Steve and y'all:
It might be a bit shocking to us in the 21st century, but back in those days
the distinction between "sacred" and "self-evident" didn't count for much.
During the enlightenment period John Locke, for example, construed rationality
as a gift from God and it was God's grace that allowed us to understand the
nature of evidence in the first. I mean, people forget that Newton was a very
religious dude and so was Descartes. Rationalism, despite the name, has always
been associated with the notion that understanding the laws of nature is the
same thing as understanding the mind of God. This goes for Kant, Hegel and
Royce as well as many others. But all this started crashing down about 100
years ago. In 1910, people like Picasso, Einstein and James were overturning
this world view. All at once, it seems, art, science and religion were
undergoing a Copernican revolution. Linear perspective, Newtonian mechanics and
Cartesian dualism were all challenged in a way that no longer admitted
the kind of essentialism hoped for by enlightenment thinkers.
Pirsig's defense of these rights is not predicated on their essential nature or
their endorsement by "Nature and Nature's God". He puts them in the framework
of evolution and then claims they are better than previous social level
conventions for practical reasons. He says the aim of these principles is to
protect the process of intellectual evolution from social level conventions or
even from overly static intellectualizations. These evolutionary moral
principles even work to protect the scientific process itself. Where would
science be without religious freedom and freedom of thought and speech? Which
reminds me...
A BBC's radio show, "Thinking Allowed", recently did a program on
"Disenchantment". The scholarly guests pointed out that this evacuation of
magic from the world is commonly attributed to science and the scientific
revolution and the secularization of society that went with it but, they said,
this is a kind of myth. (Keep in mind the religiosity of thinkers like
Descrates, Newton and Locke.) The disenchantment of the world, they pointed
out, actually began within religion. The Inquisition's persecution of
"witches", for example, was basically a movement against magic by the Catholic
Church. At the time, Catholicism was the only kind of Christianity in the
Western World but that would soon change for similar reasons. At that time,
most church goers, which meant most people, were illiterate peasants. Going to
mass, which was conducted in Latin, was an almost purely aesthetic experience
wherein concepts and propositions played a very limited role. In that context,
going to churc
h meant witnessing an act of ritual magic in which wine and bread were
trans-substantiated into the blood and flesh of Christ and by partaking in this
ritual cannibalism you could participate in his divinity. People like Martin
Luther and the puritans protested against this form of magic. It was the
puritans who came up with the notion that man's duty on earth was to live
soberly, rationally and productively. It was this religious impulse that sets
up the kind of Protestant work ethic that makes capitalism possible. Max Weber
famously showed that capitalism worked much better in Protestant nations than
in Catholic nations. So when you examine the actual historical record, it does
not comport with today's conventional wisdom wherein science and rationality
and capitalism are almost exclusively associated with secularism and are often
pitted against religion. What the record actually shows is that all of these
inheritances come straight out of religion.
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