By its nature, every system of ideas naturally has an answer for everything. Religions explain their lack of knowledge of the universal order by the idea of divine mystery. Scientism posits total materialism and the idea that constant, ambiguously defined ‘progress’ is the ideal state of human society, that in some infinitely far off point everything will be discovered finally, factually, objectively, etc, and that morals must be derived from current material considerations.
But it’s not merely these very obvious, overtly theoretical systems of thought that explain the world through their filter, a Kantian schema that can’t be seen past except with help from outside itself or personal ingenuity. Though it sounds rather obvious, and natural, it’s easy to forget that every idea is part of a system, and it’s very easy for systems of thought to offer ideas that don’t make sense except in the context of the system. Believing in such ideas, buying wholly into a single schema, results in blind dogmatism.
So, for example, there’s an idea among anti-Muslim activists that a certain Koran passage allows Muslims to lie about anything they want to spread their ideology, so when a Muslim says ‘no one cares about that passage because you have to take it in context’ the detractors cite that as an example of the passage in action. Their hypothesis isn’t falsifiable because any counter evidence is discounted by the ideology.
Another example: In today’s political climate, if a person is accused of racism for whatever reason, as they so often are these days, they’ll try to argue the point, and then they’re told that their desire to argue against the accusation is itself evidence of their racism. Any counter argument, no matter how valid, is proof of concept…a perfect Kafka trap.
Similarly, Tarot readers and astrologists and personality-test gurus will try to use the Barnum effect to account for anything that could possibly happen to their audience, and thus make predictions about people’s character and lives that can’t be disproved. Even Karl Popper’s idea that all hypotheses need to be falsifiable has become part of an inescapable, all-consuming ideology – scientism.
As an addendum to our discussion of ideologies I’ll add that every ideology naturally considers itself the natural course for history to take – an example of memetic selection. The idea survives, assesses its past, (which is to say, proponents of the idea assess it) and assumes that was the only manner in which events could have transpired. History becomes necessarily teleological, oriented towards the eventual discovery of the truth – the current framework.
It leads to the current dogma of the day – the pervasive implicit belief that science operates like magic, as a sort of holy and exclusively true process that can’t be undermined, because the precepts under which it operates are the final precepts – in other words, that materialism is the final answer. Francis Fukuyama’s end of history, except instead of history, it’s the end of alternate schemata.
Don’t confuse scientism with a lack of belief in scientific results. Scientism is not science, and don’t let them become synonymous. By doing that you’re allowing ideologically driven materialists to have control over technological progress, which is not generally a good idea.
If you’re a sceptic at this point, please ask yourself the following question. Why do you want technology to advance? You want more comfort, security, etc. Perhaps you’re excited about the possibilities of VR. But you have to admit you’ll remain human through all this development, that all the missing pieces will leave you a creature of flesh and blood. I’m not asking this question as a prelude to try to convince everyone into living a communal, hippy lifestyle. I’m well aware that advances in technology give various advantages in life on a personal and international level unequalled by any other facet of human experience. I’m merely asking the question in order to draw your mind back from the implicit assumption that our devices ought to improve over time – regardless of what that improvement might mean. This is not an atavistic call to halt development, but a request that we consider scientific and technical advancement in its proper context.
Divest yourself of the illusion that improvement is necessarily an improvement, that history has a beginning and an end, that we are ‘progressing’ to some ill-defined Platonic utopia of pure material. That’s the first step to divesting yourself of the scientism acolyte’s robe. I’m not saying ‘don’t believe it’ I’m saying ‘don’t consider what we currently believe to be objective fact to be the final answer.’
In order to grow, you have to let something else be your god for a while. One day, you discover something that makes you think it’s the end of the line, the final answer to every question you’ve ever had. ‘Oh, I’m done, if I just study this set of ideas for the rest of my life that’s it, no more needed.’ You become an ideologue. Then you come across another set of ideas and think the same thing and totally internalise it for months. And you realise that you’ve not thought about the first schema for months, and that you can confidently put a method of thought to use, state what that method would result in if applied to a particular topic, how the guru of that idea – Jacques Derrida, Jordan Peterson, Karl Marx, Jesus, would respond to any given situation.
But, crucially, you become aware that there’s more to any given issue because you have the mirror of a second set of ideas. Nothing is one-sided, nothing is explainable via a single schema. An unfortunate fact, but a humanistic fact, too. The well-learned person is a multiplicity of ideas, who has run the essential truths of those ideas through the filter of their life. Because no matter how many ideas you study, you can’t help being yourself. The end-point is you. You’re your own final guru. But not yet. When? I don’t know. All I know is that I’m not yet my own.
Having attended a university, I hold a grudge against every single social science, and so I generally tend to think that reading any non-fiction books that aren’t philosophical tracts, essays, historical texts or biographies – which are just localised histories – is a waste of time. There are notable exceptions. But generally pop science books and social science books manage to communicate all their interesting and useful knowledge within a paragraph. One can get a good grasp on all the important humanities topics by just studying history instead. But why is history different?
Historical study differs from all other fields in that it provides justification for everything it is, and everything it sees. Under a historical lens, every referent acquires an extra dimension, that of time. Once you understand a thing’s origin you understand what it is far better than someone taking an introductory class on that topic itself. A history of economic theory, for example, teaches you the working basics of each theory, as well as why they came to exist, and how they worked in practice: merely studying the theories in a long list tells you nothing about the context in which they work. And a theory – a reference – with no referent, it becomes a waste of time.
For some reason, modernity has become totally self-absorbed and we’re collectively afraid of the opinions of people long-dead – I say collectively, but it’s more like a whole subset of society is unable to cope with the fact that other cultures didn’t have the same views as we now are supposed to have. And so we have revisionism, the idea that all that existed has to be consciously filtered through us, translated into modernity and erased, so that it can be rendered acceptable and the range of ideas to which we’re exposed becomes a healthy, small range.
Studying history is the ultimate method of escaping your current philosophy and learning how to think differently because it’s more than just an alternative theory, but a whole society’s worth of theories and underlying understandings that build into a totally different schema of understanding. It also allows for an understanding that societies, and sets of ideas, can’t be artificially built, but require time and multiple inputs to grow. A society that can be understood logically by a single mind isn’t complex enough to account for all the needs of its citizens. Societies, languages, ideas, grow naturally from circumstance – they can’t be transplanted or constructed. At least, not without a great deal of resources, which inevitably don’t fulfill their specified goals as well as a natural system.
To entertain ideas foreign to a system is not generally noted as a sign of intelligence by adherents of the system in question. For example, if I suggest getting into Tarot to a random person on the street, most of the educated West would laugh at me, because Tarot readings are accepted as exploitation of the Barnum effect and of a holdover from a more superstitious period – but what does intelligence signify? There are three different aspects to perceived intelligence, only one of which is actually intelligence.
- – First, conscientiousness. The ability to recognise that a task is necessary to complete a goal, and to stick to that task and complete it.
- – Second, creativity, raw ability to take stimuli and breathe life into them, mix and match what’s in your mind to result in the optimal combination for the answer to a certain question – not necessarily a test question, or anything academic, but a question you ask yourself, such as ‘what do I want to write about?’ or ‘what should x character say in x moment?’
- – Third, memory. A large mental hard drive. (Ideally, a solid-state drive.) Or, if you’re lacking in brain power, it could be a subset of conscientiousness, if you keep detailed notes.
We can think of these three subsets of intelligence as analogous to the three primary colours. Mix and match them in varying combinations and you’ll be seen as someone who’s intelligent even if you’re lacking in one aspect.
Example: With conscientiousness and memory, creativity becomes easier and takes a back seat – you study novels, learn how writing works, memorise aspects of the craft and apply them. But you’re not especially intelligent – you have the conscientious desire to be that way, which makes up for it by manifesting the other two qualities.
Mix creativity and memory and you’re a lazy artist with good ideas but barely any content.
Combine creativity with conscientiousness and you’ll not rely on other sets of ideas so much – but you might not end up being original from an outside perspective. This is a less common combination because memory, as I said, is a subset of conscientiousness.
Of course, they’re all mixed in to all your work all the time. And intelligence is itself not the final answer in any case. Like scientific development, it’s useful to itself, but not necessary to live in general – only within a system that values it. You have to be reasonably intelligent to teach at a university, but you don’t need it so much to be a tradesman. The idea that intelligence is a good quality wouldn’t apply to a society of ants, where the expectation is that you serve the hive and show no variations from the others.
And you should think of every set of ideas, especially those you believe in, as an ideology, as strict and blinding and arbitrary as anything from 1984 or Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, because it is. That’s how systems – memes – survive.
The only final answer is argument and change.
verso folio 