4 — Constant Worship
There is no way around yourself.
For a long time, I was plagued by the thought that my own love of truth left me no other option than accepting that life was completely empty of meaning or purpose.
Looking at the world scientifically, all we see are facts. But facts are similar, facts are straight… facts are sure not to motivate. They leave us cold. But as that Talking Heads song goes: “facts are nothing but the face of things…!”
My path to understanding this was rather roundabout. First of all, it dawned on me that only because science gives us nothing but facts, we are not forced to conclude that there are nothing but facts. This would imply a hidden proposition: that only science can tell us about what there is. And this claim, that “only science can tell us about what there is”, is not a scientific claim itself… it is an epistemological claim. This is not science. It goes by another name: scientism. Thanks to John McDowell for that.
Modern moral philosophy has been a great and long attempt to find some way to ground morality in something else, since our new conception of science after the Scientific Revolution left morality, values and purpose stranded.
In the same ways physicists founded laws of the universe, moralists tried to do with the laws of conduct. What is the fundamental law that separates good actions from bad actions? Some (Kant) based their rule on pure reason: “do what you could reasonably will as universal law”. Others (Mill) based their rule on a more materialistic principle: “do what generates the highest pleasure-suffering ratio in the end”. Both are obviously false.
Regardless of how hard it would be to know what action generated the most pleasure (least of all because of the humean disconnect between cause and effect: all we observe are distinct events following one another — the inference that one is the cause and the other the effect is either meaningless or absurd), the fact that more pleasure was generated is still just a fact. “So what?” The is/ought gap remains supreme.
On the other hand, “pure reason” does not seem to work either. Not only am I unmotivated to act in a way I could reasonably will as a universal law, how do I even know what that is? Seriously: am I doing it right now? It depends on what I am doing. But what am I doing? Am I giving reasons for people to act immorally? Am I exercising critical thinking? Am I wasting my time? Am I neglecting my family and friends for writing instead of spending time with them? Am I writing? Am I pushing my fingers into keys in the computer? Am I staring blankly at a screen? Am I ignoring the fact that my room is dirty? Depending on the answer I give, I am acting rightly or wrongly. But I could argue that I am doing all those things. Is my action morally right, then? This method is ridiculous.
Rule based ethics will never work because we need to know how to interpret the rules. And giving rules of interpretation doesn’t work either — it just postpones the problem to a further layer: how do we interpret the rules of interpretation?
But seriously, how do we interpret rules? How is it that we know what a certain rule means in a certain context? Thankfully, there is some science on that. Our brain is in a constant process of adaptation to the environment, shaping the information it produces based on certain biological goals. Basically, our brain is able to select what information is relevant for our survival, and it focuses on that. This is what John Vervaeke calls our capacity for relevance realization. As far as I can see, this is what Aristotle called nous as well.
Interpretation is inextricably tied to a process of selecting information according to relevance. But how do we know what is relevant? Well, at least part of the answer is very simple: our biological make up gives us goals. This is what Aristotle meant by saying that every natural substance has its own intrinsic end or purpose (telos, if we want to be pedantic — and I do sometimes). Our biology gives us the conditions for flourishing or rotting.
Another part of the answser depends on context. A big problem with the rule based ethical theories is that they frame the “moral landscape” as a bunch of unrelated events, each to be evaluated separately, by applying a general rule to a particular case and generating a value judgement. Very industrial and burocratic, I would say.
The supposed advantage of this approach, and the reason why so many people still insist blindly on it, is its supposed impartiality and universality. No matter who you are, no matter the context or anything else: we look at what you did, we apply the rule, and voila.
If moral evaluation wasn’t universal and impartial, it wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be scientific. We couldn’t be sure of it. It wouldn’t be factual.
The implicit idea here is that, if morality fails to show itself impartial and universal as science allegedly is, then it fails to have any claim to reality as it is — back we are to moral nihilism. This is what all the emotivists (and other non-cognitivists) nowadays believe.
But, for better or for worse, actions don’t work like this — we better come to terms with it. The only way to understand an action is by giving it some context. And we give context by talking about things that happened previously. But not just anything that happened previously: only the things relevant to the current decision. In short: we tell a story.
A story is more than stating facts. We need to realize this. Stories are always partial. They select information. There is no other way. If I were to state facts about what happened in a purely impartial way, where would I begin? Should I begin by giving an accurate coordinate of the location of every single atom of my body across one second? Maybe an accurate coordinate of the atoms of the objects surrounding me, perhaps of the sound vibrations my vocal chords emit through the air, how they are received by the hearing apparatus of my interlocutor, etc. etc. etc..
There are too many facts to count. If I were to describe a simple event such as doing the dishes in this way, I wouldn’t have enough time in my whole lifetime. It is literally impossible to state facts “regardless of relevance”. That is: it is impossible to state facts regardless of what you care about. It is impossible to state facts regardless of valuing.
This is the problem of combinatorial explosion. Artificial Intelligence developers came across this problem: AI is incapable of recognizing valuable information unless it has some concerns — it needs to care about something to be able to know what to ignore and what to focus on.
Getting to this point was huge for me. This has massive implications for my whole understanding of science and the scientific worldview. The very idea that science is impartial, objective and universal begins to falter. The is/ought gap becomes seriously undermined. The solidity once attibuted to “facts” gets diluted, it begins to melt.
The idea that descriptions fail to tell us about how the world should be ignores one important aspect of description: they implicitly show us what we should care about by highlighting some things and not others. Every description is a purpose-driven and value-laden affair.
Not only that, but our scientific evaluation of hypothesis is also obviously dependant on certain epistemological values. After all, why do we find some explanation better than another? How do we know what constitutes evidence? How do we know which hypothesis are worth testing? Why do we value explanations with higher accuracy, coherence, simplicity, explanatory power? We implicitly hold the value that those are good and important things. The very pursuit of truth through science implicitly holds the claim that truth is worth pursuing. But these value claims cannot be justified by science alone.
This means that science can only exist if it is not the only way to attain knowledge about reality — especially when it comes to values. Because if science shows no values, than science itself is not valuable. Scientism is completely destroyed by this, as far as I am concerned. Historians of science like Thomas Kuhn have made this point pretty much established by now.
We are action oriented creatures, and action always implies a pressuposed value claim. This is significant for our moral considerations, yes, but it is also relevant for our scientific ones. We must not forget that science is a human endeavour. The scientific point of view is still human. The belief that we can get over this and find some universal impartiality is nothing but pride. We can’t get away from our condition. We have limits. We are condemned to our partial point of view. Know your limits, kid.
Science is not absolute and universal. It is not impartial and objective. Not, at least, in the way Illuminists thought. Not in the way of those who believe in the outdated view of scientism.
Morality, then, doesn’t need to be either. It can’t be, just as much as science. Morality is action, just as much as science is. And action is understood through story. Our knowledge and our decisions are much more complex than we might initially suppose: they are far from linear, algorythmic processes — and trying to reduce them to this is to force a square peg into a round hole: it just won’t fit.
Our whole life can be seen as a story. The ability to interpret it well is tied to the ability to interpret each particular situation well — to see what is relevant in a given moment. This situational awareness is what Aristotle called phronésis, “practical wisdom”. This is not reducible to a rule: it is the ability to know when to apply a certain rule or when to forgo of it. It is the ability to know what framing to give a certain situation: am I telling the truth or just being hurtful? Rules like “You should tell the truth” or “You should be kind” are of little use without this sensibility.
And how do we develop this? Through participation in a certain community, through embedding yourself deeply within its traditions. Listening to their stories, interacting with them, watching them react to certain events. We absorb all of this naturally — in a real sense, we were made for this. Just as much as our life has a story, a certain community also does. And when we join a community, our story becomes a part of the community’s, and vice versa. Thanks to Alasdair MacIntyre for that.
It bears repeating that this is exactly how we learn what is valuable in scientific research programs. Every scientist learns certain soft skills that constitute the “spirit” of their way of doing research. The “know-how” that allows one to see the relevant problems, to understand that counts as proof and what doesn’t, what processes are required for something to be accepted as valid by the rest of the scientific community. Scientists even learn a certain “attitude”. They really incarnate the spirit of the scientific “way of life”.
All of this gives a way more “embodied” and realistic understanding of our way to truth. And here is where Jordan Peterson comes into my story. He summarizes all of these things I had been studying as a philosophy undergrad and made the leap to link this to religion brilliantly.
His idea — which he is constantly repeating, but not without reason — is that perception itself is action oriented. He comes to this conclusion through evolutionary means: we need to know what is relevant to act in a way that most benefits not only our survival, but the survival of the species. Survival is adaptation. Our perception is an evolved mechanism of constant readaptation to the world through action.
We understand action through stories. The fact that we are action oriented creatures, then, makes us story telling creatures. We tell a story to our community so that they learn from our experience, without having to make the same mistakes themselves. Very economical and practical. Some stories, inevitably, come up again more than others. The ones that keep coming up over and over and over are the ones that alert us to things we should really pay attention to. Maybe they keep our attention on the errors we are most prone to and need most focus to avoid. Not only that, but the errors with the biggest cost.
Instead of being a story about me going hunting and losing track of the prey because I tried to be better than my brother instead of getting the prey, the story evolves into me killing my brother, for example. Instead of a story that refers to a single moment, we get a story that refers to many, many possible moments, because it captures a pattern of behaviour that reoccurs. It is a meta-story. A story about a pattern, not just about a moment.
The more a meta-story captures, the more important it is — the more wisdom it contains. We have a way of knowing, intuitively, how relevant the story really is: whether it is remembered or not; whether it hits us or not. Good stories are really hard to forget. Like riding a bike, we learn them once and that is all it takes. They stay with us. These stories are sacred.
This way, we can understand how stories adapt and evolve in oral cultures, and end up forming a cluster of “most important stories”. Peterson’s claim is that this is precisely what a mythology is. A narrative encapsulation of a community’s ultimate concerns. A way to direct the community towards the most virtuous and well adapted way of action.
Every action requires purpose, but sometimes, even most times, purposes require purposes. Why hunt? To get food? Why get food? To eat. Why eat? To satiate hunger. Why satiate hunger? Not to die. Why not die? To take care of my children. Why take care of the children? And so on. Eventually, though, this needs to end. Wherever it ends, there it is our ultimate value. What is the reason why we do anything at all? This reason is the object of our worship.
Regardless of there being a rational justification for this worship, the reality is that we can’t help doing it. Everyone worships something — and most times, it is not what they think they worship. A lot of people worship money, power, status. Some people worship another person. We can worship science. Truth. Philosophy. The Church. Most people are not monotheists in their practice, though. They worship many gods. Moral dillemas are moments when our polytheism comes under strain. Of these two gods, which shall I pick?
Rule-based, event centered, procedural ethical theories have no answer to this. They can’t even recognize this reality, let alone solve it. Only wisdom-based, agent centered, aspirational ethics can make justice to this problem.
Wisdom is the ability to know what matters and when. Agent-centered ethical theories are the ones that focus, rather than on what is a good action, on what is a good person. And this is by being virtuous: cultivating a virtuous character. And how does one do that? By developing one’s moral sensibility. This comes with the recognition of which values come above which others. What is really most important in life? Our framing of any situation will be dictated by this. Wise people are the best framers.
This ethical framework will always be aspirational. We might consider “What would a wise person do?” and try to see the world through their eyes. We can’t be that person — but we aspire to. “What would a kind person do?”, and the same of other virtues, like courage, justice, temperance, and so on. We recognize ideals and aspire to them.
But people aspire to different ideals. How do we know which ideal is true? Again, the appeal to biology here seems a good resource. We might analyse things recognizing the purposes given by our biology as valid and try to go from there. To worship a god that is bad for your health, for example, might not be the best idea. Heroin is not a great god. How about truth, respect and freedom? Those seem to be really good.
Jordan Peterson is specially valuable for showing how the christian values, extractable from the Old Testament (and obviously the New Testament) stories, align extremelly well with the best possible meta-strategy for survival. This is a very good base upon which to make the leap and just go ahead and claim they are sacred.
