Our Way Of Life

What happened in Boston last week? Two Muslim immigrants exploded two crude bombs killing 4 and wounding many more and the USA marshaled massive forces against them. I would assume that same day many others died violent deaths in other places even within the United States and the president gave no speech. It’s clearly not simply the loss of life that touched a nerve.

This of course isn’t that hard. The attacks were designed for their symbolic value. The bomb could have been placed in many other places for similar effect. The overriding question after the explosion was of course what motivated the bombers. What did the bombing mean? Meaning was of course everything.

Our contemporary liturgy of crisis continues to adapt to the realities of cable news and the Internet. Fear is expressed and catalyzed by our interpreters of the events filling websites and air time. It is obsessive and frenetic. The breathless priests of our electronic cathedral spur on the faithful while they exegete the events. The ancient litany of boasting is employed to give heart to the people and strengthen their sense of identity and community. Boston gets to now follow New York in this. It is ritual. It creates us while it comforts us.

Our leaders and media commentators speak the truth when they observe that these events aren’t simply killings and mamings,  again we don’t roll out the president simply for loss of life, his precious time is rightly reserved for threats to our way of life. What exactly are we talking about though that is threatened?

Culture Making Community Forming

Again, this really isn’t hard. What is threatened is the ability to congregate to produce culture together without fear of violence or danger. It is a basic thing and a precious thing, one that deserves our vigilant and jealous protection. The show of power and force are marshaled to communicate to anyone who wishes to endanger this precious thing that we are deadly serious about protecting it and we will spare no expense or energy in this effort.

All of this is known of course, what I’d like to note, however is what is assumed. What plays our before us is a rich world of context, values and culture. This world is simply oozing with meaning. What happened in Boston would be front page news even if no lives were lost because as said before the meaning of the event actually has little to do with the actual loss of life, at least for those of us who did not lose loved ones in the attack.
I feel for my atheist friends because our cultural liturgy eventually leads our cultural priests into religious spaces. Obama gave his speech in a church of course. Lest the religious feel too secure we should note that increasingly sports venues are being used for these gatherings and songs like “Sweet Caroline” serve as hymns.

Since lives were lost there will be funerals conducted in churches. After the Newtown shootings some atheist groups were a bit defensive about the presumption of religion in our cultural liturgy. This should all continue to make them insecure about their agenda. Religion flourishes in places and times of chaos and loss. The voices most conspicuously absent in times like these are the natural materialists. Why? Because of what they do and don’t have to offer.

At the end of May the Weekly Standard published an essay on the state of contemporary philosophical naturalism and it’s crisis spurred on by Thomas Nagel.  It nicely illustrates the official position and the dilemma it creates.

What Is Reality

What are we (not “who” by the way, “who” is far too presumptuous)? I’ll quote from the piece. http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/heretic_707692.html

Contemporary philosophers have a name for the way you and I see the world, a world filled with other people, with colors and sounds, sights and sensations, things that are good and things that are bad and things that are very good indeed: ourselves, who are able, more or less, to make our own way through life, by our own lights. Philosophers call this common view the “manifest image.” Daniel Dennett pointed out at the conference that modern science, at least since the revelations of Darwin, has been piling up proof that the manifest image is not really accurate in any scientific sense. Rather science—this vast interlocking combine of genetics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, particle physics—tells us that the components of the manifest image are illusory.

Everything about human beings, by definition, is an evolutionary adaptation. Our sense that the colors and sounds exist “out there” and not merely in our brain is a convenient illusion that long ago increased the survival chances of our species. Powered by Darwin, modern science proceeds, in Dennett’s phrase, as a “universal corrosive,” destroying illusions all the way up and all the way down, dismantling our feelings of freedom and separate selfhood, our morals and beliefs, a mother’s love and a patient’s prayer: All in reality are just “molecules in motion.”

The most famous, most succinct, and most pitiless summary of the manifest image’s fraudulence was written nearly 20 years ago by the geneticist Francis Crick: “ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

End quote

Suckers For Meaning

If you set the events in Boston next to this worldview it’s not hard to see who wins. How would adopting and really living within this world view change the cultural event that the Marathon bombing was.

Observe Dennett’s practical, elitist but deeply undermining advice about how to deploy his worldview in “normal” life.

Daniel Dennett took a different view. While it is true that materialism tells us a human being is nothing more than a “moist robot”—a phrase Dennett took from a Dilbert comic—we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes. Civil order requires the general acceptance of personal responsibility, which is closely linked to the notion of free will. Better, said Dennett, if the public were told that “for general purposes” the self and free will and objective morality do indeed exist—that colors and sounds exist, too—“just not in the way they think.” They “exist in a special way,” which is to say, ultimately, not at all.

There’s more that is worth observing about the Boston bombings with respect to our cultural liturgies, but one of the easiest things we can take from it is that it appears we’re in no danger of becoming fully consistent materialists. We deeply believe in this world of meaning and I don’t see us giving it up anytime soon.