The Digestion of 'Indigestible Knowledge'

from Richard Ostrofsky of Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed) www.secthoughts.com quill@travel-net.com October, 2011 Readers of my columns over the years may have noticed that 'indigestible knowledge' is a hobby horse that I ride from time to time most recently in my piece of last June, on just that title. My obsession with this problem stems from a remark by Otto Rank that I stumbled on once, quite a long time ago. In 1933, in a letter to a friend, he said, "For the time being, I gave up writing. There is already too much truth in the world an overproduction which apparently cannot be consumed." In my own writings, I have used the metaphor of digestion instead. In that June piece I wrote, "It is not simply that people do not know what the experts know, but that they fear and prefer to avoid full awareness of the general character of current knowledge . . . The 'culture wars' in the headlines today should not be surprising. They can be seen, I think, as a collective thought process on a global scale, trying to digest on one hand the ineluctable pluralism of the world today, and this new, disturbing knowledge on the other." It was the bottom-up paradigm of evolution or more generally, of self-organization especially as applied in current psychology and neuropsychology and social theory, that I primarily had in mind. But looking back over these columns, I find that I have never said exactly what 'the digestion of truth' would mean. We have to ask: For current scientific knowledge to be fully and comfortably digested by society at large, what would be needed? For today's culture wars to end in negotiated tranquility, what would it take? Two personal thoughts follow. My first thought is that our habit of using metaphysical arguments about the existence of God as weapons in the discussion of public policy is a disaster both for policy and for thought. Laws on abortion, recreational drugs, stem cell research and other contentious matters must reflect the current state of the body politic as a whole, not the beliefs of the faction that happens to be in power or to have captured the votes of those in power. Compromise and "spreading the discontent" are not sell-outs, but the essence of any working political system. Policy need not really please anyone, but must appease everyone sufficiently to keep the body politic from coming apart. In politics more than anywhere, "the best is the enemy

of the good," because a polarization of society on competing visions of 'the best' makes sensible compromise impossible. Likewise, confusion on this point renders clear thinking impossible. The famous dictum of Augustine and Anselm that 'one must believe in order to understand' approaches, but turns away from a deep truth: To understand anything to approach the matter in a way that will provide understanding some paradigm, some point of view, must be deployed in doing so. That one accepts and uses such a paradigm is indeed an act of faith, to the extent that other paradigms and points of view are possible. But one has to start somewhere, and inevitably from the place where one is already standing. This is as much the case for the scientist as for the Christian saint. Augustine was honest and correct to note that his faith had led him out of existential confusion to coherence and a degree of clarity. But the choice of paradigm, of starting point, need not be the same for everyone. In fact, thought makes better progress when it is not bound to a single paradigm when the elephant of Truth can be approached, usually by different people, from different angles. It's a mistake to confuse the working faith that underlies and sustains any kind of serious effort with the belief that one's assumptions are universally true. Clear thought demands the background of a good paradigm, embraced in ironic awareness that other paradigms are possible and might even be better than one's own, especially for some other purpose. Good policy demands not the victory of some viewpoint over the others but a general willingness to live and let live. Society could 'digest' the diverging paradigms that trouble it today if this point were generally understood. In particular, nearly all of the current conflict between science and religion would go away if twin concessions one from each side were made and widely accepted: Religious types would have to concede that their beliefs are constitutive myths rather than factual truths. As Carl Jung understood and taught, the intent behind every myth is to constitute a human personality. The purpose of religious faith and practice is and always was to constitute first a community, and then a whole society. By contrast, the purpose of the scientific faith and its practice is to learn what we can about the world and how it works. These purposes are necessarily antithetical, because research and critical thought will often call in question or refute religious beliefs that have been taken too literally. Yet the adherents to one or the other of these 'magisteria' (as Stephen Jay Gould called them) need not be enemies. For their part, science-minded types would have to concede the radical incompleteness of critical reason as a basis for human lives. This may be difficult temperamentally, because critical reason is as much an existential strategy for those who cling to it as faith is for the true believer. But it's a conclusion that science itself especially the sciences of psychology and anthropology demand. Adult minds need myths as much as children do,

not just to allay anxieties, but to bind communities together and make the world intelligible for human habitation. Science cannot do this job and still be science. Religions must do the job and, for the sake of their own intellectual integrity and long-term credibility must do it without repressing what the critical thinkers have learned. With twin concessions along these lines, our culture wars might be put to rest. What we are witnessing, I believe, is a clash between two antithetical paradigms: the top-down perspective of a teleological world in which things happen for a purpose, against the bottom-up perspective of a self-organizing, ecoDarwinian world which comes together spontaneously as the merely probable (not necessary) outcome of a random process. Both these perspectives have legitimate uses. Neither is complete on its own. Each feels an urgent need to defend itself against the other, yet the resulting conflict helps neither. It's time to break this vicious circle, and there is a feasible way of doing so.