The Source of Meaning
The King is dead. Long live the King.
Religion is succeeded by the blind worship of science. Scientism, the religion of "Science" - ironically distinct and remotely distant from real science - is becoming the source of meaning in our age. We scoundrels must of necessity choose our own values and meaning, but we invariably choose them to be dictated by the authority of fantasy.
Why do we live? "Because that's the purpose of our genes", say the adherents of scientism. Yet genes do not have purpose, says science and reason. Genes are mere bunches of atoms, that either replicate or not. They have no purpose, and Nature cares not what they do. Nature isn't the slightest bit pleased when things replicate, and nor is it at all concerned when they don't. Science, and not scientism, seeks to map this Nature - to reflect its form.
Science is descriptive, rather than prescriptive. It cannot tell us what is good or bad. It cannot provide us with value. If we value truth, then we take that value with us to science. We don't get it from science. There's no scientific experiment that can prove the value of truth, just as there's no scientific experiment that can prove the value of life or of death. Scientism, however, is not science, and it has a proof for everything.
In scientism, truth and value are quite literally in numbers. "Many people believe X." "The consensus is X." "My colleagues agree." "There are a number of books on the subject." "I have received no complaints." "There is much support." Truth is by popular vote. The more Nature does it, the more right it is. It is the authority of DNA - the authority of the tradition of Nature itself. And whereas in ordinary religion the logical fallacy of choice is the appeal to the authority of some holy book, in scientism it is the appeal to the authority of the number (argumentum ad numerum). For the adherents of scientism, numbers represent the only real value, and these become the very substance of their life.
People become numbers. The numbers become their horizon - their all. They are just copies.
- Kierkegaard
If you explain to these numerous fellows that they are constantly, in every waking moment, appealing to the fallacy of the number, you are wasting your breath, because they don't know anything except the number. They cannot hear you, because existence requires contrast. And for this same reason such people don't exist as individuals. They have no self, and no soul, since the soul is precisely the self, and is the genius in man.
Samuel Butler accurately describes this soulless culture - the culture of the number - in his novel Erewhon, when he visits the hallowed "Colleges of Unreason".
"It is not our business," he said, "to help students to think for themselves. Surely this is the very last thing which one who wishes them well should encourage them to do. . . ." In some respects, however, he was thought to hold somewhat radical opinions, for he was President of the Society for the Suppression of Useless Knowledge, and for the Completer Obliteration of the Past.
Ours is an age in which the man who thinks for himself is deemed to be a dangerous megalomaniac, and if he should dare to share his thoughts with even one other person then he is also a "cult leader" to be feared and reviled. Ours is a culture that is geared to minimize such unpleasantness by discouraging, and denying the individual thinker, who creates his own values, shines his own light, and follows his own star.
The hate and the fear that the common people have for the individual thinker is the hate and the fear they have for their own true, buried, selves. What they see in the individual thinker is what they fear for themselves.
Can thou give thyself thine evil and thy good, setting up thy will as a law? Canst thou be thine own judge and the avenger of thine own law? Even so is a star cast out into the void, and into the icy breath of solitude.
- Nietzsche, in "Thus Spake Zarathustra"
What people don't want to be reminded of, is that, to the degree that one has a mind at all, and to the degree that one makes conscious choices, then it is impossible to obtain values from anywhere other than oneself. For if a person gets their values from a book, then they are personally choosing to believe that book. And if they get their values from another person, then they are choosing to believe that person. And if they get their values from a dream, they are choosing to believe the dream. Therefore, for the sake of "sanity", and for the sake of "others", conscious choice is denied. Not only is the individual thinker denied, but the mind and the very self are denied. Human becomes machine, and the sleeper is lost in a dream.
Science arose by accident in the brief space when one great orthodoxy was loosening its hold and the new great orthodoxy had not yet reached its full strength. The first orthodoxy was that of religion which dominated the dark ages. The second orthodoxy is that of the belief in society, which is dominating the dark age now beginning.
- Celia Green
By Kevin Solway
The Philosophy Takeaway 'The Meaning of Life' Issue 29
