Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

Hegelian diagram of Macrohistory evolving upward in stages and steps due to the “outworking of absolute Spirit”. What I call in more naturalistic terms : Enformy.
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Post 31. 04/20/2018

Progressophobia

Is The Decline & Fall of the West Immanent?

Most Western academics and scientists, being also Atheists, are reluctant to use the term “progress” in reference to natural or cultural events. In his latest book, Enlightenment Now!, Steven Pinker made a candid admission of his own bias. “Though I am skittish about any notion of historical inevitability, cosmic forces, or mystical arcs of justice, some kinds of social change really do seem to be carried along by an inevitable tectonic force.” Simultaneously, Skeptic Magazine publisher, Michael Shermer, just published his own assessment of cultural progress in The Moral Arc. Both works are talking about positive trends in human culture, as judged by the standard of human needs & desires. But if humans are merely upright animals, their group behaviors are presumably caused ultimately by the same kinds of forces that propelled inorganic Nature, for billions of years before humans and their societies emerged only in the last tick of the cosmic clock.

Like those authors, I am an A-theist, in the sense of rejecting most traditional religious god-models as out-dated metaphors for mysterious forces. But I have become a Deist, in that I think a god-concept is necessary for any complete understanding of human Culture, pre-human Nature, and even the whole Cosmos, in a larger context. Due to their antipathy toward the Imperial Religion of medieval Europe, Enlightenment era Deists left behind the ancient pre-scientific explanations for natural events & phenomena. But they could not justify dispensing with the most general accounting1 for the orderly & predictable succession of events we observe in both Nature and in Culture.

18th century philosopher, Georg Hegel — like Pinker, Shermer, and many other observers — also found repetitive progressive patterns in history. He described that motif as a “dialectic”, as-if it was a back & forth debate between different views of reality. Despite the zig-zag path of opposing cultural forces, he discerned a forward-inclined and upwardly-mobile direction that resulted from the tug-of-war between human opinions. Just as imposed physical forces on a structure can be diagrammed as positive & negative inputs, the mathematical resolution is drawn as a vector (arrow) that points in a direction somewhere in between the opposing inputs. [Diagram at right] Hegel sometimes referred to the general “force” behind all historical changes as the “Spirit of History”. In the quote above, Pinker described the same kind of vector as “an inexorable tectonic force”, like an earthquake or tidal wave, sweeping all things before it.

Atheists like Pinker prefer to avoid any hints of super-natural agencies, because they view progress as a sign of human intention alone. Indeed that is the point of both books noted above. But, if we trace the chain of causation back to the beginning of time, we are faced with a dead-end. Unless we project that trajectory backward into the “time” before time. In any case, trends, tendencies & forces always imply some external input of energy, like a billiard cue striking a ball. Nevertheless, Atheists look at the seemingly random zigs & zags, and overlook the composite vector that results when two balls meet and shoot-off in the direction intended by the shooter. But, by definition, random accidents2 don't cause long-term stable structures like organisms and cultures. So, what else would you call such a mysterious impulse to evolve?

Post 31 continued . . . click Next

Cultural Progress

2. Random Pattern :
An oxymoron. The quality or state of lacking a pattern. But even statistical random-ness has predictable trends, such as those used by weathermen.
   Hegel’s historical progress is such a notable tendency. Due to feedback loops, weather patterns and historical trends sometimes build temporary structures, like cyclones.
   But cultural patterns are self-reinforcing due to conscious intention, and form more stable patterns over time, such as nation- states and corporations.

1. Panendeism :
Literally, All in God. The self-existent deity is viewed as both the “substance” of the physical world, and the meta-physical cause of its existence. Conceptually, it is the category of all categories.

Substance of God :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Baruch_Spinoza#Substance_of_God

Progressophobia :
“Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves “progressive” really hate progress.” Skeptical Inquirer, May/June 2016

See Post 38
for more discussion of Pinker’s book in the light of Enformationism theory