AS I mentioned I'm having eye trouble, which is why I haven't been relying on using things I have to type out. I really had wanted to use more of Sr. Verna Holyhead's commentary for Advent but typing while reading hasn't been easy. I recommend her books that have commentary for the Sunday readings of the current Catholic lectionary cycle. It's good to read several different commentaries on the Scriptures because a lot of these people who have lived with the Scriptures can suggest things in them that we beginners are liable to not notice. You don't have to agree with everything they conclude but it is helpful to have other points of view to think about. Doing so in the small weekly or daily bites you get from the lectionary of different denominations is a good way to do it. I also recommend the online commentary of Fr. Scott Lewis at the Canadian journal Catholic Register, NOT to be confused with the right wing outfit that goes by a similar name but is far less worthwhile reading in its right-wing ideological polemics.
Recently from reading RMJ's excellent and far more consistent Advent posts I'm led to thinking more and more about how much of what we think of as "objective knowledge" is really the creation of explanatory stories, how much of life, how much of human experience is too complex to fit into the confines of the reliable physical sciences or, even more so, within equations. The demotion of "story-telling" is both unwarranted and, in some cases, a warranted practice.
In some of that most important and controversial rejection of story telling, which I approve of completely, is the Stephen Jay Gould-Richard Lewontin identification of Sociobiolgy and evolutionary psychology as relying on "just-so stories." Those two innovations in evolutionary biology of the 1970s were, in fact, the creation of creation myths peddled as hard science when they were ideological in their motivations and the start of an extremely dangerous repeat of the earliest and most dangerous aspect of Darwinism, eugenics. The current eugenics, everything from the most banal seeming of assumptions of human inequality to the criminal application of it during the Covid-19 pandemic in Sweden and under the Trump regime is just the latest reminder that eugenics kills people in large numbers, whether it be the active type that sends people to gas chambers or the passive type that just lets "nature take its course" with the least among us.
That those two astute biologists did, in fact, hit that neo-eugenic ideological effort at its core practice, making up stories where actual observation was impossible, so quickly was due to the fact that all of Darwinism and way too much of the scientific study of evolution was inevitably dependent on making up stories, scenarios, which, happening in the lost past, a past known by the most fragmentary of physical evidence of severely limited evidentiary value of what lives from hundreds of thousands to millions to even billions of years ago could have been.
Since Darwin's natural selection was adopted as the controling ideological feature of evolutionary and other biology, as it was adopted in the even less reliably scientific of science, the creation of explanatory stories has, in fact, been adopted in place of the more properly scientific practice of observing nature, measuring it reliably and reporting the conclusions derived from a strictly limited adherence to the observation and the measurements of what was studied. That is impossible when trying to study the lost past.
The fact that all of psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. and much of evolutionary biology has been a cycle of rapid promotion of claims, their acceptance, their establishment as orthodox holdings only to have their claims corrode under further study at a remarkably fast rate is based in the fact that a story cannot substitute for the close observation of actual events and physical objects. And even when you have living beings before you you cannot really go beyond what you can see, if you bite off more than you really can chew and make over-ambitious claims about that, the limits of your observation has a way of coming back to haunt you. That is the ghost haunting the life sciences, one which the materailists refuse to admit is there. Stubbornly refusing to come clean that what they're doing really isn't much like what physics did in its, perhaps past, productive heights and what chemistry does.
In a recently made comment I noted how much of what we do as intellectual culture is, in fact, the construction of stories, story-lines, narratives, development of themes - for more honest and less honest and straight forward purposes. I once read a rather whiny classics professor (I admit I detested the old fart) complaining about how the themes he'd developed in one of his classes were incompatible with more recent and rigorous historical conclusions. The fact is that all of history, that which is rigorous and inclusive of primary documentation and all of the less honestly done history, is based in the construction of stories, the presentation of condensed stories about the human past that we cannot go back and reproduce in all of its enormous complexity and depth. We cannot possibly access that even though there is enormously more evidence for much of that past time. The difference in what is presented about the human past can be everything from innocuous and minor to major and dangerous. In the United States two of the most dangerous and damaging and dishonest narratives of the past are what can be generally called the "Lost Cause" mythology about the American South and the "Old West" nonsense about the history of white people in the Western states. Both of those are elaborately constructed lies made for a number of purposes. One of the most effective means of doing that is the desire of movies, cheap novelists, story scribblers and typists to peddle lies for easy sale and to promote a right-wing, inegalitarian ideology. So, not that different from the motives behind evolutionary psychology and natural selection.
The fact is that even the present requires that we invent stories to explain the world to us, especially when we don't have direct access to something that makes what really happens more directly known. While that story making can be done badly, on partial knowledge or very badly for malign purposes makes it all the more important that we admit what we're doing and more critical about the stories that, especially, TV, the movies, books, the internet tell us. For me one of the most important things in that is to always be on guard for the possibility of harm coming from them and the feature of attractive, seductive dishonesty that is so often done for the purpose of leading us to evil useful to the one telling the story.
This isn't an easy subject to think about but, face it, we're stuck with it because it's what we do as human beings, admit it or not. And if there's one thing we don't want to do, whether we're someone like me, a low placed, unimportant and marginal participant in life or a highly placed academic or scientist, it's admit that we're making up stories. I suspect that this is something I'm going to increasingly think about.
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