Why Religion Matters

Huston Smith

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061756245
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia delle religioni

Huston Smith, the author of the classic bestseller The World's Religions, delivers a passionate, timely message: The human spirit is being suffocated by the dominant materialistic worldview of our times. Smith champions a society in which religion is once again treasured and authentically practiced as the vital source of human wisdom.

PART 1

MODERNITY’S TUNNEL

I move into Part One of this book by way of three quotations. They are longer than I might wish, but there is good reason to quote them in full. For whatever the reader may think of the controversial chapters that follow, I do not see how (after reading these quotations) it will be possible to doubt that the chapters are set on sound foundations.

The first quotation is by a colleague of mine while I was teaching at Syracuse University, the sociologist Manfred Stanley.

It is by now a Sunday-supplement commonplace that the…modernization of the world is accompanied by a spiritual malaise that has come to be called alienation…. At its most fundamental level, the diagnosis of alienation is based on the view that modernization forces upon us a world that, although baptized as real by science, is denuded of all humanly recognizable qualities; beauty and ugliness, love and hate, passion and fulfillment, salvation and damnation. It is not, of course being claimed that such matters are not part of the existential realities of human life. It is rather that the scientific worldview makes it illegitimate to speak of them as being “objectively” part of the world, forcing us instead to define such evaluation and such emotional experience as “merely subjective” projections of people’s inner lives.

Ernest Gellner, sociologist and philosopher, picks up where Stanley leaves off by admitting that we have no reason to think that the world in itself is as Stanley describes it. It is just that we are now constrained to think that that is its character because the Promethean concerns that power the modern world decree that the only “true” knowledge is the kind that digs into nature’s foundations and increases our ability to control it. In Gellner’s words:

It was Kant’s merit to see that this [epistemological] compulsion is in us, not in things. It was Weber’s to see that it is historically a specific kind of mind, not human mind as such, which is subject to this compulsion…. We have become habituated to and dependent on effective knowledge [as just described] and hence have bound ourselves to this kind of genuine explanation…. “Reductionism,” the view that everything in the world is really something else, and that something else is coldly impersonal, is simply the ineluctable corollary of effective explanation.

Gellner admits that this epistemology that our Prometheanism has forced upon us carries morally disturbing consequences:

It was also Kant’s merit to see the inescapable price of this Faustian purchase of real [sic] knowledge. [In delivering] cognitive effectiveness [it] exacts its inherent moral, “dehumanizing” price…. The price of real knowledge is that our identities, freedom, norms, are no longer underwritten by our vision and comprehension of things. On the contrary we are doomed to suffer from a tension between cognition and identity.

Hannah Arendt carries these thoughts to their metaphysical conclusion:

What has come to an end is the distinction between the sensual and the supersensual, together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides, that whatever is not given to the senses…is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears; that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the senses…. In increasingly strident voices, the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilism inherent in this development. The sensual…cannot survive the death of the supersensual [without nihilism moving in].

With these thoughts clearly before us, welcome to the tunnel of modernity.

CHAPTER 1

WHO’S RIGHT ABOUT REALITY: TRADITIONALISTS, MODERNISTS, OR THE POSTMODERNS?

Wherever people live, whenever they live, they find themselves faced with three inescapable problems: how to win food and shelter from their natural environment (the problem nature poses), how to get along with one another (the social problem), and how to relate themselves to the total scheme of things (the religious problem). If this third issue seems less important than the other two, we should remind ourselves that religious artifacts are the oldest that archeologists have discovered.

The three problems are obvious, but they become interesting when we align them with the three major periods in human history: the traditional period (which extended from human beginnings up to the rise of modern science), the modern period (which took over from there and continued through the first half of the twentieth century), and postmodernism (which Nietzsche anticipated, but which waited for the second half of the twentieth century to take hold).

Each of these periods poured more of its energies into, and did better by, one of life’s inescapable problems than did the other two. Specifically, modernity gave us our view of nature—it continues to be refined, but because modernity laid the foundations for the scientific understanding of it, it deserves credit for the discovery. Postmodernism is tackling social injustices more resolutely than people previously did. This leaves worldviews—metaphysics as distinct from cosmology, which restricts itself to the empirical universe—for our ancestors, whose accomplishments on that front have not been improved upon.

The just-entered distinction between cosmology and metaphysics is important for this book, so I shall expand it slightly. Cosmology is the study of the physical universe—or the world of nature as science conceives of it—and is the domain of science. Metaphysics, on the other hand, deals with all there is. (The terms worldview and Big Picture are used interchangeably with metaphysics in this book.) In the worldview that holds that nature is all there is, metaphysics coincides with cosmology. That metaphysics is named naturalism.

Such is the historical framework in which this book is set, and the object of this chapter is to spell out that framework. Because I want to proceed topically—from nature, through society, to the Big Picture, tying each topic to the period that did best by it—this introduction shuffles the historical sequence of the periods. I take up modernity first, then postmodernity, leaving the traditional period for last.

MODERNITY’S COSMOLOGICAL ACHIEVEMENT

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Europe stumbled on a new way of knowing that we refer to as the scientific method. It centers in the controlled experiment and has given us modern science. Generic science (which consists of careful attention to nature and its regularities) is as old as the hills—at least as old as art and religion. What the controlled experiment adds to generic science is proof. True hypotheses can be separated from false ones, and brick by brick an edifice has been erected from those proven truths. We commonly call that edifice the scientific worldview, but scientific cosmology is more precise because of the ambiguity of the word world. The scientific edifice is a worldview only for those who assume that science can in principle take in all that exists.

The scientific cosmology is so much a part of the air we breathe that it is hardly necessary to describe it, but I will give it a paragraph to provide a reference point for what we are talking about. Some fifteen billion years ago an incredibly compact pellet of matter exploded to launch its components on a voyage that still continues. Differentiation set in as hydrogen proliferated into the periodic table. Atoms gathered into gaseous clouds. Stars condensed from whirling filaments of flame, and planets spun off from those to become molten drops that pulsated and grew rock-encrusted. Narrowing our gaze to the planet that was to become our home, we watch it grow, ocean-filmed and swathed in atmosphere. Some three and a half billion years ago shallow waters began to ferment with life, which could maintain its inner milieu through homeostasis and could reproduce itself. Life spread from oceans across continents, and intelligence appeared. Several million years ago our ancestors arrived. It is difficult to say exactly when, for every few years paleontologists announce discoveries that “set the human race back another million years or so,” as press reports like to break the news.

Taught from primary schools onward, this story is so familiar that further details would only clutter things.

Tradition’s Cosmological Shortcomings

That this scientific cosmology retires traditional ones with their six days of creation and the like goes without saying. Who can possibly question that when the scientific cosmology has landed people on the moon? Our ancestors were impressive astronomers, and we can honor them unreservedly for how much they learned about nature with only their unaided senses to work with. And there is another point. There is a naturalism in Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and tribal outlooks that in its own way rivals science’s calculative cosmology, but that is the naturalism of the artist, the poet, and the nature lover—of Li Po, Wordsworth, and Thoreau, not that of Galileo and Bacon. For present purposes, aesthetics is irrelevant. Modern cosmology derives from laboratory experiments, not landscape paintings.

Postmodernism’s Cosmological Shortcomings

With traditional cosmology out of the running, the question turns to postmodernism. Because science is cumulative, it follows as a matter of course that the cosmology we have in the twenty-first century is an improvement over what we had in the middle of the twentieth, which on my timeline is when modernity phased into postmodernity. But the refinements that postmodern scientists have achieved have not affected life to anything like the degree that postmodern social thrusts have, so the social Oscar is the one postmodernists are most entitled to.

The next section of this chapter will discuss postmodernism’s achievements on the social front, but before turning to those I need to support my contention that postmodern science (it is well to say postmodern physics here) does not measure up to modern physics in the scope of its discoveries. It says nothing against the brilliance of Stephen Hawking, Fred Hoyle, John Wheeler, Freeman Dyson, Steven Weinberg, and their likes to add that they have discovered nothing about nature that compares with the discoveries of Copernicus, Newton, Maxwell, Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Schrödinger, and Born. In molecular chemistry things are different. DNA is a staggering discovery, but, extending back only three billion years compared with the astrophysicists’ fifteen billion, it is not in nature’s foundations. The fact that no new abstract idea in physics has emerged for seventy years may suggest that nothing more remains to be discovered about nature’s foundations. Be that as it may, postmodernism’s discoveries (unlike modern discoveries in physics—the laws of gravity, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics, which continue to be used to make space shuttles fly and to help us understand how hot electrons behave in semiconductors) have concerned details and exotica. The billions of dollars that have been spent since the middle of the twentieth century (and the millions of papers that have been written on theories that change back and forth) have produced no discoveries that impact human beings in important ways. All are in the domain of the meta-sciences of high-energy particle physics and astronomy, whose findings—what is supposed to have happened in the first 10^-42 seconds of the universe’s life, and the like—while headlined by the media have no conceivable connection to human life and can be neither falsified nor checked in normal ways. This allows the building blocks of nature—particles, strings, or whatever—to keep changing, and the age of the universe to be halved or doubled every now and then. Roughly 99.999 percent of science (scientist Rustum Roy’s estimate) is unaffected by these flickering hypotheses, and the public does not much care about their fate.

Outranking the foregoing reason for not giving the cosmological Oscar to postmodernism is the fact that the noisiest postmodernists have called into question the very notion of truth by turning claims to truth into little more than power plays. According to this reading of the matter, when people claim that what they say is true, all they are really doing is claiming status for beliefs that advance their own social standing. This relativizes science’s assertions radically and rules out even the possibility of its closing in on the nature of nature. The most widely used textbook on college campuses for the past thirty years has been Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and its thesis—that facts derive their meaning from the paradigms that set them in place—has shifted attention from scientific facts to scientific paradigms. As there are no neutral standards by which to judge these paradigms, Kuhn’s thesis (if unnuanced) leads to a relativism among paradigms that places Hottentot science on a par with Newton’s. Kuhn himself phrased his thesis carefully enough to parry such relativism, but even taken at its best, it provides no way that science could get to the bottom of things. This demotes the enterprise, and in doing so provides a strong supporting reason for not giving postmodernism the cosmological prize. It does better with social issues, to which I now turn.

POSTMODERNISM’S FAIRNESS REVOLUTION

The magic word of postmodernism is society. This is not surprising. With the belief that there is nothing beyond our present world, nature and society are all that remain, and of the two nature has become the province of specialists. We seldom confront it directly anymore; mostly it comes to us via supermarkets and cushioned by air-conditioning and central heating. This leaves society as the domain that presses on us directly and the one in which there is some prospect of our making a difference.

And changes are occurring. Post colonial guilt may play a part here, and so much remains to be done that self-congratulation is premature. Still, a quick rehearsal of some changes that have occurred in a single lifetime makes it clear that social injustices are being recognized and addressed more earnestly today than they were by our ancestors:

• In 1919 the Brooklyn Zoo exhibited an African American caged alongside chimpanzees and gorillas. Today such an act would be met with outrage anywhere in the world.
• The civil rights movement of the 1960s accomplished its major objectives. In the United States and even in South Africa today, people of different races mix where they never could before—on beaches, in airline cabin crews, everywhere.
• In the 1930s, if a streetcar in San Francisco approached a stop where only Chinese Americans were waiting to board, it would routinely pass them by. By contrast, when (fifty years later) I retired from teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, my highly respected chancellor was a Chinese American who spoke English with a Chinese accent.
• No war has ever been as vigorously protested as was the war in Vietnam by United ...