The Inquisitive and the Inquisition

truth is an unpredictable beast

It’s always heartening when someone does such a fine job of writing about something that you yourself have been brooding on writing about, that you feel you no longer have to—write about it, that is. (There’s always room for more brooding.)

I felt this way vis-a-vis Michael Pollan way back in The Omnivore’s Dilemma days, when it seemed no one in my undergrad circles was paying much attention to the many questions food raises, or to the questionable raising of food. Pollan’s brave and timely book brought these complex topics to the forefront of the national consciousness and seemed to articulate everything I’d been churning over. It was the kind of book that made you think, I’m not alone. Not crazy.

In recent years I’ve often felt a similar pang of resonance-mingled-with-relief at reading Charles Eisenstein’s work, not least his Coronavirus essays, in which he resolutely refuses to be drawn into culture war rumblings or partisan group-think, opting instead to turn polarizing assumptions on their ear and recover a scrap or two of sanity from the maw of myopic obsession, shrill accusation and counteraccusation that characterizes so much of our cultural moment.

Then a few months ago—very belatedly, given my interest in things like symbols and planets—I discovered Richard Tarnas’ writing, notably his Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New Worldview, which begins with as sweet, gentle and devastating a takedown of materialist mythology as you’re likely to find anywhere.

Somewhere amongst my page-turning it dawned on me that what felt like an unspeakably fringe position when I started thinking along these lines as a lonely, angsty undergrad about eighteen years ago, has become, well, speakably fringe. The fringe is growing downright populated (if not exactly popular) these days, perhaps something to do with the mainstream’s central thought-edifice being hollow and cracked to the point of dereliction, and with the mainstream’s mouthpiece being increasingly unable to disguise the fact.

It’s as if suddenly everyone wants a shot at bringing down the lumbering beast, even knowing its eventual fall will occasion untold havoc. The masses clamor for a sacrifice. The king must die!

Well, the latest writer to make my list of brave, clear-eyed cultural critics and harbingers of the widening gyre comes from a perhaps unexpected direction: Paul Kingsnorth is founder of the dystopian literary project Dark Mountain and now a zealous Orthodox Christian. As he puts it, his conversion came “much to my own surprise and initial horror, after a very long search for truth." Without sharing his faith, I find I resonate with much of Kingsnorth’s analysis. It’s worth quoting from his recent piece in Unherd at some length:

Every culture is built around a sacred core. When it begins to rot, as all cultures do, it is because that core has been neglected. Usually its people have taken their eyes off the sacred centre and directed them somewhere else; towards false gods, golden calves, or their own dolled-up image in the mirror. Chesterton, again, took issue with Marx on this one. “The truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people,” he wrote. “Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world.” This is the process which Christianity used to condemn as “idol worship”, and today’s West is at it in spades. 

A lot of people who talk about “defending the West” these days are either trying to defend red in tooth and claw capitalism — the system which has done more to destroy culture and eternal values in the West than anything else — or they’re trying to defend free speech, individualism and the right to be rude on the internet. I would suggest that these things in themselves were the results of a settlement designed, in the process now known as “the Enlightenment” to replace the West’s original sacred story with a new, human-centred version. 

This was the liberal settlement. It assumed that humans were disaggregated individuals who could roam the world speaking freely, consuming freely and imposing a rational science-based order on the world, the better to achieve progress. It combined the moral values and universalism of Western Christianity with rights-based individualism and a faith in science and technology, and it brought with it a new origin story, to replace the one about the garden and the snake.

This new story told of how we were saved from superstition and ignorance by the holy trinity of modernity: Reason, Science and Technology. Along the way, we stopped believing silly stories about gods and monsters, which had been made up by our ignorant ancestors before we could see the harsh but bracing reality that the universe is just a meaningless swirl of matter-energy which came from nothing for no reason, and human beings are just gene-replicating machines. Now here we are, working out how to rationally manage the whole show. Now, here we are, a new kind of being: post-religious Man.

Shades, here, of Eisenstein. What Kingsnorth calls a “new story,” Eisenstein happens to call the “old story,” or the Story of Ascent. Regardless, it’s a story we all know: Excelsior! Progress! Ever onward, upward, ever higher. Also, ever more precarious and disconnected from the roots. Ever more Icarus.

These two thinkers don’t have too much else in common, but they both see a need for a realignment of values, of the very narratives that shape the world. Kingsnorth’s proposed remedy is, of course, an Orthodox Christian one. That’s not my cup of Kool Aid (or lamb’s blood), and yet in a weird way the choice of theological beverage is beside the point. Because, for all of Kingsnorth’s worry over false idols, I think he would agree that the worrying idols of our time are not the deities of any world religion, but the pseudo-gods whom we worship with our time and attention. (For Neil Gaiman fans, these are the powers he’s written about in American Gods, the slick, pimply, humorless crew who smell of burning electrical wire.) These are the powers whose worship is so dominant that they aren’t even recognized as gods at all; no one would think to deny their potency.

For any who doubt that the “Holy Trinity of…Reason, Science and Technology” has become anything less than sacrosanct in our day, I prescribe a taste of the inquisition’s lash. Go on, try questioning the trinitarian authority in a public way. Their enforcers don’t bother with the rack and iron maiden these days. A good tarring and feathering in the media will do just fine, or else a high-tech muzzle. Hell, they’ve got bots that take care of that. And, you can bet, a tidy rationale. Inquisitions always do.

(I see I’ve skated onto thin ice here, and possibly started a bonfire on the lake for good measure. Even so, a spleen venting has become inevitable. We plunge onward.)

Kingsnorth reminds me that the beef I brought up in my last post on digital censorship is not ultimately with social media companies, or government policy, or health policy organs like the NIH or the WHO. These companies and institutions all have their problems, to be sure, but the issues go deeper, much deeper, down to their assumptions about what the world is and how it works. If pressed, I’d have to state that my beef is with the secular religion of our time, the dogma so dominant that it’s as invisible as water to a fish.

It’s a paradox of sorts, isn’t it: the stronger a belief, the more difficult to recognize it as such. To a true believer, a cherished belief is simply the truth. Perfect faith has equated the two.

What, I wonder, would our world look like if partisans of each worldview or religion (they amount to about the same thing) recognized that they don’t have a monopoly on the truth? In that case, instead of dissent becoming taboo, as we’re now seeing, it’s fundamentalism that would be unacceptable. Including the strain of fundamentalism so prevalent in liberal society, the strain I call Scientism: the enshrinement of a method of inquiry and its trappings to the status of the Absolute. A full-blown, dogmatic religion complete with a white-coated priestly caste.

Ironically, it’s rarely the scientists themselves who are interested in enshrining their work. They tend to know too well how messy, how delicate, how uncertain the whole business can be. They know that science is simply a set of tools—a remarkably useful, penetrating set, no doubt. But still only tools.

Science itself has little interest in consensus. How could it, when it consists in an evolving, open-ended set of strategies and methods for learning about the world? Its findings are not to be enshrined but to be questioned, hammered at, inspected for cracks. Those cracks may open to a deeper understanding, as we’ve seen countless times over the centuries: Newtonian gravity turned out to be a crude approximation of General Relativity’s much stranger, hitherto unthinkable spacetime warpage. Relativity itself proved incomplete, failing as it did to describe the absurdist, phantasmagoric play of the quantum realm. And so on, ever stranger.

Fact is, true science is unpredictable. It can turn on you in an instant, for truth is not invested in any agenda. It can embarrass you. Truth requires that most inconvenient of traits, humility: a willingness to keep learning, to stay flexible.

Terribly inconvenient is this science, resisting as it does our narratives about the world. What a good thing then (from a certain point of view) that it’s so easily corruptible. Ah, but such a harsh word, that. Amenable, let’s say. Coaxable. It’s a matter of learning to ask the right questions—and to ignore the wrong ones. To misplace certain less-than-desirable data, to trumpet an illusory but expedient consensus that slowly becomes more powerful than any mere finding. A consensus that takes on the mantle of law and commandment.

There, where Truth gains a capital letter, where science meets ideology—there is the gateway to a world of trouble. A world that is becoming our world. Beware, as ever, those capital letters.

At the risk of stepping through the ice altogether or perhaps into the political quicksand, I’ll go a bit further and quote G.K. Chesterton, whom Kingsnorth has got me appreciating. Quoth the jolly prince of paradox: “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”

Every side may hate me for saying it, but no one—no political party, no movement—has a monopoly on the truth, or even a very first grasp on the slippery fish.

Groping as we do in the dark, each of us may brush the truth occasionally, perhaps mistaking it for something else, like the figures in the elephant parable: one grasps the tail, thinking it a rope. Another brushes a leg, thinking it a tree. One stumbles upon the trunk, thinking it a snake. Who would believe in an elephant, anyway, if he hasn’t seen one or heard of one before?

Maybe the truth is like this: more outrageous than we’re prepared to accept. Stranger and more wondrous than we’ve been able to conceive.

Perhaps we won’t know it until it steps on us. Or until (a good friend witnessed this, once, in Sri Lanka) it delivers unto us a triumphant, elephantine enema.

Perhaps a new story will emerge one day from the depths of the holy dung heap. In the meantime, there’s plenty of the sacred work of decomposition to be done.