Yes, I'm Alive

But rather busy and wondering why a good non-linear curve fitting scheme is so troublesome to implement.

I'm reading John Crowley's, Aegypt at the moment, one of the sleeper classics of our era. Every once in a while, some curmudgeonly cultural conservative will ask whether anything will be remembered of the art and literature of our iconoclastic era. I think this particular book will remain. Harold Bloom agrees with me. It's one of the few works of recent provenance that he suggests should be included in the Western Canon.

Why is it so important? Because after all, it's not particularly grand in scope. Most of it is set in New York City and somewhere in northern New Jersey or southern New York. The characters don't do much but think and write and raise sheep and generally ignore the grand problems of our era: the inequities of our globalized human society and the coincident environmental degradation. Frankly, it's a book with a lot of Boomers being obsessed by pseudoscience and living their lives poorly.

But despite the vapidity of its setting, indeed because of it, Aegypt already is looking to be a powerful novel of ideas: an exposition of modern critical realism and the failure of the Enlightenment Project in a surprisingly readable though fairly secular package.

Huh? Failure of the Enlightenment Project? What? Critical realism? Well, they didn't teach me this kind of stuff in school, I'll tell you. Well, they dropped hints every once in a while. And Crowley is absolutely wonderful in connecting a few ideas I saw in McGrath's epitome, the Science of God . He is wonderful, because he goes back to the era where the western intellectual world went marvelously off track, 1600 or so.

In that era, there were two kinds of new men: the scientific magicians and the early scientists. And the funny thing is that they weren't two different groups. For instance, I read an article in the Australian yesterday about a woman in Mercersburg, PA, who shares a surprisingly common belief that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. We laugh at this today. But Isaac Newton would consider this idea worthy of as serious inquiry as gravity. And in fact, the idea of gravity began as an alchemical idea. Scientists today try to disprove that crystals heal or that power lines cause cancer, but they only are disproving ideas that would seem far closer to axiomatic among the progenitors of the modern natural sciences.

Where this all went wrong is the rebirth of skepticism. Eventually, some came to believe first that the scientific method has no axiomatic basis, that it is completely founded on unaided human reason, and second that it was universally applicable, thereby creating standards for art, literature, and mores that might be completely divorced from the irrational beliefs of our forebears. Many scientists will tell you that the first idea is ridiculous, usually citing the so-called central dogma of physics, "The laws of nature are the same everywhere." Gravity works the same on Earth as it does in the Jovian system and so forth. And indeed each branch of science has its symbola no less influential than the Creeds for Christians. There is doctrinal evolution, though. Geologists used to consider it dogmatic that the continents didn't move (even on very long timescales). However, that doctrine violated more fundamental doctrines such as: that the Earth does not have multiple dipole magnetic fields at any one time. As I'm sure McGrath would agree, there's a lesson in such stories.

As for the second point, a few young scientists are enamored of Aristotle's argument in the Poetics that language may be mathematically tuned to beauty and effect on the listener and there is an entire field of computational linguistics. But attempts to create perfect music on mathematical principles only work when something different is added to the equation. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier is a good example.

Well, the end result of these two bad ideas, Europeans generally came up with universal standards for things that really reflected majoritarian views or elitist prejudices. And so since at least the time of Einstein and Barthes, the Enlightenment is slowly being destroyed. Just as physics or mathematics has no authoritative reference frame might go the argument, so there are no authoritative reference frames in art, literature, or mores. Hence, relativism. And because the skeptics really vexed the religious, some asserted that the universal standard was their particular interpretation of pre-Enlightenment sacred literature, hence fundamentalism, which some think is a pretty good response to relativism, too. There's a guy named Chris Hedges, who has written a book claiming the New Atheists are really fundamentalists. I think it's a fair argument. If you can turn Genesis into a science textbook, there are ways of turning one's interpretation of the scientific literature into a religion of some sort.

A philosophical school called critical realism is trying to come up with an alternative solution to this potential "St. Jean Vianney of the western mind." Crowley, I think is borrowing from this school, to create a sort of somewhat overlapping magisteria (as opposed to Gould's non-overlapping magisteria) in which we admit that the natural sciences are an excellent form of inquiry into particular aspects of the world, particularly those connected to our senses directly or indirectly through experimentation and quantitative analogy. An example might be the kinetic theory of gases, in which the sensation of heat is understood as a set of very small balls bouncing together vigorously. But we also can admit there's a part of the world that cannot be understood by these methods: the very kinds of things that Socrates used to ask people about in the Athenian Agora: truth, beauty, justice, and virtue. Crowley's contribution is to have his protagonist posit that there is "more than one history of the world." One of my college professors studied late antiquity and used to say that he read a lot of accounts of monks having visions during disasters, but he grew to think that while there is a way of seeing history in which monks hallucinate during earthquakes and floods, there's also a way in which the monks actually are seeing something going on not directly accessible to the senses.

Well, it's a good book (and there are apparently three more). So if I finish them and like them, I'll update you.