The Arrogance of Our Humility
Center of the Universe
It is often said that medieval man was arrogant in imagining that God had placed Earth at the center of the concentric spheres he created to form his universe. The implication is that, by comparison, modern man is humble in thinking of the earth as the third of the planets revolving around a sun whose own place is far from the center of a galaxy quite distant from the imagined point where the universe may have burst into being for reasons we don’t care to discuss.
Those who examine the medieval model more closely discover that the men and women who inhabited the planet at the center of the physical universe thought of themselves as separated from the spiritual center of things by their own bad moral choice. No ego gratification was gained by thinking of Earth as the gravitational center of error and sin. The real and celebrated center of reality was beyond the heavens, ineffably hidden behind those starry signs of its perfection. Redemption was available not by means of a conquering knowledge but only through a turning of the will made possible by the gift of grace.
We, on the other hand, have been taught to think of ourselves as the pinnacle toward which all natural processes have moved. Believing that reality is nothing but those natural processes, we take credit for exercising the highest faculty we can conceive of in the universe, namely that of learning to understand them. We claim greater humility than medieval thinkers on the grounds that unlike them, we can admit that we are not a special creation of God but are mere instances of physical laws at work to no end other than their own existence.
Is not the assertion of one’s humility a form of arrogance?
The arrogance hidden in this humility is that in clinging to the idea that we are merely natural and not also spiritual phenomena, we seek to abolish any ultimate significance in the experiences that are most important to us. In the name of supposedly humble honesty, we assert that non-physical realities are essentially not spiritual but really only material phenomena generated in our brains by the operation of natural laws. The ideals of justice, kindness, and the brotherhood of man; love of our parents, children, friends, spouses, and nature itself; joy in beauty of form, perfection of discipline, and logical clarity; the imagination of an eternal meaning not constrained by the limits of material nature; even the desire to understand how nature works—all are reduced to secondary phenomena solely dependent on physical processes.
Is it not arrogance that in order to fit ourselves to an idea that makes our lives no more significant than the slipping of a rock into the sea we deny the spiritual significance of what most gives meaning to our lives, including the search for meaning itself?
Speciesism
Fairly often now we also hear people argue that it is arrogant for human beings to think of themselves as being higher than other species. It is implied that in thinking of ourselves as merely one among the many species nature has evolved, we show ourselves superior in humility to the ancients, who believed that man’s rationality set him highest upon the scale of nature, and to medieval people, who believed the world and all its species were created for the sake of man. Some even claim that the religious traditions of the West are themselves the cause of our abuse of the other species and the environment.
Again, those who look further will find that for the Greeks, man’s position as highest of the natural beings put upon him the special responsibility to use his reason to live in harmony with nature, including his own nature, and that for Jews and Christians, man was charged to husband the natural world with loving care.
Here too the assertion of modern humility against traditional arrogance presents a logical problem. Apart from the grounds that the religious traditions provide, what could justify our assertion that we should not feel superior to the other animals? If we are merely another species doing what species do, which is to behave however they do behave in order to survive, on what grounds should we be compassionate to them? It may be in your nature to avoid killing flies or to protest the industrial torture of veal calves. But if it is in my nature to like killing flies and eating veal, what gives you the authority to assert that I shouldn’t do so?
Animals have rights, we are told. But where do those rights derive from and why should we grant them? If the other animals have rights that we do, why should we have responsibilities that they don’t? Why are animal rights people not preaching to lions about the rights of gazelles or to eagles about the rights of mice?
The answer is that no animals except human beings recognize, or can recognize, the moral obligations of being not merely nature but rational nature. In telling us how we should behave toward nature, the animal egalitarians depend on grounds whose existence they deny: the moral responsibility of rational beings. If this chop logic is not merely stupid, isn’t there arrogance in it? What right have we to deny our own nature as morally responsible beings?
Those who claim rights for animals don’t acknowledge where even human rights come from. All rights are built upon the same foundation: faith in the sacredness of life, the brotherhood of man, the virtues of justice, kindness, and compassion that are taught us by our religious traditions—just those values about which mere nature at its work neither knows nor cares. The only reason we should not wantonly kill flies or buy immorally raised veal is precisely that we are not just another species of animal; being rational and moral, only we among the animals have the duty to care as best we can for our fellow creatures.
Why Not Be Arrogant?
If the authority of universal spiritual values is denied in favor of mere nature at her work, then there can be no reason not to be arrogant, not to think the world was made only for man, not to abuse other species. If humility is not itself a virtue that transcends nature, then there is no virtue in the humility of admitting that the natural universe does not revolve around us.
Even to oppose geocentrism and speciesism, then, is to value what transcends nature. In saying we ought to be humble about our place in the world, the worshippers of nature are revealing their deeper but unacknowledged belief in man’s unique moral responsibility.
posted by G.Rap | 2:38 PM
9 Comments:
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This story made me think of your post.
It would be news if the animals ever built a zoo and put humans in it. There's nothing new in this human stupidity.
A few semi-related thoughts:
1. I wouldn’t say that medieval man was arrogant to place himself at the center. Ignorant, sure –- understandably so. Unimaginative, perhaps. But favoring geocentrism over heliocentrism wasn’t a mark of arrogance until at least the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler showed the earth to be in orbit around the sun.
(Nowadays, of course, insisting that the sun goes 'round the earth would take some serious chutzpah. It would be, from a point of ignorance, telling the entire field of professional cosmologists and astronomers that everything they know about their area of expertise is wrong.)
2. I think it is inaccurate to suggest that materialists "seek to abolish any ultimate significance in the experiences that are most important to us." The notion that ultimate significance can be found only in some non-physical realm comes from your worldview, not theirs. That they disagree with your premise is no reason to impute destructive motives to them. The materialists I know are as fond of "ideals of justice, kindness, and the brotherhood of man; love of our parents, children, friends, spouses, and nature itself" as are the mystics. Materialists desire to abolish justice and love and meaning to the same extent that the sixteenth century heliocentrists did –- which is to say, they don’t.
3. You ask on what grounds we should be compassionate to animals. I answer that we don’t need any grounds. We are compassionate beings, most of us: being kind to others is pleasing, and that is reason enough. I agree with the message of your rhetorical question, What right have we to deny our own nature as morally responsible beings?
We are not totally alone in this, however. The behavior of certain other animals often exhibits something at least homologous to morality. Is stealing wrong? Jane Goodall once saw the alpha male beg for hours for a low ranking chimp to share some meat with him, and eventually give up and go away. Is causing pain wrong? Carl Sagan wrote of an experiment in which macaques were fed if they were willing to pull a chain and electrically shock an unrelated macaque whose agony was in plain view through a one-way mirror. After learning the ropes, the monkeys frequently refused to pull the chain, preferring to go hungry. One macaque went without food for nearly two weeks rather than hurt its fellow. For plenty more examples of what looks like moral behavior in non-humans primates, see Frans De Waal’s book, Good Natured.
This is not the place for a full refutation of Maurile's arguments. Meaning itself being metaphysical, a materialist faith that does not abolish meaning is not simply a difference in world view. It is a self-contradiction. And the argument that we should be moral because we are sometimes moral or sometimes want to be so or because certain animals sometimes appear to be moral is absurd too. (That we are moral because we are moral is no argument that we OUGHT to be moral.) C.S. Lewis in "The Abolition of Man" has refuted the position brilliantly: from the "is" no "ought" can be derived, no matter what sleight-of-hand is used to try to derive it.
The truth is that materialists are not made only of material. That is the reason they are, for the most part, moral, kind, loving, caring, meaning-seeking beings. Their faith in materialism is the absurd faith of beings who, like the rest of us, are mysterious unities of soul and body, the only beings for whom any kind of faith is an option and some kind of faith a necessity.
Meaning itself being metaphysical . . .
That's your premise. The materialist premise is that "metaphysical" is a nonsense concept.
You can't call materialism self-contradictory because it conflicts with one of your beliefs. It is self-contradictory only if it contradicts itself. Can you name a materialist who thinks that meaning arises not from the interaction of materials, but from the existence of spirits?
C.S. Lewis in "The Abolition of Man" has refuted the position brilliantly: from the "is" no "ought" can be derived, no matter what sleight-of-hand is used to try to derive it.
Hume made the same argument.
As far as I can tell, the reason people think you can't get to "ought" from "is" is grammatical; "ought" is a modal verb and inference rules don't generally change mode. But "ought" isn't the only modal; and although philosophers have been known to agonize intensively over counterfactual definiteness, or the problem of induction, for the most part people don't seem much put out by the theoretical difficulty.
We look at a guy losing a race and say he can't run fast enough. But in fact all we see is that he isn't running fast enough -- how do you derive a "can't" from an "isn't"? We see what the sun did thousands of times in a row and conclude it will come up tomorrow; how do you derive a "will" from a "did"? We see that cold O-rings are brittle and say the shuttle would have made it to orbit if they'd waited for warmer weather; how do you derive a "would" from an "are"? "What would have happened" appears on its face to be no more of an observable than "murder is bad." It looks to me like exactly the same problem with the lot of them. Yet with all the others, somehow we muddle through.
Hume did not go on, as Lewis did, to say that therefore if we are to have value at all, we must treat fundamental values as premises, not as conclusions. You are right that materialism is a premise, just as belief in value is a premise. You want to muddle through assuming that even muddling through is a function of materiality. Fine. I believe, as Lewis says, that carried to its logical conclusions, that premise, far from being just a matter of grammar, leads to nonsense and the destruction of all value (and therefore, eventually, of humanity too). But there's no way I can convince you by proof. In my view, as Philip Thompson wrote once, "who values nothing, Value nothings" (the last word being a verb). (I realize that you would say not that you value nothing but that your values are rooted in materiality.) Where premises differ so fundamentally, it only remains for us to feel sorry for one another, except that those feelings don't much matter in your scheme of things, because they're after all only the physical laws going about their business in the guise of your muddling through, whereas in my scheme of things, being particular instances of the universal called love, they matter absolutely. I remain in my belief that to be so sure that all our gifts of non-material experience are really only materiality is hubristic. You will say the same about my faith in spirit. And this is the great rift of our age.
I agree that fundamental values should be taken as premises, not conclusions. (When we last discussed this by email several years ago, I took the opposite view; I've since come around.)
Moreover, we are on the same side against the moral relativists. We agree that normative questions can have right and wrong answers. I suspect we even agree, in most cases, on what the right answers are.
We disagree, however, when you say that materialism will lead to the destruction of humanity. What will lead to the destruction of humanity is a giant comet as depicted in the motion picture Armageddon. Barring that, what will lead to the desctruction of humanity is the notion that absolute moral principles should be gotten from some book or some priest or some god rather than from an examination of one's own conscience using one's own best judgment.
Osama bin Laden is the threat that he is because he takes the Koran seriously. He believes every word of it. He is willing to kill millions of innocent westerners because his god wants him to.
The elevation of religious doctrine over a conscience-based morality is responsible as well for millions of recent deaths in Palestine, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Kashmir, Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Eritra, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Caucasus.
Humanity has a chance if only its members would think for themselves and do what they think is right -- and not take their marching orders from the Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads, the collected writings of L. Ron Hubbard, etc.
Well, now. I fear I may be taking this discussion off on another tangent. Morever, I confess that I haven't given this as much thought as g.rap or Maurile have, nor am I as articulate on the subject as they are.
Still, I am compelled to respond that Maurile is starting from a flawed premise: That conflict (murder, genocide, mistreatment) that occurs between socities and subfactions, arises out of a failure of people to think for themselves and to do what they "think" is right. That if only people would do what they "think" is right, rather than to rely on mystical literature for guidance, all would be well with the world.
One obvious (to me) trouble with this reasoning is that Osama IS, no doubt, doing what he "thinks is right." True, the situation is complicated by the fact that he also believes he has the moral authority to do what he is doing.
But, I posit that it is not his belief in the Koran that has caused the problem. In fact, the problem is precisely the opposite. Although he has apparently read the Koran (which I admit I have not), I am confident that he has not understood it in its depth. In any mystical literature, one can find passages or concepts that can appear to legitimize an individual's own "conscience-based" morality." It can and does happen all the time. That's what happened in this case.
It sounds like you're falling pray to the understandable human desire to find a nice comfortable, and relatively easy place from which to view the world. "If this, then this." Unfortunately, mankind's infinite range of motivations, desires, and capacities must be considered. Quite simply, the unquantifiable must be factored in with the quantifiable."
The fact that spiritual beliefs have the capacity to take us terribly awry does not does not mean any more than that: It's true. People do have the capacity to misunderstand and misuse spiritual concepts.
But it is equally indisputable that the unquantifiable, mystical, factor has the potential to add meaning and depth to a life that lived exclusively in the material world can never have.
Materialism alone and particulary "conscience-based morality" are equally, and perhaps more dangerous than spiritualism alone. As we have moved farther and farther into a world where the balance has changed in that direction, I find less, not more, evidence of cooperation, love, consideration, and creativity.
If reliance on mystical literature were the sole cause of mankind's mistreatment of each other, we would expect to see less of that we we have moved farther away from the spiritually based model that governed for most of history until the post-WWII era.
The "modal verb" vetting takes the Steve Martin prize for philosophy. "I remembered just enough to F*** me up for the rest of my life.
After a game of complex moves, another stalemate. There's a reason that chess isn't a spectator sport.
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