Neo-Manichaeism, Technological “Progress” and the Ethics of War

 

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”  -  Robert E. Lee

 

Suppose that you were addressing an academic symposium on the subject of the ethics of war and you opened with the above quotation.   Further suppose that immediately after doing so you invited your audience for their thoughts on these famous words.

 

In all likelihood what you would get, would not be insightful reflection upon what the Confederate general-in-chief had actually said, either in agreement or disagreement, but a round of vitriolic denunciation of the man who said it.    It would begin with the small handful in the room who were informed enough to recognize who Robert E. Lee was, but would quickly spread to the rest as everyone present, whether they be faculty, administration, student or alumnus, began to compete with everyone else to demonstrate their woke, anti-racist, bona fides by being the loudest to express their opinion about  just what a horrible person you had just quoted.   You would be told that you should not have quoted him, because he led the South which fought for slavery which was racist and that therefore he must be condemned and cancelled.   

 

Should you be so suicidal as to attempt to correct the mob you had incited, by informing them that their knowledge was woefully inadequate and that the real story of man they were subjecting to a “Two-Minute Hate” was far more nuanced and interesting than they thought, explaining how he was the career military officer to whom Abraham Lincoln had offered command of the Union forces at the onset of the American republic’s great internecine bloodbath, but who turned it down and resigned rather than raise his sword against his own home state, to which he then offered his services, consequently becoming the strategist who delayed the defeat of the Southern states’ attempt to break away from the American union for complex reasons of which slavery was only one for longer than would have been possible under any other general and you yourself will be condemned as a racist, bigot, white supremacist and all sorts of other nasty names that have long ago been detached from any essential relationship with their lexical meaning and turned into verbal weapons.

 

Now, it may have occurred to you that in the preceding paragraphs I have myself done one of the things I have been mocking the academic woke for doing, that is, sidetracked what was supposed to be a discussion of the ethics of war, the topic of both your academic presentation in the above hypothetical scenario and of this essay, by going on about something else entirely.    The similarity is superficial, I assure you, and, oddly enough, you will find that the scenario is actually more relevant to our topic than the quotation itself.    

 

Indeed, as far as the words themselves go, General Lee’s remark does not contribute much to the discussion of the ethics of war.   The first clause can be taken as support for the assertion that war is an evil.   This, however, is neither a controversial assertion nor an ethical one.   It would be the latter if the indefinite article had been omitted before “evil”, but “an evil” is not the same thing as “evil”.  Evil, sans article, can be used as either an adjective or a noun.   If used as the former it expresses an ethical judgement on that to which the adjective applied.   If used as the latter, it expresses the idea of that which is the opposite of goodness, or, in terms more acceptable to orthodox Christianity, the defect that occurs when the goodness of creation is damaged.   When used with the indefinite article, however, it does not necessarily have these moral and metaphysical connotations but means merely something that is undesirable to those who experience it and its consequences.   Earthquakes, floods, fires, etc., are all “evils” in this sense.   In this sense, saying that war is an evil is stating the obvious.   

 

For the purposes of this essay the most important thing about the general’s saying is when he said it.   I don’t mean that the date – the thirteenth of December, 1862 – or the occasion – the Battle of Fredericksburg – are particularly significant, just the war.

 

Was the War between the American States the last pre-modern war or the first modern war?

 

If you ask historians that question you will find that they are divided on the answer.   If it is not obvious enough already, note that “modern” here is the designation of a kind of warfare not of the age in which a war took place.   1861-1865 was far closer to the end of the Modern Age than the beginning and so it would be absurd to even ask the question with the chronological sense of the term in mind.   The case for the war being the first modern war rests upon it having been fought with more technologically complex arms and means of communication and transportation than previous wars.   The case against it rests upon the even greater gap in technological complexity that exists between this war and the earliest wars of the twentieth century – World War I saw the first use of armoured motorized land vehicles, i.e., tanks, the Italo-Turkish War which preceded World War I by three years was the first war to employ airplanes, etc.

 

Regardless of the answer to the question, it is apparent that General Lee’s words were stated during a war that was transitional between the old kind of horses and swords warfare that had been a part of human life since ancient times and the high tech warfare of the twentieth and twenty first centuries.    Now think about what that means with regards to the quotation.    If General Lee was right to say “war is so terrible” in 1862, how much more true is this in the world of 2022 in which devices that can kill thousands of people at once can be dropped for airborne vehicles or shot from launchers a continent away?

 

Twentieth century technological development by making war so much more of an evil than ever before made the ethics of war more necessary than before.   Ethics is serious thought and discussion about human acts and habitual behaviour considered with regards to their rightness and wrongness.   Every aspect of war has been examined over the course of the long historical ethical discussion of war but it has long been apparent that the chief questions to be considered are two, the question of rightness as it pertains to going to war and the question of rightness as it pertains to conducting warfare.   These are the questions expressed in Latin by the phrases jus ad bellum and jus in bello respectively.   Perversely, at the same time that the development of weapons of mass destruction, rapid delivery systems, and everything that makes it now possible to wipe out entire populations from across the world with the push of a button made the ethics restraining and limiting war more important, these ethics were being subverted.

 

Essentially the complex ethical questions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello have been displaced by an over simplistic question of good and evil.   Not the metaphysical and theological question of good and evil.   It is an ontological question – an ontological question, not the ontological question of good and evil, although those asking it demonstrate by doing so that they have much in common with an ancient sect that answered the latter in a way that would be considered heretical by the standards of orthodox Christianity.  It is the question of who the good guys and who the bad guys are.   Or, more precisely, just the question of who the bad guys are because the sort of people who ask this question always assume that they themselves are the good guys.  Again, the way this question is asked it is a matter of ontology rather than ethics.   The good guys are not judged to be the good guys because of the rightness of the actions, the bad guys are not judged to be the bad guys because of the wrongness of their actions.   The good guys are the good guys because that is who they are.   The bad guys are the bad guys because that is who they are.   Identify the good guys and the bad guys and you don’t have to trouble yourself with the question of whether you are justified in going to war with X.    Of course you are.   You are the good guy, X is the bad guy, therefore you are always right to go to war with X, just as he is always wrong to go to war with you or anyone else.   Similarly, you need not be bothered with the question of how you are to rightly conduct war with X.   Since he is the bad guy, you as the good guy, are justified in taking whatever means are necessary to destroy him, whereas everything he does is by definition a war crime.

 

The sort of thinking described in the above paragraph has been prominently on display in the rhetoric of war promoters in every conflict that Western governments have been involved in since the end of the Cold War.    Think about the terms in which Saddam Hussein was discussed in 1991 and again in 2003.   Or Slobodon Milošević from 1993 to 1999.   Or the Taliban in 2001.   Or Vladimir Putin for the last twenty years but especially at the present moment.   It was never enough to say that we had such and such a grievance against these and were prepared to go to war to obtain redress of that grievance.   In each case the foe was depicted as an avatar – avatar in the Hindu sense of the word, i.e., a manifestation of a divine being rather than the gaming sense of a picture accompanying a profile – of evil.   Only so could we justify to ourselves doing everything in our power to destroy them.   The same sort of thinking was evident in the rhetoric of both sides during the Cold War.   Before that the Allies engaged in this sort of thinking in World War II, at least after the Americans joined.  

 

World War II seems to be where it all began.   Germany at the time was under the control of a man who was undoubtedly evil in the adjectival sense of the word described in the fifth paragraph of this essay.   This made it easier for our leaders to paint him as the avatar, the embodiment, the incarnation of evil, even though one of the Big Three, Joseph Stalin was just as evil and the same kind of evil as Hitler.    The fact that this depiction of our wartime nemesis persists to this day, almost eighty years after his defeat, itself shows that a major change in thinking had taken place from one World War to the next.   Sure, there had been plenty of propagandistic atrocity stories told about the Germans in World War I but people knew better then than to take these as Gospel truth and most of them were debunked soon after the war ended.   By contrast, to this day questioning elements of the accounts of what went on in German-occupied Poland during World War II can land one with a hefty gaol sentence in Europe and potentially destroy one’s career, reputation, and life in general in North America.    The contrast is that much stronger when we take into consideration the facts that it was the Soviets who drove the Nazis out of Poland, Poland remained a Soviet puppet state until late in the 1980s, until then we had to rely to a large extent upon the Soviets or Soviet-controlled sources for much of our information about what had happened in Poland, that the Soviets were never known for their trustworthiness and that the Cold War which began almost immediately after World War II ended hardly provided them with an incentive to be more truthful.   Even more to the point, however, was the fact that after the Casablanca Conference in 1943 the American president at the time, who was even more crippled morally and intellectually than he was physically, announced that the Allies would be seeking “unconditional surrender”.   From a strategic point of view this was a particularly idiotic thing to do as Sir Winston Churchill, whom FDR had not consulted before making this announcement and was forced to go along with it or present the world with the image of a divided alliance, knew full well, because it sent the message to the enemy that he must dig in and fight to the very last because he can expect nothing in the way of mercy if he loses.   From the ethical point of view that concerns us here, it is the sort of demand that one would only make if he saw him and his enemy as fighting not a traditional war but a cosmic and apocalyptic one between good and evil, which is precisely how that maniac with a Messiah complex saw it.   How Sir Winston was able to stomach being forced to cooperate with this man and Stalin for so long is one of the great mysteries of the Second World War. 

 

In one last detail of the Second World War we find the technological transformation of warfare itself into an evil of exponentially greater magnitude and the subversion of the traditional ethics of war by the Hollywood formula of good guys versus bad guys coinciding into one.   By the end of the war the Americans had found a way to harness the power of the atom to develop bombs with destructive power that had to be measured in kilotons each of which is the equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT.   Then they used two of them, one on Hiroshima, Japan and the other on Nagasaki, Japan, in August of 1945.   The death toll, almost entirely civilian, was somewhere between one and three hundred thousand.   To date this is the only time nuclear weapons have been used in war.   While some continue to repeat the claim that the death toll would have been higher had they not been used, this is utter nonsense.   After the defeat of Germany Japan began reaching out to General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the Allied forces in the Pacific Theatre, indicating their willingness to surrender and asking no concessions other than the ones they were eventually granted.   Had Roosevelt’s successor Truman followed the advice given him by former American president Herbert Hoover – drop “unconditional surrender”, promise that Emperor Hirohito could keep his throne and would not be dragged before the kind of Soviet-style kangaroo court that the Allies had in mind for the German leaders (see the eighth and final profile in John F. Kennedy and Ted Sorenson’s Profiles in Courage, 1956, for an account of Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft’s brave and lonely opposition to the Nuremberg Trials on the grounds that they abandoned the principles of justice long accepted in the English speaking world, even the United States, for those of the Soviet regime) they could have negotiated peace without becoming the only country to have ever committed the barbarous act of dropping nuclear bombs on cities (see Freedom Betrayed by Herbert Hoover, edited by George H. Nash and published in 2011, long after Hoover’s death).

 

Could this ugly episode have taken place had the development of weapons that could wipe out entire civilian populations not occurred at precisely the moment that those who had developed these weapons had thrown out traditional thinking on the ethics of war and adopted the insane notion, evident in their “unconditional surrender” policy, that because they were the “good guys” they could do whatever they wanted to the “bad guys”?

 

Indeed, it is possible that the development of these weapons is itself the explanation of the abandonment of serious thought about the ethics of war for such a shallow, clownish, Hollywood substitute.   Discussion of the weaponizing of atomic energy had begun before the Manhattan Project or, for that matter, World War II itself and was perhaps the inevitable consequence of atomic research.   It might be worth noting, in this context, the famous 1869 conversation between Marcellin Berthelot, Claude Bernard, and the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, that the latter recorded in their Journal, in which it was predicted that a century of research in physical and chemical science would bring man to a knowledge of the atom at which point God would come down from heaven, swinging His big set of keys, and telling mankind it is “closing time”.  Modern science had placed mankind on a course that led to the development of weapons of such destructive potential that could not possibly be used in accordance with traditional concepts of justice in war.   Therefore those intent on using them had to replace the latter with something else.  

 

Think about how the World War II paradigm has been applied to all subsequent conflicts.  Adolf Hitler continues to be described in terms similar to those that in traditional Christian eschatology are applied to the Antichrist.   In traditional Christian eschatology, however, the Antichrist, singular, is the final antichrist and the final tyrant, the most evil man to ever walk the face of the earth, a man so fully possessed by the devil that he is basically the incarnation of Satan.   In traditional Christian eschatology there is only one Antichrist, capital A.   His defeat marks the end of history and the Second Coming of Christ.   The point is that if Hitler, evil as he was, was so bad as to warrant this kind of description not only in the propaganda of the day but long after he was gone he would be a historical anomaly.   Yet every foe we have fought since him has been depicted as the “new Hitler”.   Could this be explained by the fact that the genie of nuclear weaponry cannot be put back into its bottle and so this sort of rhetoric has constantly been repeated just in case a “justification” for using it is needed?

 

Today, the Hollywood paradigm of these are the “good guys”, these are the “bad guys”, whatever the former do is right, whatever the latter do is wrong, has been projected even onto conflicts of the past which predated it.    Think about the predictable response of the academic woke to the quotation from Robert E. Lee discussed at the beginning of this essay.   The woke look at the War Between the States from 1861 to 1865 as a war between the “good” North and the “bad” South, basing this entirely upon what they think they know about the aspect of the conflict that pertained to slavery and race.   This was certainly not how the war was viewed at the time, even by the most self-righteous of abolitionists on the Union side.   Nor is this how the conflict was viewed in the period of the generation or so after in which one of the most admirable acts of reconciling a deep societal divide took place as all Americans came to a tacit agreement to honour the heroes of both sides of that war.  That the woke who spend so much of their time in fomenting division between people of different skin colours and ethnic backgrounds see nothing but “racism” and “white supremacy” in such a healing compromise speaks volumes about themselves.

 

How contrary the Hollywood paradigm is to the attitude of the ancients!   Homer’s epic poem the Iliad, composed in the eight century BC, is primarily the story of a falling out that occurred between Agamemnon and Achilles towards the end of the Trojan War.   The Trojan War was the ten year siege of Troy, the capital of the kingdom of Ilium in what is now Turkey, by the Mycenean Greek alliance, that resulted in the total destruction of the city.   Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, was the leader of the Greek side, and Achilles, prince of the Myrmidons, was its greatest hero.  The Ionian poet Homer was himself Greek.   Homer’s poetry was instrumental in shaping the idea of a “Greek” identity that transcended that of the Athenian, Spartan, Cretan, or any of the countless other political identities of the autonomous city-states of which Greece then and for centuries after consisted.   The individual that he most consistently depicts as admirable in his Iliad, however, was not a Greek at all but a Trojan, Hector, the son of Troy’s king Priam, and brother of the far less commendable Paris whose behaviour started the conflict in the first place.   Hector is depicted as the model whom every would-be hero should aspire to emulate.   By contrast Achilles, the protagonist of the story, sits out half of it in a sulky fit then, when he re-enters the battle in a fit of rage over the death of Patrocles, proceeds to desecrate the body of the fallen Hector in a way that brings him a swift rebuke from the gods.   Homer shows him at his best at the very end of the story when he shows clemency to Priam, allows the Trojan king to reclaim the body of his son, and promises to hold back the Greeks until the Trojans have had the time to conduct a proper burial.    Herodotus of Halicarnassus, a fifth century BC Greek who was born and raised in the Persian Empire and became the “Father of History” by writing the account of the wars between the Greeks and the Persians saw no need to demonize the kings of Persia in his history.   Thucydides, who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War fought between Athens and Sparta later in that same century, a war in which he had been an Athenian general, was more sympathetic to Sparta than his own city.  So was Xenophon, the friend and disciple of Socrates – the only one of these other than Plato whose accounts of their master remain extant – best remembered for his account of his mercenary service under Persian prince Cyrus the Younger, who picked up the history where Thucydides left off.   The Romans were far less generous to their enemies than the Greeks were but they did not demonize them the way the Hollywood-fed West now does.   The greatest enemy that ancient Rome faced in her long rise to empire was Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who from his base in Carthagian-controlled Hispania, marched his massive army of infantry, cavalry, and battle elephants – the pre-modern version of tanks – north to the Rhône valley, before moving south through the Alps to invade Italy where he defeated Rome and her allies in a series of battles taking much of Italy, although ultimately failing to take Rome herself.   Hannibal was the son of Hamilcar Barca, the Carthaginian general Rome had defeated in the first of the Punic Wars.  When Hannibal was nine Hamilcar Barca took him to the temple of Moloch and holding him over the fire made him swear eternal hatred and enmity to Rome.   Yet even he is not depicted by Livy or Polybius in the sort of terms with which we speak of Hitler but was rather spoken of respectfully as a worthy, if mercifully defeated, foe.

 

Some might point to the Old Testament as a counterexample to the above.   While it is true that the Old Testament repeatedly speaks of military defeat as punishment for wickedness this wickedness is understood in terms of the actions of those so punished not the fundamental nature of their being.   This can be seen in the fact that far more often than not it is God’s own people who are on the receiving end of this punishment.   In their initial conquest of the Promised Land, it is true, they are commanded to utterly destroy the seven nations of Canaan and to show no mercy in doing so and this is explicitly tied to specific sins of those nations.   Pretty much everyone else in the region was guilty of these same sins, however, and there was no license given to Old Testament Israel to conquer all of these and similarly wipe them out.   It was not merely a matter of punishing sin.   God did not want His own covenant people to be led away into idolatry, child-sacrifice, and the other abominations of Canaan.   They, of course, failed to follow His instructions and very quickly fell into just these sins leading to the cycle that repeated itself over and over through their history – they fall into idolatry, etc., God raises up a scourge to punish them by military conquest, they repent, God sends them a deliverer, repeat, with the whole process intensifying until the Assyrians and Babylonians not only conquer the Northern and Southern kingdoms respectively, but carry them away out of the land as well.   There is nothing in this that would support God’s people holding the view that the world is divided into “good guys” and “bad guys” with they themselves as God’s people being the “good guys” and everyone else, the nations that they conquered and the nations that conquered them, being the “bad guys”.  

 

When we look at the long ethical discussion of justice as it relates to war from its beginnings in the ancient times just considered through medieval Christian theology right up to the early twentieth century it is apparent that the goal of those engaged in this discussion and hence the purpose of the discussion itself has been to place limits on war so as to minimize the death and destruction it causes.   It is equally apparent that substituting puerile “good guys” versus “bad guys” talk for this discussion has as its purpose the opposite end – that of the removal of such limits as impediments to the use of the new technology of war that makes it easier to wreak more destruction and death from further away.

 

It is difficult to think of anything that more completely puts the lie to the Modern doctrine of progress than this.   What we call “advancement” and “progress” in the technology of war all consists of making war more lethal and destructive while removing those who wreak this death and destruction further from it.   When wars were fought with swords you had to kill your enemy from within the reach of his own sword.   The fighting therefore was much more fair in the pre-woke sense of the word and the virtues traditionally associated with warfare, most especially courage and strength, were indispensable.   Fighting in such a war was a way to test and prove these virtues in oneself and this is probably what inspired the second part of General Lee’s quotation, the part about us growing too fond of war.   If the terribleness of war from the first part of the quotation means that war is an evil, its value in testing courage, strength, and what used to be called manliness before toxic femininity outlawed that concept which drew so many to it meant that it was not an unmixed evil.   When guns were introduced men could kill their enemies from a distance.   There was still a testing of skill – who had the better aim, who could shoot faster – and courage involved.   It was a step that increased the distance between the soldier and the death he wreaked but two soldiers aiming rifles at each other from across a contested field are still a lot closer to two knights fighting with swords and lances than someone sitting behind a computer somewhere miles away, perhaps half the world away, from the buildings he destroys and the hundreds or potentially thousands of people he kills by the press of a button.   That is the generic “he” by the way.   I have seen those who regard this as “progress” celebrate the fact that it eliminates the “sexism” of war because women are just as capable of sitting behind computer consoles and pressing buttons as men.    That puts a whole new spin on Rudyard Kipling’s “the female of the species is more deadly than the male”.    

 

By making war so much more deadly and destructive and so much more remote from those who start it, technological “progress” has made it virtually impossible to adhere to traditional jus in bello standards, such as minimizing harm to non-combatants.  These are sometimes still offered lip service, of course, but this has increasingly become a joke.   Paradoxically, the very thing that makes it so hard to adhere to these standards also makes it all the more necessary that we do so.   This means that it is that much more important to follow jus ad bellum standards.   We cannot do this so long as we continue to follow the Hollywood neo-Manichaeism that has prevailed since World War II.   The sooner we abandon this modern take on an ancient heresy the better.

 

 

Man and Machine: Part Two

Science Falsely So Called


This summer I re-read The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth century, three-part epic poem. The poem begins with the author-narrator, lost in the woods, beset upon by wild beasts, when he is rescued by Virgil, the Roman poet. Virgil tells him, that he has come back from the underworld at the request of Beatrice who, having obtained this special grace for Dante, had sent Virgil to be his guide through the lands of the dead. In the first part of the poem, the Inferno, Virgil guides Dante down through the circles of hell, from limbo at the top, where virtuous pagans who lived without the grace of baptism exist without torment or hope, to the prison of Lucifer at the heart of the earth. In the second part of the poem, the Purgatorio, Virgil guides Dante up the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory, located on an island in the Southern Hemisphere. On each terrace, the redeemed are purged of one of the seven deadly sins. Finally, at the top, they arrive at Earthly Paradise, the Garden of Eden, which is as far as Virgil, who represents pagan reason and virtue can bring him. There, the mysterious Matilda meets them and brings Dante to Beatrice, the symbol of divine love and wisdom, who guides him for the rest of his journey in the Paradiso, through the abode of the blessed in the celestial spheres and into the very presence of God.

I confess that I have always found the first part of this poem to be the most interesting and have read the Inferno far more often than I have read either of the other parts or the Divine Comedy as a whole. I suspect I am not alone in this either. For some perverse reason the sufferings of the damned seem more interesting than the joys of the blessed. This time was no different and in the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno something caught my attention.

At this point in the story, Virgil and Dante are approaching the very bottom of the pit. They are in the Malebolge, the eighth circle of hell in which fraud is punished. To get through the Malebolge to reach the ninth and final circle, the circle of traitors, they have to pass through ten ditches and in the eighth of these they encounter the false counsellors, the liars, who are encased in tongues of fire. Among these they find Ulysses, the king of Ithaca, whose wiles and tricks helped the Greeks to win the Trojan War. He was the hero of Homer’s Odyssey but not thought highly of by the Romans, who saw themselves as the heirs of Troy. He speaks to Dante and tells the story of his final voyage. After the events recounted in the Odyssey, his love for his family proved insufficient to “overcome in me the zeal I had, To' explore the world, and search the ways of life, Man's evil and his virtue” (1) and so he set sail again, this time to the west, past the pillars of Hercules, out into the ocean where he spotted a mountain, “loftiest methought Of all I e'er beheld.” (2) This was Mt. Purgatory, and when he attempted to approach it, a whirlwind from the island struck his vessel, whirled it around in the waves three times, then sank it on the fourth.

As I read this story this summer, certain lines ran through my head. “It may be that the gulfs will wash us down/It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles”. These lines occur towards the end of a poem that I committed to heart some time ago, “Ulysses” by Victorian Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson. (3) I was astonished to realize the connection between the two poems in which the same story is told from such remarkably different standpoints, but it is undeniable. Tennyson’s poem begins with a restless Ulysses, after his return to Ithica, begrudging the dreariness of his existence and “how dull it is to pause to make an end/To rust unburnished, not to shine in use” while his spirit was “yearning in desire/To follow knowledge like a sinking star/Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” He praises his son Telemachus, “to whom I leave the scepter and the isle” and then, in the final stanza of the poem Ulysses reveals that he is at the port, addressing his mariners as the “vessel puffs her sail.” He commands the crew to set out, for “my purpose holds/To sail beyond the sunset and the bath/Of all the western stars until I die”. There is only one version of the story of Ulysses prior to Tennyson’s poem that includes this voyage, a version the divergences of which from the classical myth are followed by Tennyson, and which is clearly Tennyson’s source. The voyage that Tennyson’s Ulysses is about to set out upon is the one Dante’s Ulysses recounts in hell.

This puts Tennyson’s poem into a rather interesting new light. Tennyson’s Ulysses has generally been understood as a sympathetic, admirable, noble, and heroic character. This is certainly how I had always read him. Throughout the poem, the Ithican king joins recognition of age and the inevitability of death with a determination to seek life, experience, and knowledge and set his will against fate, culminating in the famous, oft-quoted concluding lines in which he declares that though ”We are not now that strength which in old days/Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;/One equal temper of heroic hearts/Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.” In popular culture, these lines are often quoted as a statement of defiance, on the part of a hero fighting against seemingly unbeatable forces. Literary critics, have often seen in the spirit of Tennyson’s Ulysses, a personification of Victorian England herself and the driving will behind both her Empire and her scientific discoveries and achievements. It would not a huge leap to extrapolate from this an interpretation of Tennyson’s Ulysses as the embodiment of what Oswald Spenger identified as the Faustian soul of modern Western civilization – the rejection of limitations and the striving for the infinite.

Yet that very term “Faustian” brings us back to where Tennyson borrowed the story from in the first place. Spengler’s Faust, was Goethe’s Faust. Goethe had taken the old legend and re-shaped it, turning the lecherous old scholar who sells his soul for youth and worldly gain, into a noble figure, a flawed tragic hero who makes a bad bargain to attain unlimited, knowledge. In the end, having won his bet with the devil by finding happiness in doing good, the soul of Goethe’s Faust is snatched by the angels from the clutches of Mephistopheles and brought into the presence of God. In a sense, Goethe’s reinterpretation of the Faust legend is similar to Tennyson’s reinterpretation of Dante’s Ulysses. In both reinterpretations, a character who in the original brings about his own destruction through arrogant foolishness is made into an example of a noble spirit, who defies chance and fate in pursuit of knowledge, who is to be emulated and who embodies the modern scientific spirit of nineteenth century Germany in the one instance and Victorian England in the other.

When a story is reinterpreted like this, the person doing the retelling feels that they can bring to light something in the story that had previously been neglected or overlooked. Perhaps, however, it is the older stories that can shed a light on elements of the newer. If Goethe’s Faust and Tennyson’s Ulysses represent the spirit of the scientific age, perhaps the way these characters are depicted in earlier versions of their stories, like Dante’s Inferno, and the fate that awaited them there, contains an insight into modern science that has been lost along the way.

Science is a word that comes to us from the Latin word scientia which simply meant knowledge, the very thing which Goethe’s Faust and Dante and Tennyson’s Ulysses, were seeking. Any sort of knowledge, whether it was knowledge of the natural world, practical knowledge of how to do things, or philosophical and theological knowledge, was originally considered to be a science. Today, we ordinarily limit the use of the word science to the physical or natural sciences, knowledge of the world of matter and energy. Even the so-called social sciences, like psychology and sociology, fall under this category because they treat human behaviour as a phenomenon of the physical world, produced by natural forces and processes, and to be studied according in the same way in which a chemist studies chemical processes or a physicist studies bodies and motion.

Why is it that we now reserve the word science for methodically precise, systematically organized, knowledge of the physical world?

This usage reflects a judgement that modern man has made, the judgement that this kind of knowledge is either more important than all other kinds of knowledge or the only true kind of knowledge that there is. This same judgement is also reflected in the way modern man has devoted so much of his energies to amassing this type of knowledge at the expense of all other types.

On what basis did modern man make this judgement? Was he right to do so?

The true believers and advocates of modern science would say that the judgement is true, that what we now call scientific knowledge is the only true and/or important kind of knowledge, that modern man was right therefore to judge it to be so, and that modern man arrived at this recognition of scientific knowledge as the only knowledge by dedicating himself to the pursuit of truth.

I disagree. Modern scientific knowledge’s chief appeal to man is clearly its usefulness to him. By means of modern scientific knowledge man can harness the forces and processes of the universe and make them serve his bidding. This is, in fact, how man has used this knowledge. He has put the power of wind, water, steam, fossil fuels, and even the energies that bind the atom together to work for him. Surely this, and not some high and noble search for the truth, is the real motivation behind modern science.

The idea that modern science has truth as its aim is actually quite laughable. Premodern man built his civilizations on the idea that truth, beauty, and goodness were real and absolute, that they were out there for man to seek, to strive for, and to find and that it was in the striving for these that man developed the virtue and character in which true happiness lies. Modern man rejected the absolute and transcendental in favour of substitutes for these that he chooses and creates for himself. As George Grant put it “’values’ are supposed to be the creations of human beings and have, linguistically, taken the place of the traditional ‘good,’ which was not created but recognized.” (4) That modern man has done exactly the same thing with beauty is evident in much of what has been produced under the label “art” in the last century. (5) “Truth” too, is treated by modern man, not as something that is, but as something for man to decide upon, choose, and create for himself.

Science’s esteem with modern man comes primarily from its usefulness to him not its ability to tell man the truth about himself and the world he lives in. Often modern man fails to distinguish between the two and believes that because science can do and has done so many things for him that it can therefore be relied upon as an authoritative source of true knowledge about the universe. Truth does not necessarily go together with usefulness, however, as the history of science shows.

Throughout history man has used scientific hypotheses to invent techniques and devices that have been very useful to him. That same history is the history of the constant replacement of old hypotheses with new ones. A hypothesis is devised, tested, taken to be valid, from that hypothesis a useful invention is created, and then at a later date the hypothesis is overthrown and replaced with a better one. That the hypothesis later proves to be false did not prevent it from being useful. Usefulness and truth are therefore quite separate qualities indeed.

In fact, one of the most important ideas put forward in the philosophy of science in the twentieth century, is the idea that a scientific theory is to be distinguished from non-scientific theories, by its falsifiability. For a theory to be falsifiable it must be vulnerable to evidence that will show it to be false. A theory that can accommodate or adjust itself to all possible evidence cannot be disproven. Such a theory, Sir Karl Popper argued, is not scientific because it is not falsifiable. Popper’s idea challenged the older idea that to be scientific, a theory had to be verifiable, i.e., capable of being demonstrated to be true.

Popper did not mean by this, of course, that to be scientific, a theory had to be false. One could perhaps reason to that conclusion by arguing that for a theory to be falsifiable, it must be false, because a theory that is true cannot be genuinely proven to be false, but it is potential falsifiability as opposed to invulnerability to falsification even before the evidence is assessed that Popper had in mind. Nevertheless, by insisting that a scientific theory be falsifiable, i.e., vulnerable to evidence that can overthrow it, Popper drove a further wedge between the ideas of scientific usefulness and scientific truth.

It would seem, however, that a far better criterion of demarcation for what is meant by science in the modern sense of the word, is neither verifiability nor falsifiability, but usefulness. All the information science gathers, the hypotheses it develops, and the experiments it runs, have as their end the bending of nature to man’s use.

Man observes that some substances in nature have the property of being fire-resistant. He studies these substances, gathering information, in an attempt to figure out what makes them fire-resistant. Is this to satisfy his curiosity? No, at least not primarily. It is because he wishes to transfer the property of fire-resistance to other substances, to protect objects he considers to be valuable from the threat of fire.

Man observes that the water running down a river and over a waterfall is moving with a tremendous force. He figures out that force can be made to turn a turbine in a generator that can provide electricity for an entire region. He observes the forces that hold subatomic particles together and realizes that by splitting the atom he can release that power, either to destroy his enemies in an explosion, or to provide yet another source of electric power. He observes that birds and insects fly through the air, studies the processes by which they do so, and devises an artificial means of transporting himself through the air.

That is the nature of modern science – to observe nature, and the forces and processes at work within it – so as to use those forces and processes for his own ends, to control them, to replicate the effects he wishes to replicate, to prevent the things he wishes to prevent, all with the purpose of improving his own existence.

The ends to which man puts the control over nature he obtains through science may be good or bad in themselves, and they are often good – alleviating suffering, lightening the burden of work, etc. In the entire enterprise of modern science viewed as a whole, however, there is more than a hint of that arrogance and presumption that brought Dante’s Ulysses to his destruction. In their Journal, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt told of a prediction made in 1869 by chemist Pierre Marcellin Berthelot that within a century through chemistry and physics, man would have unlocked the secrets of the atom and harnessed its power. Also present was physiologist Claude Bernard who predicted that man would be able to manufacture human life. The Goncourts, wrily added their own prediction, that when all of this had been accomplished, God, with white beard flowing, would come down from heaven, swinging a set of keys like an innkeeper, and say “Closing time, gentlemen”. (6) Today, the first two predictions have come true, and while God has not yet shut us down, the Goncourts’ prediction that He would was surely a response to the human arrogance contained in the other predictions. Today, man in his arrogance has, through his mastery of the atom, given himself the power to destroy both himself and the world in which he lives. Perhaps we have not avoided the shutdown the Goncourts predicted, but are merely living in a moment of temporary reprieve of sentence.

Modern man, in his arrogance, accounts this science which gives him control over the elements and to a degree control over fate and chance, the only true knowledge. Yet, as we have seen, science’s usefulness to man in securing his control over nature has no necessary connection with truth. At one time, knowledge and truth were inseparable concepts, and if a person “knew” something that later proved to be untrue we would say “he thought he knew…..” because the knowledge he thought he had was not true knowledge, not being in line with what was actually true. Science gathers facts about the world, to be sure, but these are to science, what trees are to a papermill, its raw materials. The mere accumulation of these facts is not science and would not produce the results that impress and dazzle modern man. It is through the processing of these raw materials, the developing and testing of hypotheses, that science produces the results that man desires, and these hypotheses need not themselves be true to provide the results. Although this methodology has usurped the name of knowledge for itself, it is questionable whether it deserves to bear it at all.

Usefulness, is science’s primary selling point, yet even if we were to draw up a category of “useful knowledge”, science would not comprise the whole of it. This point was made by British philosopher Michael Oakeshott in his 1947 essay “Rationalism in Politics”. (7) Although the main argument of that essay was that the rationalism that has permeated all of Western thought since the Renaissance has converted political thinking into ideology, a streamlined and inflexible modern substitute for tradition, in making this argument he had to explain his terminology and in explaining rationalism, he described it as a system of thought that reduced all knowledge to what he called “technical knowledge”. “Technical knowledge”, he said, was the kind of knowledge that can be written down and learned from a book, the kind of knowledge that can be systematically ordered into a series of steps. This is not the whole of knowledge, Oakeshott argued, and explained that even in something as simple as baking a cake, there is what he called “practical knowledge”, which cannot be written down and learned through a book, but which has to be learned through experience and can only be passed on from one person to another through a kind of apprenticeship, where the learner works alongside the teacher. While “technical knowledge” and “science” are not interchangeable terms the concepts do overlap and much that Oakeshott said about “technical knowledge” can be said about modern science, especially when we consider the co-penetration of knowing and making that George Grant argued was so aptly described by the term “technology”. (8)

If modern science is not even the whole of useful knowledge, how much less is it the whole of all knowledge whatsoever. One year after the Cambridge Journal first published Oakeshott’s “Rationalism in Politics”, the University of Chicago Press published an important book by the university’s English professor, Richard M. Weaver Jr., that was entitled Ideas have Consequences. (9) This book was an attempt by Weaver, a Christian Platonist, (10) to understand the origins of the barbarism which seemed to have overtaken Western Civilization, leading to the creation and the use of the atomic bomb. Weaver traced the decay back to the nominalism of William of Ockham in the fourteenth century. Whether in a realm of their own, as in Plato, or innate in the realm in which we exist, as in Aristotle, the real existence of universals had been fundamental to classical and early Christian thinking. Nominalism denied the reality of the universals, teaching that they were just names invented by man for his own purposes. This, according to Weaver, set in action a chain reaction of ideas that reduced reality to the material, nature to the mechanical, and man to the rational, producing modern science, rationalism, positivism, logical positivism, etc.

It was more than just one bad idea leading to another, however. The nominalist rejection of the universals, initiated a retreat away from the perception of God and the higher spiritual truth at the centre of reality. This produced both a social disintegration, because civilization had been built around the spiritual centre of reality and a corresponding fragmentation of knowledge. From classical antiquity, Weaver pointed out, civilized men had been suspicious of specialization in knowledge, because it led to a lop-sided, unbalanced, worldview and an partially developed, and hence deformed, mind. Modern science, however, requires an ever increasing degree of specialization. The retreat from metaphysics, theology, and a balanced, integrated, synthesis with God at the centre, to modern scientific specialization, saw the replacement of the philosophic doctor, at the pinnacle of medieval learning, with his secular successor the Renaissance gentleman, and finally the modern scientific specialist who represented a far greater break with the previous two. Weaver recognized where the appeal in the new specialized knowledge lay:

Knowledge was power. The very character of the new researches lent them to ad hoc purposes. It was soon a banality that the scholar contributes to civilization by adding to its dominion over nature. (11)

The specialization that produced this power and dominion, Weaver argued, was no true knowledge. It required an encyclopaedic study of minute, peripheral details, while neglecting as less certain, and less real, the more fundamental truths that lay at the centre of reality, and held it all together. This both generated dangerous obsessions, and made projects like the atomic bomb project possible by keeping specialists so focused on the details that they failed to see the big picture of where their research was leading them. (12)

All of these are good reasons for considering modern science to be a part, and a small, lesser part at that, of true human knowledge. Knowledge is, of course, a good thing in itself, something to be desired and sought after. It is not the highest good, however, and when it is pursued in the wrong way, it can have unfortunate results, including potentially the destruction that awaited Dr. Faustus in the original version of the legend, and Ulysses in Dante's telling of his story. When the pursuit of knowledge is combined with human arrogance, made subservient to the human will to dominate, and joined to a rejection of the higher truths that make an integrated, complete form of knowledge possible, what ensues scarcely deserves the name of knowledge at all, and is perhaps best described by the words of St. Paul to Timothy as rendered in the King James Version “science falsely so called”. (13)

(1) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto XXVI, 95-100, 1819 translation by Rev. Henry Francis Cary.

(2) Ibid, 130-131.

(3) Tennyson completed “Ulysses” in 1833. Like the much longer “In Memorian A.H.H.” which took him almost two decades to complete, his immediate motivation for writing “Ulysses” was the death of his friend and fellow poet Arthur Hallam. It was published for the first time in 1842, in the second volume of the collection of poems he published that year, his third collection of verse to see print.

(4) George Grant, “The Computer Does Not Impose on Us the Ways It Should Be Used”, first given as a Massey Lecture and broadcast on CBC Radio in 1975, published for the first time in 1976, and included in William Christian, Sheila Grant, ed. The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 418-434, this particular quote being found on page 427.

(5) To be fair, the idea that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is much older than the Modern Age, and there are plenty of examples of pre-modern art that can not exactly be described as “beautiful” in the traditional sense.

(6) Edmond de Goncourt, Jules de Goncourt, translated and edited by Lewis Galantière, The Goncourt Journals 1851-1870, (New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 273.

(7) Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism and Politics”, first published in Cambridge Journal, 1947, republished as the first essay in Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and other essays, (London: Methuen, 1962). The part of the essay that I am referring to can be found on pages 7-11.

(8) George Grant, “Knowing and Making”, address to the Royal Society of Canada in 1975, published in The George Grant Reader, pp. 407-417.

(9) Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). My review of this book can be found here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-we-got-here-from-there.html

(10) As was George Grant.

(11) Weaver, p. 57. Bold represents italics in original.

(12) Ibid, pp. 59-66.

(13) 1 Timothy 6:20