Oh hear ye...of the secular 'heaven' to come.

  

In the present day, there exists a secular trinity of thinkers, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. This trio currently hold intellectual sway among the secular cognoscenti. One can only applaud their courage, their erudition and many other things about them. Seated to their right is the bearded avuncular figure of Daniel Dennett.

Sitting above them is that technological marvel, Stephen Hawking eerily graveling out, with great humour, his aphorisms.

“Philosophy is dead.” (Physics is now the only game in town).

I have been struck to write this by post scanning Sam Harris’s blog and his academy of ‘Reason’. However within the confines of this encapsulated post, reason versus belief seems to me to be a redundant argument, as the opponents of reason are straw targets.

Yet, ‘reason’ itself, that child of the Enlightenment also has feet of clay. For isn’t ‘reason’ a kind of prudence, yes, a kind of prudentialist weapon, a sort of affective investment. We put off  small pleasures, say a comforting belief in God, to secure greater happiness in the future through the secular joys of reason.

Yet isn’t reason regulatory, merely instrumental for we are still seeking an emotional goal, "No, I will not fall prey to that belief nonsense, I will use reason for I am attracted to that by its long term  emotional appeal..

And reason, as does Religion, has a poor track record for tyrants and democratic politicians alike have claimed the mantle of reason when, in actuality, ambition, narcissism, vanity and lack of imagination propel their courses.

Reason or rationalism more readily consorts with absolutism, or imperialism and that untroubled conviction that our own moral views are uniquely correct, so that other cultures that do not share them are defective, sunk in unreason, irrational and, perhaps after all, best governed by us. Think of pilgrims, missionaries, English public schools and the British Empire.

So I come to paganism, which like science avoids incorrigible certainty as if treading on a mine field. The very admirable pagan suspension of judgement was not a sign of defective methodology. It rested instead on a deeply grounded appreciation of the limits of human knowledge as modest in its pretensions to historical certainty as it was to insight into the lives of individuals.

But let me not digress, as I continue to employ what is beginning to smack of biblical narrative - so as you can see the depth of my attachment to the delusory shelter of narrative/story/discourse.

Anyways along comes this unbeliever of reason

and lo and behold starts chipping away at one of the secular Gods, Darwin. ‘Natural selection has no foresight..’  the new preacher on the block proclaima. ‘...and once such new kinds of consciousness are finally accessed by design, their different textures need not be deployed in a traditional role. 

Some people shuffle, look downwards as if their shoes will guide them, others take off their hats.

,

“....In this new world it will no longer be that Darwinian tentative probing of environmental patterns before we descend from the trees. For we will live in a world of cognitive enhancers, we will reach the ‘promised land’ of hedonic paradise in our lifetimes., (sorry about this faintly fascistic espousing) “Yes, the future will a foci of delight, which will be embedded in our consciousness, It will be qualitatively as well as quantitatively a state quite alien to Darwinian humans.

This new Messiah, let us call him Nick Bostrom, is on his soap box

“Yes, hear ye, all you believers in fossilised reason, you are nothing but carbon chauvinists, inference churning, semantic primitives, who using our present limited range of concepts make pardonably false assumptions just as the religious have done in the past.

Hear ye now, old definition such as ‘reasonable person ’ are likely to fall apart in unpredictable ways for there is ‘something else’ lying latent among previously inaccessible and maladaptive neurochemical pathways. Hear ye, for all those volitional aspects of ‘thinking’, ‘feeling’, ‘willing’ will pass away just like those other trifling variations belief and reason. We will enter a much wider phenomenological family of streams of consciousness. We will enter a new kingdom, a veritable Valhalla... a hedonic Paradise.

(Finally, he addresses his audience of bemused observers) “We have had intercourse today, you and I, but I wish to assure you I am using a prophylactic, and it is this - ‘Of course. I could be wrong about all this.”

At this juncture two policemen come along.

Police Constable 1: “Alright sir, that’s enough of that.”

Preacher of new ideas: “What have I done wrong?”

Police Constable 2: “Now, now sir...we don’t want to be charged with public disorder, sir, do we? Come on now, have to move you on, there’s a good chap. Take your soap box with you, if you would, sir.”  

And lo, the preacher was taken away. And so it will always be thus, for the begetters of new ideas.