IN WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE PENULTIMATE POST in this series of presenting Arthur Stanley Eddington's lecture The Concept of Structure I said:
The idealist side of that ideological war at least had that in its favor, the very minds that were articulating materialism were minds made of the very thing which idealism posited as the ultimate reality, it was the very thing that the materialists depended on for any knowledge of the "matter" which their ideology claims to be the ultimate reality - if it's not there, the entire materialist-atheist-scientistic side of things will inevitably go "poof" or, as Russell foresaw, wind down to a dreary, dark, valueless, meaningless hodge podge of insignificance and decadent superstition. I think that prediction of the even more modern world than Russell and Eddington knew, is what has come with the cultural hegemony of materialist-atheist-scientistic modernism.
It should have occurred to me to point out that I was describing the world that the vulgar materialists had already, to some extent, lived in for pretty much the entirety of recorded history. The nihilistic amorality that Nietzsche welcomed with the destruction of Christianity and religion and, especially with the introduction of Darwinism was imagined by him as a kind of Neo-medievalism without whatever minimal inhibitions that Christianity would give to the strongest and most unprincipled wielders of power during that era (I've got a post I'm thinking of writing about that). Those who have said Nietzsche was a proto-Nazi have a leg to stand on, those who have said that Darwin's foremost German proponent (and who had Darwin's complete support) Ernst Haeckel was one too have two to stand on.
The recent Trump years in the United States, the recent Conservative governments in Britain and elsewhere, the rise of gangster governments over former aspiring democracies have achieved a level of vulgar materialistic decadence that has exposed the extent of the TV and media driven vulgar materialist regime in which even the concept of truth and, certainly, anything like unselfish, unself-centered morality have been stunningly removed by conscious design of what used to be sold under the slogan "information technology". The extent to which all of it depends on, not science and what it can tell us about the world but on morality is only striking if you, like modernism has increasingly done as it replaced things such as religion with the study of the physical world, came to consider it less than real and important.
The extent to which what former conservatives decried as "moral relativism" (I believe using a vulgar, popular misunderstanding of Einstein's far more modest claims about physics) has come in with the scientism of modern life is obvious in the total abandonment of all morality and, especially, the truth that it was those very religious conservatives who disgraced themselves the most by supporting Trump and his neo-pagan, amorally and immorally decadent reign of incompetent irresponsibility. The US Catholic Conference of Bishops, numerous right wing Catholic groups and entities (not all of them phony outfits funded by Catholic billionaires and multi-millionaires) a myriad of Protestant, fewer Jewish entities and individuals, endorsed and, in fact, participated in that. The Conservative majority of the Supreme Court, largely Catholic or former Catholics have been some of the most enthusiastic participants in that plunge into vulgar materialist decadence, the ones I imagine most likely seen at "red masses" some of the worst, Thomas More, whose feast day is, as I recall, the excuse for that abomination, would have recognized it as the same kind of thing under the increasingly bloodthirsty and ruthless king who cut his head off.
But that world of vulgar materialism is generally held to be not the same thing as the world of elite, academic, scientific materialism that is practiced by the contented members of academic communities and the such. Since he figures in the last part of this series, Eddington was enormously generous to him, in a way, or, perhaps, gloating a bit, in attributing to Bertrand Russell a measure of foresight in what he said in his lecture.
Long time readers of this blog may remember me a couple of times dipping into what Bertrand Russell said in his review of a previous published lecture series of Eddington, his Gifford lectures published as The Nature of the Physical World, it was what I referred to above. He started his review saying:
It is a curious fact that just when the man in the street has begun to believe thoroughly in science, the man in the laboratory has begun to lose his faith. When I was young, no physicist entertained the slightest doubt that the laws of physics give us real information about the motions of bodies, and that the physical world does really consist of the sort of entities that appear in the physicist's equations. The philosophers, it is true, throw doubt upon this view, and have done so ever since the time of Berkeley; but since their criticism never attached itself to any point in the detailed procedure of science, it could be ignored by scientists and was in fact ignored. Nowadays matters are quite different; the revolutionary ideas of the philosophy of physics have come from the physicists themselves and are the outcome of careful experiments. The new philosophy of physics is humble and stammering where the old philosophy was proud and dictatorial. It is, I suppose, natural to every man to fill the vacuum left by the disappearance of belief in physical laws as best he may, and to use for this purpose any odds and ends of unfounded belief which had previously no room to expand. When the robustness of the Catholic faith decayed at the time of the Renaissance, it tended to be replaced by astrology and necromancy, and in like manner we must expect the decay of the scientific faith to lead to a recrudescence of pre-scientific superstitions.
While I would differ in Russell's estimate of the extent to which 18th and 19th century science warded off "pre-scientific superstitions" and would name some rather serious ones which were replaced as science, it is remarkable that he seemed to credit robust Catholic faith with anything, never mind warding off superstition during what is superstitiously regarded as a "rebirth" of knowledge after centuries of superstition. Having read quite a bit of Russell when I was lingering in agnostic cowardice, I was a little surprised at that.
But it's clear that Russell understood that his own 19th century materialist-atheist-scientism was in deep trouble with the newest trends in physics, as explained by another expert mathematician and philosopher. And he foresaw that the trouble with the destruction of the naive, former view of science would be big trouble all through the society that had bought into it. Russell's subsequent career as a public thinker proves that he never really gave up on his own faith, though he must certainly have known it wasn't viable as something as solid as he had assumed it would be. I don't believe he would have been aware that the rug was being pulled out from under it (and his previous most ambitious intellectual work) even as he wrote the review. Though by the time Eddington gave the lecture I've been going through, both of them would know it.
Professor Eddington proceeds to base optimistic and pleasant conclusions upon the scientific nescience which he has expounded in previous pages. This optimism based upon the time- honored principle that anything which cannot be proved untrue may be assumed to be true a principle whose falsehood is proved by the fortunes of bookmakers. If we discard this principle, it is difficult to see what ground for cheerfulness modern physics provides. It tells us that the universe is running down, and if Eddington is right, it tells us practically nothing else, since all the. rest is merely the rules of the game. From a pragmatic or political point of view probably the most important thing about such a theory of physics is that it will destroy, if it becomes widespread, that faith in science which has been the only constructive creed of modern times, and the source of virtually all change both for good and for evil. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had a philosophy of natural law based upon Newton. The law was supposed to imply a Lawgiver, though as time went on this inference was less emphasized; but in any case the universe was orderly and predictable. By learning nature's laws we could hope to manipulate nature, and thus science became the source of power, This is still the outlook of most energetic practical men, but it Is no longer the outlook of men of science. The world according to them is a more higgledy-piggledy and haphazard affair than it was thought to be. And they know much less about it than was thought to be known by, their predecessors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perhaps the scientific skepticism of which Eddington is an exponent may lead in the end to the collapse of the scientific era, just as the theological skepticism of the Renaissance has led gradually to the collapse of the theological era. I suppose that machines will survive the collapse of science, just as parsons have survived the collapse of theology, but in the one case as in the other they will cease to be viewed with reverence and awe. Perhaps this is not to be regretted.
Russell was rather nastily snarky about what Eddington claimed in those earlier lectures, characterizing them in a self-serving way, to preserve some of the dignity of his preferred framing of reality by denigrating a far more subtle and rational set of arguments and suggestions that Eddington gave. I would say that I think anyone, then or now, who either tries to replace morality with science is short-circuiting things. Science, itself for its very existence depends on the morality that generates honesty and integrity, something which the education in science should but almost never includes in its prerequisites before credentials to be a scientist are conferred.
This is why I said that if one thing is clear it's that the culture of 19th century materialist-atheist-scientism is still alive and rampant among professional scientists, perhaps not those who are in the habit of being very honest about the limits of what science can tell us and that it doesn't deal with such questions as truth. Whether Sabine Hossenfelder or others I admire for their honesty would agree with Eddington that all science reveals is the mathematical structure of things, I'd like those among them who have that much of a grasp of such issues to say. But I think even many of them hold the same faith that Russell knew was not tenable in the face of modern physics or even a rigorous examination of previous physics as some of the more astute of previous scientists were aware.
Just before that final paragraph of Russell's review he says:
This breakdown of physical determinism is utilized by Eddington in his concluding chapters to rehabilitate free-will.
As a political blogger, an egalitarian, a democratic egalitarian, I only wish that that were true, Russell seems not to welcome the idea. I wish he had because I think the habits of materialist scientism are so thoroughly embedded in modern culture that the physical determinism that is a part of that faith is fatal to far more than the idea that people can come to a free thought on their own, now and again.* With that physical determinism comes the entire destruction of all the moral and intellectual prerequisites for egalitarian democracy. Certainly a species incapable of free choice will only cast a free ballot for their choice as a deluded act in which they have no choice. It is an act of banal triviality on the same level of significance as the course that algae floating in a fetid stream of water takes or oxidation or the combination of an acid and a base. Materialism, as Nietzsche correctly noted, had that effect, though it was actually the determinism that comes with that that is that universal acid that, mixed with the amorality of self interest, the basis of Darwinism, dooms anything but violent depravity, the more amoral and strong destroying the weaker.
That faith in physical determinism of our minds is actually little more than one of the weapons of materialistic hegemony against religion - as I've pointed out many times the lives of those who expound it prove they don't believe it themselves, I've pointed out how at the so-called "Free Thought" blogs you can read the materialist-atheist-scientistic attacks on free will from those who are champions of academic freedom, for academics to say whatever they want to while holding that anything they want to say is as a result of the disposition of molecules and smaller particles at the big bang and nothing else. Like the morality of official, organized Christianity for most of its existence, the faith of materialists is applied to varying degrees depending on the desires of those who expound them. I have also pointed out that, say what you will about the bloody, sordid, often hypocritical history of Christianity, every evil that can be laid at its feet is an actual violation of the teachings of its central figure, Jesus. You can't say the same thing about the evils, the cruelties, the hypocrisy of the materialists, nothing they do by way of evil is a violation of their materialism, their scientism or their atheism. In the case of Bertrand Russell, he certainly knew there was nothing in his materialism or scientism or atheism that could support his WWI era pacifism anymore than the late in life opposition to nuclear weapons - the thing that made him a hero to lefties of my generation and which I still consider admirable, if not logically supported by his life long faith which he retained even after he knew its basis was an illusion.
* I have no faith in physics, even with the uncertainty principle or principles of indeterminacy surrounding the movements of electrons to tell us anything about free will because I don't believe our minds are physical entities. Every problem that has been posed for the idea of the freedom of minds is a product of either materialism or the assumption that such a problem can be teased out using logic - which is, after all, just as much a product of our experience of the physical world and which we should have no rational expectation could tell us anything much about things that are not bound by the characteristics of physical entities.
I think the commandment against creating graven images of God may have contained a profound recognition of the dangerous inadequacies of us imagining we can comprehend God within human understanding though humans may have some inklings in the right direction. The extent to which free thought can make any sense is through some extra physical entity endowing us with it. I think that even the rank and vulgar materialist and 18th century man of modernism, Jefferson, realized that when he had to draft the most important document he was enlisted to write, the Declaration of Independence.
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