I know you're all waiting with baited breath re: the new series.
I've been asked to deliver a lecture on another topic which is consuming most of my mental energy, so I'll get back to this in a serious way after I've delivered it. I might even post a few on the way.
Suffice to say of the Blake/Dawkins article, the skeleton runs thus:
Dawkins says Blake's mysticism from the same drive as a scientist
Dawkins says that Blake "hates and fears" science which is "a waste."
SIDETRACK - a bit of an old Dawkins trick going on here. Blake is one of, if not the, greatest mystic to ever write in the English language. Dawkins kind of dismisses him off-the-cuff, then proceeds to prove mysticism wrong but grappling with snake charmers. But it doesn't really properly address the very advanced and thorough work produced by Blake.
Fact is, Blake's mysticism does not cloud his mind here. Blake's criticisms of science run on two primary fronts his best known passages 1) the notion of Euclidean space 2) the use if scientific apparatus to represent space as ordered and in harmony.
Blake's criticism of science has actually been vindicated by modern science. So it's a bit rich of Dawkins to call his poetic gift "a waste" simply because he has been critical of science.
More than that, what Dawkins worries about here is the three-fold notion of Truth, Beauty and Order.
Dawkin's complaint that poets should write with scientific input runs along the same theme. As he puts it, there is great meaning and beauty in an ordered, causal universe (which he opposes to ad hoc mysticism).
This is the beauty of the Enlightenment method. It should come as no surprise, since he mentions Locke and Newton so frequently, that he is quite wedded to these ideas of order, category, inherent structure. And, for him, beauty is the discovery of the underlying structures.
But for Blake, beauty is the destruction of structure - it is striving within the imagination to discover the limits of the believable, the understandable, the liminal. This is the truest work of a scientist - both radically subjective and striving for the universal.
An example of Dawkins really misunderstanding Blake, and it is Dawkin's that forms the waste here.
BUT ON THE FLIPSIDE
Blake is just as petty about Newton, Locke and Voltaire.
At those reaches of knowledge which people find most
liminal, there is almost guaranteed to be some opposition. Most of the
opposition is passive aggressive – dismissed as boffins, philosophers live in a
world detached from reality that could have no effect on anything in our day to
day lives (tell that the Freud or Marx!).
Artists at the avante guard are considered equally wasteful of public
funds, irrelevant, suspicious, and misguided or an outlet for the pretentious
aspirations of the ‘elites’ to feel intellectually superior. Science, like philosophy and art, is accepted
where-ever it is ubiquitous but held under suspicion where-ever it is brought
into clear focus. Just ask a scientist
whose work considers the consequences of anthropogenic climate change. The term ‘rhetoric’ is now used exclusive in
a pejorative sense outside of universities.
Often meaning either simply the words or set of words that a politician
repeats, and always linked to politics, rhetoric is considered a close relative
to a lie. Then there is theology. Today,
theology is rarely even considered a valid form of knowledge. Only legacy universities teach it.
There we have it, the five pillars of Renaissance education – art, science (& mathematics), philosophy, rhetoric and theology – still regarded with deep suspicion by the populace. All have played extensive, and important, lead roles in the formation of Western language, culture, laws and institutions. In short, those limits to how we behave – perhaps even what we are able to image – have been set by these five pillars – with language and its history of monotheistic expression at its base. Remove any one of these fertile areas of study and our conscience, expression, infrastructure and society would be literally unrecognisable to us today (like the white colonialists who signed an Aboriginal man’s name as ‘little no-body’).
Yet none are considered particularly relevant or trustworthy
by those without further education in them. And it’s not only the lazy or uneducated who
hold these reaches of knowledge under suspicion. There is a famous division at universities
between arts and science students: scientists believing arts students are lazy
and unable to accept clean logic and objectivity. Arts
students complain that science students have no sound understanding of the ways
in which politics, language or culture affect every aspect of understanding
(including scientific understanding).
This divide is often a case of jumping to conclusions about
what we don’t know based on what we already do.
Take Dawkin’s The God Delusion, in
which he makes (quasi)scientific observations and then tries to apply them to
theology, history, culture and politics.
The problem is that, while he knows a hell of a lot about evolutionary
biology, honest inspection and reflection leads to a great deal of suspicion on
his conclusions regarding the other topics mentioned. He misreads the Bible, misrepresents what many
people understand as a monotheistic God, misrepresents political movements and
groups and misunderstands history. I say
these as plain matters of fact. Considering
a little more research might have cleared much of this up, many of
his detractors argue that he doesn’t live up to his own standards of research. Some find these misnomers evidence of
deliberate misrepresentation.
Another researcher receiving a prestigious Australian
scientific prize says that he hopes that one day, when energy is available
freely and all provisions are met, science will replace ideology and the world
will live in peace. His inability to
recognise this as ideology in and of itself almost masks his inability to
recognise that science itself is inherently ideological.
Yet sociologists and political scientists mistrust of hard
numbers is a source of constant frustration to those working in the hard
sciences. It has been contended that Thatcher recognised the threat of climate
change before most of the politically progressive world because of her
background in chemistry – she knows that ideology cannot change the facts. What, after all, can a medical researcher do
with Susan Sontag’s incredible analysis of aids as a metaphor?
The point of all this?
I’m not sure. But it is something
I’m very interested in and there are some questions I’d like answered. My methodology is going to be based on
case studies where-ever possible. First, what are the merits of the
subject/object dialectic? Second, are
art and science incompatible? Third, is
mathematics capable of being in itself, outside of language? Fourth, have the ideological bases of the
sciences shifted greatly from Empirical Reason and Logic, and all the terribly
dangerous consequences of Enlightenment thought? And finally, I will ask whether theology,
arts, science, philosophy or rhetoric best express the disorder of things.
It’s something that over the coming period of time I’m
hoping to do a bit of reading and writing on.
My first post on this, which is ‘coming soon,’ will be on the poetry of
science. It will ask why so many scientists and science philosophers complain about the lack of poets
writing from a position of scientific understanding – and why do they all pick
on WH Auden when complaining about it?
In doing so, I will look at the letters of RP Feynman and some pre-God Delusion work by Richard Dawkins, as well as the poetry of Auden, Blake and Calvino.
Christians often claim that family values are at the centre
of both the Christian faith and social cohesion. They may be right – but they should be careful
what they wish for. That's because
Jesus' idea of what family meant was radically different to the 'nuclear
family' concept that is held up an an ideal today.
Remember the royal wedding?
The Archbishop of Canterbury's sermon spoke of the importance of love,
compassion, togetherness and dedication to God and one-another. The Queen listened approvingly. The congregation sang the unofficial English
national anthem, the opening lines to William Blake's Jerusalem. All this to send the strong, persuasive
message that family was the foundation of England, that authority's first and
last causes were family. That authority for a nation based on such values,
values so innately Christian, must come from family itself.
Christians – Protestant and Catholic traditions inclusive –
are rarely able to agree on anything
politically. One thing that
nearly every Christian lobby group agrees on, though, is the importance of
family values. Indeed, they are quite
within reason to state that family values are deeply embedded in Christian
belief, and that these beliefs have formed the 'bedrock' of our society. However, they are wrong if they think that
such a position can be justified through appeals to the gospel.
In a recent article in the New York Times, Stephanie Coontz
claimed to identify a “radical antifamily ideology [which] permeates Christ's
teaching” and that “the early Christian tradition often set faith and family
against each other.” She could hardly
be more wrong – Christ was radically pro-family. Christ spoke frequently on the importance of
being the sons of God, referred to God as Father and t commanded his followers
to go forth and multiply. St Paul also
uses the analogy of the family to describe the human relationship to God.
But that doesn't make the Christian family values lobby right, either. Christ sent his own family away, claiming
they had no more right to access him than any others. He commanded his disciples to leave their
families and follow him. He never
started a family of his own, and was recorded as saying you must hate
your family to follow him. This message
is so distressing that of the many books that have 'rewritten' the Bible in
every day language, none of them have been able to bring themselves to use the
word “hate” - preferring instead to say things like 'you must love me more than
your family.'
Lest the 'new atheist' crowd start self-congratulating on the
inherent contradictions of scripture, let me state my contention (they have a
much juicier morsel coming their way).
Christ was radically pro-family, but he redefined family to align with
his religio-political objectives. These
objectives were a wholesale rejection of the authority of law – which St Paul
would later refer to as a curse that Christ has freed humanity from – and
likewise of the authority of the family.
No longer was your first duty to your family – that bastion
of wealth and power as best exhibited by the Great Patrician Abraham and the
monarchical dynasty founded by King David. Part of the reason Jesus called Himself
the King of the Jews was to supplant the dynastic model of authority with the
model of a family based on fidelity to father God.
As William
Blake put it so astutely, as he so often does:
Was Jesus
gentle, or did He
Give any
marks of gentility?
When twelve
years old He ran away
And left His
parents in dismay,
When after
three days' sorrow found
Loud as
Sinai's trumpet sound:
'No earthly
parents I confess -
My Heavenly
Father's business!
Ye
understand not what I say
And, angry,
force me to obey,
Obedience is
a duty then,
And favours
gains with God and men.
Fidelity to Father God means absolute service and Love to the
whole of Humanity. This is a model of
equality and family so radical that even the Greens wouldn't touch it. It is a model of authority that is also
manifested in his utter disdain towards the local law of the Pharisees, and his
belief that money was alien (“give to Caesar what is Caesar's”), corrupting
(eg, the rich young ruler) and even “the root of all evil.” With the one exception of his rage at the
money changers at the temple, his attitude towards these two most traditional
structures of power was to openly disregard it.
Many of the ensuing confrontations with Pharisees memorably show his
general attitude of contempt towards their authority. However, none serve to illuminate both his
disregard for religious and familial authority better than the very foundation
of the claim of Christ's divinity and membership of the Godhead, the tenth
chapter of the Gospel According to St John, verses 36-39 – Jesus
response to the charge of blasphemy for calling himself the son of God:
“do you say
unto him whom the Father has consecrated and sent into the world, 'you are blaspheming' because I said 'I am the Son of
God?; If I am not doing the works of my father, then do not believe me; but if I do
them, even though toy do not believe me, believe
the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am
in the Father.” Again they sought
to arrest him, but he escaped from their hands.
Now, let me turn my attention to any New Atheists in attendance. I mentioned there was a juicy morsel coming
your way, and here it is:
Jesus did not believe in the authority of law and chose to
disregard it. Moreover, Christ demanded
that people disrupt their families at great personal cost in order to follow him
and pursue unintuitive, difficult religious ideals that many will not relate
to. Many of his followers then left
their own families to join cult-like communities of believers after his death and reported
resurrection.
But here's the rub:
That doesn't get you out of asking yourself some tough questions about
family and equality. Even if you dismiss
Christ's high standards of loving our neighbours as ourselves, and doing to
others as we would have them do unto us, there are still questions about
equality. Does equality mean providing
for your own family before providing for others? If not, doesn't this help to perpetuate a
global class structure that holds generations of people to poverty, or
underemployment, or low standards of education?
With massive overpopulation eating up the world's resources at an ever
growing rate, is it even ethical to have a family?
Christians and New Atheists alike are most likely to reject
Christ's view of a family as sons and daughters of God for the same
reason. It sets too high a standard – it
is too radically ethical, and it scares them.
