Rebuilding Reality
Escaping the artificial division between 'science' and religion'
“The pure face-off between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ is a chimaera, or rather, an ideological construct. In reality, there is a struggle between thinkers with complex, many-levelled agendas, which is why the real story seems so confused and untidy in the light of the ideal confrontation…” - Charles Taylor
What do you do when reality breaks down? It seems that we simply become afraid of everything. Afraid of a phantom of the religious, seeking to either convert or kill us. Afraid of a spectre of the sciences, trying to destroy our health in the pursuit of money. Afraid of the globalists who like Bond villains plot against everyone. Afraid of the nationalist who might, Scooby Doo style, pull off his mask to reveal it was Hitler all along. If you protest these are not the symptoms of an unravelling of the real but the consequence of either ‘misinformation’, the gullibility of ‘low information voters’, or the propaganda of the news media, I must sadly point out that those are all different names for the same thing, and its all the Reality Crisis.
During the Enlightenment, there were three kinds of ‘dangerous’ religion: superstition (faith in magic), enthusiasm (hearing ‘the voice of God’), and fanaticism (certainty that demands violating the common moral order). In The Mythology of Evolution, I described plenty of things today that fit these categories that are not religions, and this has not abated in the years since. Medicine founded upon political allegiance and not empirical evidence is superstition. The idea that someone becomes a woman solely by listening to an inner voice without needing to be accepted into the community of women is enthusiasm. Blithe acceptance of the mass murder of civilians as political means is fanaticism. True, many hold more moderate views merely adjacent to the worst excesses. But the dangers remain.
The religious might observe that each of these cases involves a tacit religion. But those who hold these unfortunate beliefs would deny to the death they practiced any religion, and they are correct. Religions persist over millennia not because of the force of indoctrination, but because they cultivate a community of care. Contemporary metaphysics do the precise opposite. Mandatory politicised medicine gambles with everyone’s health. Gender metaphysics have counter-productively fostered hatred towards women, lesbians, and trans folk. Political violence only ever produced further political violence. These are not religions unless they are broken religions, and neither are they anything to do with scientific practice - despite the idolatry of Science they might invoke.
It is precisely because what has infected our shared understandings are broken metaphysical systems that we are experiencing the Reality Crisis, and live in a so-called ‘post-truth world’. But the truth is much as it has ever been - elusive and unyielding. The path out of this trap requires us to once again embrace metaphysics - not as an academic endeavour (for who cares what the scholars say!) but as a political necessity. That means admitting, as Mary Midgley stated in her endorsement for The Mythology of Evolution, that myths are not lies but “networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world.”
What blocks the path back to communal metaphysics - shared national myths, transnational myths, gender myths, even (unavoidably) scientific myths - is the echoing dogma from two centuries of the certainty crusade. The supposed split between ‘science’ and ‘religion’, as Charles Taylor stated in the quote above, is “an ideological construct”. It is like being asked to cut a bowl of spaghetti bolognaise in half, leaving all the sauce on one side of the plate and only pasta on the other. As long as we insist upon the implausible idea that ‘religion’ and ‘science’ fall cleanly apart into distinct categories we’ll be left with broken religions distorting the sciences, and sci-fi superstitions operating as broken religions.
Reality is not a world ‘out there’ for without a mind to experience it there is no world, whether ‘out there’ or otherwise. The real always exceeds us, and reality is merely a name for our attempts to understand it. As long as we deny metaphysics, we are trapped within the bars of our own unseen metaphysical prisons. Escape lies in ceasing to claim that myths are lies, and that lies are truth. When we are ready, when our freedom to participate in our own shared mythos is restored, we shall at last begin to rebuild reality together.