Naturalism as an Inhumanism
This essay consists of thoughts and observations incited by the reaction the following article inspired:
I found the extent to which ‘green’ friends shared this article and got all excited by it, as though it contained something unknown, original and profound, remarkable and revealing.
The article catches the eye with this line: ‘What if math is a fundamental part of nature, not something humans came up with?’
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry in response to that suggestion, and the huge reaction it incited among greens and environmentalists on social media. ‘What if’ we already knew that and that the moderns, congratulating themselves on their self-creating, self-authoring, self-legislating self-importance forgot it. There’s nothing new, only a lot of things that humans have forgotten over time.
The excited reaction tells me that very many people have still to grasp the nature of the predicament facing the modern world, and how much they themselves are implicated in it. I find it encouraging that people are prepared to react so positively to the idea that math – or any notion of the true, the good, and the beautiful – is a ‘fundamental part of nature.’ I have been saying so for an awful long time now, in an effort of metaphysical reconstruction. Unfortunately, very many of the same people who get excited about ‘nature’ look askance at metaphysics. It is apparent to me that their commitment to ‘nature’ as the grounds of their value system entails an adherence to an ethics of pure immanence, ruling out transcendence, God, and religion. That, to me, tells me that they are still under the sway of the disenchanting science that has been the dominant conception for a century and more. They may be searching for the spiritual, trying to reclaim the magic and value of nature, but do so by ruling out the supernatural. They may seem to be rejecting a disenchanting science, but in truth they are trying to draw magical and spiritual conclusions from it, hence the constant struggle and surprise which characterises their pronouncements on ‘nature.’ I’ve seen how stunted those efforts at spiritual recovery can be – people get so far in proclaiming the magic that is inherent in nature only to be told that whilst such a view is appealing it is ‘non-scientific’ and therefore not valid. The nature magicians have no answer back for the very reason that they cleave to science as the one and only true – or reliable – voice of the ‘nature’ they try to worship; they lack a genuine metaphysics, and it shows whenever they are challenged on their nature spirituality.
A disenchanting science holds life and the universe are objectively valueless, purposeless, pointless, and meaningless, telling us that we are on a destinationless journey to certain death, with nothing beyond that. The only meaning that the game of life can have is to stay in the game until inevitable death and, for a species, inevitable extinction. That may sound bleak and final, but that’s what evolutionary biologists tell us.
I note how many of the greens on my pages, getting excited by the notion of inherent truth, goodness, and beauty, are themselves biologists. I find this willingness to find meaning, pattern, and beauty in nature on the part of those with a science background, and whom I know to be irreligious, both interesting and significant. To me, they seem to be reaching towards something that religion gives, but are cleaving to science as against religion, the natural as against the supernatural. They seem hard-pressed to draw spiritual conclusions from decidedly anti-spiritual premises. And it can’t be done. The science they cleave to is a universal acid and disinfectant. The judgement that views holding a value or a purpose beyond observable physical processes is ‘non-scientific’ is final, putting an end not only to God but to much else that people find meaningful and satisfying.
I would characterize such people as atheists who have yet to realize the full implications of atheism: once human beings have put God to death, there can be no successor to His inherently illegitimate authority. This is hard to do, not least because the very act of deicide tends to be emboldening and intoxicating. God has been dead a long time now, and yet daily I can switch on social media and find people congratulating themselves on their intelligence on account of their disbelief, advertising their good character, compassion, and concern in seeking the human betterment for no eternal reward. The pomposity and self-promotion indicates the extent to which such individuals are impressed with their own god-like status, choosing the true and the good as a matter of their own impeccable reason, and acting through selfless self-sacrifice. Excuse my sarcasm. I read it daily and find the tendency of people to believe their own self-image nauseating and boring.
In pronouncing the ‘death of God,’ Nietzsche was explicit in ruling out any idolatrous humanism that he expected the human deicides to put in God’s place. By the death of God, Nietzsche meant the dissolution of any and every overarching and authoritative moral framework. It is easy enough to deny God; it is much less easy for human beings as social beings to put an end to a moral structure embodying universality and commonality. In my experience it is the ‘libertarians’ who are most explicit in denying morality as repressive, the common good as suppressive of ‘otherness’ and ‘difference,’ and authority as inimical to liberty, who are the most judgemental, censorious, and authoritative of all, seeking to micro-manage and police others’ behaviours through pressure and force, either in direct connection or through legal cancellation and institutional force. That tells me that human beings cannot, after all, go down the Nietzschean route of affirming life, not as a whole. Nietzsche’s view is that of an aristocratic anarchism and is fundamentally elitist. Human beings in the round, as social being, cannot take this route in the mass, but will be found forever in their interconnections trying to manage and regulate their encounters, relations, and exchanges. For Nietzsche, the ‘death of God’ was to open an age of metaphysical carnage in which not only God but every potential surrogate for God was to perish in a universal hecatomb: Culture, Beauty, Reason, Science, Morality, Nature, and finally Man or Humanity. Nietzsche writes of ‘this laboriously won self-contempt of man.’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, Third Essay, 25:115.) Clearly, Nietzsche foresaw a time when human beings, having over-indulged themselves in the right and freedom of self-authorship vis God and the world, would turn in on and against themselves and dissolve themselves in an orgy of self-contempt. And self-destruction. It is most striking in this regard how many among the greens and environmentalists openly express - in an inverse enjoyment – the humbling of humanity in face of an indifferent ‘nature.’ This is the very antithesis of Nietzsche’s ‘joyful science’ attained through the affirmation of life. The scorn, even hatred, of human beings is palpable in the tendency to exalt and worship ‘nature,’ rendering human beings of secondary and subordinate significance and concern to ‘nature.’
Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
- Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York, Vintage, 1973
Very many are looking forward to that end, willing it on. Instead of Nietzsche’s joy, they possess a mean-spirited, misanthropic mentality: this is the psychic preparation for the end of humanity. In the old religious idiom that is now openly scorned, human beings are made in the image of God – like but not alike. In putting an end to God, human beings have tended to look upon themselves as gods, rejecting notions of objective reality, morality, and truth in favour of a view which entitles them to choose the good and the true as they see fit. Such choosing individuals have become gods themselves, advancing non-negotiable truths and goods, becoming embroiled in religious wars with fellow humans in the guise of rival gods. It is little wonder that many are becoming self-contemptuous with respect to Humanity. I had yet another altercation with a FB genius the other day, proclaiming how wonderfully rational, caring, and life-affirming atheists are compared to God-botherers. I’ll present the quote with which he launched his diatribe in its full mediocrity:
“An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not an escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty banished, war eliminated.”
Madalyn Murray O’Hair
This is a plain – and incredibly crude – case of setting up false dichotomies in order to stoke conflict and feed off the anger. As such, the best thing to do with it is to ignore it. Unfortunately, it expresses a mentality which is all too typical of the age. It has all the hallmarks of a cheap radicalism. Being an atheist in this sense is as easy as falling off a log in this culture; it is a cheap and effortless way of demonstrating one’s free-thinking intelligence. There’s nothing here worth wasting breath on. If you know the truth then spend your energy living it: ‘Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching’ (C.S. Lewis). I would just say that if I were an atheist, nothing would make me less inclined to be an atheist than this combination of pomposity and stupid argument. I see it daily from people who share Bertrand Russell memes. I cut my philosophical teeth on Russell, but the more I read these haughty memes, the more I seek more genial company.
The religious people I know tend not to be found wasting their time grandstanding and showboating on social media, but are forever busy in their involvement in their communities and in issues of poverty, peace, environment, health, education and such like. From the local to the global, united in a common ethic, religious people are involved in life. Quotes and claims like this are jaundiced, ignorant drivel. Such people have zero understanding of transcendence and how it draws humanity out of its ego. I cite such views not because they are of any merit – there are far better arguments for atheism than this – but because they are common. We live in a schizophrenic age combining humanistic hubris with (self-)contempt. But whether human beings are conceived to be like God or as gods, the conclusion is the same: God can be killed once and for all, beyond recall, by the disappearance of humanity from the Earth. Nietzsche’s true merit as an atheist lies not in his rejection of God – any idiot can do that - but in his relentless and unwavering concern to extirpate any humanism or metaphysics which sought to take the place of God. Atheism as the denial of God is the dumbest philosophy of all: it is a non-philosophy. I can remember a green friend making the statement that, to date, no atheist has ever killed anyone in the name of atheism. Unlike religion. My response was to say that no-one is able to do anything in name of atheism. Atheism as the denial of God is a negative. You may as well claim that no atheist has ever created art or made love in the name of atheism. I mean, why would you? It’s meaningless. This is why Marx – no believer in God himself – thought atheism reactionary and pointless, an attempt to proceed by pure negation. Marx’s own view was close in many respects to Nietzsche’s in focusing on the affirmation of life. I find a similar view in Lewis Mumford. It is well-nigh certain that people who relentlessly complain about something do so because that something has something appeals to them in some way. The fact that religion is still alive and still moves people is probably most disconcerting to people who find their negativity so lifeless, tedious, and boring that they have to stoke conflict to make everyone else as miserable and as pointless as they are. If you are happy and have a purpose in life, if you are busy building hospitals, ending war, and fighting poverty, why are you wasting time provoking conflict? And if you really do believe in peace, why exactly are you inciting wars on social media? As for atheism itself, a rejection of God is no ethic at all, it merely begs all the hard questions. On those questions, atheists agree as little as do other people. There isn’t anything at all to this atheism beyond the agreement that there is no God. Wonderful. Now what? Is everyone going to agree on what needs to be done to end war and poverty and bring about freedom and justice in the world? And given that a non-belief in God is now pervasive in modern western culture, what’s the point of proclaiming there is no God? In The Sovereignty of the Good, Iris Murdoch – an atheist herself – states that ‘it is always a significant question to ask of any philosopher: what is he afraid of?’ (Murdoch The Sovereignty of Good 1985: 72). The constant animus against religion is beyond reason and indicates that an awful lot of people are very afraid of something they dislike but can’t leave alone. One would think they believe that the God-botherers have all the best tunes.
Nietzsche has the merit of consistency and coherence. I think he is wrong, but that his critique is of such quality that it forces you to strengthen your case for transcendence, God, and metaphysics. Nietzsche has the capacity to destroy the less than strong, the inconsistent and the incoherent. The moderns are weak and vulnerable on all these things and Nietzsche runs a coach-and-horses through the whole flabby terrain. Nietzsche had contempt for many things – Socrates, Spinoza, the Judaeo-Christian tradition, John Stuart Mill and liberalism, democracy, socialism, women – but he had particular contempt for those who persisted in employing moral terms – equality, justice, fairness – even though they knew that their foundations no longer existed. He was particularly scathing of those who rejected God yet continued to use moral arguments and language premised on the existence of God.
I see a similar inconsistency and incoherence on the part of the naturalists among the environmental or green movement. Their views are premised on a ‘nature’ that is entirely indifferent to human concerns, and yet they espouse a politics and an ethics that is most certainly concerned. They reject God and any notion of an authoritative and overarching moral structure that a belief in God entails, and yet issue moral imperatives of their own. These imperatives are derived from ‘nature,’ which is a reversion to a position that atheists such as John Stuart Mill revealed to be illegitimate and inadequate in the nineteenth century. Once we start to distinguish good and healthy potentials and events in nature from the bad and the unhealthy, we are exercising a moral judgement – meaning that the ethics are prior to nature. An ethics of pure natural immanence are no ethics at all, miring their proponents in all manner of contradictions and controversies. But environmentalists carry on doing it because, I suspect, their fear and loathing of God and religion is greater than their love of Nature and science. Either way, their attempts to supplant God with Nature are illegitimate and won’t work for any number of reasons. This Nature is a classic example of the empty signifier. Since I argue this at length elsewhere, I shall refer people to that work and continue on with my argument here:
The views of naturalists often seem to suffer from incoherence, exhibiting a split between desire and delivery. To me, they seem to be reaching towards something that religion gives, but are resolute in cleaving to the natural as against the supernatural. They seem hard-pressed to draw spiritual conclusions from decidedly anti-spiritual premises. And it can’t be done:
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
- Max Planck
Such environmentalists are trapped in the split that opened up between science and religion in the late nineteenth century. I note how many of the biologists are Darwinian. They think they can find an ethic of cooperation as against competition in Darwinism. Good luck with that. We’ve been trying to achieve that since Kropotkin. The ultimate mystery of nature is beyond rational resolution, and requires a metaphysics of transcendence if human beings are to grow and expand into it.
Even if we hold that pattern, interconnection, beauty and such like are a ‘fundamental part of nature,’ then so what? What follows? Human beings, too, are fundamental parts of nature, and hence share in that pattern, interconnection, beauty etc. The basic question is this: where does value lie? Who or what is the source of value: the thing valued or the thing doing the valuing? Those who assert that ‘Nature’ is its own standard – to which human beings are secondary and subordinate – are guilty of proposing an empty signifier in place of God, issuing moral imperatives by way of a process of reification, miring one and all in a metaphysical void. That an ethic of immanence has left people and politics unmoved and unresponsive is of no surprise, for the very reason it lacks appetitive content and motivational force.
The same points apply to all those who believe natural selection does all the work. You can find the argument in Robert Wright’s Non-Zero and Stuart Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred and many other places. If naturalism of this stripe is correct, then there is nothing for politics, ethics, and culture to do. It is significant that when, having waded through endless discussions of natural patterns and processes, I come to the chapters on politics, ethics, and economics in these books, the arguments are thin in the extreme, full of broad statements and generalities on humanity and unity. In other words, the arguments are bereft of a genuine politics and ethics.
Approaching the issue in this manner quickly exposes the limitations of naturalism. Human beings, as religious teaching tells us, possess a relative moral autonomy, including the gift of free will. Those who work in the field of evolutionary psychology, biology, and neuroscience insist that this view is an illusion, little realising that the errors they denounce on the part of human beings is sure fire evidence, however, negative, that that moral autonomy they denounce as illusion is indeed a reality. That relative independence from nature’s immediacy is precisely the stuff of politics, ethics, sociology, and economics, and is very real indeed. Human errors and their consequences alone show the reality of that agency and autonomy. Once more, I note the emphasis on diminishing the human presence, as though human beings really are the virus on the planet that ecologists always said they were. The problems of illusion will only be solved with the disappearance of humanity from the Earth. It’s an inhumanism.
The notion that math, or anything, is a ‘fundamental part of nature,’ implies a view, repudiated by the liveliest and smartest minds of the age of disenchantment that the true, the good, and the beautiful are inherent in the nature of things and not human creations and projections. Rather than be critical in the first instance, I am inclined to shout ‘hallelujah! and Praise Be!’ for the reason I have spent decades arguing for the existence of the objectively valuable, meaningful, and purposeful universe and for the inherent worth of persons and things both in light of that objective reality. I consistently argue the need to recover the three transcendentals – truth, goodness, and beauty. So why the critical tenor of my comments? I am critical because the naturalist approach falls far short of what is required to appreciate the inherent goodness of the universe. The naturalists argue vehemently in favour of an ‘ethics’ of pure immanence, ruling out the transcendent as supra-natural and hence an extraneous force. They suspect – rightly – that all such talk of the transcendent might lead in some way to notions of a divine that comprises nature but ultimately transcends nature. They are right – the three transcendentals (which the moderns separated and differentiated and then destroyed by rendering them subjective) are interconnected as qualities of God. The environmentalists love the idea of interconnection, but only in terms of a self-contained, self-sufficient nature. I have forever pushed them on this ethic of interconnection and how it is to be established politically, only to be met with impotent and bland assertions of an ‘ought-to-be’ entirely lacking in social significance. Such environmentalists reduce things to the physical and its effects, proceeding to explain love, relationships, morality etc in terms of chemical and biological processes. Every time I bring in ethics and moral arguments, the ones who respond return with some science-based view. Neurononsense I call it. Ethics and politics cannot be based on the latest fad and fashion in science. I’ve seen them all come and go, from the Quantum self, the Quantum society and the Quantum everything, to M theory, string theory, parallel universes etc. I did a lot of reading and research into the latest science on all things. I read deeply in neuroscience. I learned that both good and bad habits can become hardwired and that much depends on environment. Brain + body + environment is key – we are embodied brains in place. And with a good environment which makes available good practices that foster good habits, there is a good chance that human beings will turn out good. Well I never. Who would have thought?
Of course, when naturalists demand evidence and proof of God’s existence, they know there will be none forthcoming, since their terms of a physical immanence rule such an entity, with a certain independence of nature, out.
But I am encouraged, all the same, to see that people are expressing a yearning to discern a truth, a meaning, and a reality that is objectively real and inherent in the world that is beyond human projection and creation. I have been making this very point for years now. In my experience, people get so far in the direction of the true, the good, and the beautiful as inhering in the universe, only to pull back as soon as they emerge as the three transcendentals. People are committed to immanence and no more.
The article asks: what if mathematical reality is a fundamental part of nature and not something humans came up with? What if there is an objective reality, truth, and morality that is something more than human creation and invention? Precisely. The theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman sought to resolve the problematic relations of science and religion in his book Reinventing the Sacred (2007). I have engaged with the book at length for the reason it grapples with substantial issues of metaphysics and metaphysical reconstruction. I criticize its direction, though. The sacred is neither invented in these terms, and hence cannot be reinvented. Once human beings become self-consciously aware of their authorship, the sacred loses its enveloping aura and mystery and ceases to be an object of reverence. The sacred has to be something that inheres in reality, as in the term ‘inherent worth.’ The word ‘worth’ here derives from old English ‘woerthership,’ the origin of worship. When affirming the ‘inherent worth’ of nature and the beings and bodies it comprises, we are effectively making a declaration with respect to the things we worship, the things we consider worthy of consideration. We are, in other words, beyond the remit of a disenchanting science. The term ‘disenchantment,’ coming from Schiller and Weber, in the German referred to a ‘demagification,’ a ‘dis-godding’ and devaluation. Re-enchantment is a revaluation of the more-than-physical properties of nature and all it contains. I see science-based environmentalists and greens groping towards an appreciation of that spiritual dimension, but failing to understand that science yields us nothing when it comes to worth, worship, and spirituality. Such people, however well-intentioned they may be, risk giving us both bad science and bad religion, mixing their logics to give us neither science nor religion, only their bogus realisation.
As for the claim itself – that there is a mathematical reality that is more than the invention of mathematicians, I can only presume that those responding so positively to the article have precious little connection with mathematics and don’t know any actual mathematicians. I don’t know of any mathematician who would argue that mathematical reality is something that mathematicians have invented – mathematicians argue precisely the opposite.
What if we have known about mathematical reality as something objective and outside of human invention and creation since, well, the beginning of mathematics?
To some, this seems to be news. One woman excitedly comments: ‘I regularly say, “if there is a god, she certainly likes math.”’ That rather gives the clue as to what is going on here (at least on this particular page): godless feminist naturalists joking that God is a woman. It’s at times like this I feel the need to wear corsets to prevent my sides from splitting. I notice the beta males castrating themselves in order to join in with the merry self-abasement. It’s the kind of low-grade intellectualizing that I find dispiriting, for the reason it is so predictable and boring. Use your brain time on things of substance, and use the rest of your time on exercise and enjoyment.
There is nothing at all new and radical being said here. Centuries ago Galileo Galilei declared that “mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe.” But I suppose that Galileo is a man and a white man to boot, and therefore no longer exists. People are congratulating themselves on discovering the well-known. There has been an expansion of education and ignorance: we are in the presence of well-educated ignoramuses.
How that statement of inherent quality is interpreted and acted upon is the key question. The problem is that human beings could come in light of this understanding see mathematics as giving them the keys to the universe. This involves a switch from recognizing and respecting the existence of an objective reality, understanding its processes, and respecting its worth to taking control of that reality and directing it to human ends. To that extent, I am also against the idea that reality is ‘made up’ and ‘invented’ by human creators, ‘men as gods’ creating Heaven on Earth. But in an older idiom, that entails a critique of the scientistic takeover of politics, ethics, religion, and spirituality, with human beings taking God’s plan for justice into their own hands. The people getting excited over this post are vehemently and virulently anti-religious and so are getting over-excited by a rather trite statement, missing its radical metaphysical implications through the failure to set it in its wider theological context. It is the modern world raised on a disenchanting, mechanistic science, technological manipulation, instrumental monetary relations, and engineering that lost sight of the simple truth that there is a reality that is other than, prior to, and enduring beyond human subjective choice, self-creation, and projection.
People are starving in a metaphysical desert, and so wax lyrical about statements that past ages would have taken for granted.
Others join in, waxing lyrical on the natural ability of human beings to intuitively measure things precisely. There world is rhythm and harmony, comprising spatial relationships, musical tones, continuous movement with patterns observable everywhere. The view was hardly unknown to the ancients. Today we are so clever – and unconfident - as to feel compelled to give a once common understanding scientific validation. My volumes of writing on Dante make constant reference to the musical model of the divine universe in precisely these terms. So the excitement that this rather basic article has caused is very interesting, not on account of its actual contents but for what it reveals about how much the moderns in their hubris have forgotten ancient truths. The claims are nothing new and not unknown.
Aeons ago, the mathematician G.H. Hardy wrote this:
"I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our 'creations,' are simply the notes of our observations."
You can find any number of similar statements from any number of mathematicians. Bertrand Russell states that ‘mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.’
So why the excitement? For all that I try to err on the side of the positive, I’m afraid I don’t see misguided moderns, in thrall to scientism, coming to see the error of their ways to embrace an ancient understanding. Instead of an appreciation of human beings as God’s partners in Creation, I still see the militant anti-religious animus that drove purpose, meaning, and final ends out of nature in the first place. Such people have spirituality enough left to see and be worried by the metaphysical void that has opened up in front of them. But they miss their target by a very wide mark indeed. Instead of revaluing a purposeful Nature as part of a project that exalts human dignity, they assert an inhuman necessity that not merely diminishes and devalues human beings but wipes then from legitimate existence, that is, legitimate in terms of a human moral and creative agency that has a degree of autonomy from nature.
Many people seem wedded to the notion of an absolute necessity to which human beings must conform. They thus affirm a conformity model that is quite distinct from the participatory model I adhere to. Such people see nature as having the prime claim, with human beings as of secondary significance and as existing in subordinate relation; I see human beings as co-agents in a creative and participatory universe, legitimate parts of nature in and through that agency. The appeal of ‘necessity’ to such people lies not merely in the clarity it yields but in its certainty, a certainty that lies beyond the endless ‘yes/no’ of the human world. That ‘yes/no’ characterises the political and social world of which human beings are active members. Rather than seek to establish the social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature in true and proper relation, people who come at this question from the perspective of naturalism and scientism seek to oppose the priority of nature to society, physics to politics. This doesn’t resolve the problem of faulty relations, it merely inverts it. Basically, such people are seeking to secede from society in order to better order it and the people in it from some abstract point or Empyrean height. That view entails a rejection not only of God but of politics, democratic engagement, and dialogue. The effect is debilitating, demoralising, and demotivating, nurturing an environmentalism that is strong on facts, figures, and technological fixes, but deficient in inner motive force and the structural capacity to act. There is zero connection with actual human agents embedded in social relations; instead, there is an attempt to mobilize mindless pseudo-publics by campaigns, protests, and demonstrations. Instead of an internal transformative capacity, there is this endless external pressure wearing the public realm down.
The inhumanism is explicit in the metaphysics. Thus Bertrand Russell writes:
‘I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing in particular to do with the planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.’
Which means that people love something that doesn’t love them in return. That sounds like masochism to me. You will find in Erich Fromm’s works a deep analysis of the processes that lead human beings to sacrifice themselves to a Nature that is greater than they are and couldn’t care less about them. Fromm revealed this self-immolation as the psychological preparation for fascism.
There is the fundamental inhumanism you can find in a naturalist environmentalism stated in a nutshell. You can find it also in Einstein’s declaration that he believed in the God of Spinoza, a God that is indifferent to human concerns: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." Is that really what we want, an end or an ideal that is indifferent to human beings? Because if that really is the nature/god that people propose, then it can be hardly surprising that it meets with little response.
Curiously and significantly, despite these statements of an explicit disinterestedness, both Russell and Einstein intervened directly in human affairs and frequently issued statements on practical social and political matters. In like manner, environmentalists under the sway of scientism will insist from outside of politics that governments ‘tell the truth’ and act upon demands made from outside of the political sphere. It is a point of some significance that neither Russell nor Einstein entered the conventional political sphere, played the political game as others play it, subject to the same constraints, troubling themselves with the difficult task of persuading others to win support for their positions. I find it all deeply troubling: from the claim to possess some independent truth to which all human beings must conform, to the denial of human significance and agency, to the issuing of political and moral imperatives from outside the political process. This is an attempt to seek power without political responsibility. Instead of treading the hard boards of politics, contesting with opponents, having one’s claims tested in public debate, negotiating with others in dialogue, winning a constituency upon which to take action, people are opting for the mobilisation of extraneous pressure upon government. We are seeing the baneful and destructive effects of social media upon politics and public life, with pressure, campaigns, soundbites and slogans taking the place of hard political work. It has been coming. We have seen governments being elected using precisely the same tactic. But at least such governments bore the responsibility which came with succeeding by such means. Significantly, such governments met the challenge by markedly scaling back their ambitions so that they could be held to account for very little. The people mobilising pressure from outside of politics have much larger ambitions, but they can afford to, being removed from the responsibility of implementing them, paying for them, and owning the consequences. It is clear that many think, cynically, that the costs and consequences will become apparent only in the longer run, born by others once plans, policies, and programmes have become an unalterable de facto reality. There are many ways by which we can describe this highly political ‘non-politics’ – cynical, manipulative, elitist, authoritarian. It is inherently, relentlessly, and systematically anti-democratic: it is based on a contempt for humanity internalised as a self-contempt (or a self-contempt projected outwards into a contempt for humanity).
This is precisely what modern environmentalists do, issuing demands in the language of ‘necessity,’ sweeping past the express will of the individuals composing the demos. It is this aspect that interests me the most in the excitement that the idea of an independent mathematical reality excites in certain people, this more than that reality. I have it on good authority from mathematicians – professors of mathematics if you please – that mathematics is entirely without moral and political implication. I’m still not sure of that, holding to the notion that the existence of a mathematical reality containing certain inherent properties and qualities – the true, the good, and the beautiful – does indeed have ethical and political implications. But those implications are properly political and ethical, that is, pertain to the ‘yes/no’ of creative human agency in determinate social relations. That leaves me treating the notion of resting politics on a musical model with caution, ensuring that such a model takes politics and ethics seriously rather than becomes a substitute for them and for the field of practical reason. It is wise to be sceptical of all those who seek an authority that is removed from human negotiation, intervention, and alteration; such people tend to seek to back their particular claims with unarguable authority and necessity.
As to the mathematics, I don't know of any mathematician who thinks that they, the mathematician, is the inventor of the mathematical reality they studies: in fact, they hold the very opposite to be true. I do know that what excites these ecologists/naturalists here is not the maths but the implicit devaluation of human significance, creativity, and agency. It is that that I also find in the more mystical celebrations of mathematics by certain mathematicians, the idea that they have found a reality which is entirely indifferent to human concerns, a reality which is prior and superior to human beings. But this denigration of human creative agency is not merely an inhumanism, it is entirely untrue of this mathematical reality being celebrated itself – human beings are active in an endlessly creative and participatory universe, with human will and consciousness legitimate parts of that universe. The denigration and denial of human agency is neither true to nature nor to human nature.
We need, therefore, to be ever vigilant with respect to the implicit (and explicit) contempt for humanity in an ecology which affirms naturalism as an inhumanism - to such ecologists everything is legitimately active in nature apart from human beings. Significantly, Marx affirmed naturalism as a humanism. Marx’s communism as a naturalism was all about the affirmation of life. I see the same thing, expressed in individualistic and elitist terms, in Nietzsche (in the manner of Max Stirner). Naturalism as an inhumanism is regressive and reactionary, however much those who espouse claim affinity with the Left in politics. No leftism of any substance, political significance, and practical purchase can be raised on the basis of such an inhumanist naturalism: such a naturalism is a bad and bogus metaphysics.
More and more I am happy with my view of human beings as God's partners in creation, not the creators of that reality but co-creators in a ceaselessly creative and participatory universe. People seem forever to be trying to find a God and a sense of the sacred on their own scientific terms, rather than going direct. I go direct. Without transcendence, immanence is a self-immolation, expressing the inhumanism at the heart of ecology as a naturalism.
I’m staggered seeing the great many shares this article has had. And the dozens and dozens of likes it has received. I really do find the incomprehension and innocence of people staggering. The idea that a mathematical reality exists independently of our ‘notes’ really should be familiar to anyone with a modicum of education. It is for this reason that I have a hunch that the appeal of this article lies not in its central claim – as trite and familiar as it is (or ought to be) – but in the implications of a necessity that diminishes human significance.
I've called this crowd right and have done for a long while now. "In our hubris we perpetrate the notion humans invented geometry and mathematics…" It’s hard to know where to begin with a statement like that. Such people conflate the science of something with the something it studies, or presume that those involved in the science of something mistake the map for the territory. Mathematics as a study of mathematical reality is very real. Try discarding mathematics and see how far contemporary civilisation can go. When I get into an airplane travelling to California or France I do so reassured not by the fact that there is a reality independent of human creation out there – I know that there is, hence my fear of falling from great heights – but by the knowledge that all those playing some role in getting the plane into the air and keeping it there have got their numbers right. But, yes, human beings have invented geometry and mathematics, just not the reality to which these disciplines apply.
The people getting excited by this article are failing to distinguish mathematical reality from mathematics, giving each their due claim. The nature of reality is inherently logical and therefore mathematical in being subject to mathematical laws and processes. Those getting excited would be happy with the tautology of ‘natural’ here, so long as it excludes human agency. Mathematics as a discipline necessarily involves human agency. Such intellectual disciplines are human inventions, created in order to discern reality the better. Mathematics is thus a subjective representation of an objective field, a mental model of the mathematical nature of reality. Instead of playing objectivity and subjectivity against one another, the wise way forward involves combining the two.
In my own work I go deep into a world that is more than human subjective choice and self-creation, only to find that when I do this, this self-same crowd run a mile. They do so because they merely want to assert a 'Nature' that is indifferent to human concerns, as against a God that is always concerned. I have the measure of this crowd for a long while now. They are with Einstein on this: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." That notion is half a god, and the easy half at that: the God of the physical universe. The Hebrew Bible - I repeat endlessly - combines two concepts of God, Elohim and Hashem, the one the God of the physical universe and its processes, the other the God of Love and personal relationships. The Bible puts these two concepts together, combining fact and value in a way that the modern world separates them and has us endlessly picking sides. These people discard the personal, the concerned, and the loving quite happily and reduce to the impersonal, the indifferent, and the uncaring. And then they seek to ‘reinvent’ the sacred and the spiritual. They are miles off beam. I don't think many of them know what they are doing, insofar as they are well-meaning. Many of them are, however, openly and systematically misanthropic. Everything is magical is nature to them, except human beings; everything is a legitimate agent in nature to them, except human beings. Although they condemn hubris, they don't have a coherent response to it, they merely invert it.
I shall keep issuing the warning that certain dominant strains of environmentalism are at least implicitly and quite often explicitly inhuman in its metaphysics and anti-democratic in its ‘non-politics,’ with the result that they make 'necessity' available to some very nasty forces. I used to give them the benefit of the doubt, because who doesn't want to protect nature? But these people are modern day equivalents of the flagellants. They are big on ecological sin and demand punishment, the more painful the better.
There is undoubtedly an issue of what Margaret Wertheim in her book Pythagoras' Trousers called "mathematical man," which pertains to the people who replaced a concern with the redemptive qualities of understanding nature by an obsession with controlling nature to create Heaven on Earth. I couldn't agree more. Take this from David Hilbert:
“The organic unity of mathematics is inherent in the nature of this science. For mathematics is the foundation of all exact knowledge of natural phenomena. That it may completely fulfil this high mission. May the new century bring it gifted masters and many zealous and enthusiastic disciples.”
That statement has an explicitly religious quality, raising the very issues of ‘mathematical man’ that Wertheim.
But reading any of the great mathematicians I get the feeling of both humility and if not hubris exactly, then a mysticism that inspires zealotry and enthusiasm. It’s there in Russell, and it is easy to understand how it could become infectious and spread outwards, certainly in relation to the idea that mathematical knowledge promises endless control and manipulation of reality – and others.
The idea that there is a reality beyond our 'notes' is precisely what I read Russell, Frege, Whitehead, and a million more saying, and saying with much greater precision and eloquence.
I think the issue comes down to what those armed with mathematics thought they could do with it practically - but hubris of that kind is a matter of social forms and relations (let's just name names here, the capital system and the way the scientific revolution came to be subordinated to capital and its accumulative imperatives). But like I said to the guy I unfriended the other day: "I took a quick look down your page to see what 'reality' you affirm: 'Nature': how profound.” I’m so very grateful for FB folk. The things I learn from them are incredible. Things I never knew and could never have guessed. Like there’s nature! How wonderful is that? And nature is wonderful! It never struck me. Nature is all we have. Let’s lament our very existence on account of our baneful impact in naturally seeking to exist. Daily I see the warning ‘we have forgotten that we are natural beings.’ Which is most helpful. Never again will I make the mistake of forgetting to make my tea and feed my face and other such things deemed essential. There are patterns in nature, too! Everything is connected and the world is one and nothing that matters actually matters, but matters so awfully much that people talk about it every day, because something should be done, even though it’s all meaningless, purposeless, and pointless and, which all that there is, doesn’t care, but is beautiful all the same whilst human beings are stupid. Most incomprehensibly incredible of all, I have learned that water is wet and fire is hot. I don’t know what I did before I joined FB.
This lot haven't got a clue when it comes to politics and ethics, human motivations, and the field of practical reason. 'Nature.' That's the extent of their metaphysics: the basics. You can find this in any children's primer, Marx said in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. To them, it is the height of wisdom. And they are mystified as to why they fail to persuade people and attract support. Drivel. The problem is that constant environmental pressure couched in terms of crisis, necessity, and alarm will translate into a very authoritarian and austerian politics, with the working class paying the price - continuing to work at the modern-day coalface, paying more for energy whilst being colder, and hammered by taxes and regulations visited by others. I do hope to see the re-emergence of a true Left one day. Because this crowd are appalling when, for the sake of the environment they seek to protect, they need to be appealing.
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