a big picture look at where we are right now…
The question for the Greeks was about the good life:
what was the good life and how do we achieve it…
The question for the Medieval man was about salvation:
what was salvation and how do we achieve it…
the quest for the Modern man was answering the Greek question:
the good life is a theology called consumerism and we are all consumers
and that creates the good life…
but this consumerism creates many difficult problems as does
the associate problem of science…
if you look at modern ideologies from the last 500 years…
several things become clear… one: none of the modern ideologies
are concerned with the “individual”… all modern ideologies
are about collectivism of some sort and none of them are
concerned or deal with the individual… thus consumerism
and communism and socialism and democracy are all about the many,
not the one…what is MY place in the universe is answered by
you are one of the many who contribute the health of society by
your materialism… you are one of many… and that in a nutshell
is the ideologies of the last 500 years…you are one of many…
man is supplanted by humanity…science is about the classification
of the many… the one doesn’t enter into science because the one
cannot be the measurement and weighting and comparison and contrasting…
you need many for measuring and weighting and comparison and contrasting…
to build your model of the universe… you cannot do so on just one
representative… you need thousands, indeed the more things you weigh and
measure and test and contrast… the better the model of the universe you get…
which cannot happen with one…I… the one doesn’t enter into
consideration about the universe… I stand alone because as a single person
I am not considered… only as a group or a unit within many units or as
a consumer which is one of many or a democracy which is one of many or
as a comrade which is one of many or as a scientific measurement of
which I am one of many… but not me… Kropotkin, I am not thought about
or considered or brought into conscience… and that was the argument
those like Nietzsche or Ibsen or Kierkegaard…the one matters just
as much as the collectivism of the modern ideologies which include
both the economic and political theories of the modern age…
indeed those named above might argue that the one is more important
then the many of society…indeed one might write a history of
the world in terms of the ongoing battle between the one, the individual
and collectivism/the many…
the middle ages fell on the side of the one…
and the modern world falls on the side of the many…
but why cannot we answer both… that may be the question of
the modern age… how can we do justice to BOTH sides of
the equation… the individual and society…
faith/religion stands clearly on the side of the one…
and indeed aspects of the modern ideologies stand with
the ancient religion… communism does so when the adherents
of communism resort to appeal to revelation such as happens when
they resort to saying… what did Marx say? or the scientist when
he resorts to appealing to the “divine” authority of Darwin or Einstein…
but if they create an argument without appeal to authority, they
are not in religious mode… any appeal to authority is faith/religion
is religion and any argument that doesn’t appeal to
revealed religion is something else…
so which is why James is both right AND wrong about science…
if the argument that doesn’t resort to appeal of the authority is not
a religion and is science…so a appeal to the original founding fathers
as to the “correctness” of interpretation of the constitution is about
a religious appeal to authority…so any argument about what the founding
fathers meant is an religious argument. appeal to authority…
appeal to divine revelation which in this case is the founding fathers…
so we have in modern society a strong case to be made in which we are still
attached to “religious” appeals for our arguments…which is why
we still haven’t made any progress toward a solution for the problems
facing society… we are still invoking the name of divine revelation
in our arguments instead of creating new arguments which is not religion…
More in a bit…
Kropotkin