The frameshifting breakthrough of monotheism is locating divinity in conceptual space. Legend has it that the Biblical Abraham came from one of the wealthiest families in Ur of the Chaldees. His father was an idol maker. That would be the equivalent to a pharmaceutical company and an insurance company rolled in one. Idols were prescribed for everything. Building a home? Better get some idols for that! You’ll need one at the gate; one under the threshold, two over the lintel; and. . . don’t forget those house gods! Going on a trip? Don’t forget the idols! Opening a new business? Got sick? There are idols for that. You’re going to need plenty. One day, Abraham’s father tells him to mind the shop. When dad comes back, he finds the whole place smashed to pieces: all but one large statue with a club thrust in his hand. He asks, “Abie! What happened here?” And Abraham replies, “Don’t look at me! The big one took his club and destroyed the rest.”

Today, we wonder at the absurdity of believing in the supernatural power of a sculpture. But try to imagine how it came about. The first sculptor would have likely felt (as would those around him) that he’d found the figure in the wood or stone; that he’d made a discovery; that the deity had revealed itself. Imitations of that first discovery would become a craft. And through convention, the society accepted that these figures were gods. So if you were a member of such a society, idols would be among the things you took for granted. It takes an Abraham to break such a spell— the spell of convention.

In his book Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, Owen Barfield (1898-1997) explains how the world we perceive is made of “representations”—images that we imbue with a metaphysic agreed upon by the community to which we belong (i.e. conventions). It is conventional today for instance to regard the world around us as composed of particles and waves; to understand sound and music as waves of air compression; to consider human beings as apes; and to regard ourselves as selfish machines. In other words, we don’t merely perceive images (I mean via our five senses) outside a context: we imbue the physical world around us with our models of understanding; we view it all through the lens of our paradigm. We create an inner image and project it upon the outer world.

In case this explanation is too abstract, think about birdsong (one of Barfield’s analogies). You hear a chirp and if you know anything about birds, you may conclude that it’s a chickadee or a cardinal or a grackle (possibly a jay) without seeing the source of the sound. In other words, we don’t merely sense things in a disconnected manner. Instead, we form conventional representations of the phenomena.

You’re likely wondering, What’s wrong with that? You hear a familiar birdsong, surely you can assume it comes from a familiar bird. And once you have that taxonomical handle on it, you can communicate about it, study it, predict some of its behaviour. Indeed. I am not arguing that our paradigms are unproductive, far from it. Think of it this way: the salient point of the analogy is that the bird is invisible and we impose our paradigms, our models, on things invisible, and we do so unconsciously. Here’s Barfield:

But a representation, which is collectively mistaken for an ultimate—ought not to be called a representation. It is an idol. Thus the phenomena themselves are idols, when they are imagined as enjoying that independence of human perception which can in fact only pertain to the unrepresented.

By “unrepresented,” Barfield means the world of particles and waves, of chemistry, genetics, optics, physics, and mathematics—notions of underlying realities that are not perceived by the senses and are therefore thought to exist and persist in the absence of human sensation: in other words, our conventional metaphysics. But Barfield is after something more universal and more widely applicable to paradigms more generally. By “unrepresented” he means to indicate an underlying reality for which we can only make models that we confirm indirectly. So the concept can apply equally to the systems of divination that held the place and prestige of our sciences during the Greco-Roman period, or any other such system involving an appeal to realities beyond our senses. In a way, the unrepresented is unknowable and therefore indeterminate. When we drape our models over the unrepresented, we illuminate some aspects and obscure others. We create representations of the unrepresented.

There is nothing wrong with these impositions until we forget their limitations: that’s when we wind up worshipping idols. Here’s Barfield again: “when the nature and limitations of artificial images are forgotten, they become idols.” He’s referring here to the models of the historical sciences—i.e. those sciences that are not subject to direct experimentation and the scientific method: sciences such as evolution, archaeology, big bang cosmology, black hole cosmology, and the like. When we speak of evolution or of the gradual progression and succession of civilisational development or of the big bang or of black holes or of dark matter or of anthropogenic climate change as though they were sensible realities—when we make models of things insensible and believe them to now be sensible—we are making and worshipping idols.

Barfield’s most remarkable insight concerns the ancient idea of saving the appearances, an issue I’ve discussed before in “What is a Scientific Fact?” According to Pythagorean-Socratic metaphysics, the world of the senses is a world that perishes, a place of illusions; the true world is the eternal world of forms or ideas, which are not subject to temporal change. This world of forms precedes the temporal world and provides the foundations, the archetypes, geometries, mathematics, and laws upon which the physical world is built.

Via Plato and Aristotle—the chief developers and promulgators of the Pythagorean-Socratic school—the Western world came to believe that we could not know true realities by studying the physical world because it is a distorted world of shadows. The best an observer could do was “save the appearances,” a confusing translation of the Greek original, which is better understood as “account for the phenomena.” Consequently, models representing the cosmos were considered to be useful heuristics (helpful devices), but not actual representations of how the cosmos worked. No doubt, they came to this conclusion because the movements of the heavens were confounding and elusive and could never really be accounted for.

It wasn’t till Galileo that this paradigm was challenged, when he insisted that reality itself could be represented by a cosmological model if it accounted accurately for all the associated phenomena. This is what was so radical and controversial about Galileo’s claim. It was a complete paradigm shift. Suddenly right and wrong were re-contextualised. Galileo’s demand was that we relate to the temporal, sublunary world as a true reality. What were the implications for the unrepresentable eternal world, the world of forms, the really true reality?

Here’s where things get confusing. The models made by human ingenuity were the underlying reality, were the structures of the world of forms. We could indeed represent the unrepresented.

Like the first sculptor feeling he’d found a god in the wood or stone, scientists ever since have been working under the impression that their invented models are in fact discoveries—discovered gods, ultimate truths, which today we call “facts” and “laws.”

A further twist to the story is that this confusing marriage (or merging) of the temporal and eternal meant that the material world wasn’t a shadowy distortion of the really real reality: they were one and the same. Consciousness of the fact that we’d erased a distinction faded. The machine metaphor engulfed perception, overwriting our analogical impositions, thereby making idols of the phenomena. Thus we lost sight of the fact that we were relating to our models as primary—indeed as gods, reflecting eternal truths. We became amnesiac Platonists, at once evicting God from the garden (the natural world) and unconsciously re-installing divinity in the essence of our calculations, in our sense of their omniscience and omnipotence.

By happy coincidence, I was reading “Virology’s Event Horizon” by Dr. M. J. Bailey while putting together this article. I hadn’t heard of the reification fallacy before, but I saw at once that this concept encapsulates perfectly the subject at hand. Bailey quotes a Wikipedia entry on this fallacy as follows: “the error of treating something that is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing.” That’s idolatry in a nutshell. I felt that if Barfield’s explanation came across to some readers as too arcane, that description might clinch it for them.

I think it’s important to add that I’m not advocating an abandonment of scientific models. I am cautioning against their worship and recommending a more sober relationship with them. Good models are productive. But they are just convenient conventions that necessarily occlude other avenues of perception and productivity. In the case of virology, as recent events have shown, a runaway model can result in mass injury, death, and even tyranny. When we finally appreciate the limitations of our present models, we will encourage the design of exciting new ones. . . productive and limited in their own novel ways.

I’ll leave you with a quotation from psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910), one I presented in a previous essay, and worth repeating here:

I have heard more than one teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in. But the slightest reflection on the real conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so crude.

from The Will to Believe (1895)

Share

Leave a comment

Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.

Last week I observed that old archetypes find new expression by mining science for new figurative language. Not only do these archetypes. . . these old psychological drivers (stories and characters) figure in sci-fi stories, but they also find authoritative, scientific expression. Millenarianism now wears the scientific cloak of climate change. Revelation now poses as TheScience™. Idolatry now wears the habits of putting the scientific model before the phenomena, and of making phenomena fit the models. And that’s just a few examples. Consequently, the notion that science escapes the figures and tropes of poetics and fiction to present us with the one true Truth is a myth. It follows that truth is a slippery thing, and the philosophical concern is that we’re sliding into relativism, the idea that any personal claim is true. Of course this is not the case. Some explanations work and others don’t. Reality isn’t simply a figment of one’s imagination. I addressed this issue at the end of last week’s Barstool Bit and promised to pursue the matter further this week.

So what makes a literary conceit work? Broadly speaking, correspondence. What do I mean by correspondence? Literary scholar Jeffery Donaldson explains the concept in his article for analogy magazine, “A Bridge is a Lie: How Science Does Metaphor”: “In the correspondence model, a proposition is true if it ‘corresponds’ with something outside it.” In other words a conceit works when it strikes one as plausibly connected to the world and one’s experience. For instance, when poet Robbie Burns writes, “My love is like a red red rose,” readers connect to the image because they have experience of the beauty and the prickliness of love. The image corresponds to the experience.

It’s worth noting that this correspondence isn’t simply intellectual: there’s a participatory and enthusiastic element to figurative correspondence. If I suggest, for instance, that in picking up a button from a lawn, I am undressing it. . . one is struck by how the grass suddenly springs forth like hair. Notice the inner element invoked here, the stimulation of the imagination, the assertion of an inner power to make things new, to defamiliarise the mundane and see things as though for the first time.

In other words, an inner work takes place, an awakening of consciousness. One is put in touch with the psychic power to revitalise the banal and habit-worn ways of life. When enough corresponds in a surprising enough manner for a mind to feel tickled and for the heart life to be stirred, we have ourselves a conceit that works. In this present case, the reality invoked is the human ability to perceive familiar things from a new perspective; the figurative language puts us in touch with an inner transformative ability. Enjoying cognitive flexibility of this kind is essential for finding creative solutions and for discovering entirely new approaches to practical problems and scientific questions.

Equally important to wrap our heads around is the phenomenon of bad poetry, or bad conceits. When do they fail? Top of my mind is so-called “dark matter” and “dark energy”—apparently invisible stuff that just has to be since there isn’t enough visible stuff for our model to work. The most obvious issue here is inconsistency. You base a whole perspective of the universe and how humans ought to relate to it on empiricism—that is, hard, visible, measurable phenomena—and then you set aside your cornerstone when your model fails to account for the phenomena. It’s a desperate act (a self-negating one) to rescue a broken model.

In terms of science, when things don’t add up, it’s not the phenomena that require correction, nor is it the job of science to make stuff up so the math works. The conclusions must show correspondence with the observed phenomena. The dark stuff hypothesis compensates for this asymmetry—the fact that the model fails to correspond to observations—by proposing that most stuff exists beyond observation.

This sort of trouble is not only rooted in problems with correspondence, but also with what is often referred to as coherence. As Donaldson puts it: “In the coherence model the proposition or model is true if it ‘holds together’. Think of a wheel that we say ‘spins true’.” When physicists propose that most of the matter and energy in the universe is invisible, they violate the coherence of their discipline. In effect what they’re saying is, Our science is True and trustworthy because based on the observable universe; observation shows most of the universe is not observable. This inconsistency (or lack of cohesion) is fatal to the paradigm.

Worth mentioning here (for those unfamiliar with the physics) that dark stuff was introduced owing to the problem of galaxies lacking enough matter and energy to cohere. In other words, they should fall apart because there’s not enough matter and energy in them to explain how they hold together. We’re talking about literal incoherence here. Referring back to Donaldson’s metaphor, the present model of the wheel (of the galaxy) does not spin true.

When science starts making stuff up like this, we ought to be shocked. A pedestrian equivalent would be short changing someone in a financial transaction and claiming that you paid most of the money in dark dollars.

As the analogical mind applies itself to this problem of what is real and what works and why, what becomes apparent is that we must look for areas of analogy and agreement. Phenomena like archetypes fit the bill because they appear again and again despite changing perspectives, disciplines, and paradigms. In other words, there are things that remain when we pull away our instruments, methods, and paradigms; things that are confirmed as real when we apply other instruments, methods and paradigms.

When multiple branches of physics and philosophy for instance wind up concluding from entirely different frameworks that the human being is a microcosm of the cosmic macrocosm, or that there’s a holographic quality to the universe, we can allow ourselves to suspect that perhaps we’re onto something truly empirical. The question then remains whether the reality in question is an inner one or an outer one. . . or of course whether it’s both, in which case, no doubt we’re dealing with a level of correspondence and cohesion that would qualify as about as real as we’re ever going to get.

Leave a comment

Share

Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.

The words anthropocene and anthropogenic are new coinages with that sciency flavour that gives believers in TheScience™ a warm, fuzzy feeling—that sense of intelligence and righteousness so valuable to a social-media identity. The self-loathing these terms bestow and the way they impugn white, colonial oppression on a global scale are immensely satisfying. These words hit every funny bone in the woke body and tickle those brains most pickled in the voice of Richard Attenborough.

Humanity is an infestation, a plague on the planet, and something must be done to stop its disgusting proliferation before it destroys its own habitat and every ecosystem with it. Anthropocene implies a geological epoch of enormous impact, equal to that of the Eocene, the Oligocene, the Miocene, the Pliocene, the Pleistocene, the Holocene and so forth. All of these “-cenes” are terms used by geologists to refer to identifiable strata in the layering of sediment built up over millions of years. If these strata are understood to represent pages in the great book of Gaia, those that attest to the period of humanity are the damning final chapter. Everything previous to us was nature, but we are not nature; we are an affliction that got out of control and killed it all, ourselves included, forever.

The late poet laureate of England, Ted Hughes (1930-1998), pointed out that a word can essentially trigger a story in one’s mind. As Hughes put it: “A single word of reference is enough — just as you need to touch a power-line with only one finger.” Such is the power of the words anthropocene and anthropogenic. The story they tell is cosmically tragic and all owing to a hateful and inherently selfish humanity. But who wrote this story? Where does it come from? Is it true? According to believers, TheScience™ told the story and it’s not just true; it’s not even a story; it’s a fact!

As it happens the tale of anthropogenic climate change is rooted in a deranged ideology promulgated by a misanthropic think tank that goes by the ominous name of The Club of Rome. On the surface an organisation concerned with the welfare of humanity, The Club of Rome manages—through its deeply flawed and oversimplified modelling of exponential growth—to turn its humanitarianism into anti-humanitarianism. Its chief analogy is the machine, and it treats the globe and humanity as a kind of clockwork with a few main gears which it tells us are growing larger and larger teeth rapidly and expanding in circumference at an alarming rate in a disastrous feedback situation that cannot be corrected without immediate, coordinated globalist intervention.

The main drivers of their prophesied disaster are population and industry, that it claims are devouring our resources at an exponential rate such that once the problems of overcrowding and dearth are apparent, it will be too late for a correction due to lag times (“delays”) between interventions and results (Limits to Growth 81, 97-8, 168-69, 182-3). To halt the exponential growth scenario (which is a patently false and entirely debunked model), The Club of Rome insists that human fertility must be curtailed along with polluting industry to achieve a balanced system—which resembles a ledger in which gains balance against losses (of people and goods). In their thinking, one may observe the machine model applied at the planetary scale: global humanity is a machine, resource uptake is a machine and the climate too is a machine, and all these machines have levers we can pull and knobs we can turn up or down as we sit at the mixing board of the universe like the Wizard of Oz.

Shot through with contradictions, their publications reveal a logic unworthy of being entertained as intelligent. For instance despite repeated insistence that humanity must change its priorities and quit being essentially consumerist, its entire philosophy is predicated on the desire (of an elite group) to live in material luxury. And while it argues that interventions must be immediate due to time lags, and that the global population must be reduced and find a ledger-book balance of births and deaths, it assumes a perfectly stable environment without the sort of disasters that might require natural population conditions to survive. Apparently time lag is not in play when a population is decimated, only when it threatens the wealth of the global elite.

Most glaring is that their globalist perspective loses sight of individuals, families, ethnicities and regional demographics. This is how their apparent humanitarianism turns sinister. Their megalomania, their playing at God, their notion that all human affairs must be centrally managed necessarily leads to a dehumanising dispensation that subordinates individuals to the global collective, to be directed by what they perceive as a benevolent tyranny. They themselves, of course, the elites, those whose concerns have been elevated from the day-to-day concerns of feeding themselves and their families, are the philosopher kings who will be in charge of the horrifying Plato’s Republic they envision. In case you had any doubts, they provide a graph of this logic (see below) that places them at the pinnacle of human concerns (Limits to Growth 18-19). Talk about crackpot pseudoscience!

A scientiphysized millenarian fear (that the prophesied apocalypse is upon us) is the motive engine of their thinking—founded in 1968, their orientation was the state of global resources by the year 2000—and alarmism is the flavour of their messaging. Over and again the literature insists that their oppressive, global empire must come to fruition before the end-times descend upon us. These are the ideas promulgated in their “reports”—the first, published in 1972, entitled The Limits to Growth, and the second, called The First Globalist Revolution published in 1991.

The first text truly appears altruistic until the final chapter where it states rather grimly, in condescending and dehumaising terms, that “The world system is simply not ample enough nor generous enough to accommodate much longer such egocentric and conflictive behaviour by its inhabitants” (192). And it concludes, “Entirely new approaches are required to redirect society toward goals of equilibrium rather than growth.” And though this statement alone may seem reasonable, we find the following sinister sentiment a few sentences downstream: “Although the effort may initially focus on the implications of growth, particularly of population growth, the totality of the world problematique will soon have to be addressed” (193). That was in 1972 when the think tank was in its infancy. By 1991 their misanthropy had found stronger formulations:

The need for enemies seems to be a common historical factor. States have striven to overcome domestic failure and internal contradictions by designating external enemies. The scapegoat practice is as old as mankind itself. When things become too difficult at home, divert attention by adventure abroad. Bring the divided nation together to face an outside enemy, either a real one or else one invented for the purpose. (108)

They are quite literally using Machiavelli and Orwell’s 1984 as handbooks. Their next move in The First Globalist Revolution was to dispense with democracy in a chapter entitled “The Limits to Democracy” (110-115). These philosopher emperors of the world after all require dictatorial powers to allow for their immediate and desperate interventions on an international scale, and they were plotting (quite openly) how to manage a behind-the-scenes takeover: “In the world that is emerging, decision making can no longer be the monopoly of governments and their departments, working in, yes, a vacuum” (114).

And to complete the transformation from humanitarianism to sinister misanthropy, they reasoned that to get the world on board with their vision, we needed “a new enemy to unite us”:

In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. In their totality and in their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which demands the solidarity of all peoples. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself. (115)

And voila! The diseased (glaringly ironic) reasoning process is complete. The nascent idea of self-hatred on a global scale was initiated. It took time to coin the terms anthropocene and anthropogenic as derogatory epithets to attach to “climate change,” but there’s the root of the sick fruit emerging from a misguided and desperate megalomania.

Through a multipronged approach to disseminate their message, they channelled their misanthropic ideology along multiple avenues as expressed openly in their literature: via the UN, various grassroots efforts, and via a “world forum where statesmen, policy-makers, and scientists can discuss the dangers and hopes for the future global system without the constraints of formal intergovernmental negotiation” (Limits to Growth 197). Those who have not yet heard of the World Economic Forum (WEF), or who believe it to be a benign association, might want to bone up on the goals and strategies they employ because they have sinister, imperialist plans underway.

Have any doubts? Take a few minutes to watch interviews with lead author of The Limits to Growth, Dennis Meadows. In the following clip, you can watch him talking about the need for a dictatorship, since democracies cannot deal with global populations much larger than one billion. And he further expresses a hope that humanity will accept depopulation civilly and peacefully.

Leave a comment

Share

Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.

None of what I’m proposing about Science telling stories and inventing myths about itself is new or even especially controversial. Thomas Kuhn pointed to this trouble back in 1962 in his now famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The problem originates in the didactic practices of science—what we might call pedagogy and curriculum. Kuhn places the onus on textbook pedagogy:

To fulfill their function [i.e. the function of textbooks] they need not provide authentic information about the way in which those bases were first recognized and then embraced by the profession. In the case of textbooks, at least, there are even good reasons why, in these matters, they should be systematically misleading.1

In what sense misleading?

Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. . . .Yet the textbook-derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that, in fact, never existed.2

In other words science textbooks engage in fictions. Why? Because it is considered more pedagogically expedient. “The result,” Kuhn explains, “is a persistent tendency to make the history of science look linear or cumulative, a tendency that even affects scientists looking back at their own research.”3 So that’s the main underlying fiction that science tells about itself: science is a progressive, linear and cumulative process. Toward what exactly? Toward a teleological reality: that is, an already articulate reality for which we can provide a singular matching articulation. I’m using “teleological” in a special sense here to emphasise the notion that science reveals the design and purpose of phenomena, even while rejecting the idea that the universe has any purpose. This conception is generally referred to as “correspondence”—the idea that theories and formulations (whether scientific or theological) correspond to an articulate reality. And this reality itself is a fiction demanding faith. In fact it’s a fiction as fraught as God—to put it in terms a committed atheist will understand best. For what else is a teleological reality other than an omniscient being awaiting us in the wings and revealing itself when our formulations match its divine formulations? In short science most definitely does tell fictions about itself very similar to those religions tell about themselves, and for the very same reasons: pedagogical expediency. Here’s Kuhn again:

As pedagogy this technique of presentation is unexceptionable. But when combined with the generally unhistorical air of science writing and with the occasional systemic misconstructions discussed above, one strong impression is overwhelmingly likely to follow: science has reached its present state by a series of individual discoveries and inventions that, when gathered together, constitute the modern body of technical knowledge.4

In other words science’s misconceptions and misrepresentations of itself are not a result of purposeful manipulation. No scientist is consciously trying to mislead the public or his students. No. The uptake of fictions begins with the curriculum and proceeds implicitly to distort the scientist’s conception of his practice and his place both in history and the world at large.

So why does Kuhn think this technique “unexceptionable”? He seems to have seen it in terms of any trade. One doesn’t need to learn the history of machining, say, or carpentry, or electrical installation to go out and earn a living in the trade. As Kuhn puts it:

Why, after all, should the student of physics, for example, read the works of Newton, Faraday, Einstein, or Schrodinger, when everything he needs to know about these works is recapitulated in a far briefer, more precise, and more systematic form in a number of up-to-date textbooks?5

Therefore science has no classics, no historical sense, and no real sense of textuality. Worse, it is disconnected from the very forces that have given rise to its own productivity, which are hardly linear, barely cumulative, and questionable where progress is concerned. And, by the way, like Kuhn I am a lover of science, and have no intention by these clarifications to imply that the sciences are just a bunch of lies. What I am saying is that our conceptions of science being concerned with fact and all other disciplines with fiction is a false model and the wrong way to be looking at the situation. As Kuhn put it: we require a “paradigm shift” to see the situation more clearly.

Kuhn answers his question as to why students of “physics, for example” ought to read the historical works of science by addressing the advantages enjoyed by the humanities in this regard:

As a result, the student in any one of these disciplines [in the humanities] is constantly made aware of the immense variety of problems that the members of his future group have, in the course of time, attempted to solve. Even more important, he has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately evaluate for himself.6

In contrast, scientific textbook training “is a narrow and rigid education, probably more so than any other except perhaps in orthodox theology.”7 And this of course gets to one of my most fundamental points. Science is an outgrowth of and in some ways a continuation of the same project that gave rise to religion—i.e. the pursuit of Truth. It wasn’t the sciences that brought us out of the confines of bad religion: it was instead humanism, something evidenced in the power of that movement to bring about cooperation across the Catholic-Protestant schism even during the brutal Thirty-Years War (1618-1648). And indeed it was humanism that brought to term the transformation of consciousness that yielded the secular, pluralistic scientific spirit.

Had Kuhn gone back further in his survey, he might well have concluded that science was in fact a paradigm shift from the religious perspective, and the catalyst for that shift was humanism. Keeping in mind my article “Educating the Analogical Mind” what brought about the opening for a new perception of our approach to knowledge, understanding and truth, was a proliferation of stories when the humanist project brought attention to the forgotten texts of Classical antiquity, creating the conditions in the cultural mind of an early Greece, to use Ted Hughes’s language. Instead, the sciences have pursued an avenue that has led directly to dogmatism and intolerance.

In an informative and fascinating interview for Uncommon Knowledge—a video series produced by the Hoover Institute and hosted by Peter Robinson, entitled “Does God Exist? A Conversation with Tom Holland, Stephen Meyer and Douglas Murray” (aired January 10, 2023)—Tom Holland (a distinguished medieval historian) quickly reviewed a pattern in Christian history in which the heroes in the search for Truth criticise and overturn an old order and establish a new one until authoritarianism and sclerosis set in, at which point a new set of heroes in pursuit of Truth step up, and the same process begins again.

Holland informs us that the early Church, since the time of Saint Augustine (354-430) established two guiding notions: (a) religio (a redeeming force capable of connecting humanity to things eternal) to counteract (b) the saeculum (the flux of time upon which we are born and that sweeps us toward oblivion). Those original Christian rebels who established the new order with the promise of salvation through religio, felt that they were smashing the heathen idols and rejecting the superstitions of the Classical period (ancient Greece and Rome), i.e. the saeculum. The rebels of this age, however, became the oppressive elites of a new orthodoxy that engendered a new revulsion, a new reformation. By this time we’re a thousand years on and talking about Martin Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-1564), credited with launching the Protestant Reformation (1517), which demonised and denounced the Catholic Church and Papism, and went about “the tearing down of idolatry, the banishing of superstition, only now it is the Roman Church that is seen as something to be torn down. That is a kind of a binding Christian impulse.”8 Holland explains further:

Moving into the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, you see exactly these same instincts, only now it’s not just the Roman Church that is the target of this repudiation, it’s the whole fabric of Christianity. But the instinct… the paradox, say, of the French Revolution is that when the revolutionaries are tearing down the privileges and the fabric of the Churches [he’s interrupted here briefly by the interviewer]. . .they’re doing it for deeply, deeply Christian reasons. That’s why (I said at the beginning of this) I think there’s a kind of inherent trend within Christianity that moves towards atheism. Because, you know, even before Christianity, the impulse of the Hebrew prophets is to condemn the gods of the Egyptians or the Babylonians as so much stock or stone and tell people that there is no divine manifest in springs or on the top of hills. The reformers are doing that in the Reformation. Umm, materialist scientists now are doing that. The process of banishing the supersti…, of desacralizing the world is an incredibly Christian one.9

X Club historian Ruth Barton would likely agree. Here’s how she puts it:

Huxley sometimes interpreted these intellectual changes as the working out of the principles of the Protestant Reformation. The “act which commenced with the Reformation is nearly played out” he told the students at Aberdeen in 1874, a “wider and deeper change. . .a revolution in thought” is coming. Reformation metaphors were popular in radical literary circles. New understandings of religion were presented as continuous with the principles of the Reformation. . . .

. . .

Contemporary Christian beliefs were summed up as heathen ignorance and superstition, and the X-men and their allies were the forces of truth and righteousness. Moreover, they would win, they were on the side of history and, metaphorically, of God.10

Barton also discusses the establishment of Sunday lecture societies and the X Club’s collaboration with “Unitarians, secularists, positivists, Christian socialists, leading liberal and radical politicians, and reforming lawyers” to counter Sabbatarianism (Christian advocates of observation of the Sabbath day). These lectures were often dubbed Lay Sermons and were billed as part of the self-improvement movement and as better alternatives to the pubs, and therefore morally upstanding by reducing Sunday drunkenness. A critic of the movement “satirizing the scientific authority of [one of] Huxley’s lecture[s]” wrote:

The object of it seems to be to tell that if there is a God, which is at least doubtful, nature is the entity in question, and physical science is its prophet. . .that “scepticism is the highest of duties, blind faith the one unpardonable sin”;. . .and that when he [the man of science] has once fairly learnt to “break in pieces the idols built up of books (Bibles, for instance) and traditions and fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs,” he will be able to “cherish the most human of man’s emotions by worship. . .at the altar of the Unknown and Unknowable”—a very scientific prospect.11

Indeed the defensiveness of science adherents today is generally fanatical, religious in flavour, and often savage—exposing the penchant among the putatively rational, reason-centred, level-headed leaders of Science of losing their minds, suffering meltdowns and embarking on censorship campaigns when confronted with anything that might bring reasonable doubt to bear upon the practices of TheScience™ and its conclusions. (For an immediate example, see “Pseudoscience and the Lysenko Affair.”)

Analogy readers will recall Max Perutz’s reaction to Princeton science historian Gerald Geison’s revelations of fraud in the work of Louis Pasteur in his 1995 book The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, as told by Horace Freeland Judson in his indispensable The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science. Captured in Judson’s title is the sense of dismay felt by those like me who were brought up to believe in TheScience™ only to discover when applying the Royal Society’s motto, nullius in verba (nothing at the word of another), that we’ve been misled, lied to and defrauded. Judson tells us that “Geison wrote, and said to me as well, that he had felt consternation as he realized what the notebooks told.”12 The historian too engages in a form of scientific research, and he has a moral obligation to present the facts as they are, even if they seem to undermine the mythologies and heroes of the prevailing cultural narrative.

What emerges from Judson’s research is a deep seated culture of fraud among the sciences and especially emanating from the medical sciences. We guffaw at the risk of our own health, the health of our loved ones and public health—as we saw in “Scientism Subverts Secular Society: A Case Study.”

Part of the culture of book cooking in Science is the attitude “that misconduct underlying your immediate publications can be justified if later research, your own or others’, proves your faked or fudged results were right.” When one’s intuition is found to have no grounds and one feels desperate for reasons that may include financial granting for continued research, it’s okay to manipulate the data. Judson continues:

The assertion that present fraud, even if it leaves the supposed conclusions of a paper without foundation, can be excused post facto if those conclusions are later confirmed, has also appeared in controversy over recent cases. It is a seductive idea. It marks one of the deepest divides among practicing scientists today.13

In personal interactions with believers (of both religion and TheScience™) over the years I have encountered canned reactions, prepared in advance and delivered with smug satisfaction as though the exercise of argumentation had set parameters devised by collective practice, and the outcome is a mere shifting of pieces on a chessboard in a famous game already played a thousand times. The religionist will at some point bring up Pascal’s Wager, and the new atheist will undoubtedly ask you to provide your mathematical proofs and to account for the falsifiability of your claim. These are moves in a game meant to shut down discussion; they are made in bad faith because any response must work very hard to shift the linguistic field of play which requires a sophistication of argumentation beyond the conversational.

Should one find a way to communicate this much, one’s interlocutor will make one of three final moves which amount to much the same: either (a) he will dismissively scoff at your assertions and claim he has no time for such rubbish; (b) imply or state directly that the field of study in question is beyond your comprehension or expertise (are you a doctor? mathematician? or other equivalents to stay in your lane appeals to scholastic authority); or (c) raise his voice and tell you that you are engaging in very “dangerous” rhetoric. In all cases the final blow is ad hominem and meant to insult and even start a fight. If he gets a rise out of you, he’s won because you are proven to be irrational. In other words the strategy is to shift the grounds to the irrational because recourse to the rational has no footing.

Share

Leave a comment

Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.

Read more

Read more

Manifold Perception

So how is it that secularism is slipping away from us and being replaced by orthodox scientism? No doubt, there are many factors, including personal and corporate greed, pharmaceutical capture of public health institutions and the news media, aided by public ignorance of the depth and pervasiveness of this corruption. This study, however, must leave these and other equally relevant issues aside to focus on one significant crux: our cultural attitudes toward science as final revelation, and the erosion of the cultural conditions that give rise to creative, analogical thinking. This article explores the central role of pluralism in the formation of the philosophical, truly scientific mindset. Essentially, there can be no innovative, analogical reasoning without an array of cultural narratives to compare. Once a given worldview or paradigm takes total command of a culture, creative thought dies, since—as noted in my essay, “Scientism Subverts Secular Society”—such a culture perceives as illegitimate any practices unsanctioned by its ideology. Those who dare propose new insights are deemed heretics, or in today’s terms, deniers and denialists.

In “Myth and Education,” Ted Hughes—poet laureate of England from 1984 until his death in 1998—wonders about the origins of philosophy and the scientific method. “What was so special about early Greece?”—he asks:

The various peoples of Greece had created their own religions and mythologies, more or less related but with differences. Further abroad, other nations had created theirs, again often borrowing from common sources, but evolving separate systems, sometimes gigantic systems. Those supernatural seeming dreams, full of conflict and authority and unearthly states of feeling, were projections of man’s inner and outer world. They developed their ritual, their dogma, their hierarchy of spiritual values in a particular way in each separated group. Then at the beginning of the first millennium they began to converge, by one means or another, on Greece. They came from Africa via Egypt, from Asia via Persia and the Middle East, from Europe and from all the shores of the Mediterranean. Meeting in Greece, they mingled with those rising from the soil of Greece itself. Wherever two cultures with their religious ideas are brought sharply together, there is an inner explosion. Greece had become the battleground of the religious and mythological inspirations of much of the archaic world. The conflict was severe, and the effort to find solutions and make peace among all those contradictory elements was correspondingly great. And the heroes of the struggle were those early philosophers. The struggle created them, it opened the depths of spirit and imagination to them, and they made sense of it. What was religious passion in the religions became in them a special sense of the holiness and seriousness of existence. What was obscure symbolic mystery in the mythologies became in them a bright, manifold perception of universal and human truths.1

In other words, it was the convergence of many myths, many stories, many conceptions of the universe and humanity’s place in it that brought about the philosophical impulse to consider things more and more abstractly, more and more in conceptual and analogical terms. When one ponders, even today, the variety of belief systems at play, one feels compelled to conclude that either (a) the one we possess is the only true truth, or (b) that there is no truth, or (c) that there is some truth to all of them. Rejecting both exceptionalism and nihilistic relativism, one tends toward (c), mining for truth the areas where various perspectives converge.

Xenophanes of Colophon (c. late 6th, early 5th century BCE) was a poet-philosopher who turned a critical eye on the Homeric gods and their less than divine natures. Feeling a mismatch between their behaviour and the ethics of his society, he looked around at the wider world of which Greece had become aware, and noted an anthropomorphism that struck him as absurd:

But mortals suppose that gods are born,
wear their own clothes and have a voice and body.

Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black;
Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired.

Perceiving this plethora of gods and goddesses, and considering how the various cults and clergies of his time espoused moral virtues and devotion to these deities, Xenophanes distilled a conception of divinity worthy of worship: one single God that encompassed them all while at once analogically standing for an ideal beyond the human:

One god greatest among gods and men, 
not at all like mortals in body or in thought.

Monotheism is a frameshift not credited enough. When the Biblical Abram took up an axe and destroyed the idols in his father’s shop, placing the axe in the hands of the chief god, and in answer to his father’s inquiry as to what had happened, claimed that the chief god had smashed the rest, he was—much like Xenophanes—ridiculing the naive materialist fallacy of conflating the material form with the idea. I cannot underscore this amazing change in perspective enough. We’re talking about a recognition fundamental to philosophical and rational thought, the distinction between our inner and outer worlds, between the material and the conceptual.

Meanwhile, the monotheistic God is still not properly understood because that distinction between material and conceptual has proven one of the most difficult for humanity to entertain. The first two commandments are all about this problem. Thou shalt have no other gods before me, and Thou shalt make no graven images are instructions intended to prevent any sort of mediation between the spiritual seeker and God because the monotheistic God is an abstract concept and not to be confused with a material thing or person. Monotheism is about the continuum of being; and it hopes to put the individual into resonance with creation. But always the materialist impulse intervenes, always that need for a material signifier that is analogically put for the abstraction. The stand in, however, is not to be confused with the subject for which it stands in. Most of our social confusion stems from this trouble distinguishing between the signifier and the signified. Logicians of metaphysics and language call this the distinction between de dicto and de re, between the thing stated (or represented) and the thing itself.

No doubt, the recidivism we’re witnessing in the sciences is ultimately to be lain at the feet of our education system, which is failing to train the imagination. This is Hughes’s insight. At the beginning of “Myth and Education,” he asks why it was that Plato, in The Republic, advocated teaching children the myths.2 If the ideal republic exiled the poets, then why raise kids on their works? Children could easily be trained on mathematics and logic alone. Why risk corrupting their minds with the absurd tales of supernatural beings who are anything but exemplars of ethical behaviour? Why teach them lies? This is a question we’re seeing posed again by New Atheists like Sam Harris.

Consider the conditions that gave rise to the philosophers of ancient Greece. There was something about the convergence of stories there that provided the ideal matrix for philosophical foment. For secularism to emerge, we require both pluralism and the freedom to bring the analogical mind to bear. As soon as there is only one way, the analogical mind dies and creative evolution, true innovation, hits a wall. Nature abhors such oppression and will always find a way to surmount and overturn paradigms that claim a final revelation. The purpose of raising children on stories and myths is to recreate the conditions of ancient Greece in their minds, so that they can have access to that fertile Ur-ground that produces philosophy and secular culture.

That’s it in a nutshell. But Hughes’s reasoning probes far deeper:

A child takes possession of a story as what might be called a unit of imagination. A story which engages, say, earth and the underworld is a unit correspondingly flexible. It contains not merely the space and in some form or other the contents of those two places; it reconciles their contradictions in a workable fashion and holds open the way between them. The child can re-enter the story at will, look around him, find all those things and consider them at his leisure. In attending to the world of such a story there is the beginning of imaginative and mental control. There is the beginning of a form of contemplation. And to begin with, each story is separate from every other story. Each unit of imagination is like a whole separate imagination, no matter how many the head holds.

If the story is learned well, so that all its parts can be seen at a glance, as if we looked through a window into it, then that story has become like the complicated hinterland of a single word. It has become a word. Any fragment of the story serves as the ‘word’ by which the whole story’s electrical circuit is switched into consciousness, and all its light and power brought to bear. As a rather extreme example, take the story of Christ. No matter what point of that story we touch, the whole story hits us. If we mention the Nativity, or the miracle of loaves and fishes, or Lazarus, or the Crucifixion, the voltage and inner brightness of the whole story is instantly there. A single word of reference is enough — just as you need to touch a power-line with only one finger.3

“The story itself is an acquisition, a kind of wealth,” Hughes tells us. “We only have to imagine for a moment an individual who knows nothing of it at all.” Such a person would be alienated from our culture, would find himself “outside our society.” Hughes explains:

To follow the meanings behind the one word Crucifixion would take us through most of European history, and much of Roman and Middle Eastern too. It would take us into every corner of our private life. . .Openings of spiritual experience, a dedication to final realities which might well stop us dead in our tracks and demand of us personally a sacrifice which we could never otherwise have conceived. . .Those things have been raised out of chaos and brought into our ken by the story in a word. The word holds them all there, like a constellation, floating and shining.4

The totality of stories we read, hear and learn are “an acquisition” which constitute our cultural heritage. But that’s not all. “Imagine,” Hughes proposes, “hearing somewhere in the middle of a poem being recited, the phrase ‘The Crucifixion of Hitler’ ”:

The word ‘Hitler’ is as much of a hieroglyph as the word ‘Crucifixion’. Individually, those two words bear the consciousness of much of our civilization. But they are meaningless hieroglyphs, unless the stories behind the words are known. We could almost say it is only by possessing these stories that we possess that consciousness. And in those who possess both stories, the collision of those two words, in that phrase, cannot fail to detonate a psychic depth-charge. . .All our static and maybe dormant understanding of good and evil and what opens beyond good and evil is shocked into activity. . .

. . .

The stories have gathered up huge charges of reality, and illuminated us with them, and given us their energy, just as those colliding worlds in early Greece roused the philosophers and poets.5

So it’s not cyphers and words alone, it’s not abstract concepts and mathematical precepts and data points alone, it’s the stories we devise from those constellations, and the interactions of those stories that enlighten, that enable those novel frameshifts that are the hallmark of our creative evolution. What the two stories of Christ and Hitler “show very clearly is how stories think for themselves, once we know them”:

They not only attract and light up everything relevant in our own experience, they are also in continual private meditation, as it were, on their own implications. They are little factories of understanding. New revelations of meaning open out of their images and patterns continually, stirred into reach by our own growth and changing circumstances.

Then at a certain point in our lives, they begin to combine. What happened forcibly between Hitler and the Crucifixion in that phrase, begins to happen naturally. The head that holds many stories becomes a small early Greece.

It does not matter, either, how old the stories are. Stories are old the way human biology is old. No matter how much they have produced in the past in the way of fruitful inspirations, they are never exhausted. . .There is little doubt that, if the world lasts, pretty soon someone will come along and understand the story as if for the first time. He will look back and see two thousand years of somnolent fumbling with the theme. Out of that, and the collision of other things, he will produce, very likely, something totally new and overwhelming, some whole new direction for human life.6

The analogical mind understands that our cognitive apparatus depends on stories and that our stories “are never exhausted.” New analogical parallels are always presenting themselves. With each new technology, humanity has access to new metaphors, opening up new perspectives. The industrial revolution inspired the Enlightenment thinker Julien Offray de La Mettrie to look back at Rene Descartes’ idea of the animal machine and write L’homme Machine, looking at human biology as a machine. This analogical move represented a frameshift away from Galenic medicine and the theory of humours toward something new. Doubtless, newer perspectives taken from newer innovations like electricity and electronics will evolve and displace our present perspective.

Stories & Laws

In his study Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution, poet and literary scholar Jeffery Donaldson remarks, “Religionists and scientists may have a hard time getting on the same page of late, but one thing they do have in common is a reluctance to be considered story-tellers”.7 This fallacy is the source of the materialist recidivism to which I keep pointing. Fact thumpers are no different from Bible thumpers. They both believe they are in possession of an ultimate and final revelation. The analogical mind understands, however, that such dogmatism means to shut down our creative evolution. A fact thumper may, for instance (and this is a common example), invoke the undeniable action of gravity on Earth. Beyond the notion that most objects have a tendency to fall, and that when they do fall, there’s a mathematical formula concerning their rate of acceleration, the law in question is not quite what the fact thumper makes it out to be. So many factors intervene that even the basic formula requires adjusting when outside its ideal frame. Friction, wind currents and the shape of the falling object require consideration. In addition qualities like temperature and the medium through which the object falls add further factors, possibly involving displacement and buoyancy. For the said fact to have any relation to reality, so many circumstances must align that it can hardly be called a fact; soon enough we’re looking at a much diminished heuristic or useful guideline to help provide rough estimates of material behaviour within a limited frame. Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation nearly satisfies the notion of a fact, but in what sense it is a Law is a question of its frame of reference. It is of course a mathematical law, a question of geometrical relationships in relation to quantities of mass. Expressed in mathematical terms, one is impressed by the metaphysical implications, and it is to these implications that we apply the notion of a Law.

I must admit to being seduced by this alignment as much as anyone else. However, we must not allow that seduction to occlude the possibility that the applicability and productivity of the heuristic—i.e. the fact that it works—is incidental. History is full of discarded heuristics that were productive. The Ptolemaic system, for instance, was completely false and yet reliable enough mathematically to predict eclipses and make calendars. The Big Bang is far worse because it makes of a tenuous claim a cornerstone doctrine. In short, the arrogance of the fact-thumping New Atheist is equivalent to the arrogance of the Bible thumping religionist who claims that the Resurrection of Christ and the Harrowing of Hell are not stories, but facts; and what’s more, any refusal to accept the doctrines will earn you excommunication in this life and eternal damnation in Hell in the life to come. As we saw last month in “Scientism Poisons Everything,” such fanatical attitudes are not foreign to New Atheists.

Followers of TheScience™ will object that these are not comparable, as though the analogical mind has no business here because one mustn’t compare material realities with fiction. We mustn’t conflate the inner and outer worlds. I couldn’t agree more. The question then hinges on being very careful in our discernment about what constitutes inner and what outer. Too often both science and religion find this process beyond their skill set. That’s when we get ideological lockdown, cognitive necrosis and cultural recidivism. The Law of Gravity was not discovered or written by Nature; it is a notational tool invented by scientists to aid in their experiments. In other words, this Law stands at the interface between outer reality and our thoughts about it. The measures we use are invented. To Nature there is no time in seconds, and there are no metres. These are arbitrary conventions we impose. This is a fundamental confusion of which Newton was aware, and which he warned us about in his famous Principia.8 We are good at attempting to align our metrics with objective analogues, but they are always analogues, and may represent impositions that get in the way of new discoveries.

Where does the irrational fanaticism come from in the case of New Atheism?—one wonders. After all, the story of science (a false history) is full of super-rational heroes who paid dearly for their heresies, but spoke out anyway. The whole mythos of science is redundant with the secular ethos. Let’s get back to Hughes’s essay for further insights on this trouble.

Stories Train the Imagination

Hughes proposes three possible states of any individual imagination: (a) no imagination, (b) an inaccurate imagination, or (c) an imagination both accurate and strong. These states of imaginary power, he explains, correspond with certain broad personality types. A person with no imagination, “who simply cannot think what will happen if he does such and such a thing” must “work on principles, or orders, or by precedent, and he will always be marked by extreme rigidity, because he is after all moving in the dark”:

We all know such people, and we all recognize that they are dangerous, since if they have strong temperaments in other respects they end up by destroying their environment and everybody near them. The terrible thing is that they are the planners, and ruthless slaves to the plan — which substitutes for the faculty they do not possess. And they have the will of desperation: where others see alternative courses, they see only a gulf.9

In an address entitled “Is Life Worth Living?” first delivered in 1895, philosopher and psychologist William James had this to say on those lacking “scientific imagination”:

I have heard more than one teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in. But the slightest reflection on the real conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so crude.10

The only way we arrive at an administrative science like the one that perpetrated the covid panic of 2020 is if the vast majority of system operators along with a vast majority of the public surrender their imaginations and therefore feel the desperate need to follow the plan set by TheScience™ because it is felt that TheScience™ is in possession of “all the fundamental conceptions of truth.” I say “surrender” despite the reality that many lacked any imagination because I witnessed a complete abnegation of this faculty among many who had well-developed minds. Such is the horror of administrative capture that it demands the complete relinquishment of one’s analogical mind, which is at once our birthright and chief bullshit detector. Systematised religion and science both demand a sacrifice of the imagination on the premise that they are in possession of the final revelation: “that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in,” and that therefore the imagination is a vestigial appendix better left to the surgeon. Consequently society is expected to demonstrate unquestioning faith because our evolution has finally arrived at its ultimate conclusion. This state of existence, as James rightly pointed out, is barbaric.

Now we have a pretty good grasp on how we arrived at this historical juncture. But what can we do about it? Hughes suggests we go about deliberately teaching the imagination, that we train and strengthen it. Following my cursory critique of the fact thumper, I suggested that we mustn’t confuse our inner and outer worlds, and indicated that distinguishing between the two can easily slip away from us, especially when we reify our supposedly objective measures. Here’s Hughes on the subject:

Sharpness, clarity and scope of the mental eye are all-important in our dealings with the outer world, and that is plenty. And if we were machines it would be enough. But the outer world is only one of the worlds we live in. For better or worse we have another, and that is the inner world of our bodies and everything pertaining. It is closer than the outer world, more decisive, and utterly different. So here are two worlds, which we have to live in simultaneously. And because they are intricately interdependent at every moment, we can’t ignore one and concentrate on the other without accidents. Probably fatal accidents.

. . .

We can guess, with a fair sense of confidence, that all these intervolved processes, which seem like the electrical fields of our body’s electrical installations — our glands, organs, chemical transmutations and so on — are striving to tell about themselves. They are all trying to make their needs known, much as thirst imparts its sharp request for water. They are talking incessantly, in a dumb radiating way, about themselves, about their relationships with each other, about the situation of the moment in the main overall drama of the living and growing and dying body in which they are assembled, and also about the outer world, because all these dramatis personae are really striving to live, in some way or other, in the outer world. That is the world for which they have been created. That is the world which created them. And so they are highly concerned about the doings of the individual behind whose face they hide. Because they are him. And they want him to live in the way that will give them the greatest satisfaction.11

To neglect this insight and refuse to look inward, Hughes warns, to remain occupied only with the objective faculty proves fatal: “The exclusiveness of our objective eye, the very strength and brilliance of our objective intelligence, suddenly turns to stupidity — of the most rigid and suicidal kind.” Following this statement, Hughes concedes a deep and troubling contradiction: that (a) this over-emphasis on objectivity is a scientific ideal without which “the modern world would fall to pieces” and “infinite misery would result,” but that (b) due to this narrow vision, our civilisation “is heading straight towards infinite misery” anyhow.12

Hughes then fixes on the camera as a manifestation of the narrow, objective view and tells the story I’ve related elsewhere about the photographer who snapped pictures of a woman being ripped to pieces by her pet tiger instead of intervening. He called this “the morality of the camera.” Since then, our camera has become ubiquitous, and we’re witnessing people who mediate their lives through their cell phones. Hughes’s image of “A bright, intelligent eye, full of exact images, set in a head of the most frightful stupidity,” strikes one as prophetic. This insight about the narrow focus of the objective mind is worth discussing further, and I intend to pull on this thread following some final remarks on “Myth and Education.”

Hughes concludes his essay by pointing out that the analogical mind is the “faculty that embraces both [inner and outer] worlds simultaneously.”13 This metaphor-making, analogical faculty “uses the pattern of one set of images to organize quite a different set. It uses one image, with slight variations, as an image for related and yet different and otherwise imageless meanings”:14

What began as an idle reading of a fairy tale ends, by simple natural activity of the imagination, as a rich perception of values of feeling, emotion and spirit which would otherwise have remained unconscious and languageless. The inner struggle of worlds. . .is suddenly given the perfect formula for the terms of a truce. A simple tale, told at the right moment, transforms a person’s life with the order its pattern brings to incoherent energies.15

To put a still finer point on it:

The character of great works is exactly this: that in them the full presence of the inner world combines with and is reconciled to the full presence of the outer world. And in them we see that the laws of these two worlds are not contradictory at all; they are one all-inclusive system; they are laws that somehow we find it all but impossible to keep, laws that only the greatest artists are able to restate. They are the laws, simply, of human nature. And men have recognized all through history that the restating of these laws, in one medium or another, in great works of art, are the greatest human acts. . .

So it comes about that once we recognize their terms, these works seem to heal us. . .The inner world, separated from the outer world, is a place of demons. The outer world, separated from the inner world, is a place of meaningless objects and machines. The faculty that makes the human being out of these two worlds is called divine.16

The concern of the poet and the philosopher is the reconciliation of the whole human being. The concern of science is one area alone to the exclusion of the other. There would be no problem with this bias in science if TheScience™ hadn’t come along to turn its narrow, objective lens on the inner world. As the late nineteenth, early twentieth century philosopher Henri Bergson put it, “I recognize that positive science can and should proceed as if organization was like making a machine. . .For its object is not to show us the essence of things, but to furnish us with the best means of acting on them.”17 It is inevitable that the objective eye will perceive the inner world as clockwork because clockwork is its only analogy. TheScience™ jettisons the imagination because it has but one metaphor. When it attempts to direct human affairs it behaves like the blithely sinister HAL 9000 in the film 2001 Space Odyssey. A great deal of science fiction has been written to warn humanity of the dangers inherent to the mechanical treatment of human affairs. But the rejection of these warnings emanating from the inner world is the hallmark of TheScience™, which has no truck with what it considers paltry fictions.

Right & Left Brain: Master & Emissary

Psychiatrist and neuroimaging researcher, Iain McGilchrist has had some insights into this troubling tendency among scientists and in our culture more broadly. In his insightful book The Master and His Emissary McGilchrist argues that our culture suffers from left-brain lockdown, a situation in which—borrowing a page from Nietzsche—the emissary (left brain) has grown contemptuous of the master (right brain) and usurped his role. The left brain focuses on grasping and manipulation—the reason the vast majority are right-handed. Consequently the perspective of this hemisphere is utilitarian. It seeks to distinguish objects, identify patterns and render things familiar enough to act upon them (or react to them) automatically. By breaking things down in this manner, it establishes a mechanistic view of the world that relieves us of stress through its high-definition clarity and predictive acumen. Crucially it has command of language. Without the right brain however it does not understand context and therefore cannot process metaphor, humour, mendacity and all manner of subtlety. The left brain is a data processor and therefore atomises and pixelates the world into mere data points.

Context is the domain of the right brain. It attends to the peripheries, to the unknowns that lurk outside the narrow focal point. Significant to our discussion, the left brain is also the side that focuses the eye—the characteristic Ted Hughes intuitively grasped when fixing upon the camera lens and in coming up with that statement about “A bright, intelligent eye, full of exact images, set in a head of the most frightful stupidity.” It is the right brain that enjoys facial recognition, the reading of body language and thus empathy. It perceives the individuality and uniqueness to which the left brain is blind.18

But because it is not in possession of language, the right brain cannot communicate directly. It needs to recruit the left brain to find expression, hence the left brain’s role as emissary. This is why the left brain finds the right brain dumb, both literally and pejoratively. Without the right brain though the left winds up too immersed among the predetermined objects and predictive circumstances of its worldview to recognize new information. Significantly too it is the right brain that contextualizes the self in the real world. In other words, abandoned to its own lights, the left brain succumbs to an idealized version of things as it has determined them to be, and slips into automatism. Vitality, creativity and imagination belong to the right brain. As a result even followers of TheScience™ who hope to convey something original cannot operate purely with the left brain. What we do find in their behaviour however is a detrimental preference for left-brain function at the expense of right-brain insight.

Hopefully your analogical mind is being activated here and you can see the correlation of left and right brain with outer and inner worlds, even appreciating the troubling circumstance that both hemispheres form one internal organ. If you consider yourself a practical, no-nonsense type, you are likely taking sides, cheering for the left brain, for the outer world, the perception of objective, hard facts. But brain science tells us you are indulging an illusion because, as McGilchrist explains, “the left hemisphere. . .is expert. . .at finding quite plausible, but bogus explanations for the evidence that does not fit its version of events.” Indeed not only is there something frightfully stupid about the left brain, it is also a liar and dissimulator with a love of authority. Those “slaves to the plan” that Hughes criticized may also be seen as left-brain automatons:

It will be remembered from the experiments of Deglin and Kinsbourne that the left hemisphere would rather believe authority, ‘what it says on this piece of paper’, than the evidence of its own senses. And remember how it is willing to deny a paralysed limb, even when it is confronted with indisputable evidence? Ramachandran puts the problem with his customary vividness:

“In the most extreme cases, a patient will not only deny that the arm (or leg) is paralysed, but assert that the arm lying in the bed next to him, his own paralysed arm, doesn’t belong to him! There’s an unbridled willingness to accept absurd ideas.”

But when the damage is to the left hemisphere (and the sufferer is therefore depending on the right hemisphere), with paralysis on the body’s right side,

“they almost never experience denial. Why not? They are as disabled and frustrated as people with right hemisphere damage, and presumably there is as much ‘need’ for psychological defence, but in fact they are not only aware of the paralysis, but constantly talk about it . . . It is the vehemence of the denial - not a mere indifference to paralysis - that cries for an explanation.”19

Surely we are all familiar with folk who deny having said something or having behaved a certain way immediately upon having performed the action. No doubt we have all witnessed that type who will publicly go out of their way to perform the denial. I have in mind an incident with an acquaintance who counted himself a hot sauce aficionado with a mouth and gut perfectly inured to the heat of all peppers. Upon an outing when he heaped on schug—a sauce with which he was unfamiliar—and turned red, began to cough, tear up and break out in a sweat, he claimed that it was not a reaction to the heat of the sauce, but instead that it had merely caught in his throat. He blamed the consistency of the sauce, derided the flavour, claiming it was flavourless, and went as far as to ask the staff about the nature of this horrible sauce. He spoke of it for some minutes as though to convince himself of his ridiculous narrative, and was impervious to the teasing of his comrades. I later witnessed similar behaviour from the same individual in ensuing circumstances. (Is it coincidence that he worked as an administrator in the civil service?) McGilchrist tells us that “The left hemisphere is not keen on taking responsibility. If the defect might reflect on the self, it does not like to accept it.” If however “something or someone else can be made to take responsibility - if it is a ‘victim’ of someone else’s wrongdoing, in other words - it is prepared to do so.”

Ramachandran carried out an experiment in which a patient with denial of left arm paralysis received an injection of harmless salt water that she was told would ‘paralyse’ her (in reality already paralysed) left arm. Once her left hemisphere had someone else to blame for it, it was prepared to accept the existence of the paralysis.

Ramachandran again: ‘The left hemisphere is a conformist, largely indifferent to discrepancies, whereas the right hemisphere is the opposite: highly sensitive to perturbation’. Denial, a tendency to conformism, a willingness to disregard the evidence, a habit of ducking responsibility, a blindness to mere experience in the face of the overwhelming evidence of theory: these might sound ominously familiar to observers of contemporary Western life.20

The Master and His Emissary was first published in 2009, around the time Fauci and Gates’s “systems” were changing the meaning of the term “pandemic” to exclude the notion of causing vast injury and death in order to make the category trump the reality. And as I demonstrated in Scientism Subverts Secular Society, Fauci and Gates both invoked this left-brain denial of data and real world impacts of their misguidance and malpractice. In fact on paper the whole Western world engaged in the same form of denialism, whilst attacking those who invoked the actual data and realities, calling them “deniers.” It was enough to make one’s head turn a full 360 degrees on itself. What the heck was going on? Madness? Mass formation psychosis, as some believed?

According to McGilchrist, “A sort of stuffing of the ears with sealing wax appears to be part of the normal left-hemisphere mode. . .Evidence of failure does not mean that we are going in the wrong direction, only that we have not gone far enough in the direction we are already headed.”21 If you recall, this refusal to acknowledge failure and double down was Bill Gates’s way of dealing with the so-called vaccines and lockdowns that neither killed the virus nor stopped its spread, but instead injured and killed an unconscionable number of people, devastated lives, gutted livelihoods and destroyed economies.

As for Fauci’s apparent inability to reason clearly on the subject of science and how one ought to obey its diktats without question while at the same time accepting its unreliability as a system undergoing continual reassessment, McGilchrist tells us, “To the left hemisphere, a thing once known does not change. . .the left hemisphere achieves, through this process [of imposing an unreal stasis], power to manipulate, which I would claim has always been its drive.” The left brain generally dominates the manipulative function, hence the predominance of right handedness; and narrow focal vision similarly supports the handling of objects. Analogically, manipulation of the physical world manifests as power over others, status and power in the world. It is very important to the left brain that its assessments be correct and its conclusions deemed right, and that therefore its commands be followed. In contrast, it is the “right hemisphere [that] makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome.”22

For individuals suffering from left brain lockdown “the differences inherent in actual individual things or beings are lost, but those derived from the system [of classification] are substituted.” In other words the rules determine the realities. Such persons, Hughes’s “planners,” no longer observe reality and evolve accordingly, but instead conform to a playbook. Those are the ones Hughes accused of having no imagination. But left brain predominance also accounts for those in Hughes’s second category, who have an inaccurate imagination. This problem is tied into the left brain’s need for certainty especially in uncertain circumstances. McGilchrist describes a left brain reflex to bypass reality in the absence of data and impose certainty where there is none.23 The interesting part here is the left brain does in fact ply a form of imagination after all, one “known as confabulation, where the brain, not being able to recall something, rather than admit to a gap in its understanding, makes up something plausible, that appears consistent, to fill it.”24

Ambiguity & Uncertainty

In attempting to understand Hughes’s intuitions through McGilchrist’s clinical observations, we come to understand that the problem of imagination, which at first appears to be a simple left brain / right brain divide, in which the left brain is strictly without imagination, while the right brain alone is imbued with the imaginative faculty, in fact has more to do with kinds of imagination. The left brain is prone to abstraction, idealism through categorization and disconnection from the real world as it favours its charts and theories over what is actually presented in front of it. In a way the left brain is a fantasist that couches its terms in objective jargon and measures. Meanwhile the right brain perceives accurately the uncertainty, the ambiguity, the chaos and flow; it sees the big picture, anticipates the peripheral and not yet manifest and therefore withholds judgement and cautions humility. Therefore any education of the imagination, if it is to succeed, must train the left brain to work for the right, and not the other way round.

Most significant to my argument is that the analogical mind is exclusive to the right brain. “Only the right hemisphere,” McGilchrist informs us, “has the capacity to understand metaphor.” And in case there were any doubt as to why this matters, he further tells us that “Metaphoric thinking. . .is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life.”25 McGilchrist remarks how the term metaphor comes from the Greek meta-, meaning across and pherein, meaning to carry, implying that metaphor “carries you across an implied gap.” “Let me emphasise,” he notes, “that the gap across which the metaphor carries us is one that language itself creates.” In other words, “Metaphor is language’s cure for the ills entailed on us by language.”26 The central concept here is that words are analogically put for experiences. And this analogical process of putting for creates a gap that the words hope to bridge. Some process or faculty of mind, however, must alert us of this gap. This reflexive awareness is distilled consciousness; it is the mind looking at itself with an awareness that it is doing so. Where the left brain hides its processes behind screens of objective guides and measures, the analogical mind reveals both its own processes and those of its arrogant counter-hemisphere.

As I close this essay, I’d like to return to Hughes’s ideas regarding the central role of story telling in the formation of our consciousness. Though ultimately balanced we’ve drifted perhaps too far into left-hemisphere territory in terms of the certainties of our explanations, and I’d like to point us back to that mysterious side Hughes invoked when he spoke of

all these intervolved processes. . .our glands, organs, chemical transmutations and so on. . .striving to tell about themselves. . .about their relationships with each other, about the situation of the moment in the main overall drama of the living and growing and dying body in which they are assembled, and also about the outer world, because all these dramatis personae are really striving to live, in some way or other, in the outer world.

Our bodies are an assemblage of entities, energies, synergies and discords. We are an ecosystem supporting bacteria, archaea and fungi that in turn support our own organism. And Western medicine recognizes only the human machine and its chemistry. Beyond our bodies are our families and communities that operate as larger organisms before which our objective eye is useless. One need only look at the unpredictability of our economics and the behaviour around markets to conclude how tenuous is our grasp of group dynamics. So we need stories, for our stories “are little factories of understanding” out of which “[n]ew revelations of meaning” emerge, “open[ing] out of their images and patterns continually, stirred into reach by our own growth and changing circumstances.”

We must remain open. And the best way to remain open is to take in as many stories as we can so that they may enter into dialogue with each other and yield ever new insights from what appears to be their limited data sets. That we can render so much from limited data sets like poems and stories suggests that the much greater and grander data field of natural phenomena must represent a truly infinite potential for exploration and understanding. Therefore, our scientific conclusions ought to be understood in this context, not as final, but as useful within a limited frame. The alternative is to shed the various stories necessary to a healthy, active and creative inner world, or consciousness, and to replace that analogical dynamic with a mechanism, an algorithm set by systems, institutions and the textbook approach to learning. The result: a society of obedient robots who have no reference points with which to compare and contrast the singular (often false) narrative with which they’ve been programmed.

No doubt, some will object that science does not tell stories and has no truck with fictions, especially false ones. Such a position however is uninformed. I’ve addressed this misguided assumption by examining some of the most glaring examples of story telling and mythologising that science indulges in “Science is Just a Bunch of Stories.” Analogy magazine keeps working to dismantle the false sense that science is somehow an exceptional and transcendent realm of human activity that yields the one True Truth. The pursuit of Truth is an ancient human quest and not only the concern of science in its present institutionalised form. In a future article, I’d like to show how science emerged from religion and still has fundamental roots in religion—not just Christianity but also ancient spiritual cults like the Pythagoreans. The present day emergence of a reductive and quasi-religious, orthodox scientism, then, should be no surprise.

Share

Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.

Bad Atheism

In the introduction to Michael Shermer’s How We Believe,1 he reviews a couple of extreme responses concerning his suggestion that it’s okay to believe in God. One interlocutor wrote, “Anything less” than complete rejection of “religion/belief” was “duplicitous, disingenuous, appeasing—and ultimately helps the other side by providing approval where disapproval should instead be offered.” Shermer takes issue with how this person imagines “the other side.” To his credit, Shermer engages his analogical mind and notes the following: “What a revealing way to phrase a critical attitude toward religion, whose long history of dividing the world between ‘our side’ and the ‘other side’ is a notoriously bloody one.”2 The next extremist position he presents is from one who said, “I won’t let anyone who believes in god in my home. I won’t sleep with them and I have none in my social circle. But I can do more.”3

This type of intolerance betrays a zealotry and fanaticism we generally associate with religion. In this case, however, we observe a transference of religious fervour to atheism, and by extension, to belief in science. Shermer’s book was first published in 2000, so we can conclude that this tendency was already in play during the twentieth century. The extremist ardour of New Atheism and its attendant rhetoric, claiming objectivity and science as its core guiding principles, however, had to wait till the twenty-first century to begin revealing the true dangers of the irrationality lurking behind its rationalist facade.

In a debate entitled Atheism Poisons Everything—hosted by the Fixed Point Foundation in 2010—mathematician, molecular biologist and philosopher, David Berlinski, faced off against New Atheist journalist, and chief prosecutor of religion, Christopher Hitchens, whose book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, set the phrasing of the resolution under discussion.

In rebuttal to his adversary’s contention that the Nazi project demonstrated how rationalism and science could be turned to evil purpose, Hitchens, in a deepened and severe tone, often turning to the ad hominem, argued that the Nazi movement was chiefly a religious organisation. Their discussion is worth examining in some detail because their exchange yields a number of insights due not only to the facts under consideration but also to their manner of delivery.

After conceding that “religion poisons some things” Berlinski’s two main points were as follows:

In the first place, the men guiding these regimes [committing unparalleled brutality, stupidity and violence in the twentieth century] and their entourage did not believe for a moment there was any power higher than their own… And they acted on that assumption.

And in the second place, in the mass murders they conducted, they were aided and supported by any number of crackpot scientific disciplines. . .In the case of the Nazis, the scientific disciplines were derived from biology and especially from Darwinian biology. In 1937, having murdered 70,000 handicapped women and children, the Nazis released a film, and on the background of the film, the narrator says in terms of solemn incomprehension, “My goodness, we have sinned against the law of natural selection.”

After attacking the character of his interlocutor, and chastising him for blaspheming the irreproachable Saint Darwin, Hitchens argued that Darwinism was not taught in pre-WWII Germany. Hitchens admitted that The Origin of Species was translated and published in Germany along with a “misprint” concerning the idea that evolution requires “the survival of the fittest”—but, Hitchens contended, this was no fault of the canonical Darwin. One wonders how this constitutes a rebuttal unless the issue for Hitchens is a relationship to the letter of The Origin of Species as gospel, rather than as an intellectual framework, laying the premise for ideas like social darwinism. After all, Berlinski was not impugning Darwin; he was discussing “crackpot scientific disciplines” “derived from. . .Darwinian biology.” Had Hitchens read Darwin’s The Descent of Man and had he been familiar with Darwin’s Malthusian (survival-of-the-fittest) attitudes and late political statements, he could not have made the counter-factual claims he did. (Darwin was a racist, eugenicist and elitist anti-democrat, a fact I’ve discussed elsewhere.)4 This unread and often misinformed approach to argumentation is typical of New Atheist debating (a theme I plan to return to in a future essay).

The fact is that Germany did not need Darwin to politicise natural selection. After all, natural selection was not Darwin’s invention. His survival of the fittest was Malthusian, and in any event, Germany had its own homegrown Nietzschean ideas to pervert. Moreover Germans were enthusiastic about evolutionary science and had their own, preferred school known as structuralist evolutionary theory. According to science historian Nicolaas Rupke, during the Third Reich “Darwinism became thought of as ‘un-German’.”5 That said, Germans were familiar enough with Darwinist notions. German translators made eager appeals to Darwin to give them first dibs on The Descent of Man, which was a best-seller, both in England and across Europe.6 So Hitchens was partially informed with selected ideas in defence of Saint Darwin. He was however entirely wrong in his conclusions: (a) about the biographical Darwin having no truck with cruel Malthusian policies and (b) also about the pervasiveness of Darwinist ideas in popular discourse across Europe, including Germany. So whether Darwinism was officially curricular there is a moot point.

Following that awkward episode of scriptural fundamentalism coloured with Darwin hagiography, Hitchens launched into an emotive diatribe marked by biblical style parataxis, almost like a revivalist minister, making the following five points: (1) “How! come!?” Hitler invoked God in the opening chapter to Mein Kampf, claiming to be doing God’s work and executing God’s will? (2) “How! come!?” Nazi officers took an oath in the name of Almighty God, pledging allegiance to their führer, “making Hitler into a minor god”? (3) “How! come!?” upon the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier was emblazoned Got mit uns (God is with us)? (4) “How! come!?” the very first treaty of the dictatorial National Socialist regime was with the Vatican, handing over power of Germany to the Catholic Church? (5) “How! Come!?” the churches celebrated Hitler’s birthday every year?

Then to round off this trembling appeal to the emotions of the audience, Hitchens concluded with, “To suggest that there is something fascistic about me and my beliefs… I won’t hear said, and you shouldn’t believe.” Berlinski, it ought to be noted, at no point in the debate indulged the ad hominem, so Hitchens appeared confused and engaged in wild rhetoric when he made it sound as though he had been personally insulted as a holder of certain beliefs. Indeed, he sounded like one of the many religious who were personally offended by his own book. (Though perhaps I should add that he earned enthusiastic applause for all this misinformation from the audience.)

If I may add to Berlinski’s observations, the problem with Hitchens’s counter-argument was quite glaring. The Christian aspect of the Nazi movement was, at least to some extent, the charitable side, the side that brought soup kitchens to the streets when Germans were starving from the devastating hyperinflation ravaging the country. To be sure, there were also cruel, ethno-religious elements motivating the idea of an Arian Master Race. But eugenics was hardly a Christian idea. Elimination of cripples and genetic degenerates was most definitely not Christian. And the systematic methods at work in the extermination camps, the machine-like heartlessness that permitted Germans to carry out their cruel duties, the methods devised and employed, were all done under the aegis of objectivity, not God. Not the wrath of God, but the rational, machine-like superiority of the German people would vanquish the inferior, degenerate races through their superior mechanical, social and genetic engineering. This thinking was a legacy of the Enlightenment and industrialisation.

The Nazis were effectively Godless, or in the Jungian idiom, they conflated themselves with, and usurped the God-image. That is how come the name of God and the Christian religion were invoked by the National Socialists. A glorious leader would reshape humanity in place of God. And the Master Race was not sold as an image of divinity, but of technological evolution. Even the racism, anchored as it was in phrenology and physiognomy, was decidedly scientific by the standards of the time.

Furthermore, the designation of Jews as unclean—although tied to Christian notions of the hateful Jew—was not ultimately perpetrated using religious arguments as the inquisitions of yore had done. Segregation was achieved through the invocation of virology: the dirty Jews had typhoid and therefore had to be quarantined. Moreover, the Jews had to be weeded out of society because they threatened the gene pool. It is odd indeed that Hitchens would not cede such obvious points unless we count him among the fanatically inclined New Atheists. If the teachings of Darwin cannot be criticised due to misprints, misunderstandings, and warped interpretations, then neither can the teachings of Yeshua ben Joseph of Nazareth be held to account for the atrocities committed in his name.

In short, Hitchens was wrong to paint Nazi evil as a purely Christian phenomenon. The German people were ethnically Christian, and therefore their Nazi ideology had a Christian flavour. One wonders if Hitchens is being disingenuous in characterising Hitler as a religious man, motivated by strictly religious zeal. Surely a journalist and social critic as experienced as he was at the time of the debate would be familiar with politicking. Are we to characterise Barak Obama as truly religious simply because he affirmed his Christian faith as a politician? How about Donald Trump? Most do not expect these leaders are truly religious, only that they demonstrate some respect for religion and the dominant ethnicity of their constituents, perhaps at times invoking religion to make a show of their solidarity and moral upstandingness. Hitler counted himself a Catholic, but he did not ignite a war of religion against Christians of other denominations to restore the one true faith, and claim Germany and the Empire he planned to conquer for the Pope. He was first and foremost an ethnic nationalist.

When Israelis complete their basic military training, they take an oath on the Bible. Yet the entire ethos of the country is based on a breaking away from religion, a kicking over of the traces of religious ancestry who failed to take back their birthright. The Bible there signifies ethnic heritage, not necessarily a belief in God. Oaths are taken with reference to some higher power; otherwise, what is the value of an oath?

Until after WWII, the famed Hippocratic Oath sworn by MDs invoked the gods and goddesses. How come? And in the 1964 revision, the phrase, “Above all, I must not play at God” was included. How come?—if not to address the growing problem of atheism in the practice of medicine, and a concern over the increasingly characteristic feeling in the profession (as per Dr. Mengele) that there was “no power higher than their own,” as Berlinski put it.

On the other hand, I think Hitchens did have a perfectly valid point that, had it been expressed with more nuance, would have been entirely true. The Nazis were an extreme instance of a two-headed, religio-scientific beast that was corrupting the Enlightenment project and threatening the terms of an amazing secularism that had been successfully and steadily inching forward with the progressive values of human equality for several centuries. Hitchens was on the right track when he indicated a religious source to the animus. But it wasn’t religion proper as he claimed, nor was it a spiritual orientation in the world. It was something that runs more covertly through the human psyche, a fanatical fervour beset by a tendency to codification and institutional mechanisation meant to turn out goodness by formulaic processes. This is a key materialist meeting point of organised religion and modern science. There is a will to incorporation that drives worldviews—whether of the spiritual type or of the Grand Theory type—to establish institutions that represent the entire body of humanity, that promise moral salvation and social safety to those who join, and that punish those who stand aside, resisting absorption into the common body.

In both religious and scientific spheres (and likely in those to come), there exists an impulse to establish a means of ensuring peaceable individual behaviour. It is felt by many that if we just had the right system, we could guide people toward goodness, even force it upon them. The reasoning seems obvious: if even vicious folk were to practice good deeds, we’d have a good society. It makes such perfect sense, it seems foolish to argue. But there’s a fatal flaw to such thinking because it is informed by a naive materialism, emphasising acts over faith, to put it one way (namely, the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther’s), or emphasising outer performance over inner development. This sort of theorising, however, has been the rationale behind every oppressive regime ever to emerge in human history. What actually winds up happening is a hollowing out of the ideas motivating the system, followed by rapid social decline. Piety replaces intention, and soon enough, vicious persons find a way to outwardly appear upstanding while, in fact, subverting the ethical framework they pretend to uphold. In reality, the very mechanisms put in place to police compliance provide a haven for the vicious to practice their evils under the guise of service to the public good.

Bad Religion

Implicit in my critique of science is a critique of religion. I am not, however, an atheist. My trouble with religion does not stem from a rejection of spirituality or God. I even find aspects of theology to be of value. It is religion as an institution with which I take issue because the structures of its offices and doctrines breed a naive materialism that undermines and subverts the raison d’etre of its spiritual teachings. Once we put the bureaucrats in charge and try to make any system run by mechanism, we abandon the heart and intention of any enterprise, no matter how noble. Conditions rapidly deteriorate. When naive materialism corrupts religion, we get empty pieties and inflamed egos; we get fanatical brutality and a devolution into the very barbarism the religion was designed to supplant; we get rampant hypocrisy, bloodlust, and inverted values.

Anyone who participates in a religion, who attends a church, a synagogue, a mosque, or any other temple; anyone who listens to sermons and socialises with a religious community, and truly takes to heart—I mean deeply, inwardly, in a way sincerely affecting one’s intentionality and behaviour—truly takes to heart the responsibilities of personal evolution without slipping into narcissism will struggle with this problem of institutional materialism and personal shallowness among the most pious. Those who wrestle in this way with their religion are never fanatics because such people reject elements of doctrine that are quite clearly not God, not divinity, not spiritual, but instead, the interventions of priests and administrators absorbed in temporal matters and ego. All the intelligent, religious folks I have met and talked with know this; they understand that the institutions are human and flawed.

To give these abstract cogitations a concrete, human face, let’s consider an anecdotal example of fanatical behaviour among the pious. In conversation with a severe and dogmatic Catholic, I urged that the teaching of the Sacred Heart was at heart about being a good person, not in the materialist, pious sense, not in the sense of worship and sacramental devotions, but rather in the immaterial sense. Abandoning all humility (humility representing a cornerstone of the teaching of the Sacred Heart), my interlocutor explained that being good is not enough. It was imperative to partake of the rites of the one true Christ and to believe in and devote one’s life to the only true religion, the Catholic Church or be damned for all eternity.

I then asked how he could square his extremist position with the understanding that the fanatics of all other religions felt the same as him toward their religions, and that these attitudes have historically led to persecutions and wars. He replied that his religion was not at present persecuting anyone. I rebutted by pointing out that this was only because our civilisation had enacted a separation of Church from State, and that given his position, were others like him to ever again assume the reins of power, political persecutions and wars of religion would inevitably ensue. To this, he simply replied that he himself wasn’t persecuting anybody. In other words, he refused to consider my point.

Essentially, he believed that his religion is the one true Truth and that was that. Worst of all, his dogmatism led to a complete inversion of the teachings of Yeshua and the early Apostles because the Sacred Heart was not a concept to him, not a symbol of humility, charity and good will to all humanity; it was a material ritual that bestowed by a magical grace outside himself, something superior to goodness. He found a way to despise the majority of humanity while wearing the pious and sanctified mantle of doctrine. I see this attitude and behaviour as bad religion, and try to distinguish it from good religion, which can potentially dispense social and personal harmony.

The analogical mind understands that institutional creep is not a phenomenon unique to religion, but applies to all great paradigms that establish systemic structures to dispense and implement their visions in the social and political spheres. Atheism is no exception. Whereas atheism is a philosophical stance that—if taken seriously and is not conflated with nihilism or just plain, shallow thoughtlessness—can amount to a spiritually respectable condition, New Atheism is a dogmatic and fanatical form of naive materialism that, like the above example in the Catholic context, leads to a close-minded inversion of scientific epistemology and the secular ethos. Stated baldly like that without much qualification, my claim may seem outrageous to the committed New Atheist, for how, after all, can it be argued that he is in any way, shape or form, in fact a sort of religious zealot? Given the dominant paradigms shaping our civilisation, it would take several chapters of a book to draw aside the curtain on my position for someone thus inclined. Hence my motivation for launching analogy magazine. If there is any chink in the New Atheist’s teflon-coated armour, the articles that appear here hope to exploit that slim crevice of curiosity and undo the programming.

Scientistic Orthodoxy

Painful though it may be for many scientists (and science fans) to hear, science in the twenty-first century has become doctrinaire and dogmatic—a fact that is evidenced by the cultural pushback and tug-of-war we are witnessing today in the 2020s. Semiotic confirmation of this recidivism abounds: “follow the science” has recently become a slogan only because of the substantial lack of faith questioning minds have been evincing toward the most popular claims science makes: The Big Bang, Darwinism, vaccine safety and efficacy and anthropogenic climate change, to name a handful. Believers follow “the science,” whereas, unbelievers, or heretics, or heathen—rebranded as “deniers” or “denialists” in present discourse—question and challenge “the science,” but this questioning is denigrated as an indulgence in “conspiracy theory,” promulgated by devilish and demented entities spreading “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “malinformation.” If science were behaving as promised, if it resisted and kicked over the traces of dogmatism, this situation could not have arisen: there would never be such a thing as the science—a newly popular coinage that aggregates supreme authority to those who invoke the term by indicating its singular, monolithic, unquestionable, and implicitly unchangeable nature. Indeed, this new entity has replaced God as a conversation stopper in our culture.

Among New Atheists, who are essentially fanatics of this religification of science—deniers are nothing short of evildoers, and are treated with scorn, derision and dehumanizing insult. In fact, as we have seen during the unfolding of the covid mysophobia scare, and as we continue to see vis a vis the millenarian “climate emergency”—followers of the science believe that deniers should be punished for their moral delinquency. Believers call unbelievers “deplorable,” “selfish,” “ignorant,” “stupid” and “a menace to society” never mind to life on earth. When politics enters the equation, deniers are deemed “white supremacist,” “patriarchal,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “domestic terrorists” who threaten to unravel the hard-won liberal freedoms humanity has been fighting to establish for several millennia. Here we find the conflation of politics with science, which, like the merging of religious fervour with science, is fundamentally unscientific and ought to be perceived as beneath the dignity of the scientific mind.

From a linguistic perspective, the definite article “the” in the noun phrase, the science, is misplaced. By scientific standards, the term, The Science, should have no truck in scientific thinking, which is supposed to encourage rather than suppress questions and challenges. Implied in this terminology is the notion of the scientific consensus, a misleading collocation meant to solidify authority and dogmatic adherence to approved ideas. Who approves the right kinds of ideas? The Science as represented by scientific consensus. How is consensus established? Either through statistical hijinks—as research into the 97% climate consensus reveals—or through institutional intimidation—as borne out by the various medical associations and hospital boards who threaten MDs with license revocation and the end of their careers should they be caught practicing or expressing dissent. These cultural examples represent only the very tip of the iceberg, but they suffice to illustrate the morass into which present day science has fallen.

Perhaps it is worth dwelling briefly on how this oxymoronic situation has come about, if only to help point the way toward a return to a scientifically motivated culture, and hopefully to help identify how we might prevent such confusion from setting in again if we’re lucky enough to find our way through. The desire to wield authority is the most obvious among human impulses, and we needn’t belabour the point. Twenty-first century historians of science point out an increasing politicization of science during the French Revolution (and subsequent upheavals in France), the American Civil War and a deepening entrenchment of scientistic approaches to political sophistry following WWII.7 Significantly Enlightenment luminaries including Jean Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin deployed scientific styles of intellection and scientific methods of presentation to rationalise political ends.

In her book The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science, nineteenth century science historian, Ruth Barton, has explored the lobbying efforts of the nine prominent scientists who formed a group called The X Club in 1864. Monumental figures like Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and Thomas Huxley (1825-1895)—known even to non-specialists—came together to coordinate efforts to displace the oppressive authority of the reigning elites, their religious commitments to the Church of England and their educational emphasis on Classics (Greek and Latin) and its associated literary-historical and religious studies. Notably, Barton explains, “Clearly, many eminent men were concerned by the state of scientific and technical education and wished their voices to be heard. The X Club was one group among many.”8 Of especial interest to my theme is how in their agitating for authority, “Spencer and Huxley sometimes directly attacked ‘literary’ education.” In 1867 Frederic Farrar (not of the X Club, but directly associated with it) delivered a lecture arguing that “an education confined to Greek and Latin was an anachronism,” in Barton’s words.9 Due to the struggle of science advocates against the elites and ensconced authorities in those times, a compromise was achieved:

This was a two-cultures argument for both-science-and-literature rather than either-science-or-literature. The scientific witnesses [at the Devonshire Commission 1875] agreed that science students needed literary culture for breadth, but the part of the argument that performed useful work was that, equally, classics and divinity students needed scientific culture for breadth.10

Let’s recall that I am attempting to recover when and where scientism or our notion of The Science originated. These political disputes over the place of science in education were the start. It’s essential to understand that the Huxleys and Spencers of the English world at that time felt overlooked by the arbiters of power and influence. The governing and titled elites who moved in parliament were all educated in the old system and had little respect for what they perceived to be a non-intellectual occupation. (Yes! That’s right: there was a time, not that long ago, when science was not deemed the pinnacle of human intellection.) Those who understood that science required rigorous study and disciplined thinking and were themselves advancing scientific discovery wanted to command public respect; and they desired more cultural acceptance of their divergent religious and spiritual beliefs. In the struggle, this new cultural entity called “Science” emerged as a radical progressivist vehicle of political and social reform and came to be closely allied to Victorian Liberalism. And since the elites weren’t having any of it, science became an avenue of self-improvement and empowerment for the under-classes. Barton explains as follows, sharing an exceptionally juicy bit from Huxley:

The contributions of the X-men were at lower levels, to science teaching in elementary schools, night schools, and “third grade” secondary schools. “The English nation will not take science from above so it must get it from below,” wrote Huxley to [Joseph] Hooker [1817-1911], with medical allusions for his fellow navy surgeon: “if we cannot get it [the nation] to take pills [we] must administer our remedies par derrière.”11

Perhaps even more relevant to my thesis is how conscious some science lobbyists could be in the mid- and late-nineteenth century regarding their representing a new religion they hoped would oust the predominant one. Here’s another passage from Barton, central to understanding where the religious fervour of scientism today comes from:

In Huxley’s rhetoric, teaching science was preaching a new truth. He understood science education as a secularizing force that would counter the religious emphases of conventional education and described his teachers as “scientific missionaries” who would “convert the Christian Heathen of these islands to the true faith.”12

But it was more than just one man’s rhetoric. The evangelical quality of the lobbying efforts and educational programs of Huxley’s circle was in the air at the time. Barton tells us that “Beatrice Webb, a sympathetic but critical observer of the scientific movement, described it. . .as a ‘religion of science’.” And Webb further commented that its promoters had “an implicit faith that by the methods of physical science, and by these methods alone, could be solved all the problems arising out of the relations of man to man and of man towards the universe.” Apparently Webb “had followed this faith for only six years (1876 to 1882, she said) before she ‘found it wanting’.” Barton tells us that “Looking back, she [Webb] thought the faith in science ‘almost fanatical’ and speculated that it might have been due to hero worship.”13 A fan of X Club member John Tyndall (ca. 1822-1893), one Mme Olga de Novikoff wrote to her hero, “I sympathise now more than ever with the great number of people, unknown to you but living upon the bread you give them. Let the faith of those unknown but united be complete in you.” As Barton points out, Novikoff was invoking the symbology of the eucharist and drawing an analogy between Tyndall and Christ.14

In short, we ought to keep in mind that science recruited politics and politics recruited science for the purposes of authority very early on and that the two are entangled in a Gordian knot, infusing the whole scientific enterprise with religious zeal. The scientists of our time have inherited these qualities, the fervour, the faith and the evangelism. They have also inherited the opposition to both traditional religion and to literature. As I keep pointing out, the denigration of literature and Classical studies as just a bunch of stories has resulted in a gutting of our inner lives. And moreover the relegation of stories and myths as anachronistic fictions not worth our time and attention has resulted in a loss of the grounds for philosophical inquiry and pluralism. No doubt a separation of science from state is necessary. We know that such policy is possible and effective. So let’s get that project underway before all is lost.

Share

Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.

The social deployment of the term pseudoscience continues to fascinate me. Googled Stephen C. Meyer the other day. First up as always is Wikipedia telling me he advocates for “the pseudoscience of intelligent design.” As mentioned in my Barstool Bit on this subject, Graham Hancock has been smeared with the same can of ACME product, along with Rupert Sheldrake. In that bit, I wrote about the Lysenko affair, something I don’t get into here at all. But for those interested in appreciating pseudoscience as the sort of science that serves an ideology or party inte…

Read more

A few weeks back, I wrote a piece for Barstool Bits called “‘This is Just to Say’: The Post-Covid Apology Genre” about the demonisation of the so-called “unvaccinated” and the truly despicable savagery levelled at this group, including calls for segregation and death. Prime ministers, presidents and other leaders of state and province, bolstered by their public health authorities, stoked fear and hatred of “those people”; and the media helped fan the flames. “This is Just to Say” was an off-the-cuff review of certain barbaric events that many seem to want to forget, and I put a humorous spin on the subject, concluding that we shouldn’t hold our breaths for an apology. The crux of the piece was Emily Oster’s article for the Atlantic, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty: Let’s focus on the future and fix the problems we still need to solve.” Oster’s claim was that “We didn’t know” and therefore “we” ought to be let off the hook for lockdowns and for what we did to “those people” in ignorance. What follows is the long-form, research essay I promised on the subject of “we didn’t know” with notes and links.

Even before covid and the sudden appearance of The Science™, I was concerned with the direction science was taking—especially as a cultural movement. Well before 2020, attitudes toward science were becoming religious. A lot of this had to do with the antagonistic agitations of New Atheists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Michael Shermer, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Christopher Hitchens. These folks seemed to be inspiring a generation of scientistic, fact-thumping types who held unexamined beliefs in the doctrines and dogmas of institutionalised pop-science. These fanatics enjoyed monkeying about, berating “denialists” and beating their chests over any attempt to strike up a conversation about alternative perspectives. To their minds, all alternatives were “pseudoscience” and no need to bother reading or researching. Worse, their ignorance about science extended to its methods, history, sociology, epistemology and philosophy. This new cadre of believers in The Science was ignorant of the internal disagreements, paradigmatic troubles, struggles with fraud and corporate agendas. This growing faction believed in total fictions; but most troubling, it believed in “settled science” and “scientific consensus”—terms that inform the idea of The Science™ and now, by extension, notions of “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

At the time, my attention was focused on this authoritative drift away from the secular and toward those elements of religion from which science had promised to save us: a canonical set of doctrines established by an elite and the dispensation of its approved dogmas for the masses via Church-like institutions. To disagree or to discuss taboos was verboten enough to warrant labelling as “pseudoscience” followed by various forms of cancellation, our modern version of excommunication. This was a group with amazing influence and with acolytes everywhere, working hard to shame others into agreeing with them and their doctrines. Disagreement would be met with sneers, rude comments and demands you show your math—though none of these folk had any math of their own to show, let alone understand.

Covid catalyzed this trend and crystallized a substantial mass who’d been primed with scientism. And with that we rounded a decisive corner and found ourselves in a new world divorced from secular values. To consolidate The Science™, after all, censorship was needed… to combat “misinformation” of course. But it was okay this time because this time we really knew what we were doing. Not to worry. Oppression and tyranny are good now that we’ve finally established the one true Truth. No need for the crutches of secularism when we’ve got it all figured out, right? Well, I wasn’t having any of it. So with covid behind us now (officially as of May 5, 2023), I thought it time to review some of the things that happened in the name of science between 2020 and 2023 that had nothing whatsoever to do with science proper, but had a lot to do with authority and the dismantling of our secular society.

The Catholic, The Secular & The Science™

As a point of departure, let’s begin with the most general sense of the word secular. The secular refers to the worldly, as opposed to the churchly. Although dictionaries tend to set the secular against both the spiritual and the religious, I think lumping these together is misguided. The Church (or any religious body, for that matter) perceives as illegitimate any spiritual practices unsanctioned by its theology. So it’s worth making the distinction between spiritual and religious. Since the advent of religious tolerance, ultimately codified in the American Constitution—we may better define secular as the accepting spirit that brings about a pluralistic ethos. To be secular, therefore, at least for the purposes of this inquiry, is analogous to the notion of being small-C catholic in. . . well, the secular sense: i.e. having open-minded tastes, interests and sympathies.

To better understand what’s going on with the secular, it’s worth noting the etymology of the term catholic, how such a word, denoting universality, came to refer to a specific theological set of doctrines. Indeed the cultural story this word tells us is analogous to the story now unfolding with regard to science and its more authoritarian cousin, the science, or The Science™.

The case of the term catholic is by no means linear. In other words, it was not first used to mean liberal and progressively deteriorated over the centuries into its opposite. Oddly enough, its usage suggests that almost the reverse is true. The etymology of the term is from the Greek phrase, καθ όλου (kath’ olou), meaning on the whole, in general; eventually the phrase became a single word, katholikos. Church Latin borrowed the term, rendering it catholicus circa 1300-1350, when it took on its first circumscription as referring to the doctrines of the early Church before the Arian Controversy of the 4th-century that split the universal Church over whether Christ was man or God and from which Person the Holy Spirit proceeded, resulting in the East-West divide with which we are familiar today.

So, a Christian Liberal of the two-hundred year period, circa 1350 to 1550, was inclusive—so long as those in question were good Christians. As the mass slaughters of the Crusades (1095-1291) and various medieval inquisitions (initiated 1184) evidence, the Mussulman, the Jew (and other “heathen”) and various Christian heretics fell outside the grace of this universalism.

The next delimitation of the term took place with the advent of the Protestant schism (start 1517, but truly in full force with the response of the Papal Church in 1545), when catholic took on its upper-case ‘C’ mantle to denote the Western Church exclusively. Significantly, it was the Protestants who dubbed the Roman Church “Catholic.” One cannot help but sense that Protestants applied the term ironically, as one might today use the term capital-‘L’ Liberal with a wink and a nudge. It was only in the 1580s that lower-case ‘c’, catholic, came to mean (at least in the English language) “not narrow-minded or bigoted,” likely as a reaction by the newly minted Catholics to their Protestant detractors. (https://www.etymonline.com/word/Catholic)

“I Represent The Science™—That’s Dangerous”

I predict that soon enough, this cultural transformation of attitude will affect the word, science, as well. Indeed, the process is already well underway. For example, during the three-year covid scare of 2020-2023, Dr. Anthony Fauci, reacting to Congressional, scientific and public criticism of his inconsistent messaging and libellous smear campaigns against his opponents, responded publicly as follows:

But you’re talking about systems, you're talking about the CDC, you’re talking about the FDA, you're talking about science in general.

Anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this. So if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about. But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people could recognize there’s a person there. There’s a face, there’s a voice you can recognize, you see him on television. So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.1

Surely, more dangerous than criticizing science—considering scrutiny of one’s peers is a cornerstone of scientific progress—is spreading the idea that science ought not to be criticized. Perhaps worse is the notion that one man “represents science” and abides in a social sphere beyond criticism. And what is it “about systems” exactly that places them above public scrutiny? The paradigm Fauci is expressing here sounds very much like the Church and the Holy Offices of the clergy. Yet, this was Fauci’s message on every venue that would have him. Here’s another Fauci quotation from the New York Times “Sway” podcast:

It is essential as a scientist that you evolve your opinion and your recommendations based on the data as it evolves, and that’s the reason why I say people who then criticize me about that are actually criticizing science.2

To give credit where it is due, at least here he admits that a scientist’s messaging should “evolve” according to the data. But this stance is fundamentally inconsistent with the notion that neither science nor its representatives should be challenged or criticized. Trying to parse his argument, one might rightly worry about his basic reasoning skills. A classic authoritarian, Fauci wants to eat his cake and have it too, for when the reverend doctor speaks, one must obey as though The Science were settled. And when he changes his messaging, it’s because science evolves. Does science evolve or is it settled? If it evolves, a scientist cannot rightly ask for unquestioning obedience. He cannot impose mandates directly or by proxy. Must it be pointed out how puerile this strategy is? It’s right out of the schoolyard game in which a kid makes up the rules as he goes along so as to maintain the upper hand.

We Didn’t Know?—What We Knew & When

Meanwhile, when looking at the data, the Fauci case thickens. In early May 2022, Bill Gates, in an interview with CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria at an event organised by 92nd Street Y, confided, “We didn’t really understand the fatality rate [of COVID-19], you know, we didn’t understand that it’s a fairly low fatality rate and that it’s a disease mainly of the elderly, kind of like flu is, although a bit different than that.” Notably different, indeed, in that it was less harmful on the whole because it wasn’t claiming the lives of healthy children.3

If one had been paying attention from the start, however, one would ask, who exactly the ignorant “We” is to whom Gates was referring. Because we most certainly did know very early on that the data did not support claims that COVID-19 was any worse than the flu. How early did we have this data? Certainly no later than the end of the 2020 flu-season enough data was available to determine that humanity was not facing a new Black Death. As far back as March 17, 2020, Dr. John Ioannidis, the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University, warned that making policy based on such insufficient or inaccurate data could turn out to be a “once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.”

Sweden had never imposed lockdowns, and they were doing just fine, in part, because the “We” in that country had determined immediately that the world had gone mysophobic. After all, SARS-CoV had never before presented a pandemic deemed worthy of invoking universal lockdowns and shutting down the world. Faced with Sweden’s success despite its flouting of the nearly universal lockdowns around the world, the press was highly critical of the Swedish reaction, and many remain of the opinion that the country’s policies backfired, resulting in massive casualties. This position however is not borne out by the data. Sweden’s covid fatalities were well within the range experienced by countries that imposed lockdowns. Toward the end of January 2023 worldometers.info placed Sweden 42nd among impacted countries, below Canada, Australia, Switzerland and Denmark.

Arguments have been made that Sweden was less impacted due to low population density, but this notion fails when considering Australia and Canada which have lower population densities. No doubt far more quibbling is possible. My point here is that Sweden’s numbers have by no means been off the charts and a clear case of policy failure. Moreover, by rejecting lockdowns, Sweden avoided the mass casualties and social damage resulting from shuttering businesses and closing schools. A March 23, 2023 article in the Spectator reviewing excess mortality data confirms that Sweden did more than relatively well compared to other countries, indeed having the lowest or next to lowest excess deaths.

Prior to April 2021 when his message finally began to trickle out, Nobel Laureate, Michael Levitt, tried back-channelling to inform the world that the data was clear, but he was frustrated in his attempts to be heard. One of the only ways Levitt’s message could reach the public was via a little known Youtuber and data analyst named Ivor Cummins. But Fauci wasn’t listening, and Gates had no ears for it either.

Meanwhile, Levitt and Ioannides were not alone among high-profile MDs trying to be heard on a variety of issues surrounding the mishandling of this milder cousin of the rebranded flu. The messaging from well-established doctors like Joseph Mercola and Scott Atlas was politicised, with U.S. Democrats either ignoring them or claiming they were spreading dangerous disinformation, while Republicans, like Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis invited them to panels to get to the bottom of the covid scare.

Pulmonary and critical care specialist, also Associate Professor at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Dr. Pierre Kory testified to the U.S. Congress in early December 2020, pleading for permission to use proven and well-established therapeutics for early treatment, because patients were being sent home until coming down with severe symptoms due to newly imposed regulations preventing doctors from doing their jobs in the face of covid positive PCR results and using pre-approved and longstanding medications that might have saved lives. He was painted by House Democrats as somehow a political ringer. Meanwhile, unlike his titular colleagues, Fauci et al., running the masquerade from their manorial offices, Kory was a practicing physician, dealing with thousands of patients in the field. (Significantly, he didn’t die of this new plague despite repeated and continuous exposure.)

All these doctors were treated like heretics, their ideas of medicine and medical practice constituting apocryphal sources, and measures were taken—or more accurately, an all out campaign was initiated through behind-the-scenes collusions—to silence, discredit and marginalise such high-profile critics as mRNA vaccine developer, Dr. Robert Malone, former Pfizer CEO, Dr. Michael Yeadon, and the influential (widely published) epidemiologist, Dr. Peter McCullough through strategically placed, libellous hit pieces in established and supposedly creditable sources such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Wikipedia. Warning labels appeared on messages and articles deemed heretical by the orthodoxy at the helm of Fauci’s “systems.” The terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” were deployed across platforms and in traditional media to dissuade readers from listening to leading scientific minds.

In short, we most certainly did know early on. Logic suggests that Gates had no interest in data that didn’t suit his purposes to promote public panic and sell vaccines, because he, like Fauci, stood to profit financially and reputationally from a pandemic.

Changing Definitions & Shifting Goal Posts

Which brings us to yet another unscientific manoeuvre, this time on the part of the WHO. Just a month prior to the Swine Flu-, or H1N1-scare of mid-2009, characterized by what turned out to be a toothless (but apparently highly transmissible) virus, some committee decided to alter the definition of “pandemic” so as to exclude the clause stating that its impacts must cause “enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” Evidently, this was not a data-based evolution, but instead, a way to lower the threshold of what constituted a pandemic so that in future, all that would be required was a novel “virus [that] appears against which the human population has no immunity.”4

This was a system-rigging definition-change meant to trigger an easy emergency that would lead to vaccine sales (a multi-billion, if not multi-trillion, dollar industry). But the H1N1 campaign failed in that regard, managing only to sell megatons of Purell® hand sanitiser, destroy millions of pigs worldwide, and produce a deadly and highly injurious vaccine. But apparently, Gates’s “We” saw the H1N1 false panic as a good dry-run.

With this knowledge in mind, one is hard pressed to determine how Fauci’s “systems” have anything to do with “science in general.” In fact, the systems to which he was referring, NIAID, the NIH, the CDC and the FDA (along with their equivalents abroad) were institutions that were undermining scientific integrity and the dignity of science-based western medicine.

And that is not all; there is much more lurking beneath the surface of the covid panic. For instance, employing Orwellian double-speak, in September 2021 “We” managed to redefine the term, “vaccine,” such that products bearing that label no longer had to deliver immunization—as commonly understood by anyone who was to hear the word, “vaccine.” This was a bald-faced marketing ploy involving collusion between Fauci’s “systems” and the pharmaceutical industry, conveniently categorising these shots as “biologics” rather than “drugs,” “medicines,” “therapeutics” (or “experimental gene therapeutics,” as the mRNA products ought to have been labelled).

Biologics enjoy a special status among pharmaceuticals, as they are exempt from a number of provisions affecting all other pharmaceutical substances. Most importantly to developers and producers, they enjoy legal immunity against insurance claims for injury and death caused by biologics. Additionally, these interventions on otherwise healthy persons, could be fast-tracked to global markets without having to undergo the rigorous and years-long, scientific processes of safety testing.5

In the case of genetic therapy products deployed against SARS and even mandated by unethical government edicts in 2020, they were highly experimental serums with a history of failure, injury and death among lab animals. A well known paper in the field dating back to 2003 documents how attempts to engineer a vaccine against SARS-CoV-1 resulted in lung injury and death to lab animals due to vaccine induced suppression of natural immunity—i.e. the body’s ability to produce certain antibodies—and were inducing “vaccine enhanced disease” upon contact with live virus (and other exposures).6

This research is especially significant because Moderna, one of the producers of the mRNA product widely distributed against SARS-CoV-2 had discovered by March 2021—at the end of their unconscionably brief testing period on humans (begun June 2020)—that their product was having a similar impact on their human subjects—a reduction in antibody production and an elevated vulnerability—meaning vaccinated groups were vulnerable to vaccine enhanced disease.7

In March 2020, when the data was clear that SARS-CoV-2 was no worse that SARS-CoV-1 and that therefore no vaccine was necessary, Fauci explained to the locked-down public that the road to a vaccine—which would release them from lockdowns—would take at least 18 months. MDs were up in arms, warning that this was an unprecedented and dangerous timeline. “Vaccine development is usually measured in years, not months,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar focused on emerging infectious disease at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University. “Vaccine trials typically start with testing in animals before launching into a three-phase process,” wrote CNN reporter Robert Koznia in an article published April 1, 2020. But authorities skipped animal trials, and none of Fauci’s “systems” stepped in to correct the dangerous error. Koznia quoted “Dr. Emily Erbelding, an infectious disease expert at NIAID” as saying “the typical vaccine takes between eight and 10 years to develop” and “that the accelerated pace will involve ‘not looking at all the data’.” Keep in mind that no mRNA product had ever been approved. Nevertheless, “it took less than one year to complete the design, manufacture, efficacy and safety tests, and evaluation and approval for use.” These gene therapy products were first made available to the public in Europe and North America throughout December 2020.8

Downplaying Vaccine Injury Reports

In April 2022, a study entitled “Increased emergency cardiovascular events among under-40 population in Israel during vaccine rollout and third COVID-19 wave” was published in Nature. The revelations were damning because the refusal to evolve with the data was now on full display:

The study by the Ministry of Health in Israel, a country with one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, assesses the risk of myocarditis after receiving the 2nd vaccine dose to be between 1 in 3000 to 1 in 6000 in men of age 16–24 and 1 in 120,000 in men under 30. A follow up study by the US Center of Disease Control (CDC) based on the VAERS and V-Safe self-reporting systems further confirms these findings. The CDC has recently posted a warning regarding a vaccine-related risk of myocarditis, but still maintained their recommendation to vaccinate young individuals and children over 12. Similar concerns are reflected in the recent Food and Drug Administration approval to the Pfizer vaccine that requires several follow studies on the short and long terms effects of myocarditis in young individuals.9

One expects that health authorities would be especially concerned with protecting children. But as we can see, this is hardly the case. Keep in mind that we have Gates on record confirming that COVID-19 does not effect children, and as you will note below, this fact was known very early on. In light of this, why would the CDC recommend a harmful product for this age group?

On August 6, 2021, Rochelle Walensky, Director of the CDC, a very talented PR spokesperson, skilled at rhetorical evasion, admitted to Wolf Blitzer on CNN that the covid vaccines did not stop or reduce transmission or prevent infection. What the CDC refused to admit was the injury and death rate signal they were receiving from VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, was higher than decades of reports for all previous vaccines put together,10 and that other such reporting systems, like the Yellow Card in England were confirming this alarming trend. When Japan noticed the high rate of heart injuries (December 2021), they placed warning labels on the mRNA products. In mid-December 2021, Canada’s CTV News published a correction as follows: “A previous version of this article stated that the risk of contracting a serious side-effect after COVID-19 vaccination is less than one in a million. The correct figure, based on data reported to the Public Health Agency of Canada, is roughly one in 10,000.” Pharmaceuticals with a much lower injury rate in the past were pulled from shelves.11 But the West covered its mouth, blinded itself and plugged its ears. Fauci’s “systems” and “science in general” were most certainly not evolving with the data. Evidently, they were flat out ignoring it.

Additionally, there were the PCR virus tests run at unreliably high cycles (40-45 rather than the recommended maximum of 20 cycles) that produced over 90% false positives, thereby generating what became known as “casedemics”—high case counts rationalising unprecedented government emergency powers, dereliction of constitutionally enshrined rights and internationally established human rights, brutalising citizens the world over.12

Then there was the pharmaceutical sponsored media that promoted the casedemics. It is no secret that Pfizer sponsors CNN, NBC, CBS and a host of other news outlets because they shamelessly announce to audiences their “brought to you by Pfizer” plugs as often as they can. In tandem with these unethical media manipulations were the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of Fauci et al. working to censor and discredit the highly qualified medical doctors critical of the institutional refusals to evolve with the data.

Smearing Lockdown Critics

Indeed, many came together to sound alarm bells over the psychologically, immunologically, socially and economically devastating lockdowns. In early October 2020, for instance—three MDs with qualifications that ought to have given authorities and journalists some pause—joined hands to pen the Great Barrington Declaration. Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist alongside Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modelling of infectious diseases, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases came together at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to draft a statement and open letter to inform world leaders and citizens alike that lockdowns were causing vast, irreparable harm.

Here are two quotations from the introduction to the declaration:

Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.

And to once again debunk Gates’s disinformation that “We didn’t really understand the fatality rate”—remember, this is from October 2020, after these doctors were frustrated in their attempts to back channel their concerns. They knew this well before the autumn of 2020:

Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.

As for Fauci’s “systems” and “science in general”—according to what data are medical professors from among the most renowned institutions with qualifications directly related to the subject under scrutiny excluded from the conversation? And, moreover, how is their criticism in any way to be construed as having “a distinct anti-science flavor”?

In any event, the media worked to black out news of the Great Barrington Declaration among passive news viewers, while at once discrediting it among those who caught wind of it and were seeking information. The tactic worked, and the public remained widely ignorant of it. Consequently, the project never built the momentum it would have gained in a truly secular society with a functional Fourth Estate (i.e. free press with investigative journalists pushing hard for honest answers). Behind the scenes, Fauci and his colleague at the NIH, Francis Collins, were colluding to conduct a smear campaign against the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, spreading disinformation about them as “fringe” scientists and discrediting their assertions as. . . you got it! “disinformation” and “misinformation.”

Safety is the New Salvation

Despite all of these goings on, which would have been known to anyone as closely connected to the situation as Bill Gates, he was telling the public as late as mid-2022 that “We” didn’t know, and that the vaccines were ineffective, that one should keep getting boosters nevertheless, and that next time, we ought to do the same, only with swifter and stricter lockdowns and the same “safe and effective” vaccine program, only more rapidly deployed. Considering that Gates has gone on record in support of population growth-rate reduction (through improved health, since healthy societies tend to have fewer children), and since preventing overpopulation is a main pillar of his CO₂ reduction plan, many came to the conclusion that his vaccination programs were designed to kill.13 Though hard to believe, the effect of lying to the public, spreading disinformation and labelling solid scientists engaged directly in scientific inquiry as spreaders of disinformation has struck a blow to the credibility of the scientific project, and nearly obliterated any semblance of secularism.

Gates, by the way, has advocated government censorship of social media, especially concerning statements casting doubt on vaccination safety.14 The example he gives—i.e. “the COVID-19 vaccine makes you infertile”—is so specific as to be misleading. Considering that such a point regarding other vaccines like Merck’s Gardasil 9 vaccine against HPV is a verifiable statement of scientific and medical fact (not that it makes one infertile, but that it can and sometimes does), and, moreover an item of information never discussed in public debates and therefore widely unknown—one is morally obligated to question Gates’s motives along with the motives of all those who agree that such information ought to be suppressed.15

Nothing about the institutional reaction to covid can be interpreted as evolving with the data. Notably, as an example of bureaucratic incompetence and the irrational creep of a religious zeitgeist among The-Science™-fearing public, even following Bill Gates’s admissions at 92nd Street Y, the website of this venue retained a banner advising visitors that only vaccinated persons would be permitted entry.

As the evidence mounts in the case of the COVID-19 false alarm and the deployment of dangerous gene therapy products, what one sees is not science at all, is not careful, data-driven evolution, nor cost-benefit analyses, but the capricious and reckless policies of institutions associated with something we might call, “scientism,” or as journalist and free-speech advocate, Glenn Greenwald, dubbed it, The Science™—a sharp formulation that captures perfectly the various forces at play in the corporate, profit-motivated fear-campaign of COVID-19. Following Greenwald’s lead, we might observe how H1N1 and COVID-19 were pandemics® requiring the rushed deployment of *safe and **effective vaccines®. To add yet another analogy, we’re looking at the sort of legal trickery associated with McDonald’s “shakes”—carefully labelled such so as to exclude the word “milk”—since they don’t use milk in their milkshakes. Notably, the covid confidence game foisted on the global public was worse because, unlike McDonald’s, the Gatesian “We” was able to change the definitions of key terminology to mislead the public.

To return to my main point, the covid scare of the early 2020s provides a case study to help us view a pivotal, historical moment when social, systemic, institutional and corporate forces were operating upon the scientific project much as they did upon the Christian project centuries ago—moving inexorably from openness and universality toward a bureaucratised institutionalism, growing ever more rigid and dogmatic in the process. Same as the evolution of the term catholic into Catholic, we are witnessing the term, science, transmogrify into the term, The Science™.

In the various Catholic inquisitions against heretics like the Cathar, the Mussulman and the Jew, those who refused to join the truly “universal” and truly “open” community of Christ were tortured and put to death. Analogically speaking, COVID-19 was a science-flavoured version of the Bogeyman, or fear of the Dibbuk and demon possession. The administration of the cure, which was no cure at all, but an injurious and often deadly intervention, was mandated like a sacrament, and all those “deniers” or “denialists” who refused it were essentially excommunicated from the pious and orthodox community of believers in The Science™. A vaccine passport was mandated to enter gyms, restaurants, movie theatres, museums, stadiums, casinos, strip clubs—anywhere a public gathering took place excepting open air parks—and even those spaces were often shut down, preventing people from maintaining healthy exercise regimens. Many lost their jobs because vaccination was enforced at their place of employment. Many who did not want to take part in the experiment were coerced into doing so or face loss of home and livelihood. In some cases, access to food was also curtailed for the “unvaccinated”—a dubious term, implying a magical undoing of all previous vaccination, but also the implication that such people were somehow unclean.

These measures were not put in place based on any data whatsoever, nor did they evolve according to the data. They were meant to dragoon compliance, and establish the supreme power of The Science™. In Canada, one was barred from travel by land, air and sea, excepting land travel by personal automobile, thereby preventing the non-compliant from travel and from exiting the country. At the U.S. border, authorities required proof of vaccination. In short, one was stripped of one’s Charter Rights, that is, one was rendered no-longer a full citizen, effectively excommunicated. Peaceful protests against medical segregation, imprisonment and fines for non-compliance held in Ottawa—which came to be known as the Trucker Convoy—were quashed with further authoritarian actions via which the government froze the bank accounts of supporters and brought in a thuggish squad of masked police to intimidate and physically assault protesters.

As noted at the start, all religions perceive as illegitimate spiritual practices unsanctioned by their theology. Analogically speaking, we’re witnessing the same pattern with science today as the scientific establishment seeks underhandedly, through its various institutional influences, to malign, censor and obliterate scientific ideas and practices unsanctioned by those in high office. The main difference between Church and Science now is that the present iteration is overtly materialist, whereas the previous iteration was ostensibly spiritual. Instead of Church Offices, we have Public Health Officers. In place of their draconian actions being done in the name of your salvation, they are now being done in the name of your safety. To the analogical mind, the terms of the game have shifted so slightly, it’s not even tricky, it’s laughably silly. It’s the same face wearing a cheap Groucho disguise.

Share

Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.

In “What is a Scientific Fact? Laying Bare the Heuristics,” I explained that mathematical probability could not establish any laws of physics or nature because probability is actually a clever workaround (heuristic device) for what we do not know and cannot predict. The best it can do is give us a roundabout purchase on phenomena we perceive as random and involving chance or luck. There is a reason for this limitation.1 Probability was developed to help describe the phenomena of gambling. According to Britannica, probability originated “in the study of gambling and insurance in the 17th century.” A further entertaining bit of trivia from Britannica:

The modern mathematics of chance is usually dated to a correspondence between the French mathematicians Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal in 1654. Their inspiration came from a problem about games of chance, proposed by a remarkably philosophical gambler, the chevalier de Méré.

Any application of probabilistic math to gambling makes a decent fit, but still cannot reveal the outcome of the next spin of the roulette wheel or roll of the dice. Such math can represent, augment and test common-sense observations about the likelihood of rolling another double six or of a ball falling into another red slot with a kind of accuracy that helps the house establish betting rates and gamblers decide whether the bet is worth it. When you think about it, though, probability isn’t establishing any laws; it merely enhances one’s sense of the odds.

The most troubling problem is that this gambling math has been repurposed for other uses in science where it has very little relevance and arguably muddies more than it clarifies. Since pointing out these limitations, I have continued to stew over probability. I’ve been reading Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence of Intelligent Design, where Meyer spends a lot of time considering the probability arguments supporting Darwinist notions of the role of chance in evolution. Meyer makes a distinction between origin of life science (or first-life) and evolution; the latter examines historically progressive, biological phenomena, while the former works to understand a one-off event.

It’s been a brain-tickling read, Meyer’s careful critique of probability as a tool to support the theory of undirected processes in creating the first life. He takes probability on its own terms and shreds it; in fact, disproves the role of chance and accident in the assembly of DNA, RNA and the information coding and decoding that goes into nucleic processes. That’s right. The odds are against the information-rich computing system of life having come together by mathematically defined, random processes. Many fascinating ideas emerge from Meyer’s consultations with some of the world’s leading probability mathematicians, one of which I’ll share at the end of this barstool bit.

But the overall takeaway I’ve had is that when bundled with statistics and applied to things like populations, economies, moral actions, happiness and public policy, evolutionary theory, quantum physics and climate modelling, the math is misapplied. What was a clever workaround tailored to one set of phenomena to begin with is now repurposed to apply to categorically different phenomena. Not only that, but the application is often reversed (as in Neo-Darwinism and big bang theory), starting with the outcome (the now) and imagining or (predicting. . . or should it be postdicting?) the origin; then working up the invented origin by hypothetical and probabilistic processes to the presently observed state. (Which sounds a lot like confirmation bias through storytelling.) The result is a bad fit and impositions of assumptions regarding the phenomena that no one would assume were it not for the math.

This clumsy cannibalising goes further to my point that present-day science erroneously imposes its models on phenomena, trying to make the phenomena fit the models. This cognitive error gets so far out of hand that scientistic persons (including many scientists) often forget that the phenomena come first and models are secondary derivations. Instead, they posit that their models precede the phenomena with underlying “laws.” On the heels of this epistemological error, they attempt to make various phenomena fit their models by dreaming up ad hoc phenomenological attributes like dark matter, virtual particles, wavicles, missing links and parallel universes.

More specifically, the application of probability to a phenomenon assumes the phenomenon is a game of chance in some kind of casino. Nonsense? No. Whether we’re talking big bang or Darwinist evolution, the operating assumption that allows us to apply probabilistic concepts in the first place is a “laws of Nature directed” but otherwise random knocking about of energy and matter or a number of other undirected collisions. But in what sense “random”? In the sense that no conscious intelligence is directing things—not externally from beyond the cosmos, and most definitely not centrifugally from any internal agency in any of the myriad life-forms that inhabit our planet. Human consciousness is an impossible fluke, as unlikely as flipping a coin and getting one-hundred heads in a row.

The assumptions thicken. The idea that the universe has developed into what it is by an accumulation of chance incidents is a casino analogy that recruits the notion of do-overs, repeated turns at the roulette or craps table. This is where we impose the model, suggesting the existence of multiple universes for each possible outcome. These universes however are phantom vestiges arising from the math. There’s nothing wrong with considering the possibility. But you ought to be aware when doing so that you’re no longer investigating a phenomenon, but instead a dreamt up fiction, an intriguing fallout of mathematical thinking that is likely just a blind alley.

In reality, we ought to assume that the universe we occupy is the only one to have developed. In any event, it’s all we have to investigate (at present). Probability sprouts imaginary universes. It’s a tool to dream with. And it’s productive in that domain. Too productive. It plays too big a role in shaping our worldview and our behaviour.

How does probability get us anywhere, scientifically and interpersonally speaking, if it necessarily imposes these hypothetical alternatives that never happened or will never happen? That’s not really science anymore. It might be mathematically directed philosophy, sure. But science? Granted, its measures can glean keen and useful distinctions when applied in numerous rational endeavours. But stats and probability make up much less of the picture than popular scientism admits.

One might argue that the vast variety of species, elements and molecules points to a random distribution or at least fits with the idea. Such varieties as we observe are the outcomes of cosmic do-overs at a roulette wheel made of matter and energy. Accidental or undirected combining and recombining of these limited elements by happy coincidence evolved into ever more complex roulette wheels from the original simple one.

Not a bad excuse to apply the mathematics of probability to notions of development and evolution… See where it sticks. That would lead to some tentative hypotheses. Okay. But we’re always left with the problem of the original roulette wheel. At some point, we’re going to have to face that issue if we hope to actually resolve the question. What sets first-life thinking apart from evolutionary thinking is that the origin of life is a single instance (supposedly): the emergence of the first amoeba. How did the first organism organise itself? By agency or accident? If the human mind is imposing the probability game by analogy (a likelihood considering it’s after the fact), how do we know it corresponds to the actual shape of the phenomena? And if we are in fact reading the phenomena for what they are, then how did the cosmic roulette wheel come together in the first place?

One of the insights I’m after is that the mathematics of probability cannot support accidentalism, or the idea that the world and life and consciousness as we know it is all a big accident arising from undirected processes.

This is not a failure of probability. (We will get to its failure in a minute.) It’s a misapplication of the heuristic. How do we know? Because the reasoning breaks down into self-contradiction. Rather than assuming accidental processes, probability assumes design. It assumes a game, a framework, an aim, a purpose, a vector of potential and significant outcomes. How do we get a meaningful result from a probabilistic measure if we don’t presume a significant possibility? There needs to be a casino with games designed to yield an array of certain specific results, right? There’s no probability measure for throwing the roulette ball out the window or the craps dice into a toilet (unless we change the parameters of the game). To impose the measure, we must delimit the game, and in doing so, we set up a designed context. (Same goes for game theory.)

Unwittingly, then, those atheists who insist on accidentalism as a principle of cosmic and evolutionary development, introduce principles of design to make their point when they recruit probabilistic measures. What are dice without markings? What is a roulette wheel without numbers and colours and a ball? In other words, we need to assume significant context to even get the probability ball rolling. The infinite regress of development-by-chance hypotheses is stupefying. The idea that a study of chance reveals definite directing laws of nature (the “laws of probability”) turns accident into necessity—a fundamental contradiction. I am aware that some (like Richard Dawkins) have argued that chance is not accident because governed by the laws of probability. But they decide to stop thinking there. Implications go out the window, and they wind up expressing a belief in accidentalism anyway.

And now. . . for that probabilistic anomaly I promised to share earlier from Meyer’s book. We have this through mathematician, William Dembsky: he pointed out that if you were to flip a coin one-hundred times and record the sequence of Hs and Ts, you would wind up with a unique series of outcomes; in fact, so unique that the odds of getting that particular sequence—1 in 2¹⁰⁰—would be the same as getting one-hundred Ts or one-hundred Hs in a row. Meyer uses roulette to help elaborate his point, explaining that the odds of winning 100 times in a row are 1 in 10¹⁵⁸. But if you were to record the series of outcomes of 100 spins of the wheel, the odds of that particular sequence of outcomes occurring would be exactly the same as the odds of winning 100 times in a row (Meyer 182-3).2

In other words, according to probability, we are always participating in a sequence of events that is highly improbable and unlikely. Intriguing. And I think most of us would tend to agree on that point. But the probabilistic analogy is unrealistic. The math recruits a fiction to confirm a truth. How does that happen? Let me explain.

Common sense tells us the math here doesn’t agree with experienced reality because we will never witness the phenomenon of coin flipping result in one-hundred consecutive tails or heads, never witness the phenomenon of a roulette player winning at 100 consecutive turns of the wheel. These are fictional hypotheticals. The math however insists, Why not?! Any sequence of 100 spins or flips is equally unlikely. Hmmm. Looks like we may be using the math to recruit a fiction to make a rhetorical point, not a mathematical one.

My barstool intuition tells me to probe my common sense here to explain how we know with such certainty that we will never witness 100 consecutive Hs. I think we understand at some level that the combinations and recombinations we’re going to get are restricted by an incommensurable element, like the infinite, non-repeating decimals we find in π, φ and ψ. These incommensurable numbers are key to understanding the unfolding of Nature. They are also key to describing electromagnetic phenomena. And as I’ve pointed out before, these numbers indicate a gaping flaw in our mathematical heuristics because we can only approximate them by present means.

One last, sobering observation from the barstool: probability distorts our thinking about the world and our place in it. Nevertheless, probability and statistics rule the developed West like a primitive god. Our economies are built on them. Our education. Our sports. And via the insurance companies, we are made to rent our holdings and guard them like they were our own. And your property better be up to code. Your concert on the farm too. That fence along the gorge marks the insurance man’s territory. He oversees the wilderness… the banks. He regulates the traffic the way He regulates the solar system, the galaxy, the cosmos. Your retirement. He taketh and hopeth never to dispense; and where He can, He wheedleth out. He rules over the living and the dead. He replaces what is taken by earthquake, flooding, hurricane and fire. (*But He doesn’t cover acts of God or Big Pharma.) He is measuring the height of your balcony railings. He wants to know what you eat, when you last saw a doctor. How’s your cholesterol? He knows what you are pooping. We live in the insurance man’s casino where we are the games; where we are the thing they’re betting on. And the buy-in—not to play, but to be played—is mandatory.

Share

Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.

Last Update: January 27, 2025

The following resource page…

Read more

I’ve been reading science historian Nicolaas Rupke’s 1994 biography of Richard Owen, revised and updated in 2009. It’s called Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin, and it’s a rehabilitation of character after a century or so of Owen having been demonised by Darwinists and then by science historians who parroted Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882) instead of taking the trouble to cross reference and waste their time actually reading Owen.

If you Google Richard Owen, you’ll find the ugliest of caricatures. This hit piece by a graduate of Ryerson University is typical. Funny to find it on a website called Factinate (“fun facts about everything”) and strange to find it undated, one supposes because “facts” are eternal. This piece calls Owen insane and accuses him of all manner of vile and loathsome behaviour, not least of which was plagiarism of the most gruesome sort I’ve ever read about. He lifted the evidence from a demented and decrepit, dying old man, virtually pried it out of his withered hands. Old Bones Owen however was not mad and bad at all but in fact the most revered naturalist of his time until being relentlessly slandered, wilfully misinterpreted and the focus of a decades-long, Victorian campaign led by Tom Huxley to have the man cancelled.

Owen’s love child was the Natural History Museum of London, which took decades of work to politically massage into being, and he managed to found the enterprise despite attempts by the Darwin mafia to prevent such a museum ever coming into existence.

Owen is also famous for coining the name “dinosaur” in 1841, fusing the Greek words deinos, meaning  terrible, and sauros, meaning lizard. As a museum man, he put together three discoveries of massive lizard fossils, and observing some analogues between them, placed them together under a sub-order, and poof! we had a novel vision of our planet once being inhabited by these terrible lizards.

The more I read about the history of evolutionary theory and the ascendancy of Darwinism, the more curious I find the whole thing because the history reveals the squabbling and political context… which makes me question the very “facts” we’ve been brought up to believe in as “settled science” when it comes to evolution.

So I go to the Khan Academy to review the evidence because I know I’m going to get a basic textbook review of the evolooshin spiel. Homology is a big one: that’s when we see resemblances in bone structure and anatomy—Owen’s specialty and cornerstone of Darwin’s hypothesis cum theory. More recently there’s been DNA homology. But there are problems with homology as evidence. Check out this cute video from the intelligent design camp.

And before you guffaw, design isn’t what it used to be. Of course, there are religious folk involved, but not exclusively. It’s not about God and scripture. Personally, I take intelligent design in the way Richard Owen and the nineteenth century German naturalists did, also the way Henri Bergson saw it—i.e. still naturalistic and not claiming divine intervention or a platonic vis vitalis (a non-material, life-giving substance). The sophisticated design idea these Victorian scientists were entertaining was that there’s a geometrical intelligence at work in matter. We see it in crystal formation for instance. And most significantly, we see it in magnetic fields.

Think about it: magnetic fields are polarised, expressing a left and right, a symmetrical morphology we see in most living organisms as well as in inert formations like planets. Even the branching and twigging of plants and trees, the veining of leaves. We see it also in how those branches and twigs reach into one element, while their root systems reach into another: polarised, homologous in approach, but shaped by the medium they reach into. Why two eyes, arms, legs? Why twin sets of ribs? Where’s the symmetry coming from? According to Darwinism and all our present ideas of evolooshin, it’s due to common descent from some original ancestor that randomly expressed these developments. A compelling proposition.

But this is just one analogy. What if there were others, like magnetism—a geometric intelligence proceeding out of the aether, finding ever more rarefied expression as it unfolds through Time (whatever that is). Our brains and nervous systems are electromagnetic after all. Atoms are electromagnetic… solar systems and galaxies share homologies. Do we conclude that galaxies descended from atomic ancestors? Or is there a different analogy at work there? Why is that? What are the implications?

The Pythagoreans held the pentagram as divine because it expressed a perfect symmetry of relationships defined by the irrational and mysterious number φ—the golden ratio—in all its angles and limbs… the shape of a human being, but as we note homologically, also many other creatures. Why do we see this repetition of fives? This star shape. Our five senses. In other words, homologies may not indicate descent at all, but instead a common design pattern inherent to the material universe, the stamp of a God principle.

Religious promoters of intelligent design speak of “a designer,” and I can see how this might put some atheists off. But think of it this way: there may be a meeting point here, an evolving view of God as not a Big Bad Daddy in the sky so much as a geometrical intelligence, not to be underestimated in terms of its power and connectivity, nor its spiritual dimension. Atheism by such an insight would have an opportunity to evolve too. Science would be free to admit things about consciousness and certain spiritual phenomena it presently must close itself off from and dismiss despite these phenomena playing an integral role in human experience. (Science might also quit policing how things work and go back to observing.)

The magneto-geometrical hypothesis does not imply that natural selection is bunk. Nor would it imply that species haven’t developed and evolved. But if magnetic sculpting were indeed at work in shaping the development of biological matter, it would dramatically alter our concept of evolution. The very fact that we can entertain alternative analogies points to the deeper fact that we don’t really know what evolooshin is! How exciting! No? I don’t mean to be stealing anyone’s teddy bear; I just find an unsettled science more interesting than a settled one… and a heck of a lot less authoritarian.

One last point. This one’s related to my observation about probability as discussed in “What is a Scientific Fact?”—that the “laws of probability” are a very clever workaround for what we, in fact, do not know and cannot predict, not the actual laws governing how things truly are. Similarly, the clever device of natural selection disguises what we in fact do not know, which is how life emerged in the first place. And without the answer to that most basic of questions, we really can’t claim to have any idea what we’re talking about. It can be a fun, playful and creative conversation, nevertheless, if we allow it to be.

What do you think? Looking forward to your comments.

Share

Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.

THE LAWS OF NATURE

My mother tells this story about attending an outdoor event when it began to rain. Someone standing close by, turned to her with a confused air and said, “But I don’t understand. It wasn’t supposed to rain.” It was an absurd statement, but one that reflects a common problem with our notions of fact and reality. Weather forecasts are notoriously unreliable, and yet many religiously attend to them in order to decide how to dress for the day or to plan for the weekend, for the vacation week ahead, or for a planned event. After all, when it comes to more dramatic predictions like storms or very high or low temperatures, weather forecasts have a certain reliability to them. That said however, those who are less risk averse, will not cancel an outdoor event or a camping trip owing to a weather forecast, because they have experienced disappointment too often in doing so. Weather forecasts are as close as we get these days to the ancient practice of visiting the oracle or augur, and yet, we consider meteorology to be a science.

“It wasn’t supposed to rain” is a fundamentally misguided statement because it gives primacy to the model over the phenomenon. Surely, phenomena come first and we use models to furnish ourselves with some measure of understanding and purchase on said phenomena. The correct perspective when it rains despite the forecast, then, is that the model failed to account for the reality. Why do models frequently fail in that regard? Well, because they are heuristic devices, and not themselves realities. Just as important a question is—Why do we confuse our models for realities and reverse the relationship between heuristic devices and reality? It is equally important that we ask—To what extent do we indulge this slippage? What is the frequency of our confusion and in relation to how many phenomena?

Consider what we call the “laws” of physics. The word law as we understand it in the legal sense is itself a metaphor borrowed from the idea of a layer or stratum. Think of layers of earth or of cake in which we can observe an inherent order of processes and even a hierarchy, perhaps even priority. So laws are analogous to this built-in layering. The origins of the Latin word lex is more salient here because this was the word the late-sixteenth, early-seventeenth century philosopher Francis Bacon used in a novel way when he applied it to natural phenomena instead of to jurisprudence1 The etymology is unclear, but lex is generally taken to be connected with the Sanskrit roots lag- and lig- —to fasten. We find this root embedded in the words “obligation” and “religion” as they both imply a fastening or binding of sorts.2 So when we say that things are bound to be a certain way, we are invoking a similar concept. Of course, no one consciously thinks all these things when they speak of the laws of physics. But the attitude that nature is bound to laws as by a contract of sorts, and that these laws are as fundamental as the layered geological strata, lurk there in the etymology, and arguably by transmission and usage, these ideas underwrite our notions of scientific laws. Adding a further layer to our understanding of the so-called “laws of nature,” Owen Barfield points out in his History in English Words that when the term law was first applied in this manner, it was conceived of “as present commands of God.” He further notes, “It is noticeable that we still speak of Nature ‘obeying’ these laws, though we really think of them now rather as abstract principles—logical deductions of our own which we have arrived at by observation and experiment.”3 In other words, the lineage of the concept remains with us, and we have a tendency to think of the laws of nature as inherent to the divine design—something like the ten commandments handed down by God to humanity, but in this case handed down by God to natural phenomena.

This perspective is further reinforced by the notion that these laws have been discovered rather than imposed. By this unexamined manner of thinking, we lose sight of the fact that these laws are not law in any of its implicit, etymological senses, but are, instead, heuristics, invented principles mediated by our instrumentation (our tools of observation) and models built up from inductive and deductive methods. Considering that the laws in question come after the fact, it is erroneous to think of them as preceding the phenomena. The phenomena come first, and then we derive various principles from them. Nature, in other words, is not in any way bound to our instrumentation and principles. Our principles, however, are very much bound to our instrumentation. This circumstance entangles science in a fundamental epistemological problem: to what degree are we looking at a phenomenon directly? And to what degree are we observing it in relation to our heuristics (or through coloured glasses, so to speak)? Hence, “it wasn’t supposed to rain,” indicates this commonly inverted relationship by which we mediate phenomena through the lens of our models.

INSTRUMENTATION

Thus far, I’ve been speaking in abstractions, so let’s examine a concrete example. Our relationship to thermometers is ubiquitous. I find myself asking a friend who has just popped in to collect me before going out, “What’s it like out there?” He says, “Warm but not hot.” I look at the way he’s dressed and consider further that what he calls “warm” and “hot” might be different from my relationship to those terms. He might wear jeans when I would wear shorts. So I ask further, “What’s the temperature?” He has no idea because he is not a thermometer, and there’s nothing in nature one might observe to communicate temperature. Why? Because a thermometer is a heuristic device we use to establish a conventional standard. A thermometer is furthermore a clever method of analogy whereby we establish a relation between the volume of mercury in a glass cylinder according to essentially arbitrary, but necessarily conventional, gradations marked on the glass. Then we consider our conventional standard for room temperature and think, Okay, how much warmer or cooler is it than that? We go outside and we discover that despite all this work, it’s either hotter or cooler than we had deduced by the thermometer. Why? Because there are other factors like humidity and breeze. In short, the instrumentation only provides a piece of the puzzle. Now I must add a hygrometer and an anemometer before I have a sense of the weather. These are specialised instruments, and if I happen to use them, I will still be missing information. I’d be better off stepping outside, observing the tree tops and the clouds. In other words, I’d be better off casting aside all the mediating interventions and just letting exterior nature and the nature interior to my person provide the information I require. Despite the apparent accuracy of our instruments, they fail to account adequately for the phenomena, at least insofar as my body and the weather are concerned. If the instrumentation fails there, it is worth considering in what other ways our instrumentation falls short of accounting for other phenomena and why.

A useful concept here is one that emerged from the Alexandrian period (circa 300 BC to 650 CE) with respect to Ptolemaic cosmology. It’s known as “saving the appearances,” and was used to describe the purpose of cosmological models with respect to predicting celestial movements like eclipses and planetary conjunctions as well as to cast astrological charts and to establish accurate calendars. The original term was σῴζειν τὰ φαινόμενα (sozein ta phainomena), and, according to Owen Barfield’s book on the subject, Saving the Appearances, it was introduced in an Alexandrian Commentary on Aristotle’s De Caelo by a sixth century scholar named Simplicius.4 It is worth noting that the word σῴζειν that we translate as save did not denote in this context “that desperate expedients were being resorted to. . .(in the sense of rescuing)”5 as the idea is now used when scientists speak of “saving a theory.” Perhaps a better translation would be accounting for the phenomena. In any event, the concept included a tacit acknowledgment that the work of the cosmologist was to develop models that could best match up with the observations and do well enough to predict with, increasing accuracy, planetary behaviours. In other words, the work of cosmological science was not to discover the realities. There were various reasons why the bar was set so low—as we are likely to see it today, since we expect science to deal in final assertions of Truth. One reason for their lower expectations in this regard was the platonic notion that the world of the senses—the world of becoming—was not knowable in any final sense, but could only ever be the subject of opinion.6 It is for this reason that translators opt for “appearances” when interpreting the word φαινόμενα; they wish to communicate what we miss when we ply the term phenomena today—the platonic idea that the appearances did not match the realities. In addition, the instrumentation they were using was clumsy and most certainly could not have been mistaken for how the cosmos actually functioned.

Instead of expecting science to account for the phenomena today, we expect it to align with a teleological reality—i.e. a manifest articulation out there, awaiting a matching articulation devised by science. Some consideration of this expectation reveals what a fool’s errand such a pursuit must be, because what we’re in fact asking is that science reveal a perfect analogy to reality based somehow on its own devices. This confusion has come about through various means, not the least of which has been the increasing sophistication of our instrumentation. As with the thermometer, we wind up imposing the model on the phenomena and work furiously to confirm their alignment. And just like with the thermometer, we wind up viewing our models as primary and the phenomena as obedient to them. In other words, unbeknownst to scientists and secular science culture, our view is still essentially platonist and Pythagorean—believing in a mathematical world of forms informing and giving rise to the manifest world. This perspective represents a serious problem to those who claim to be naturalists; that is, for those who would like to think that they do not subscribe to anything mystical or supernatural.

THE MATH HEURISTIC

The issue here comes down to our attitudes toward mathematics. Much the same way the notion of a scientific law is informed by its etymology, our understanding of numbers and math is informed by ancient Pythagorean mysticism. In an unexamined way, it is assumed among many scientists and popular science fans that numbers were discovered rather than invented, that indeed, they essentially represent the language of the universe. This proposition however is erroneous; number systems have evolved much like any other language. Until the universal use of the arabic numerals (lauded for its discovery of zero), cultures worked with what they had: the Egyptians used hieroglyphs, the Greeks used their alphabet, and most of us are familiar with Roman numerals. All of these methods were cumbersome and not especially conducive to mathematics. Nevertheless some pretty sophisticated mathematical insights were still possible, and feats of engineering were not uncommon. In other words the utility of our numerals is no indication of their divine perfection or absolute alignment with natural phenomena. The arabic numerals allowed us a clarity never before possible, the way a more efficient computer language for coding allows for greater control and condensation. With arabic numerals we could better represent fractions, and ultimately our decimal system gave us an even greater sense of accuracy. Nevertheless there are dead giveaways that our mathematics is still incomplete. This insight requires a quick run-through of Pythagorean mathematics, its beliefs and its trouble with incommensurable numbers.

Pythagoras developed a system of numeric representation that bore fruits of its own. Pythagorean ideas are ill represented in arabic numerals (a much later development). In fact it takes an entirely different mindset to grasp their conception of numbers and therefore of mathematics. Arthur Koestler addresses Pythagorean tenets in his history of cosmology, The Sleepwalkers (1959), informing his readers about how this philosophical school perceived “‘philosophy [as] the highest music,’, and how they taught that the highest form of philosophy is concerned with numbers: for ultimately ‘all things are numbers’.”7 This formulation is a little gnomic, so Koestler unpacks it:

The meaning of this oft-quoted saying may perhaps be paraphrased thus: ‘all things have form, all things are form; and all forms can be defined by numbers’. Thus the form of the square corresponds to a ‘square number’, i.e. 16 = 4 + 4, whereas 12 is an oblong number, and 6 a triangular number:

Numbers were regarded by the Pythagoreans as patterns of dots which form characteristic figures, as on the sides of a dice; and though we use arabic symbols, which have no resemblance to these dot-patterns, we still call numbers ‘figures’, i.e. shapes.8

“Between these number-shapes unexpected and marvellous relations were found to exist,” Koestler continues, demonstrating some of the insights that emerged from viewing numbers in this fashion. This dot-mode of representation—which one mights see as most representative of the bean-counting origins of mathematics—crumbles when faced with the square root of 2, which cannot be represented by a dot-diagram. “And such numbers were common,” Koestler points out, “they are for instance represented by the diagonal of any square.”9 These numbers are known as “incommensurable” or “irrational.” If the tenet, all things are numbers is true, then either (a) irrational numbers describe an “ineffable” mystery—as the Pythagoreans maintained; or (b) such numbers are not numbers at all, pointing to the need for an alternative notation that might yield another rational realm, another theory altogether.

The problem that irrational numbers present has yet to be addressed as a serious problem and persists to this day. Numbers like π, φ and ψ are fundamental expressions of geometric realities and the properties of physical phenomena, and yet our system of numbers can only ever approximate them. They exist geometrically; they can be found on the number line; yet our number system—anchored in dot-diagram, atomistic thinking cannot grasp them. One would expect of a language whose claim to fame is its correlation to material processes that it would be able to clearly handle the terms most relevant to its sphere of application. But numbers were not initially conceived of in that way: instead they were bean-counting tools that were later imperfectly adapted to logic. After all, math is a shorthand that helps us condense and track our logical processes. Where quantities are useful, numbers come into play. And quantities are useful when working with heuristic measures like clocks, scales and rulers. The repurposing of a counting system to logical processes is an artificial act, not a discovery. The sense of discovery lies with the play of the analogical mind as it works up a poetic conceit tied to the driving metaphor. And the driving metaphor of our sensibilities toward mathematics, lost to time, is the mystic Pythagorean belief “that mathematical relations held the secret of the universe.”10

To put a finer point on the matter, Arthur Koestler explains, quoting Plutarch of the Pythagoreans: “‘The function of geometry. . .is to draw us away from the world of the senses and of corruption, to the world of the intellect and the eternal.’” In other words mathematics is a method of contemplating the eternal; it is “the way to the mystic union between the thoughts of the creature and the spirit of its creator.” Ultimately, Koestler observes, “The Pythagorean concept of harnessing science to the contemplation of the eternal, entered, via Plato and Aristotle, into the spirit of Christianity and became a decisive factor in the making of the Western world.”11 To this day, we maintain a mystical veneration of mathematics, calling sciences based on math “exact” and “pure.” Consider for a moment how your veneration of math boils down to two assumptions: (a) that it clears away the clutter of the phenomena, and (b) that it somehow transcends the errors of human thinking. Now consider what we’ve just reviewed: that mathematics is a language, indeed a product of thinking.

THE PROBABILITY HEURISTIC

Once again, I’ve been speaking conceptually, so let’s ground these observations in something concrete and as commonplace as the weather and thermometers. It bears repeating that the issue here—as stated in the second paragraph of this paper—is how we confuse our models for realities and reverse the relationship between heuristic devices and reality and how pervasive this problem might be. Let’s take a look at a popular favourite: probability.

Let’s start with the ubiquitous coin flip. Many experiments have been done and some complex math can be applied, but we’re going to keep things simple. Furthermore, the internet will tell you that real world coin flipping, even mechanically driven, does not conform to the theoretical model. Although such information helps reinforce my thesis, I’m going to proceed with the theoretical rudiments to make what I hope is a deeper point. So let’s presume the chances for a heads or tails outcome are indeed 50-50, which is shorthand for 50%:50%. That’s true of one coin flip. How about two flips, three flips, four? Most seem to think that the chances remain 50-50 no matter how often one flips the coin. But this is not the case. And since the misconception is so pervasive, let’s quickly review the basic principles. If the flip is truly random and I get four heads in a row, the next flip is far more likely to present tails.

Let’s put some skin in the game. Say I roll double sixes12 on a pair of dice three times in a row, what are the odds that I’ll do it again? It’s no longer 1:35 against or 2.8%. There’s a progression: the probability of rolling double sixes three times in a row is 1/46,656, which we may derive (most simply) by multiplying the probability of one roll of double six exponentially, i.e. 1/36 x 1/36 x 1/36. The odds of rolling four times in a row, we may represent as 1/36^4 or 1/1,679,616. In other words the chances recede exponentially.

Same goes for the coin toss when trying to predict the outcome of the next flip following four heads in a row. What starts out as 50-50 grows exponentially lopsided. When we go about the calculation, we take 50/100 and reduce to 1/2. Over four flips, our chances of getting four heads in a row are 1/2^4 = 1/16, and the fifth will be 1/2^5 = 1/32: if we’re thinking in terms of odds, that’s 31 to 1 against. The only way by which the probability resets at 50-50 is if human agency intervenes, like when a friend holds out two hands and asks you to guess over and again which one is hiding the ball. Once we remove what we call “randomness” from the equation, the terms reset at each iteration.

All of this probability stuff is indeed fascinating, but the main issue that we lose sight of is what probability can’t tell us: the actual outcome of any given event. In other words, probability is an extremely clever workaround to compensate for what we do not know and cannot predict about the phenomena. So what the terms 50-50, 1/2^5 and 1/36^4 obfuscate is that truly random events are not, in fact, predictable; if they were, coins would land on heads then tails then heads again in succession. In other words, probability is not how the universe works. Instead it is most evidently a heuristic device we use to get around the fact that we don’t know and cannot predict the behaviour of the phenomena. In other words, it would be foolish to assume that probability represents the phenomena in any direct way. Much like those ancient cosmologists, what probability does do is account for the phenomena in an applicable and useful manner. To put it another way, the phenomena do not obey the laws of probability. Such a take is an inversion of the relationship between our models and realities, and is of the same order as believing that the weather ought to obey the weather forecast. When we perceive the world in this manner, we are subscribing to a scientistic metafiction instead of to a true metaphysic; we are indulging in a modern form of superstition.

Although probability is an ingenious, indirect approach, it reveals quite a lot about the phenomena—the way we might imagine echolocation reveals quite a lot without quite providing a true picture. What probability reveals however is not what we generally attribute to it. For instance, it tells us less about outcomes and more about the implications of distribution and increasing-decreasing likelihoods. How does the universe know that following several successive outcomes of heads, the next flip of the coin should be tails? Why doesn’t it reset back to 50-50 with each toss? Surely this phenomenon implies (a) some sort of cosmic memory, (b) a continuity of action, and (c) an open-ended future. What we generally call “randomness” and “probability” obfuscates these conclusions, in part because we entertain a certain predetermination or predictability in the so-called “laws of probability.”

I have another anecdote like “it wasn’t supposed to rain” to supply a more pedestrian side to the problem of reversing the relationship between model and phenomenon. In this case, I was at a bar when an acquaintance showed me a nickel, and by humorous slight of hand, which was essentially a fumbling about his person, slipped the nickel in his shoe, then presented me with two closed fists and asked me to guess in which hand the nickel was. I laughed and told him that much like in a shell game, it was in neither hand, and that, besides, I’d seen him put it in his shoe. Nevertheless, like a pro at the shell game, he insisted that I guess which hand, and added that he would give me $200 if I guessed correctly, but that I’d have to pay as much if I guessed wrong. The banter proceeded with equal incoherence until we were joined by a young man who proudly stated that he was a statistician. He asked, “How many guesses can I make?” The shell game master guffawed and didn’t commit, but made the statistician feel very clever. This was all in good fun and no money was exchanged. However, the moral of the story is that the statistician had missed the shell game aspect entirely because he was focused on the stats. In other words, he wasn’t observing the phenomenon at all. Instead, he was imposing his model where it had no relevance. The whole point of a shell game is to turn the odds paradigm against the gambler. I’ve called this a pedestrian example; but I mean to suggest by this commonplace tale how pervasive and reflexive is our habit to impose scientific models, and furthermore, how we wind up duped in the process.

THE TAUTOLOGY OF SCIENTISTIC METAFICTIONS

In The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins says, “What I have now done is to define the gene in such a way that I cannot really help being right!”13 A few pages later, he admits that his method proceeds “tautologously.”14 This self-consciousness would be commendable if the author took it for a serious flaw. Often enough, after all, a tautology amounts to a form of circular reasoning—a classic logical fallacy. The famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) that tautologies are essentially meaningless:

4.461 The proposition shows what it says, the tautology and the contradiction that they say nothing.
The tautology has no truth-conditions, for it is unconditionally true...
. . .
4.462 . . .
In the tautology the conditions of agreement with the world—the presenting relations—cancel one another, so that it stands in no presenting relation to reality.15

So what does this mean practically speaking? When asked to make a statement of scientific fact, common answers range from “gravity” to “the sun rises in the east.” Folks are not generally sophisticated off the cuff. If pressed, they will self-correct: “well, okay, the sun doesn’t exactly ‘rise’—the rotation of the Earth on its own axis gives the appearance of a rising sun.” That’s a scientific fact. Gravity, however, is a problem. In what sense is gravity a fact? Let’s set that aside for a moment. Instead, let’s return to our thermometer. One might say, “It’s a scientific fact that water freezes at zero degrees celsius and boils at one-hundred.” Now there’s an obvious tautology. It’s a statement that amounts to nothing because the celsius scale was designed to give such readings. In other words, the markings on the vile of mercury were determined by the freezing and boiling points of water. The statement is circular and therefore says nothing. More often than not, this is the sort of thing we take for scientific facts.

When it comes to gravity, if we’re talking about the acceleration of a falling object, the numbers we work with are determined by the scale employed, whether metres or feet, and then by seconds, that is, by clock time, which is a measure of oscillations, a relational contrivance of our own, found nowhere in the natural world. In other words, the terms of the so-called fact are defined by the instrumentation. The phenomena are thus thrust aside in favour of the metrics. We impose our models.

When we say “the sun rises in the east,” we encounter the same trouble because the term east is defined by the place where the sun rises. Etymologically speaking, philologists hypothesise that east comes from the proto-Indo-European root, aus-, meaning, “to shine, especially of the dawn.” More recently, the term comes from Proto-Germanic aust- “literally ‘toward the sunrise’.”16 In other words, the statement, “the sun rises in the east” amounts to saying “the sun rises where the sun rises.”

What we’re left with upon scrutinising these examples are the following facts: (a) falling objects accelerate; (b) the Earth turns on its axis; and (c) water can freeze and evaporate. Statements of so-called “accuracy” about the phenomena are impositions that are not factual, but tautological. Our instrumentation specifying time, distance, place and temperature are all heuristic guides, conventions that can be useful for purposes of communication in regard to the phenomena and for the purposes of manipulation of the phenomena. The instrumentation, as noted, is demarcated with numbers that we then use in our mathematics, all too often oblivious to the fact that the numbers employed are arbitrary and have little to do with the phenomena in any inherent sense. With that understanding set aside or obfuscated, we then make the assumption that we’re dealing with a “pure” and “exact” method providing us with epistemological truth regarding the phenomena. It should go without saying that the application of these various heuristics is useful and productive. What I’m getting at is they need not also be considered facts about reality, though they do, at times, imply certain facts.

To make matters worse there are often complications even with those statements of fact. Statement (a) above, for example requires qualification because not all falling bodies accelerate—buoyancy, displacement, and relative temperature are important variables. The other two statements seem general enough to present no problems. But when we specify a rate of acceleration, we run into trouble again: variables like friction, shape of object and medium (air, heavier vapour, water), then require consideration. And when we provide a temperature for water freezing and evaporating, the celsius scale provides us with only a guideline because it pertains specifically to pure H2O at sea level—neither of which conditions are found together in nature.

To summarise, scientific tautologies emerge from two sources, the most obvious being those arising from instrumentation and hypothetical (including theoretical) models. We find less glaring, that is, more hidden, instances in circular definitions like Dawkins’s implicitly ethical argument about selfishness being ontologically inherent to genetic processes. Because tautological truth statements are often taken to be fundamental, and are often used as foundational notions, many areas of science build their theories on metafictions instead of what we expect to be solid, epistemologically grounded metaphysics.

RUNAWAY METAFICTIONS

Some might object here and claim that I am not examining actual scientific facts, but oversimplified popular conceptions of scientific facts. True. But hold on. I am getting to some very real science in just a moment. This is not the place to enter into the details of the various sciences and disentangle the tautologies from the facts. That project would occupy several tomes and should be left to those more qualified than me. My purpose here has been to demonstrate our habits of thinking; and these habits of thinking do indeed permeate the minds of scientists, including Darwinists like Dawkins and statisticians like the young man from my anecdote. The point I’ve been driving at, if you recall, is that we confuse our models for realities and reverse the relationship between heuristic devices and reality. I have provided accessible examples that can be applied analogically here-forward by those with a mind to do so.

Our trouble with inverted reasoning is problematic in all manner of ways; but most urgently, at present, this sort of fallacious approach to the phenomena is generating some very worrisome conclusions about our world and humanity’s place in it. When it comes to our planet, we’ve come to believe that certain quantities are desirable and others are undesirable based on computer models. The ethos of UN and globalist policy initiatives is driven entirely by this inverted relationship of model to phenomena. Instead of basing models on the phenomena and trying to best account for them, governments—plying what they believe are scientific rationales—are now trying to make the phenomena (including human beings) fit the models. The results can only be disastrous. Indeed, they already have been. Perhaps it bears stating that this habit of mind is not the sole cause of our errors or of our present predicaments. Many factors are intervolved with the subject under analysis here. But these lie beyond the scope of this study. The object of this essay is to bring to light what seems to be a submerged and unexamined relationship to our scientific models in order to gain a greater intellectual purchase on them and to thwart a paradigm that would enslave us to its diktats.

Back in March 2020, a paper emerged from Imperial College-London (ICL), under the lead authorship of epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, predicting that 2.2 million people would soon die of covid in the U.S. alone if strict lockdowns were not put in place. Although the paper17 presented this forecast as a worst-case scenario generated by its computer modelling, Ferguson flogged this alarmist message to the media and to governments around the world, and the message that reached the public and policy makers was that this was the scenario for which we ought to responsibly prepare. In other words, the Ferguson modelling was a lot like the weather forecasting problem I presented at the start of this paper. The difference is that instead of invoking the sentiment It wasn't supposed to rain, the ICL pandemic forecast asserted 2.2 million will die in the U.S. alone. Moreover, both these types of forecasts entail a recommendation. When it comes to the weather, one might bring an umbrella or warm clothing. When it comes to a pandemic forecast, however, the recommendations are more consequential. Indeed, the result of the Ferguson model was a period of over two and a half years of public policy panic, including lockdowns that violated human rights, devastated economies, destroyed small businesses, decimated families, led to delayed medical procedures (with untold years of damage and lost life), delayed education and child socialisation, and also led to skyrocketing mental illness and depression rates, drug addiction, addiction relapses along with related overdoses and a spike in suicides.

When it comes to a false weather prediction, one might get wet or cold or dress too warm or wind up carrying an umbrella for no reason; but in the case of a false pandemic prediction, the consequences are far more severe. The crux of the trouble in this instance lies with a disposition of our present society to value scientific models over and above traditional socio-political models. To clarify, the models in play in a democratic society include humanitarian orientations that have been codified in charters of rights and documents like the U.S. constitution. Such models of governance have been developed over centuries of negotiation with kings and princes (Magna Carta, 1215), and were later honed in parliaments during the Enlightenment and via various revolutionary actions. The pluralistic, democratic model constitutes our social contract and was the the one in play when the pandemic was declared; and it was this model that was displaced by a novel, scientific model that suggested the democratic, pluralistic one would lead to mass death. So to return us to the main thesis again—the evolving socio-political model which has been working to emancipate and benefit more and more people for hundreds of years by encouraging freedom (which we may look at as freedom of human phenomena), was suddenly overturned in favour of a model with the opposite ethic. The earlier contract was developed through negotiations (and where those failed, various wars), and was therefore a descriptive model arising from the phenomena, whereas the new scientistic one was a model imposed on the phenomena, a tyranny. Unlike the phenomena like the weather, when the phenomenon in question is a human population, and the phenomenon is made to serve or fit a given model, the issue becomes ethical.

Based on the ICL Ferguson paper, governments around the world seized health emergency powers (which are still in effect nearly three years later), allowing them to adopt extreme measures that provided grounds to coerce citizens against their wishes to take dangerous and experimental medical interventions mislabelled “vaccines” that have caused serious, longterm injuries at unprecedented rates.18 Once again, the problem may be framed as a misapplication (a reversal) of our modelling vis a vis the phenomena. When it comes to vaccines there are several modelling issues to consider. Until this latest false alarm, a vaccine was defined as a preventative medical intervention providing a sterilising effect. In other words, vaccines were sold as products that would prevent infection and help the body kill off a virus. The logic of the model was that if one took the vaccine, one was rendered immune to the virus. What happened however was that the term vaccine was changed to include a non-sterilising medical intervention that does not render immunity. Consequently, the logic of its deployment was lost. Nevertheless, the vaccination model remained in place and its application was rolled out in an unprecedented manner. Once again, a scientific model took precedent over the phenomena.

As mentioned above, when the phenomena in question are human beings, the issue becomes ethical. This last violation of personal autonomy over one’s own body is unconscionably egregious and frightening, especially considering that it was the Nazis who introduced this sort of unethical experimentation on human beings. In the wake of such atrocities, humanity developed what came to be known as The Nuremberg Code (1947), which codified the rights of the individual with regard to the acceptance or rejection of experimental medical interventions. The first point of the ten-point document reads as follows:

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision…19

Despite this document—a model for ethical human behaviour where medical procedures and pharmaceuticals are concerned—governments, institutions and many businesses dragooned citizens to accept the experimental pharmaceuticals with threats they’d lose their jobs and face other penalties, including being barred from public spaces, businesses and travel, and in some cases even face financially ruinous fines and even prison sentences.20 This is how scientific models wind up imposed on human phenomena. Ignorant and frightened citizens, influenced by media hysterics and stoked by celebrity opinion, went as far as to suggest that the “unvaccinated” should be denied medical care. The rationale throughout the false covid panic was represented by the ubiquitous slogan, Follow The Science—the assumption being that modern science has better models than those established by human trial and error over several millennia. Although this Follow The Science motto strikes many as being unscientific, and indeed reminiscent of Martin Luther’s sola fides—your salvation lies in faith alone—many have taken the follow-the-science credo as an affirmation of allegiance with the scientific method and its foundation in exactness and purity.

In case some readers draw the conclusion that the covid false alarm was a one-off case of mismanagement, I’d like to briefly draw your attention to previous bungles and demonstrate how the covid debacle was a culmination of our tendency to reverse the proper relationship of model to phenomena. Unfounded global alarmism took hold on at least two previous occasions in recent history, first in the late 1990s, early 2000s with regard to the Mad Cow panic.21 As public policy expert Phillip Magness explains the problem with Ferguson’s modelling, the “line of argument falters as social science because it assumes the validity of the very same forecast it purports to demonstrate.”22 In other words, the trouble here is steeped in tautology and the fallacy of circular reasoning—a not uncommon problem in the sciences, as noted above.

Reading Magness’s articles along with the Spiegel article cited below with reference to the Swine Flu panic, some observers will note that it’s not science that’s at fault in these instances, but instead political and pharmaceutical interests. Plenty of scientists, after all, were sounding alarm bells about the shoddiness of Ferguson’s work.23 As it happens, for instance, viruses do not spread and kill exponentially, but instead follow what’s known as a gompertz curve (see the notes). If we could only wash science clean of the corruption of filthy lucre, a fresh and purified science would be more than qualified to lead the way. It bears repeating that the subject under analysis here is not the only factor at play in these goings on. In fact, this point is central to the problem of designating science as “exact,” “objective,” and “pure”—somehow transcendant. Scientistic rationale is being used and couching itself in scientific language as a tool of authority.

While I’m all for finding a way to release science from corruptive influences and for ways to improve modelling, I’m also a realist who has read Horace Freeland Judson’s work, The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science (2004), and it is foolish to think that the task of untangling science from its funding structures, dysfunctional self-policing, ambitious personalities and corporate capture is something we can look forward to. The public should not make the mistake of imposing a false model on science—a science should be this perfect pure thing, when it is in fact something else entirely, an all too human and flawed endeavour. I can see one objecting that had we used other and better scientific models instead of those ICL-Ferguson ones, we would not have taken bad advice. The problem was with the experts consulted, not with science. But (a) how is one to determine a correct scientific model from an incorrect one? (b) who chooses the experts (aren’t all involved certified scientists?) and (c) the problem wasn’t only owing to a single flawed model: political and corporate interests were also in play deciding points (a) and (b). Furthermore, let’s not lose sight of how one’s sense of having a scientific orientation can lead to missing the shell game. Owing to the biases inherent to its own paradigms, science alone cannot hope to self-correct and provide authoritative models upon which to remodel society. Faced with a scientistic revolution, it seems we’ve arrived at an historical moment when we need to consider a division of science from state, establishing limitations on scientific models and recommendations where they come into conflict with established models of governance.

That said, I still maintain that even if we managed to develop an emancipated, truly pure science, the hope that it would produce predictive models to which we ought to conform in place of those that have arisen through negotiation is fundamentally misguided because based upon a misunderstanding of the relationship between such models and the phenomena they wish to account for. Surely our instrumentation and our models ought to serve us, and not we who ought to wind up serving them. In the cases of the epidemiological modelling I’ve just noted, the principal approach is statistical and probabilistic; and as we’ve seen, the mathematics of probability is a clever workaround not to be mistaken for reality. Meanwhile, statistics are notoriously flexible and often deployed in misleading ways. Worse, when public policy comes into play, the models make tautologous assumptions that engender runaway metafictions. Policy makers posit an ideal balance underwritten by an unconscious and unexamined ledger book analogy, setting targets for desired outcomes. While such an approach may have utility in the sphere of finance, when we look at human populations in this manner, we are imposing models on a phenomenon (human beings) in an unethical manner. Human beings are more than mere %s after all. Indeed, the % tag is inherently reductive and dehumanising. Whether the issue is equal distribution targets among various identity groups, or zero covid targets, or net zero carbon emissions, the paradigm in play is one in which we are attempting to force the phenomena to fit the model instead of the other way round. And as we’ve seen, this is a recipe for disaster.

In the spirit of stimulating some discussion, I’d like to introduce a final line of objection to the thesis I’ve proposed. If we are to quit imposing models on the human phenomenon, how are we ever to achieve any progress? All socio-political, legal and economic systems are imposed, after all. How, for instance, might a slave society manage to move away from the paradigm of slavery without the imposition of new models? At some point in time, slavery was seen to be the natural order, one arising from millennia of human behaviour. This line of questioning gets to the heart of the matter and is likely to be productive in bringing greater nuance to the claims set out here. Slavery and authority are indeed the issues underwriting the concerns of this paper, and nothing could be more paradigmatic of tyrannical models. Perhaps we need to interrogate further the sorts of models that enslave and those that emancipate. In any event, what’s clear is that science alone cannot make those decisions for us; hence the focus of this essay on scientific models and scientism. Surely we require more types of thinking at the table than this one ascendant Science, rapidly asserting its authority (through claims of purity and exactitude) as a repressive, orthodox force.

Looking forward to your comments!

Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.

In the following paper, author of Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution (2015), Jeffery Donaldson, explores how science engages in productive analogy, while at the same time denigrating the “metaphoric initiative.” What can an understanding of poetics teach about science?

MERE METAPHOR?

Nothing brings home the flight of time like finishing a book. You smash the bottle of champagne against your title and set the whole thing afloat, whereupon it drifts from harbour, captainless, over the horizon and out of sight. Not that you notice right away. You’re out looking for new crafts. When my book on metaphoric process—Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution—came out in 2015, I had no clear idea of what the next project would be. I had said my thing: so far from being a merely decorative or handy language tool for tough ideas and expressions, metaphor was fundamental, all determining … and absolutely everywhere. The “metaphoric initiative” is deeply embedded in material reality, in the mechanisms of relation that we accept as true in physics and chemistry, in evolution, in cognition and consciousness, in culture and literature. It is as profoundly consequential as it is hidden and misunderstood. Ask scientists about metaphor and they’ll give three cheers! Analogies are fine tools for describing tricky concepts. Thought pumps, as Daniel Dennett says. They’ll offer examples: the universe is a “block” of time; time is a frozen river; an atom is a solar system, and so on. But metaphors are seductive as well, they’ll warn, and deceptively relative. Use them carefully, keep them at arm’s length, and don’t mistake them for fact or truth. Ask anyone on the street. In fact, ask a literary critic, a religious person, a philosopher, a linguist, they will tell you the same thing. Often enough producing the old spoon—“Metaphor is a comparison that doesn’t use like or as!”—they will talk about metaphors, likenesses that they like or don’t like. They don’t talk about metaphoric thinking or the puzzles of relation itself. They tend not to consider that the logic they use to draw their conclusions and their means of thinking already evince a relational mechanism whose reach—literature shows us—is elusive and infinite. Science skips this step in exploring its own habits. Not that there aren’t good reasons to handle metaphor with care. See the end of this essay. But good reasons do not proceed by mischaracterizing the subject.

I’m enjoying an excellent study on the evolution of human mind and consciousness by David Lewis-Williams, called The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art.A fine study of pre-historic cave drawings and the sociological roots of image-making habits, Lewis-Williams’ book is a fairly typical example of the tacit metaphor prejudice you find these days in various disciplines. He considers, for instance, the “swiss-army knife” metaphor of mind, but is careful to introduce a decisive caveat: “It is important to remember that all these understandings are no more than metaphor: they have no foundation in physical existence.” The hierarchy implied in his “no more than” blossoms subsequently into full flower: “we may feel that we are indeed explaining the phenomenon of mind. But we are not. We are merely playing with words.” Such formulas remain invisibly a sign of the times.

Suspicions toward “mere” metaphor in the sciences might align with an apperception of the power it can wield when it gains traction in the general culture. Lewis-Williams talks about the ubiquitous presence, for instance, of the “mind is a computer” metaphor, which on the one hand influences what software and “wetware” engineers try to do with computer technology, but also drives subtle attitudes towards our identities as such. Daniel Dennett holds tenaciously, often for good reason, to his idea that our brains are complex machines. Richard Dawkins’ theory of the “selfish” gene is a further example of how metaphors become dominant concepts, the ground and means of current debates and their complicated outcomes.1 Pointing out to them that they are arguing over myths and metaphors is met with familiar indifference, a dull stare, a swatting at flies. They know what you’re talking about and what you have to say isn’t relevant. What they’re getting at, they retort, is truth. There is a conspicuous double-think in science’s application of metaphor that reminds me of Richard Wilbur’s fine adage (in a poem entitled “Epistemology”): “We milk the cow of the world, and as we do / We whisper in her ear, ‘You are not true.’”

Writing Missing Link turned my obsession with metaphoric process into a conscious despair at science’s and religion’s, and even literary criticism’s, patronizing mishandling of metaphor. While my focus is on this particular zeitgeist in the sciences, I might take a moment to observe its spread in my own discipline of literary criticism, for indeed, even in literature departments myth and metaphor can get short shrift. They can disguise, we say nowadays, ideological dispositions and thereby sweeten the pill that poisons your thinking. Your job as a creative critic is to find out where those seductions are hiding and purge the corrupted work of its too viral contaminants. Well-intended as the effort is, it can sometimes look like mere content spotting. Social concern criticisms in the humanities share an attitude with the ascendant modes in science. They both point to a certain real thing that grounds their theories. Science points to data and observed objects, litcrit to social and cultural history. Science says there is fact and truth in the world; story and metaphor are fine, but don’t get carried away. Litcrit says there is the urgent reality of social concern: myth and metaphor must, and in any case always do, serve these. The assumptions that these disciplines make as to their proper materials are necessary, they would say, and necessary because they are productive. Science offers us a world of working toasters and litcrit a world of social justice (in the criticism at least, not the literature, which must alas be saved from itself by those who know better).

FACTS & FICTIONS

Impatient of how we neglect properties of truth in fictive worlds, I took an interest in the work of the Heterodox Academy. Here were some folks who were interested in different points of view and provided a language with which a reader might resist the compulsory imperatives of our critical mood. Who could be opposed to heterodox approaches to the truth? You could have knocked me over with a feather last year when a colleague in my department expressed scepticism at heterodox ideas. I guess the thinking is that if you look at things from all sides you are insufficiently committed to real social change. The Heterodoxers are self-declared moderates who want to hear positions from all sides, love to be corrected, open their hearts to being wrong. All good practice, to be sure. Even here, though, I found the axioms of science at work. The only way to fund and nourish the heterodox spirit, they argue, is with “evidence-based fact” and “reasoned argument.” There was that binary again, the one that positions a certain understanding of reality as the correct one. The truth was out there, and a mind disciplined in heterodox thinking, with fact and evidence, would get nearer the mark. To me they are still missing a further underlying intuition (or fact if you like), that “fact,” “evidence” and “reasoned argument” are themselves implicated in metaphoric relations. I thought I might try out a paper along these lines at their annual conference in Denver this past summer; it would align ideas of metaphoric thinking with the heterodox idea of alternative thinking.

So what about metaphoric thinking? In Missing Link, I took up the familiar idea that there are two kinds, or degrees, of metaphoric identification. I’m not referring here to the distinction between simile and metaphor, where the former softens the “error” of metaphors by saying that one thing is only like another, the latter going full monty on the transgressive potential of saying that one thing simply is another. No, I mean something nearer to Philip Wheelwright’s distinction between epiphor and diaphor. His work in books like The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism and Metaphor and Reality goes to the mood and effect of the metaphoric moment and the consequences of its audacity. We all recognize those times when we struggle to describe something—like time itself, for instance—and must have recourse to an analogy, something that the elusive idea is like. We find it: time is like a road that runs in two directions. Excellent, now we understand time a little better. We draw the vague idea towards the familiar one and our consciousness is expanded. But now consider a different metaphoric moment. “Daylight lies on the bed like a fresh shirt.” This is Walter Benjamin at his finest. In this instance there is no prior state in which something is not understood. We know what daylight is and we know what a fresh shirt is. But then along comes the troublemaker poet. He says, these two things are actually involved in one another. Your sense of how things are is now questionable. What must the world be like for this new thing to be valid or interesting and not simply nonsense to ignore? Your mind goes with the beguiling chance. The “break and make” moment, as I call it—out with the old way, in with the new!—expands your consciousness. You do more thinking. You chase after the “opening away” of new possibilities.

In Missing Link, I call these two kinds of metaphor “assimilative” and “inventive.” When we say that “time is like a road,” we assimilate the vaguer idea to the more certain one. When we say that “Daylight lies on the bed like a fresh shirt,” we destabilize knowledge (as we like to say). We oblige the reader, if she wants to “go with” the suggestive implication, to reinvent her sense of the world. The assimilative metaphor is essentially conservative: the known now includes an unknown and is thereby expanded and consolidated. The inventive metaphor, on the other hand, is transgressive. It obliges the reader to question the coherence of the prior understanding. It isn’t a bad idea to have both conservative and transgressive ways of thinking, and metaphor assures us of both.

So far, I've been talking about things like “understanding” and “what the world is like.” We can expand our language here to see how science, religion, and literature are implicated. We could take a phrase like “what the world is like” and think in terms of cosmology, that is, ideas of total order, the world as it really is, and so on. We can take terms like “understanding” to refer to the kinds of patterns or models or unities by which we gather and organize and make sense of experience. We say that the pattern or unity or model holds together. It does so because all of its elements are in agreement with one another, relate in a way that we say works. How do we get time to fit our understanding of the world? Ah, it’s like a road. How do we get the idea that “daylight lies on the bed like a fresh shirt” to fit what we say the world is like? How interesting, let me try to figure that out. In both cases we work with a kind of heuristic axiom that truth is what “makes sense” and “holds together.”

How things hold together is fundamentally a metaphoric problem. We have to take a moment to understand how. The mathematician Max Black did excellent work when he tried to explain, in mathematical terms, what really happens in a metaphoric event. Every item of knowledge, every meaningful word, every datum of experience possesses what he called its own “system of associated commonplaces.” By this he meant the ready associations that are available when you invoke a thing: what you know about it, in effect. You have, for example, all the things that come to mind in relation to the word “love”: for instance, that it can give joy and pain, that it is beautiful, that it can die with neglect. Definitions are obviously included, but associated commonplaces are broader than that. In fact, the number of love-associations are apparently endless. On the other side of the metaphor you have the things you think of when you think of a “rose,” that it is beautiful and thorny, that if you don't water it, it will die, that it needs proper soil and good weather, that it is fragile, and so on. Good! We say we understand these things. Then the poet, in this case Robert Burns, comes along and says “My love is like a red red rose.” We permit Burns the impertinence (this is Ricoeur’s term) of saying so because we “see” that some of the associated commonplaces of both love and rose are themselves relatable. Love can hurt; roses are thorny. Love can die; roses are fragile. The possibilities are multiple, yet circumscribed.

A logician might argue that Max Black has merely reduced the metaphor to a set of logical moves: “love hurts” equals “roses are thorny.” The authority of logic itself is still intact. The metaphor theorist, in reply, might accuse the logician of simply interposing a further set of metaphors. How is the pain of love like the thorniness of a rose? You have to find the associations of “emotional pain” and the associations of “thorns” and make connections between those parts, and then the parts of those parts, and the parts of those parts of those parts. Even the original ideas that we began with, love and rose, were only metaphorically associated with their own commonplaces. In the sciences we once said that objects are definite things, elementary and substantial, but then we learned that even the hardest things in the world are made of atoms in relation; then we discovered that atoms are electrons and protons in relation, which we found are further made of more elementary particles like muons and bosons, which are made of, well, what? strings vibrating in relation? We’re not sure yet. Another rabbit hole. All knowledge is relational knowledge. As you chase after the infinite regress of “reasons,” you never escape the cascade of relations themselves.

Knowledge itself then is a way of putting things together. Putting things together is a way of thinking metaphorically, which is to say, a way of finding the relations that enable things to be themselves. The more relations you can set up between parts of an argument or idea, the more the ensuing pattern becomes convincing. Your argument holds together. At any one particular instant in your thinking experience, your thoughts point in two directions at once: “upwards,” as it were, towards the overall context or unity or model you have in mind, and “downwards” towards all the little reasons and connections you might rattle off to explain what you mean by this or that in your overall picture. Relations form into unities and unities subsist on relations. Think of the chicken and the egg.

COHESION & CORRESPONDENCE

Let’s apply these intuitions to a scientific description. A theoretical physicist might come up with a model of the universe.  She would take any new observed data from the objective world, which experiment provides, and assimilate those parts to the model she is developing. The model is true only when all the parts fit together and there is nothing that doesn’t fit. The model accounts for observations and appearances, but it never accounts for all of them, that is, for all of what we imagine to be out there. Thomas Kuhn writes in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: “there are seldom many areas in which a scientific theory, particularly if it is cast in a predominantly mathematical form, can be directly compared with nature.”2 We can also see how the process of refining the model predetermines what is permitted to stand as evidence and fact within it. Kuhn argues that “until the adjustment is completed … the new fact is not quite a scientific fact at all.”3  In other words, “facts” are only considered as such within the context of a given model or way of looking at things.  It does not become a fact until it fits.  In short, whenever you claim that a fact is a fact, you are pre-invested in your model as the one and true model.  Models are made into models by having facts connected within them. No models without facts, but no facts without models. The chicken-and-egg puzzle again.  Truths come in degrees of convincingness, whereas final proofs for models and facts can only appear in the form of one hand washing the other.

It turns out that what you mean by truth is itself variable, such that your definition already provides the grounds to support itself. In truth, we trade in self-fulfilling axioms. We can add a modicum of clarity if we conceive of our models along two essential axes: “correspondence” and “coherence.” In the correspondence model, a proposition is true if it “corresponds” with something outside it. In the coherence model the proposition or model is true if it “holds together.” Think of a wheel that we say “spins true.” While I’ll be showing some love to the coherence model, I’ll nevertheless insist on a group hug. As it happens, these two ideas of truth form a dialectic where each is inescapably related to the other. Facts depend on models, models on facts. We are still fussing, scientists included, with the implications of this.

Kuhn’s book on revolutions in science, mentioned above, was itself a revolutionary work. He noticed an important detail about how scientific models evolve. Looking at changes in our theories over history, he saw that “normal science” was the work of assimilating new data to existing models. At the same time, he noticed that the criterium of truth was never any absolute knowledge of the relationship between the model and any reality outside it, but rather simply the extent to which the model itself held together. We say it is true because it works. The work of science expands the model, such that the expansion is itself the proof of its authority. Major changes in the model tend not to occur. They do so only when a new observed datum is discovered that does not fit with the existing unity. If you cannot get the datum to fit, you have two choices. You can tweak things to make it fit—using modelling stratagems known variously as “saving the appearances” and “saving the theory”—or you can treat the new datum as an “anomaly” (Kuhn’s term throughout the book) and go to work changing the model itself. And Presto! a revolution. We can relate the habits Kuhn describes here to our two kinds of metaphor. Normal science is like assimilative metaphor, a conservative initiative that consolidates and expands the model. Revolutions in science are like transgressive or interactive metaphors: they occur when the anomalous thing is so counter-intuitive that it eventually drives a reinvention of the model itself.

When it appeared in the 1962, Kuhn’s argument ruffled some feathers in the science community. His critics saw that he favoured a coherence model of truth over the correspondence model. What else do we have, asked Kuhn? We can only credit the “descriptive” value of a model when it coheres within itself. There is no “outside the model,” or as Derrida would say, “Il n’y a pas de hors text.” All a model can do is grow, not grow towards anything.  Scientific process, he allowed, gives us an “increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature…. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything.” We are accustomed to seeing science as “drawing constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance. But need there be any such goal?.”4 This past summer, we've seen the process at work that Kuhn describes. Theoretical physicists are, as we speak, debating the meaning of new observations from the James Webb telescope. Observations of certain distant galaxies, so I gather, don't quite fit with the current modeling of the so-called “Big Bang” universe. Actually, physicists don’t even agree on whether the data represents a new anomaly (revolution!) or really does fit after all (save the appearances!). They are nonetheless in agreement that “more thinking” must be done to sort out these quirks in relation to the existing model.

A BRIDGE IS A LIE

What gets to be true and serious and “at the table” in this world relates to facts and verified theories. You can see how literature falls out of the question. The first thing a scientist—I’ll throw together a strawman here, just to make a point—wants to say about a poem or novel is that it is not a true theory about the world and does not use fact as a decisive criterium. It trades in fictions and says things that don’t need to correspond with the real world outside it. It makes stuff up, unlikely stuff, and this self-granted allowance disqualifies it—in the same way that it disqualifies religion and superstition—from the more serious conversations about what the real world is like. Most suffering and error, a Richard Dawkins argues, can be attributed to a failure to be reasonable, to distinguish what is true from what is false or fake. Religious or political zealots, extremists of all cloths, are trying to pull the wool over your eyes. They say stuff that ain’t so. And oh, by the way, so do poets! Thinkers like Dawkins get rather fuzzy when they try to parse the distinction between these two ways of going astray, that is, believing in God and writing poems about unicorns. Many poets and novelists (and their critics!) meet him halfway. They can feel awkward and even guilty about “deficits” in their own discipline. They’ll twist themselves into every awkward attitude trying to prove that their work has to do with more than imaginary things. My son found a science-fiction writer online who denigrates writers of fantasy. His books, at least, are about science and the real world!

In a first-year course at McMaster, I defend the authority of literature as imaginative fiction by pitching an analogy. I try it out on my students at the beginning of term. I say, “A bridge is a lie.” Then I wait. After a bit of head scratching, we get into it. We like to say, I explain, that poems are not about the real world in the way that science and technology are about the real world. But if we’re to say that, I propose, you also have to say that a bridge is a lie. Why? Because it does not follow the contours of the world, the terrain as we know it to be. Instead of going like this (I make a U-shaped curve down into an imaginary valley on the chalkboard…), it goes like this (… and draw an arcing road across the top). It's a boldfaced lie! Who would fall for it?! Look how it deviates from how the world really is. But keep watching! The person driving along the road does not screech to a halt at the foot of the bridge and complain that the bridge is just “making stuff up.” No, the driver is happy to “go with” the arc of the engineer’s narrative, the little story he tells of how the world might go, if only we went with its way of being. The unfolding arc of the bridge supersedes any sceptic’s observation of how the world really goes. And the arc is realized, in every actual and metaphoric sense, because we go with it! Think of a corollary: all those ancient, abandoned bridges and aqueducts that crop up in the middle of nowhere in Italy, no longer connected to anything. How many landfills overflow with computer monitors from the 1980’s? They are as outdated as myth, and we go with them no longer.

We could say the same of cell phones and office towers. What kind of true model of the world do they support? Totally made up, fictions every one of them! What is an iPhone but technology’s version of fantasy literature? Why do we go with such fake fictions, such whacky ideas of what the world is like? On the one hand, because they work! Because they hold together. And on the other, because they expand our reach. Our scope for action is enlarged, like a model of what things are like. We realize, and activate, some idea of our human potential. Bridges and iPhones and cars and fridges and dentist chairs all project (like bridges!) a cosmology of their own, a crazy world whose purpose and utility are realized when we go with them. They don’t build up a real world, they build up a made world, a human world.

A certain materialist might reject this dichotomy between real things and made things. Fiction is make-believe fantasy because it isn’t composed of matter, whereas a bridge is really real because you can touch it.  The argument is shortsighted. First of all, the criterium of solid material hardly accounts for arts like sculpture, to mention an obvious case. But there is a further complication. Every fiction or work of art has a manifesting materiality, violins for music, bodies for dancing, books and paper for poems, even just a voice for speaking. The materials are organized in such a way that they evince an otherworldliness, an alternative way of inhabiting what you call the world. The same goes for the materials that materialists call real. You hold an iPhone in your hand, but nothing about the world it projects—a cyber world—is material that you can touch at that moment. Cyber reality is a real thing because so many of us live by it, and there seems to be nothing about its immateriality that gives us pause. Even a bridge, which you can crash into, is the material instantiation of a conceptualized plan that the world should really be, or go, in such and such a way. It is the alternative idea, and not its material embodiment, that we go with. Take the abandoned Italian aqueduct again. There is nothing about its materiality that compels us to go with it any longer. It is a “mere myth” now, no matter how much its brickwork still weighs. A further corollary begs me to point out that when some people don't like what a story projects, they burn the books, a tragicomic mistaking of where the genuine reality of the book’s made world lies.

Where am I going with all of this? I’m arguing for the real authority of the metaphoric imagination and all the ways it expresses itself. I’ll take a step back and start again. Clearly there is a lot of familiar stuff in the world, bodies made of flesh and blood, hard objects, real needs, urgent concerns. However hard it is to define the limits of that world, science does excellent work in approaching it as the appropriate world to focus on. W.H. Auden’s observation that many have lived without love but not one without water still makes its point, and it would be odd indeed if science threw all its resources behind finding an explanation for weird cosmic events in a Star Trek episode. We do appear, for the time being, to live in a certain kind of shared single world that (more or less) holds together and doesn’t go away. Poems and stories that create alternative worlds would be pointless if they did not include in their own materials the world of familiar experience in front of us.

But here’s my point. The fields of science and literature each include and license the authority of the other. In making many worlds, poetry uses, as its material-to-play-with, the world that science treats as solid and singular. In building up its single world, science uses fiction’s willingness to make up things that aren’t so, bridges and iPhones and coronary stents. Science plays in its single world and literature is very particular and exacting in its proliferation of many worlds. We’ll lay this perspective aside for a moment, develop some related ideas, and then come back to it for a grand finale.

MADE UP WORLDS

Perhaps now we have a leveler playing field, a conception of what the world is like that makes it less easy to subordinate the imaginative and fictional. We can put literature on the same footing with what scientists and literary critics say is the world that really matters. Time now to push a little further still. Like those that science creates, poems create whole worlds. They are models and universes that hold together. They hold together in the same way that bridges and iPhones hold together, by having all of their parts relate to one another in a way that works. Every verbal fiction is a heuristic: it is based on the self-granted assumption that it is an entire universe unto itself and has in it everything it needs to be whole. Ezra Pound offers an entire world that goes like this: “The apparition of these faces in a crowd, / Petals on a wet black bough.” Nothing more, nothing less. John Keats says “I stood tiptoe upon a little hill.” Lo, it is so! And off the poem goes. The world it makes unfolds and expands from within. It expands even after Keats finishes writing it. Let a reader engage the smallest poem with imagination and curiosity and she will quickly discover that the world opened there is potentially infinite, that no constructed library, howsoever large could contain all that might be said and discovered among its relations. Part of what a poem foregrounds and emphasizes is the very condition of metaphoric relation that makes it what it is. In a poem, as in a scientific model, everything is relation, a whole that derives from the leaps of mind that pass between words, images, stanzas, sounds and rhymes, echoes of other words and other images and sounds. An entirety of relation. Like a bridge that goes this-a-way, the poem speaks into being what it says. Both poems and bridges are hypothetical and heuristic. They say, “let’s see where this goes.” Their authority lies in how they cohere, complete and whole unto themselves. The reader (and the driver) show how such alternative ways might be worth going with.5

This was the attitude I was trying to recommend to the folks at the Heterodox Academy. After I made my case, a scientist came up to talk and said that he really liked what I had to say about metaphor. It fit with a book he had read about the authority of metaphoric thinking before the Enlightenment, before, that is, we replaced its habits with rational and scientific thought. Still handy though! he wanted to throw me a bone. Ah well, Rome wasn't built in a day, I thought to myself. And neither is the world of heterodox cosmologies, its many poems, its many metaphors, its many ways.

In any case, thank God for science. It provides us with a world of wonders. We live by its recommendations, kinds of poems in their own right, speculations on how the world might be if it went like … iPhones and electric cars. Science may be vulnerable, however, when some of its advocates insist that its way of knowing is the real and only way. They keep wondering why everyone can't think the way they do. I should of course be speaking of scientism rather than scientists. The past century has showcased brilliant theoretical physicists who push at the limit, in every sense, of their discipline. A brief stare out my window has brought to mind Einstein of course, Alfred North Whitehead, David Bohm, Roger Penrose, and younger folk like Donald Hoffman and Julian Barbour. Such writers make generous allowances for all ways of knowing. They speak their own language without seeming to pat other languages on the head, telling them to go out and play. It is a sign of the power of a certain way of thinking—and of marketing that thinking—when its own habits of mind are thought of in popular culture and media as the only habits going, the true ones.

PLAYFUL COHERENCE

I come to the big hurdle again, that science is about real things and poetry about imaginary things. I’ve tried to indicate a few ways over it, but will stop here, take a few steps back and then try to clear it for good. We seem to live these days at a breaking point (haven’t we always?) of tensions between disagreeable factions of mind and idea. Everyone wants to be right. People want to live by their models and their ways of thinking. Everyone gets to point to their own facts—facts that really do fit their perspective—and accuse everyone else of failure. A chaos of relativisms! Reason cries out. Metaphor and fiction and imagination and wishful thinking, with their associated abracadabras, are only making things worse, trying to make things so, just by saying them. The only cure for radical relativism, they say, is good science, and fact, and objective truth. It isn’t hard to see why they feel so driven to pound on the table of facts; they see around them so much wishful thinking gone off the rails. But is playing the fact-and-evidence card getting them where they want to go? Are they convincing the people they want to convince? Taking science at its own word, fundamentalists can always find actual objective facts to suit them. You have your facts; I have mine. What gets to be fact remains in question. It is why, as Northrop Frye says, no one was ever convinced by an argument.

As Thomas Kuhn showed, the real proof of any model, either scientific or poetic, is not its connection with a merely relative idea of the facts, but its inclusivity and coherence. When we say that a model holds together, we are evaluating it in a “closed” context, as a model. No single model that is epistemologically open is also holding together at that instant. There would be loose ends. Trying to be open and closed at the same time leaves you staring at the paradox of all metaphoric thinking, where we accept out of hand (for the sake of argument, so to speak) that A is not-A. In any case, refusing this inference is exactly what allows us to do more science. Most normal science goes on, indeed is only possible, for the very reason that scientists guard the coherence and fixed nature of the single world they build up. Their job is to develop the potential of further relations within it. One wants to see, after all, just how far such a world can take us.

If normal science is the work of relating everything to everything else inside a model, we ought to have some such term as “normal creation” in the making of a poem. We watch over Emily Dickinson’s shoulder as she writes. Her poem grows and we think of her hard at work “saving the appearances,” that is, permitting nothing to be added that doesn’t fit the whole, while expanding that whole using everything that does fit. Like the concept of dehiscence in biology (the flower in relation to its seed), the poem opens toward the total form that its smallest parts already predict. There is, again, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in the made worlds of science and poetry.

But there is a difference between these two expressions—in science and poetry—of making things work. In science there is the commitment to a single model, what it would say was the true world. As new data arises needing to be assimilated to the model, scientists will use every trick in the book to preserve the model itself. Kuhn is spot-on in his description of these “saves,” calling them “numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications.” In short, they use metaphoric (which is to say relational) leaps. Northrop Frye talks about how the space between any two conflicting points can be “filled in” with further connections and leaps.6 The scientist sees a gap between two points and adds extra moves to make the gaps smaller between each one. You “explain” the gap, which is literally to say you spread it around. The poet would embrace the original gap as a gap. Scientists use their extra leaps in the service of preserving their model and so employ the gap-fillers accordingly. Poets, because they can make many worlds, can be more committed to the gap-moment itself and discovering what sort of new world it will, quite actually, predict.

Science devotes itself to a single world for intelligible reasons. It explores and expands upon what we call an objective physical world, a world that emerges out of consensus and represents that consensus. We don’t have to say that it is the true world, only that it is a negotiated and shared one (a metaphoric problem, no doubt, to begin with). Science helps to work out its contours and characteristics, dizzyingly complex in its unfoldings. There is a sense then in which we “go with” the single bridge (the only one, as it happens, that arches over the valley for the time being) because it is the bridge that others go with, and we only have so much money to spend on bridges. Social relations require efficiency, convenience, and a pooling of resources. The difficulty arises when one neglects the intuitions, for instance, of a John Keats, whose idea of “negative capability” celebrates that state of mind that can inhabit “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” We want to go with the bridge in the spirit of consensus while not taking the bridge literally. We confidently put our foot on the accelerator and drive out onto clouds.

And so each discipline disappears into the other. In its effort to preserve the logic that its system requires, science chases quantum mechanics and string theory to their limits and ends up creating, in its one model, theories of a multi-verse (at least according to some thinkers). Out of the one, many. Literature, conversely, in letting multiverses expand exponentially on library shelves, leaves each individual fiction free to enjoy all the rights and privileges of a single universe, the very “truth” that science itself longs for. Out of the many, one.

Each system includes, then, as its enabling mechanism, features that we associate with the other system. In its idea of one real world, science tells real fibs about how the world actually goes. It makes things up, then like a poem, invites us hypothetically to “see where this takes us.” The converse applies for fiction, which, in its hypothetical pitch to “see where this goes,” keeps turning back to our familiar consensus world for material already actualized and prepped for playful handling. Poetry is free to treat metaphoric gaps as free-radicals (if I may misuse that word), because it can permit worlds themselves to multiply. Science will use tricky leaps too—gaps to close gaps—but it must do so to preserve its single model. And notice that when it does come upon anomalies that it can no longer finesse, it will favour some new theory (which may already have been around for some time) that allows interpretation to go off in an alternative direction in just the way that poems do.

And so, up and over the hurdle: we actually live inside made-up worlds, imagined and theoretical worlds. In turn, our novels and stories are populated with actual things—trees and street cars—to play with. A poem is a universe! A universe is a poem! With both poems and universes, we live as though they had everything inside them, not because we can prove them true, compare them to, or make them absolutely fit with, anything beyond, but because they work, and because they exclude nothing. To imagine that they exclude “outside” things is simply to point to another world, like the one a reader could say she lives in, or the one a sky-watcher might imagine is beyond the cosmic microwave background. It would not be the one that the poem or the universe holds before you, with all its own infinities opening up inside.

Metaphoric thinking favours both/and ways of being. We take it on good faith—the great heuristic assumption—that however little we may understand poems and universes, we may treat them as true so long as everything fits and remains in play. Like a fantastic hypothesis—opening and opening into what it already says—poems and universes invite us to see how everything is related to everything else, which is the very instantiation of potential as such. They point in the direction of more.

Let’s leave things there for now. Once again, my aim was not to show that there are deficits or shortcomings in the vastly intricate and brilliant models of science. But there is no Kool-Aid one needs to drink to push at the limits of what science shows us. Scientists do it themselves all the time. Normal and revolutionary science will continue, to our hopeful advantage. Poems that are both finished and infinite will go on doing their thing. My aim was to introduce questioning complications into the attitude of some science advocates towards what it means for their work to be true and for literature's work, in turn and by definition, not to be true. Science is about reason; art is about feelings. Reason is calming and stable, and therefore can be trusted and followed; make-believe is risky and unpredictable, so must be constrained. That the implied hierarchy is simply assumed in our age ought not to obscure a fundamental reality that both science and art share. The human mind has a relational architecture that must, and always will, manifest in two directions—towards the seen and the unseen. In order to be what it is, science must evince the very habits of mind it pretends to disavow, hurling iPhones in every fantastical direction. Conversely, poems will always be imaginary gardens with real toads in them, as Marianne Moore says. How we parse the different products of their work, where getting out of bed in the morning to find reasons for living is concerned, is partly a matter of personal choice, not of a hierarchy that favours one way of thinking over another. I might only add that metaphoric thinking, which lies at the heart of both practices, is the force that unites them and points them in expanding directions.

It seems to me now that the best test of a poem, or a model, or a universe is not whether it is true in the way that popular science often means, but how playful it is in relation to its own coherence, its ways of relating that lead to more thinking, not some idea of righteous thinking. Scientists sometimes brag that they are very good, possibly the best, at being open to new truths and new ways. That may be. I would only want to add that poetry as well, in its infinite metaphoric potential, has been revealing the same way all along.

Jeffery Donaldson continues to daydream, in front of students at McMaster University, about metaphor theory, fictive worlds, poetry, and poetics. His seventh volume of poems, Granted:  Poems of Metaphor, is appearing in December 2022 with Porcupine's Quill. 

Why is it considered "settled science" among epidemiologists, virologists and the general public that certain diseases like Influenza and COVID-19 are transmitted through human contact, when in fact it has never been proven that diseases spread this way? For more than a century Germ Theory has had the dominance and authority of religious orthodoxy, yet a far more plausible explanation for how and why we get "infected" with certain illnesses is Terrain Theory, which illustrates that a multitude of environmental and genetic components combine to determine the incidence of disease in a population or individual. In the following essay, Torsten Engelbrecht, Dr. Claus Köhnlein, MD and Dr. Samantha Bailey, MD draw on material gathered in their extraordinary book Virus Mania to reveal the explanatory power of terrain theory.

Read more

Combining poem and prose, this essay by Asa Boxer draws on ideas from films, literature, science and philosophy to examine a question of particular importance in our age of rampant censorship and disinformation: How do you know if you're brainwashed?

Read more

INTRODUCTION

The aim of “Covid Heretic” is to provide a resource page for those seeking reliable sources on the subject of viral transmission and lockdowns during an information crisis. At present, the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” are being deployed to undermine and silence legitimate opposition to democratically unconstitutional policies. Surely, if a republic (or even a constitutional monarchy as exists in the UK, Canada and Australia) wishes to rescind or indefinitely suspend all basic civil and human rights, while at once shutting down entire economies, there must be irrefutable evidence that such actions are proportionate responses to a truly imminent threat. One hopes that such would be the standard. Unfortunately, in the case of COVID-19, such a standard has not been met. This page provides links to reliable, scientific evidence and careful data analysis to educate citizens on subjects that prior to 2020 were not essential knowledge, but that since have become nec…

Read more

In this groundbreaking paper Wal Thornhill introduces a new Theory of Everything: The Electric Universe. Set aside everything you think you know about all things great and small because the ideas presented here overturn it all. Was there a big bang? Not likely. Einstein’s Relativity? Doesn’t hold up. Is the Sun a thermonuclear fusion reactor which will eventually run out of fuel and burn out? Nope. Are there black holes? No such thing. What about dark matter and dark energy? Forget about that nonsense and start learning about the science of the 21st century. “. . .the Electric Universe is the only coherent cosmology that has correctly predicted and explained discoveries in the space age.” For example, Thornhill specifically predicted the unexpected results of the Deep Impact mission to comet Tempel 1 in October 2001, almost four years before the event. He was alone in successfully predicting what would be seen beneath the clouds of Saturn's moon Titan.

The Electric Sun Experiment

In 197…

Read more

In this paper Rupert Sheldrake elucidates his controversial hypothesis of morphic fields and morphic resonance, a revolutionary expansion of the idea of Darwinian evolution that accounts for how living organisms assume their different shapes and develop their unique traits. The implications are far reaching and help account for phenomena of interconnectedness (like telepathy) overlooked by mainstream science.

Morphic fields underlie the organization of animals, plants, cells, proteins, crystals, brains and minds. They help to explain habits, memories, instincts, telepathy and the sense of direction. They have an inherent memory. They imply that many of the so-called laws of nature are more like habits.

This is, of course, a controversial hypothesis.

The fields of morphogenesis

My interest in these new kind of fields first developed while I was doing research on the development of plants at Cambridge University. To start with, I was concerned only with one particular kind of morphic field, namely morphogenetic fields.

How do plants grow from spores or seeds into the characteristic form of their species? How do the leaves of ferns, oaks and bamboos take up their shapes? These are questions to do with what biologists call morphogenesis, the coming-into-being of form (Greek: morphe = form; genesis = coming into being), one of the great unsolved problems of biology.

The naive approach is simply to say that morphogenesis is genetically programmed. Different species just follow the instructions in their genes. But a few moments' reflection shows that this reply won’t do. All the cells of the body contain the same genes. In your body the same genetic program is present in your eyes, kidneys and fingers. If they are all programmed identically, then how do they develop so differently?

Thanks to the great triumphs of molecular biology, we know what genes actually do. Some code for the sequence of amino acids in proteins; others are involved in the control of protein synthesis. They enable organisms to make particular proteins. But these alone cannot account for form. Your arms and your legs are chemically identical. If ground up and analyzed biochemically, they would be indistinguishable. But they have different shapes. Something other than the genes and the proteins they code for is needed to explain their form.  

Biologists who study the development of form in plants and animals have long been aware of these problems, and since the 1920s many have adopted the idea that developing organisms are shaped by fields called morphogenetic fields. These are rather like invisible blueprints that underlie the form of the growing organism. But they are not, of course, designed by an architect, any more than a "genetic program" is supposed to be designed by a computer programmer. They are fields: self-organizing regions of influence, analogous to magnetic fields and other recognized fields of nature. 

But no one knows what these fields are or how they work. Most biologists assume that they will at some time in the future be explained in terms of regular physics and chemistry. This is no more than an act of faith.  

After ten years of research in developmental biology, I came to the conclusion that these fields were not just a way of talking about standard mechanistic processes, but something really new.

The hypothesis of morphic fields

This was the starting point for my own development of the hypothesis of morphic fields first proposed in my book A New Science of Life1 and further developed in The Presence of the Past.2

All self-organizing systems are wholes made up of parts, which are themselves wholes at a lower level, such as atoms in molecules and molecules in crystals. The same is true of organelles in cells, cells in tissues, tissues in organs, organs in organisms, organisms in social groups. At each level, the morphic field gives each whole its characteristic properties, and interconnects and coordinates the constituent parts.

The fields responsible for the development and maintenance of bodily form in plants and animals are called morphogenetic fields. In animals, the organization of behaviour and mental activity depends on behavioural and mental fields. The organization of societies and cultures depends on social and cultural fields.3 All these kinds of organizing fields are morphic fields.4

Morphic fields are located within and around the systems they organize. Like quantum fields, they work probabilistically. They restrict, or impose order upon, the inherent indeterminism of the systems under their influence. Thus, for example, a protein field organizes the way in which the chain of amino acids (the “primary structure,” determined by the genes) coils and folds up to give the characteristic three-dimensional form of the protein, “choosing” from among many possible structures, all equally possible from an energetic point of view. Social fields coordinate the behaviour of individuals within social groups, for example the behaviour of fish in schools, or birds in flocks.5

The mathematician René Thom has created mathematical models of morphogenetic fields in which the end-points that systems develop towards are defined as attractors.6 In the branch of mathematics known as dynamics, attractors represent the limits towards which dynamical systems are drawn. They provide a scientific way of thinking about ends, purposes, goals or intentions. All morphic fields contain attractors.

The most controversial feature of this hypothesis is that the structure of morphic fields depends on what has happened before. They contain a kind of memory. Through repetition the patterns they organize become increasingly probable, increasingly habitual. The force these fields exert is the force of habit.

Whatever the explanation of its origin, once a new morphic field, a new pattern of organization, has come into being, through repetition the field becomes stronger.  The same pattern becomes more likely to happen again. The more often patterns are repeated, the more probable they become. The fields contain a kind of cumulative memory and become increasingly habitual. Fields evolve in time and form the basis of habits. From this point of view nature is essentially habitual. Even the so-called “laws of nature” may be more like habits.

The means by which information or an activity-pattern is transferred from a previous to a subsequent system of the same kind is called morphic resonance. Morphic resonance involves the influence of like upon like, the influence of patterns of activity on subsequent similar patterns of activity, an influence that passes through or across space and time from past to present. These influences do not fall off with distance in space or time. The greater the degree of similarity, the greater the influence of morphic resonance.

Morphic resonance gives an inherent memory in fields at all levels of complexity. Any given morphic system, say that of a squirrel, tunes in to previous similar systems, in this case previous squirrels of its species. Through this process each individual squirrel draws upon, and in turn contributes to, a collective or pooled memory of its kind. In the human realm, this kind of collective memory corresponds to what the psychologist C.G. Jung called the “collective unconscious.”

Morphic resonance should be detectable in the realms of physics, chemistry, biology, animal behaviour, psychology and the social sciences. But long established systems, such as zinc atoms, quartz crystals and insulin molecules are governed by such strong morphic fields, with such deep grooves of habit, that little change can be observed. They behave as if they are governed by fixed laws.  

By contrast, new systems should show an increasing tendency to come into being the more often they are repeated. They should become increasingly probable; they should happen more easily as time goes on. For example, when a new chemical compound is synthesized by research chemists and crystallized, it may take a long time for the crystal to form for the first time. There is no pre-existing morphic field for the lattice structure. But when the first crystals form, they will make it easier for similar crystals to appear anywhere in the world. The more often the compound is crystallized, the easier it should be to crystallize.

In fact new compounds do indeed tend to crystallize more easily the more often they are made. Chemists usually explain this effect in terms of crystal “seeds” from the new crystals spreading around the world as invisible dust particles in the air, or chemists learning from others how to do it. But the hypothesis of morphic fields predicts that this should happen anyway under standardized conditions, even if dust particles are filtered out of the air.

Connections with quantum physics

Experiments to test for the spatial aspects of morphic fields imply a kind of non-locality that is not at present recognized by institutional science. Nevertheless, it may turn out to be related to the non-locality or non-separability that is an integral part of quantum theory, implying connections or correlations at a distance undreamt of by classical physics. Albert Einstein found the idea of “spooky action at a distance” implied by quantum theory deeply distasteful; but his worst fears have come true.7 Recent experimental evidence shows that these connections lie at the heart of physics.

Several physicists have been intrigued by the possible connections between morphic fields and quantum theory, including John Bell (of Bell’s theorem) and David Bohm, whose theory of the implicate order, based on the non-separability of quantum systems, turned out to be extraordinarily compatible with my own proposals.8 These connections have also been explored by the American quantum physicist Amit Goswami9 and by the German quantum physicist Hans-Peter Dürr.10 But it is still not clear exactly how morphic fields might fit in with quantum physics, if only because the implications of quantum theory for complex systems like cells and brains are still obscure.

Experiments on morphic fields

The hypothesis of morphic fields is a scientific hypothesis, and as such is experimentally testable. There are several possible ways in which it can be, and has been, investigated by experiment. Some of these tests attempt to detect the fields as they link together different parts of a system in space; other tests look for the effects of morphic resonance over time.

The easiest way to test for morphic fields directly is to work with societies of organisms. Individual animals can be separated in such a way that they cannot communicate with each other by normal sensory means. If information still travels between them, this would imply the existence of interconnections of the kind provided by morphic fields. The transfer of information through morphic fields could help provide an explanation for telepathy, which typically takes place between members of groups who share social or emotional bonds.

When I started looking for evidence of field-like connections between members of social groups, I found that I was moving into realms very little understood by science. For example, no one knows how societies of termites are coordinated in such a way that these small, blind insects can build complex nests with an intricate internal architecture.11 No one understands how flocks of birds or schools of fish can change direction so quickly without the individuals bumping into each other.12 Likewise, no one understands the nature of human social bonds.

One particularly promising area for this kind of research concerns telepathy between people and domesticated animals, as discussed in my book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. For example, many dogs and cats seem to know when their owners are coming home, even when they return at non-routine times in unfamiliar vehicles such as taxis, and when no one at home knows when they are coming. The animals seem to be responding telepathically to their owners’ intentions.13

According to the hypothesis of formative causation, morphic fields extend beyond the brain into the environment, linking us to the objects of our perception, and are capable of affecting them through our intention and attention.14 This is another aspect of morphic fields that lends itself to experimental testing. Such fields would mean that we can affect things just by looking at them, in ways that cannot be explained in terms of conventional physics. For example, we may be able to affect someone by looking at them from behind, when they have no other way of knowing that we are staring at them.

The sense of being stared at from behind is in fact a common experience.  Experiments already indicate that it is a real phenomenon.15 It does not seem to be explicable in terms of chance coincidence, the known senses, or fields currently recognized by physicists.

The unsolved problems of animal navigation, migration, and homing may also depend on invisible fields connecting the animals to their destinations.16 In effect, these could act like invisible elastic bands linking them to their homes. In the language of dynamics, their home can be regarded as an attractor.17

Morphic resonance in biology  

The build-up of habits can be observed experimentally only in the case of new patterns of development and of behaviour.  

There is already evidence from observations of fruit flies that morphic resonance effects may be occurring in the realm of morphogenesis. When fruit fly eggs were exposed to a chemical (diethyl ether), some of them developed abnormally, turning into flies with four wings instead of two. When this treatment was repeated generation after generation, more and more flies developed four wings, even if their ancestors had never been exposed to the chemical.18

There is also much circumstantial evidence that animal behaviour can evolve rapidly, as if a collective memory is building up through morphic resonance. In particular, large-scale adaptations have occurred in the behaviour of domesticated animals all over the world.

One example concerns cattle guards. Ranchers throughout the American West have found that they can save money on cattle grids by using fake ones instead, consisting of stripes painted across the road. Real cattle guards are made of a series of parallel steel tubes or rails with gaps in between, which make it difficult for cattle to walk across them, and even painful to try. However, present-day cattle do not usually even try to cross them. The illusory grids work just like the real ones. When cattle approach them, they “put on brakes with all four feet,” as one rancher expressed it to me.

Is this just because calves learn from older cattle that they should not try to cross? Apparently not. Several ranchers have told me that herds not previously exposed to real cattle grids will avoid the phoney ones. And Ted Friend, of Texas A & M University, has tested the response of several hundred head of cattle to painted grids, and has found that naive animals avoid them just as much as those previously exposed to real grids.19 Sheep and horses likewise show an aversion to crossing painted grids. This aversion may well depend on morphic resonance from previous members of the species that have learned to avoid cattle grids the hard way.

There are many such examples. There are also data from laboratory experiments on rats and other animals that such effects occur. The best known involves a series of experiments in which subsequent generations of rats learned how to escape from a water maze. As time went on, rats in laboratories all over the world were able to do this quicker and quicker.20

Morphic resonance in human learning

Morphic resonance has many implications for the understanding of human learning, including the acquisition of languages. Through the collective memory on which individuals draw, and to which they contribute, it should in general be easier to learn what others have learned before.

This idea fits well with the observations of linguists like Noam Chomsky, who propose that language learning by young children takes place so rapidly and creatively that it cannot be explained simply in terms of imitation. The structure of language seems to be inherited in some way. In his book The Language Instinct Steven Pinker gives many examples to support this idea.

One of the few areas in which detailed quantitative data are available over periods of decades is in the scores of IQ  (Intelligence Quotient) tests. If morphic resonance occurs, average performance in IQ tests should be rising not because people are becoming more intelligent, but because IQ tests should be getting easier to do as a result of morphic resonance from the millions who have done them before. This effect is now well known, and is called the "Flynn effect," after its discoverer, James Flynn.

Large increases in IQ test scores have occurred in many different countries, including the USA, Japan, Britain, France, Germany and Holland.21 Many attempts have been made to explain this "Flynn effect," but none have succeeded.22 Flynn himself describes it as “baffling."23 But morphic resonance could provide a natural explanation.

Implications

The hypothesis of formative causation has far-reaching implications in all branches of science. For example, morphic fields could revolutionize our understanding of cultural inheritance, and the influence of ancestors. Richard Dawkins has given the name “meme” to “units of cultural transmission,”24 and such memes can be interpreted as morphic fields. Morphic resonance also sheds new light on many religious practices, including rituals.25 Even scientific paradigms can be seen as morphic fields, stabilized by morphic resonance, with a tendency to become increasingly habitual and unconscious the more often they are repeated.26

But however wide its implications, this hypothesis has a major inherent limitation. It helps explain how patterns of organization are repeated; but it does not explain how they come into being in the first place. It leaves open the question of evolutionary creativity. Formative causation is compatible with several different theories, ranging from the idea that all novelty is ultimately a matter of chance, to explanations in terms of divine creativity.27

Dr Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 90 scientific papers and nine books, including Science Set Free and Ways To Go Beyond, And Why They Work.  He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. He is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sinces, Petaluma, CA, and of Schumacher College, in Devon, England. His web site is www.sheldrake.org