Chapter 2
I. The One Dogma
The enveloping problem approaches me from all directions, rumbling, carrying corpses and fire within its spreading ethereal maelstrom. Walls do not slow its movement toward me. It knows where I am…It knows where everybody is. I watch it absorb friends who fight helplessly to resist its calling.
“Enter me” it calls within my head. “I am the dark and the light. I am despair and hope. Lose yourself within me. You will become me and fear the person who once fought against me. Nay, you will fight to stay within me and wonder why you ever resisted my calling. I am coming. I am already here.”
Weapons of a material age are of no use against today’s problem. Bullets and blades pass through it without damage. Reason can no longer protect us. The problem has corrupted reason by unshackling it from the Good and giving reason reckless freedom. We have entered an age when the tools that once freed us from subjugation are now useless. The problem, the One Dogma, has been around since the beginning. Before it solidified, this dogma helped birth the weapons that gave us our freedom—philosophy, science, literature, religion, capitalism, democracy; each of these are a product of the One Dogma, and thus willing servants of a master who now demands to be paid in full.
“I gave you knowledge and freedom,” spoke the Problem, “now pay.”
My thesis is simple—we are subjugated by a common dogma, a dogma that we serve without resistance while it feeds on our bodies. This is difficult to believe, but if we accept our dependence on local dogmas, dogmas of religion, culture, politics, families, and philosophy; then what prohibits the existence of a more encompassing dogma that encircles everyone? All dogmas compete for dominance, do they not? Does (dogmatic) capitalism not try to spread itself? Does democracy not seek to expand its borders? Does totalitarianism not desire to control all? Do religions not desire to convert all? Does science not wish authority in all fields of knowledge? I speculate that an unnoticed dogma has already achieved dominance, and unlike dogmas such as capitalism and communism which are noticed because they compete with one another, the One Dogma is not opposed to any other dogma, it competes with no one, and we cannot ground its identity through comparisons of difference and similarity.
Before we can open up to the idea of an all-encompassing dogmatic organism, let us first ask if all people are acolytes of some species of dogma. In my experience, the most prevalent local dogma in America is a bodily materialism that goes something like this: my body is ultimately a collection of particles, although our world may contain things that are not particles (God, mind, soul, spirit…). Most of us see bodily materialism as an obvious truth, or tautology, or think that I have little understanding of the progress of physical and biological science. Know that I have been raised in the physical sciences, and am somewhat proficient in the mathematics and theories surrounding biology and physics, and believe they provide us with knowledge about the world. Nor do I have any faith in the concepts of God, mind, soul and spirit, which are hollow words in our day; and I do not appeal to emergentism, or the idea that a whole can be more than the sum of its parts. Still, I am not enveloped in the dogma of bodily materialism, a dogma that I have noticed feeding off of the people around me, whether they are highly educated or not, theists or not.
Bodily materialism is so common and so bound to our organs that most of us cannot consider the question of bodily materialism, and of the few philosophically minded people who can contemplate the question, most of those in America think bodily materialism has been empirically supported—as if metaphysical questions are subject to empirical support—or believe that the fruits of science justify our belief in bodily materialism—as if a dogmatic bodily materialism had anything to do with the progress of science. There remains a small subset of individuals who reject bodily materialism, but those people may not be who you would expect. For example, I suspect most Christians are bodily materialists—Christians have decomposed the person into body and soul, and have willingly turned over their bodies to materialism, saving the soul for the eternal. Even the act of decomposing a person into body and soul, as two substantive objects, as two independent parts that may come together as a whole, betrays a greater decompositionalism that underlies Christianity and Platonism.
Dogmas associated with political party affiliation are perhaps the most salient dogmas in our culture. Progressive and conservative, democrat and republican—these dogmas are out in the open and together infect more than half of the American population. Unlike bodily materialism which parasitizes most people silently in the background, political dogmas are quite obvious to the host. The salience of political dogmas arises largely through opposition. The liberal, for instance, is aware he is a liberal through opposition to the conservative point of view. That is, without the existence of conservatism, the liberal would hardly identify himself as a liberal—if everyone were liberal, and the dogma of conservatism did not exist (not even as an idea) then the liberal could not see himself as a liberal as such. Liberal dogma would be taken for granted, it would be no more noticeable than the oxygen we breathe, and yet make an important contribution to our daily lives. A dogmatic liberal identifies as a liberal only when she notices attitudes and ideas that depart from her own and rejects these alternative possibilities in favor of how she already is.
Dogmatic organisms can infect us with or without our attention directed at the dogma. Most people do not attend to bodily materialism; they do not talk about it as such although they practice it daily as an accepted part of routine living. Bodily materialism in America is a lived-ritual that evokes no more interest than speaking English in an English speaking country. In contrast, many people spend time attending-to and talking about political dogmas, dogmas that are described and advertised daily in our culture, and it requires effort to avoid focusing upon them.
It requires effort to turn-away from salient political dogmas and to not get caught up in them, but it also requires effort to turn toward dogmas that are so accepted that we do not notice them at all. Most people do not discuss bodily materialism, and even the word materialism in America is primarily associated with our penchant to buy Louis Vuitton bags and BMWs, rather than the idea that the universe is only matter in motion. Dogmas like bodily materialism exist within our attentional background—they are not in front of our eyes, but if we learn to study the periphery of our attention, we will be able to bring them into focus. Political dogmas during our day occupy the foreground of our attention. It takes no effort to see them; rather we must expend effort to turn away from them and to see other things.
Great thinkers are generally people who bring previously background or everyday dogmas to our attention while introducing new ideas that contrast with the freshly exposed dogmas and eventually overthrow them—think Copernicus, although many other historical people meet this definition. By overthrow I imply the process of bringing a background dogma to our attention, then supplanting this previously background dogma with a non-dogmatic belief that eventually becomes a background dogma itself. Great thinkers shape the periphery or background of our attention, and in Einstein’s case, the structure of the attentional field itself.
Dogmas enjoy living in the background of attention for there they direct our action and thought without being critically attacked. In contrast foreground dogmas, having definite form to an observer, are potentially objects of our critical attention. Critical attention is that process where we stand before an attentional object, but rather than simply behold that object passively, we actively probe it with questions. Critical questions explore the attentional object with tendrils that attempt to penetrate and decompose the object into parts, search for the connecting origins of the object, or try to annihilate the object into nothing. I may uncritically attend to God and ‘behold his glory’, or I may attend to God and question his desires, composition, powers, appearance, reality, origin, etc.
I don’t mean to belittle what I have called passive or uncritical attention, and it is completely incorrect to conflate passive and uncritical attention. While we do passively attend to many objects, there is another sort of attention where we actively ‘take-in’ objects without being critical. This type of attention, let us call it intention, involves a process of actively creating a space for an object within oneself. Rather than probing, penetrating, decomposing, and explaining the object; with intention we push our insides around, create a place for that object to be, and bring that object closer. If attention is the act of physically touching an object, then intention is the act of digesting an object. Intentional intention, although commonly overlooked, is no less active and necessary for understanding than critical attention. At this point the reader may wish to read my Not Communication for a fuller understanding of my use of intention and attention.
A dogma may be in the background of attention simply because it is so common and accepted (like air), because we lack the means to express it (motion prior to Newton’s calculus), or because we are fearful or shameful to call it out (Oedipal complex). More than just existing in the background of attention—which is a desirable place for a dogma to be—dogmas lust to take over the attentional field itself, meaning they hope to become enmeshed with the attentional field so that the dogma determines what can and cannot enter attention. Once a dogma binds to the attentional field, it may become nearly impossible to make that dogma a distinct object of critical attention. Analogously, HIV infects the immune system such that HIV can no longer be adequately targeted by the immune system. A computer virus may infect an anti-virus program such that the program is directed to overlook that particular virus. The attentional field may be infiltrated by a dogma such that that dogma makes it impossible for that dogma to be an object of attention.
The most reproductively successful dogma will have embedded itself within our attentional system so that it hides from our critical attention. Hidden from critique, this dogma is outside of description. It has no human competition. You might wonder, how can a dogma reproduce if I cannot talk about that dogma as a formal object, or if I am unable to describe its characteristics, functions, and parts? Surely I cannot spread a dogma if I cannot describe it in words? If you believe that dogmas are only propositional beliefs that exist in language, then the sort of dogma I hint out cannot reproduce. But I have always referred to dogmas as organisms and not stagnant, lifeless, propositional belief entities. All organisms reproduce without the need for advanced language or belief, and dogmas are no different, except that they may appropriate language to aid in reproduction.
II. Dogma Filters Evidence
At this point I am almost where I began—a large gray sphere lies before me. I cannot see beyond a fragment of its surface which is now smooth and without ridges. I notice its curvature and believe it to be a sphere but cannot be sure because I can’t see around the entire structure at once. I suspect its smooth gray surface wriggles before me in fear, but I cannot prove this.
Can we prove anything? And what is evidence? If I have evidence, can I share that evidence with someone else? How do I share evidence unless evidence is tied to sensory material objects? Why does evidence require the ability to perceive? Is evidence tied to perception, and if so, then evidence may be liable to misperception, to miscommunication; and thus evidence is nothing in itself. If evidence cannot break through the shackles of communication and perception, then evidence is just another sensory or intellectual event that grounds nothing. When someone asks you to prove something, to give evidence, that person simply means “give me the means to believe what you say.”
Evidence, like all perceptual material, is subject to miscommunication and therefore not able to justify itself. I am not saying to give up on evidence, but I do insist that you cannot flaunt evidence before us without admitting its limitations. My resistance to evidence follows from my observation that human creatures lack a sensitivity to truth, that is, humans lack an innate apparatus to identify truth in the wild. No technological device, no heightened sensory organ, no intuition, no spiritual revelation, and no philosophical contraption can isolate truth with any degree of accuracy. How do I know such things? Does not my statement contradict itself? Perhaps, but I am not claiming truth of this statement; I am merely stating an assertion with confidence in the hopes that you may come to believe it. There is evidence if you need it. Among our population of human beings, for every assertion I can identify a proportion of people who agree, disagree, and fall somewhere in the middle of the two. While an observation of disagreement does not prove that truth cannot be found, it shows, empirically, that human beings as a species may not be imbued with an organ for finding it. (I have just used evidence to suggest that evidence does not function as evidence—surely a poor argument or perhaps an indication of the limitations of the concept of evidence).
Just to be clear, if you believe that a fMRI scanner can detect truth in the brain, then you have confused belief with truth. A fMRI scanner can probabilistically identify when someone is trying to deceive, meaning, when someone believes one thing but tries to tell us something other than what that person believes. Neuroimaging is somewhat sensitive to the brain processes that occur during active deception relative to brain processes that occur when a person responds according to her beliefs. No doubt, creating deception requires a bit of extra imagination that can be identified by fMRI, but fMRI cannot identify objective truth. Ask a person if God exists while they are in an fMRI scanner—or, if you like, if alien life forms exists—the resulting brain scans tells us nothing about the truth of the question, only about the beliefs of the person. When we tell our children to ‘tell the truth’, we are more rigorously saying ‘tell me what you believe, do not cover your beliefs with imagination.’
Dogmatic conceptions of evidence fuel some of the ongoing conflicts between dogmatic theists and atheists today. Both sides might agree that evidence, whatever evidence is, functions first as a mechanism to generate and support belief. Provide me with evidence of quantum theory and I may begin to believe it, but my believing quantum theory has nothing to do with the objective truth of quantum theory. The truth of quantum theory could care less if I believe in it or not. It will remain true, if it is true, completely independent of whatever I believe. The truth of quantum theory does not require evidence to support it, but whether I believe in quantum theory or not requires evidence. So I am saying that evidence does something for human beings, it causes changes within us and modifies our beliefs, but it does nothing to change the object of that evidence.
Evidence modifies the human organism in some way—and you don’t even need to call this modification belief, use material explanations of modified synaptic weights and neural networks if you like. Evidence modifies both the dogmatic theist and atheist, but since both have been invaded by dogma, dogma that subverts their belief forming mechanisms, each is sensitive to different sorts of evidence at the onset. The dogmatic atheist says to show us the evidence of God, but the only sort of evidence that moves the dogmatic atheist (I realize that many atheist and theists are not dogmatic, but I am not referring to them) comes packaged as perceptual objects or quantified outcomes of perceptual situations. We might call this ‘object evidence;’ it is The Evidence of our day. Surveillance videos, gene expression profiles, and particle detector plates exemplify object evidence.
Although the dogmatic theist perceives objects and outcomes just as well as the atheist, when pressed for evidence of God, she ignores concrete perceptual objects and defers to harmonies in nature or personal spiritual experiences—I’ll call this theist evidence ‘relational evidence’ because the evidence develops between a person and her relation to a perception, object, or experience; and not from any object or set of objects.
Atheistic dogma blocks its host to relational evidence. While the atheist can appreciate the ‘wonder and beauty’ of the universe, and delight in this wonder, he does not see his relation to this wonder as a type of evidence. His wonder functions purely as a surface phenomenon, as a hedonistic pleasure similar to the enjoyment of sex or an expensive wine. The wonder does not connect to an underlying solid relation, just as sex need not reflect a bond of love or caring. In a sense atheistic dogma invades the attentional field of a host such that the host is blind to the depth of relations in the world. He literally does not grasp relations, although he can conceptualize relations as abstract sets and mathematical expressions. Since the atheistic host does not see the relation between the host and the experience of the object, he cannot possibly appreciate or understand anything the theist is saying with regard to relational evidence. What precisely is the relation between a person and his experience of the divine? Such things are not perceptual objects, and cannot count as evidence to the dogmatic atheist.
The dogmatic theist, reciprocally, tends to discount object evidence. While the dogmatic theist can attend to objects—he can run a scientific experiment as well as you or I and observe the results—he tends to label these objects as ‘mere’ appearances of the material world. Perceptual objects do not count for or against belief in the existence of God, and as such are not taken to be evidence in this matter. The dogmatic theist has managed to partly short-circuit her innate connection between perceptual objects and belief formation. When the atheist says “show me the evidence”, the theist does not respond by pointing to perceptual objects to justify belief in God, but says how one must look inside to find God. Being aware of your relation to something begins to establish a sense of the divine. Focusing upon perceptual objects as objects distances us from it. Christian Science, an extreme variant of theist dogma, is highly successful at suppressing object evidence within its host; so successful that the host will often refuse simple medical procedures out of the belief that perceptual situations of physical suffering are completely illusory.
Today, of course, things are not so simple. Some theists point to statues that bleed and a slice of toast with the face of Jesus as evidence of God. Dogmatic atheists and others howl at these examples, in part, because theists, in pointing to perceptual objects as evidence of God, are undermining their foundations (evidentiary support) of belief in God, and adopting, at least transiently, the atheist’s type of evidence, not to mention that seeing the divine on burnt toast smacks of irony and sacrilege at the same time. Similarly, the intelligent design movement, to the extent that it adopts perceptual objects and quantification as standards of evidence in supporting the belief in God, is an atrocity on theism. This movement erodes theism from the inside, and atheists waste their time attacking intelligent design for atheist attacks strengthen theism while mutating it into something else.
Dogmatic theism and atheism are likely dual aspects of a single theism-atheism dogma which expresses itself differently in different hosts (no dogmatic theist or atheist will agree to that statement, which to me suggests I am on to something). In one host, the theistic variant suppresses the host’s ability to ground beliefs through object evidence. In another host, the atheistic variant suppresses the host’s ability to ground beliefs through relational evidence. It is possible for the theistic variant to switch to the atheistic variant in the same host and vice-versa—we call this ‘finding God’ or ‘losing faith’. Many conflicts between dogmatic atheists and theists have nothing to do with battles for truth between rival groups, but reflect a useful evolutionary strategy from the perspective of atheism-theism dogma. The never-ending conflict attracts new potential hosts to the dogma and cements its followers. Mutations of theism-atheism dogma have given rise to new strains of dogma, and we might call advocates of intelligent design one such strain that have developed a limited but contradictory capacity to appreciate object evidence in relation to the divine.
III. Technological Acolytes of Eternal Replacement
When I search the air for values and virtue, I grasp and see nothing. Perhaps that is what I was supposed to find as I was searching through the air? But my eye was placed upon people as well, yet I found nothing firm. I see people working to eat and breed. I notice that people move towards money. I see people head toward new experiences and an innovative future with optimism, but this movement does not appear guided by the value of anything. I see people preach about God, yet look like hollowed-out caricatures speaking only to other hollowed-out receptacles. I do not believe that our children inherently value money or experience or sermons. Yes, they lust after technology and the latest news and freshest songs; but this desire, this lust, this movement is not fueled by value. Behind our movement for instant news and wealth and God lies fear—a fear of being left b