Autor: Gregory, Brad S.

Buch: The Unintended Reformation

Titel: The Unintended Reformation

Stichwort: Moderne: Resultat eines Hyperpluraslimus, Kingdom of Whatever; soziale Desintegration; Versagen d. Philosophie; Naturwissenschaften; moderne Rechte; Versagen einer Rechtfertigung

Kurzinhalt: The intellectual foundations of modernity are failing because its governing metaphysical assumptions in combination with the findings of the natural sciences offer no warrant for believing its most basic moral, political, and legal claims.

Textausschnitt: 378a As a result, public life today, perhaps especially in the United States, is increasingly riven by angry, uncivil rivals with incompatible views about what is good, true, and right. Many of these views and values are increasingly distant from substantive beliefs that derived most influentially from Christianity and that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remained much more widely shared, notwithstanding inherited early modern confessional antagonisms. But the rejection of such answers to the Life Questions has led to the current Kingdom of Whatever partly because of the dissolution of the social relationships and communities that make more plausible those beliefs and their related human practices. Most visibly in recent decades, this dissolution owed and continues to owe much to the liquefying effects of capitalism and consumerism on the politically protected individuals within liberal states, as men and women in larger numbers prioritize the fulfillment of their self-chosen, acquisitive, individual desires above any social (including familial) solidarities except those they also happen to choose, and only for as long as they happen to choose them. Which means, of course, that the solidity of these social “solidarities” is better understood as liquidity, if not vaporosity. Nevertheless, these same liberal states continue to depend on the widely embraced pursuit of consumerist acquisitiveness to hold together the ideological hyperpluralism within their polities. Hence modernity is failing, too, because having accepted the redefinition of avarice as benign self-interest—a latter-day extension of early modern Christians’ self-colonization by capitalism—it relies for cohesion on a naturalized acquisitiveness that simultaneously undermines other shared beliefs, common values, and social relationships on which the sustainability of liberal states also depends. And this cultural contradiction of capitalism stands quite apart from what else seems very likely: that ever greater levels of consumption are contributing to global climate change in potentially dangerous ways, another unintended consequence of the political protection of individual rights within modern liberal states (and of burgeoning consumption by citizens in illiberal states, too, as in the case now of China). (Fs)

378b But is philosophy really failing with respect to the Life Questions? In ways analogous to Protestantism and on its own terms, the evidence suggests that it has already failed. Those who dispute this might revisit the historical evidence and survey the state of contemporary philosophy. Considering the practical problems posed by deadlocked doctrinal controversy in the Reformation era, modern philosophers beginning with Descartes understandably sought to articulate universal truths based on reason alone, without reference to authority or tradition. By the late twentieth century, there was every indication that this ambition had been a long-lived albeit profoundly influential washout. Instead of discovering or devising rationally demonstrated answers to questions about God, metaphysics, morality, human nature, or human priorities, or even offering any evidence of convergence toward such answers, modern philosophers replicated in a rationalist key the unintended, open-ended, apparently irresolvable pluralism of Protestantism. Those who carry on in the same tradition continue to do so. There is nothing remotely resembling agreement or convergence among contemporary philosophers about what is true, what reason prescribes, what their discipline’s starting point or assumptions ought to be, what philosophy’s most important problems are and priorities should be, or by what methods philosophers should or could try to resolve their disagreements. Based on the evidence of the past four centuries and the state of contemporary philosophy, the rational conclusion is that reason alone has failed as a means by which to discover or devise the truth about the nature of reality, morality, what human beings should care about, and how they should live. Despite high hopes for its success since the seventeenth century, modern philosophy has foundered in its central ambition. It sought universal, rationally demonstrable truth, but has produced instead an open-ended welter of preferential, ultimately arbitrary truth claims. The implications extend much further than philosophy as such because of the pervasive influence of modern philosophical ideas about human nature and reality, often uncritically taken for granted, throughout the social scientific and humanistic disciplines. At the same time, the demise of modern philosophy has left considerable skeptical detritus in its wake, with many academics inferring relativism from pluralism and asserting the truth claim that all “truths” about matters of morality and meaning are contingent and constructed. After a centuries-long modern interlude, this is a postmodern reappearance of the early modern skepticism that Descartes and other thinkers sought to overcome: Montaigne redivivus, but now without recourse to custom in the Kingdom of Whatever. (Fs; tblStw: xy) (notabene)

379a The modern natural sciences, on the other hand, have been and continue to be an astonishing success, nowhere more obviously than in their technological applications and never more so than in the past half century. From Copernicus through Galileo to Newton and beyond, most early modern investigators of nature’s regularities understood themselves to be discovering the rationality with which God had imbued his creation. But it turned out that whether the natural world was God’s creation or not, the explanation of those regularities did not depend on theology or morality and was intellectually separable from them via amoral methodological naturalism. By deliberately setting aside the Life Questions and any questions of value, meaning, morality, purpose, or teleology strictly in favor of efforts to explain natural phenomena, scientists have produced and continue to produce ever greater, cumulative, specialized knowledge of the natural world in their respective domains of inquiry, Kuhnian protestations notwithstanding. Besides its countless contributions to human flourishing, the application of scientific findings has also contributed to untold destruction and human suffering, especially in the past century. Nor is this surprising, because science itself does not prescribe nor can it even suggest whether, how, or to what ends its findings should be applied. These are moral issues, about which the findings of science per se can say nothing. But moral questions are vigorously contested and incapable of rational resolution not only within the narrow scope of modern moral philosophy, but more broadly within the wider society’s hyperpluralism that is protected and incubated by modern liberal states. Science enables human beings to do increasingly extraordinary things in manipulating the natural world, but says nothing and can say nothing about what we should do or why we should do it. It is definitionally amoral. Yet power is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of political leaders and the wealthy, who are thus in a position to enact their moral preferences through the technological applications of science in disproportionately influential ways. (Fs)

380a Modern reason in its two most influential expressions is therefore a schizophrenically mixed bag: philosophy has dramatically failed, but science has spectacularly succeeded. One consequence is that the ever-expanding technological capacities afforded by scientific advances are set within an increasingly rancorous culture of moral disagreement and political contestation. If not necessarily a failure of modernity per se, this fact certainly contributes to its volatility and potential for man-made catastrophes on scales inconceivable in the preindustrial world. Another consequence of modern reason’s schizophrenia goes to the root of modernity’s inability to justify intellectually some of its most basic moral, political, and legal assumptions. Not that this inability has yet been widely recognized. But the exclusion in the secularized academy of any religious claims or metaphysical assumptions besides naturalism has eliminated any possibility of justifying the belief that members of the species Homo sapiens are persons, or that rights are real. There are certainly no grounds for thinking that rights are natural, rooted in nature as many Enlightenment theorists claimed, given all that biological and medical research has disclosed about human bodies. Never in any anatomical investigation or surgical procedure or lab test on any human being has any evidence for any rights been discovered. Nor has a shred of dignity been detected or any value been measured. Nor indeed has a person ever been observed. The persistent, even adamant, positing of rights has no evidentiary basis given the metaphysical assumptions and epistemological demands that govern not only the natural sciences, but knowledge-making across the disciplines in the academy. Thus the fundamental categories at the basis of Western modernity’s most influentially institutionalized philosophy—liberalism—cannot be rationally legitimated on the terms of the scientistic naturalism that prevails in research universities and in the public sphere. Those who regard this as a pseudoproblem easily resolved by reference to an allegedly shared, intuitive, commonsensical understanding of what it means to be a person should consider more carefully the unresolved disagreements about abortion. Transhumanists, with their biogenetic aspirations to hasten a post-human future for today’s descendants of Homo sapiens, understand much more clearly that “persons” and “rights” no less than “dignity” are fictions if metaphysical naturalism is true. (Fs)

381a Rights and dignity can be real only if human beings are more than biological matter. The modern secular discourse on human rights depends on retaining in some fashion—but without acknowledging—the belief that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God, a notion that could be rooted in nature so long as nature was regarded as creation, whether overtly recognized as such or not. But if nature is not creation, then there are no creatures, and human beings are just one more species that happened randomly to evolve, no more “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” than is any other bit of matter-energy. Then there simply are no rights, just as there are no persons, and no theorizing can conjure them into existence. The intellectual foundations of modernity are failing because its governing metaphysical assumptions in combination with the findings of the natural sciences offer no warrant for believing its most basic moral, political, and legal claims. (Fs) (notabene)