The Rant #1

I wrote this back in 2004. Holds even more today.

Why is it that so many people are turning to faith and extremism?
Why do 42% of Americans consider themselves fundamentalists or born again?
Why 44% do not believe in evolution.
Why there are so many cultures that are moving toward more extremist beliefs
a. Middle East – including Israel and Jew in general
b. Russia
c. Afganistan, Pakistan, Iran and soon to be Iraq?

Is it the fall of rationalism, empiricism, the enlightment/modernism?

If these things dissolve what else do people have to turn to besides more base/instinctual belief systems – e.g. looking to the “devine” or a megaman (Nietzsche)– a power larger than yourself – to guide you and then only believe that that is the true path to relief from all the bad things in the world.

These beliefs (empiricism) have failed to solve basic problems, they seemed to hold promise starting 400 years or so ago, they allowed leaps of understanding and development far beyond anything that had come before (or so it seems) – but they repeatedly fall short of expectations. Some of the negatives include the alienation from nature, alienation of self, the detachment from community, narcissism as a reaction formation to these alienations.

Another way they fall short is that the empirical model/enlightenment/rational/modernist belief system fails to bring a large enough majority of “believers.” This model engenders, in fact, a lack of faith – even to itself – in its own system which makes it unavailable to large numbers of people. It also requires a certain level of education and understanding to gain adherents (though there are of course those with that education and understanding that continue to adhere to fundamentalist religious beliefs [a fact that I can not really understand]).

It is also failing to substitute for faith in the sense that faith brings, or can bring, full release from pain, a full letting go of “seeking” for answers which is incredibly comforting. There is no release of that kind in empirical model/enlightenment/rational/modernist belief system and really the two are largely incompatible. So we get the conflict the friction and fights over basic truths and human endeavors. It is ironic that the Judeo/Christian model was the progenitor of the emiricist/enlightment model and then it tried to suppress it.

Empirical model/enlightenment/rational/modernist belief system has also failed to really bring enough people to make it a workable system for very long. This “democracy” is foundering (some might say failing) because of that friction. Those of faith are programmed to believe without doubting that things are as they believe they are – that whatever falls within their context is true – even when there is a mass of evidence to the contrary – the evidence is dismissed because it does not fit with their “faith.”

The same thing happens, by the way, in the empirical model/ enlightenment/ rational/modernist belief system – people stick with their derived theories for a long time, even when there is clear evidence against the theory. However, eventually, there is a shift that occurs (e.g. flat world/round world, or creation vs. evolution).

The rational system becomes troublesome because of the inherent nature of questioning and the expectation that the belief you have today might be wrong, and can be proven wrong, with evidence presented in “the right way.”

This makes defending your position much more difficult (if you might be wrong then your belief can be more easily undercut). If you have faith – you are never wrong. This makes for a much seemingly “stronger” position (especially if you share faith and reject “empirical thought.”

The failure of the rationalist approach, evidence collecting, hypothesis testing to come up with the answers to the basic questions of human life: self-meaning, aggression, hatred, poverty, racism, disease, inequality (domination of one over the other), nutritional needs, health, as well as search for meaning… means that you are drawn to seek answers to these problems elsewhere. Once obvious direction to look is faith – it is a going back to the pre-rational mode, a more basic fundamental (primitive perhaps is I dare to use the word) way of thinking about these questions.

Another way is to succumb to anarchy – total disorganization and meaninglessness (the kind of direction laid down by simplistic readings of postmodernism and deconstructionist metaphors).
Can we move beyond empiricism and faith to another mode (paradigm) that will push us to being able to find better answers to these problems? I put forth that no model has worked well enough to secure a survivable future for humanity. It is always easier to see the problem than to find the solution.