Only a Game

The Hunt for Gender Armistice

Can there ever be an end to the vicious cultural war over gender...? It is a question that troubles me greatly, and not only because I find the breakdown of the rainbow alliance inexpressibly heart-breaking. The political capital being squandered on this terrible and destructive in-fighting has meant that the most serious problems facing humanity today - whether poverty, environmental degradation, or anything else you might care to mention - have become impossible to address. Violence against trans people or anyone else is deplorable, but we will not prevent harm by refusing to discuss our disagreements about what liberty means. On the contrary, whenever new cultures encounter one another we must learn how to live together peacefully, which requires that we talk to one another.

It is now half a century since the last successful civil rights movements, and those liberation movements that were pursued beyond the 60s and 70s have devolved into the uncivil wars of identity. Perhaps the most merciless of these battlegrounds is that of gender, especially in the political conflict between trans activists and what might be called 'classical lesbians'. A lesbian in the classical sense of the word is a human female who is sexually attracted to human females or, if you prefer, a cis woman who is sexually attracted to cis women, or even (to complete this set of equivalent and yet politically opposed definitions) a natal woman who is sexually attracted to natal women. The wider gender warzone, of course, now involves far more than just trans people and classical lesbians, but the hostilities escalated from this initial battlefront and it was only later that other kinds of women became embroiled. Over that time, it has become increasingly acceptable to accuse classical lesbians of transphobia (hatred of trans people) for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, those accusations might well be justified. All too often, however, it seems as if 'transphobia' is being evoked simply to shut down discussion.

I'm going to say something that is forbidden. Transphobia may be something we dislike, but as with every other kind of prejudice it is not something we have any reasonable means to prevent. Any attempt to do so risks encouraging an equal an opposite form of hatred - transphobiaphobia. This phenomena, bigotry against those who are perceived as transphobic bigots, is a special case of what I called in Chaos Ethics 'intolerant tolerance', an essential problem of our time that we are absolutely failing to deal with. The trouble is that we know that those who believe in bigotry are evil... as such, we can act towards them in a manner appropriate to those who are evil. But this problematic line of reasoning allows us to become evil in order to fight evil, and this is not the way to effectively campaign for civil rights, but rather a terrifying way to recapitulate the wars of religion that beset humanity for millennia.

What bankrolls transphobiaphobia is the intense belief that those who can be accused of transphobia pose an existential threat to trans people - that they seek to nullify their existence, or even wish to kill trans people. Yet transphobia is an accusation levelled against a wide variety of situations, many of which do not entail threats of violence as such, and if an existential threat is indeed entailed to some degree, we should consider to what degree such an existential threat poses a genuine threat to life. I am open to the idea that those who insist on calling a trans woman a man, or a trans man a woman, do indeed pose an existential threat to the trans community. But the question remains: what kind of existential threats are we actually dealing with? And who is subjected to these existential threats? Just the trans community? Or the classical lesbian community as well...?

There are several degrees of existential threat worth considering here. At what might be called the first degree, the most extreme and horrific end of this grisly spectrum, there are existential threats of actual extermination against an entire class of beings. As a reasonable approximation of a politically neutral example, consider a major asteroid impact that could bring extinction to the entire human race: that would be an existential threat of the first degree to everyone. Then there are the horrific campaigns of extermination we humans have waged against each other: the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s was a first degree existential threat to Cambodian Viets, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was a first degree existential threat to the Tutsis, the Holocaust was a first degree existential threat to European Jews. Mercifully, no such existential threat faces either the trans community or the classical lesbian community.

At the second degree, there are situations where death occurs, but as single incidents within a certain class, rather than against an entire class of being. These awful second degree existential threats apply to a vast variety of people - over gender, sexuality, culture, race, or religion - and if we wish to build an authentically inclusive society all such threats ought to be our concern. The trans community certainly does face these kinds of second degree existential threats and sometimes in unique ways. Consider the tragic death of Jennifer Gale in 2008, a trans woman who needed access to a homeless shelter in Austin, Texas, but was told she would have to shelter with the men. This incident was, in many ways, a call to action in the current trans activist movement. As such, we could judge this movement's success by its potential to prevent such a tragic event recurring. Yet based upon the significant rise in anti-trans violence since it began, I rather fear that this particular wave of activism has had the opposite effect.

At the third degree are political existential threats. In such cases, no actual threat of violence is involved, but rather a conceptual threat to existence occurs. An odd example of this that I mentioned back in 2018 happened when prominent 'New Atheist' Richard Dawkins suggested it was "consciousness raising" for parents to bring up their children with no religious tradition, so they could then choose their own religion at adulthood. Some people thought this was a wonderful suggestion; most practitioners of religious traditions saw this (quite logically) as an existential threat in the third degree. Dawkins was permitted to make these claims even though they posed an existential threat to religious people because they did not rise to incitement to violence (i.e. encouraging a second degree existential threat or worse), and this is where we have always drawn the line in free speech.

Accepting that we were right to let Dawkins voice these views no matter how offensive they may have been to religious people, we can use this example as a test case. If we approach the gender battlefield with the idea that there is one correct way of viewing sex and gender, it is not very hard to believe that gender-critical feminists, including classical lesbians, might indeed risk presenting an equivalent third degree existential threat to the trans community. So too with that subset of Christians and other religiously-motivated people who do not accept the trans community's various understandings of gender. But we must not fool ourselves here. Current trans activism imposes the same kind of third degree existential threat to classical lesbians, and arguably to certain other classes of women as well. It seeks to deny them their freedom of thought on issues of gender metaphysics that go to the very core of their being in the world. This situation, as I claimed back in 2018, is directly parallel to the example of Dawkins seeking to abolish every religious tradition rooted in the family (i.e. nearly all of them). Therefore, on parallel grounds, no nation should be making political commitments to third degree existential threats as policy, regardless of kind, since to do so is to further betray our human rights agreements and to mandate bigotry against some class of its citizenry as law.

I abhor third degree existential threats, I detest political opposition to other ways of being... but I accept that they are inevitably going to happen, and that you cannot attempt to stamp out such ideas without instigating an opposing third degree existential threat (or worse...) against those who make them. On such a path, there is no democracy, no freedom of thought. On such a path we are marching backwards towards tyranny and imperial monoculture, not forwards towards a more inclusive democracy and the beautiful chaos of individual freedom. The path to trans liberty cannot lie on such a path, for the path to no-one's liberty can lie on such a path.

And this is the problem with transphobiaphobia: it blocks the path to trans liberty. It is no help, for instance, denouncing the Salvation Army for its transphobia if our goal is to prevent anyone else dying in the tragic and avoidable circumstances that led to Jennifer Gale's death in 2008. She died primarily because of poverty, because she was rendered homeless - and the Salvation Army is one of very few organisations trying to help people who have become homeless due to poverty. They did not refuse to shelter her because she was trans, they offered to shelter her with the men and did not understand why she could not do this. This failure to understand her different way of being in the world was pivotal to the terrible circumstances of that tragedy. But it is not tragic that the Salvation Army tries to help homeless people, it is tragic that in this instance they failed to do so because they did not understand how to help this particular person. Yet transphobiaphobia will not help the Salvation Army understand trans people either. The Salvation Army is not so much 'transphobic' as they are completely ignorant of the many trans ways of being in the world, in part because we would rather accuse them of hate than try to talk to them in love.

Neither will transphobiaphobia resolve the culture war between trans activists and their allies on the one hand, and gender-critical lesbian feminists and their allies on the other. Last year, philosopher Kathleen Stock at the University of Sussex was subjected to a campaign of abuse, up to and including death threats (i.e. second degree existential threats), that forced her to resign in October 2021. These actions were initiated by a group calling itself Anti Terf Sussex, who claimed Stock presented a danger to the trans community, stating: "We're not up for debate. We cannot be reasoned out of existence". Unlike those who opposed her, Stock was up for debate... as a university academic, she was obligated to be so. Fulfilling her duty in this regard paradoxically resulted in her losing her job - and I am surely not alone in being shocked to discover that a classical lesbian can be forced out of a job she is good at merely for the thoughtcrime of holding the metaphysical beliefs of a classical lesbian. Yet I find it quite hard to see this incident in any other way, except perhaps that she was a victim of transphobiaphobia.

I have argued with Stock on various matters in and around this issue; I don't share her views on gender, but neither do I have answers to all the relevant political questions she has raised in this regard. Frankly, I don't believe anyone does, how can they? We aren't allowed to have the conversation ("We're not up for debate", announced Stock's persecutors, as they ceded democratic values in favour of vigilantism). But Stock has always argued with me and others with civility and an openness to fresh arguments, and I have always defended her academic freedom and the liberty to speak her mind, even when she has said things I disagree with. I would defend everyone's right to speak in this way, regardless of who they were, and would draw the line solely at whenever someone crosses over into second degree existential threats, that is, calls for actual violence, such as those levelled against Stock by her transphobiaphobic opponents.

Actively preventing debate on the kinds of disagreements Stock has honourably participated in cannot possibly improve anyone's understanding of the problems of trans existence. Indeed, in her willingness to argue against various trans philosophical positions, Stock paradoxically did more to advance the cause of trans liberty than most people in recent years precisely because she was willing to have the debate. Indeed, it was because she did engage in debate with trans philosophers that she came to my attention in the first place. I was excited at the possibility that we might clear away some of the barriers preventing acceptance of trans life experiences. The trans community still does not seem to appreciate that the deplorable prejudice against their many ways of being cannot be resolved by refusing to engage in discussions around the relevant political issues. On the contrary, every time this necessary discourse is curtailed, prejudice against the trans community festers and grows, and further hate and violence on all sides becomes depressingly more likely. As such, Stock's forced resignation is not a victory for trans liberty, it is merely another brick in the wall blocking the path to it.

Everyone says they want a more inclusive society, but nobody seems to truly appreciate what is required to achieve it. That might be because one of the things we need to make that new world happen is an ability to accept that some third degree existential threats will still be voiced. But fortunately, the vast majority of these kinds of threats are not advanced with the intent of provoking actual violence. Dawkins didn't call for actual violence against religious people; he is just irrevocably prejudiced against their numerous ways of being. He's hardly alone; the same prejudice is painfully common among classical lesbians and trans people too. Anti-religious bigotry, especially bigotry against Christians, is a very fashionable kind of hatred right now. Everyone has prejudices, nobody is pure, and the line between love and hate is wearing very thin indeed.

Classical lesbians are not to my knowledge calling for actual violence against the trans community, although many do speak very disrespectfully about trans people, an animosity that is all too frequently reciprocated. Regardless, almost all classical lesbians (and Stock is definitely included in this), celebrate those protections under the law that trans people now possess in the UK and elsewhere. But the classical lesbian's way of being in the world regrettably does seem to be perceived as a kind of third degree existential threat to trans people, just as the transphobiaphobia of trans activists presents a third degree existential threat against classical lesbians, and indeed a second degree existential threat whenever this uncontrolled hatred of haters paradoxically impels people into committing hateful crimes such as death threats.

In the world I want to live in, both classical lesbians and trans people are welcome, not to mention people of every religious tradition and those of none. I have no idea how to resolve all the conflicts inevitably entailed in building such a world. But then, it's abundantly clear that nobody knows how to build such a world, and as long as transphobiaphobia blocks the path to trans liberty such a world cannot be built at all. Of course, this is only one of the myriad barriers to our collective liberty... yet we ought not to be afraid to say this aloud if we are indeed striving for our freedoms, rather than merely marshalling hate against those we judge as our enemies.

I have focussed here upon the original fault line in this metaphysical battle over gender, the skirmish between trans women and classical lesbians... but this issue now extends far beyond these two camps. The trans community is supported by all those who hold the metaphysical view that our internal mental and emotional state is the ultimate truth of who we are. This is a strange collision between the freedom to make ourselves offered by existentialism and the appeal to certain truth entailed in essentialism. The opposing political camp is resolutely essentialist - "sex is immutable" - and represents a highly unusual alliance given that it is the first time that classical lesbians have found themselves aligned with politically conservative women over just about anything. It is a mistake to keep characterising this camp in terms of its 'radical feminist' roots, as the insult 'TERF' does: this is now a broad coalition rallying against what it can only see as blatant misogyny. It is naïve to expect the accusation of transphobia to hold sway here.

This culture war is all too often presented as if it were a bizarre choice between misogyny and transphobia, as if we are obligated to express hatred and our only choice is whom we turn upon. It is an intractable conflict unless either side shifts its metaphysical beliefs, which nobody should ever expect. As long as both sides uphold rival forms of essentialism a peaceful resolution might remain forever out of reach, a lamentable situation we have already suffered for half a century with the metaphysics of abortion. Yet while we cannot expect people to change their untestable views of the world, our metaphysical views will adapt when we encounter new circumstances, and debate - when it is attainable - carries the possibility, however remote, of forging new understandings. But in this terrible new battle over gender, the animosity is now so great that both sides are resolutely closed to new meanings, and indeed many of the voices with something to say are either banned from being heard or too afraid to speak up.

What we need now more than anything is an armistice, a ceasefire that allows us to attempt to open discussions. Since nobody is in charge on the gender battlefield, we cannot ask for generals to call a truce, but fortunately that means anyone and everyone is free to lay down their ideological weapons and come to the negotiating table. There are things we all want out of this, and we will get none of them without first trying to talk about it. I therefore encourage everyone to give up fighting in culture wars that pit identity against identity and to begin to practice the challenging skill of cultural disarmament. The civil rights movements that preceded this endless strife and hatred understood clearly what we have forgotten: that the end point of every political struggle is the necessity of building the beloved community together.

There is a world for everyone that we can make together. But to learn how to make it, we first of all must learn how to talk about that world together. We must be open to debate, open to hearing from others who are not like us, open to disagreements. We cannot always get everything we want, but rediscovering the lost art of compromise might help us all to get everything that we need. The path to trans liberty lies beyond a gender armistice we currently cannot even imagine, but that we can still seek. You cannot end hatred by hating haters, but perhaps we can hold our anger in check just long enough that the hunt for gender armistice might begin.

The opening image is a detail from Male Image, a 1966 painting by Grace Hartigan. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended and I will take the image down if asked.

Cultural Disarmament

Even the mention of peace has now seemingly left our world. We have gone from wishing for a peace we doubt we can have, to no longer even wishing for peace. Yet if we still desire peace, there are few greater guides to that journey than Raimon Pannikar. His work has been a consistent source of inspiration to me. A Catholic priest and a philosopher, he became a crucial figure in the interfaith dialogue that prospered in the twentieth century. Upon visiting his father's homeland of India, he wrote: “I started as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without having ceased to be a Christian.”

It is not solely a wry joke about our obsession with box-ticking categories that I identify as a Zen Sufi Hindu Christian Discordian. On the contrary, like Pannikar, I found a path between religions that brought me to a deeper truth than I could ever have attained from within one tradition. Still, at a time when it is fashionable to deny the relevance of any religious tradition, those like Pannikar and myself who have found wisdom within many religions are all too easily dismissed. This presents a substantial barrier to sharing any of Pannikar's philosophy today: the religious are trapped inside the limits of their faiths, and the non-religious are wedged inside their box of non-belief. Small wonder we can no longer find a role for peace!

In the case of Cultural Disarmament, a 1992 book originally published in Spanish, Pannikar's insistence on treating the question of peace as a religious matter will seem to instantly disqualify his philosophy of peace from further consideration for a great many people. Yet his arguments are sound, his intuitions persuasive, and his programme represents the only plausible path to peace that could be taken seriously. It is harder now to make a call for the kind of disarmament he espouses: so many view themselves as 'outside' religion, and thus beyond any thought of being swayed by religious reflections. Yet there is an illusion here.  The religious communities Pannikar was writing for in 1992 were no more open to his case than the non-religious. In fact, both the religious and the non-religious share the same mythos that Pannikar sought to challenge.

Peace, for Pannikar, is precisely a question of our mythos. It is a symbol rather than a concept, and symbols are "the building blocks of myths". With a good symbol, one can build many myths, which is to say, mythos for different cultures, regardless whether these are religious or non-religious cultures. Since the awareness of the role of mythology in human thought has declined along with religious practice, attempts at peace may have become more difficult. The non-religious, after all, are even more blind to their mythos than the religious, and as Pannikar points out, no one is fully aware of their own myth. Yet this situation is not so different in practical terms, since no culture can claim a monopoly on peacefulness and the name 'religion' changes nothing of importance. Regardless of which culture we are talking about, the meanings of the term 'peace' rest upon what each culture evokes with this term. This is why Pannikar insists that peace is always a symbol rather than a concept. Cultural disarmament, therefore, necessarily refers to an intercultural striving for peace. 

What's more, cultural disarmament, although it is a call to everyone, is especially a call to us, to anyone who reads this and thus certainly belongs to the predominant world culture, where a veneration of scientific thought and technology is taken for granted. This culture, Pannikar attests, originates in Europe, for all that it is now global in reach. We who belong to it see our values as indisputable and not open to negotiation - even though, as the last few years have made clear we do not agree on the meaning of these values at all. Pannikar was writing in 1992 about the need for the conceptual disarmament of the technocratic culture we all belong to, in order that we might foster peace with all cultures. Today, the same disarmament is also a requirement for peace within our own technocratic culture. The 'culture wars' that journalists report on with lurid glee reveal that the problems which prevent dialogue between us and the other nations of the world now also prevent dialogue within our own nations.

We deceive ourselves when we take up a cause, such as social justice, and then believe we must be fighting for peace. Pannikar is explicit: "One cannot fight for peace. One fights for one’s own rights, or, in a particular instance, for justice. But not for peace. To fight for peace is a contradiction." This is particularly so because "the regimes that we ourselves impose are not peace for the one who must endure them, be that one a child, a pauper, a foreigner, a family, or a nation." We might add to that all those suffering from racial disparities and those suffering from the attempts to enforce a rebalancing of these disparities. We might add to that all those suffering from the imposition of gender regimes, whether the terrible old version, or the dreadful new one. We might also add those unvaccinated pariahs who have been made into scapegoats by a medical empire that long since parted company with scientific discourse.

Dialogue is precisely that which we have lost touch with as we have given up on the wish for peace. Yet it is only through dialogue that peace has any hope of attainment. Whether we are talking race, or gender, or vaccines, we have given up on equality, and thus made dialogue impossible. Pannikar writes:

One must realize that dialogue, concerning which so much is presumed, is utterly impossible without conditions of equality. Indeed, it is insulting to speak of dialogue to someone who is starving to death, or has been stripped of all human dignity, or who does not even know what we are talking about because his or her suffering or difference in culture generates an incapacity for doing so.

This tendency for us to "treat others as enemies, barbarians, goi, mleccha, khafir, pagans, infidels, and the like" is precisely the problem to which the symbol of peace is a potential solution. Attempting to defeat the enemy is fruitless, because all we will do is enforce some new regime on the vanquished. "Victory leads to victory, not peace. And we all know the lethal effects of prolonged 'victories'...". Neither does Pannikar see any aspect of peace as lying with the restoration of a lost past, or indeed in defence of the status quo. Indeed, he sees peace as requiring emancipation from the current order and the acceptance of what he calls a fluxus quo, which is never settled outright.

What Pannikar calls cultural disarmament does not mean that we have to give up our own values - it means that we learn to recognise when we are wielding "reason as a weapon", as happens whenever we force our own technoscientific biases upon others. To Pannikar, this issue was primarily about the enforcement of economics and technology upon so called 'developing' nations, presupposing in the very name that we ought to be making them more like us. I have argued from the opposite direction: we have much more to learn from these cultures that have not yet fallen into technocracy than we ever presume.

It is even easier than ever to see this problem today. When the colonial programme occurred elsewhere, in places far from us, we were unlikely to witness it, and thus it tended to pass unnoticed. In the last two years, however, we have resorted to forcing our colonial technoscience onto each other. In so doing we have created an incredible opportunity to finally understand that 'science' was never the secret name of absolute truth, but rather that of a fragile method of exploring possible truths through experimentation and discussion. Authentic scientific practice cannot be deployed to police the truth without falling back into our colonial arrogance, and it is a farce to talk about 'decolonising curricula' without first accepting cultural disarmament - all this can possibly mean is imposing new dogmas, new regimes. Peace will not be found on such a path.

Rather, Pannikar warns that we require "a critique of current technoscience," and stresses this does not mean "destruction" or "reform", but rather "an intellectual demythologization". The myths of technocratic rule are so widespread now that we utter them without ever noticing. "Sustainable development" is something oft spoken of, for instance, but Pannikar cautions that even the concept of 'development' entails a presupposition, it is a kind of "cultural colonialism" (he optimistically suggests this was finally coming into question around the time he was writing). Our technocratic values are deployed "as weapons for invasion with the excuse that it is the natives themselves who seek entry into the technocratic club." A greater lesson for Bill Gates has never been written.

Pannikar builds a figurative emblem out of the peace symbol created by Gerald Holtom (pictured right). This originally represented a desire for nuclear disarmament, but it came to be incorporated into the civil rights movements in the United States with a broader meaning. Pannikar assigns to the three divisions of the sign the meaning of 'freedom' (left), 'justice' (right), and 'harmony' (below), suggesting that these are the components from which peace can be built. He thus remarks:

...in the ensemble of the elements that make up peace, each of them seems to tend to invade the terrain of the others, that is, to destroy what medicine calls “homeostasis.” Countries overly concerned with justice restrict freedom. And vice versa: where freedom is sacrosanct, justice frequently suffers. And with too much harmony, “your neighbours invade you.”

He remains resolute that "freedom is an essential ingredient of peace", but stresses that while there can be no peace without freedom, liberty should not be confused for mere freedom of choice. It is perfectly possible, Pannikar persuasively argues, to have a wider range of choices and yet suffer a severely diminished freedom. True liberty requires that our decisions are not shaped by dependencies and influences from the outside. "Neither a car nor its driver is a free being." He invokes the supermarket as symbolic for those situations where an immense range of choices do not entail authentic freedoms (in particular since we are dependent upon the supermarket, and have limited capacity to influence what it stocks). Likewise, "to be able to vote for this candidate or that, along a limited spectrum of possibilities, means a very relative freedom, and sometimes merely an apparent one..." The wisdom of this remark will not be lost upon those whose political landscape is so one-dimensional that elections can be determined primarily by who it is that we wish to prevent from winning.

The inclusion of justice is an important part of his symbolism, since Pannikar does not mean by this simply obeying the law: "lawfulness is not justice, many dictatorships are perfectly legal." He engages especially on the question of terrorism, where he wisely observes: "If violence is not the solution, still less will state or legal violence be." Rather, violence persists whenever two sides are unable to share in the same mythos, because "the parameters are different". Therefore, throughout his discussion, Pannikar returns to this same point: the need to discover or forge shared mythologies that can foster peace. It is a theme that is recurrent in my own philosophy of imagination, and in this respect Pannikar and I have always been firm allies.

In a novel conception unique to Pannikar's philosophy, he asks not for autonomy (self-government) but ontonomy. He develops this idea from the premise that "the ultimate structure of reality is harmonious", and therefore concludes that the potential forms of existence available to any one being must have a relationship with the potential perfection of the whole they belong within. Neither is this some permanently determinable circumstance. Quite the opposite. He argues that there is no way to legislate for peace in some permanent and unchanging manner. Indeed, to attempt this would not be any kind of peace "any more than love can be commanded - it would not be love." Rather, peace must be continuously created and re-created.

This dependence upon an image of reality as harmonious will perhaps provide a significant stumbling block for many people today, yet most religious practitioners are honour-bound to accede to this presumption. Pannikar's knowledge of the dharmic traditions of the East is clearly an influence in presenting this view, for dharma in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain philosophy has precisely this character. Exporting this wisdom to the Abrahamic religions would require a certain leap of faith - and finding a way to mount such an argument for the non-religious is perhaps impossible. Pannikar does not try. The entire book presupposes a religious reader (but not a specific religious tradition), which is arguably its greatest limitation, for all that having taken this path empowers him to explore some quite remarkable philosophical spaces.

The three elements of his annotated peace emblem also serve to draw attention to the obstacles to peace, for according to Pannikar whenever freedom, justice, or harmony are undermined, peace becomes unobtainable. But in an unexpected elaboration on this idea, he proceeds to demonstrate how this also applies to our veneration of the sciences: our adoration for the scientific can also become a barrier to attaining peace. When we yield scientific authority as "the privilege of a few", a "moral inequality" becomes struck in the heart of humanity, and Pannikar remains insistent that true dialogue requires equality:

Precious little good it will do for scientists to declare that they do not possess the universal panacea, and that they know perfectly well the limits of scientific knowledge. The fact remains: science’s unshakable successes, and its symbiosis with modern technology, have persuaded the people that “outside science is no salvation.” And indeed, unless you have a career in science, there is little to “eat” today in the First World and its satellites. If the fundamental thing for humanity is knowing, and if this becomes (except for the elementary necessities of life) the specialty of a few, then we are implanting in the human heart one of the causes of a lack of peace.

Our elevation of expertise into elitism is linked by Pannikar to the philosophical legacy of Descartes, which he calls 'the culture of certitude'. He further suggests that the logical consequence of this is a 'civilization of security', which has become our prevailing ideology - and this from an author writing in 1992! How much more have we seen this in the three decades since. Yet he challenges this obsession with safety by suggesting that while uncertainty and insecurity is something intolerable for human reason, it is something that perhaps may even be experienced pleasantly, if it can be pursued in love.

Pannikar draws against Saint Augustine's name for peace, 'the uncertain good', and contends that if we place our trust in the powerful to protect us, we will run into impossible contradictions. After all, he says (invoking the famous Latin phrasing): Who will watch the watchers? Against this, he suggests that we must place our trust in reality, which means placing trust in ourselves. It is a revolutionary proposition, yet it is also surely one which the civil rights campaigners of the twentieth century understood, and which we have since lost. As long as we are counting on an elite few to provide security and certainty for us, peace is rendered pragmatically unobtainable. Rather, we must be willing to undertake the call to peace ourselves.

Drawing once again from Hindu wisdom, Pannikar talks of what is required to "shatter the law of karma", which is to say, the cycle of violence. And in this, he maintains that forgiveness, reconciliation, and ongoing dialogue are a requirement to break through and open a path to peace. More than this, he makes it one of his central propositions that only reconciliation leads to peace. And here, he is keen to stress that the very etymology of this word requires the convocation of others - which is to say, to speak with them, to open a dialogue, which "is a science as well as an art". In a striking metaphor of how difficult it is to accept cultural disarmament and open discussion, Pannikar writes:

Humanity has known since prehistoric times that it is more painful to extract an arrow than to drive it deeper. If the social body is wounded by many arrows, there is nothing to be done but withdraw them. And that is no easy task.

The desire for peace must be, and can only be, the desire for dialogue - which requires us to accept something most of us find unthinkable: that those we must reconcile with might have something to teach us. We are so certain that we are right. Thus, when others cannot accept what we insist we know with certainty, any hope of dialogue is removed from possibility. It is thus in our own hearts that the path to peace must be opened. In concluding his vibrant reflection on peace, Pannikar rewrites the famous words of Flavius Vegetius Renatus ('Would you have peace? Prepare for war'). Against this, Pannikar counters: "Would you have peace? Prepare yourself."

Cultural Disarmament: The Way to Peace is published by Westminster John Knox Press, ISBN 9780664255497

A Magisterium for Science

"I believe in free speech," goes an archetypical conversation I sometimes have in the pub with people largely outside of any religious tradition, "but people shouldn't reject vaccination/evolution/science etc." Oh dear, I think to myself... how do I unpick this knot without offending them? Because these apparently innocuous statements run perilously close to saying "democracy is great, but I prefer theocracy". How can this possibly be...?

For more or less anyone reading this, theocracy will seem like the worst possible form of government. Indeed, a great deal of the tacit hostility that some today hold for the Catholic Church lies in the rejection of the idea that anyone should be placed in a position of arbiter of the truth, and thus in hostility towards theocracy, broadly construed. This is sometimes expressed in a conceptual rejection of the Catholic pope, as Trey Parker and Matt Stone did in their hilariously blasphemous South Park episode "Fantastic Easter Special", which ends with a rabbit being appointed pope and the claim that this was what God had always intended. This episode really interested me, as I believe it successfully captures Protestant Christians' prejudice against Catholics, from which the so-called "New Atheist" movement descended (all the prominent New Atheists began by rejecting Protestant Christianity, then expanded their dismissal until it encompassed all world religions). A similar theme also manifests in the Principia Discordia, the sacred book of the Discordian Society, which also aligns with elements of Protestant theology against Catholic theology, while softening the hard edges by cross-breeding (rather productively) with those schools of Zen Buddhism that embrace absurdity as a path to wisdom.

In Catholic parlance, the term 'theocracy' is seldom if ever used (although Vatican City can be understood as a theocratic nation - albeit a rather small one!). The official term for the authority of the Vatican is 'magisterium', meaning 'power of the office of magister', where 'magister' is Latin for 'master'. The magisterium is understood as the capacity of the pope and the bishops to render a judgement on the authentic interpretation of the Word of God, taken both in the sense of establishing an official interpretation to scriptural texts but more importantly in terms of guiding traditional practice, which encompasses an extremely broad range of human activities. Thus, when Pope Francis endorsed the idea in 2016 that Catholic churches could offer the sacraments to divorced Catholics (a controversial suggestion in some quarters!), he was exercising his official role in the magisterium.

The term was applied outside of Catholicism in 1997, when the brilliant evolutionary essayist Stephen Jay Gould proposed that the alleged conflict between science and religion could be resolved by asserting 'non-overlapping magisteria' (NOMA). His proposal was to assign dominion over facts to the sciences, while religions (and non-religions) would have separate dominion over values. Gould's use of the term 'magisterium' was borrowed directly from Catholic parlance; as a palaeontologist coming from a Jewish family in New York, where 60% of the population is Catholic (and only 10% Protestant), he would have been quite familiar with Catholic terminology and thought. This proposal did not go down particularly well - those who would go on to align with the New Atheist movement unilaterally replied that there was no need for such a principle because science could claim authority over everything and there was thus no need to make concessions. In such situations, 'religion' is being rejected not over the idea of asserting a magisterium, but merely because the wrong magisterium is being asserted. 

This is roughly where I see the problem with my friends in the pub claiming to support free speech, but placing its limit on topics that they consider to have been scientifically resolved, and thus beyond dispute. This position implies a magisterium of science, and in the same way that the presence of a magisterium in Catholic tradition implies a theocracy, any time someone unthinkingly singles out a scientific topic for special status (vaccination and evolution are by far the most common), they are also requesting or expecting something similar, if only implicitly. For it is solely in the presence of a magisterium of some kind that there could be authority to adjudicate what is or is not permitted as an absolute matter. The law, after all, is free to change when the people require it; only a magisterium is beyond dispute.

I think back to a very good friend of mine expounding his outrage in respect of a Creationist Museum somewhere in the United States that he had heard about. And I found this odd, because it sounded very amusing to me, and I could not see any legitimate cause for indignation here. "But it's not true," was his retort. But so what? It's not true that there is an inherent goodness to humanity, but I still choose to believe it, and if we are defenders of the so-called free society (and always assuming such a thing still exists) we should be able to accept that at least some of the things others believe are 'not true'. It seemed to me that a Creationist Museum was hardly likely to change anyone's opinion about anything, which means even if we accept that it's 'not true', the expected harms of such an establishment are rather limited.

Besides, who are we to call out other people's nonsense and not our own...? I have yet to meet a human who does not harbour strange non-testable beliefs of some kind, and I am perfectly happy for this situation to persist - because the alternative can only be a theocracy of some kind, or rather, I suppose atheocracy, in that it has become very possible to compose the kind of metaphysically-justified autocracy without any concept of deities. Besides, we make a mistake when we associate religions exclusively with positive theology (a concept of God or gods), since we are singling out just one aspect of the immense diversity of religious experiences and making it central. This is not entirely surprising, however. Christianity and Islam were too successful at making a theology of truth versus falsehood central to our thought via the creation and maintenance of libraries over a span of millennia. We never lost this habit of thought, we just switched from from theology to atheology and from libraries to corporate-managed online repositories while also ceasing to notice the change entirely. 

The idea that truth is singular and that deviation from it is abhorrent is an artefact of the monotheistic religions that has been inherited by those who place their faith in 'science', as Nietzsche shrewdly pointed out in 1882. This desire for a magisterium for science is far more widespread than we tend to admit. Consider the political questions that have continued to erupt over gender and sex for the entire duration of the feminist movement (which is to say, since at least Mary Wollstencroft in the latter half of the 18th century). Feminists largely managed to avoid calls for anything like a magisterium on gender up until the end of the twentieth century. After this, the number of non-testable beliefs about gender required to meet everyone's emotional needs ballooned beyond any reasonable expectation. Problematically, tolerance between these different metaphysical conceptions has been extremely limited - remind you of anything? I can't be the only person who thinks that offensive labels like 'TERF' or the 'trans cult' are oddly resonant of older insults like 'heretic' and 'infidel' that came from others who were rather too certain about their beliefs...

No-one should be subjected to the arbitrary beliefs of others, and it does not matter to me one jot whether those beliefs are about God, or gender, or flying spaghetti monsters. However, quite unlike the South Park creators, I don't find a rabbit a desirable replacement for a human Catholic pope, especially one with such an uncommon passion for the oft-forgotten humility of the Christian tradition as Pope Francis. It rather seems to me that the problems with the Protestant Christian traditions I was raised in emerge precisely from the consequences of deciding that a rabbit would indeed be better than a human as a pope. As a Discordian, the absurdity amuses me; as a Christian, I am less convinced. The Catholic church may lag behind the western zeitgeist by about a century but it does eventually change its mind, whereas certain Protestant Christians seem to have an almost negligible possibility of changing their mind under any circumstances! Frankly, they are far from alone in this...

Here I should like to note that the Discordians have a different and altogether more hilarious conception of what it is to be a pope. In a move clearly inspired by the Protestant philosophy of the Enlightenment, Discordians claim that every human is a pope, and some Discordians like to give out 'pope cards' to certify people as such. Indeed, I was ordained as a Discordian pope by Robert Anton Wilson in the late 1990s, which sounds impressive but really is not, since there is no Discordian magisterium and if there were, Wilson would have excommunicated himself. The followers of this religion are almost universally anti-magisterium, and I hope that most if not all of my fellow Discordians would have the sense to never be caught arguing for a magisterium of science, although the golden rule of the followers of Eris is that "we Discordians should stick apart". As such, Paul Feyerabend's adage for capturing the realities of scientific practice, "anything goes!", applies far better to Discordians than to scientists, where suggesting that 'anything goes' is widely considered tantamount to blasphemy.

And here lies the awful truth of the idea that we can claim to be a supporter of free speech but place its limits at some scientific point of reference: the emotional framework that makes this possible is directly parallel with that of blasphemy. This word, after all, is only the name we have given cognitive dissonance when it occurs within a religious context. We must already have determined a necessary truth in order to wish to prevent dissemination of alternative views, and this implies that we secretly desire a scientific magisterium, the rejection of which would be tantamount to blaspheming. Yet free speech depends upon an absence of limitations, with the sole exception being the one proposed by Immanuel Kant: that we should only enact limitations upon freedom where they are necessary to protect a like freedom for others. It requires a real commitment to liberty for people to negotiate how to achieve such a balance, and alas for the most part we have decided not to bother.

Besides, why worry about being free to speak when the social media giants of Facebook, Twitter, et al. and the search engine giants of Google, Baidu, et al. have conveniently provided their own magisterium of thought for us? Watch them with amazement as they merrily adjust search results and the relative visibility of what different people are saying, choosing on the one hand what should be read first, and on the other hand pronouncing which blasphemies must never be heard. Habemas papam, Cyberpope Google I...? I shudder to think. It is situations like this that ought to provoke the outrage my friend felt for a mostly harmless 'museum of ignorance'. Yet we apparently accept this gerrymandering of information without concern - some of our neighbours even advocate for this censorship, as the example from the pub at the opening of this piece foreshadowed!

When I first starting thinking about 'science popes' and a magisterium for science - always in opposition of any such concept! - my concern was that there would come some kind of attempt to create a Council of Scientists that could attempt to act as magister and offer declarations of what was or was not scientifically valid and therefore permitted to be enforced. Then came 2020, when the World Health Organisation - to its own great distress! - found itself unwittingly appointed to this role in a new and disturbing medical magisterium that spread into almost every world government and swiftly ran out of anyone's control. The topics upon which adjudication was demanded rapidly and inevitably fell into that state of pseudoscience whereby disagreement was not permitted (and thus the sciences cease to function), and the medical magisterium that we collectively instituted immediately undermined its own credentials in a manner rather parallel to the idea that a rabbit would make a better pope. I will not say that a rabbit would have made a good replacement for the WHO, only that the WHO struggled to fulfil its role scientifically while it was also expected to act as magister.

It is an admirable thing to stand up for public health and say "what can I do to help?" It is far more problematic to stand up and demand that everyone must satisfy your chosen vision of public health. In a democracy, any such claim is valid solely while it is has the support of the people, and if we propose any intervention on scientific grounds (where the people may have to take it on trust that we are not mistaken), those acting must at all times be ready both to absorb any new evidence, and to remain open to even the most difficult debates about what it all means (which is never a scientific judgement). We are no doubt emotionally secure in our support for science, but it remains to be seen if we are intellectually secure in our support for the sciences. The test for this is whether we are indeed open to new evidence... whenever you no longer need to test your own claims because you know in advance that you are correct, it makes little sense to assert that what you are doing is 'scientific': you are just playing at magister.

We have a choice to make, between free scientific enquiry and a magisterium of science. Yet there is no viable magisterium of science that will not swiftly become an abomination, since it is only because scientists are free in their enquiries that they gain their cybernetically-enhanced power to secure whatever limited truths are available via various research methods. Without debate there can be no legitimate science of any kind, and since a magisterium of science necessarily declares an authorised truth to enforce it could never be scientific. Rather, these kinds of atheology (like so many brutal monotheisms before them) rest upon an ideological claim to a complete and final knowledge - a rather ugly conception that might truly deserve the name 'anti-science'. Inevitably, every attempt at a magisterium of science prevents discussion and therefore unleashes the state of pseudoscience where free research is impossible, thus destroying the very conditions for enquiry that make scientific methods effective.

Perhaps, if you have read this far, you have nodded sagely to everything I've said and thought it obvious. Yet the moment you step away from this train of thought, you will encounter the anti-vaxxers or the pro-maskers, the Creationists or the militant atheists, the 'TERFs' or the 'trans cult' or whatever else it might happen to be that throws you into a blind seething rage. And when you do, won't you still experience that powerful emotional upheaval that comes with encountering blasphemy...? Underneath it all, our desire for a truth that we can depend upon is entirely human, and the Catholic church's stumbling towards hopes of a good life via its magisterium are only one expression of our unquenchable desire for secure foundations to truth. The Catholic pope these days always has the moral defence that the magisterium of the Vatican applies solely to those of the Catholic faith. A magisterium for science demands more: it demands obedience from us all, and a silencing of all objections. This is not, and can never be, scientific, no matter what claims it defends, no matter what motives it evokes. This is the ghastly confusion at the heart of the terrible events of 2020. Yet all it would take to bring this mistake to an end is the restoration of free scientific discourse, of listening once more to all we have refused to listen to. If only any of us knew how we could go back to doing that.

Ezra Furman on Judaism

I’ve been very much enjoying the new album, Transangelic Exodus, by Ezra Furman, although I miss the 50’s rock and roll influence of his previous barnstormer, Perpetual Motion People, which I fell in love with ever since BBC Radio 6 plugged me into it. I came across this great interview on Pitchfork that has a lot of interesting discussion in it, but I was particularly struck by this section on how Furman’s queer identity was not for him a clash with his Judaism. Here’s an extract:

…it takes some defiance, I guess. But maybe what feels to you like the spirit of religion is something that’s become rote and habitual and divorced from its access. But if you read the Bible and if you read like, Jeremiah or Isaiah, those are people who are railing against authorities and rich, complacent people, cause—the core being abuse. They’re outraged at violations of justice and the way that human dignity is being trampled on. And what religion serves—to me the reason the access of religion is about human dignity and it’s—it is depressing that most people think of it as this oppressive universe of conformity. Because to me, it’s a protest against much of the worst in our society—imperialism and nihilism, those are the enemies of at least real Judaism. I’m interested in God. I’m not interested in religion for religion’s sake.

You can read the whole interview over at Pitchfork.

Beyond Space

An open letter to Charles Cameron responding to his blog-letter No Man’s Sky at Zenpundit as part of the Republic of Bloggers. Further replies welcome!

Dear Charles,

The second of my five religions, Zen Buddhism, came about entirely as a consequence of a famous tale you allude to in your wonderful letter. The library at the University of Manchester, where I studied until gaining my Masters degree, was a wonderful resource for me during my time as a student. Although I do not remember the details, I read something about the Last Patriarch’s teachings there, and it went something like this:

The nun Wu Jincang once asked Huineng to explain passages of the Nirvana Sutra to her. Huineng couldn't read, and he asked her to read the passages aloud. Astonished that the revered Zen master could neither read nor write, Jincang wondered how Huineng could understand the teachings. Huineng replied: “Words are not truth. Truth is like the moon, and words are like my finger. I can point to the moon with my finger, but my finger is not the moon. Do you need my finger to see the moon?”

I spent a great deal of time that night meditating upon the gloriously full moon, a little about my finger, and a great deal about the space in between. Space. The space between. The space beyond. When I could be any or all of these, I went to bed. I thought to myself: How arbitrary it is that we should see ourselves as the finger, and as not-the-moon, when we might just as well consider ourselves the spaces in between – since without that, we could never be not-anything!

This lunar encounter served me well until about five years later I hit a terrifying crisis of identity when I lost faith in any ability to use words to communicate at all. I began to fray at the edges… If everyone’s words were their own symbols, how could we ever manage to communicate? Did we? Or were we just braying at each other at random, each one watching a different play on the stage we had been thrown together upon? I was a practicing Discordian at the time, getting my religious community fix from a cabal of strange and wonderful folks who had come upon the journey into chaos with me. We were all wrapped up in our own strange adventures. That was always the risk of leaving the clearly marked paths behind… of being set adrift, becoming a nomad. And we are all becoming nomads these days.

With a flair for the Biblical inherited from the time when Christianity was my only religion, I spent forty days and forty nights hitchhiking across the country, staying with friends. Upon my return, I left Manchester and moved to London, where I began working as a professional videogame designer. I had the honour of working with Sir Terry Pratchett – although not a knight of the realm in those days! – and indeed spent a launch party sat next to him and his agent, Colin Smythe, having a marvellous chat about writing and publishing. Alas, I was young and cocky, too arrogant to truly appreciate how much that night was to come to mean to me. My first book came into print soon afterwards.

Years later, Wittgenstein helped me make sense of my problem with words. He was long gone, of course, but he left his words behind, which meant I could listen to him even if he could not hear me. He made clear how words could be understood as belonging to the many different games of language: the meaning of the word was its use within the game it was deployed within. (“I don’t buy that” means one thing in a courtroom; quite another in a shop.) That meant if you wanted to be sure you were using the words correctly, you had to know which game you were playing. That’s precisely the problem with what you call the God NoGod argument: two very different games are being played that just happen to have identical rules. But once you realise that, once you take that idea aboard, you risk being set adrift from living life in one particular way – you risk becoming a nomad.

Peter Lamarque, perhaps Britain’s greatest living aesthetician, awoke in me a whole new way of riding Wittgenstein’s thought when he expressed how beneath it all was the concept of a practice, of lived practices. At which point, Isabelle Stenger’s idea of an ecology of practices, as a manifold of games, or (as I put it in Chaos Ethics) a multiverse, was the only way to understand our mutual predicament. This multiverse, or pluriverse as William James also puts it, is an idea I develop from Michael Moorcock, who – rather amazingly – is also origin of the use of ‘multiverse’ to mark the physicist’s imagined plurality of universes, a quaintly nontheological reverie if ever there was one. Yet at least one of my Discordian friends speaks of having personally experienced this physical multiverse… Should I treat him differently from those who speak of God, or the Goddess, or even of the Universe? What does a nomad do confronted with any singular way of being? What kind of reply is: there are other ways…

Thank you for the letter, and your continued friendship, albeit of the nomadic, disembodied kind where we have never met in the flesh. I place more stock on flesh these days, but then, I also have a great deal of faith in words.

With unlimited love,

Chris.

Any and all replies are welcomed, whether in the comments, or via a blog.

Disbelieving Just One More God

Contains ideas some atheists may find offensive.

A well-known joke states that since every religion involves disbelieving the gods of other religions, atheism merely involves disbelieving just one more god. The profound truth upon which this joke relies is that atheism is necessarily theology, and as such, does not involve an escape from religious practices, but merely their transformation into yet another form.

This is one of the great oddities of the European diaspora: the presumption that the atheist is the person who has successfully freed themselves of religion. For many, this is essentially their definition of the term, which is thus the source of the valorisation making atheism an appealing identity to adopt. Those who count themselves as an atheist (of the Christian kind, at least) tend to underestimate the extent to which their thought depends upon the thought practices of the very religion they wish most fervently to distance themselves from. This does not make atheism a religion as such; it utterly fails to sustain a community of care, for a start. Rather, it draws a historical connection between individual atheists and the religions they are rejecting – the most common form of atheism today being a rejection of all things Christian, with all other religions taken as mere variations on Christianity.

This odd qualification – the idea of a Christian-flavoured atheist – reads strangely for precisely the reason that the joke works: the concept of religion it relies upon is dependent upon the form of theology that emerges out of European Christianity, and thus from the philosophy of Plato that influenced it. Not coincidentally, this is also the theology that gave rise to the contemporary sciences (and also their valorisation as the nebulous omnicapable ungod Science). It is the equation of religion with belief, understood as the acceptance of propositions without evidence, and this is a very particular and peculiar kind of theology.

We will find no such propositional theology among Buddhist atheists, such as the Dalai Lama, nor among those of the Hindu traditions, whether or not their path involves bakhti, or devotional worship. And it is not entirely clear what a Shinto practitioner would make of any of this. Similarly, if we look at the relationship between what we now term religion around the Mediterranean prior to Christianity, we find that the different gods were not competing propositions, but merely a pool of different names for the same entities, and this never quite managed to generate a contradiction until emperors made themselves gods-on-earth and spoiled the game for everyone.

It is the peculiar legacy of the core traditions of the Abrahamic faiths (and I exclude here traditions like Sufi Islam, which straddles between the God of Abraham and the Dharmic faiths) to risk founding theological thought upon the assumption that our god is the only real god. The story of Bel and the Dragon in the Judaic sacred texts (apocryphal to Christians) is precisely a forensic investigation at to why Bel (or Baal) is not a god. This scripture is the first detective story, the Sherlock Holmes mythos millennia before its time. Yet to equate this kind of exclusionary theology with all religions is terribly misleading. What’s more, the success of Christianity – or better yet what Kierkegaard called Christendom – is precisely an artefact of the sheer success of this theology, and a reminder of precisely why our sciences were able to grow out of it.

The question of what kind of atheist someone might be when they claim this identity is thus far more complex than it originally appears, in part because of the sheer historical influence of theology in European culture. For many atheists, the rationality of their atheological position depends upon whether god (and even more so God) is a proposition (equivalently: a hypothesis) and therefore whether that proposition is true, meaning, existing in reality (itself a perverse understanding of theology). In such cases there can be little doubt that the people in question are still practicing a variation on the kind of deistic theology well-known to the men and women of the Enlightenment and the centuries thereafter.

The kind of critique I am advancing here entails an uncovering of the practices of thought entailed in personal identities that thrive on distancing from religion – and this is almost completely obscured by the idea that you must be either a theist or an atheist or agnostic. It is in no way natural from, say, Hindu theology to understand matters this way (nor is it in any way accurate to consider those particular traditions to be polytheistic, i.e. as comprising of a set of gods instead of one God). The three way split is only the false choice between the theist presupposing a certain theology and thus requiring theodicy (i.e. the problem of how God allows evil); the atheist presupposing the failure of theodicy and thus requiring atheology; or playing this game without conclusion for the agnostic. The entire framework here is Christian theology.

Thus anyone for whom the joke about disbelieving just one more god adequately works, not just as a joke but as a mission statement, is necessarily engaged in theological practices that are resolutely and inescapably Christian in their origin and nature. Christian-atheist would be a misleading term, but perhaps achristian atheist is not far from the mark. To reject theology entirely requires a very different capacity, and is what I suspect motivates so many deep thinkers today to focus instead upon ontology, which is effectively non-theology. There is no complete rejection to be found here, only various kinds of righteousness to be generated by different kinds of allegiance or conversion, and various forms of non-participation, whether secular or otherwise.

Over a century ago, Nietzsche remarked that “the complete and definitive victory of atheism might free mankind of this whole feeling of guilty indebtedness toward its origin” – and I suppose he was right, but not in the way that he intended. For what has emerged instead, which Nietzsche would have reviled, is a kind of widespread willed ignorance concerning how most atheological thought comes to reach any kind of conclusion about god-concepts. Disbelieving ‘just one more god’ is not rejecting theology: it is just another version of Christendom’s insistence upon a single mandatory theology. Both the religious and the non-religious can do better.

The Scientific Age?

Do we live in a ‘Scientific Age’? What would that phrase mean, and how could we judge – scientifically – if it were true?

I recently read a piece in The Atlantic on free will that disappointed me. I’d already been checking up on the state of the art for this topic (see Is Free Will Too Cheap?), which has become particularly interesting in recent years. But nothing of that could be found in the piece in The Atlantic, which felt suspiciously more like a poor excuse for a Sam Harris interview. The article closed by tacitly declaring that we live in “the scientific age” – and that rather amused and annoyed me. Because if that were a fair characterisation of our time, would that not be blaming scientists for our rather dreadful global predicament? My sense of this, as a scientist by training, is that there is no empirical basis for such an attribution, and that rhetoric (rather than evidence) is what motivates such an assertion.

To properly explore this, we must first ask: what does it mean to characterise an Age? For the most part, the practice of defining Ages has entailed a historical or mythological assessment. Hence, for instance, the attribution of a Golden Age in ancient Greece, which was a mythic time before humanity messed everything up. The Age of Sail and the Age of Steam were likewise retroactive attributions, albeit in these cases based on historical rather than mythological considerations. It actually makes more sense to make these kinds of assessment after the fact, since only then can the relative competing factors be weighed carefully against each other – although even then, the choice to assign an ‘Age’ shows a bias in focus at the very least.

It is only with the twentieth century that we see attempts to characterise history in the present tense – and even these seem relatively dubious upon later reflection. The Atomic Age built upon fantasies about the future born of the New York World’s Fair of 1939, but as it happened nuclear energy did not characterise much of an Age, since it gave way within decades to the Space Age, which was equally short-lived. The frequent use of ‘space-age’ as a marketing adjective links both these science fiction tales to the flourishing capitalist production line – and indeed to their rhetorical deployment against the Soviet production line that was almost indistinguishable apart from its overriding mythology. Industry, either side of the Iron Curtain, was much more important than science, which was (and is) industry’s bitch.

This analysis is not scientific, of course, but rather historical and political. Our second line of enquiry must then ask: what do we mean by ‘scientific’? The usual invocation here is ‘the scientific method’, the cycle of observation, hypothesis, prediction, testing, and eventual theory. However, empirical observation of scientists at work has not validated this as a general method applied by researchers, and it appears to operate more as a catechism than as a practical methodology. (You would not get very far using solely this method as-stated for a research project!) A key problem is that observations are themselves theory-laden, and as the historian Thomas Kuhn observed it is never the case that observations alone determine how one theory replaces another. The wider philosophical questions here are not vital to the current discussion, however, only that ‘the scientific method’ is not a means of distinguishing what is scientific from its alternatives, regardless of its uses as an educational dogma.

Central to what is deemed ‘scientific’ is evidential reasoning, the process of taking evidence (observations, measurements) and then drawing conclusions from it. Theories form an indispensable element of such reasoning: the theoretical apparatus provided by the periodic table guides evidential reasoning in chemistry, for instance. But by itself, evidential reasoning can only exclude things that are clearly not scientific (such as divine revelation, or faith in free markets), it cannot positively identify a science. It’s notable, for instance, that evidential reasoning is core to the skills of historians, who are not often called scientists, and every branch of the humanities uses evidential reasoning in some role.

What distinguishes most things that are called ‘scientific’ from other disciplines that deploy evidential reasoning is the possibility of verifying judgements, a point discussed at length by Karl Popper. Evidential reasoning in the humanities invites a relationship between propositions and conclusions, yet the propositions themselves entail an element of judgement but not of measurement. Conversely, ethology (study of animal behaviour) entails judgements that are open to verification by further observation. This field, which does not resemble the archetypal ‘scientific method’ at all, nonetheless entails a substantial element of verifiable judgement.

Yet a grey area occurs. Some physicists insist, for instance, upon a quantum multiverse – the existence of which is essentially impossible. (Indeed, the word ‘existence’ has a questionable meaning in these kinds of context). We then might be tempted to extend ‘scientific’ to mean ‘asserted by scientists’, at which point the phrase will cease to distinguish anything useful. Many scientists will assert that George W. Bush was a fool, but that should not be mistaken for a scientific claim: that would require some means of verifying the judgment that was not merely anecdotal. We ought to be careful about this distinction if we value the work of scientists, since the credibility of the term ‘scientific’ is all too easily strained when we start deploying ‘Science says...’ as a form of prophetic persuasion.

Suppose we accept my provisional criteria for determining something as ‘scientific’. We can then ask: what would be required to scientifically judge our time as a ‘Scientific Age’? Immediately it should be clear that it will necessarily fail to qualify for this accolade; firstly because ‘scientific’ is not a criteria that could be applied on a scale beyond specific observations, methods, or practices, and secondly because the characterisation of an ‘Age’ is necessarily a historical judgement, and not one open to verification in the required sense. Of course, this doesn’t rule out the historical judgement in question – but it cannot be a scientific claim in any conventional sense of the term.

So what about the historical judgement? Here, we still have to meet the requirements of evidential reasoning and the evidence is not very convincing. We would presumably expect to see evidence of widespread evidential reasoning in culture at large – something that would be very difficult to produce. Where we do find it – in law, for instance – the trend goes back to before the aforementioned Age of Steam, indeed before the Age of Enlightenment, so using this to characterise our time seems to be extremely misleading.

Not a scientific judgement, not a historical judgement, what is the basis of claiming we live in “the scientific age”? Like the Atomic and Space Age, this appears to be a purely rhetorical move, presumably one intended to contrast our time with an ‘Age of Faith’. But characterising even the Middle Ages as an ‘Age of Faith’ would be a struggle for any honest historian, and until the late nineteenth century the development of the sciences was a quintessentially Christian endeavour (although it was also underwritten by earlier Islamic scholarship, which in turn carried on the work of the ancient Greeks).

The point of claiming that we live in a ‘Scientific Age’ appears to be to continue asserting the alleged war between ‘Science’ and ‘Religion’, and to further imply that ‘Science has won’. But this is simply bad evidential reasoning. As I explore in The Mythology of Evolution, the cultural conflicts that are being spun within this rhetoric occur both within the sciences (e.g. over different evolutionary theories) and between religion and non-religion (e.g. over the theological and atheological implications of said theories). Frankly, it is a hopeless task to treat the terms ‘Science’ or ‘Religion’ as unifying in anything beyond the sketchiest of senses, and even if these generalisations are accepted we ought to take note of Stephen Jay Gould’s objection that there cannot be a conflict between two almost entirely disjunct concepts.

I can find no evidence that positivists, those whose non-religious faith is invested in the sciences, are better or worse people than religious folks. But I can provide evidence that they are alike in many ways, including the example that I have discussed here. Rhetorical tactics such as asserting that we live in “the scientific age” are essentially self-betraying; they do not uphold the evidential values that positivists justifiably venerate. We can gainfully compare this to the reprehensible tendency of some Christians to endorse torture and war against Muslims, thus betraying the moral values of Jesus’ teachings, which they are supposed to venerate, or for a small minority of Muslims to betray Mohammad’s teachings by murdering innocents. If the latter cases are notably more extreme, it’s worth remembering that some positivists have also supported this kind of horrific brutality, it’s just that they are not being overtly hypocritical in doing so, ‘just’ morally repugnant. Every tradition, alas, has its darker side.

What positivists, Christians, and Muslims all have in common is that they are all human. As Charles Taylor argues in his epic tome A Secular Age, one of the most unique characteristics of our time is the sheer range of beliefs and practices on offer, having fractured and diversified in the wake of what he calls ‘the Nova effect’, forming an (all-too-real) phenomenal multiverse. However, as the examples I have given above demonstrate, we could rhetorically dub our time an ‘Age of Confusion’, an era when faithful adherence to the values of any tradition has become increasingly hard to find, while our critical faculties are frequently numbed by the easy appeal of emotive rhetoric – especially when we get to valorise ourselves while denigrating others. If, like me, you think the practices of the sciences deserve our respect, you owe it to yourself to uphold their core values concerning evidential reasoning and not slip into the cognitive biases that flourish as much today as in any other era of human history.

The opening image is Density of States by Dr Regina Valluzzi AKA ‘the Nerdly Painter’, which I found here on her Wordpress site, Nerdly Painter (used here with permission).

Ontology as Non-Theology

To speak of ontology is to speak of being, to say what exists, or how it exists, or how the things that exist are related, while to speak of gods or God is what is called theology. Every theology is necessarily a form of ontology – it takes a specific position on what exists – but not every ontology is a form of theology. However, every ontology is and must be, at the very least, a non-theology. Which is to say, you can’t talk about being or existence without at some point crossing into religious territory, however tangentially.

Let’s get some helpful maps for entering this rather contentious territory.

Either you have an image of God, or of gods, in your mind, and it matters to you, or you have an image of the impossibility of deities and that matters to you, or you do not find images of divine entities are of any particular relevance for how you think about existence. These three positions are those of the religious and non-religious positions of theism (e.g. Christianity, Islam), atheism (e.g. secular humanism, Marxism), and non-theism (e.g. Theraveda Buddhism, Jainism). That makes it sound as if you cannot get by without positioning your view of existence (your ontology) in respect to images of God or gods, even though you quite obviously can – it is just that when you are confronted about theology, whatever stand you take must be positioned somewhere within the space of this particular game.

But it is not just theology that everyone is forced into a position upon, ontology is equally inescapable: everybody who speaks has an ontology – even if it just all the names of all the things that they know about. Your ontology is the set of things you can say exist, and this process is well established in us long before language gives us names for them. Some philosophers develop quite intricate systems for describing how things are, or for setting the limits of what can be known about how things are, in what could be called technical ontologies. However, despite the care with which it is practiced, ontology is not a subject prone to widespread agreement: the number and kinds of ontology are limitless, and all of the more sophisticated ontologies come with a recognition of the limitations of this kind of thinking.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) sets the pattern here. While ontology in one form or another goes back at least three millennia to the Sanskrit scriptures known as the Vedas and to the ancient Greek philosophers, the way we think about technical ontologies remains coloured by the work of Kant during the Enlightenment. As Theodor Adorno has commented, Kant recognised that an ontology “exists only for others” and thus has no meaning outside of lived experience, while he simultaneously tried to conduct a “salvaging of ontology” as something beyond experience. The tension between these two elements of Kant’s ontological work has never gone away.

Today, philosophers can be broadly divided into two camps. Firstly, there are those who have continued to pursue Kant’s project of ontological rescue who are engaged in trying to construct ontologies that can be claimed to go beyond experience. My personal favourite of these is Alain Badiou, who identifies ontology with mathematics (set theory in particular), and then reasons about ontology by using maths as his foundation. On the other hand there are those who are engaged in Kant’s project of ontological critique, who are primarily engaged in situating ontologies (including theologies) as elements of a plurality. Here I have a fondness for Paul Feyerabend, who found technical ontology less than useful, and was dismissive of what Terrance Blake calls “the detour through ontology”.

What ontology and theology have in common, what binds them together as conceptual sisters, is that both are about how we imagine existence. If we did not live in a world so heavily conditioned by theistic traditions, it might not even be necessary to distinguish between these two practices – but our intellectual inheritance is inescapably coloured by the Judaic concept of history, the Islamic reinterpretation of Greek philosophy and mathematics, and the Christian faith in truth, which descends from the earlier monotheistic practices and has given rise to the tradition of scientific investigation. The core danger of trying to paint our time as one where religion and science ‘fight’ is that the key battlegrounds are within the sciences and within religious (and non-religious) thought, as I drew out of the discussion within The Mythology of Evolution. Despite the ‘official story’, the majority of those who believe that the sciences uncover the truth about the world are Christian, and the most vociferously asserted theologies in the public sphere are atheologies that insist upon crossing out all gods. 

Theology, including atheology, always possesses a moral element (or an aesthetic element – the distinction is not always important). Take any of the atheologies being deployed today and you will always find behind it a (moral) commitment to truth. Since gods clearly do not exist (the logic goes), we must commit ourselves to an atheology where gods are not an acceptable part of our thought. This position is undergirded by a prior commitment to the importance of truth. It is because gods are not true that we must reject them. The theological positions are generally more varied, and include those that are a direct inversion of the standard atheology (starting once more with the commitment to truth), as well as others in which God serves as a distant moral guarantor (which was broadly Kant’s position), or in which a moral order is otherwise given a divine foundation.

Now in the case of contemporary technical ontologies, the moral element may appear to be absent, and this could be taken as a justification for not linking these systems of thought with theology altogether. However, this is not as straightforward as it might appear. Many non-theological ontologies begin with the same (moral) commitment to truth as other theologies/atheologies, even if that prior moral claim is sometimes obscured by a claim to nihilism, usually developed with (or perhaps against) Nietzsche. But nihilism is essentially a self-negating position for philosophers: if it were plausible to void all truth and meaning, there would be no viable topics for any philosophy to address. Only the rather limited claim that ‘the universe in itself is devoid of value or meaning’ is available, and this is a terribly uninteresting observation until it enters theology, where it becomes a rather straightforward atheological claim.

Even those technical ontologies that do not begin with the moral commitment to truth cannot avoid entering into moral territory later. Once you make a claim for how existence is organised or can be understood it is hard to avoid this becoming a demand to understand in this way (or something like it) on pain of error. If the ontologist did not have this kind of commitment to truth before theorising, and they manage to avoid acquiring it afterwards, then what motive would they have for sharing their ontology? There is always a moral value here, even if it is concealed behind epistemic justifications. We should expect this: no-one is going to pursue ontology or theology without a motive, and that motive will always contain a moral (or aesthetic) element.

Tolstoy claimed that it was impossible for a person to have no religion, in the sense that this word means a relationship to the universe. This statement no longer seems as self-evident as it did a century and a half ago because the meaning of ‘religion’ has become mangled through its deployment as a caricatured ‘enemy’ to be fought… those whose self-image is founded upon ‘fighting religion’ are effectively barred from considering how this practice might also seem like a religion when viewed from the outside. It was for this reason that I began to talk of non-religions, and for equivalent but opposite reasons that others talk of ‘worldviews’. Technical ontologies scrupulously avoid overt religious elements, but they cannot entirely avoid operating as non-religions, because you simply cannot talk about existence without taking some kind of moral (or aesthetic) stand upon it.

Thus ontology can be understood as non-theology, as a means of conducting the same kind of how-and-why-things-are-this-way discussions that occur within theology – the ‘Queen of the sciences’ as it was once known – without having to take any particular positive or negative view on the existence or otherwise of divine forces. Except, of course, they always do. How can they not! You can’t have a system for summing up existence and yet never be required to take a theological stand when the vast majority of the planet constrains their ontological concerns to those of theology. These two practices are twinned; they are distinct, but they can never be separated while theology is still being practiced. Accepting this proposition doesn’t mean that everyone has to be a theologian – but it does mean that you can’t practice ontology without at least brushing up against theology. And good fences, as they say, make for good neighbours.

The opening image is David Chidgey’s Music of the Spheres, which I found here on his website Art Glass Mosaics. As ever, no copyright infringement is implied and I will take the image down if asked.

Think for Yourself?

An extremely common demand made by non-religious folks is that you ought to ‘think for yourself’. On the surface, this seems like a reasonable request – certainly, the people who make this claim believe it is morally exemplary to do so! But what does it mean to ‘think for yourself’ and what moral weight can this directive bear?

It is worth observing that the demand to ‘think for yourself’ is often made against the background assumption that if you are part of a religious tradition you do not think for yourself. This appears to be based on two separate but related assumptions: that religious folks do not think for themselves because a centralised autocratic institution dictates norms of behaviour, and that ‘thinking for yourself’ is necessarily a mode of freedom. The latter claim is largely the converse of first, based on the logical connection that says ‘either you think for yourself, or an institution thinks for you’, and the problem with this is that it is solely by drawing against traditions and institutions that any kind of thinking or language is possible. The trouble with the former assumption is that it doesn’t describe contemporary religious institutions outside of purely fictional narratives very accurately.

Of all the world religions, only Catholicism has a central bureaucracy and single leader, and yet Catholics (if you actually talk to a reasonable number of such people) are generally far more independently minded about their theology and religious practice than protestant Christians who – despite their branch of that religious tradition having expressly broken away for the purpose of ‘thinking for themselves’ – all too often align around congealed interpretations of their scriptures. (I personally find it fascinating that an education system that purportedly discourages independent thought creates so many independent thinkers, and suspect this says more about schools than religions). If we move away from Christianity, the situation is even less one of outsourced thinking: the norm for global religion is distributed religious practice, with no centralised elements whatsoever.

There is, however, at least one way that religious folks can be said to not ‘think for themselves’, which is that when they face moral crises they will turn to their co-religionaries or (local) community leaders for advice. This is, however, what is required in this situation, since the best philosophical and scientific evidence suggests that you can only operate in a moral context when you are embedded in a common moral community and can engage with others in what in Chaos Ethics I have termed moral representation. A person who solely ‘thinks for themselves’ i.e. who never checks their reasoning, ethics, or assumptions against another person cannot be relied upon to think reasonably, or to reason morally, because humans naturally skew their reasoning towards their own benefit.

This question of ‘thinking for yourself’ also takes a strange turn when we bring in psychologists and psychiatrists who provide life advice and moral representation to their patients. This relationship is parallel to that between a religious community leader and their congregation; only the framework of reason and morality is distinct, as it is when we move between religious traditions. Is a person who is extolled to ‘think for themselves’ prohibited from seeking psychological assistance? I doubt this is the intent of the phrase. Indeed, I suspect that this kind of secular (and allegedly scientifically grounded) advice-seeking is something that would normally be encouraged. Similarly, the advice to ‘think for yourself’ is turned on its head in the context of scientific consensus, which advocates of this phrase typically align with while opposing those (such as people who dispute the reports of climate scientists) who ‘think for themselves’ on empirical issues, and thus where independent thinking is both mocked and disdained. In this regard, ‘think and verify’ might be a better phrase to bandy about.

So the demand to ‘think for yourself’ transpires not to be advice to think independently – which anyway, would be both impossible (since our linguistic concepts are maintained collectively) and undesirable (since thought without cross-checks is self-serving and apt to mislead). Rather, it risks becoming a demand that you think within the same framework of reason and ethics that the person making the assertion holds. Which at this point means that it has become simply a non-religious version of the very complaint being levelled against the religious alternatives i.e. it is an insistence of adopting specific norms of reason and ethics, namely the secular descendant of the Enlightenment tradition of reason and ethics. This is a great tradition – one that both religious and non-religious people are participating in – but it cannot be elevated to the sole source of norms without transgressing its own values of freedom and autonomy.

The one good thing I can say about a demand to ‘think for yourself’ is that at least it is a positive claim. I would rather hear this than incoherent fantasies like ‘the world would be a better place without religion’, which is only a secular version of an all-too-familiar religious bigotry that insists everyone who isn’t like me is necessarily inferior. There are authentic moral values being espoused in the claim to ‘think for yourself’ – it is just that in its most basic form, ‘thinking for yourself’ is also likely to lead to terrible vices. In this, as in all ethical affairs, we need to be part of a community if we hope to live up to our chosen moral standards. Besides, we now have plenty of people who ‘think for themselves’ and it isn’t helping any more: what we need is not a greater supply of autonomous thinkers, but better forms of collective reasoning. And this requires co-operation between everyone, whether they ‘think for themselves’ or not.

Galileo the Hero and Other Mythos Histories

Suggest Jesus was just another human and you horrify orthodox Christians – suggest Galileo wasn’t heroic, and you horrify orthodox Positivists. How do disputes over historical facts possess this power to induce horror?

The inability to bear contradictory conceptions is called cognitive dissonance by psychologists. Recently, we have made watching other people endure dissonance into entertainment – amateur ‘singers’ who become enraged when their lack of talent becomes exposed, or low-income lovers reacting violently when a lying partner is revealed. The experience is disorientating, and can invoke rage in certain cases, yet we all experience minor dissonance on a daily basis in pursuit of a consistent sense of self: the story we tell about ourselves has to be maintained against the ambiguities of life.  We expect to encounter a single consistent story about the world – history – and when this is threatened by rival accounts, dissonance occurs.

In Chaos Ethics, I use the term moral horror to describe cognitive dissonance in the context of ethics – the unsettling or fury-inducing response to incompatible ethical conceptions. Moral horror can be seen in the context of abortion, gay marriage, and many more cases of contemporary political disagreement. My additional claim in this piece is that because we possess moral values concerning truth, clashes over historical questions also evoke moral horror, and this is the reason that contrary historical claims can bring about dissonance. When positivists express outrage at the idea of creationism, for instance, it is because this suggestion transgresses their deeply held moral values concerning truth (see The Mythology of Evolution for this discussion). What on the face of it seems to be a factual dispute becomes a moral conflict: ‘you should not believe this (because it is not true)’.

We need moral horror – it is not something we should wish to eliminate. It is one of the few things that will motivate us to take action against that which we judge as morally wrong. But there is also severe danger any time cognitive dissonance is involved, because we are at the greatest risk of acting unreasonably whenever it affects us (just recall the poor victims of those ‘shocking’ day time talk shows). In the grip of moral horror, we are certain we are right, and cannot – quite literally – imagine how the other view of the world that horrifies us could be in any way reasonable. At most, we can tolerate the other perspective, which is a polite way of saying that we look down on these foolish others and patiently endure their being so obviously wrong. A key part of my purpose in exploring moral horror in Chaos Ethics is precisely to move past this intolerant tolerance, and to achieve this requires a deeper understanding of the role of imagination in morality – and history.

To unravel the moral horror of clashing histories we need to appreciate that our access to the world is mediated by certain imaginative patterns. Joseph Campbell referred to the mythic systems that are tied to lived practices as ‘living mythologies’ and it is the nature of such things that they are indeed lived. Often, this entails a relationship between the practitioners’ ethics and the stories of their mythos (i.e. a specific cultural vantage point, see the chapter on ethics in Imaginary Games for more on this). We cannot, as Jean-François Lyotard and others have suggested, break out of seeing the world through these ‘grand narratives’ – judging them as if we could get completely outside is simply, as Charles Taylor observed, yet another mythic point of view (what might be called the postmodern or relativist mythology). No, I’m afraid we all must imagine in specific ways if we are to imagine anything at all (whether fact or fiction), but as both Campbell and Raimon Pannikar drew attention to, we all have great difficulty in understanding our own mythologies as anything other than truth – and this is the root of the problem to be explored here, because it is this that sets up inevitable cognitive dissonance.

For the purpose of explaining the phenomena under consideration, let us treat any mythos as comprised of two elements – mythos stories that are recognised as stories by those who share them, and mythos histories that are taken as factual. Mythos stories have as their focus their moral content – Jesus’ parables are a great example, or Homer’s Odyssey as a guide to how a Greek warrior must be tempered before he can become a good husband. Conversely, mythos histories are read as informing chronology rather than morality, a key archetype being Jewish genealogies in the Torah (“Abraham begat Isaac” and so forth) that organize the passage of time. Indeed, the Abrahamic traditions are sometimes taken as having ‘invented history’ in the way it is often understood – perceiving time as both passing and consecutive, and also as heading somewhere  (see, for instance, Jacob Neusner’s The Christian and Judaic Invention of History). Homer and (later) Herodotus developed a concept of recording the past narratively, but it is only after Christianity brought Jewish practices to Rome that the mythic dimensions of histories became fully-fledged.

Now the problematic part of mythos histories is that the transition from ‘story’ to ‘history’ implies a move from an infinite space of possibility to a finite space of definite facts. There can be (it is assumed) only one history, or rather there can be only one true history. In those traditions partly descended from Plato’s Greek philosophy (especially Christianity and its offshoot atheisms) this is an especially likely habit, but via the sciences (which grow out of Christianity and Islam, and hence Platonic thought) the trend is now everywhere. What is more, wherever the prevailing assumption is to demand a single true history, there is a temptation for people to treat mythos stories as mythos histories. For example, orthodox Christian sects may recognize parables as ‘just stories’ but the Garden of Eden will be taken as history. This is by no means a given, of course – the majority of Christian groups draw their lines here very differently – but the point remains that the presumed line between fact and fiction becomes blurred within an individual’s mythos.

This phenomena is not constrained to religious traditions, as is usually assumed, but happens just as readily within non-religious contexts. For example, for many positivists Galileo is presented as having defended a suppressed yet true description of the arrangement of the planets (heliocentrism) against the erroneous dogma of the church. However, the records of the same event offer multiple alternative accounts - including that the clergy at the time were the sober scientists in this affair and that Galileo's techniques were not sufficient to prove what he had nonetheless correctly intuited. Similarly, the usual positivistic mythos history requires Galileo as a valiant hero maintaining the truth against the errors of the church – but this account is somewhat undermined by the cynic’s observation that Galileo’s offending manuscript brought trouble for him primarily by portraying his then-ally, Pope Urban VIII, as a simpleton. Woe betide anyone who suggests to an orthodox positivist that Galileo’s downfall was his own arrogance!

We can see in this example why a mythos history is more than just a neutral chronicle of events, and why it is sometimes difficult to separate ‘story’ from ‘history’. To hail Galileo as a scientific ‘martyr’ requires a mythos history that presents him as heroically resisting religious oppression, and bringing forth the world-changing power of empirical observation that is the ‘sacred’ value of positivistic non-religion. This particular episode comes across radically differently from the viewpoint of (for instance) the Chinese, who were never so invested in any specific cosmological arrangement, and who readily adopted Copernicus’ heliocentric cosmos when exposed to it by the Jesuits – and without the significant seismic upheavals attributed to Galileo’s ‘heroism’. This is directly contrary to what is claimed by, say, Luciano Floridi, whose mythos history (presented at a TEDx talk in Oxford) essentially requires Galileo, along with Darwin and Freud, to acquire the grand status of epoch-making scientific iconoclasts fighting religion (a mythos Bertrand Russell helped lay the groundwork for). It is not that this role does not match ‘the facts’ in each case, but rather that the account of these individuals purely as revolutionary is radically incomplete – as would be the case for any history presented solely from a single point-of-view. As the philosophers of the twentieth century never tired of emphasizing, all history is mythic history.

Rather than taking this situation to mark the ‘end of history’, I want to offer a slightly different approach. In Chaos Ethics, I draw against William James and (later, and independently) Michael Moorcock’s image of a multiverse, rather than a universe. This is not the multiverse of quantum physics, however (although Moorcock also helped inspire that), but rather the idea that beings and things experience their own separate worlds, and that none of these worlds can claim to be ‘the true world’ when taken alone. Thus while in an (imagined) universe there is only one true version of events, in an (also imagined) multiverse the facts depend upon the world you are in: it is false in most Christian worlds that ‘Jesus was an ordinary human’, but this is true in any positivist worlds. Crucially, no world-independent account is available in a multiverse, even though there is substantial agreement (at least between humans) about all manner of things. All facts always depend upon the world they are perceived from, but these diverse worlds are congruent in the majority of cases for any given species or entity provided the necessary translations can be performed accurately. Where they diverge, however, is precisely at the fault lines between contrary mythos histories – and these thus become a locus for unresolved cognitive dissonance.

This multiversal perspective is not something that can be expected to attain widespread acceptance since it requires a strong imagination to envisage. But it may only take a sufficient volume of intellectuals to adopt it (or something like it) to radically enhance our diplomatic power, and thus our capacity for effective, peaceful action on a whole host of pressing issues. Orthodox theists and positivists are unlikely to be able to talk to each other effectively – but their moderate colleagues could cross this bridge, and securing that dialogue would go a long way towards motivating substantial moral action in the developed world. By substituting a mythos superset for a singular and exclusive mythos history, the possibility of harnessing moral horror as a transformative influence can begin to seriously emerge. This is a powerful option since, as mentioned previously, it is moral horror that helps motivate reform on ethical matters – but only when it is properly aligned. Up until now, the potentialities of the multiverse have been used mostly for ‘spin’ – to obfuscate and deceive by using the gap between events and the mythic histories that record them solely for partisan gain. We can only speculate at what might be achieved if we began to use it instead as a tool for peace.

For more on moral horror, intolerant tolerance, and how to be a traveller in an ethical multiverse, check out my latest book Chaos Ethics.