Letter #250: Irrational Rationality
Do NOT Follow the Science
Spence!
Many years ago, I was writing a crime novel in which mobsters buried a man in the concrete foundation of a building. That way, once the building was erected, the corpse would never be found. I wanted the scene to be realistic, but how could you do the necessary research in that pre-internet age?
I was sitting alone at a Christmas party when a stranger sat down next to me and started a conversation. He said he was in the construction business. So I asked him my question.
The man proceeded to describe in terrifying detail exactly how to bury a man in concrete and what would happen if you did. I (because I’m an idiot) responded by making a joke about the notorious crime boss John Gotti. The man then explained to me that John was a wonderful fellow and I shouldn’t believe all the terrible things I read about him in the paper. In short, the guy was a mobster involved in the construction business — which is to say, he was the exact person I needed to speak to!
I’m sure you’ve noticed that the world of reading and writing is rife with such meaningful coincidences. The mystic Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called this “synchronicity.” Which makes it synchronicity that, right after reading your last letter, I was reading Carl Jung and came upon a passage that seemed to answer you directly.
You raised the issue of “modern science-worshipping would-be despots” who “want to bring the whole world under one system of order and measurement, one perfectly calibrated language of numbers, time, and space that will lock the world into an unchanging order they can control.”
Jung, writing in 1957 near the end of his life, said this: “Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge and therefore imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role. The individual, however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality.”
In other words, there is something inherent in a scientific — or even just a rational — view of the world, that is not only unrealistic, but oppressively antithetical to our humanity.
This fits in nicely with the view of modern philosopher Iain McGilchrist, who believes the theorizing left hemisphere of the brain has usurped the proper throne of the right hemisphere, which experiences the world as a holistic gestalt.
It is interesting that both Jung — who described atheism as “an urban neurosis” — and McGilchrist — who derides materialist thinking as “nothing buttery,” — must go to great philosophical lengths before expressing or half-expressing a belief in the existence of God. It is as if they are decrying the mental cage in which we have found ourselves while locked inside the cage themselves.
I think what we’re facing is a massive cultural task: the task of teaching the learned to rediscover what any fool could once plainly see.
Love, Dad
Common sense of the rural people. I grew up in the country. Nature always fascinated me. My mother had her first three children baptized in the Catholic Church as infants. Therefore, like Hannah giving Samuel to the service of God, my mother wished that for all three of us. I have two other siblings, but I am the only one practicing my faith.
On June 11th I will have been a practicing Catholic for 2 years. My formation in the Church was mostly in the First Assembly of God Church and the Baptist Church. I was introduced to liturgy only in 2015 at an evangelical-episcopal church in Jenks, OK. Listening to the Daily Wire and Michael Knowles I heard about the Latin Mass controversy and watched 2 documentaries on it. In one of the documentaries a Latin Mass was shown and the Holy Spirit touched me even though I didn't understand Latin. It made me weep, so I knew it was of God via the Holy Spirit.
I attended the University of Oklahoma from 1983-1987 in Microbiology, 10 hours short of a B.S., but I did graduate from the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine in 1991 and trained for 22 months in General Surgery at KUMC.
Higher education never affected my faith negatively because I was reared in a rural setting and never lost my awe and wonder if the created world. Everything and most everyone has disappointed me in this life. But in spite of all the pain and suffering I have endured, Jesus and the Holy Spirit never abandoned me. The unseen world is more real to me than the seen.
When I became a prodigal for a few years from age 28-43 I always ran back to the Church and the love of Christ because the darkness and evil of this world scared me severely.
To me, the Catholic Church has the whole story, but is in need of reform because Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism has definitely crept into the Church I used to attend. Jesus has never failed me and my higher education never decreased my faith. It actually increased my faith in God.
Just look at creation, it screams of a loving Creator.
“We have now sunk to such a depth that the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” - George Orwell