The Mythology of the Modern World

I'd like to explore the mythology behind what we call the "scientific worldview." Just to clarify, when I speak of "mythology" here, I don't necessarily mean something that is false. Myths are rather metaphorical motifs by which we make sense of the world around us. Many people today imagine that what is propagated as the "scientific worldview" is based purely on empirical research, and has no untested assumptions or metaphorical ideas behind it. In response to this, I would like to give a genealogy of the modern worldview known as "scientific materialism."

We begin with Thales, the earliest recognized Greek philosopher. He was the first to try to explain the world without reference to traditional mythological explanations. He developed an alternative mythology which did not appeal to personal deities, but instead involved a theory of matter and form. Next, we come to Pythagoras, who saw all the world as an expression of mathematical equations. Many physicists today, when you scratch the surface, are still essentially Pythagoreans.

We then skip to Parmenides, who used logic to try to prove that change is an illusion, and that the one true reality is eternal and unchanging. His followers were impressed with his logic, but couldn't quite accept his conclusion. Instead, they all tried to figure out which aspect of reality was eternal and unchanging. For Plato, it was the eternal forms. Plato's allegory of the cave suggests that there is a reality hidden to the senses but accessible to reason, of which the world of appearances are like shadows on a cave. It is from this idea that we get the idea of eternal, unchanging laws of nature.

The One and the Many

There is an increasing tendency among philosophers and other intellectuals to insist that everything is interconnected.  So consistently will they harp on the sickness and wrongheadedness of the tendency to divide the world up into discrete, autonomous entities, that one wonders who exactly they're arguing with.  The Cartesian worldview is dead, and Aristotelianism doesn't get much praise either.  So who is contesting this interconnectedness that all these intellectuals insist upon?

One person challenging this view is Graham Harman.  In his object-oriented approach, he critiques both the undermining of objects in which they are reduced to their component parts as well as the overmining of objects in which they are reduced to their relations.  He suggests instead that objects recede from their relations -- that they are always more than any of their properties or relations, and have hidden capacities to relate in other ways than they currently do.  In this sense, no object ever encounters another directly.  They only encounter a caricature of the other objects, experiencing only a small portion of the objects properties that are relevant to it within their particular relation.  Objects do not relate to each other directly, but only vicariously through a third object which constitutes the relation between them.  Thus, according to Harman, nothing is directly connected, and the connections that do exist have to be made by the objects, and are not all simply pre-existing.  He describes a reality that is "clunky" and not a smooth continuum like that described by someone like Alfred North Whitehead or David Bohm.

Deterritorializing Authority

I think it's crucial to understand the role of habit in upholding social systems.  Yes, it is true that the state's authority is ultimately backed by violence, but most people don't encounter this violence, and don't even give it a second thought.  They're simply used to always doing things a certain way.  David Graeber, in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, suggests that hierarchy develops out of habit.  If someone acts like royalty, people will begin treating them like royalty.  In what sociologists refer to as the Matthew effect, there is a common social tendency to give more to those who already have more.  More prestigious scientists are likely to be given more credit for a discovery than lesser-known scientists who did more significant work that preempted theirs.  If you do a favor for someone, you are more likely to do favors for them in the future.  If someone does a favor for you, they are more likely to do favors for you in the future.  In order to avoid the emergence of such hierarchy, rules about reciprocity need to be established and made habitual.

We also see the notorious effects of habit in all systems of privilege.  White privilege exists because white people are used to being treated a certain way and people of color are used to being treated another way.  White people are oblivious to their privilege because for them, things have always been a certain way, and it's working great for them, so they don't understand why everyone's complaining about it.  They don't see what it's like for people of color when interviewing for a job, applying for a loan, trying to move into a neighborhood, or getting pulled over by the police.  And if they did see it, they might not recognize what's going on, because they don't see the influence of habit in these situations.  The person interviewing a person of color for a job probably isn't consciously looking to disqualify them based on their race, but they might think they look "unprofessional." The police officer might pull over a black person not because they're consciously looking to persecute black people, but rather because they look "suspicious."

Habit creates systems of privilege through normativity.  It determines the norms that people follow without questioning them.  This is not to demonize habit.  Habit is neutral.  The issue is what kind of habits we have, and how to shift toward healthier habits.  This is no easy task.  If morphic resonance means anything, it is that each repetition of a habit makes it more solidified and deeply entrenched.  Counteracting these habits involves the construction of new habits.

Cosmic Creativity

Previously, I mentioned my long-standing enthusiasm for Whitehead, and the compelling critique of his ideas presented by Graham Harman.  I must say that I am in broad agreement with much of Harman's thought, and cannot continue to identify myself as essentially Whiteheadian.  However, if there is one thing I take away from Whitehead's work, and wish to preserve, it is this fundamental polarity between habit and novelty.  It seems to me that these two components are the only necessary ingredients to have any kind of creativity.  I think Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance is about the best theory of habit I've encountered.  Novelty is a more subtle problem that I think needs a bit more unpacking.

I think Whitehead had the right idea, but ultimately I find his system a little too Platonic.  Whitehead's idea is that every occasion is mediated by eternal objects(essentially Platonic forms) that are narrowed into a set of probabilities by God and selected by each actual occasion in its act of becoming.  First of all, I don't like this atomistic account of becoming.  I'm much more keen on Bergson's idea of duration.  Second and more importantly, I have trouble believing that every form or type of experience existed in this potential realm for billions of years before there were lifeforms that were able to prehend them.  Yes, I realize that Whitehead's system is panpsychist(or to use David Griffin's term, panexperientialist), and I'm very sympathetic to that idea.  But there are different types of experience that different entities are capable of.  Vision, for example, is a type of experience that was not available until the evolution of eyes.  The qualia associated with the color red could not have predated vision, even if the part of the light spectrum we associate with red may have existed and made a difference for photons bouncing off of surfaces we would perceive as red.  The kind of universal forms we experience visually are very different from the ones we encounter through auditory or tactile sensations.  If these forms are indeed eternal, we'd have to believe that the universals available to sight were just sitting in the ether waiting for a creature that is able to prehend them.

What I think Whitehead is getting at, though -- and I very much agree with this -- is that creativity is archetypal.  There is a sense in which creative acts of novelty are moving toward something virtual that has not yet been actualized.  It is moving toward a form.  In this way, final cause can be considered to be simply a broader variety of formal causation.  So where do the forms come from if they aren't eternal?

Why I became an Anarchist

Those of you who read my old blog are probably aware that I was Georgist for many years.  I now identify as an anarchist.  I'm sure some of you out there might be confused about this, so allow me to explain how I got here.

In a sense, it wasn't as big a transformation as it might have seemed.  I remember about eight years ago, when I was going through a right-libertarian phase, I nonetheless said that I was an anarchist at heart.  I just didn't have the practical or theoretical knowledge to understand how anarchy might work.  I always had anti-authoritarian instincts, but it took me a long time to rid myself of the notion that there needs to be hierarchy in order for any kind of organization to take place.  I also had also always had a sense of compassion and even duty to those less fortunate than myself, and the conflict between this and my anti-authoritarianism made both liberalism and right-libertarianism uncomfortable fits.  I became a right-libertarian out of shame.  In order to justify the welfare programs I was defending, I had to justify the state's power to coerce individuals into giving up money that they earned(or so I thought -- I did not yet understand the concept of rent and interest).

When I discovered the work of Henry George, it was a breath of fresh air for me.  The state taking money that people had earned from their own labor was theft, but taking unearned income in the form of land rents and rendering them to the commons seemed more than fair.  The fact that doing so would not only fund government, but also reduce the need for government by reducing inequality and thereby eliminating the need for a welfare system appealed to my anti-authoritarian side.  Georgism helped teach me about the difference between charity and justice.  It also compelled me to learn about economics.  While I never pursued a degree in the subject(I was never much of a math person anyway), I read vociferously about economics, particularly heterodox economics, as I had become sickeningly disillusioned by the neoclassical synthesis.  As I read about things like Modern Monetary Theory, Silvio Gesell's theory of interest, John Maynard Keynes' prediction of the "euthanasia of the rentier," and so much more, I developed my understanding of Georgism to a level where I found very few Georgists had anything to teach me.  I was taking it into new territory.  I worked out how land value taxation would not only take the "free lunch" of rent out of the hands of speculators, but would also eliminate artificial scarcities of capital and thereby cause interest to fall to zero as well(I didn't realize it yet, but I had inadvertently stumbled upon Marx's theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall).  This would mean the end of wage labor, and a new economy based on worker ownership. Suddenly, I found myself in a quasi-socialist position.

Object-Oriented Ontology

I find the most interesting philosophers are ones that make me rethink my previous ideas while still not quite sitting well enough with me to fully sign on to their philosophy, thus forcing me to develop my own ideas in response.  Such is the case with Graham Harman and his object-oriented ontology.

I've long been fascinated by Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy(a fascination that runs in the family).  Actually, it would better be described as "process-relational philosophy," as Whitehead, like Wittgenstein and a few other philosophers of his day, took relations as the fundamental building blocks of reality.  Reality, for him, is constructed of single "actual occasions" which are relational in nature, and which form complex occasions called "societies" or "actual entities."  Some of these actual entities form what are called "enduring objects," which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.  But the enduring objects have to recreate themselves at every moment to maintain their identity.  Thus, instead of a continuity of becoming, what you have is a becoming of continuity.  I won't yet go into the role that God plays in Whitehead's system, because that's not really important for the point at hand.  The point is that in his system, objects are defined by their relations, and maintain their identity through a process of inheritance from the past.

Harman, starting from a Heideggerian perspective comes to a very different view.  Heidegger famously spoke about the use of a hammer.  While you're using a hammer, its status as an object is invisible to you.  It exists purely as a tool that is "ready-to-hand."  We can use it with theorizing about it.  Only when it breaks does it become "present-at-hand" -- that is to say, present as a real object.  But whereas this analysis has traditionally been interpreted from a phenomenological angle, in terms of what tools are "for us," Harman offers the more radical suggestion that whether he knew it or not, Heidegger is actually giving us an ontology of objects.  Using the example of a hammer is a bit deceiving, since hammers have to be wielded by the person using them.  But the ready-to-hand can be found all around us at any moment.  As I speak, there are wood beams holding up the roof over my head, which in turn are held together by nails.  Solar radiation is penetrating the Earth's atmosphere and warming up the planet to a temperature at which I am able to survive.  Plants are producing oxygen I require to breathe.  Electricity is being supplied to my house, thus allowing me to type this sentence on the keyboard and have it show up on the internet.  Objects all around me are exerting a real force upon the world to form a background of order that is invisible because it functions so perfectly.  Only when these things break down do they become present to me.  These objects don't exist the way they do for me.  They exist in their own right, and they exert a real force upon the world because of some inner quality that gives them the capacity to relate to other objects.

Welcome

For those who followed my old blog, I decided to start this new one for a couple reasons.  First of all, I've undergone some significant ideological changes since I last updated it.  I no longer identify as a Georgist, and now consider myself an anarchist.  In addition, while my previous blog was almost exclusively devoted to economics, I've been wanting to branch out and talk more about philosophy, sociology, and other social sciences and humanities.  You may be wondering about the name "morphic revolution."  I use the word "morphic" as a tribute to Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance.  I've been attempting to work out a deeper ontology based on his theory.  The word "revolution" has a double meaning, referring to both the revolutionary potential such an idea has for cosmology, as well as the political revolution I seek as an anarchist.  I hope that over time, I can bridge the gap between my metaphysical views and my political philosophy, and show the intersectionality between them.