Chapter 3.                  (continued) 

The First World War shattered the optimism of the Golden Age prophets, but it also shattered much more deeply the confidence of the nations of the West, which had begun to believe that they had found the answers to life’s riddles. Pre-WWI, people in the West had come to believe that their wise men were in control: the ways of the West, with Science to lead them, were taking over the world, and thus the sufferings of the past would be gradually reduced until they became only dim memories recorded in books.

 

There had been wars and famines and depressions before, but people still believed in the traditional ideas of God and right and wrong, based on the Bible, because: first, the damage had been minor compared to that caused by WWI; second, the ways of the West had, for the most part, worked; and third, there hadn’t been a serious alternative set of beliefs to consider.

 

But now, with the rise of Science, all was changing. As we gained physical power, our ideas about how to handle all that power began to seem increasingly inadequate. Then, in the horrors of WWI, the moral systems of the Western societies seemed not just to fail but to unravel; people’s worst fears came true. The “guys at the top” were fools. Science was a monster and it was on the loose.

 

Science was providing new communications technologies that were giving the xenophobic, tribalistic forces and leaders in Western societies more power to mold people’s minds. It was also arming these forces and leaders with ever bigger and more terrible weapons – while the moral philosophers and social scientists dithered about what “right” was and what we “should” be doing. The outcome had a feeling of inevitability to it. An arms race became normal. Bigger warships, cannons. Weapons ever more effective. Poison gas. Flame throwers. The odds of the war starting kept rising. Sooner or later, it had to happen.

 

  

       Standard German soldier’s belt buckle (WWI (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

Descartes’ method, using Christian morals to control scientific technologies, wasn’t working. Not only were Christians doing unthinkable horrors, they were doing those horrors mostly to one another. Worst of all, in every one of the warring nations, these acts were being done expressly in the name of their God. Gott mit uns was embossed on nearly every German soldier’s belt buckle. “Onward Christian Soldiers” was sung at church services in nearly every English-speaking country in the world.

 

In the meantime, by the end of the fighting, the political, religious, and business leaders in every sector of society appeared to be out of answers. Most of the victors continued to spout the platitudes that had got their nations into the horror to begin with. To thoughtful observers, Western moral systems looked bankrupt. Paralyzing doubt began to haunt people in every level of society, from the rich and powerful to the middle classes to the poor.

 

If the morals of the West had led to this, people could not help but think maybe Science was right about the Bible. Maybe the moral beliefs that it recommended had all been a fraud. Maybe there were no moral rules at all. Disputes between cultures must always be settled by violence. Darwin’s model of the living world had portrayed “nature red in tooth and claw.” It seemed to be the final word. Survival of the fittest: wolves kill deer, spiders kill flies, big fish kill little fish. This seemed to be the only credible model left. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world. 

 

 

Chapter 3            Where Moral Emptiness Leads

 

 

 

                  World War I, young German soldier (credit: Wikimedia Commons)  

 

By the early twentieth century, the impacts of the ideas of Darwin and Freud, and of Science generally, had arrived. Social scientists and philosophers were left scrambling to understand what new moral code, if any, was implied by this new way of seeing the world. “What is Science telling us about what’s right?” people asked. Answers on every side were contradictory and confusing. Then, following too soon, in a bitter, perhaps inevitable irony, real-world events broke out of control. In 1914, World War I arrived; it became the major test of the moral systems of the vigorous, new, Science-driven societies of the West.

 

When World War I began, in the cities and towns of Europe and of all the other countries attached to the main belligerents, banners flew, troops marched, bands played, and crowds of men, women, and children all shouted for joy. A few sober people raised objections for one set of reasons or another, but they were drowned out in the din. In every nation involved, people fell easily into viewing the human race as being made up of "us" and "them", as people tend to do in wartime, and people easily began to say, even in ordinary conversation, variations of this: “the armies and ideals of our decent way of life are finally going to sweep aside the barbaric armies and ideals of our nation’s enemies”.

 

Exhorted in speeches by their leaders and in articles by writers in the media to stand up for their homelands, the men of Germany, Turkey, Austro-Hungary, Russia, France, Britain, and Italy, and all their allies, absorbed the jingoistic stories being told in their theaters and newspapers. Men signed up to fight. Competing “narratives” about Europe and its history had brought European nations into head-on confrontation. "They" had their view of how the future should go. "We" had a different, incompatible one. Scientists said, "You're both right.", or more often, "Don't look at us. We don’t get involved in debates about morality." The only way left to resolve the dispute was to fight it out.

 

                                              

                      

           

                 Anti-German propaganda poster (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

My country, Canada, was part of the British Empire in 1914, and Canadians were just as eager as any of the loyal subjects in London, England. Young men leaped out of the crowds lining the streets to march in step with the parades of soldiers going by. Many of them were worried that by the time they got through their training and over to Europe, the fighting would be done. Girls clustered around men in uniform who came back to visit their workplaces or colleges or even high schools before shipping out. Old ladies out shopping, by 1916, would spit on any young man of military age who was not in uniform. “Right” in that time, beyond any dispute, meant doing your “duty” to your country. Period. If you disagreed, you just shut up.

 

Long before the casualties began to mount, historians knew World War I was going to be huge because, for the first time in history, modern scientific weapons and technologies were going to be used to kill men in assembly-line style. The process was going to be made as efficient as the new factories. Scientifically tested technologies, arranged in efficient sequences, supervised by experts, would be set up to kill men. (“To end war”, the leaders said!) Now we would see what Science could do.

 

We saw.

 

Consider just one telling statistic: the British Army casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme were 60,000 – 20,000 of whom were killed. Actually, in about five hours. France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, the U.S., and all other countries involved eventually suffered similar losses, for four long years.

 

In the end, nine million combatants were dead, with three times that many permanently scarred. And those were just the combatants. How many civilians? No one really knows. Every country on Earth was touched, or, we should say, wrenched, either directly or indirectly. Over 600,000 Canadians (from a population of 8,000,000) enlisted in the armed forces, and out of the 420,000 who actually got into the fighting in Europe, 66,000 died.

 

Commentators writing in newspapers and magazines in the last months leading up to WWI had discussed in total seriousness the very likely possibility that the new modern weapons would be useless because men would simply refuse to use them on other men. Modern torpedoes, flame throwers, machine guns, poison gas, airplanes – and the horrors they’d cause! No. No one would really use them.

 

                       

 

                         Early 20th-century French postcard depicting the year 2000

                                               (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

Other writers a few years before, more hopeful about how Science would affect society, had even been speaking of a coming Golden Age. Science wasn’t just showing us how to build weapons. It was also curing diseases, creating labor-saving machines, improving agriculture, and even inventing new forms of entertainment. Progress was steadily reaching into the lives of even the humblest citizens. Surely, goodness and mercy would follow close behind.

 

 Chapter 2.       (continued)

                   Artist Dosso Dossi's imagining of Greek Philosopher, Democritus 

                                             (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

At this point, some social scientists respond to their critics with further, more aggressive counterattacks of their own. They argue that no science, not Physics itself, is “objective”. Cultural biases shape all human thinking – including that of physicists. For example, over a century ago Western physicists postulated, and went looking for, what they called “atoms”, because early in Western history, a philosopher named “Democritus” had postulated the idea that the world is made of atoms. Once instruments capable of reaching into very tiny levels of matter became available, Westerners already had the concept that enabled them to imagine and set up experiments at that level. It had been planted there during the educations they acquired in their cultures. But Democritus did not derive the idea of the atom from observations of any “atoms”. The idea was a product of his culturally shaped imagination.   

Thus, these social scientists argue that the overarching view called relativism is the only logical one to adopt when we study the body of social science research (or all research in all fields, for that matter). We can try to observe human societies and the belief systems they instill in their members (Western science being just one example of a belief system), but we can’t pretend to do that work objectively. We come to it with eyes already programmed to notice in the details around us the patterns we consider “significant”. We see as we do because of beliefs we absorbed as children. Every scientist’s model of what the world is lies deeper than her ability to articulate thoughts or even just observe. Cultural bias can’t be suspended; it preconfigures our ability to observe or think at all.

 

The whole of reality is much more detailed and complex than the set of sights, sounds, etc. any one of us is paying attention to. Other folk from other cultures notice different details and construct different pictures of reality. Some of the pictures are radically different from ours, but they are still quite workable.

 

In short, any human view of the world, and especially any culture-wide model believed and used by any human society, is inherently biased. This is the stance taken by most social scientists: even Physics, they say, is made of opinions.  

 

Some social scientists go so far as to claim there aren’t really any “facts” in any of our descriptions of past events or even of events happening around us. There are only various sets of details noticed by some of us; these are filtered through values and concepts we learned as children. Within each culture, people group these details to form a “narrative”. Thus, as we go from culture to culture, social scientists say, we see that any one of these narratives is as valid as any other.

 

So, at the level of large generalizations about what is “right” and what is “wrong”, social scientists not only have nothing to say; social scientists insist that nothing objectively true can be said. “Science” is just a Euro-based set of theories that seem to work most of the time. For now. But it is not true in any ultimate sense of the word. 

 

Scientists in the sciences other than the social ones continue to assert that there is an empirical, material reality out there that is common for us all and Science is the most reliable way we have to understand that reality. But scientists in all branches of Science admit that they can’t give a very good explanation or model of what “right” and “wrong” are – if such things can even be said to exist.

 

In a further rebuttal of relativism, however, scientists in the physical sciences and life sciences assert that the idea that Science can’t give us any useful insights into how any parts of the world work is nonsense. Science works. Its successes have been so large and so many that no sane person can doubt that claim.

 

In this complex picture lies the dilemma of the West in modern times. Back and forth, these arguments called the Science Wars continue to rage. I’ve touched on a few of them, but there’s not enough space here to go into even five percent of the whole controversy.

 

So what’s the bottom line? The point of all the discussion so far in this chapter?

 

The point is that Yeats was right: the best really can lack all conviction. They can even reject the whole idea of anyone having any “convictions” ever. Thus, many social scientists can read about customs like honor killings and remark, “Well, that’s their culture.” In fact, for many thinkers today in the universities, all convictions are temporary and local. (A more sensible compromise position is taken by Marvin Harris in Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times.⁵)

 

This has been the scariest consequence of the rise of Science: moral confusion and indecision in, first, our intellectual elites and, then, the whole of Western society. This confusion began to become serious in the West in the nineteenth century after Darwin and the granddaddy of all relativists, Nietzsche, who basically argued that the human world is indeed a mess, and the only thing that brings any kind of order to it is the will of a hard-driven, visionary individual. This he argued back in the late 1800s. And here we are in the twenty-first century, and the crisis of moral confidence is getting worse. No educated person in the West wants to say what “right” is anymore.

 

Now, all of this still may sound far removed from the lives of ordinary folk, but the truth is that relativism’s effect on ordinary people’s lives is crucial. When a society’s sages can’t guide its people, people look elsewhere for moral leaders. When the philosophers and social scientists respond to their fellow citizens’ queries about morality with equivocation, or flatly refuse to answer the queries, others – some very unwise – move in to fill the demand in the ideas marketplace.

 

(In case the larger point here is not clear, this is a good place to stress again that the main aim of this book is to articulate a moral code that all humans can live by. One we can choose to follow because we can see by reasoning and evidence that it explains the cultural diversity that we see and that, therefore, it will likely work. It will get us to a world society that is both peaceful and vigorous.)

 

So, now we must ask: how has this growing moral paralysis since Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud affected ordinary folk? How has the eroding of our old moral codes affected real people’s lives? What consequences did people who lived in the growing moral emptiness of the last hundred years have to endure?

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

1. Ruth Benedict, “Anthropology and the Abnormal,” Journal of General Psychology,          10 (1934). 

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/heathwood/pdf/benedict_relativism.pdf.

 

2. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd ed., 1996).

 

3. John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science 

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

 

4. Harold Kincaid, Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences: Analyzing Controversies in Social Research, (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

 

5. Marvin Harris, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1999).

 

 

   

        A clash of cultures: skulls of buffalo shot by U.S. government hunters, 1880’s   

                                 (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

 

Chapter 2.  (continued) 

In response to the criticisms of the “unscientific” nature of their discipline, some social scientists have tried hard to be more rigorous in their work. However, many have admitted Searle is at least partly right. For example, studies done in Anthropology are usually difficult to replicate for an array of reasons. Thus, replicating of research in social science is almost never possible. 

 

Here let’s recall that, in order to qualify as “scientific”, a model or theory must be testable in the material world, and the tests must be replicable. If the tests can’t be replicated, the theory is not Science. Tell me how you test your theory. Then, I can check it by doing those tests myself. Easy to do in Physics and Chemistry where materials and pieces of apparatus are standardized. Very difficult most of the time in Sociology and Anthropology.

 

Many factors make social science’s studies hard to replicate.

 

First, background conditions of studies in social science often can’t be reset. Socially relevant facts keep changing. For example, how could a tribe return to living as fishers if the species they once caught off their coasts are gone?

 

In social science, we also accept implicitly that, even when conditions in the world can be “reset”, no custom should ever be forced on a tribe. For example, trying to get a tribe to go back to living naked once they have chosen to wear clothes would be unethical. Tribes in the Amazon, once they join a society where clothes are worn, don’t want to live naked anymore. Cultural anthropologists would not try to make these people go back to living naked, as they had been living just a few years before. The anthropologists’ own moral code tells them that trying to “guide” changes in a tribe’s way of life to aid research – or for any other purpose – is wrong. Social scientists are ethically bound to observe societies as the people in them live, but never to interfere in their changes.    

 

In addition, a researcher’s own biases influence what she looks for and how she sees it. These biases are impossible to avoid, no matter how carefully the studies are designed. People of the Amazon see trails of peccary or cayman in crushed grasses. But Western anthropologists see details they have been programmed to notice (e.g. flowers, insects). An anthropologist living with an Amazon tribe needs years of training before she can learn to skilfully track peccaries.  

  

Finally, a social scientist’s watching a tribe of people also changes what is being watched, namely the morés of those people. For example, an anthropologist in the field usually can’t work without shoes. Often in only weeks, the folk she’s living with and studying, if they have been living barefoot, start to want shoes.  

 

For all of these reasons then, social scientists admit they often must settle for what is really a single occurrence of the social phenomenon they wish to study. One that can’t be replicated. But no generalizations can be drawn from a single, unrepeatable instance of anything. That’s a direct contradiction of what the word “generalize” means.

 

These difficulties with social science research put us in a logical quandary.

 

Societies vary widely in their beliefs and morés, and those morés keep changing even while scientists are studying them. There are many human tribes to study, and each contains many customs that are changing all the time. Social scientists will never adequately document all the societies of the world as they are now.

 

Thus, we’ll never arrive at any useful conclusions in social science unless we can first propose larger, more generic theories of how human societies work. (The main aim of this book is to arrive at that more generic model of social systems and how they work. But first we'll explain why we need that model so.)

 

In fact, most social scientists see that kind of plan as being immoral from its outset because it amounts to Europeans imposing their ways on other cultures. In the meantime, critics of social science say such a grand theory can’t be formulated. They insist that social science is too vague, from its terms on up, to ever enable its practitioners to create a general theory of how societies work.

 

If such a theory ever were articulated, it would give direction and focus to all social science work. Under it, social scientists could propose and test specific hypotheses. But until social science has a comprehensive theory to guide its research, it will remain what Ernest Rutherford, the great physicist, dismissively called “stamp collecting”: people recording data but making no attempt to explain them.

 

 

Chapter 2                      The Moral Emptiness of Science

                           

          

                                  William Butler Yeats (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

—from “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats, 1919

 

 

In the West, when our idea of God began to erode, so did our ideas of right and wrong, and when those ideas began to erode, we became the society that Yeats described in his great poem “The Second Coming”. We live in a time in which some truly immoral citizens are filled with “passionate intensity”. Fraudsters claim they are daring entrepreneurs; Mafia thugs claim that they are soldiers in one more kind of war; warmonger generals tout their own indispensability. In short, these people see themselves as moral, even heroic.

 

In the meantime, some of what should be society’s most moral citizens “lack all conviction.” For example, it would seem logical that people looking for moral direction in the Science-driven countries of the West would turn to their gurus, i.e. scientists. Especially scientists who study human societies and their moral beliefs. In the West, these experts are our anthropologists and sociologists. Trained to make astute, Science-based judgments about human societies and their “ways of life”, social scientists should be our most morally gifted citizens.

 

But social scientists in the West have no moral directions to offer the rest of us. In their writings, they flatly deny that moral values refer to anything real at all. As I noted in our previous chapter, American anthropologist Ruth Benedict put it succinctly: “Morality differs in every society and is a convenient term for socially approved habits.” ¹ Thus, as moral guides, Science and scientists (social scientists, in particular) appear to be pretty close to useless.

 

How can this be? Ordinary people in societies and tribes all over the world, when they are asked to explain their actions, answer by giving the moral codes they learned in their childhoods. It seems clear then that Social Science ought to be studying those moral codes if it wants to explain why people in tribes and societies do the things they do. But in response to questions about what moral codes are, and how they relate to humans’ actions, social scientists say that moral codes have no basis in the real world. Moral claims are just expressions of tastes, like a preference for one brand of ice cream over its competitors. Statements about “right” and “wrong” are just ways of venting emotion. Right and wrong are empty concepts, unrelated to the observable facts of Science. These experts then go so far as to challenge their opponents to prove otherwise. 

 

Many even go over to the offence and ask what it is that all Science is seeking. Are scientists seeking perfect truth about reality? That, by pure logic, is unattainable. But, if not truth, sociologists ask, then what is Science seeking?

 

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is arguably the most influential work on this topic. In it, he casts a dark shadow over Science’s view of itself. He argues that all branches of Science move forward via processes that are not rational. The scientific method is driven not by logic, which can be very clearly defined, but by intuition, which long has been a nebulous concept. Science does not progress by a controlled march of improving knowledge. Instead it moves from less useful pictures of reality to more useful ones by unpredictable leaps that he calls paradigm shifts. 

 

A paradigm shift occurs in a branch of Science when many individuals in that branch, separately, each have a moment of insight and then experience a leap of understanding so profound that it makes them literally see reality in a new way. The insight for most of them will have been triggered by things they have read by some fellow scientist. But they cannot tell you after their cognitive leap has occurred exactly how it happened and how they then came to grasp this new picture of the world.

 

Scientists who grasp a paradigm shift do indeed come to “see” the world in a new way; their minds are reprogrammed to see different patterns in the details around them. That’s how profoundly the new model, once they learn it, affects them. Each scientist who “gets it” experiences a kind of “conversion” that steers her into a new way of seeing reality and into a community of fellow believers.

 

In all branches of Science, Kuhn claims, old ways of thinking are dropped and new models become accepted ones via this process that appears to be driven at least as much by non-rational mental leaps as by rational steps like hypothesize, test, and repeat. The modes of thinking that enable Science to evolve run deeper than reasoning and evidence can explain. Kuhn gives many examples from the History of Science to support his case. His work has evoked many responses, pro and con, and there is no doubt that he has shone a troubling light on the reliability of all of Science.² In short, Science is not done “scientifically”.

 

In the meantime, counterattacks aimed back at the social sciences are made by critics like philosopher John Searle. He admires the physical sciences because, he claims, they can be logically rigorous. Physical sciences, he says, describe their theories and the studies designed to test them using unambiguous terms. (One calorie heats one gram of water one Celsius degree.) But the social sciences use terms that are too vague to support rigorous reasoning. (In Anthropology, what makes a “band” or a “big man”?) Thus, conclusions reached in social science are not reliable.³ (Critics of social science are well countered in Harold Kincaid’s Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences.⁴)

                                                  Chapter 1 (last portion) 

                               artist's imagined montage of Jupiter and 4 of its moons

                                              (NASA/JPL via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                     

If we consider just these three scientific theories – of Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud – what can we say have been their consequences? Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, for most people, removed the biblical God from their picture of the cosmos. They didn’t need him in their model. Darwin removed God as the creator of life. He even reduced humans to just one more kind of animal. And Freud made humans look like sick animals, easily deluded by their own lustful, aggressive, self-absorbed thoughts. (Palmer articulates this idea well.⁷)

Despite all this, Science has not proved that a universal moral code is impossible or that the existence of God is impossible. But over the past four centuries, Science has badly shaken traditional ideas of God and thus, also, traditional ideas of morality. (The two are deeply intertwined, as we shall see.)

However, let me stress again that what does not follow from these scientific models is that there is no God or that all forms of theism and all moral codes are wishful thinking. We just need a new understanding of what right and wrong are. Then, we can reason our way to a new view of God.

But for now, we can say that Science has almost levelled the pre-Enlightenment ways of thinking of these things. And let’s make no mistake about what the loss of their belief in God has done to the masses of ordinary people. Removing God from Western society’s generally accepted picture of how this world works had the inevitable consequence of ending our society’s confidence in its moral code. We lost confidence in our ideas of what right and wrong are and how we should try to act, toward the world in general, but especially toward each other. 

If the moral rules we’re supposed to follow aren’t God’s rules, whose rules are they? Human authorities’ rules? Which human authorities? Who are they to be telling me what to do? They’re human, like I am. I know all humans make mistakes. Therefore, I’ll work out my own moral code. Thank you, anyway.

And perhaps it is worth pointing out here that there are still people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe, and God made the universe in six days and rested on the seventh, and the miracles described in the Bible really did happen, parting a sea, walking on water, and all. But the trend of the last five hundred years is unmistakable. More and more people are having less and less confidence in the old ways of explaining the world.

The point may seem a trivial one to many people today. Why should we care whether the old ideas of God and right and wrong are crumbling? But it turns out that our caring about these matters is vitally important. If we don’t believe in Christian moral codes anymore, then they must be replaced with something. Our moral codes enable us to live together in communities and just get along. That space in our lives can’t stay empty. A moral code is not a luxury to be used and enjoyed when we have time for it. A moral code is what we consult just to move through ordinary days. What matters? What doesn’t? What should I do about these things? Every moment of every day of ordinary experiences.  

Explaining in more detail how morally vacant Science has been – so far – and why humans all over the world are struggling to cope with the loss of their moral codes, even though they may not be aware of the philosophical names for the thoughts they are having – will be the business of our next chapter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

1. Barbara Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 55.

2. “Life Expectancy,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed March 29, 2015.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy.

3. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, Articles 211 and 212, ed. Jonathan Bennett. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/descartes1649.pdf.

4. Ibid., Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations 3 and 4., trans. John Veitch, 1901.http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations.

5. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1966), p. 353.

6. Cathryn Delude, “Researchers Show That Memories Reside in Specific Brain Cells,” MIT News, March 22, 2012. http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2012/conjuring-memories-artificially-0322.

7. Donald Palmer, Does the Center Hold? An Introduction to Western Philosophy (California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1st edition, 1991), p. 56.

 

 

 

                                   Sigmund Freud (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

 

All of this may seem bad enough, but it gets worse. The third significant way in which Science eroded Religion came when Science began to understand the workings of the human brain. Humans had long felt that many things in this world could not be explained in scientific terms because they had long known that inside the privacy of their minds, which both Science and daily experience had shown resided in their brains, they had dreams and feelings that, by Science alone, made no sense. Even in physical reality, away from all dreams, they sometimes saw or did strange things that seemed to have no logical explanation.

Cruel or lustful thoughts and acts were bad enough, but at least they seemed somewhat predictable, given humans’ “sinful” nature. From long experience, we’ve come to know our human drives, so we can accept intermittent thoughts of fornication, theft, violence, and murder as natural. The traditional wisdom had explanations for them all. We are morally “fallen” creatures, the Bible says.

But people also have weirder dreams and even see weird things when they’re awake that, by the laws of both Science and common sense, are not possible.

 

                                

                 

 

                                  The Nightmare (Fuseli) (credit: Wikipedia)  

Why do people have dreams and waking visions of angels or demons hovering in the air, or of talking cats on mountaintops, bathed in orange light and standing on their hind feet? Night after night, many of us dream not just cruel or lustful dreams, but also many more that are simply absurd. Other people, wide awake, see angels, demons, and miracles. For centuries, if a person saw or did something that afterward he himself could not make sense of, the accepted explanation was that God (or Satan) had caused the event or made him do the deed. Much of normal human experience, apparently, lies beyond Science and even beyond common sense. In those times, “The Devil made me do it!” was an acceptable explanation for otherwise unexplainable behavior.

When Freud came along, his big contribution to human knowledge was simply the proposition that all these perceptions come from inside the brain of the person having the dream or vision. Thus, visions and miracles can be easily explained. They come from stored-up memories that combine and recombine to form narratives that are driven by deep, unconscious needs – needs that the visionary isn’t aware of because they are buried so deeply, he can’t consciously access them, no matter how he tries. Under stress, his brain transmits images into his optic nerves – the opposite of what normally happens. So even wide awake, we sometimes see what in physical reality is not there.

Most of our memories are not recallable at will, but they are all in there. Unless a person has had some brain-destroying injury or disease, her brain holds all she has ever experienced, all the sense data that have ever been fed into her brain via her vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. How they will affect her moment-by-moment flow of consciousness can’t be predicted in advance, but the patterns in “paranormal” experiences coincide too often and too closely with the subject’s personal issues for us to believe that those experiences are somehow independent of the mental states that preceded them. 

People have visions of angels when they have been reading about miraculous cures for the very illnesses under which they have lately been suffering. They dream of tidal waves after watching a TV show about a recent big one in Japan. They see ghosts of their dead fathers after days of feeling guilty about how they neglected him while he was alive – the dream coming just before what would have been his 80th birthday. The sciences of the mind have shown us – with evidence – that we can literally see what we want to see.

While at first, Freud and his followers were considered to be sex-obsessed crackpots, they soon began to gain credibility and command respect, mainly because they were getting results. Their models could explain all of human behavior, they could make high probability predictions about how individuals with certain backgrounds would act in specific future situations, and they began to cure people of neuroses and psychoses that, in earlier times, would have been pronounced hopeless.

Then, as research on the human brain advanced, other researchers showed that the model portraying all of a person’s experiences as being stored in his brain – even though he can’t recall the experiences at will – is literally true. Patients willing to stay conscious during neurosurgery and allow researchers to place tiny electrodes on their brains are able, when milliamp currents are turned on, to recall all kinds of memories which they are ordinarily not aware of.⁶

Freud went much further with his psycho-sexual explanations of nearly all of the motives that drive human behaviour. Much of what he had to say has today been discredited; for example, we no longer believe little girls are consumed with a desire to have a penis. But the larger impact of his discoveries remains. Those parts of human experience that for so long had seemed to defy both logic and common sense can now be explained rationally. The dreams and visions are products of overactive human imaginations; they never actually took place.

No more dreams sent from God. No more waking visions. No more miracles.