Bad worldbuilding Roger, bad.
Bad worldbuilding Roger, bad.
No order at all, not even chaos. Not even wrong.
Roger Scruton’s The Face of God: The Gifford Lectures 2010. (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2014, ISBN 9781472912732).
Picked this up when I was writing the other Roger Scruton posts listed below, but only began reading it a couple of days ago after I mined Super Cooperators. Partly because it is another Gifford Lectures book, like which I covered last week, with Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, at Noting Iris Murdoch quoting Wittgenstein and friends.
And a couple of mentions in the next two:
Categories versus structure/s Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger: an analysis of concept of pollution and taboo | with a new preface by the author
Gap hunting duck-rabbits with Miles, in homage to Ludwig Wittgenstein (ach Hans! it's just St Augustine of Hippo in the pear tree) Miles Hollingworth’s Ludwig Wittgenstein
(I am using this short post as a theme collection post and a goodbye to Roger.)
The Gifford Lectures are annual series of lectures which were established in 1887 by the will of Adam Gifford, Lord Gifford. Their purpose is to
“promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term – in other words, the knowledge of God.”
Unlike Iris Murdoch who took the opportunity to put a major part of her thought together, in over a decade of writing after givingthe lectures, Roger Scruton’s book feels like it’s basically playing to a very friendly gallery. They have have similar-ish positions. And similar to mine it must be added, at east in a use of Wittgenstein.
However they both use aporia to dismiss that which they do not like, while excusing what it is they prefer to throw into the gap.
There are always gaps, so this whole enterprise is disingenuous. We live that gap in worlding and selfing, they example it while dismissing those who do the same thing in reverse.
I say we live that gap, but not because we are human, but because we are alive.
In Roger’s first chapter we get advocacy for an imperialist God (definitely preaching to the converted here ) which colonises or conquers those who would prefer otherwise.
“God is unavoidable.”
Atheists don’t exist. Much like Ukraine doesn’t exist, which means you can invade and colonise their misfortune to not exist.
Besides a few slurs against atheists (much like Dostoyevky’s opening slurs against Poles in his novels), we get the low-down on scientism. Then we get the whole rigmarole from Plato to Kant, via Avicenna (and Averroës, Moses Maimonides, Aquinas), unaware that logic is a hindsight, despite the Wittgenstein, and not simply some part of some division Kant sets up at the end of this history (some of his set-ups are great though, pity I only know them by repute) between the objective and subjective.
If logic is a hindsight then this split can never be a priori. But anyway. A priori is created in a moment of hindsight, an extrapolation of hindsight.
Life goes on, I say.
For an example of the gap-gnosticism but throw it in the gap animism anywayism, page 14:
“there is, Kant suggested, always an illegitimate leap from the realm of understanding – in which we apply our thinking to experience, in order to know the world as it presents itself to us – to the realm of pure reason, in which we are tempted to ask questions that have no answer since they apply concepts outside the domain in which they make real distinctions. Just such a question is the one I have been considering – the question ‘why’ asked of the world as a whole.”
Good question. He then uses this question (while giving a kind nod to some more agnostic notions) not to lead to a neo-Pyrrhonistic life of suspended judgement, but to fall into the temptation of chucking stuff into this gap like a lord. Like any apparatchik of the pharaoh or party priest blessing Stalin’s tomb like a very naughty boy.
Sure they sin, these structuralistic scientismists, but we are pure and have mercy on everyone. Our inconsistencies are our grace, our faith, our understanding, our mystery, our nationalistic consciousness.
Other peoples’ inconsistencies are a sign of their damnation, their devilry in trying to turn us humans into mere machines, or demonic meat grinders.
See also Russian Orthodox Church Probes Priest Who Blessed Stalin Statue (in this alternate reality Trump won the second term election).
I’ve said elsewhere, perhaps poorly, that when we world we do so in/out of the gap, as indeed we do when we self. It’s the same two-step process, if Janus-faced, with many outcomes that fractally circle two strange attractors of self and world. Roger leaps into the gap he selfs his self from, and so, sees himself as humanity worlding away, and calls that self-sublimity the face of god.
I’ll add here that when we world-build (when we more attentively world) at this point, we often, and with false humility, throw stuff into the gap, as if simply worlding away is not enough, for our special powers are god-creator-given! Even if we can see that this is the case, when we look at ourselves worlding, we pretend it is not us, as if, perhaps, like, you know, if we just squint sideways at it, but correctly, like with faith, or knowledge, or practice, or honour, or…
It is not necessary to do so. No landfill is required.
Life goes on.
A moment on Platonism. Which some Scientism-botherers think is what science seeks (both for and anti).
If it were true, and Neal Stephenson wrote a wonderful romance about this fantasy, then its possible (in my fable not Neal’s) that if you added 2 plus 2 and got 5 you would drop down dead.
Not much of a fable, but it’s possible in such a cosmos that via Gödel’s incompleteness theorem that the universe would self-extinguish at the moment of creation.
Perhaps that’s what happened to god? (Please don’t throw this in the gap.)
In order to survive such a universe would have to outlaw being wrong.
Being wrong, what is it really?
I am wrong you say, and yet here I am. And I throw nothing into the gap.
Being wrong, what is it really?
This is also a better question, it is worlds better, than throwing oneself into the gap asking, “Why O cruel world, why?” Or, “Why am I god’s chosen one “ to be thrown into the sacred jaws of myth:
Let me sacrifice the ways with guilt and suffering…
Let me make chucking stuff into the landfill that hides the gap creating the world anew, a holy sacrifice of me. Let me market my sacrifice to the sovereigns. Praise be individualistic devotee, we have an empire to build. Onwards.
Roger Scruton rejects science having anything to do with this gap-filling landfill reality of understanding of his. I suspect that not only does Roger see gaps where there are none, he still throws stuff into them.
In Super Cooperators (see Mining Super Cooperators) E. O. Wilson gets a major walk-on part, and in Roger Scruton ‘s The face of God he gets a drubbing along with evolutionary game theory.
On page 41 he rejects the history of evolution as having any insight into what he is doing after asking “why this world”.
He deflects it away with the question
“what remains of free will?”
And then valourises one half of the gapful set-up by Kant object/subject… —because freedom. (Freedom per se is not the issue here, compare what a Catholic would say… —because obedience. Same prestidigitation.)
Thus we end up with new age anti-science drivel like:
“Suppose we now replace folk psychology with some explanatory neuroscience. The result would inevitably undermine the use of our three metaphysical worlds.
I say new age drivel because a lot of people practice pseudo-religions without faith per se. Scruton favours a non-religious metaphysics of god-ishness, saying nothing at all, while pretending he cannot speak thereof, and then selfing on regardless.
The world is not metaphysical, sure you can do metaphysics in it, and not drop down dead, and the world mediates reality which Roger wants to ask “why” of, but the
“undermine the use of our metaphysical worlds”
above is a call to arms.
Why do that?
(Bad worldbuilding Roger, bad. No order in that at all.)