Re: so what?

On Sat, 1 Feb 2003 Threehegemons@aol.com wrote:

> Interesting comments.  On reflection, I would agree that scientific
> humanism produced world class art--although I am thinking more of
> dissident literature and filmmaking.

Well, there were also people like Mayakovsky and Eisenstein, who, although
persecuted at times, were in no meaningful sense dissidents from
scientific humanism.

> Ironically, all this collapsed
> with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, and it is hard to think of any
> comparable cultural achievements that have emerged out of 'liberated'
> Eastern Europe.

Nor Russia itself, for that matter.

> I would also say that's its a quality of most belief
> systems--scientific humanism included--to oscillate between communal
> unification and the creation of a giant atomizing surveillance
> apparatus.
>
> In terms of spirituality, I was thinking of way many religious
> traditions have produced searching reflections on the relationship of
> the self to the universe.  Here I think enlightenment ideologies have
> tended to be weak, since they tend to encourage their followers to
> simply adopt a godlike position outside of and capable of remolding
> society.

Well, Enlightenment ideologies have undermined anthropocentric and
terracentric worldviews, and they have gotten people to reflect on the
links between humanity and other creatures, as well as on the vastness of
the universe and the multiplicity of worlds.  These achievements are not
to be discounted.

As for the adoption of a godlike position outside of society, I would say,
first, that all notions of the sacred involve a radical disjuncture
between the "normal" everyday world and the world of the sacred.  It is
for this reason that we expect good science (or good art) to be more than
just an execution of orders given by a political leader.  However, a
radical disjuncture is not an absolute disjuncture.  All good scientists
recognize that the conceit of Laplace's demon is just a myth, because no
real scientist stands outside of time.  The problems begin when scientists
(and scientific humanists) insist that everyone act as if this
were absolutely true, everywhere and forever; that scientists, and
scientists only, are entitled to such a suspension of disbelief.

Basically, I fundamentally agree with what you say, but I get
uncomfortable around claims that the Enlightenment as such and necessarily
is spiritually truncated compared to the "world religions", because that
is the textbook conservative critique of modernity (as you seem to
recognize below).

> While I distrust theories that draw a straight line between
> various ideas or frameworks and crimes against humanity, this way of
> thinking is compatible with the hugely destructive efforts to remold
> society so common in the twentieth century.

True, though the true destruction came when particular ideas were
hypostatized and enforced as the only correct ones.  I would also note
that the established world religions have also on occasion tried to remold
society and have been hugely destructive in doing so (e.g. Augustinian
Christianity is largely responsible for the collapse of the Roman Empire
in the West).

> Warren Wagar has emphasized the way religions usually reinforce and
> validate the hierarchies of the status quo--true enough (although I
> think scientific humanism or hismat must be included as typical of
> belief systems here).  Ditto the fact that religions have produced many
> great radical thinkers.  But a key role of religion has also been to
> bring some sort of unity to a previously divided group.  Ancient
> judaism, for example, pulled together a number of warrior groups.
> Islam created a remarkable zone for commercial activity.  Scientific
> humanism found followers among every race, and from all sorts of
> religious backgrounds.  It provided the underpinnings for efforts at
> global institutions such as the UN, however problematic those efforts
> turned out to be in practice.
>
> But these days, to simply assert the validity of enlightenment thinking
> runs aground in ways unintentionally illustrated in the critical remarks
> about political Islam posted by R.Yurukoglu posted by Ismael Buyukakan.
> I personally agree that categories of class have more utility in
> explaining the social reality of contemporary Turkey than do categories
> derived from religion (I'm not so sure about the category of nation).
> But clearly lots of people don't agree, and to simply continually assert
> the rightness of our categories is to produce a situation in which the
> term of Tariq Ali--The Clash of Fundamentalisms--becomes useful.  For a
> belief system (secular or religious) to play the unifying role described
> above, it has to attract followers, rather than simply bully the
> followers of other faiths.  And this is where I see enlightenment
> thinking these days hitting a dead end.
>
> The solution would seem to be to produce a new belief system that could
> transcend these differences--although, as Khaldoun Samman noted in an
> earlier discussion about the prospects of a new universal religion, such
> a belief system could not substitute for the necessary redistribution of
> power and wealth to produce a more peaceful and equitable world system.
>
> Steven Sherman
>
>

-- 
Boris Stremlin
bstremli@binghamton.edu