Is Civilization The Enemy of Truth?
Reconnecting With History, Part 6
The Lies that Build Our Worlds
Remember Galileo? He used his shiny new telescope to look at the sky, and he saw the moons of Jupiter, and the mountains on our own Moon, and thus proved that Earth was not the center of motion in the universe, nor were the heavens made of crystal spheres and/or perfect in every way. What was “up there” looked suspiciously like what was “down here,” and that was a problem.
The received wisdom of the ancient world—well,the version that was most widely known and most theologically congenial, at any rate—held that the Earth, being both fallen and corrupt, was at the lowest level of the cosmos, and all things above the Earth were better, purer, and, well, higher. Jesus had ascended into the heavens by rising up off the ground into the sky, as had several Biblical prophets before him.
For over a thousand years, that was not only The Truth, it was used as the foundation from which to explain all the other truths which bound together the community of faith.
In this context, you can imagine that Galileo's discoveries might raise some uncomfortable questions, such as:
If “up there” was filled with more of the stuff that was “down here,” then where did Jesus ascend to?
What did it mean for God to send his son “down” to the Earth, or for his spirit to “descend” onto people as happens so many times in the scriptures?
When Galileo started regaling women at high-class parties with tales of the secret knowledge he’d found, he made a lot of people upset. The Truth, it seemed, was no match for this weirdo’s gadget—and without the authority of The Truth, society would fall apart.
The Truths We Cling To
It did fall apart, after a fashion, due to this factor and others. Europe wasn’t the same after the Enlightenment pushed in from the South and the Reformation swept through the North.
But the Catholic Church, despite losing a great deal of political power, survived.
One of the advantages of being the Catholic Church is that, when theological problems present themselves, you can say “We wrote the Bible, we get to say what it means.” Moving slowly, the Church shifted its teaching so that it depended less on the ancient geocentric view of the universe held by the authors of the Bible.
To hear Catholic historians tell it, the big problem with the situation was that Galileo was an antisocial blabbermouth that couldn’t resist betraying his personal friend—the Pope—in order to get a little transitory street cred. The Church knew that the Earth was not at the center of the cosmos, and had known so since before it commissioned Copernicus to fix the calendar. It wasn’t hostile to the idea that the visible universe was part of creation and not part of heaven, but it knew that most of the public didn’t have the sophistication to understand things like “worldview constraints” and “mythological metaphors,” so it was working on slowly informing the public. Galileo was an egotistical jerk whose discoveries didn’t really change anything theological, but it did threaten the integrity of Christendom, so imprisoning him was entirely justified. The only reason people are ever imprisoned, after all, is because the ruling class deems them a threat to the social order.
At the end of this gradual shift, despite the efforts of that jerk Galileo, all was once again right with the world, and problems didn’t rear their ugly heads again for anyone but heretics and anti-Catholics.
That’s one way to tell the story. On the other hand...
If you tell the story from the secularist’s point of view, this was the moment when The Evil Church sought to suppress a Rogue Individualist’s attempt to spread The Truth. This Hero of Truth was put under House Arrest for life, and his example helped to finally put paid to a thousand years of lies, mysticism, and darkness. The Catholic Church’s grip on power was shattered, and the world could finally and decisively move towards a post-Christian future where science and more personal spiritual explorations would be free to re-define humanity’s relationship with the universe.
The hell of it is...
...both versions are true.
What a Piece of Work
What a piece of work is man!
How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!
In form and moving how express and admirable!
In action, how like an angel!
In apprehension, how like a god!
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II Scene II
The problem of competing truths continues to plague us today.
Consider one of the louder subjects of our current cultural cacophony: human nature. Since the Enlightenment (partly for reasons I explored in The Year That Never Happened), the West has fought a civilizational civil war over human nature.
Are humans individuals with a fixed nature, or are they blank slates that might be molded to ends that serve society?
Are they animals determined by their genes, or are they a socially constructed being whose environment determines their behavior?
Are they risen apes, or fallen angels?
There are some interesting points in favor of each position.
On the biologically-determined end of the argument, consider that there are real genetic differences between people-groups. They at least shape our affect, body types, skin color, athleticism, and spatial acuity. Some groups reliably score higher on IQ tests, others reliably win marathons. Some seem to find monogamy and individuality to be second nature, others tend more towards polygamy and clan life. Some get skin cancer at low latitudes, some get rickets at high latitudes. There are some serious differences between groups and individuals across humanity.
But on the other hand, we have good reason to think that genetics might not be all that important when it comes to human culture. Humans are a single species, after all, and they have less genetic diversity than dogs (this point is not in dispute). How different could they really be? Shouldn’t we expect culture to be the whole ballgame?
And to press the comparison with dogs further...
All dogs, no matter how different, still respond to love, to conditioning, to work, to food, and to social order. All humans, no matter how different, want love, status, purpose, security, and meaning.
So why should there be any reason why we can’t find an optimal moral, economic, and political system for all humans, everywhere? Especially if the system were flexible enough to allow for the wide range of circumstances in which humans should find themselves.
The right system should be able to figure out the right way to be, and to justly rule all humanity, and rule it justly and well, to the benefit of all.
It’s a pretty convincing argument when put in those terms, isn’t it? This is why a concept like “moral progress” is so sticky. Absent any big glaring reason to doubt it a priori, it matches our experience with the simple systems we encounter every day. We know what a perfect (or close-to-perfect) horse looks like when it’s running. We know when a machine is functioning well, and when it’s out of whack. There is a right way to do things. There is a right way for things to be. We can see it with everything else.
It follows, then, that there is a right way to do the human thing, doesn’t it? All we have to do is know enough of the truth that we can intuit what that right way is.
This is, essentially, the thrust of the modernist project.
The Modernist Project
“Modernism” is the worldview of the Enlightenment. Though there are dozens of ideologies and religions that have sprung from from it, the Modernist Project is the intellectual struggle to create a coherent worldview that doesn’t depend upon the metaphysics of ancient mythology. It takes as a starting point a distrust of divine revelation: Since there is no way to verify whether God has spoken to someone, or what God might have said if He did speak to someone, the only way humans really have to make sense of the world is their experience of the real world and the inferences that can be made from those experiences.
From this foundation sprang the major institutions of modernity:
Science and Engineering, as means to explore the physical world and make sense of it
Modernist philosophy, which seeks to create an intellectual foundation synthesizing the discoveries of scientists and engineers with the human experience as recorded in art, politics, and previous philosophy.
Politics, which—seeing no a priori reason why one person might have a right to rule over another—seeks either to legitimize or de-legitimize existing hierarchies and institutions based on some criteria other than the Divine Right of Kings (that is, the notion that God has ordained the existing leaders for his own reasons, and thus they should not be opposed).
The modernist project, like most other things in life, turned out to be a double-edged sword.
On the happy side, shaking off thousands of years of prejudice in matters intellectual helped free individuals to seek their own fortunes. Democratically-secured governments, the explosion of prosperity, easy travel and cultural mixing, and the technological uplift of all corners of the world are some of the better results.
On the downside, the explicit use of “man as the measure of all things” has resulted in some astonishing disasters. The idea itself may be sound, but the inability of individuals to get a reliable view of themselves from outside is mirrored in the species as a whole. Since we all proceed from a mishmash of inherited thought forms and biological drives—all of which are as invisible to us but as plain to others as our faces—it is predictable that the great thinkers who tried to remake the world for man would instead wind up trying to re-make man in the image of their own unexamined ideals.
Nonetheless, the goal of the modernist project persists, and it’s been going on long enough that we all reflexively assume that there is a right way to be human. All of our public moral debates, and even the very notion of “human rights,” take this assumption as a foundational premise.
But what if there is a flaw that makes this moral intuition fail on its own terms?
The Limits of Intuition
If the human race is a single thing, it follows that there’s a best way for that thing to be.
That means that, as both liberal (small-L) philosophy and religious conservatives believe, there is a true, knowable, universal moral code.
It is as obvious and straightforward an intuition as can be had on such a fraught topic.
Fraught?
Consider, for a moment, the usual objections that cultural relativists make to this intuition:
Power attracts corruption, so any system, ideology, or religion that unites humanity will ultimately fall into disrepute under the weight of corruption. If that which falls does have the truth pretty well figured out, the truth will then become anathema, and the generations that follow will live in darkness.
Humans are individuals and often want mutually exclusive things. Sometimes for one to win, another must lose. There is no state in which all beings win, nor one in which all experience goodness.
Societies are ecologies, not machines, and it is impossible (even in principle) to know how it functions well enough to plan it. Any time humans try to too tightly control ecologies or economies or cultures, the object of control flies apart.
Humans have to have a stake in the well being of one another—to the extent that trust or fellow-feeling cannot be secured, they will prey upon one another instead of supporting one another.
I am inclined to think that all these things are true on their face, requiring almost no justification, but I also don’t think they really explain the full depth of the modernist’s failure to base a society upon truth and goodness.
The postmodernists (noticing the same problem) eventually converged on the idea that truth, in any grand sense, is an illusion, and that the only thing that really explains the world are the social mechanics of power. I don’t quite buy that, and yet when you look at how and where the modernist project has failed...
...there is something to the postmodern critique.
The Limits of Truth
Truth is a slippery customer. There’s a lot of it out there, but to make sense of it we must posit it in the form of a story. Stories have causes and effects. Choices and consequences. There is no real randomness, only the inexorable workings of consequences springing from causes both near and distant, great and small. When something happens, there’s a reason for it, whether that reason is “a volcano erupted” or “God was angry.” Without a story, the human mind cannot rest.
The modernist search for truth has trained us to be relentless questioners, and as a result we’ve discovered more answers of every kind than any human civilization that we know of. Every tool, every artifact, every web page and article and argument and man-made object and name for something you’ve ever encountered is the result of an answered question. We have so many answers, and yet we feel our limitations so keenly, that we can even occasionally appreciate the depth of our ignorance.
What are we to make then, of the ridiculous situation we live with?
We sit surrounded by mountains of answered questions, and we still can’t say with confidence what the best way to live is. For nearly every lifestyle feature you can mention, I can point out another culture that has done that one thing well. For nearly every taboo, I can show you somewhere that its violation was key to some group’s survival. And in both cases, for those that I can’t, there’s someone out there who can, and who can back up their answer.
Why, with all our answers, can we not say, once and for all, what the right way to be human is? Were the postmodernists right? Is there no real truth out there to find?
Or is the problem of a different sort?
What if the problem is not that the truth isn’t out there, or that the truth is unknowable, but that the truth—especially the truth about what humans are and how they operate—is not...useful.
What if the modernist’s ambition to bring the entire world into a state of systematized understanding within a well-ordered society, without war or want, is impossible because the truth about humanity is too expansive.
In other words, what if the truth is too big for humans to handle?
What if social constructionism is an illusion whose plausibility is facilitated by the fact that humans are so well-adapted to their ecological niche that they can successfully and healthily exist in a range of conditions that no single society can support?
Dynamic Systems and Adaptability
Look at the facts before us:
Societies across the world, throughout history, have thrived, endured, and produced wonders under a variety of governmental systems, family arrangements, and religious regimes.
Consider governments: Feudalism, Theocracy, Empire, Chieftainism, and Republicanism have all had centuries-long runs at high levels of prosperity, while pure democracies, communism, and religious cultism have not.1
Or marriage: Polygyny, tribal communalism, social monogamy, romantic monogamy, and (very occasionally) polyandry have all produced stable multi-generational family systems from time to time.
Or economics: Mercantilism, lassiez-faire free markets, and corporate fascism all have produced stable long-run prosperity.
Or religion: Centralized religions, pagan religions, Gnostic religions, family-scale religions, imperial cults, and high theology have all, at one time or another, provided social stability and a certain amount of human flourishing.
Or food: Humans can thrive on almost any kind of food, can eat things that are poisonous to most other creatures, can hunt and kill and consume almost anything in the world. If it’s parasite-ridden, we can cook it and remove the danger.
Or social arrangements: Humans do well in tribes and bands, in clans, in city-states, and in nation-states. We do well in cultures where dueling is the norm, or where courts are the norm. We thrive where there is no formal government, and where government is highly formalized. About the only time we don’t form stable societies is when a balance of power does not exist between the rulers and the ruled—and even then, an unstable arrangement never lasts for long. We find ways to make it work.
The truth is that, so long as humans can trust the people they depend on, they do quite well. The forms, the conditions, the institutions, the doctrines, and the shibboleths are all quite incidental to human flourishing.
This truth is too big for any one culture to accommodate.
And so we don’t.
The Lies We Need
Humans are amazingly flexible.
Civilizations, alas, are not.
No civilization can long prevail if it is both liberal and traditional, clannish and individualistic, agrarian and post-industrial, republican and managerial. The best a broadly-based civilization can do is to have compartments where different sorts of people can do different sorts of things, and this only works to the extent that all such groups have an allegiance to a unifying principle and leave one another alone. That principle may be a person (such as a prince or a President), a religion, a nationality, a moral project, or a narrative, but the buy-in must be nearly universal.
In other words, there must be, on some level, a shared identity.
And, like all compromises, there is a price to pay: Any identity that’s large enough to accommodate the population of a modern nation-state must suppress some aspect of the truth.
Thus, every successful large-scale civilization is built on lies. It has to be.
In the end, the foundational ambition of the Enlightenment—the disinterested search for truth—may be its ultimate limiting principle. It gives me no pleasure to say so, since this is a project to which I have devoted much of my life (including this column—which, don’t worry, isn’t going anywhere), but there you have it.
Culture wars across history are invariably contentions of different factions over what is really true about power, morality, nature, and goodness. While it is easy to identify certain players in recent memory (such as Mao, or Marx) who preferred to dispense with truth entirely in order to rebuild the world in their own image, it is far more common for each faction in such a struggle to be fighting for something that is not just their truth, but that is undeniably based on a provable piece of the truth.
When a civilization finds a way to compartmentalize competing truths, it survives.
When one faction’s truth triumphs decisively over another’s, we call it a revolution.
Unfortunately, most of the time, revolutions shatter civilizations—and civilizations are not easily put together again.
The truth will set you free.
And it can also cut the bonds that hold civilizations together...
...irrevocably.
This essay grew partly out of background research for Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible, which will see publication later this year.
If you found this essay helpful or interesting, you may enjoy the Reconnecting with History installment on Understanding Before Thinking, and this essay on learning to think through language and story: Are You Fluent in English?
When not haunting your substack client, I write novels, literary studies, and how-to books. You can find everything currently in print here, and if you’re feeling adventurous click here to find a ridiculous number of fiction and nonfiction podcasts for which I will eventually have to accept responsibility.
1 Historian Will Durant would argue that this is because the former are ways of managing aristocracy, while the latter are systems which concentrate power into the hands of a single dictator, but parsing whether and to what extent he was correct is probably too long a trek for this short column. Let’s just take the trend as a given.
Most of this is a tangent, but it was the thoughts brought to mind.
"In other words, what if the truth is too big for humans to handle?"
That is very close to the saying the reason is known only by God.
"...both versions are true."
Allow me to propose a third story which, although a little more sympathetic to the Church, is still distinct. It also allows me to ride a favorite hobby horse (which should be obvious by the end).
Galileo was a mathematical astronomer much more than an observational astronomer, his discoveries of the Galilean moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn not withstanding (in fairness, the norm for his time). He was also a skilled self-promoters.
He combined his few valuable observations with an okay heliocentric system to portray himself as a bullwark of Truth, fooling those centuries later who don’t even understand what he did and didn’t do but who need a weapon against their enemy, Christianity, especially Western Christianity. In fact, they even actively misrepresent the Church’s position about the Earth being the center of the universe claiming Galileo demoted Earth from a premier position which, as you point out, is 180 degrees off.
Galileo was not the man who truly changed our understanding of the universe and the Earth’s place in it. Why? Because his mathematical system did not obey Occam’s Law while another, still Earth-centric system, did, that of Tycho Brahe.
Tycho combined both the idea that other items orbited the Sun while still having the Sun, and thus its satellites, orbit the Earth. This system, not Galileo’s, explained the best observations available at the time. This should not surprise because Brahe was the man who made those observations. He devoted his, too brief, life to making. He invented new instruments for observing and measure the movement of the planets and positions of the stars.
Why did his Earth not move? Because a good distance to the Sun was known and if the Earth revolved around it the fixed stars should show a parallax on the 2AU baseline observations a year apart. In fact, we call the distance of 3.26 light years a parsec, short for parallel second, to designate the distance at which an object will show 1 second of arc (1/3600ths of a degree) parallax on a 2AU baseline. No start is this close so parallax of the stars wanted quite some time after both Brahe and Galileo to be measured.
Yet Brahe mostly forgotten today by the fans of Galileo and why is best exemplified by the “I love fucking Science” crowd. Galileo had some new but not world changing knowledge combined with self-promotion and the ability to show off at parties. Brahe stayed up all night doing the hard work of measure and then finding a theory to match the measurements while not taking a flier on ideas that required a world that defied the observations.
Beyond defending Tycho Brahe’s achievements and the importance of observation and experiment I’m not sure why this is such a big thing for me to damn near kneejerk present when Galileo comes up. We know what we know and both men’s work is superseded.
Perhaps I’d just rather make the “right” people heroes. Yes, Brahe was very flawed and his observations were truly fulfilled by Kepler. But for our generation and later Sagan did a lot of good work bringing Kepler to the popular mind while slighting Brahe.