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Wendy Wheeler
© Wendy Wheeler 2007
It is widely held amongst semioticians that the adaptive pressure leading to the evolution of articulate language (Homo australopithecus and Homo erectus had successful forms of gestural language for several million years before the advent of Homo sapiens) was not primarily communication, but was, rather, the drive to model, in more and finer detail, a shared world of human experience (including of the more than human). And what, we may ask, was this experience of such power and mystery that it impelled humankind upon the painful path of articulation, which would eventually result in the evolution of the dropped larynx and altered jaw physiognomy by which we identify our own archaic progenitor sapiens? Assuredly, it was recognition of order, pattern and purpose in nature, and the desire to understand, through shared meanings, a fuller articulation of what that extraordinary fact itself might betoken.
Religions (from L. ligare to bind) are the attempt to give social form to a central aspect of human experience: the wonder of consciousness of a wondrous world. In fact, we do not have to look further than our own presently lived experiences to know that relationships do not grow on the basis of utility alone. We never go very far and deep into any human relationship before we find ourselves in the process of trying to discover what we have in common, to what extent we can share, and can further together model, a shared world. Modelling a shared world capable of putting experience into words is surely what drives the eventual formation of religions. And, on this account, the deeply felt political affiliations and passions of secular modernity are, in fact, religion in other times by other means. For Walter Benjamin: 'Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction'.
When political life began the long task of disentangling itself from religious power, and thereby gradually casting off constraints on both scientific progress and traditional morality, it did not, in fact, get rid of god or religion; in the place of the latter it gradually put science; and in the place of the former it eventually put a great fattening, narcissistic and self-interested, human self. And in this (supposedly) disenchanted world, vacated of meanings, patterns and purposes, reasoning is largely reduced to instrumental reasoning in pursuit of economic and state efficiency alone. Revolutionary socialism, being modern, does not escape from any of this. Both the bourgeois and the revolutionary suffer from what Alasdair Macintyre has called 'epistemological self-righteousness'. In this world, ethics or morality - no longer capable of joining experienced facts to larger values, and means to such valued ends - become strictly meaningless, and also, too often, perverted to highly abstract ends such as 'the good of the economy' or 'the good of the state'.
Following a conversation with the Soviet theoretician Bukharin in 1935, Michael Polanyi described the utopian modernism of totalitarian regimes in terms of 'a powerful moral motive' combined with 'extreme critical lucidity' such that means are utterly subordinated to the inhuman telos of a highly abstract idea. He thought it a general vice of modernity itself, and we might equally conclude that highly centralised modern (supposedly) democratic capitalist states might be equally susceptible to such ideological abstractions. It made Polanyi think hard about how humans really know things and become skilful in knowing, doing and being, and it led him to formulate an account of practical knowledge as experience made tacit. A similar process led Macintyre towards Aristotle's idea of knowledge as practical wisdom (phronesis). This tacit dimension of knowledge is both teleological and autopoietically evolutionary. Complex systems (including humans) adapt to experience: learning belongs to all living things, not only to humans. Too much bewitchment by the abstractions of words divorced from common experiential values and purposes can be dangerous. It means, of course, that the evolution of real knowing (in nature and culture) is rooted in communication, which is to say practical relationship (human and more than human). As Raymond Williams, for one, understood, communication and learning is essentially ecological. Observation of this fact of the communicative (biosemiotic) nature of all living material things has also led some people (C.S. Peirce and A.N. Whitehead, for example) to say that it might be more helpful not to wonder how mind emerged from matter, but, instead, to think of matter as essentially processual and mind-like. This is not to say, of course, that matter is conscious (and a very great deal of efficacious human mind is not conscious either). But it might be to say that matter has consciousness immanent within it. Funnily enough, this idea of matter as having potentialities, inclinations and probabilities only realised when measured (i.e. in communication) is fully in accord with the nature of reality as revealed in quantum physics.
The idea of the purity of angelic abstraction being humanised by experiential relatedness is the theme of the extraordinary 2006 German film The Lives of Others (directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck), in which the inhuman and incorrupt Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler (his evening meal is boiled white rice with a dollop of red ketchup) is like a terrifying angel until he falls into worldly entanglement via his identification with the lives and loves of others. Lest we miss the association von Donnersmarck makes between politics and religion, the sacrificed human here is named Christa-Maria. The film seems to make use of Alain Badiou's idea of 'the event' (broadly to be found under the categories of Art, Love, Politics, and Science) as that which 'seizes' us, as act, and thereby demands our fidelity to it.
Set in the GDR before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the film's protagonist lovers are Georg Dreyman (a celebrated writer) and Christa-Maria Sieland (a celebrated actress). Perhaps the most telling moment of Wiesler's identification with others is the moment at which the film cuts, from Dreyman's spooned holding of Christa-Maria after her sexual violation by the politician Bruno Hempf, to Wiesler's similarly inclined listening and witnessing body. Later, Wiesler tells Christa-Maria that she is 'most real' when she acts, and the film appears to play out the different ways in which individuals can be seized by art, love, politics, and (in this film) the 'science' - in both senses, as idea and as super-efficient technology and bureaucracy - of marxism. But the film's critique, it seems to me, is not really directed towards a now nearly twenty year's past communist utopianism. Rather, it is directed towards modernity's, still unfallen, abstract fantasy of a fully knowable, fully surveilled world managed by instrumental rationality.
Widely taken as straightforward critique of the inhumanity of totalitarianism in the former GDR (and rumoured to be due for a Hollywood remake to spread the good news), The Lives of Others appears to take as its text the idea, wrongly attributed to Edmund Burke, that 'for evil to triumph all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing'. One of the film's central tropes hangs around the gift - a music score of 'Sonata for a Good Man' - from a blacklisted theatre director, Albert Jerska, to the film's writer-protagonist Georg Dreyman. Shortly after delivering his gift, Jerska, deprived of all hope of future creativity because his creativity depends upon the creative lives of others, commits suicide. Following news of Jerska's death, Dreyman plays the piece on his piano and, at its conclusion, says to his lover Christa-Maria, "Is it possible that some-one who had heard that music - I mean really heard it - could be all bad?". Unbeknownst to him, the music has been heard, really heard, by the Stasi agent, Wiesler, who has been assigned to monitor Dreyman's bugged apartment, and who is listening to these events unfolding. Wiesler's own moral idealism, which has led to his commitment to the communist state, is similarly rendered hopeless by the revelation that the entrapment of Dreyman has been engineered by the Minister for Culture Hempf's desire for Christa-Maria. Seized by his act of witness and the music's power, Wiesler begins the series of subterfuges by which he will protect Dreyman from the Stasi's investigations. This will become ever more urgent as Dreyman, inspired by Christa-Maria's decision to resist the Minister's exploitation of her, decides, himself, to act by writing an article on GDR suicide rates (unpublished since 1977) for Der Spiegel. His article, which is smuggled to the West, begins by noting that the complete and detailed surveillance accomplished by the Stasi, in which figures are collated on every detail of each East German citizen's life, falls uncannily silent on one score alone: that of the GDR's suicide rates, until 1977 second only to Hungary's, and, in 1977 itself, presumably exceeding even those.
Wiesler takes two things from Dreyman's apartment; one is the typewriter that would otherwise incriminate the playwright, the other is a book by the East German Bertolt Brecht. The film surely recalls us to Brecht's poem 'To Posterity', which is about the experiential chaos of caring about an interconnected world of human and more than human relationship, whilst finding oneself driven to inhuman means, and the ignoring of that interrelatedness, in order to achieve a world in which such interconnectedness might be realised:
You, who shall emerge from the flood
In which we are sinking,
Think -
When you speak of our weaknesses,
Also of the dark time
That brought them forth.For we went, changing our country more often than our shoes.
In the class war, despairing
When there was only injustice and no resistance.For we knew only too well:
Even the hatred of squalor
Makes the brow grow stern.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we
Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.But you, when at last it comes to pass
That man can help his fellow man,
Do no judge us
Too harshly.
But this divorcing of practical means from valued ends is like hoping a tree will grow strong if you keep hacking at its green shoots. The organic understanding reveals the poverty of the abstracted idea. The film ends a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Wiesler, working as a postman (angels are always messengers), sees Dreyman's new novel Sonata for a Good Man in a Marxist bookshop and discovers that it is dedicated, under his Stasi agent code number, to him.
The point of saying all this is not to leave the old terms 'reason' and 'belief' in place while merely affirming the superiority of one: in fact human reasoning depends on both. It is to say, rather, that all world-modellings involve beliefs. Science is our most creatively brilliant way of understanding the world yet. But it, too, always takes place in the context of systems of belief. Ernst Mayr, affirming that all life is teleological, tells how, until recently, biologists risked their careers if they seemed to attribute purposes to living things. This is beginning to change, and, indeed, the scientific way of modelling the world is one that is premised on the possibility of change via the building of better models.
So the enemy isn't belief; many scientists see deeper, spiritual or religious purposes in the extraordinary world revealed, for example, by physics and by evolutionary biology. Moving beyond a belief in reductionism as the only source of explanation, science moves in the direction of ever more complex understandings of complex life. Equally, spiritual traditions may offer profound insights, not least because they are able to deal in values. But, as Hilary Putnam has recently argued, 'value and normativity … permeate all of experience', and 'theory selection always presupposes values'. As biology becomes able to talk about natural purposes and flourishing, and as we understand that we are natural creatures, and that culture is the way that nature has evolved with us, it may become easier to talk about human flourishing as necessarily including both material and spiritual well-being and flourishing.
Unicef's 2007 Report Card 7: Child Poverty in Perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries , in which Britain came bottom, just below the United States, on scores for ruined childhood, certainly suggests we could do with some values, beyond materialistic ones alone, to pass on to our broken kids and the future. What we need to move beyond is not simply the arid conflict between reason and belief, but, much more importantly, all fundamentalism and 'epistemological self-righteousness' of any sort - whether scientific, political, or religious - wherever it is found. Understood properly - in terms of the quality of experience rather than in the mealy-mouthed language of neo-liberal utility - environmental values, including spiritual ones, might be a good place to start.
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