Enchantment and objectivity

Last updated on: August 8, 2015 at 1:58 pm by Tom Swiss

Enchantment and objectivity 2015-08-08T13:58:10-04:00 Tom Swiss

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We’ve had a bit of a brouhaha here at Patheos Pagan, a bit of a philosophical dust-up between my respected colleagues John Halstead and John Beckett. John H. posted his contribution to Patheos’s ongoing “Why I am still a (whatever)” series. He’s an outspoken “humanistic Pagan”, and his post speaks both to his frustration with the commonality of irrational beliefs in Neo paganismand his faith that its practices can help “reenchant the world.” I don’t agree with everything there — anytime I see Ken Wilber cited I have to shake my head — but the overall message resonates with me.

(I will have a “Why I Am Still a Zen Pagan Taoist Atheist Discordian” post sometime soon, by the way.)

John B. took some exception to that post, and posted that “[y]ou can’t practice Paganism while you look down your nose at it.” Which I very much don’t think John H. was doing.

But this sentence in particular seems to require comment:

The stark objectivity and lust for control that separate us from each other and the natural world are the same forces that insist there can be no Gods, spirits, or magic.

With respect, I think John B. misses the mark here. Objectivity and lust for control are entirely different things.

You and I are made of exploded stars. (Image European Southern Observatory via Wikimedia Commons, CC by 4.0

There can be plenty of enchantment in the objective world-view. There is a form of beauty in seeing how the moon’s orbit and the arc of a pop fly follow the same Newtonian law of universal gravitation. Cantor’s diagonalization proof that there are more real numbers than rational numbers is one of the most beautiful things I know. The objective scientific worldview tells me that you and I are made of bits of exploded stars, that every atom in your body and mine pull on each other with gravitational and electromagnetic force — however far apart we are, we are joined, inseparable, entirely part of the natural world.

These are things that we can appreciate and be moved by without seeking to control at all. (We bump here up against the distinction between “science” and “technology” or “engineering”, I think.)

On the other hand, to claim that *only* the objective world view is valid is irrational. We do not know the objective world directly, only theoretically — the world we know directly is the subjective one. If that direct experience is by its nature invalid, then we can say nothing about the objective world we see dimly through it.

But on the gripping hand, human civilization faces an existential crisis, clearly demonstrated by objective methods, which many Americans deny because they believe that their adopted tribal god created the world and gave dominion over it to mankind — a lust for control fueled by a non-objective non-rational worldview.

If in trying to break our fellow Americans out of that dangerous non-objective non-rational view, outspoken atheists (of which I might sometimes be one) tread on the toes of those who value benign non-objective non-rational experiences (which I might also sometimes do), perhaps some slack should be allowed.

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