that fail to harmonise with these desired conditions. 

The report in the Irish Times, which originated from Reuters news agency, turned out to be inconclusive by comparison with the headline. Still, it began: ‘God did not create the universe and the Big Bang was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book’.

It soon turned out that the author(s) of the report had not read the book, but merely cited from an extract published by The Times of London. It also emerged that the book was actually co-written with US physicist Leonard Mlodinow. 

Hawking and Mlodinow being eminent scientists, it’s reasonable to expect that what they had to say would be reasonable and intelligent. I subsequently read their book and found it fascinating. I’m happy to report that The Grand Design contains a great deal more substance than was attributed to it by this report in the Irish Times, which unwittingly indicated that it amounted to nothing more than a circuitous series of semantically tautological statements.

For example, the Irish Times article elaborated on the Hawking/Mlodinow thesis: 

‘Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing’. 

What could this be taken to mean? Words are what we use to understand difficult concepts, so it is important to be able to see when they are being used loosely or precisely. Is it possible blandly to accept the idea of ‘a law of gravity’ as pre-existing the ‘creation’ of a universe? Why should this be presumed? If the universe had never come into being, could gravity be assumed to exist at all? Who might assume it? Can we say that gravity, for example, came into being before matter? If so, what was its source? What, indeed, was its function? 

Why would anyone, scientist or not, have a right to assume that something like gravity can be taken for granted — that gravity would have existed even though nothing else did?  Clearly, gravity comes to us as part of the package of elements comprising the reality out of which the universe emerged. Indeed, gravity arises from the interaction of bodies, and without such bodies, i.e. matter, there would have been no universe, in which case gravity could have existed as a theoretical concept only — a situation in which there would have been nobody to postulate any theory about anything. 

For that matter, is gravity merely a ‘law’? Surely the idea of ‘laws’ is something man brought to these questions? Before the law, wasn’t there something else, from which the law emerged? Is gravity not a force of some kind? If so, again, where did it come from? 

Yes, the universe converged — is still converging — under the force of gravity, but to imagine that this can be deemed a pre-existing first-cause phenomenon which disposes of all other questions relating to the origin of the universe is an absurdity beyond belief. I don’t suggest that there is a single scientist in the world who would seriously posit such a notion, but this does not prevent journalists from putting such a sentence in supposedly objective reports of allegedly magisterial scientific findings. 

To say that ‘because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing’ is like saying that because the lights in the room are on there is no necessity for us to use our eyes. Both the eyes and the light are given, and together amount to the possibility of seeing.  Similarly, gravity and matter, which in their interaction helped to generate the universe, are inextricable elements of the same mystery. 

At the least, I would suggest, the Hawking/ Mlodinow analysis required to be amended to read: ‘The universe can and will create itself from nothing except gravity and matter derived from . . . ‘ Here, the attempt at definition breaks down, but might be continued with perhaps something like ‘. . . another universe’. And so we begin the same exercise with this other universe, and so on to infinity. 

It may seem that I am playing tricks with words. Yes, but so is the author of the sentence, ‘Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing’, though, because it is shielded by the reputation of a world-famous scientist, this trickery comes across as something else. 

Incidentally, how can something ‘create itself’? Does it do the creating first or wait for itself to have been created (by itself) before it makes a start on this endeavour of self-creation? In other words, does the word ‘create’ not itself imply something or someone pre-existing? If a spontaneous eruption, of what from what? 

Bang on cue, here’s another quotation, this time directly from The Grand Design: 

‘Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.’

This might make sense if we could be given any idea of what ‘spontaneous creation’ might be like or amount to, especially (as here) in the absence of clarity as to what kind of ‘creation’ process is at issue. Surely this phrase in itself is merely an evasion of mystery, because it invokes two concepts — spontaneity and creation — which can have no meanings or conceivable existence in speaking of a reality (pre-creation) which remains undefined and undescribed. What is ‘nothing’? To say that ‘spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing’ is to propose some kind of alchemy, which may well be demonstrable by reference to the context out of which the spontaneous event arose, but I don’t see how it rules out the possibility of some force or actor making this process happen. The sentence employs several concepts rooted in the reality with which we, its would-be interpreters, are to varying extents familiar — and therefore already understand in some way by the empirical  and rational laws that we have absorbed. But it is not credible to believe we can simply transplant these concepts to an utterly unknowable ‘reality’, such as ‘nothing’ or ‘nothingness’, and expect them to follow the patterns we might expect from them in this reality now. 

We cannot know what ‘nothing’ is like, except perhaps to say that it is like nothing on earth, which is to say like nothing we know of already, which is to say very unlike the idea of ‘nothing’ we on earth have arrived at. We have no means of conceiving of nothing in its absolute sense, for if we had, this very process of conception would be proof that the existence of nothing is actually an impossibility. For by meditating on nothing and summoning a conception of it, we would have caused it to cease to be nothing and become instead the subject of a thought, which itself cannot be nothing and could not exist in a void. It is clear that someone — the scientists, their editors or the journalists reporting on their ‘findings’ is playing tricks with words. On the evidence of the Irish Times report, The Grand Design appeared to offer merely a series of empty assertions, the equivalent of its authors endorsing the idea of magic while denying the existence of the magician. 

Another quotation, again from the book: 

‘It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going’.

This, again, was uncritically conveyed, as though it made total sense. But what does ‘not necessary’ mean? It has the hint of the weasel about it. What does the word ‘God’ signify for the authors of The Grand Design — or indeed for the author of the newspaper report? What do Hawking/ Mlodinow and/or the journalist(s) who constructed this report imagine their readers will understand by the word ‘God’? This is important, because as the word stands it must be assumed to invoke the most simplistic imaginable concept of ‘God’ — perhaps an elderly bearded man sitting on a cloud and waving a magic wand in what he is about to declare to be the air.  This ‘old codger conjurer’ is rather typically what scientistic-minded scientists and others tend to employ when invoking the idea of God. 

Who/what, if not a god — i.e. a pre-existing force or being — might have ‘lit’ the notional ‘blue touch paper’? Presumably it was indeed ‘lit’?  With what? A cosmic cigarette lighter (which came from where?)? Who made the touch paper blue? What is touch paper? Oh — a metaphor! What is a metaphor and where does it come from? What is blue and where does is emanate from? Is there anything, indeed, that, in the absence of the human retina, can be described as blue? 

And, by the way, if someone or something else — other than ‘God’, that is — lit the blue touch paper, why are we not entitled to call this ‘something else’ by the name ‘God’? That’s all human beings ever did in the first place: devise a term to summon up first causes, while having not the faintest clue what those first causes actually were. From this perspective, I would question whether the Hawking/Mlodinow analysis can be said to move the matter forward in the slightest. 

Of course, to say that something is ‘not necessary’ is rather different from saying it is untrue. I may say that it is ‘not necessary’ to have a biro in order to write this article, but this does not mean I could not have written it with a biro. So, even in the eyes of Professors Hawking and Mlodinow, ‘God’ may not be ‘redundant’ after all. ‘God’ might exist or might not; He/She/It might even have created the universe, though of course, if we are to believe the Hawkings/Mlodinow analysis, this involvement by ‘God’ was ‘not necessary’. Someone/something else might have ‘created’ it, possibly even under instructions from God, or perhaps not. In other words, we have been told nothing at all that is new. ‘God’, whatever you might think the word means, might or might not exist. We still don’t know. The reader might have assumed that he was reading about ‘science’ in the carefully couched language of an eminent scientist, but in reality he was simply being invited to absorb verbal’s sleights-of-hand that played tricks with existing conceptions — bunker constructs formed from bunker words. 

The Irish Times report went on to observe that these comments ‘suggested’ Professor Hawking had broken away from previously-expressed theories on religion. It was noted that, in his previously-published bestseller, A Brief History Of Time, he had said: ‘If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.’ Here, then, was the narrative of newness which is what journalism claims to be interested in, though actually as employed it is merely an alibi to cover a deeper ideological purpose: to convey that Hawking had recanted on a previous belief in a/the deity. For anyone familiar with his work, this would not have been a sensation, as he had frequently in previous pronouncements been dismissive and reductive in his treatment of the question of God. 

And of course, as another scientist, Richard Dawkins, observed concerning that ‘mind of God’ quote, it was intended as a poetic rather than a scientific characterisation. Of course it was: Hawking had been invoking the concept of ‘God’ in the manner in which human culture had employed it from the beginning — as a metaphor for what is currently unknown and which appears unknowable. No scientist worth his salt — and certainly not one with Hawking’s track record — would ever set out from the premise that the existence of, for example, a personal, loving God was to be taken for granted to the point where the next step was to discover the nature of the Godly mindset. Still, the idea of ‘knowing the mind of God’ may have been either a metaphor or a flight of fancy on Stephen Hawking’s part, but the idea that we can say with conclusiveness that such a mind does not exist is an absurdity unworthy of even a mediocre human mind. Science cannot claim to be answering questions about reality while using language that spews out tautologies and tendentiousness with every breath.

In the summer of 2014, I had the pleasure of visiting the Most Serene Republic of San Marino, to address an international symposium of scientists on the subject of rock ‘n’ roll. San Marino is the oldest surviving constitutional republic in the world, a tiny state of some 30,000 citizens, entirely surrounded by Italy, and situated slightly inland of the north-east Adriatic coast. Its capital, also San Marino, is a walled town with the external appearance of a castle, set in the most spectacular of countryside. The invitation came from a group of Italian scientists, who every summer invite some of the most imminent of their peers from the international scientific community to San Marino to talk about their work.  They expressed a particular interest in the nature of the creative process as elaborated by artists in the medium of pop and rock, and in the potential for comparison between such approaches and the scientific method.

My own participation turned out to be a rather challenging experience unassisted (rather ironically in view of the situation) by a faulty projector, which forced me to abandon my plan to show some clips of artists I wanted to talk about. But the next day’s proceedings more than made up for it, for I was allowed to sit in with the scientists as they discussed matters relating to the nitty-gritty of their own disciplines and the role of science in the world and its communicability in modern culture.

The group included a leading paleontologist, several astrophysicists, a neuroscientist, biologists, physicists, mathematicians and a linguist in the tradition of Chomsky. 

Each branch of science has its own lingo, constructed to ensure that scientific exploration remains as immune as possible to the vagaries of common speech. I have trouble half-understanding many of the articles in the New Scientist, but I noticed that, when the scientists spoke with colleagues from a different discipline, their language moderated, moving closer to everyday exchange.  I was especially drawn to two connected themes of the day’s proceedings. One related to a subject we have been mulling over — the direction of progress in discovering the nature of human subjectivity. The other discussion that fascinated me was when it emerged that, behind closed doors, most of the scientists in San Marino harboured grave concerns about the increasing ideological inclinations of some of their colleagues and the way advances in this area are being communicated into the mainstream of culture. (I was especially tickled when a French mathematician reminded the group that a study of speculations about the future in the novels of the past century shows that the predictive capacities of novelists stand up far better than those of scientists.)

Several of those who spoke agreed that all progress in science is tentative and that, over the full course of their careers, most scientists have to deal with the fact that the next phase of major striding in their area will be most unlikely — other than through occasional happenstance — to occur within current human lifespans. For this reason, they appeared to agree, it behoves scientists to be cautious in deriving dramatic extrapolations from minor incremental advances. There was consensus also that some scientists are inclined to deliver highly unscientific speculation in the guise of research, which is jumped upon by uninitiated journalists and reported as ‘gospel’ in its over-inflated form. One scientist afterwards told me that he believed some among his own academic colleagues were engaging in Faustian pacts to gain prestige and celebrity by making sensational statements guaranteed to gain headlines. 

Some of the implications of such a tendency should be immediately obvious. Science has a solemn responsibility to acknowledge the contingent nature of each of its apparent advances. It also needs to remain aware of the slipperiness of language, the ease with which a tentative finding may be rendered apparently concrete by a loose use of words.  

It is arguable that the failure of some scientists to retain such reservations as cautionary checks-and-balances in promoting their work may be responsible for creating mass misconceptions about key elements of supposedly changing human reality. For example? Well, the insinuation of a reductionist view of human nature which imposes on human beings much the same mechanistic analysis applied to manmade technologies. Or the unquestioning acceptance in mainstream culture that such hypotheses and descriptions are capable of adequately encapsulating the natures and existences of human beings. More generally, there is the incessant ramping up of the ideological content of human culture to squeeze out more fluid concepts of human activity and potential, including the religious, artistic and philosophical approaches which have served so well in keeping the collective mind of humanity unlocked and opened up to — more or less —the present, which is the key to a functioning as opposed to a scientifically ‘literate’ humanity. 

Science, at the point of apprehension by the human intelligence, comprises words and signs. By the average human intelligence, this is further reduced to words alone, which become signs of a different kind. Without words, man would gaze at the world and be unable to grasp it. With words, there is always the risk that he merely appears to grasp it, for what he grasps, really, may be the shapes and sounds and resonances of the words he has himself brought into being. He names something and it becomes what he calls it. But really all he has grasped is the association of word and thing. The thing itself remains elusive. A bush or a flower has an existence beyond and beneath its man-given name — beyond and beneath the reach of the words ‘bush’ or ‘flower’. 

The true difficulty with describing the mysterious realities a human person encounters in existence may therefore be largely a problem of language. When the human pursuit of understanding through words creates petrifications that are clung to by limited minds, understanding is closed down in ways that conceal what has happened. Words, rightly seen, are merely codes we use to compare our internal, personal understandings of reality. To treat them as the absolute repositories of meaning is in effect to hand over our reason to be played with by wordsmiths and lawyers. In a sentence, in a sense, the words are the least important element: Far more vital is the extent to which understandings are already shared between speaker and listener/author and reader. Always, the words must enter into an educated intelligence capable of extracting their particular meanings in the instant context, while also perceiving their limits as cyphers of meaning in the first place.

This tendency for words to change their meanings has always existed, but has recently been subjected to a kind of exponential acceleration due to the explosion of technological communication. The periods of growth, vibrancy and disintegration experienced by particular kinds of words have been accompanied by, and perhaps helped to speed up, the rapid-fire cultural processes and ubiquitous technologies now available to modern culture. And some of these processes and technologies simultaneously wield the power to provoke passivity towards such developments in the hearts of affected humans, while seeming to bring a new form of liberation. These processes come swaddled in words that go further, or seem to go further, than the actual process, properly comprehended, actually do. Unbeknownst to most of those affected, words can be used in ways that enable entire cultures to move towards some utopia of fantasy, thereby excluding the heart of each man while proclaiming new dispensations of thought and progress. 

We need an awareness of these potential limitations of language whenever we seek to speak of what we believe and know.  If we are to mount a counter-offensive to the reduction of reason in our culture, we must begin by matching the claimed deconstructions of the scientists and those who relay details of their pursuits with rational deconstructions of the way these findings are couched or reported. If we are to organize a cultural resistance on behalf of the self, or the soul, in culture, we must begin to expose the tricks used by various disciplines operating under the general banner of positivism so as to expose the limits of their claims and protect the health of human culture for as long as this is practicable. And we must begin from our subjective selves — not as an act of defiance, but because this is the only means we have to truly grasp what is real. 

In these matters as in much else, I am a layman. I have, in this chapter, this series, been trying to convey a sense of what I understand from trying to grasp the subtleties of a discipline which speaks its own highly complex language when its practitioners are speaking to each other, but which at the same time has profound implications for me and my life.  I also believe that, although I might be loath to engage in scientific terms in a debate with a physicist about quantum mechanics, or with a neuroscientist about the chemistry or mechanics of the brain, I would be capable of engaging with either or even both about the human implications or their work, about the ethical implications of it, and about the capacity of the attendant self-referential language to mislead both the scientist and the listening layperson as to the potential of the endeavour. 

In every speaking moment, we use words in an instinctual, spontaneous way, seeking merely to ‘express’ ourselves. To say what we really, deeply feel, what we really desire, is all but impossible, however, so we aim for some passable approximation. We blurt out something that conveys itself to another more in its inarticulateness than its content. The hearer unconsciously recognises our confusion and incoherence and identifies it with a similar incapacity in himself, and it is in this that our meaning, or something of it, is conveyed. We ‘hear’ much as we ‘see’ — by means of a fragmented receptivity in which images are reconstructed in our brains to create pictures which, in truth, are never completely captured. Really, words, for all their limitations, enable us to rebuild in our imaginations concepts and messages we pick up only fleetingly but make sense of by a process of comparison with our existing banks of knowledge and experience. 

At best in seeking communication, we strive for the words that are the least inadequate to our needs. Yet, our cultures and their collective conversations increasingly treat words much as they are treated in a courtroom, assuming it is possible to pin meanings down to the point where nothing but the literal content of statements might be deemed admissible, as though words could be fixed and immutable, capable of capturing truth in their shapes and patterns. Modern culture, probably due to the homogenisation of language by mass media, has come to treat as axiomatic the idea that words are the sterile carriers of meaning — that they function like polystyrene cups, transporting intact the goodness — or the less-than-goodness — from a source to the body or being of the beneficiary. We think therefore that, by refining the constructions and composition of our words, we can perfect the channels of our understanding. 

If — as seems to be increasingly true of our cultures now — words are assumed to carry truth — and truth which can only come from outside — then it seems to follow that truth must be something that can only be verified according to external criteria. In such a climate, we begin to trust ourselves less, to discount our own responses, and the normal process of human verification is reversed. Various studies of words used in books through time have found that the language of experts has gained enormous traction in the past quarter century. Previously, words enabled us to verify what we understood was felt or understood by others; now, we can enter the experience of another only by a process of rational comprehension, mediated by ‘experts’. We have even become persuaded that scientific methods of assessing the feelings and thoughts of others are more reliable than conventional human processes.

Positivism, the programme by which our public thought is increasingly processed, seeks to deny or ignore the organic nature of language. In the dominating ideologies of our time, manufacturing and disseminating not merely thought but also sentiment, words are required and assumed to have fixed, legalistic meanings, aloof from life. But the human heart is not like this: It is contradictory, chaotic, infinite in its desiring, inarticulate as to its deepest wants, and capable of coherence only by means of intricate communication with another ‘like-minded’ heart. If public culture renders such chaotic modes of communication impossible, it ceases to serve the needs of those humans who seek to use it. 

This mismatch of nature and culture may mean that, by definition, we are all becoming — each in his or her own cocoon — detached from any common understanding of what really moves and defines us. Each of us is mystery, especially to himself, because the entity we inhabit can never completely be claimed as ours completely, or become a final, total home to our deeper selves. In the case of our interior selves, the mystery is even more elusive than in the exterior realm, because it involves not simply the unknown, or even the potentially unknowable, but that which is ineluctable in us but beyond description. We ‘know’ this part of ourselves but can neither describe it in words to ourselves, nor in any satisfactory way for someone who refuses, or is unable, to see us as we are. Or ever to see himself as he is. 

There is another way of understanding words: that they do not so much carry meaning within themselves so much as act as igniters of meaning in the human heart. A healthy culture would insist upon a use of words that acknowledged their limitations. In such a dispensation, things would require to be stated as though in a sauce of irony, and sentences would came accompanied by a kind of cultural government health warning. Such cultures have existed and some continue to (Ireland was so until relatively recently) but gradually both our public spaces and interior selves are being colonised by the new literalism. Our cultures increasingly treat words as though they were capsules of meaning which could be administered and swallowed almost regardless of context, triggering their absolute meanings again and again without possibility of confusion or complication.

This may be among the initiating cultural processes of the objectification of the human person. The normal method of subjective verification is abandoned in favour of an ‘objective’ method which purports to bypass the subjective intelligence. Empiricism, human experience, dwindles in favour of a pseudo-rationalism that becomes increasingly dominant. 

Previously, words enabled us to verify that what we felt or understood was felt or understood by others; but increasingly we enter the experience of another only by a process of ‘rational’ comprehension: schematic knowledge, even-handedness, box-ticking: ‘I prefer to follow the science’. Having allowed ourselves to become persuaded that scientific methods of assessing the feelings and thoughts of others are more reliable than conventional human processes — such as empathy and instinct — we begin to imagine that the same might be true of our attempts to understand our own inner selves. Having half-learned to psychoanalyse others, we move to psychoanalysing ourselves. 

Words are really like loose stones that provide for makeshift paths across treacherous stretches of molten lava: If you move quickly you may be able to use them to reach your meaning. If you get stuck on a word, your intentions are doomed. Really, we cannot ‘tell’ one another anything. We can but point, nudge, gesture, and look for signs of recognition. If we try to hold each other to our words, they will disintegrate in front of our eyes. But if we take as read their ultimate unreliability as anything but stepping-stones, we are always at the point of take-off. Really, the function of words is to provoke and affirm, to set off in us internal processes of comprehension. They do not ‘give’ us the understandings. These we glean, in a sense, from between and around the words, which trip us into reveries concerning what we already know. 

Even within a healthy, functioning culture, the multiplicity of words available creates an illusion of communicability that lies in wait for the uninitiated. I may have a sense of the mysteriousness of something I speak of, but I have no means of communicating this mysteriousness other than by contriving to ‘trip’ a ‘switch’ in the mind of the hearer who I may hope harbours an approximately similar sense of things. Language instills a deceptive sense of certainty that seems to flow from the mechanistic fluidity of grammatical structure, and this can be misleading as to the capacity of sentences to carry truth. 

Language conveys an illusion of infinite possibility, but in reality imposes a horizon on our understanding — even while enabling us to grasp things we could not grasp without it. We need words but they are also traps. Words deceive us, swirling around us all the time, but beyond that dissipating into confusion, like swarms of insects, and eventually converging along the horizon, like dead things. Yes, it is true, we can achieve almost no meaningful communication without them. We seek, then, the ‘least inadequate words’. 

This phenomenon is ostensibly a ‘live issue’ in poetry, but has been somewhat overwhelmed in the wider cultures of our time because of the pursuit of purely semantic concepts of meaning by practitioners of poetry who have become infected with the virus of positivism. In the logic of a poem, the words stir up what is already there, or already intuited, or ‘remembered’ in some way form an experience that was perhaps thought of as something unique. This is why an education in poetry is so vital: because the functionality of words is only as trustworthy as the culture in which the words circulate, because they depend on deep reservoirs of memory, learning, self-awareness, complexity, paradox, irony, contradiction and many other characteristics which in our modern culture have come to be seen merely as ‘poetic’ devices relating to a process which is no longer regarded as central to apprehension but merely as a kind of embellishment of reality, a decoration. 

‘Daffodils’ is a word that bring something specific to the human imagination. Once you have heard the word and identified the phenomenon it signifies, you are unable to hear or read it without being visited by an image. If I say ‘a field of daffodils’, you see something broad and weaving and coloured, a sea of yellow and green. And yet that phrase  — ‘a field of daffodils’ — is really just a series of cyphers: four words, six syllables, 17 individual letters, eight when you allow for the repetitions. Just eight different black marks on a white surface translating into an image of extraordinary vividness and beauty, capable of being shared by countless people if they happen to hear the phrase at the same moment.  To write the letters down in a row is an interesting exercise: a, f, i, e, l, d, o, s. It signifies nothing. The letters, like musical notation, combine to draw forth from the human imagination an image from experience, unleashing in the mind of the receiver infinite possibilities of image and meaning and memory.

And yet the words these letters make are useless unless the parties involved in the communication already know an enormous amount of unstated cultural and other information. We speak to one another in shared codes, but I cannot know for sure that what I experience is the same as what anyone else does. Simply by using a word, I insinuate a horizon of the knowable — a landscape of potentially shared understanding — which is dependent on the extent of the knowledge I share with those I seek communication with. This comes from belonging to a shared, protected culture. 

‘Rationality’ and ‘reason’ are nowadays deemed to be coterminous entities, and this may well be semantically unavoidable in a culture recognising only one kind of reason.  But there is nonetheless a process of thinking that is ‘reasonable’ while not adhering to the process of ‘logic’ on which science, for example, requiring a pure line of thinking, must rely. This is reason beyond the realm of positivism — beyond what is provable, measurable, weighable; reason that flows from an instinctive sense of what seems inescapable about reality and existence; reason that rises up from some wordless part of oneself beneath the reach of one’s name or identity.

When you think about it, if any of us did not have some capacity for such reasoning, we would be unable to live even with the idea of ourselves, because we would be constantly astonished and confused by the idea of our own existence. Somehow, moment to moment, we hold ourselves — or are held by something else — in a wordless embrace in this strange world we have awoken in, which we accept for what it is, even though this sense of awe and inarticulacy is often totally at odds with the logic in which we swim. Because we cannot think to the origin of ourselves, our very existences stand as an insult to what passes for logic in our bunker culture. This culture teaches us to be skeptical, leads us to demand proofs of everything. And because we cannot ‘prove’ ourselves, we discount ourselves, looking at and assessing the world, but consciously regarding ourselves only to the extent that we can adapt exterior concepts and apply them to ourselves. This begins as metaphor, but insidiously becomes literal as well. 

Standing, sitting, in their own bodies, men look upon their own natures and, cursed by the logic of objectivity, must exclude the most sensational aspects of their existences from their calculations about reality. In the past, mankind may have erred in one direction, elevating the soul above the body, but now we do the opposite, denying the existence of the soul because the ‘expert’ cannot find it in his body. And yet, each man himself knows that this — or something — is there. None of the conventional, biological explanations suffice for any individual man in his heart. Darwinism makes sense to me as an understanding of human development that ‘explains’ everything and everyone except myself. I accept it as an explanation for everyone else, but it doesn’t explain me to me. I do not comprehend myself as biological descendent or thinking animal, or ‘clump of cells’. My subjectivity tells me I am something more. Charles Darwin definitely did not make me. 

Setting out from the premises nowadays laid down in mankind’s most ‘advanced’ attempts at self-understanding — starting, for example, from the position of the biologist or the economist assuming materialism, man’s scrutiny of reality becomes a sterile gaze upon an object, either ignoring or objectifying himself.  But such a purely material explanation cannot account to man for the enigma of himself. We know this, but constantly endeavour to disprove it, or succumb to its debunking by others, to quiet the questions in ourselves.

Is there any as yet unexplored way of seeing that enables us to transcend the limitations of cultures that no longer enable us to breathe metaphysically? Is there anything outside the available literalism that we can trust absolutely? Is it, for example, possible for a reconstructed ‘religious’ understanding of mankind to transcend this limitation, using words while accepting their limitations, edging man towards some greater understanding of himself, using the tools developed in the course of his quotidian existence to bring him beyond the bunker’s walls? The language of art, once reliable in this respect, nowadays contrives an affected aestheticism and burrows inwardly in loops of self-referential knowingness. The usage of ‘religious’ language in our cultures appears increasingly to become isolated within its own domain, sentimentalising everything it invokes or describes, repeating itself in singsong voices that have no traction in a culture looking for something else without knowing it is looking for anything. Increasingly, what is lost is not merely the human capacity to be intensely human but the ability to understand that this quality is being lost. 

Series concluded