The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (3 page)

BOOK: The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason
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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, no one fails entirely, but everyone says something true about the nature of things, and while individually they contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed.

ARISTOTLE
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On his long journey home from Troy to his wife, Penelope, in Ithaca, Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s
Odyssey,
was swept from his ship through the fury of Poseidon, the god of earthquakes and the sea, who had turned against him. Luckily, the goddess Leukothea, who lived in the depths of the sea, took pity on him and offered him a magic scarf that, when bound around him, would protect him, while the goddess Athena calmed the waves so that he could swim towards the shores of the land of the Phaeacians. In this crisis Odysseus still had to make his own decisions, in the short term at what moment he should leave the timbers of his ship and strike for shore. A massive wave sent by Poseidon made the decision for him, and he found himself swimming without any support. The coast came into view, but it was rugged. Is it better, Odysseus wondered, to land where he can and risk being crushed against the cliffs by a wave, or continue onwards in his exhaustion in the hopes of finding a sandy bay?

Odysseus’ ordeal ended happily. He was washed ashore and rescued by the beautiful Nausicaa, daughter of the Phaeacian king. He was saved by two goddesses who successfully challenged another god, Poseidon. So here is a man at the mercy of divine forces who nevertheless retained the power to think rationally and who saw rational thought as a means of bettering his chances. One can hardly say this is a revolutionary step; archaeological evidence from South African caves shows that individuals were able to provide “rational” adaptations to their changing environment (in the sense of adapting their tools) as long as 70,000 years ago. What is important is that Homer distinguishes rational thought, even at this primitive, almost instinctive level, as a mental activity, independent of the whim of the gods.
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This is the mental landscape of Greece in the eighth century or earlier—the Odyssey took its final form about 725 B.C. from much older oral traditions—but it is a world that is passing. Odysseus is an aristocrat, a king in his land of Ithaca, where he has palaces and cattle. His wife, Penelope, though vulnerable without him, has her own status. When they are finally reunited, they enjoy each other’s conversation as equals before they make together for the royal bed. Emerging is the world of the Greek city state, where, from the eighth century, one finds communities making focused settlements, typically with their own sacred spaces and public arenas. There is a shift, probably as a result of population increase, from the “aristocratic” extravagance of cattle farming to more intensive cultivation, of olives, cereals and vines. A peasant economy emerges based on a free citizenry relying on slaves for extra labour. Women are now segregated, the aristocratic palace replaced by the enclosed home, which, unlike Penelope’s palace in Ithaca, contains no allotted space in which women can appear before strangers. Fighting is no longer between aristocratic heroes meeting in single combat but between massed phalanxes of hoplites (the word comes from
hoplon,
a shield), made up of the peasantry, who fight side by side with each other and overwhelm their opponents by sheer weight and determination.
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Population increase and political infighting encouraged settlement overseas, and the city state, or
polis
as it was known in Greek, proved eminently exportable throughout the Mediterranean. One finds the same structure, domestic areas, public meeting places and a demarcated area, the
temenos,
for temples and sacrificial altars, in most Greek cities. Remarkably, despite the fragmentation and extent of settlement, there remained a common sense of Greek culture, sustained by religious festivals, many of them with games, oracles and centres of pilgrimage, at which Greeks from across the Mediterranean gathered.

The number and frequency of such festivals reflects the intensely spiritual nature of the ancient Greeks. They had a powerful sense of the sacred, often personified in gods and goddesses, elaborated in myth and celebrated at an enormous number of shrines, some natural such as caves and springs, others opulent temple complexes. Their gods remained close to them, traditionally portrayed in human form and displaying behaviour which was often all too human in its fits of jealousy and anger. Among the twelve Olympian gods the full spectrum of human life was represented, from the wild excess of emotion (Dionysus) to the calm exercise of reason (Apollo), from the lustful enjoyment of sex (Aphrodite) to virgin modesty (Artemis). Each god or goddess played a number of roles, accumulated from different traditions both inside and outside Greece. So Zeus, the father of the gods, could act as lord of the skies, as a bringer of victory, a symbol of sexual potency, the upholder of rulers and the god of thunder and lightning. Alongside the Olympian gods there was a mass of lesser deities, such as Pan, the god of shepherds, and local heroes with a range of roles. Ancient Greece vibrated with spiritual presences.
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Mediation with the gods took place through prayer and sacrifice. The sacrifice was the central point of almost every ritual. An animal—an ox, sheep, goat or pig—would be presented to the gods and then killed, burnt and eaten by the community. Sacrifices were not an aberrant or cruel activity—they were a sophisticated way of dealing with the necessity of killing animals in order to eat. In fact, the rituals surrounding sacrifice suggest that the Greeks felt some unease about killing animals they had reared themselves. So the illusion was created that an animal went to its death willingly, and before the killing all present threw a handful of barley at it, as if the community as a whole was accepting responsibility for the death. At the moment of the slaughter women would utter impassioned cries, again a recognition of the seriousness of what was being done in taking life. This was a common theme in ritual, also found in Greek tragic drama, an awareness that any transition involved a loss that had to be recognized within the ritual itself. There was also a strong belief that through the maintaining of the round of rituals the city had been protected. As one Athenian citizen put it in a public debate:

Our ancestors by sacrificing in accordance with the tablets of Solon [laws instituted in the early sixth century] have handed down to us a city superior in greatness and prosperity to any other in Greece so that it behooves us to perform the same sacrifices as they did if for no other reason than that of the success which has resulted from these rites.
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So, Greek religion acted as mediator of political and social tensions. Transitions could be effected through the use of ritual and difficult decisions made with the help of oracles. Even so, political life was not easy, and in the seventh and sixth centuries in particular there were continual clashes between the old aristocratic elites and the newly wealthy, who had made their money through trade, and the rising peasant classes, increasingly conscious of their own cohesion and power. At the very worst a city would explode into civil war. Thucydides describes one case in 427 in Corfu, which saw a vicious spiral of terror and counter-terror between the ruling classes and “democrats.” In the resultant complete breakdown of order, where, as Thucydides puts it, “fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a ‘real man,’ ” fathers killed sons, temples were violated by the massacre of those sheltering in them and many committed suicide rather than wait to be killed. “As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.”
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The most sophisticated resolution of conflicts such as these was to be made in fifth-century Athens, where all male citizens came to share in government equally, in the Assembly, as jurors in the law courts and, for those aged over thirty, as administrators. Athenian democracy lasted some 140 years and, despite its exclusion of women and slaves, remains a remarkable political innovation.

It was in this resolution of internal conflicts that a remarkable intellectual development took place. It seems to have been based in an optimistic belief that there were forces that tended to good order.
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One finds such a feeling in the early sixth century B.C. in the verses of the Athenian statesman Solon, who had been charged with resolving a political crisis caused by the economic and social exploitation of a debt-ridden peasantry by the landed aristocracy. He proved to be a pragmatic statesman— it is human beings themselves, not the gods, who must bring peace and good order (the Greek word used is
eunomie
) to their cities. However,
eunomie
(who is personified as a daughter of Zeus) is seen as a force in her own right, even if one who works alongside mankind. In Solon’s own words:

Eunomie
makes all things well ordered and fitted
and often puts chains on the unjust;
she smooths the rough, puts an end to excess, blinds insolence,
withers the flowers of unrighteousness,
straightens crooked judgements and softens deeds of arrogance,
puts an end to works of faction
and to the anger of painful strife, under her
all men’s actions are fitting and wise.
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In other words, the political world tends towards stability under the auspices of divine forces. The work of the politician lies in shifting the city’s affairs into their natural groove of harmony, and he will be sustained by
eunomie
in achieving this (“under her all men’s actions are fitting and wise”). However, remarkably and apparently uniquely to the Greek world, a further intellectual leap appears to have taken place; it was appreciated that if the city tended to good order, perhaps the universe, the cosmos, did as well. The natural world was seen to change according to rhythms, of the seasons but also of the movements of the stars, rhythms that appeared to persist in spite of the fragmented and unpredictable nature of everyday life. Only a few years later than Solon, in 585 B.C. in the Ionian city of Miletus on the coast of Asia Minor, the philosopher-scientist Thales is said to have predicted an eclipse of the sun (the eclipse did indeed take place and was independently recorded by the historian Herodotus). For Aristotle, writing some 200 years later, this was truly the moment when Greek philosophy began. An underlying order to the cosmos had been observed, and its movements were assumed to be so regular that future events could be predicted from empirical observations gathered over time.

This single instance was not revolutionary in itself—after all, the Egyptians had been able to work out a calendar based on the regular phases of the moon as early as 2800 B.C. Where Thales and his associates in Miletus went further was to speculate on why the world was as it was. They began to ask major questions. What was the cosmos made of, and why did it move in the way it did? Thales himself suggested that the world may have originated in a single substance, water, and that it rested on a base of water. He was challenged by another Milesian, Anaximander. What then did the water rest on? Anaximander suggested that the apparent stability of the world arose because it was at the centre of equally powerful forces—the Boundless, he called them—that surrounded the world on all sides and from which it had been formed. Just as a city would tend towards harmony, so would the cosmos be held in balance by these surrounding forces. Another Milesian, Anaximenes, suggested that everything came from air. If steam could be condensed into water and water could be frozen into ice, it followed that a single substance could change form dramatically, and perhaps air could be condensed into solid forms. These speculations were bound to be primitive, but they did represent a new way of thinking and, moreover, one in which each thinker was able to use observation and reason to challenge his rivals. So within 150 years of Odysseus’ swim to Phaeacia, rational decision-making had been transformed into something much more sophisticated and universal, what we might call science. Thinking about how the predictable rhythms of the natural world related to the observed chaos of the actual world presented, of course, a daunting challenge. But it was faced as early as 500 B.C. The brilliant Heraclitus (from the city of Ephesus, close to Miletus) believed that the underlying order (the word he used was
logos,
which will reappear many times in this book) was sustained by continual tensions between different forces. The harmonious city, said Heraclitus, is not one in which everyone lives in peace but one among whose citizens there is constant activity and debate. “Justice,” said Heraclitus, “is strife.”
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Heraclitus’ insight that reasoned thought is born within the tensions of the city state is supported by modern research. Geoffrey Lloyd, who has carried out intensive explorations of the background to Greek scientific thinking, traces the origins of a systematic use of reason (without which empirical observations cannot be related to each other) to the intense political debates that raged within the Greek cities. If two factions wished to find a “just” solution to a problem without tearing apart their own city, then at some point there was likely to be a consideration of what was meant by “justice.” There was an incentive to go back to first principles and attempt to define an agreed basis, some kind of axiomatic statement, from which to begin the arguments that could only take place according to rational principles if agreement was to be maintained between the opposing parties. Lloyd argues that this process can be discerned within the fragments of political debate that survive, and, crucially, it was also applied to the study of the natural world. The terminology used supports this. Lloyd shows how a word such as “witness,” as used in the law courts, was the root of the word for “evidence” in scientific discourse, and how the term used for cross-examination of witnesses was adopted to describe the testing of an idea or hypothesis. He also argues that within the city the ability to argue persuasively conferred status, and that this status could be transferred into other areas of intellectual activity.
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BOOK: The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason
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