Chapter 3.                   Part B 

A flawed view of the world can lead one to a lifetime of error and misery. Marxism's biggest error is its assertion that everything is political. It may be that Art and journalism can be shown to be influenced by the political philosophy of the journalist or artist. For Marxists, all human activities, even artistic ones, are either Marxist work that is helping to advance the Marxist cause, or fascist work that is hindering that cause.  

But Science is about physical reality, the reality that comes before political or artistic activities even begin. If we assert, as some Marxists do, that Science also must bow to the "will of the people", we will inevitably begin to tell our scientists what we want them to conclude, instead of asking them what the evidence in reality seems to imply.

A clear example is the doctrine called "Lysenkoism" in Soviet Russia. In that nation, in the 1920's, the official state position was that human nature itself could be altered and humans made into perfect "socialist citizens" by changing their outward behavioral traits. Make them act like utterly selfless socialist citizens, and they will become so, even in their genetic programming. This government position required that the Darwinian view of evolution be over-ruled because politics must rule Science.

Darwin had said that members of living species do not acquire genetic changes from having their external appearances altered; living things only change their basic natures when their gene pools are altered by the processes of genetic variation and natural selection, over many generations of evolution. In its determination to make "socialist men", Soviet Communism required that people believe the opposite, i.e. that the acquired characteristics of an organism — for example, the state of shrub being leafless as a result of its leaves having been plucked — could be inherited by that organism's descendants. (1.) For years, Soviet agriculture was all but crippled by the Party's attempts to make its political "truism" be true in material reality, for crops and livestock, when it simply wasn't.   

          

                                                            Clostridium botulinum 

Another example: I may think I know all about bacteria and how to can foods at home in sealer jars. If I’ve looked through microscopes, I may be confident that my picture of the microscopic level of reality is a true one. But if my knowledge of home canning only covers common bacteria, my limited knowledge of bacteria and of canning may prove to be a dangerous thing. The usual boiling water bath for foods canned in jars does kills most bacteria. But for a few microbes, boiling is not enough. Botulism is nothing to be played around with. Botulinum bacteria can be boiled to death, but their deadly toxins can survive boiling. My partial and inadequate set of beliefs about home canning might get me killed.    

Or consider a few even more basic examples. Even my senses sometimes are not to be trusted. I may believe that light always travels in straight lines. I may see, half-immersed in a stream, a stick that looks bent at the water line, so I believe it to be physically bent. But when I pull it out, I find that it is straight. If I am a caveman trying to spear fish in a stream, a blind adherence to my ideas about light will cause me to starve. I will overshoot the fish every time, while the girl on the other shore, a better learner, cooks her catch.

I can immerse one hand in the snow and keep the other on a hand warmer in my coat pocket. Then I can go into a cabin to wash my hands in the sink. One hand senses that the sink water is cold, the other, that it is warm. Can't I even trust my own senses?

When we seek to find some things in our experience that we can believe in absolutely, we are stopped by questions like: “What do I really know?” and “How can I be sure of the things that I think I know?” and “Can I even be certain of what I see, hear, and touch?” We are deeply aware that we have to have a core around which we can build the rest of our system of beliefs or we may, at some time down the road, suddenly find that a whole set of ideas, and the ways of living the system implies, are ineffective, even dangerous illusions.

Even a complete world view, learned, used, and trusted, may turn out to be a fraud. Nazism may sound logical, if I am told, as a boy, by teachers whom I trust that every race on Earth, including my own, must fight to survive. I may come to truly believe in their model of the workings of the biosphere of this planet. If I believe it, I may then infer that winning new land for my race and subjugating competing races is my sacred duty to my people. I and millions of like-minded comrades may march off to a war that gets millions killed before my nation loses and the war is finally over.

                                                           World War II cemetery - France 

   

The problem all along was that the Nazi worldview was built around a core set of lies. The Nazi ideas of race have no foundation in fact; humanity is one species. In Science, there is no "Aryan race". Different nations/cultures do compete and struggle to survive, and Germany was, and is, a nation that has had one of the harder struggles. But culture is not genetically acquired. Culture is learned, and therefore, cultures can be amended by education and experience. In addition, war is not the only way by which cultures can evolve. Germany, as a nation, changed profoundly after WWII, but then it went on, very successfully, in fact. It didn't fizzle out and vanish as Nazi leaders had predicted it would if it lost the war. Millions of Germans and of their adversaries died because of an illusion.    

Around our basic ideas, we build more complex ideas. These eventually lead us to ways of acting and living. Knowing how ways of thinking and believing lead to ways of living, and how flawed belief systems can lead us into suffering and even death, I now set out to try to construct a reliable core around which I can build the rest of my thought system. In my case, that effort will begin with an examination of the epistemology that attempts to build its core around not a political or religious ideology but physical reality.

   

                                         John Locke (the founder of empiricism) 

                                               David Hume (the most famous empiricist philosopher)

               

        In the modern world, the belief set that most people in the West use as their core is the one called "Science". Under its view, what scientists seek to know is what is real. What is this ocean of stuff in which we swim and how do the things in it work? But the harder we think about this question, the more it leads us to a deeper one. The crucial question is not "What is real?" but "How can I know what is real?". How reliable is the system that I use to take in and understand the impressions that my senses send me about reality? Trying to answer these questions leads us into the branch of Philosophy called "epistemology".   

         The epistemological view of most scientists and philosophers in the West today is called "Empiricism". It is a beginning point. Empiricism assumes that all that I can know is my sensory experiences and memories of sensory experiences, plus the concepts that I have learned that enable me to sort those experiences and memories, plan responses to events in my world, and then act out the plans. I keep and use those concepts that have reliably guided me in the past to more health and vigor and less sickness and pain.

               

            Our sense organs are feeding bits of information into our minds all of the time: textures, colors, shapes, sounds, aromas, flavors, and so on about the things around us. Even when I am not consciously paying attention, at other, deeper levels, my mind is aware of these details. I know, for example, when the noises outside suddenly contain the sounds of a car approaching or a dog barking. I detect headlight beams sweeping across my yard, crunching gravel in the driveway, etc. – sometimes even in my sleep. One spouse wakes up to the baby's crying; the other dozes on. One wakes when the furnace isn’t cutting out as it should be; the other sleeps. The ship's engineer sleeps through steam turbines roaring and prop churning. She wakes when one bearing begins to hum just the tiniest bit above its normal pitch. She wakes because she knows that something is wrong. Empiricism is the modern way of understanding this complex information-handling system.