What Place Value in a World of Fact?

WHAT PLACE VALUE IN A WORLD OF FACT?

LIVING WITH THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE FACT-VALUE DUALISM

“Many a true word hath been spoken in jest.”

― William Shakespeare, King Lear

‘Scientists have discovered a powerful new strain of fact-resistant humans who are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life, a sobering new study reports.’ ‘The research … identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, leaving scientists at a loss as to how to combat them.’ So writes Andy Borowitz in his article ‘Scientists: Earth Endangered by New Strain of Fact-Resistant Humans’.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/scientists-earth-endangered-by-new-strain-of-fact-resistant-humans

“These humans appear to have all the faculties necessary to receive and process information,” Davis Logsdon, one of the scientists who contributed to the study, said. “And yet, somehow, they have developed defenses that, for all intents and purposes, have rendered those faculties totally inactive.”

It’s satire and it expresses a mordant humour. And it reveals a truth much deeper, and much more disturbing than the obvious one. Because the tone of the article is that, of course, human beings should respond to fact. Why should we? The idea that we 'ought' to respect and respond to facts implies a moral commitment to truth, and that requires values. And that begs the question - whatever happened to values? The fact that so many climate warnings have failed to produce the required response in recent years should tell us that the problem is something deeper than a simple immunity to fact. We should know that we live in a social world, a world in which behaviour is structured and patterned, in which human beings are located in different positions, have different roles and interests, all of which shapes the way that they see facts. But the problem much worse than the failure to understand the extent to which the way human beings see the world is context-based.

‘While reaffirming the gloomy assessments of the study, Logsdon held out hope that the threat of fact-resistant humans could be mitigated in the future. “Our research is very preliminary, but it’s possible that they will become more receptive to facts once they are in an environment without food, water, or oxygen,” he said.’

At first, I laughed at that conclusion of the article. But understand precisely the implications of that conclusion, as well as the central thrust of the article as a whole. Only fact matters, whether it is the facts of the scientists which we ‘virulent strain’ of humans are immune to, or the brute facts of nature as the life-support systems crash. The tone of the article is all wrong. There is something missing. The article could easily be re-written, only this time referring to a ‘virulent strain of scientists who are virtually immune to any form of moral knowledge, leaving human beings at a loss as to how to combat them.’ The truest words here are 'scientists have no clear understanding of the mechanisms that prevent the fact-resistant humans from absorbing data'. Because the key point to take away from this is how clueless the scientific mind is when called out of their 'real world' of facts. Take a look at this comment on the article from another site. 'If this is supposed to be satire; why does it "feel" so right-on? It seem that increasingly people simply refuse to actually "look" at the reality, the facts, the real world data, and come up with some barely related "notion" of their own... I guess I'm just some relic of the ancient past; I rely on science, and data for everything.'

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread1067205/pg1

Actually, no. No-one in the ancient past would have been so crude as to rely only on 'facts' for their understanding of the world, and no one before modern times would have been so naive as to claim that 'the facts', as 'real world data', are all there is to life and how human beings experience it. The ancients bound up a profound and intimate knowledge of nature with a mytho-poetic understanding of life. Such an approach recognised natural cycles and constraints whilst ministering to psychic realities. The pre-moderns lived in a purpose-driven world, an animated world, a world of meaning. We are dealing with a wholly modern phenomenon here. But we, of course, are more enlightened and advanced. Such is our superiority that we are heading for eco-catastrophe and cannot change direction. And the reason for this is not our inability to understand basic science. It's too easy to claim human beings are a virus or a stupid. The blinkers are not only where these articles allege. Human beings do come up with 'notions' of their own, it's called culture, and we live or die by it. If our dominant culture is 'barely related' to the facts of our real world - and remember that that world is the social world as well as the natural - then, yes indeed, we are headed for trouble. But this estrangement works both ways. We need to be asking why our scientific understanding of the world has become so detached from our culture, from the social world in which we live.

The human species is not a virus, human beings are not dumb, are not failing to understand facts, are not denying facts - they just can't respond to them or act on them owing to being imprisoned in this super-rational Megamachine which has issued from the scientific and industrial revolutions. Governments are subject to the systemic imperatives of the capital system; they must facilitate the process of accumulation as a condition of their own power and resources. And the people urged to act in light of scientific facts are even more dependent upon this capitalist machine as a condition of their own survival in a competitive market society. Facts come is all shapes and sizes, and these are the hard economic facts that neither government nor the governed can deny. We live in the here and the now, and this is where immediate human self-interest lies. I am willing to bet that very few people explicitly deny the science on climate change; I am willing to say that most people accept the science. The problem is not immunity to facts - it is the inability to act on them given a structural and psychic dependency on the economic system.

'If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.' (Mark 3: 25). Humanity's house is di­vided against itself. Reason has split off from the rest of our sensibilities. The result is a rationalisation that extends knowledge and instrumental power over the world but in the process renders the very things that give life meaning empty and devoid of content. Designed to fail, divided to fall, we are imprisoned within systems that canalise our cooperative sensibilities into sterile and destructive ends. We desire the common good but lack the associational means and collective mechanisms to achieve it. But our lack amounts to much more than effective institutions and organisations - we lack an appropriate metaphysics.

'The hope that... without bothering our heads about spiritual and moral ques­tions, we could establish peace on earth, is an unrealistic, unscientific, and irra­tional hope. The exclusion of wisdom from economics, science, and technology was something which we could perhaps get away with for a little while, as long as we were relatively unsuccessful; but now that we have become very success­ful, the problem of spiritual and moral truth moves into the central position. From an economic point of view, the central concept of wisdom is permanence. We must study the economics of permanence.'

So wrote E.F. Schumacher in his book from 1973, Small is Beautiful.

Many people read and were inspired by Schumachers book in the seventies, and have continued to be inspired. The messages that people take from this book concern the need for scale, for intermediate technology and the need for an economics in which people mattered. But Schumacher's message was much deeper than this. Time and again in this book, he discusses metaphysics in relation to our predicament:

'The task of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical recon­struction. It is not as if we had to invent anything new; at the same time, it is not good enough merely to revert to the old formulations. . . . The deepest problems of our age ... cannot be solved by organisation, administration, or the expenditure of money, even though the importance of all these is not denied. We are suffering from a metaphysical disease, and the cure must there­fore be metaphysical.'

So what is metaphysics? Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy which examines the problem of substance and its qualities; change and causation; universals and particulars; freedom and determinism; being and reality; the object of our thinking; the limits of metaphysical speculation. Metaphysics concerns the ultimate or the underlying reality. It's about the world beyond facts. The 'real world' is a world that is more than the facts. And that is the world that metaphysics studies. In Institutes of Metaphysic, Scottish philosopher put it simply: "Metaphysics is the sci­ence of real existence." A reliance on the facts about the 'real world' doesn't do away with metaphysics, it just gives us a bad metaphysics. The ‘real world’ revealed by the senses is not as it appears to be. Bertrand Russell thus described common sense as ‘the metaphysics of barbarians’.

Big claims are made for metaphysics. ‘Apart from metaphysical presuppositions there can be no civilisation’ (Tomlin 1947:264). Such a view is out of favour in the modern world. Unravelling the reasons why this is so is central to our coming to understand the depths of the problems we are facing.

Why, then, has metaphysics been discarded? The truth is that metaphysics has been deliberately targeted and systematically destroyed by materialistic science and philosophy, in whose world of fact we now live. Value, meaning and purpose have been extinguished, lest they offer any scope for the return of some ghostly, godly, extraneous force. The idea that there is a world beyond facts doesn't fit the mechanistic ideology of reductionist science. And that materialism has stripped nature and humanity of the sacred. The world is failing not for want of technique and know-how, it is failing as a result of metaphysical disease.

‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.’

‘We have created new idols. The worship of the golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose’.

‘Modern loyalty is devoted to impersonal and func­tional purposes.’

‘The "objective" discharge of business primarily means a dis­charge of business according to calculable rules and "without re­gard for persons'".

‘”without regard for persons” is also the watchword of the mar­ket and, in general, of all pursuit of naked economic interests.’

'[Political problems] can be properly solved only by a recasting of society on an organic or pluralist basis...a regime no longer based on the self-propagating power of money...but on the human value and aim of work where the class struggle introduced by capitalist economy will have been surmounted along with this economy itself...'

These are quotes from Karl Marx, Pope Francis, Max Weber and Jacques Maritain. It says something that very different sources are speaking the same language. The quotes all point to the devaluation of human beings and of the world, the loss of the sacred and our confinement in the ‘iron cage’ of capitalist modernity. Getting out of that cage requires more than social force and organisational power. Weber’s ‘steel hard cage’ is a psychic prison that embraces our very subjectivities; we cannot see the bars on this cage, they are internal. Emancipation will require metaphysical reconstruction. The quote from Maritain comes from his book The Rights of Man and Natural Law (1943: 90). For Maritain, Natural Law expresses both what is natural in the world and what is known naturally, and that is available to all.

Natural right, human rights, depend upon natural law, nature as seen through the eyes of reason. Further, to know and appreciate this natural world requires that we draw upon all disciplines, from the natural sciences to art, literature, poetry and mysticism, to explore all human possibilities and bring about an integral personality. Include the claims of Nature, and you have the approach I take to social and environmental justice. And that justice requires that we reorder our whole social metabolic order from the roots upwards.

Max Weber referred to our social and psychic dependency on the economic system in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

'The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order.. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the 'saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment'. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.' (Weber 1985 181/2).

This steel hard cage is the modern Megamachine, the product of the rationalisation of the world. It is the realisation of chemist, physicist and inventor Robert Boyle's maniacal dream of the 'empire of man' ruling over nature. Boyle decried 'the veneration men commonly have for what they call nature', since such respect 'obstructed and confined the empire of man over the inferior creatures'. He proposed that 'instead of using the word nature, taken either for a goddess, or a kind of semi-deity, we wholly reject, or very seldom employ it'. (Keller, EF., Reflections on Gender and Science 1985: 54.)

And they have been denigrating, devaluing and discarding nature ever since. Out went meaning and purpose, out went value. The only deities left were the various technologies used to manipulate and exploit a valueless nature. The result is that humanity stands face to face with the 'wild facts' of social disintegration and ecological catastrophe, morally and politically disarmed, and desperate for science and reason to come to the rescue. They won't. This is an existential crisis. The mechanistic worldview and the activities associated with it have delivered a wasteland.

So that’s where progress finally ends? The loss of culture and art, a pervasive meaninglessness and hopelessness, the fall of civilisation, the destruction of nature, the end of life itself. Look at all these things and ask with John Ruskin: ‘Are they not what your machine gods have produced for you?' (John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, vol. I p 270).

The latter day Furies of war, terrorism, social breakdown, extinction of species, climate change and global warming will not be appeased by economic growth or technological sophistication. I have news for all those who still believe in the promise of 'progress', it is here, you have arrived at your destination. Forget messiahs, nothing and no-one will save us from ourselves but ourselves. We need to value 'who' we are and 'where' we are. Only the recov­ery of warm, affective ties, bonds and solidarities in the context of closely integrated human and natural communities will be sufficient to lay these Furies to rest and bring peace to the world. And that requires a transformation in our way of life, a recovery of values and a moral growth on our part.

In his book, Reinventing the Sacred, biologist Stuart Kauffman argues that 'we have been under the Galilean spell that all is governed by natural law. It is no accident that Galileo got in trouble with the Church, not for his heliocentric, Copernican views, but for believing that science, not revelation, was the only true path to knowledge. From Galileo we come to Newton, to Laplace to Schrodinger, to reductionism, to the view that, when we understand it all, "all" will be covered sufficiently by natural law. This is the Galilean spell that holds us in its sway. With it, spirituality seems pointless, as does the universe of the reductionist.'

Scientistic pretensions in social science has involve a blind copying of the mechanistic methods of physics. We see the damaging effects of this most clearly in economics. The irony is that physics has long abandoned mechanistic thinking. Scientism obsessed with positive knowledge has been the dominant approach because it corresponds with a social order that has replaced purposes with functions and driven ends out through the extension of means. The world is dominated by an instrumental rationality. We live within a value-free social system. The call for a recovery of value-centred thinking in the mode of classical political economy is a demand for a transformation of the value-free social system. Joan Robinson wrote disparagingly of economists "running to hide in thickets of Algebra, while abandoning the really tough ques­tions to journalists and politicians" (Robinson, 1962). Of all the disciplines, economics, concerning the practicalities of our material life-processes, is the one where the destructive effects of the fact-value division are most obvious. A "value-free" economics is in danger of meriting Oscar Wilde's remark that a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. But, as Marx observed, these economists are not so much wrong as right about an economic system that is itself wrong. We live in an inverted world, with things invested with existential significance and human beings reduced to passive objects. That is a condition of alienation and, with their value-free science, economists are being true to the economy they serve and rationalise. Marx somewhere described economists as the lickspittles of the bourgeoisie, and experts by way of nothing. They are experts on an alienated social system that proceeds without regard to human values.

In passing, I shall note that Joan Robinson's condemnation of economists who run to hide in the thickets of Algebra, leaving the tough questions of value to journalism, politics, religion too, I would add, applies generally. We cannot leave the crisis in the climate system in the hands of scientists, technicians and engineers. To tacke this crisis we have to come out of the world of fact and means and instrumental rationality and attach our material power to moral power - we have to address the 'really tough questions' of human values, worldviews, how we choose to live our lives.

Scientism in any form is a dead-end. The emulation of the methods of natural science and the displacement of value by fact was condemned decades ago by scientist Norbert Wiener:

'The success of mathematical physics led the social scientists to be jealous of its power without quite understanding the intellectual attitudes that had contributed to this power. The use of mathematical formulae had accompanied the develop­ment of the natural sciences and become the mode in the social sciences. Just as primitive peoples adopt the Western modes of denationalized clothing and of parliamentarism out of a vague feeling that these magic rites and vestments will at once put them abreast of modern culture and technique, so the economists have developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise ideas in the language of the infinitesimal calculus. ... To assign what purports to be precise values to such essentially vague quantities is neither useful nor honest, and any pretense of applying precise formulae to these loosely defined quantities is a sham and a waste of time.' (Wiener, 1964, p. 89).

For the reductionist, for whom we live in a world of fact, ethics is meaningless. And insofar as we accept the primacy of this reductionist view, we lose agency, value, meaning - we lose everything that inspires and motivates and equips us to act in light of knowledge. In the ancient conception, ethics and politics are intertwined. This is the world of practical reason that has been hollowed out, we have been demoralised and depoliticised. There is no mystery at all as to why we fail to respond to the appeal to facts. The planetary managers and engineers, the people who possess the world and the people who work for them in the Megamachine, the people who contest the terms of that possession, do not speak the language of motivations, other than how to keep improving incentives so that people work harder. To speak of motivations, as I speak of them, would be to acknowledge and address values. Values are crucial to social and ethical cohesion in their organisations. The problem, however, is that we live in a world in which functions have taken the place of purposes, means have been displaced to replace ends. We speak the language of economics and technologies, not ethics and politics.

The problem is this, as a result of the rationalisation of the world, fact and value have become divorced from each other, and leaving us ill-equipped to act wisely with respect to our technological power and know-how. Our technical capacities have outstripped our moral capacities, and the result is that we cannot assume responsibility for the forces we have unleashed upon the world. Here, in our inability to make common cause and take a common stand to address the crisis in the climate system, we reap the whirlwind of our technological conquest of the world. Max Weber characterised the processes making for capitalist modernity as a ‘disenchantment of the world’.

'the fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world’. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values, have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.'

Weber SV in Gerth and Mills ed. 1961:155

This ‘disenchantment’ is the stripping of meaning and value from nature and the concomitant subjection of nature to an all-pervasive instrumental rationality in pursuit of goals abstracted from the natural order. The origin of Weber’s term ‘disenchantment’ is Friedrich Schiller and what he called die Entgotterung der Nature. Rationalisation is thus the ‘dedivinization’ or, more accurately, the ‘dis-godding’ of nature (Herman, 1981: 57).

As philosophers like Toynbee (1974: 143-5) and Passmore (1980: 10) have argued, this process of disenchantment has two big consequences: first, the sense of the sacred in the world is denied and, second, nature is commercially and technologically exploited in complete indifference to the qualities of natural objects. The loss of the one leaves a great gaping hole in the world where the soul once was, and no amount of material quantities generated by the other can ever suffice to fill it up.

Weber’s disenchantment reveals capitalist modernity to as a process of ‘disgodding’, a devaluation in which Nature comes to be stripped of a sense of the sacred and reduced to dead, factual matter, available for technological appropriation and commercial exploitation, to be used according to human desires and projects. William Smart presents a clear and concise statement of this commercialisation and instrumentalisation of the world which accompanies its disenchantment.

"The economic goal of civilization is to turn the whole natural environment of man from a relation of hostility or indifference into a relation of utility." (Smart, 1926, p. 13).

Weber’s analysis exposes the most profound, and the most incapacitating, split in modern society. This split began as the schism between faith and reason. The origin of this schism is the scientific revolution and the reign of reductionism in the aftermath of Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Laplace. In time, the scientific and the industrial revolution defined the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment in terms that fitted the emerging capitalist relations. Reductionism became the gold stan­dard for yielding knowledge about the world ‘out there’. What was lost was the ‘in here’. The separation of faith and reason can still appear to be liberatory, signifying the triumph of science and the forces of reason over religion and the forces of superstition. But that is a superficial view. That triumph has expanded our power in terms of technique and know-how, but diminished us in the sense of a demoralisation and devaluation. We have lost our sense of ‘knowing-why’. Our technical advance is thus also a massive human loss.

Weber’s description of the modern rational universe is confirmed by theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg and his famous dictum: ‘The more we comprehend the universe, the more pointless it seems.’ The logical conclusion of scientific reductionism is that we live in a meaningless universe of facts. Facts without values.

The British economist A. C. Pigou quotes Dickinson's Letters of John Chinaman in pointing to the moral human cost of capitalist industrialisation and rationalisation:

In short, the attention of the German people was so concentrated on the idea of learning to do, that they did not care, as in former times, for learning to be. Nor does Germany stand alone in this charge; as witness the following description of modern England written by an Englishman from the standpoint of an Oriental spectator. "By your works you may be known. Your triumphs in the mechanical arts are the obverse of your failure in all that calls for spiritual insight. Machines of every kind you can make and use to perfection; but you cannot build a house or write a poem, or paint a picture; still less can you worship or aspire . . . Your outer man as well as your inner is dead; you are blind and deaf. Ratiocination has taken the place of perception; and your whole life is an infinite syllogism from premises you have not examined to conclusions you have not anticipated or willed. Everywhere means, nowhere an end. Society is a huge engine and that engine itself out of gear. Such is the picture your civilization presents to my imagination." There is, of course, exaggeration in this indictment; but there is also truth. At all events it brings out vividly the point which is here at issue; that efforts devoted to the production of people who are good instruments may involve a failure to produce people who are good men (Pigou, 1932, p. 13).

I believe that Weber is as brilliant in his field of social science as Weinberg is in his field of theoretical physics. But I believe that both were right about a particular universe in a particular time and place – rationalised capitalist modernity – but fundamentally and profoundly wrong about the world we live in and who we are. The scientific revolution and the industrial capitalist revolution went hand in hand and gave birth to the modern world. In For the Common Good (1990), Herman Daly and John Cobb write of the extent to which 'the wild facts' of today are in conflict with standard economic theory and practice. How ironic to see these former allies now at loggerheads, each hurling their facts at the other. Capital demands service, science is now demanding revolution. But here's the problem - the capitalist facts, the imperatives of growth and expansion, are buttressed by a political system, by laws, armies, media and by a belief system; the scientific facts have sweet reason, and a naive faith that everyone in the world respects truth.

Why does the loss of values matter? It matters because, as we can see with respect to our collective failure to respond to the crisis in the climate system, despite ample warnings from the world of science, ways of life, indeed, civilised life as such, hang in the balance. We live in a world reduced to facts and figures, a world in which instrumental rationality has come to dominate and in which substantive rationality has dissolved into value judgements, a world in which means have become enlarged to displace ends. We need to reintegrate the manifold qualities and attributes of the human experience in order to unify the human house on a single foundation.

In the contemporary world we are not short of factual knowledge and technical know-how. We are utterly bereft of ends. Lewis Mumford thus describes how modern civilisation turns in and against itself. ‘Civilisation begins by a magnificent materialisation of human purpose: it ends in a purposeless materialism. An empty triumph, which revolts even the self that created it.’ (Mumford 1957 ch 3).

'If the values of civilisation were in fact a sufficient fulfilment of man's nature, it would be impossible to explain this inner emptiness and purposelessness. Military defeats, economic crises, political dissensions, do not account for this inner collapse: at best they are symptomatic, for the victor is equally the victim and he who becomes rich feels impoverished. The deeper cause seems to be man's self-alienation from the sources of life.' (Mumford 1957 ch 3).

Mumford describes purposeless materialism as ‘the vice that now threatens to overwhelm our own civilization in the very midst of its technological advancement’. Our mistake is to have treated materialization as an end in itself. (Mumford 1966 ch 4).

Political and economic crises are symptomatic of a deeper malaise, a crisis in our environmental relations deriving from our alienation from the sources of life. This is a self-alienation, denoting an active process in which we have turned our creations into ends in themselves whilst, at the same time, denigrating the richer materialism which forms the essential ground of our being. As a result, our technological progress has taken the form of a purposeless materialism, something that, in the words of Lewis Mumford, now threatens to overwhelm our own civilization in the very midst of its apparent technological triumph. The vitality of urban life has been arrested ‘by the error of treating materialization as an end in itself.’ (Mumford 1966: 135/36 ch 4).

Lewis Mumford affirms a humane and life-giving alternative to the present process of hopeless mechanization and purposeless materialism. This alternative is embedded in the very nature of human beings, for our nature has many other capacities besides the gift for exploiting scientific curiosity, for performing regular work, and for fabricating machines.

'Furthermore, I believe that at a critical point we shall make a series of new choices, just as deliberate as those which made the machine itself a dominating factor in our lives; and that if we make these choices in time to ward off disaster we shall bring about a general renewal of life.'

Mumford openly challenges scientific reductionism and mechanistic materialism:

‘If human life has no purpose and meaning, then the philosophy that proclaims this fact is even emptier than the situation it describes. If, on the other hand, there is more to man's fate and history than meets the eye, if the process as a whole has significance, then even the humblest life and the most insignificant organic function will participate in that ultimate meaning. (Mumford 1952: 61/62).

The world and the life in it is more than physical fact. We are now seeing that Mumford was right all those years ago. In making an appeal to people on the strength of the facts, scientists are reaching for political and moral effects, but lack the connections and motivations that make such an appeal effective.

Mumford’s criticism of purposeless materialism implies the need to revalue and recover purpose. Maybe we will again come to appreciate that 'purpose' is immanent in all natural processes, rather than something we superimpose upon the world via an abstract moral system, or just plain discard altogether, as in mechanistic science.

'Time out of mind it has been by the way of the ‘final cause,’ by the teleological concept of end, of purpose or of ‘design,’ in one of its many forms .. . that men have been chiefly wont to explain the phenomena of the living world: and it will be so while men have eyes to see and ears to hear withal. With Galen as with Aristotle, it was the physician's way; with John Ray as with Aristotle it was the naturalist's way; with Kant as with Aristotle it was the philosopher's way. ... It is a common way, and a great way; for it brings with it a glimpse of a great vision, and it lies deep as the love of nature in the hearts of men.'

—D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, 1942

The schism of faith and reason is but part of a much bigger and much deeper split at the heart of the modern world – that between fact and value. And that split has been opened up by the driving of meaning and purpose out of the universe.

Knowing why and how this occurred is crucial to our success or failure in recovering value. relating our creation of values to inherent worth, which refers to the good of a thing as such, not just its intrinsic value and inherent value, which refer to the value human beings place upon a thing, whether for cultural, aesthetic, instrumental or commerical reasons. This latter valuation may have an important role to play, but the bedrock is inherent worth, the good inherent in the things of the world and the world as such. We do not create ex nihilo, but work with something. The road to wisdom leads to the understanding that nature has a value and contains values that transcend human measurement and calculation. Making value is a co-evolution. The social causes can be located in the ascendancy of specific social relations of production. At this point, I want to examine what Schumacher called 'metaphysical disease' more closely. Behind the dismissal of metaphysics is a fear and loathing of essentialism, which is defined in the worst possible terms to fit the pet hatred of the particular critic, God for atheist materialists, biological determinism for feminists. The fear and loathing of essentialism is apparent in most forms of modern and postmodern thought.

Aristotle defined essence as ‘the substantial reality’ of a thing, that which ‘cannot be reduced to another definition which is fuller in expression.’ (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 988n:30-35; 994b:15-20 as in Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle, The Modern Library,

NY, 2001.) To be an essentialist is to hold that a thing is something essentially and is essentially something and that, therefore, a thing really has an existence that is in some way meaningful. Such a view runs against the atomist and empiricist metaphysics of the modern world. Postmodern thought continues this modernist metaphysics in seeking to dismantle the sense of an underlying meaning and overall story. As Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote: ‘I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives’ - a metanarrative being a ‘legit­imizing myth’ or ‘narrative archetype’. (Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge, 1984, p.24 and Foreword at p.9.)

Fine, but the essentialist tradition from Aristotle to Marx is well equipped with the intellectual tools and capacity to critique and dissolve any such legitimizing myths, and it can do so precisely because it can check a given reality against a view of substantial reality. Without that essentialist view, reality becomes arbitrary, a series of discreet events with no connecting purpose or underlying meaning. That is hardly a post-modernism at all, it falls firmly within the Humean metaphysics that has defined the modern world. Postmodernist critics see essentialism as an arbitrary conceptual construction which is instrumental in seeking, gaining and rationalising power. For an essential, the view that a thing is essentially something and is something essentially rules out any such arbitrary implication and, further, sees a notion of essence as our best defence against those who would manipulate and mould people and planet as a matter of social construction.

Essentialism is anathema because it contradicts the (post)modernist view that only factual materiality is real, that only that which can be demonstrated to exist in empirical terms is the real world. Logical positivist A.J. Ayer declared metaphysics to be ‘literally senseless’ since the things it deals with cannot be known through the senses. (A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 1961, p.61.) That’s the world we live in, a world in which the body is real, and can be bought, quantified, priced, commodified and sold on the market, and the soul is discarded. We do indeed, as Marx said, live in ‘soulless conditions’. Here, the modernists and postmodernists reveal themselves to be on a continuum rather than being on opposite sides. For both, there is no ‘beyond’ the world of facts and discrete events, and hence no reality for the meta­physician to access. There is no essence, no soul, no élan vital, no spiri­tual heart sustaining the world as it keeps on turning.

Those who are sceptical of any and all meaning in history are soon lost in the thickets of accident. The world is just facts and happenings. To those who believe this applies what Marx wrote of Gustav Hugo: ‘He is a sceptic as regards the necessary essence of things, so as to be a courtier as regards their accidental appearance.’ (Marx MECW I 1975 204). It was for this reason that Jurgen Habermas characterised the poststructuralists as ‘young conservatives’. If you deny essence, meaning and purpose in ‘the real world’ then, whether by default or design, you end up as a supporter of the status quo. And the status quo at the moment is the secular religion of ‘progress’ based on a false eschatology of endless accumulation of material quantities and monetary values. It is a nihilism.

‘Instrumental reason is concerned with efficiency: it takes the ends of human activity as given and is concerned to calculate the most effective way of achieving those ends. In its characteristically capitalist form it is concerned with production for the sake of further production, consumption for the sake of further consumption, and above all, profit for the sake of further profit. In other words, it is concerned not with ends in themselves, but with ends insofar as they may be used to pursue further ends. To be rational in this sense is identical with the pursuit of power, not as a means but as an end in itself.’ (Ross Poole, Morality and Modernity, 1991 ch 4, Liberalism and Nihilism).

In the conception of the mechanistic universe, there is no purpose in the world, no value in the sense of inherent worth or goodness. Human beings are biological machines, designed for the biochemical reproduction of ‘selfish genes’. There is no meaning to life, no point, other than survival. There is no essence, whether human or divine. In the concern to drive out gods and deities from nature, the materialists have driven out values. But if this is the case, then life itself has no meaning, and certainly no ultimate meaning. There is no ‘ultimate’ in this world of surface events. And there is no point. The existentialists were trying to create and assert value in a world that has none. It was a hopeless task. Without essences, all choices will be arbitrary. As Sartre drew Being and Nothingness to a close, he declared that ‘the idea of God is contradictory’, and followed this up with that statement that ‘Man is a useless passion.’ Sartre was right about a world that has emptiness at its core. The only values in this world are the ones that we ‘make up’, arbitrary values that need pay no heed to nature or the human ontology. So we end up with a capital system that sees the world and the things in it as ‘resources’ to enclose, commodify and exploit, a world in which the only values which count are monetary values.

Schumacher drew the connection between purposeless, valueless materialism and the mechanistic character of capitalist economics.

'Estrangement breeds loneliness and despair, the 'encounter with nothingness', cynicism, empty gestures of defiance, as we can see in the greater part of exis­tentialist philosophy and general literature today. . . . Nature, it has been said, abhors a vacuum, and when the available 'spiritual space' is not filled by some higher motivation, then it will necessarily be filled by something lower - by the small, mean, calculating attitude to life which is rationalised in ihe economic calculus...'

It's not even that metaphysics has been destroyed. Schumacher describes this reductionist, mechanistic materialism as 'a bad, vicious, life-destroying type of metaphysics'. To overcome 'the idolatry of economism'. 'the idolatry of enrichissez-vous, which cele­brates millionaires as its culture heroes' we need to engage with 'the most vital ideas about the inner development of man.' And that cannot but mean the recovery of essentialism in some form. We need, in Schumacher's words, to be 'truly in touch with the centre.' And in my view, that 'centre' is essence of life materi­alist scientists and philosophers have been most concerned to throw out of nature. Why? I think it has plenty to do with a suspicion that teleology of any kind suggests some extraneous force, some vital presence, that very quickly leads to conclusions concerning the spiritual qualities of things. As Laplace said when Napoleon asked him about the place of God in his science: 'I had no need of that hypothesis.'

And here we start to understanding why essentialism can provoke such hostility. In part, it is the misuse of such notions in practice, too often mirroring dominant worldviews and prevailing social arrangements, as when Aristotle declared some people to be slaves by nature. It is easy to understand why, in light of this, feminists are extremely critical of essentialism, given how easy it is for a prevailing social order to define subaltern groups as naturally this or that, a view which has rationalised the marginalisation and subordination of women throughout history. That is most certainly not the essentialism I defend. And it is not the reason why, to materialist scientists and philosophers of a mechanistic and reductionist persuasion, essentialism is anathema. The real concern is that essen­tialism is a philosophical slight of hand that allows spirituality back into our understanding of life. Even worse, God! It doesn't have to. A purely naturalistic conception is perfectly possible. As Scott Meikle argues in his Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx: Often thought of as a theory that sees the world as the artifact of a God or Guiding Intelligence and each thing in the world as existing and behaving in the way that it does as a fulfilment of his purpose. That is not the theory of teleology adopted in this book (see Chapter 9 (viii) ). Here it is a theory about how the real nature (essence) of a whole entity is to be identified; how its development from immature, to mature (telos) and declining forms is to be explained; and how its characteristic behaviour (ergon) is to be explained in a law-like fashion. A whole entity can be anything from an amoeba to a form of human society, or an astronomical system.' (Meikle 1985 Glossary).

But such a view, I argue, is consistent with my view that spirituality and politics are joined together rather than separate. And I mean politics as intertwined with ethics. And by ethics, I mean a concern with human growth through the actualisation of healthy potentials. And such a view implies the recovery of value, of the sense that there is an inherent goodness in human beings and in the world. In this respect, essentialism is linked with the idea of intrinsic value. And that view frames the world and the things in it in terms of inherent worth. And at this point, things may get controversial. The word 'worth' is derived from the Old English word 'woerthship', from which we get 'worship.' The idea of intrinsic worth thus asks us to anwer the deepest of question concerning service, sacrifice, to what end or purpose do we live. The idea of worship raises the awkward question of just which god do we serve? 'No man can serve two masters . . . Ye cannot serve God and mammon' (Mt 6 : 24). The word Mammon is a transliteration into New Testament Greek of the Aramaic tnamona, meaning 'wealth' or 'profit'. The attachment to wealth estranges human beings from the inherent worth of things, from the ground of our being, from God. If we see intrinsic value in the world, we are brought face to face with the sin of idolatry: what do you worship? what has worth for you? how do you distinguish the real thing from false idols? Here is the challenge to mechanistic materialism, to Robert Boyle's 'empire of man'. Having separated spirit and matter, faith and reason, value and fact, and constructed a Megamachine in which function has replaced purpose, means have displaced ends, our modern day imperialists pretend that spirituality doesn't exist, yet proceed to worship the new idols of the centralised nation state, bureaucracy, the market, money, capital, commodities, soulless, impersonal things one and all. Here is where service is owed in the modern world. And here is where we will find sacrifice aplenty.

I will go for the God of love, the God of personal relationships, the God of love manifest, a God which draws us out of the ego and into relationships with others and the world. A God of responsibility too. We have obligations relating to others and the world, we are made to 'own' the consequences of our actions in a most personal sense.

Essentialism doesn't have to go in this direction. A naturalistic explanation built on natural selection, evolution and an innate moral grammar is perfectly possible. What is clear is that an essentialist metaphysics makes us recognise the worth of things and take responsibility for our values. Stuart Kauffman presents a wholly naturalistic conception of this ethic. 'we truly need to reinvent the sacred for ourselves to guide our lives, based on the ultimate values we come to choose. At last, we must be fully responsible for ourselves, our lives, our actions, our val­ues, our civilizations, the global civilization.'

'If, as I advo­cate, we rename God, not as the Generator of the universe, but as the creativity in the natural universe itself, the two views share a common core: we are responsible, not God. But the two views do differ in their most fundamental aspect. One sees a supernatural Generator God as the source of the vastness around us. The view I discuss, beyond reductionism, partially beyond natural law, sees nature itself as the generator of the vast creativity around us. Is not this new view, a view based on an expanded science, God enough? Is not nature it­self creativity enough? What more do we really need of a God, if we also accept that we, at last, are responsible to the best of our forever-limited wisdom?' (Kauffman 2008 ch 19).

I would emphasise here Kauffman's idea that we are co-creators in this ceaselessly creative universe. Kauffman is right to argue that our moral views as we engage in this co-construction of the universe. That sense of actively participating in the creative unfolding of the world is important to hold onto in order to avoid falling back into arbitrariness. There is a world, we work with real substances and do not just invent our values. These values are not merely subjective or the product of social construction alone. Our values are part discovery, part creation, developing as we participate in the co-creation of our ever-emergent world, made manifest as we give positive expression to our healthy potentialities. Values are both inner and outer qualities that emerge all the more clearly and vitally the more true we are to the insurgency of life.

We need an alternative to the current worldview. I see spirituality and politics as creative human self-realisation as united. I see our practical activities as motivated by a quest for meaning and the need to house the sacred, house the psyche, create a place to be. And the beginnings of this alternative can be discerned in the increasing awareness that there is more to the world than meaninglessness. The world is not objectively valueless, as scientists like Stuart Kauffman are showing. And there is more to life than survival. The big claims made for metaphysics may indeed, after all, be justified.

Here is biologist Christian de Duve in Life Evolving:

‘few of us will deny that the new picture emerging from modern science is bringing us closer to what may be called ultimate reality. In other words, the human intellect, though born from very mundane preoccupations with tools and other practical means of survival, has developed into an instrument for approaching ultimate reality.

Science deals only with the intelligible facet of this reality. Are there not other facets, to be discovered by mental faculties other than intellect? And is it not conceivable that those faculties have, like intellect, grown from beginnings deeply rooted in biological survival, to become means of apprehending those other facets of ultimate reality?’ (Christian de Duve, Life Evolving, 2002).

Answering such questions revises the philo­sophical understanding of ‘materialism.’ Materialism has been rigidly defined against spiritualism, and is based on the assertion that there is ‘nothing but’ matter. Christian de Duve points to a contemporary monism that is redefining matter in such a way as to include ‘spirit’. Here, we move beyond dualism. Here, we can reinvent the sacred in the purely naturalist terms in the manner of Stuart Kauffman. Most interesting is to see this position defined as ‘metarealism’ by Catholic philosopher, Jean Guitton, in his book Dieu et la Science (God and Science). ‘If spirit and matter have a common origin, it becomes clear that their du­ality is an illusion, due to the fact that one considers only the mechan­ical aspects of matter and the intangible quality of spirit.’ Guitton concludes that: ‘Spirit and matter form a single and same reality.’ (J. Guitton, Dieu et la Science, 1991: 182 184). Strange days indeed. But maybe not so strange when we remember that the dualism of flesh and spirit entered into Christianity from external sources, Platonism, Neoplatonism, Manicheism. The idea of 'metarealism' opens up the possibility that we may be able to reinvent the sacred, reconstruct metaphysics, call back the soul, recover essences and unite immanence and transcendence.

However this turns out, it is a move in the right direction. An integral part of my work is to address the causes and consequences of the separation of fact and value, showing how it is accompanied by the technological exploitation and destruction of a ‘dis-godded’ nature and by the demoralisation of the collective life of human beings. The result is that we end up in a meaningless universe of facts devoid of values.

I think we are entitled to discuss the recovery of values in terms of the sacred. Kauffman writes on reinventing the sacred. I see this in terms of valuing life and place in the sense of housing the sacred. Here is Jamie Whittle writing about the human ecology of his home bioregion.

‘I consider the River Findhorn a sacred place. ... I dream of a day when the watershed of the River Findhorn has been reforested, when the howl of wolves can be heard on moonlit winter nights, and when wild salmon return to the river in abundance. Because that day will be a great day. It will be a day when we human beings have come to see our true place in the interconnectedness of the world, and have been moved to act upon that consciousness. It will be a day when we start to inhabit the Earth with a grace. Like a river.’

Jamie Whittle, White River

‘As source meets Firth the mountains mingle with the shore overlooked by the blue sky: a fitting end to a journey of love, passion, anger, and achievement.’ Origins and ends, who we are, where we are going, answering the ‘who’ and the ‘where’ questions.

White River, A Journey Up and Down the River Findhorn, by Jamie Whittle

https://earthlinesmagazine.wordpress.com/2013/07/06/book-review-white-river-a-journey-up-and-down-the-river-findhorn-by-jamie-whittle/

Bringing ecology and law together in the Highlands

http://www.scotsman.com/news/bringing-ecology-and-law-together-in-the-highlands-1-1161616

It’s a vision that integrates life in the never ending poetry of Earth, seeing life as a river, a poetic surge into the world. The trickle that is the river's source grows and flow until we reach that place that is the housing of the sacred. This housing of the sacred concerns the resting place of the psyche. It's about calling back the soul, putting an end to soulless conditions. It's about 'Real People in a Real Place', to adopt the title of an essay by poet Iain Crichton Smith in a collec­tion entitled, most appropriately, Towards the Human. It's about Being and Place, seeing your own value and self-worth in the face of the other, in the contours of the land, in other creatires. It is to connect with the soul of the world. As Crichton Smith puts it:

'Sometimes when I walk the streets of Glasgow I see old women passing by, bowed down with shopping bags, and I ask myself: "What force made this woman what she is? What is her history?" It is the holiness of the person we have lost, the holiness of life itself, the inexplicable mystery and wonder of it, its strangeness, its tenderness.'

Iain Crichton Smith, Towards the Human: Selected Essays, Macdonald Publishers, Loanhead, 1986, pp.56-7

In his holistic approach to nature, the poet, artist and engraver William Blake comes close to the positions of contemporary ecologists and the emphasis upon the interdependence and interconnection of all things, unity in diversity and organic growth. More than this, Blake offers a perspective on the re-enchantment of the world. If we can go beyond our five senses and cleanse the doors of perception, then we will see that 'everything that lives is Holy'. (Blake, Complete Writings, pp.777, 379,149,160). This encapsulates Blake's total vision of reality. Everything that lives is holy not because we choose to think it so, but because it is intrinsically holy. The holy cannot be defined, only experienced as the ultimate knowledge of consciousness. ‘Within the scope of human experience there are degrees of knowledge and value, self-authenticating, of which those who have reached the farthest regions tell us, the vision of the holy, and the beatitude of that vision is the highest term.’ (Raine 2011). And it is because of this that Blake's stars and grains of sand can say no other than ‘Holy, Holy, Holy.’

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

Here, we are beyond a narrowly intellectual appreciation of the world. As Raine concludes, this is not poetic fancy: it is the profoundest knowledge. The vision contained in the mind’s eye is realised by freeing the sensuous imagination to play upon reality as a field of potentialities:

'. . . the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.

This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.' (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p. 187).

I am trying to remember some deep philosophical debate as to whether we are embodied souls or ensouled bodies but, frankly, it may well just cloud the basic point in a fog of profundity. And the point is that the dualism of flesh and spirit has given us a delusional notion of transcendence which, when attached to the worship of technological powers, our new gods, and the devaluation of nature, is positively dangerous. That's the road to self-destruction.

How deeply we are mired in duality becomes clear in our concerns to restore the connection between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds. Through our disconnection from nature, we have become bifurcated personalities. The externalization of nature is a consequence of what Blake called the ‘wrenching apart’ of the appar­ently external world from the unity of the wholeness of being.

And Los, round the dark globe of Urizen,

Kept watch for Eternals to confine

The obscure separation alone ;

For Eternity stood wide apart,

As the stars are apart from the earth.

Los wept, howling around the dark Demon,

And cursing his lot ; for in anguish

Urizen was rent from his side,

And a fathomless void for his feet,

And intense fires for his dwelling.

But Urizen laid in a stony sleep,

Unorganiz'd, rent from Eternity.

The Eternals said : "What is this? Death.

"Urizen is a clod of clay."

Los howl'd in a dismal stupor,

Groaning, gnashing, groaning,

Till the wrenching apart was healed.

But the wrenching of Urizen heal'd not.

Cold, featureless, flesh or clay,

Rifted with direful changes,

He lay in a dreamless night,

Till Los rouz'd his fires, affrighted

At the formless, unmeasurable death.

The First Book of Urizen 223

‘This has created an unhealed wound in the soul of modern Western man, leaving nature soulless and lifeless, and the inner world abstracted from the natural universe, its proper home.’ (Raine 2011).

That wound can be healed. It's time to go home. It's time to embark on that journey that connects origins and ends, seeing that the question of 'who' were are can only be answered in relation to the question of 'where' we are. 'I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.' (John O'Donohue). To dive into that river is a life-affirming rite of passage, an initiation into knowing and being in the world, and to keep swimming is to experience Being in the process of Becoming - be-ing as an active condition. It is to turn essence into existence, leaving a passive state of being to embrace an active state. By growing, we come to know what it is to be fully human in this world. And we can do some such thing. We are now coming to appreciate the fact that we are active members in a ceaselessly creative universe. We can overcome our abstraction from the natural universe and see our true place within it. This is more than the intellectual appreciation of some impersonal necessity. We are active co-creators of this creative universe; the world is always in some way humanly objective, infused with will, purpose, consciousness and choice.

But here is the problem. Knowledge is not, in itself, fully a virtue, in that it is not appetitive, it does not motivate action from within.

In my moral philosophy, I argue for the creation of society as a habitus which enables human beings to acquire the virtues and develop the character enabling them to act in such a way as to live well. In line with the virtue tradition, this view holds that the desire for the good is natural, something that is innate. Hence, the world of values works with our natural inclinations, educating desire or appetite from the inside, motivating behaviour and action. This view is in complete contrast to modern ethics, Kant, for instance, who asserts a split between duty and inclination and for whom, therefore, reason educates desire or appetite from the outside. My point is that knowledge alone cannot educate or motivate in this way, the cognitive is affective only if fact and value are joined rather than held apart. Only thus can knowledge be appetitive, motivating and producing an inclination in appetite to some kind of human good.

That we keep publishing the latest scientific research concerning climate change, only to express complete mystery as to why there is, yet again, no response, indicates how much we have lost in the disenchantment of the world. Progressives may celebrate the triumph of reason over faith, and they may also celebrate the pluralism of value judgements as an advance over the assertion of some overarching, substantive ethic (usually religious based). That sounds eminently reasonable and enlightened. But it is a moral disarmament. Fact is being pressed into service in the absence of value, reason is being made to do a job it cannot do if its ethical component is not in place.

Although, in the virtue tradition, prudence is an intellec­tual disposition, it is a disposition quite unlike knowledge as such. The problem is this, knowledge in itself does not make one positively desire to grasp the true; to be able to do this it would require an appetitive component. As Thomas Aquinas argued: "[H]aving knowledge does not make one want to consider the truth; it just makes one able to do so" (QDVC 7c). Whilst we all ‘know’ in some innate sense the difference between right and wrong, we require the appropriate dispositions to motivate us and give us the desire to embrace this knowledge and use it to guide our lives. To think that scientific evidence and reason in a fact-based world will be sufficient is mistaken, and dangerously so. In the older idiom of the virtues, we require the disposition of prudence to ensure that our in­tellect will attend to the relevant information we possess. But that is precisely what goes missing as a consequence of the reason-faith/fact-value split. We have become technologically equipped but morally and politically disarmed. As a result, we dominate nature and come to exploit and use the ‘things’ of the natural world as mere resources lacking in intrinsic value, possessing only monetary value, but, as the very facts of ecological degradation are put under our noses, we cannot act in other than instrumental terms. We have lost the ability to apprehend a substantive rationally.

Against this view of a disenchanted, objectively valueless, meaningless universe, I argue for a worldview beyond reductionism, instrumentalism and commercialism, a worldview which sees human beings as co-creators and active members of a creative and participatory universe in which agency, mean­ing, value, and consciousness are forever at work in the realisation of immanent potentialities and the unfolding of purposes.

This view is contrary to the worldview of mechanistic science, and could be dismissed as teleological. But I think that not only is it scientifically defensible, it puts the worlds of fact and value back together so that, at last, we can see ourselves, take our place, and take responsibility in a world that is in part our own creation. And the teleological aspect is unavoidable. Once we have agency, we have meaning and value, and these things are as real as anything studied by physicists. As biologist Stuart Kauffman explains his theory of emergence:

“There are things that we just can’t deduce from particle physics — life, agency, meaning, value and this thing called consciousness. The fact is that we can act on our own behalf and make choices. So agency is real. With agency comes value. Dinner is either good or bad. There’s consciousness in the universe. We may not be able to explain it, but it’s true. So the first new strand in the scientific worldview is emergence.” (http://darwiniana.com/2008/11/28/more-on-revinventing-the-sacred/).

Stuart Kaufmann argues for the principle of self-organisation in nature, describing it as ‘order for free’. But he argues for much more than this, arguing for organisms evolving, values, doing, acting, meaning, history, and opera as all very real, all part of the furni­ture of a very meaningful universe. ‘Science cannot foretell the evolution of the biosphere, of human technolo­gies, or of human culture or history. A central implication of this new Worldview is that we are co-creators of a universe, biosphere, and culture of endlessly novel creativity.’ Kauffman demonstrates that whilst reductionism has many successes to its name, it can never be a wholly satisfying way of understanding reality.

‘Agency has emerged in evolution and cannot be deduced by physics. With agency come meaning and value. We are beyond reductionist nihilism with re­spect to values in a world of fact. Values exist for organisms, certainly for human organisms and higher animals, and perhaps far lower on the evolu­tionary scale. So the new scientific view of emergence brings with it a place for meaning, doing, and value.

Then there is the brute fact that we humans (at least) are conscious. We have experiences.

The evolution of the universe, biosphere, the human economy, human culture, and human action is profoundly creative.’

'The reductionist confronts us with Weinberg's pointless universe in which the explanatory arrows always point downward to physics. Yet the emergence and evolution of life and of agency, hence value and meaning, cannot be reduced to physics.' (Kauffman 2008 ch 14).

The implications of this are profound. The ceaseless creativity of the co-constructing biosphere, human culture, civilisation and material interchange with nature means that science and the facts it yields with respect to our objective world may be limited in radical ways. The truth is that there is no 'objective' world in the sense of the world being some external datum, and the world that there is, the world that we live in, is incomplete, always in the process in being co-created. The implications are radical - culture is creative, we partially create the world around us, we need fact and value together. 'If the biosphere and human culture. If we only partially understand our surroundings, if we often truly do not know what will happen, but must live and act anyway, then we must reexamine our full humanity and how we manage to persevere in the face of not knowing. Reexamining ourselves as evolved living beings in nature is thus both a cultural task, with implications for the roles of the arts and humanities, legal rea­soning, business activities, and practical action, and part of reinventing the sa­cred—living with the creativity in the universe that we partially cocreate.' (Kauffman 2008 ch 14).

For so long, we have laboured under this misconception that we live in an objectively valueless and meaningless universe, something which charged us with the onerous task of inventing and imposing our own values upon the world. The split between reason and our other human sensibil­ities was expressed in social form in the estrangement of a capitalist world which separated us from our bodies, our senses, our powers and invested our essential qualities in ‘things’. This could be cast in progress terms, as the triumph of reason over faith through scientific advance and the Enlightenment. But this masks a more profound transformation, the split between fact and value in light of the extension of capitalist relations and instrumental rationality. In effect, progressives turned reason into a faith, denigrated or lost touch with other human sensibilities, and sat back expecting scientific advance and technological innovation to deliver peace, freedom and democracy. They failed to develop their political and moral capacities, and so suffer endless defeat in face of the new gods, the new idols, the adherents of the new faith – free markets, state bureaucracies, transnational corporations, capital, commodities, money. I could have entitled this piece 'What Price Value in a World of Facts'. You see, faith was never really beaten, and never really went away, it just took bastardised form in the world of hard capitalist facts. These are the facts that govern a world that lacks any sense of value other than monetary value. Science simply cannot fight back politically and morally. It educates, lectures and, now, with every failure to respond to the alarms being sounded with respect to the climate crisis, admonishes from the outside. But to be effective, and motivate human action, scientific reason needs to be on the inside of that context-dependent, patterned, human world. The world of fact needs to be joined with the world of value. True value, intrinsic value, not monetary value. At the moment, economic imperatives are the hard facts which trump ecological realities and necessities every time. The process of accumulation simply must take place, capital must expand its values, or there will be economic crisis. Given the way that we have organised our social system, these are facts that no one, no government, no business, can deny.

So here is my point - determining which set of facts prevails in this clash between economics and ecology is a question of values. If we are to act on the facts concerning climate realities, we have to challenge the facts concerning capitalist economic realities. Accepting the one implies the denial of the other. We are in the world of practical reason, ethics and politics, and in this world, 'facts' alone decide nothing.

We can blame the reductionistic scientific worldview. In my own writings, I locate this separation of fact and value, and the associated pathos of inverted means and ends, in precise social relations of production, capitalist relations which enclose and commodify the world and reduce everything in it to the status of exploitable resources. All the fact, logic, reason and evidence in the world will not suffice to educate and persuade those charged with the job of facilitating the process of private accumulation. For those people themselves are not autonomous choosers, they are mere personifications of economic relations, their decisions expressing the imperatives arising from the central dynamic of capital accumulation. Without a transformation in underlying social relations, creating a social identity which enables individuals to identify their private good with the social good, then all the appeals to scientific fact, evidence, and knowledge will change nothing – the appeals lack social relevance.

Why do we not know this? We have overvalued a certain conception of reason and rationality, placed our faith in a reason that is divorced from value. Scientific reductionism asserts that the ‘real world’, the world we live in, is a world of fact without value. And if it is true that we live in a meaningless world, then we have no option to create our own values. If we are to have values, that is. And, no doubt, impose them upon the objectively valueless world from the outside. It all seems very arbitary. The French existentialist philosophers sought an individualist solution to this problem of living a life of meaning in a world that is devoid of values. The task is hopeless, and any such meaning would be arbitrary. But the existentialist solution is hopeless for another reason – the question of values can only be settled in a collective sense. Human beings are social beings living a social existence. The forces which govern social life are supra-individual forces. To find some kind of meaning and exercise some kind of moral responsibility requires a global ethic, a common good, a collective moral framework – the very things which the capital system has dissolved, putting its own commercial universality and commonality in their place. Kauffman describes this reductionist world of fact devoid of values as an ‘injury’ which deprives us of the ‘global ethic’ we need in order to give expression to our agency, values, meaning and consciousness. ‘We lack a shared worldwide framework of values that spans our traditions and our responsibilities to all of life, one another, and the planet.’

We will only get that moral framework if we succeed in putting the worlds of fact and value back together in the one world. Mechanistic science gave us the objectively valueless, a world lacking in meaning and purpose. We should not be surprised, then, that we have failed to respond to scientific facts which possess political and moral implications. We should not be surprised that pointing to the facts of this meaningless world should fail to motivate us into action. Theoretical reason has been split from practical reason, with the result that we are not morally and politically equipped to act in light of evidence and information. For all of the reduction of ‘objectively valueless’ nature to self-chosen human values, ‘we’ do not decide the facts of this world. In the absence of that overarching moral framework integrating human society and nature, there is no ‘we’. All that there is are the brute facts of nature and climate crisis on the one hand and the imperatives of the capital system’s second nature on the other. And politics and ethics are nowhere in this clash. And neither are ‘we’. There is no 'we', and since this is the case, there is no basis for a global ethic. And that has consequences.

‘Our lives are full of value and meaning, yet no single framework offers a secure place for these facets of our humanity to coexist with fundamental science. We need a worldview in which brute facts yield values, a way to derive ought from is, just the step that Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume warned against. Agency, values, and "doing" did not come into being separately from the rest of existence; they are emergent in the evolution of the biosphere. We are the products of that evolution, and our values are real features of the universe.’ (Kauffman, 2008 ch 1).

There are good grounds, however, for thinking that this global ethic is within our reach.

'If for no other reason, we must try to invent a shared global ethic that will help us shape what we will deem to be an appropriate global civilization. For the first time in human history we have both the necessity to do so as our cul­tures are crushed together by globalization of commerce and by global communications, and the elements of the means to jointly partially shape what will become via global communications and international discussions at many governmental and non-governmental levels.

It is our very making of meaning in our lives. It is emergent. And it is as amazing, awesome, and as worthy of respect as the creative biosphere. As we see ourselves in a creative universe, biosphere, and culture, I hope that we will see ourselves in the world in a single framework of our entire hu­manity that spans' all of human life, knowing, doing, understanding, and inventing. The word we need for how we live our lives is faith, bigger by far than knowing or reckoning. A committed courage to get on with life anyway. How to live a good life with faith and courage is at the core of philo­sophic traditions dating back to Greece, with Plato stating that we seek the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Philosopher Owen Flanagan, in The Really Hard Problem, pursues this philosophic tradition, asking how we make meaning in our lives in a set of meaning domains, a "meaning space" including the sciences, arts, law, politics, ethics, and spirituality. Flanagan is right. We make our meaning touching all these spaces of meaning. The ex­istentialist insistence that we make our meaning in a meaningless universe by our choices and actions was a response to reductionism, in which the universe is meaningless. But life is part of the universe. In a newly envi­sioned universe, biosphere, and human culture of unending creativity, where life, agency, meaning, value, doing, and consciousness have emerged, and that we cocreate, we can now see ourselves, meaning-laden, as integral parts of emergent nature. Whether we believe in a Creator God, an East­ern tradition, or are secular humanists, we make the meaning of our lives, to live a good life, in all these ways. And we act without knowing every­thing. What should and can we do in the face of the ignorance that we confront? Our choice is between life and death. If we choose life, we must live with faith and courage, forward, unknowing. To do so is the mandate of life itself in a partially lawless, co-constructing universe, biotic, and hu­man world.

In face of this unknowing, many find security in faith in God. We can also choose to face this unknown using our own full human responsibility, without appealing to a Creator God, even though we cannot know every­thing we need to know. On contemplation, there is something sublime in this action in the face of uncertainty. Our faith and courage are, in fact, sa­cred—they are our persistent choice for life itself.' (Kauffman 2008 ch 14).

The reference to Plato is significant. My philosophical approach is grounded in the concept of 'rational freedom', affirming the link between reason and human freedom in a properly ordered universe. The concept goes back to Plato, whose view echoes throughout the history of political philosophy. 'The more man is guided by reason', argued Spinoza, 'the more he is free'. Spinoza was arguing for a rational state as the embodiment of freedom. Later, Hegel argued for the state as ethical agency. In this properly ordered state, the freedom of each individual and all individuals is co-existent. Those in the individualist liberal tradition consider the conception 'totalitarian', rendering the individual subservient to the state. Not so. The freedom of each and all individuals is precisely the thing which defines the state as rational. But it is as well to be aware of a curious parallel between Plato's Philosopher King, the king who rules by reason, and the modern idea that science, however reductionist and value free, is the highest form of knowledge and should, on that account, rule. Plato maintained no such crude thesis. For the realisation of a full humanity, we require the unity of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Such a view integrates science, ethics, politics, philosophy art, and the spiritual. The reason in the rational freedom I defend is fully in touch with intuition, emotion, feeling, aesthetics.

In the new scientific worldview Kauffman describes, we live in an meaningful universe of ceaseless creativity in which life, agency, meaning, consciousness and ethics have emerged and play active roles. Human development as a result is co-constructing, evolving, emergent, and unpredictable - it cannot be reduced to facts and physical laws. We are beyond seeing the world we live in as an objective, external datum or machine. Our stories, ideas, values, dreams, visions, inventions, and actions all make constructive, constitutive contributions to the creative universe. We can put fact and value together. Indeed, we must do so if we are to play a fully conscious and creative role in the co-construction of the world we live in. That is precisely what assuming responsibility for our actions and environmental impacts requires.

The problem of the separation of fact and value goes right to the heart of capitalist modernity. As Max Weber demonstrated, we live in a morally divided world and lack the overarching moral framework within which moral argument could claim authority. The world thus expresses a plurality of values, no one of which can claim priority over the others. If we think that fact-based knowledge alone can do the job, then we are mistaken. And we have been in this impasse long enough now to have learned. That too many haven’t learned, and still think that fact will persuade, motivate and inspire tells me that I am right to argue that, far from representing the triumph of reason over faith, the rationalists have placed their faith in reason – and this most certainly is a god that is failing.

And I shall add this point too. I agree with Stuart Kauffman’s concern that we establish a global ethic. However, all such appeals to the common good, affirming that the good of all is the good of each, lack social relevance if we do not, at the same time, create a social identity which connects the individual and the social good. The question, then, is not just that of re-establishing the overarching moral framework but also of recovering the community and communal identity within the bonds and ties of civil society so as to make that framework meaningful. We need to avoid the danger of asserting a common good that is abstracted from the human relations and ties which alone give it content. And that means challenging the capitalist relations which have devalued the world around us and placed us at the mercy of brute fact – the hard facts of capitalist imperatives or the hard facts of runaway climate change.

And Stuart Kauffman argues for some such thing, however generally.

‘Part of reinventing the sacred will be to heal these injuries—injuries that we hardly know we suffer. If we are members of a universe in which emergence and ceaseless creativity abound, if we take that creativity as a sense of God we can share, the resulting sense of the sacredness of all of life and the planet can help orient our lives beyond the consumerism and commodification the industrialized world now lives, heal the split between reason and faith, heal the split between science and the humanities, heal the want of spirituality, heal the wound derived from the false reductionist belief that we live in a world of fact without values, and help us jointly build a global ethic.’

I agree. But at this point things get really difficult. The demand that we recover values involves more than advocating a substantive moral position. It is as easy to assert an abstract moral position as it is to seek membership in a surrogate community - and delusional and impotent as well as being possibly repressive. Building a global ethic is about building a civilisation, reconstructing a way of life from within society and its social relationships. The world was demoralised as a result of specific social relations, its value can only be recovered and respected through the creation of new social relations. It behooves those who talk about a remoralisation to outline the contours of the new society which enables us to see value in the world. This is where the idea of virtues as qualities for successful living and as dispositions to act well become important. The challenge is to envisage and bring about a social identity within certain social relations that locate human beings within patterns of behaviour and communities of practice which connect modes of thought, action and organisation to a proper valuation of environing conditions, contexts and relations. Any ethic that is to be more than an impotent ideal has to have social content and practical import; it requires a supporting social infrastucture constituted by social practices, identities and activities - in the same way that the devaluation of nature under the capital system is reinforced and extended by the instrumental relations, egoistic identities, exploitative practices and destructive behaviours of the capital system. Building a common ethic which revalues the world and our place in it requires an appropriate social infrastructure. Transforming society from within, drawing increasing numbers into clusters of cooperation and communities of practice, generating new social relations through a self-socialisation from below, is key and is where attention should be focused. We are engaged in the very practical enterprise of society-building.

There is no reason why this cannot be done. Indeed, what requires explanation is why an economic system which is so contrary to the creative nature of the universe, ourselves included, has survived so long. Those creative potentials have been hijacked by free riders and diverted to selfish ends. Transforming social relations is about taking those potentials back and directing them into more productive channels.

This can be done. But realising such a future state is not a matter of drawing up blueprints and seeking to put them into effect. Whilst vision and constructive models of the future society may be necessary to inspire the effort to bring that society about, the precise shape of that society can only emerge through practice. We build solutions together. To think otherwise is to remain within the confines of mechanical thinking. As Kauffman argues, we are co-creators of a ceaselessly creative universe and, since this is the case, the world is always in some sense unknowable. We live into mystery. Our reason alone will not be enough, we need to integrate all our human qualities and experiences. We are beyond scientific reductionism and beyond the idea that our knowledge of the laws of physical nature is sufficient to explain everything. There is agency, meaning, purpose and value in this creative, participatory universe, and our civilisation, culture and economic activity has a place alongside the biosphere in being a part of the never-ending, ever-resurgent creativity in the universe. And we are well beyond the endless assertion of facts, beyond treating facts as moral imperatives. They are not. Facts are neither affective nor appetitive. They motivate no one and change nothing, when divorced from values and psychic realities. We need to move away from a reliance on pure scientific rationality and embrace prudence, practical reasoning, bounded rationality, citizen science and whatever else may be involved in inspiring, motivating and obligating human beings when it comes to choosing and acting and living. Music, art, poetry, literature are all essential aspects of the human story, indicating that there any many ways of knowing. Science is seen as the supreme way of knowing, the most reliable check we have against reality, our best self-correction. But it is not the whole of human knowledge. Newton dismissed poetry as 'a kind of nonsense'. Newton gave us the mechanistic universe of dead matter. John Keats knew better, writing that 'the poetry of the earth is never dead'. We need to recover that poetry, that meaning, that sense of the inherently valuable world. Knowledge is both cognitive and affective, our Being in the world requires the harmonious integration of the various ways of knowing, uniting intellect, invention, imagination, emotion, intuition, feeling, aesthetic sensibilities, everything that goes to make for a truly human life. We need to cease seeing the world as objectively valueless and instead recover the poetry of the Earth. We need to put fact and value together - our lives depend on it.

There is nothing to stop us, other than ourselves, and our failure to identify the role we play in this meaningful, creative, expansive web of life. The forces which stand in our way are, in one way or another, our own forces. The forces of money and power are our own social forces in the form of capital and the state. But there are also the forces within our own psyches. Recovering value in the world entails coming to value ourselves as something more than economic or biological mechanisms. We are teleological beings with a longing for meaning. We act, relate and create as part of that quest. The world of fact knows nothing of this, it is an empty, mean-spirited world that will die in its meaninglessness. It hasn't a friend in the world.

Addressing the social, economic and ecological crises that face requires much more than 'fact'. We know the facts, we are living with the facts. It's acting on the facts that counts, and that's the wprld of practical reason, not theoretical reason.

If scientific law refers to a compact description, which we can have beforehand, of the regularities that unfold in the universe, then evolution of the biosphere and of human life and culture cannot be fully explained by "law." A ceaselessly creative, co-constructing universe that is ever emerging takes us beyond physical laws in this sense. We should have known this. In his theory of four causes, Aristotle demonstrated that scientific knowl­edge fails for practical human action, since final, formal, efficient, and material causes were necessary. Before dismissing the argument as just so much outdated ancient metaphysics, just consider that the argument was strong enough to turn lifelong atheist philosopher Anthony Flew into a theist. (http://www.strangenotions.com/flew/). Stuart Kauffman argues for a purely naturalistic explanation, arguing that the creative universe is God enough. But Aristotle's four causal explanation plays a role in his conception too. I would add here a reference to Aristotle's insistence on practical reasoning, showing how human beings think, act, decide, live everyday despite not having and never being able to have complete knowledge. Aristotle's understanding of rhetoric is also pertinent to this question. Many people are perplexed as to why governments and the people do not respond as they should to the facts of climate change. But facts in themselves are not persuasive. They give us a certain knowledge, but not the desire or the will to act on it. Rhetoric is an art by which writers and speakers seek to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. That is precisely the art we need in order to get people acting in light of the facts of climate change. For Aristotle, "rhetoric is a combination of the science of logic and of the ethical branch of politics ..." and is "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion." (Aristotle. Rhetoric. (trans. W. Rhys Roberts). I:4:1359.; Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.2.1,).

Once more, and this point cannot be emphasised too much, we have entered the sphere of practical reason - ethics and politics. This is where out scientific facts, knowledge and theoretical reason need to be. The mere statement of fact is not enough. We should know this by now, if no other reason than it has no worked so far, despite the publication of countless research articles.

In an endlessly creative universe, knowledge will always be limited and incomplete. Yet we must always act, We need to become persuasive and practical in the way we disseminate and assimilate knowledge. Rhetoric is the capacity to give our wisdom practical effect in face of specific, uncertain, unfolding situations of life. As such, it is every bit as important as science and theoretical reason. Often dismissed as verbal trickery which can turn black into white and white into black, rhetoric is the art of persuasion which addresses the need to act in a specific situation. So, my argument should by now be clear - the mere presentation of facts can never suffice to provoke a response and inspire action on the part of human beings. Scientific knowledge can only do this if it is connected to the means of persuasion and motivation - rhetoric, ethics and politics. Aristotle wrote his Rhetoric, Ethics and Politics whilst living in the Athenian polis where persuasion, prudence and practical reasoning were required in politics. Aristotle may well have been 'the first scientist' as biologist Armand Leroi claims, but he was a scientist who sought to bring scientific knowledge to bear in practical action. And that is precisely the thing we have been trying, and failing woefully, to do. And we are failing because we think science alone can do the job. It can't. We have to create the connections and bridge the gap between knowledge and action, theoretical reason and practical reason.

And here is where I bring this article to its conclusion.

There is an imbalance in our approach. We certainly have sufficient knowledge with respect to the crisis in the climate system, and we certainly have the technical know-how and institutional capacity to turn that knowledge into practical effect. The deficiency we face is not one of technology or political power in this physical sense, but moral capital or capacity. We need to body-build our moral sensibilities and capacities so that we become capable of responding to and acting upon the knowledge that comes our way. Climate action involving social transformation requires not merely prompting governments, groups and individuals into taking effective action, but persuading and engaging with them so that they are not merely able to take action but are motivated and hence willing so to do. That means persuading and motivating them to be both willing and able to take action using both their intellectual and moral assets as capacities. This is a much tougher proposition than merely informing and educating from outside the transformatory process. After all, it is not apparent, especially with intangible eventualities like climate change, that the costs of certain immediate actions are greater in their accumulating impacts than immediate individual benefits. And even if, on some intellectual level, people come to accept the argument, that they are expected to ‘own’ the consequences of their actions and share both costs and benefits with others, they will still require further convincing to act upon this awareness. This requires the cultivation of the right virtues and capacities so that it becomes possible to connect knowledge with persuasion, conviction, commitment and practice – the very qualities that turn knowledge into reality-constituting effect.

The point is, if we can come to see ourselves as co-creators in a ceaselessly unfolding creative universe, we will act despite the limitations of our knowledge, for prac­tical action is something the unites fact and value. If that sounds difficult on paper, remember that each and everyone of us does this every day. Let's just do it. Our principal enemy is ourselves.

'The enemy has not ceased to be victorious', wrote Walter Benjamin in Illuminations (1969: 255). And the enemy will continue to be victorious if we continue to speak its language instead of finding our own voice in this creative universe. It is the voice of the Earth. And it is a voice which expresses the goodness and worth inherent in the world. If 'the facts' mean anything, they mean this - we are being called upon to reintegrate our full humanity and live our lives in a world of goodness.

Schumacher's Epilogue to Small is Beautiful can't be beaten for their combination of simplicity and profundity:

'Everywhere people ask: "What can I actually do?" The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science and technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.'

I'll just qualify this by adding that our morality is not 'traditional' in some fixed, eternal sense but evolves as we play our part in the co-construction of the world, expanding possibilities as we go. But that view is covered in the natural law, which emphasises the active use of reason in relating to nature. That qualification aside, the basic thrust of Schumacher's conclusion is correct. We can't just keep looking at facts and means and technologies and economic expansion, these are not the gods we once thought them to be. They are idols and, all functions and imperatives without purpose, they are failing badly. We need to recover the moral sense inherent in the world and in life, and determine to live by ends that relate to intrinsic worth. When we do this, we will indeed reinvent the sacred and come to house the inner life.

I started with Shakespeare, so I may as well end with him. From King Lear.

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile, Hath not old custom made this life more sweet Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court? Here feel we not the penalty of Adam, The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind, Which when it bites and blows upon my body Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say ’This is no flattery. These are counsellors That feelingly persuade me what I am.’ Sweet are the uses of adversity Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything. (II.i.1–17)

If only it was that simple to escape the flatlands of the megamachine! In The Story of Utopia, Lewis Mumford made a distinction between utopias of escape and reconstruction, the one a backward looking retreat in face of intractable circumstances, the other a forward looking and visionary concern to bring about a new society. Pastoralism is a utopia of escape, a retreat into Arcadia as a way of coping with the difficulties and disappointments of the dominant social order. Putting the worlds of fact and value back together is about expressing the reality of intrinsic value. In this sense, the appreciation of the goodness inherent in the world is more than an expression of longing for a lost world, it is an integral part of moral growth in the realisation of the utopia of reconstruction. And it is a practical project; that common ethic has to be built.