The
outcome of this intellectual endowment is science, which is especially
characteristic of man.
(Abdu'l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 29.)
Continuing the discussion on
the topic: The Disorder of Knowledge and the Reconfiguration of Human
Intelligence
The dominant form of intellectual
perception of the Adamic Cycle has exhausted its possibilities of expression
and development, and so a spiritual one is being awakened within us. The exhaustion/awakening, death and birth
moment, that period when the not yet gone occupies the same “space” as the not
yet born, creates the disorder of knowledge.
Responses to the disorder of knowledge take three basic forms: to simply
continue with the dominant scientific paradigm; to return to earlier traditions
of knowing to create a complete paradigm of understanding; to find new
knowledge within Revelation. I will take
these up in turn. But first we must understand how we got to where we are.
All periods of history possess
certain conditions of truth that constitute what is acceptable as knowledgeable
discourse. These conditions of discourse
have changed over time, from what Foucault calls one period's episteme to another. (See Foucault’s The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge.) But the
tradition of modern western civilization, starting in its earliest emergence
about the twelfth century, is unique in that it is the first civilization to
establish an episteme, a knowledge-base, upon assumptions other than those
provided by religion. I mean that
Christendom not only refused to be spiritually enlightened by Muhammad, but also
went on to repudiate its own spiritual foundations of Christianity, and with
disastrous spiritual and moral results.
Rather it took its spiritual lead from the philosophy of the Greeks and
Romans and unleashed a tremendous intellectual quest to understand all things
from what we have come to call a materialist point of view.
Without the transcendent
coordinating power and moral authority of religion as the Word, anarchy
everywhere appears in the human system. Baha’u’llah
warned: “Religion is verily the chief instrument for the establishment of order
in the world and of tranquillity amongst its peoples. The weakening of the
pillars of religion hath strengthened the foolish and emboldened them and made
them more arrogant. Verily I say: The greater the decline of religion, the more
grievous the waywardness of the ungodly. This cannot but lead in the end to
chaos and confusion.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah:
63-64) And: “Should the lamp of religion
be obscured, chaos and confusion will ensue, and the lights of fairness and
justice, of tranquility and peace cease to shine. Unto this will bear witness every
man of true understanding.” (Tablets of
Baha’u’llah:125)
From about the twelfth-century, slowly
but with increasing acceleration, like a snowball coursing down a mountain achieving
avalanche speed and destructive power, chaos and confusion began to grow in
European Christendom, attaining an acme of disjunction in the United States. A violent commotion and competition arose,
first between church and state but later involving more claimants to social leadership,
for two things. First, for the guiding
metaphors and principles to direct intelligence and, second, to find a social structure to direct power in
order to govern what was quickly becoming, by historical standards, an
ungovernable situation.
These were both necessary because
when religion loses its hold on the mind and heart the soul’s relation with the
transcendent is broken, and we are left with only the human view of the
superhuman. Culture, the arts and
humanities, and the secular knowledge system of science are drawn into this
void to become the symbol-producing center of society while secular government
becomes its actual center. Belief
becomes humanistic and this-worldly, the gods are psychologized and morph into
human projections, the sacred and spiritual are deemed vestiges of past
mythical days, mere fetishes of superstition, or are thrown into that rubbish
heap in the cellar of the mind called the unconscious, and in social government
we get competing theories like the democratic will of the people and the divine
right of Kings. Knowledge proliferated, yes,
but wisdom and understanding were overwhelmed and retreated; a situation
described by ‘Abdu’l-Baha as “civilization conjoined with barbarism.” (Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha:
284)
But in any belief or knowledge
system an anarchy of truths always results when the coordinating
epistemological vision becomes exhausted and the manifold differentiated
empirical facts it discovered and generated move to a free-floating limbo world
awaiting some theory to capture them and put them to effective use. I mean that the driving forces that
created modernity were left unchecked to reach the negative end of their
logical conclusions. This is another way
of describing the disorder of knowledge.
Economically, as Wallerstein demonstrated,
starting around the fifteenth-century, (See: The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of
the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century) a market economy
formed and grew into the modern capitalist world system that has encircled the
globe. Polanyi went farther and claimed that
the market economy expanded as both belief system about human nature and as
economic system until it emancipated itself from the social relations it was
traditionally embedded within, turned and swallowed established political and social
relations and reformed them upon capitalist market principles, creating a
market society that has crushed all human relations into relations of commodities.
(See Karl Polanyi: The Great
Transformation)
During this phase, science as we
know the term is invented, both in name and practice. Economics, sociology, psychology, and political
science were born as rational inquiries into human nature and society, but
solely upon ego, material and sociological principles devoid of any reference
to spiritual or transcendent ideals, and sooner or later anarchy was discovered
to co-exist with order in each of these domains also. Thus, where Adam Smith saw a shadowy guiding
hand structuring the market, Marx saw, beneath the supposed rationality of
personal choices, the anarchy of the market.
Shoghi Effendi discerned “the anarchy inherent in state sovereignty” and
ominously warned in 1936 that it was “moving toward a climax”, (The World Order of Baha'u'llah:202) meaning that its full destructive power was
about to burst asunder the bonds holding nation-states together and bring the
entire international political order crashing down. Psychologically, the ego was gradually
liberated from all social and moral restraint until he became the imperial
self, and society was no longer constituted around a divine covenant, but
covenanted around human constitutions.
Poets usually see things first. In the sixteenth century, that is, at the
very start of the modern age, John Donne saw the breakdown of the whole
medieval system and the appearance of something not only psychologically new
but also dangerous. He wrote in his poem
The Anatomy of the World:
And
freely men confess that this world’s spent,
When
in the planets and the firmament
They
seek so many new; they see that this
Is
crumbled out again to his atomies.
‘Tis
all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All
just supply, and all relation;
Prince,
subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For
every man alone thinks he hath got
To
be a phoenix, and that then can be
None
of that kind, of which he is, but he.
This
is the world’s condition now…
In European letters, between the
sixteenth and seventeenth century, when Wallerstein’s “modern world-system” was
achieving real material shape , T.S. Eliot described what he called a
“dissociation of sensibility” happening in the western psyche. By that phrase he meant a shift in style and
even content, but mostly in how thought was expressed. In his essay, The Metaphysical Poets, Eliot wrote:
“We may express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the
seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth,
possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.
They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors
were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, or Cino. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of
sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered….” (The Metaphysical Poets in in Selected
Prose of T.S. Eliot: 64)
McLuhan saw the fragmentation of
perception brought on by “Gutenberg technology” behind all this
dissociation. The elevation of what he
called the visual sense over all other senses, leading to mechanization, an assembly
line of linear thought and organization invading all areas of human life, a
homogenization of Newtonian space, and the standardization of time into
work-discipline. (See Marshall McLuhan. The
Gutenberg Galaxy)
The Age of Reason in the 17th century with its heady brew of atheism,
material science and mathematical law—Blake’s “single vision and Newton’s
sleep”—begins the last and most concrete stage of this paradigm of knowing,
when rational philosophical thought crystallized into a positivist scientific
thought-form.
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