The Real and the Good. If it were true that there were in fact witches – beings who entered a pack with Satan to receive supernatural powers to do malice to their neighbor – then what the medieval church did with the witch interrogations and burnings would make some sense. If nature and human nature were in fact as the Nazis conceived it – superior and inferior, even parasitic races; war as a means to high evolution – then Nazi policy would have made sense and did make sense to many Germans of that time. What you do, how you feel, what you say, how you live – the Good – is grounded in what you take to be reality.  Thus the attempt of power people to "control the narrative" or, in the case of Trump, to construct a fantasy version of reality for his cult.

       But it would be too simple to believe the medieval Church and the Nazi’s got their facts or science wrong. A scientifically minded inquisitor or Nazi ideologue who wanted to test their ‘theories’ empirically could probably think of ways (ways that would sound sick to us). Each could use an army of undercover agents with doctorates in anthropology to infiltrate communities of witches or Jews, for example, to test some of their conjectures. Such a study might have the power to modify or qualify their views. For example, Harry Potter style witchery – making things appear out of thin air or changing people into animals – might be refuted; overt malice on the part of Jewish families against Aryans might not show itself to the investigators. But given that in each case we are dealing with a priori beliefs and conceptualizations of the respect target groups – witches and Jews – such empirical research would not be enough to refute the problematic beliefs. These a priori beliefs are not data-based, not scientific beliefs subject to empirical falsification. 

 

 

Not facts, but belief systems are given when it comes to metaphysics.  When we are dealing with beliefs and related concepts about the world as a whole – or large parts of it - a believer’s statement can be made logically to fit into any circumstance. Scientifically, it may not be meaningful; it may have no definitive empirical implications. The absence of overt magic on the part of witches can simply be interpreted as witch-magic working covertly. The absence of overt malice on the part of Jews can be interpreted as a conspiracy never to openly show it. A person who equates all reality with the closed system of physics would interpret a visit by an angel as a hallucination. And so on. It is the belief system as a whole that makes sense of the world – or not. Belief systems cannot be dislodged in the same way a scientific theory – e.g., Newton’s theory of light and gravity – can be (although this is also complex). 

      This is almost the exact definition of what it means to be finite, and thus potentially fallible. We cannot know all of reality from a divine perspective. Our deepest convictions about reality – and therefore, the Good – are not amenable to rigorous, certain proof (as in geometry) or empirical methods (as in natural science). When confronted with an incommensurable worldview, we are thrown back on this factum of human nature. We come to terms through historically and socially situated common sense reason, our response to beauty, and listening to our hearts. Or rather, if we are not damaged, unable to respond to beauty, unable to access the goodness that is somewhere inside our hearts (i.e. our ability to love and accept love), then we have these resources. It is through the purest moments of joy and love, but also when despair stairs you in the face, that we can access what is real beyond the everyday shadows we live with. 

 

 

Trauma and world. That so many people in the Middle Ages and in the Germany after the Great War were traumatized makes it no accident that their souls were nearly cut off from the damaged ego-consciousness. True, Naziism makes no sense to me. It is obviously evil. But then, I was loved as a child; I am not a man traumatized by losing an unimaginably terrible war in which all that I was taught to believe came crashing down and then thrown into a situation of mass insecurity. 

        Of course, other factors than trauma can cut a person off from beauty and goodness. Mental illness, for example. Not every child is born into a loving family. The injustice that is as pervasive today as it was at the time of Jesus lacerates souls. Christopher Lasch has argued (persuasively to me) that our socioeconomic structure gives rise to narcissistic personality types by destroying forms of public, communal, and family life, substituting a therapeutic ethic and a consumerist mentality to the questions of life. Social media has poured gasoline in that fire. I could go on.

 "You can't use reason to convince anyone out of an argument that they did use reason to get into" – Neil Degrasse Tyson

      I would qualify – unless you can bring it about that they come to feel differently, mostly through coming to see something they hadn't before or through coming to see something in a different light. Like the Grinch, when confronted with the reality of what he had done to the Whos down in Whoville: "and then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.” [example from Dr. Suess]

                                     

        People can come to feel shame over some of their attitudes. The heart has its reasons, but since most scientists (Tyson is a contemporary Carl Sagan) don't believe in the heart, and by reason they mean only empirical scientific reasoning, they can’t see that shame, in some cases, is a rational response to reality because it is appropriate to the meaning of their previous attitude. I think many opponents of the Civil Rights Movement felt this rational shame and did change their views because of an argument (made by MLK and others). Of course, if what a man means by reason is just science, then Tyson is right. But human reason cannot be divorced from meaning, and thus not from emotion, or catastrophe will result. To equate science (or scientifical rationality) with reason is like putting blinders on reason, like mistakenly deciding that all of reality appears within that reduced field of vision.