jakell wrote:More and more often I note, with wry amusement, how religion tends to rear its head so quickly in discussions nowadays.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a good thing. People are starting to notice, or at least intuit, that religion is a far important thing than it has been given credit for by the last few generations of progressive 'thinkers'.
This tends to fall a bit too quickly into the binary of religion vs rationality, the sort of rut that humans like, and tends to get stuck there. The tendency to view everything as a problem to be solved is hard to resist, and we don't like to think that what we are facing might be a predicament.
So, if we can't solve religion, the only solution is to learn to live with it. I would say that the issue is not religion as such, but religiosity, something that is part of the human psyche, which is why we see the tendency cropping up even in those who claim to eschew traditional religious forms.
I would say that one positive way of looking at religion is that it tends to address values, which something I identified as lacking in my previous post.
Agreed, should be careful to not fall into a dualism that posits possibly false dichotomies, though this more of an issue for those with a fragmented experience and perception.
One resolution to that conflict of ideas I imagine comes in some sort of nonduality or to see how in some respects that the two don't necessarily undermine one another. This fragmented nature seen within dualism is something I associate with a lack of a
dialectical worldview that emphasize relations between things in a way that the empiricism doesn't empiricism seems to consider things that aren't concrete objects to simply be subjective. Instead of thinking of things projected onto material objects as simply subjective due to their abstract but not so concrete ontology. We can treat our abstract projections that give an object a particular meaning as a sort of 'concrete thought' which has meaning derived from the relations that underpin the object. Which for most of us today is capitalism, which commodifies things and considers them primarily in terms of instrumental rationality.
What you call religiosity I would characterize as something that falls under ideology in a broad sense of the sort of meaning/narrative we prescribe to concrete objects. Ideology which allows us to function as people within a society with certain rules on how to behave and think in a socially acceptable frame.
The emphasis on empiricism is itself based on certain axioms and values. That whilst modernism demystified a lot of the sentimentality we held to things and reduced things to instrumental use. Relegating all that is thought but isn't a objective object external to ourselves as mere subjectivities without any truth value.
I suspect that the dualism results in a false sense of separation of fact and value. Because certain values underpin certain views/axioms/assumptions which then leads to a certain frame of accepted facts.
A short summary wondering about the fact/value distinction
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/ethic.phpI prefer to say that Marx did not have an ethical theory. But how then to explain the approval and disapproval which he expresses in his works, the fact that he sided with the proletariat and incited them to overthrow the system? How, too, it may be asked, do I account for his attachment to the cause of humanity and to the ideas of communism and human fulfillment? In asking such question, however, one must be careful not to assume at the outset the form the answer must take. For this is what happens if one is saying, 'Here are two worlds, facts and values; how do you link them?' But to accept that reality is halved in this way is to admit failure from the start. On the contrary, the relational conception which was discussed in the last two chapters required that Marx consider what was known, advocated, condemned or done by everyone, himself included, as internally related. Every facet of the real world, and people's actions and thoughts as elements in it, are mutually dependent on each other for what they are, and must be understood accordingly.
The logical distinction which is said to exist between facts and values is founded on the belief that it is possible to conceive of one without the other. Given a particular fact, the argument runs, one may without contradiction attach any value to it. The fact itself does not entail a specific value. Historically the view that moral beliefs are contingent has tended to go along with the view that they are also arbitrary. On this model, all judgment depends in the last instance on the independent se of values which each individual, for reasons best known to himself, brings to the situation. The ethical premise is not only a final arbiter but a mysterious one, defying sociological and even psychological analysis. Though some recent defenders of orthodoxy have sought to muddle the distinction between fact and value with talk of 'context', 'function', 'real reference', 'predisposition', etc., the logical line drawn in conception remains. Yet, if one cannot conceive of anything one chooses to call a fact (because it is an open ended relation) without bringing in evaluative elements (and vice versa), the very problem orthodox thinkers have set out to answer cannot be posed.
Moreover, on Marx's view, the real judgments which are made in any situation are a function of that situation and the particular individuals active in it. Thus, the very notion that it is logically permissible to take any attitude toward a given 'fact' is itself a judgment inherent in the circumstances out of which it emerges. Rather than being logically independent of what is, any choice—as well as the idea that one has a choice is linked by innumerable threads to the real world, including the life, class interests, and character of the person acting. Judgments can never be severed, neither practically nor logically, from their contexts and the number of real alternatives which they allow. In this perspective, what is called the fact-value distinction, appears as a form of self-deception, an attempt to deny what has already been done by claiming that it could not have been done or still remains to do.
Marx would not have denied that the statements "This is what exists' and 'What exists is good' or 'This is what should exist', mark some distinction, but he would not have called it one of fact and value. If we define "fact" as a statement of something known to have happened or knowable, and 'value' as that property in any thing for which we esteem or condemn it As man is a creature of needs and purposes, however much they may vary for different people, it could not be otherwise. Because everything we know (whether in its immediacy or in some degree of extension through conditions and results) bears some relation to our needs and purposes, there is nothing we know toward which we not have attitudes, either for, against or indifferent.
Likewise, our 'values' are all attached to what we take to be the 'facts', and could not be what they are apart from them. It is not simply that the 'facts' affect our values', and our 'values' affect what we take to be the 'facts—both respectable common sense positions—but that, in any given case, each includes the other and is part of what is meant by the other's concept. In these circumstances, to try to split their union into logically distinct halves is to distort their real character.
Followers of Marx have always known that what people approve or condemn can only be understood through a deep-going social analysis, particularly of their needs and interest as members of a class. What emerges from the foregoing is that the forms in which approval and condemnation appear—like setting up absolute principles or values—must be understood through the same kind of analysis. This is not the place to undertake such an analysis, but it may be useful to sketch its broad outlines. The attempt to establish values which apply equally to everyone results, to al large extent, from the need to defuse growing class conflict arising from incompatible interest in a class-ridden society. To apply values equally is to abstract from the unequal conditions in which people live and the incompatible interest that result. The main effort of capitalist ideology has always been directed to dismissing or playing down this incompatibility. The abstractions with which such ideology abounds are so many attempts to sever the class-affected 'facts' from the judgments and actions that ordinarily follow upon their comprehension.
Marx goes so far as to suggest that the fact—value distinction is itself a symptom of man's alienation in modern capitalist society: 'It stems from the very nature of estrangement that each sphere applies to men a different and opposite yardstick—ethics one and political economy another.'11 A chief characteristic of alienation, as we shall learn, is the separation of what does not allow separation without distortion. The organic unity of reality has been exchanged for distinct spheres of activity whose interrelations in the social whole can no longer be ascertained. Removed from their real context, the individual's relations with nature and society, taken one at a time, appear other than they are. As part of this process, many, often contradictory yardsticks for measuring achievement come into existence for different areas of life, making all broad plans of reform seem 'illogical' or 'irrational' in some respect of other. In this context, it would appear that altogether too much attention has been paid to the biased and false message in capitalist ideology and too little to what is predisposed in the forms of though themselves, to the class advantage contained in accepted rules of thinking. For any attempt to universalize a moral code, whatever its content, by undercutting the reality of class conflict only succeeds in serving capitalist ends.
As far as Marx's own work is concerned, those remarks which strike us as being an evaluative nature are internally relate facets of all he says and knows, which in turn are internally tied to his life and all surrounding circumstances—not as an exception, but because everything in the world is related in this way. However, being conscious of this, Marx integrated his remarks of approval and disapproval more closely into his system than have most other thinkers, making any surgical division into facts and values so much more destructive of his meaning. For example, Marx claims that when a communist stands in front of 'a crowd of scrofulous, overworked and consumptive starvelings', he sees 'the necessity, and at the same time the condition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social structure'.12 Marx is asserting that for those who share his outlook these 'facts' contain their own condemnation and a call to do something about them. If an individual ''''chooses otherwise, it is not because he had made a contrary moral judgment, but because the particular relations in which he stands (the class to which he belongs, his personal history, etc.) have led him to a different appreciation of the facts.13
Another lengthy paper that discusses how Marx seems to make evaluative claims whilst not providing a moral argument against capitalism:
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1007/BF01043575But in both cases of someone raised primarily in the sphere of influence of the Church or the public education system, in both cases many are likely meant to accept certain things as fact in their up bringing. That we think of it in terms of a very crude indoctrination when we disagree with such an ideology.
That children are educated in the sense of learning certain things as facts in both institutions and whilst there might be somethings later on considered to be critical thinking, it will likely be within the frame of the ideologies espoused by the institutions. Not that expect little kids to be little Socrates, but that both institutions are meant to instill certain views and values in what is expressed and the habitual practices of those institutions.
So when one is presented with facts from one institution and primarily within its ideological hold and less so the other, then I speculate this creates the sort of tension where one's values show opposition to the other. Not that there had to be an opposition, because its perfectly comprehensible to accept facts about the natural world and a spiritual/metaphysical truth as well, which I think was the function of Descartes dualism to separate the two so that science could be done without undermining the legitimacy of God by asserting that the metaphysical questions were separate from the reality that exists.
People have been able to maintain a nuanced and elaborate spiritual faith whilst accepting many established scientific facts and models that explain aspects of reality.
But that doesn't seem to be what is put into practice in somewhere like the US where there seems to be a sort of scientism that thinks it can argue from a fundamentally different philosophical viewpoint, often without understanding their own philosophical assumptions, why God is irrational. Similarly, there are people who are considered religious leaders who denounce science because it disagrees with values or conclusions they have. To see where this comes from I can only imagine it's been somehow a useful division in political issues where the two parties in the US throw social issues out to the public to fight over whilst they do what they do anyway within interests of capital.
That I think would have to look at the history of how the political parties have taken shape, like how the Republican party began to appeal to a religious and now fundamentalist platform for what ever reason. I think it has been useful to use propaganda to tailor certain social issues as divisive ones. Not that the issues are necessarily insignificant in themselves, especially to peoples' lives but that they don't do anything to create a meaningful change and thus are spinning wheels which is useful for passifying a people within the frame of a
liberal democracy.
That I think part of it is what I have seen many people consider a particularly American thing to only assert the facts and not think so much. The issue being that people are getting a different set of facts and they haven't been provided support to question the manner in which they interpret and accept facts.
That the American people, though I would argue many within liberal democracies have been put through institutions that don't foster radical thought in the majority of people and live an existence that isn't conducive to it for a lack of time (working all the time) and many distractions that are superficial in substance. And from this heads butt more easily because there is no resolution in facts, they're more easily directed by their feelings based on the things they take to be facts, they can be fed more and more facts and they can have the appearance of informing themselves with facts. Which by their education is a sign of intelligence that is rewarded when its the right facts that give you status/acceptance in that community.
This is a rather cynical appraisal of people, I do hold greater hope for the capacity of many people to think through things, but it is the case that many people simply don't have the time, the energy or the will to think through things. Even when they do have all those things, they can still be mislead because it's difficult for us to meaningfully distinguish between reality and fiction, particularly when our sense of reality is so thoroughly immersed in modern technological communications that disseminate information but not necessarily true knowledge.
It's hard for me to see how much this fits to the reality of the matter for why there is a say a tension between fundamentalists and those categorized by scientism. But I like to think its a nice speculative narrative. That to we would have to look at a real world example to really explore the matter I suppose, because treated in a general sense, it seems to have abstracted so much information away that its difficult to consider why such tensions/conflicts occur.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By JohnRawls
- By litwin
- By Rich
- By Unthinking Majority