Modernism(25 slides)

creatively compiled by dr. michael farnworth

“We don’t know who discovered water but we know it wasn’t a fish.”

Morris Berman’s The Re-Enchantment of the World, p. 57

• “Modern consciousness thus regards the thinking of previous ages not simply as other legitimate forms of consciousness, but as misguided world views which we have happily out grown.

• According to modern science, the further back in time we go, the more erroneous are men’s conceptions of the world.”

The scientific method

• The claim to fame of the scientific method is it’s objective, non-participatory, rigorous gathering of data.

• The scientific method is the method of acquiring knowledge dependent on measurement, prediction, and verification which distinguishes the field of science from other fields of knowledge.

Science’s claims to strict objectivity falters in the face of any paradigm that does not fall with in its narrow definitions and

boundaries of its philosophical reality.

In other words, science will determine what is legitimate to study or dismiss out of hand if the material does not meet

it’s presupposed criteria.

The biases of science

As Albert Einstein once said

• “It is the theory that decides what we can observe.”

• And the theory of the scientific method cancels out any field of knowledge that does not fit it’s non-participatory, objective paradigm and reality, such as: religion, mythical, somatic, affective, personal, spiritual, artistic, beauty, meditative, stories, revelation, scripture, realities, etc.

The machine metaphor

• The scientific revolution of the middle ages created a machine metaphor to view the world.

• In the belief that to understand the laws that ran the machines we could control the machines themselves whether nature, humans, or whatever.

• The universe became a machine metaphor to gain control over.

In his book: The Re-enchantment of the World…

• Morris Berman explains the historical events and philosophical changes that took place before, during and after the scientific revolution of the middle ages.

• The world changed from an enchanted, alive, participatory and sacred world view that enjoyed the immanence of God to a dead, mechanical, non-participatory world view with a transcendent engineer type god.

The effects of modernism

Mark Scholl, “Developments in Modern Physics and their Implications for the Social and Behavioral Sciences” The Religion and Family Connection p. 317-8

• “We must first begin by consciously realizing that many of the so called facts we use to construct our paradigm are not facts at all, but socially constructed shared assumptions, consensus reality, and agendas for research.

• We adopt these agendas for research through the process of enculturation, that is, cultural amnesia, becoming hypnotized by consensus reality and begin acting toward our cultural assumptions as social facts, which later manifest themselves as social psychological pressures.”

Punctuating Reality with what we already know as true.

• We all punctuate reality (paying attention) according to our own unique histories and biases.

• We can have the same experience as another but come out with a completely different perception of it.

• But, both realities are consistent with the punctuation (orientation and attention) given it.

Margaret Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Sciences, p. 67

• “Reality emerges from our process of observation, from decisions we the observers make about what we will see.

• It does not exist independent of those activities.

• Therefore, we cannot talk people into reality because there truly is no reality to describe if they haven’t been there.

• People can only become aware of the reality of the plan (or

idea) by interacting with it, by creating different possibilities through their personal processes of observation.”

Modern scientific world view

• “The scientific world view isolated man and woman in an alien, objective and disenchanted world.

• It rejected the sacred inner landscape of the spirit and adopted a hostile attitude toward body and environment, both of which are controlled and exploited for mercantile profit and subdued in the face of authority, religious and secular.”

Morris Berman’s Re-enchantment of the World, p. 125*

There can be little argument

• The goal and philosophical ends of contemporary science has always been to control and have power over nature and all that occupies it: plants, earth, animals, people and mother nature herself.

Competing world views

• The idea that there are two competing world views vying for our attention and affection seems consistent :

• Machine versus Organism

• Material versus Immaterial

• Mechanistic versus Vitalist

“Each world, whilst it is attended to, is real after it’s own fashion; only the reality lapses with the attention.”

William James, The Perception of Reality, Principles of Psychology

Confusion as the fatal error

• Edward O. Wilson in his book Consilience, page 9 writes in relation to the problem of crossing fields of knowledge:

“The result is confusion, and confusion was correctly identified by Francis Bacon four centuries ago as the most fatal of errors, which occurs whenever argument of inference passes from one world of experience to another. ’’

The scientific method

• The scientific method has become the modern Tower of Babel.

• A desire to go where God is at and control the heavens and the earth and to be above it all.

• While at the same time denying the existence of an intelligent creation it is trying so hard to reproduce its own image in it.

Modern science may also qualify as a god of sorts

• It is a very, very jealous god that will not allow any other competing gods to interpret reality.

• It holds out salvation in the form of eventually solving all of our problems (ageing, disease and health).

• It denies the existence of anything mystical or spiritual and preaches the religion of a rational, reductive, empirical, objective and linear truth.

• “All my life I have shied away from these disturbing and highly unpopular –even offensive– themes. But I cannot do so any longer, because in my old age I have taken to reading the scriptures and there have had it forced upon my reluctant attention, that from the time of Adam to the present day, Zion has been pitted against Babylon, and the name of the game has always been money– “power and gain.”

What is Zion? A Distant View p.58

Modernism as a Darwinist Paradigm

• “Our Assumption of superiority does not come to us by accident. We have been trained in it. It is soaked into the fabric of every western religion, economic system and technology. Organized along rigid hierarchical lines, all of natures resources are regarded only in terms of how they serve the one god- the god of growth and expansion. In this way, all of these systems are missionary; they embrace dominance. They are the creators and enforcers of our beliefs. We live inside these forms, we are imbued with them, and they justify our behaviors. In turn, we believe in their viability and superiority largely because they prove effective: they gain power.”

Jerry Mander, In The Absence Of The Sacred

It may be time to move on- out of the scientific paradigm of the dark ages and into the future world view of the new sciences with their

exciting/disturbing new paradigms of reality.

the end