The Disunity of American Culture

Science, Religion, Technology and the Secular State

John C. Caiazza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351483544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

The Disunity of American Culture describes culture now, when different forces are influencing it than in the past, altering it to near incomprehensibility. Identity issues have an effect on culture and politics; more influential is the question of what support the state is obligated to provide the individual. John C. Caiazza seeks to explain how this situation came to be.He begins with an explanation of the origins of Protestantism in America. Caiazza describes how the American religion has declined and the recent responses the decline has provoked. Caiazza follows with an analysis of science as it presently exists in American culture. The work of three scientists prominent in their respective fields—Steven Weinberg in physics, E. O. Wilson in biology, and Stanley Milgram in psychology—are examined with respect to how their work has influenced culture.The author examines the failure of America's school of philosophy, pragmatism, to explain the relationship between religion, science, and general culture, even though its founders, Charles S. Peirce and William James, made serious efforts to do so. He concludes by making the case that there is a contradiction between scientific reason and the claim of state power. Caiazza argues that cultural disharmony will guarantee that the secular state never achieves the dominance over culture and political life it desires.

Chapter 1

Dissonant Themes in American Culture

That there have been dissonances in American culture is not a new observation. This book is an account of contemporary American culture at a time when a different set of forces is influencing it than did in the past, altering it now to the point of near incomprehensibility. In our day, issues of identity—sexual and racial—have a serious effect on our culture and our politics, but even more influential is the hotly debated question of what degree of support the state is morally obligated to give the individual, financially and in other ways. Meanwhile, the popular culture is seemingly dominated by the industrialization of entertainment, going far beyond what radio and television previously offered, to where it threatens to overwhelm our personal selves by enticing us to identify with fictional creations of programmers and scriptwriters. Interaction with real people is replaced by interaction with computer images; meanwhile, identification with real people is increasingly based on emphasizing the differences between ourselves and other people, making it increasingly difficult to create overarching bonds among American citizens. Our social differences are now reaching a level of fractiousness that has resulted in the “polarization” of our politics and its consequent inability to solve the immense problems that the nation now faces.

Because of the complexity of American culture at the present time, it is unlikely that the whole can be encompassed in one overall account, so one particular approach must be selected. The general approach taken in this book begins by analyzing American culture in terms of a debate that first arose in the nineteenth century: the apparent conflict between religion and science; but, after treating several allied subjects, it ends with presentation of the issue of the expanding power of the new secular state. While at the end of this introductory chapter the reader will find a summary of the book, it might be more helpful to get a sense of it to understand that it weaves four themes together. If we think of the book as if it were a piece of music, however, we find that the themes do not make up a harmonious whole, but are in fact a dissonance, a disharmony that implies a widening conflict in the culture. In any case, there are four themes to be examined.

Science Replacing Religious Belief

As understood here, science has, in large part, replaced religion as the primary culture former in the contemporary world. “Religion,” however, is a general word, referring more than usual among general terms to a very wide and possibly incoherent collection of phenomena. “Religion,” when used in any discussion of secularism in the West, however, refers more particularly to the Christian religion; for it is the Christian religion, manifested in its authority, ubiquity, and power, that dominated its culture and politics from Europe’s founding until the middle of the twentieth century in America. In its various faces and social forms, it is this Christian religion that is being replaced, in large part, as the culture former of Europe and the West generally, including America. The Christian church is the infamy that Voltaire and now Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett claim should be wiped from the earth. (It should be noted that a major part of the inspiration for this new atheism is not only opposition to Judeo-Christianity, but blatant fear of current Islamic expansionism. The violence characteristic of Islamist expansionism stains the reputation of all religion, which is thus understood in general as encouraging oppressive violence against nonbelievers without distinction.¹)

It is not merely the power of the Christian churches in their various social manifestations that are being relegated; it is Christianity in a philosophical sense as well, as a mode or form of thinking that is being systematically undermined, and here attention must be paid not only to Christianity but to its ideological forebear, Judaism. For it is not merely a sentimental ecumenism to speak of Judeo-Christianity in this context or because of guilt over Christian mistreatment of the Jewish people in past times. Rather, Judaism and Christianity have a shared attitude toward the relationship of ideal reality, represented by the figure of the Lord God, and of physical reality as lived day-to-day, for in Judeo-Christian terms, there is a definite, identifiable portrayal of the relationship that has implications and consequences historically and philosophically for modern science; and this connection, in turn, affects what happens as modern science becomes the agent of secularizing Western culture. That attitude is reflected in the fact that in both the Old and the New Testament, God or his agents (such as prophets, angels, or Jesus) are intimately concerned with the affairs of human beings and that the divine order is exactly understood as commanding, judging, guiding, inspiring, and loving the creatures He has made, ordering all reality to the good of the human race. The drama of the Judaic and Christian accounts of God’s presence on the earth might be dismissed as merely one among a plethora of myths, not unlike those of the ancient Assyrians, Greeks, Incas, Chinese, and so on. Yet the Judeo-Christian account is different in the exact manner in which the realm of the divine interacts with that of the plane of earthly existence; as a result, its relegation in the name of modern science has important consequences for society, ethics, and science itself.

How Science Influences Culture

Asserting that science is a major cause, if not the exclusive one, of the contours of contemporary culture, what are its particular areas or forms of influence? That is, what are its entry points into Western culture? Basically there are two: the impact of scientific technology on human life and the cultural influence of scientific theories. Technology has manifestly improved our lives; usually, the examples given have to do with railroads and automobiles, or space technology, or electromagnetic communication, but the best example may be from medical research because it has extended the human life span almost double in the past century and a half (from roughly forty years to eighty) and made human life more comfortable and less fraught with fear. This realization in turn encourages a positive attitude toward the sciences in general, because it has brought about such medical and technological benefits. But this positive attitude is directed not to scientific theories such as the germ theory of disease or the theory of the electromagnetic field but rather induces a general belief that science in the form of scientific technology provides the most effective approach to solving the problems, salving the hurts, and providing the hope for the future of the human race.

The other form of scientific influence is in the cultural effect of the actual theories of science of which the outstanding contemporary examples are evolution and the big bang. Evolution is assumed not only to be able to explain the origin of life-forms (species) but also to give the underlying cause of all life, so that no other explanation of the major aspects of life—including human life—is necessary. Evolution is perceived by its more avid proponents to preclude the doctrines of religion, the explanations of philosophy, the insights of literature, and the traditions drawn from millennial human experience. Significant examples of influential scientific theories come from the physical as well as the biological sciences; while one could mention the influence of Newton’s mechanical theory in the eighteenth century, the most notable contemporary example is the big bang account of the origin of the universe. The big bang theory has entered popular culture to the extent that it is the name of a popular television program whose theme song begins, “The universe was in a hot, dense state.” The idea that by means of the big bang theory, science has explained the origin of the universe and thereby its ultimate meaning is becoming pervasive in the West (and possibly throughout the world); and it is feared by religious believers, for the big bang theory is assumed to replace the biblical account of the universe’s origin, which, in Genesis, was accomplished by the word of God.

The approved story of the replacement of the Judeo-Christian religion by modern science is what can be called a “Whig history”—in this case, perhaps the essential Whig history: that of progress over false superstition, bigotry, and ignorance by the forces of untrammeled intellect, systematic observation, and pure intentions. This hardy, Victorian view of what Taylor calls a process of “subtraction” (i.e., of various dogmas proclaimed by religion being removed as scientific knowledge progresses) is largely false, however.² A basic assumption of the Whig view of science history is that the role of religion is essentially explanatory: that thunder and lightning, for example, need no longer be explained as the manifestation of the anger of Thor or Jupiter; that human disease need no longer be explained as the invasion of evil spirits into the body; or that the existence of the universe need no longer be explained by God’s creative action. E. O. Wilson, the most prominent of contemporary evolutionists, provides a particularly hubristic expression of this view.³

A kind of temptation accompanies the progress of science. Astronomy serves as an example, because it is the first modern science having developed from a merely descriptive and observational study, of the positions of the stars and their paths over the year, to a modern science in which general, mathematical laws are used to explain and predict their behavior. This happened in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the development of the Copernican description of the solar system and the Galilean use of mathematical laws to explain motion. The use of an abstract model prescinds from actual observation in the case of Copernican astronomy, in which the theoretical observer has to see himself looking down on the system of sun and attendant planets as they whirl about it. This means abstracting oneself from the surface of the Earth where we live and where in fact the sun does appear to revolve about us every twenty-four hours, rising in the east and setting in the west each day. Yet in abstracting the theoretical viewer, taking him up from the surface of the earth where he actually lives, up beyond the sky and into outer space where he looks down on the solar system, we have created an illusion and put ourselves as observers in the way of hubristic temptation. To look at astronomical charts and calculate, as Kepler and Newton did, is to lead less intelligent people (and the vast bulk of the human race is less intelligent than either figure) to infer that they not only understand the solar system but, in a certain manner, control it.⁴

It may seem as if that the temptation to imagine ourselves as godlike is a small price to pay for having attained a central truth about the place of human beings in relation to the astronomical universe. But while the price may seem negligible at the level of astronomical phenomena, as I will attempt to demonstrate in the second part of this book, it is less so at the level where life itself is the object of scientific investigation—and much less so when the causes and judgment of human behavior are. At the levels of biology and social science, the price of the advance of scientific understanding is much higher, because at these levels, the temptation to hubris leads to the denigration of the value of life itself, mechanistic accounts of human behavior that are caricatures, and atomistic accounts of social interaction that become the rationale for totalitarianism.

Finally, explaining the influence of science upon Western culture by means of both its technological results and its theories, however, implies a dissonance, for the reliance on technological applications for an understanding of science causes people to ignore the relevance of scientific theory. The result is that modern science is assumed to be something (what exactly is not specified) that produces goods that provide comfort and security for the middle class, rather than an intellectual process of discovery. The further consequence, as explained in Part IV, is that the “decline of physical theory” reinforces another influential cultural meme: postmodern critical theory, which is really a form of epistemological relativism. Together, this has led currently to the belief among educated elites that truth is no longer applicable to human concerns, since the assumed acquisition of truth produces hegemonic results. But epistemological relativism leads to moral relativism, which is highly problematic for the continued sustenance of democratic politics.

Secularization Theory

There is a large literature on secularization, which extends back to the nineteenth century. Ernst Troeltsch made the distinction between “Church civilization” and “Modern civilization,” indicating a clear separation between the medieval and the post-medieval cultures based on the presence of the Church in day-to-day life and the subsequent lack thereof. Ferdinand Tonnies made the distinction between two types of social organization, “Gemeinschaft” and “ Gesellschaft,” that is the former characteristic of premodern society that was organic in which each separate aspect of society was organized into an ideological and social whole, and the modern setting that is characterized by individuals making contracts and having to make a presentation of self and take a stance regarding each distinctive aspect of society, between unity and disparateness, so to speak. Max Weber famously made the connection between the rise of Protestantism and capitalism and also characterized formally for the first time the nature of leadership styles and, ominously, the nature of bureaucracies that now dominate all areas of modern social life.

In a certain sense, these attempts to characterize the differences between medieval and modern life constitute the origins of modern scientific sociology, as if the felt life of modern civilization could be appreciated or evaluated only by means of contrast with what went before. There is present, in these early attempts, then, a kind of nostalgia for a time that, because it is outside the range of actual memory, has to be reconstructed—an artificial memory, as it were, for certainly the actual life of the Middle Ages—which was rent by war between factions; hostility among religious movements; and a common life characterized by disease, unremitting labor, early death, and illiteracy, at a time when the popes fielded armies against emperors and feudal lords, and when Aquinas, now seen as the quintessential representative of high medieval culture, had his “heretical” books burned by the bishop of Paris—was not a time of social or ideological unity. Yet it must seem so, if only because modern life is so constantly and insistently characterized by our inability to see life and see it whole, because there are so many competing social pressures that do not allow us even to rest for a moment and gather up our resources. And so we, as did the early sociologists, invent a time when life was easier because the pressures were not so intense—a time when life was simpler. This extends not just to a simplistic reconstruction of the Middle Ages but to earlier generations in our own era. Thus the cliché that things were “simpler” in our parents’ generation, when all they had to worry about was Hitler or the Cold War or Civil Rights or the Great Depression. The irony, of course, is that things were not any simpler or easier for previous generations than they were in the Middle Ages.

Another aspect of this early sociology, a characteristic that continues to this day, is that it was supposedly based on the personal stance of the scholars as one of being distanced from what they were studying and writing about. That is, there was and is—characteristically of the social sciences in general as well as specifically of sociology—the claim of neutrality as if it is not a matter of personal concern to the scholar whether or not secularization is taking place, for the concern of the social scientist must be to distance himself from whatever emotions or convictions he or she may have on the issue in order to dispassionately expose all its elements, explain the process by which it takes place, and put it in a general context. This formal neutrality becomes a heavy cross to bear, however, when discussing such things as racism or neo-Nazism or hyperinflation or sex slavery, for in such cases where injustice and immorality are dominant, then a stance of neutrality is much more difficult to adopt and, to outside observers, will probably look as if the scholar lacks not only feelings but moral judgment as well. But even in subjects where injustice or immorality are not so apparent, the social scientist has been attracted to it because if nothing else, he or she is interested in it for discernible reasons, perhaps even feeling strongly about it. Anna Freud did not write about children because she had no feelings about them; Gunnar Myrdal did not write about African Americans because he was neutral on the subject of Jim Crow and segregation; Alfred Kinsey did not write about the sex habits of Americans because he had no personal interest in sexual behavior. Inevitably, the stance of formal neutrality of sociology and all of the social sciences can become a kind of pretense, as if with a wink and a nudge, we know that the scholars do have an opinion about what they are studying; and, further, that it has not only slipped unnoticed into their research but in fact has largely guided it.

With regards to secularization, it appears as if the nineteenth-century scholars were looking at it not only as a cultural process that they had newly discovered was taking place, but, in effect, as though they approved of it. Surely, their studies did not lead them or others to condemn secularization, for in the heavily Protestant culture in which they were writing, the identification of the Middle Ages with the Roman Catholic Church practically guaranteed that secularization would be seen as a good thing, as a freeing up of Western civilization from the judgmental priests, the feudal economy, the crabbed theology, the power of the papacy, and the stultifying class structure. Attacks on medieval culture came also from the notion that science is the key to cultural progress and that medieval theology is the enemy of scientific reason: the Galileo case was inevitably referred to in this argument. These characterizations also took place in the nineteenth century, when the appearance of the inevitable progress of Western civilization was unchallenged, except by a few poets and literary critics. The arrival of Darwinism put in place the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Dissonant Themes in American Culture
• Part I: Origin and Decline of the American Religion
• Part II: The State of Science and Culture Now
• Part III: Science as Cultural Unifier: Three American Scientists
• Part IV: Decline and Consequences
• Part V: Unresolvable Differences
• Index