Analogismoi Five: Epoch of Meaning / Epoch of Matter

In this week’s Main Project post we began the process of introducing the Bible. Today I want to continue this introduction by talking about the epistemology of the Bible, the natural cognitive framework of man and how these stories arose and became the wellspring for all of western civilization.

 

One way to look at the Bible is as a meta-narrative distilled over a vast period of time to guide human survival and flourishing. For the books in the Bible the question of the material nature of the world (e.g., atoms, stars) are secondary at best to surviving nature’s challenges — conflict, scarcity, betrayal and mortality. The stories of the Bible teach how to act in ways that sustain individual and communal life, such as honoring commitments (covenant), practicing forgiveness and pursuing truth.

The stories aren’t meant to compete with science but to provide a framework for ethical and psychological action, addressing questions that science can’t answer.

As I’ve mentioned before, David Hume famously said in his Treatise Concerning Human Nature, that you cannot derive an ought from an is. Let’s consider this a moment.

French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace, in 1814,  posited an idea we now call Laplace’s Demon. The demon is the embodiment of determinism. The idea goes that an ultra intelligent being which could track every particle in the universe could, in theory, predict all future states and retrodict all past ones. This is the pinnacle of enlightenment thinking. The idea that the scientific knowledge of the world would remove any uncertainty about anything in the past or the present and that every other consideration was irrelevant. A little more than a hundred years later the science of Quantum Mechanics would settle the issue by introducing the uncertainty and probabilistic behavior of the universe at the sub-atomic level, but thousands of years earlier the biblical authors already knew this was an impossibility.

You cannot derive an ought from an is. No amount of knowledge of the physical world or the laws of physics that guide it will ever be able to instruct you on how to move forward. An example frequently used is that of a grass field. If your goal is to get from one side of the field to another, no amount of knowledge about that field will definitively tell you which of the infinite number of ways you can cross that field is the right one or even if there are ways that are better than others. The only way to gauge the best way to cross a field is to examine your motivation behind setting the goal to cross is and then considering which way would best conform to the self-imposed goal. Simply put, the question of what to do and the question of what is are very different.

So, if you cannot derive and ought from an is where do you derive the ought from?

To answer this and come back to the distinction between the epoch of meaning and the epoch of matter we first need to look more at the Bible. What is key here is that you approach the Bible as a novice. It doesn’t matter what you have read and it doesn’t matter what you’ve been taught or what you think. If you do not approach this as something you do not understand it will not speak to you. In his book Man and His Symbols (published posthumously in 1964) Jung says that “the fool is the precursor to the savior.” His idea here is so elegant in its simplicity. You cannot be a master of anything without starting and you cannot start as a master. It is only the person who is willing to humble himself as a fool in the beginning who can, in the end, be great (Jung points to Christ being a nazarene laborer for this).

This is true in all things and maybe true in the most difficult way for modern man with regard to the Bible. If you are not willing to put aside your arrogance and fear and allow yourself to be a bumbling novice, there is nothing for you here. So with that in mind, I want to start with some more very basic things about these uncanny stories.

One of the first things you need to know about the Bible is that it is a comedy. Comedy is defined classically as a story with a happy ending. That we have a biblical corpus which is a comedy is very strange. Up until that point in both the hellenic world and the near eastern world the stories of the God’s were almost always tragic. But the biblical stories which, after being cobbled together over 1000 years, maintain an underpinning plot are a comedy — there is a happy ending.

The structure of the Bible, though there are thousands of sub-plots, is simple. There is chaos. God creates a universe out of that chaos and creates a paradise for man. Then a cataclysm occurs and people fall into history and history is a story of limitation, mortality, suffering and self-consciousness. After falling into history man attempts to find the proper mode of being which will allow him to return to the prelapsarian state of paradise until the logos which God spoke into the chaotic void to create habitable order manifests in flesh and sets the example for how to return.

If you happen to notice the plot from every single movie here you are not mistaken. Human’s only really have a few

basic stories and we just keep telling them in different ways. And do not take these stories lightly. The oldest cave paintings in the world, some thirty five thousand years old, contain double helixes. Cross culturally, in every part of the world, for thirty thousand years people have been drawing the double helix. The double helix structure of DNA was discovered in 1953 by Watson and Crick. Over thirty thousand years of human beings painting a picture of their own DNA on walls. We have been telling each other and the world who we are for as long as we have been here.

There is an almost Darwinian evolution of the functional myths of the biblical library as, on multiple levels, the stories and the history of the stories are evolved structures.

Keeping this in mind, it is important to remember that regardless of your feelings about the Bible, these stories are the foundational documents of Western civilization, Western values, Western morality and the very notion of good and evil in the West. Regardless of anyone’s stated beliefs, we act out Christianity as a culture daily. These stories are reflective of our values, civilization and morals and like them the structure of the stories is incredibly complex.

The common and trite question of whether these stories are a “true history” needs to be abandoned. Whether or not the stories are literally true makes absolutely no difference. Whether or not they are literally true they are true in the sense that they teach you how to orient yourself in the world optimally. They teach you how to confront the harsh realities of life courageously and with nobility. They do this as a result of a distillation of abstractions of humanity then presented condensed into story form. This is part and parcel of an epoch of meaning.

As a quick aside, the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote a book outlining what he believed to be the physical properties of the world. It never would have even occurred to Aristotle to go test his theories. It absolutely would not have occurred to him to pay a dozen research assistants to take a formalized method of how to test these theories with instructions on how to write up testing results. It absolutely would never have occurred to him to do this in order to prove himself wrong. He never would have taken the methodically written notes of the research assistants, removed any variable data and kept what conforms over all experiments and then see how his theories stacked up to the empirical testing. This is not how ancient people thought, especially the ancient Hebrews.

The question for these ancient authors of the Bible was how do we live in a limited and mortal world filled with suffering? What do we do about it? The answer in the east was to practice a mindfulness that will help you escape the cycle of suffering. This was not the answer here. The answer here was to find the mode of being which emulates the force that created order out of chaos at the beginning of time, to imbue the suffering with meaning by acting courageously, paying attention and speaking honestly and to justify the catastrophes of existence by being heroic.

The biblical library is intensely practical. It is not about what the world is made out of, it is about what we should do knowing full well that in very short order we are going to suffer greatly and then die. We will lose everything we love. We will encounter pain.

Earlier this week we mentioned that these were not stories about how to be happy. The thing about happiness is that it is fleeting. If you find yourself happy, enjoy it. Really, it is a gift. But imagine everything you could possibly want is yours. You are everything you want to be. Everything is fantastic and you are happy. Then what? Ok, well — then you find out you have late stage esophageal cancer and your mother dies in a car accident, your father is diagnosed with aggressive Alzheimer’s, the distractions in your personal life gets you fired, the strain causes problems at your home with your wife and, just for a kicker, you beloved pet dies. How’s that happiness working out?

The goal here is not to be happy, but to find a mode of being that will sustain you when the flood comes. You might say it is a guide to building a metaphysical ark. Because what do you want to be, the person who is happy now or the person who lives a life which protects him from the catastrophe which, in no uncertain terms, is on its way? The flood is coming, it isn’t the smiling idiot who is going to survive the flood, save his family and recreate the world.

So how do these stories come to be?

Let me start by saying I am an evolutionary thinker. I believe the world is fifteen billion years old. I believe that the split from last universal common ancestor was three billion years ago. I believe that primates emerged sixty million years ago and that the human variation split from the chimpanzee eight million years ago. That communities  formed after the last ice age sixteen thousand years ago and that civilization got up and running about six thousand years ago. There are those who say that this flies in the face of the biblical stories, but I do not believe that to be the case for one second. The biblical critique of evolution, like the evolutionary critique of religion are both based on the consideration of the Bible as a set of empirical facts and histories listed in a way that would not come about for thousands of years after the books were written. Fundamentalists and Rational Materialist Atheists both believe that the the Bible is a set of facts, the only difference between the two is that one side thinks the facts are true and the other side thinks they are false. This view drastically ignores the reality which is that they are judging ancient ideas by modern standards and, to put it bluntly, they both miss the point entirely.

In the 17th cenuty, Irish Archbishop James Ussher claimed the world was six thousand years old. He came to that number by picking apart the genealogies of the Bible all the way back to Adam and Eve. This is an absurd idea that is used for absurdly bad arguments for a religious tradition that it shows, at best, a juvenile understanding of.

For the authors of the Bible and, indeed, for people until at least the sixteenth century, how old the world wasn’t an interesting question. It didn’t matter. Here we are, what the hell are we supposed to do now? This is the question the Bible is getting at and this is the epistemological epoch it was put together in.

So how do these stories come about, the answer is right there in the text: through paying attention.

We have been watching each other for millions of years. You watch people and you imitate them. Over time what is imitated gets abstracted. That abstraction is shared. That shared abstraction is a story.

In the Mesopotamian story, something that the oldest books of Genesis rely highly on, the question they are primarily trying to answer is who should be in charge and why. How do you do this? Well, let’s say in your life you see a dozen people who are in charge of something. You pay attention. You abstract out things they have in common that make them good leaders. Now let’s say you do this with hundreds of other people with thousands of other examples and you do it for generations over the course of a thousand years. That story gets more and more distilled until you get to the very heart of what abstract principle a person must embody to be a good leader.

For the Mesopotamians, after spending an enormous amount of time paying attention to themselves and to other tribes, what they abstracted out from a thousand years of distillation of qualities in a good leader is Marduk. The embodiment of courage, honesty, sharing, attention and articulate speech. Not power. Not intelligence. And from then on, the emperor of Mesopotamia was charged with being an avatar of Marduk on earth.

It is in no way obvious that this would be the case. The obvious answer, even if it is incorrect, is that the good leader is the one with the most power. This idea took a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of pain and death to come forth. First to abstract a notion of sovereignty out of individual sovereigns over centuries and then to make it so that even the sovereign is subject to that abstraction. This is what it means to be the king of kings.

The stories that make up the biblical canon are the culmination of some ten thousand years of paying attention, abstracting principles and then telling stories about them. These are the most sophisticated and thorough ideas of humans living in an epoch of meaning rather than matter. The biblical library is a series of stories which, in the most condensed and sophisticated way every created, tell the story that science cannot tell.

These are the stories we are going to contend with. This is our wrestling match.