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The mystic Manly P. Hall discusses the view of the ancients on the spiritual nature of reality here.
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Here, spiritualist teacher Santos Bonacci presents his views of what he terms the Holy Science which is kind of a mish-mash of astrology and some gnostic ideas.
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In this essay, Mises gives a “conspiracy-theoretic” explanation of the decline of rationality in the modern era. Specifically, Mises says, “The economists had entirely demolished the fantastic delusions of the socialist utopians… The socialists were absolutely unable to raise any objection to the devastating criticism of their schemes and to advance any argument in their favor. It seemed as if socialism was dead forever. Only one way could lead the socialists out of this impasse. They could attack logic and reason and substitute mystical intuition for ratiocination.”
I perceive a connection between all of these. I think that our forebears were much more enlightened than they are given credit for since the time of the Renaissance. In fact, if you think about the meaning of the Renaissance - rebirth - it seems that those in the Renaissance era had a real respect for the wisdom of the Ancients. The whole point of Renaissance thinking was to throw off the ideological shackles of Christian dogma and reclaim the highest achievements of human learning which had not been much advanced - outside of Islamic, Persian and Indian scholarship - for over a millenium.
Later, during the so-called “Enlightenment” the first symptoms of modernist hubris and scoffing at the supposed benightedness of the Ancients began to appear. We’re supposed to believe that nobody before Christopher Columbus understood that the Earth is not flat. Nobody before Copernicus understood heliocentrism, the size and distance of the Moon and Sun or the correct ordering of the Planets. And so on. The fact is that the Ancients made astoundingly astute observations of the heavens. The ancient Egyptians, Indians, Persians, Greeks, Mayans and so on had not only detected the precession of the equinoxes, an extremely subtle shift of just 1/70th of a degree per year in the stars, but correctly calculated its magnitude and period (roughly 25,000 years).
To mock people capable of such meticulous observations and calculations as benighted mystics who threw their hands up at the difficulty of explaining natural phenomena and resorted at the first opportunity to supernatural myths in lieu of causality is ridiculous. But it is on this myth that is built the bigger myth of “human progress”, the idea that we are involved in some kind of inevitable, ever-upward march towards greater and greater heights of technological and economic achievement.
Who constructs such myths and why? Is it possible that these myths are not merely the product of sloppy - yet uncoordinated - thinking? Is it possible that there are people and organizations who benefit from widespread confusion about the most basic truths of the human condition?
This is the spirit of Mises’s conspiracy theory regarding the breakdown of rationality in the sciences. The socialists (sponsored, as they are, by the State) will stop at nothing to preserve the dogma. No price is too high, even the end of science and knowledge itself. But what are they concealing, really? They seek to conceal the purposefulness of human behavior. They seek to conceal the fact that there is causality in human affairs which can be known and extrapolated.
Anyone who is familiar with the debate in the last two decades over the philosophy of consciousness (Dennett et. al. versus Chalmers et. al.) knows that there is a great deal of skepticism around the idea that consciousness exists. The suggestion is that consciousness is some kind of illusion or magic-trick that “emerges” out of blind, insensible matter. I perceive in this debate the same vein of anti-reality, anti-reason mentality that Mises identified in the anti-rationality of the socialists.
But what purpose does it serve? To what end? What are those who want to suppress the basic fact that humans are aware trying to achieve?
Let’s take a brief detour through Bonacci’s territory (astrology, astrotheology, etc.) If it is true that the ancients were a good deal more enlightened than they are given credit for these days, then we might suspect that their anthropomorphism was more conscientious than we usually give them credit for. Ptolemaic astronomy, for example, was the basis not only of what we understand the scientific aspect of astronomy to be but also what we consider to be the pseudo-scientific aspect of astrology. Copernicus’s heliocentric model (which actually goes back to Aristarchus of Samos circa 250BC) was less accurate than Ptolemy’s geocentric model. In other words, Ptolemy had a more useful astronomical model than the supposedly more correct Copernican model.
As it turns out, both models are mathematically correct, it’s just that Copernicus’ model is more generalizable and therefore more useful in extrapolating to the distant heavens beyond the Solar System. Our knowledge of the heavens could never have expanded beyond the Solar System itself so long as we were working in a Ptolemaic model. But as far as the Solar System itself went, the Ptolemaic model was an astoundingly rigorous work of scholarship that was the definitive model of the heavens for almost two millenia.
On top of that model, however, were built the astrological connections to everything. As one quote Bonacci gives in one of his lectures (can’t remember the attribution): everything is connected. All knowledge is connected. All truth is connected. It is all part of one reality and conforms to one law. So, naturally, it makes sense to connect it all together. Human personality types connect to the heavens which connect to the myths of the gods which connect to the elements (fire, earth, air, water) which connect to the primitives of geometry (the Platonic solids) which connect to chemical elements which connect to the basic intervals of music and the basic proportions of visual art, and so on.
What the modern mind misses in its unforgivingly literal understanding of ancient scholarship is that this connectedness is not necessarily a literal connectedness. It is a metaphorical or allegorical connectedness. But it is a mistake to think that metaphor is unserious or that it is not useful. It is precisely because metaphor is so powerful that the ancient mind saw the value in connecting together many apparently unrelated concepts into an inter-connected whole.
And we have long been missing one of the key components that made such holistic thinking possible: schools of thought. When I first encountered Austrian economics, the idea of a “school of economics” seemed absurd to me. How can there be a school of any subject? After all, the truth is the truth. But the fact is that our understanding of the truth is always much more limited than we actually like to admit and the interpretive context in which you place the truth is just as important as the truth itself. The interpretive context is what makes the truths that you know useful to you.
Schools of thought arise only under the condition of a market in education and scientific research. Education and science - like religion - have long been politicized commodities. With the exception of some of the great medieval universities, the education market has not really thrived since the time of the Ancient Greeks. That is why we look back to their time as a Golden Age of learning and knowledge.
Unlike later “eclectic” forms of thought, the school-of-thought system is much more rigorous. Not only must all the known phenomena (facts) be taken into account, but the formal rigors of the school’s metaphysical and cosmological assumptions must be adhered to with consistency. By comparison, the modern thinker is undisciplined and his scientific theories are merely ad hoc “curve-fitting”. “Whatever works” is the motto of the modern thinker on the supposition that such “utilitarian” and “pragmatic” thinking is more serious and scientific. The reality is that “whatever works” is a “good enough” attitude. Dark matter/dark energy are a wonderful illustration of the grotesque consequences of such lackadaisical and undisciplined thinking.
This decline is not an illusion. It is a secular decline in the humanness of the sciences motivated by a fixation with the Absolute - a point that Mises expounds in his article. Steven Pinker talks about the decline of the elite arts in modernity here (until 18:26). The reasons that he gives for the decline - that the elite arts no longer appeal to humans because they are based on a denial that humans have a nature - is generalizable to all fields of knowledge.
To return to the question I raised at the outset: why is there a “conspiracy” against the fact that humans are aware (and that they act with purpose)? I think we have to go even further than Mises did and identify a larger arch in history. This larger arch is the will to enslave, that is, the will to live parasitically off the productivity of others. Disconnecting people from a sense of their own purpose and the cosmic importance of their own consciousness is the ultimate form of bondage. A slave need not be aware that humans act because slaves do not act (slaves do what they are told by their owners/gods, who act). A slave does not need a sense of the cosmic importance of his consciousness because he has no use for it. He will not enjoy life and - because he cannot - he cannot have satisfaction.
To see this in action, let’s look at what happened to the geocentrism and anthropocentrism of the ancients. In its stead, we have the so-called Copernican Principle. The idea is that man is “just a speck of dust” somewhere out on a random planet orbiting a random star in a random arm of a random galaxy. This is all supposed to be very humbling. We are tiny little cogs in an incomprehensibly large - and essentially random - clockwork. This is supposedly a much more “serious” and dispassionate way of looking at ourselves.
But there is a striking similarity between the Copernican cog-in-the-machine and the slave. Neither really acts. Neither is really aware of anything. Awareness - if it exists at all - is just an illusion or magic trick. The new cosmology isn’t science. It, too, is a myth or narrative whose purpose is to teach us our place in the order of things, just like the astrological myths and narratives of the ancients. The difference is that the ancient myths and narratives were illuminating. They taught man about his innate nature and purpose and made him aware of the cosmic importance of his consciousness.
The old justification for slavery was the aggrandization of the mystical, that is, the claim of Divine Right to rule. The King rules his subjects just like God rules all of humanity and the King is appointed by God for this purpose. With the breakdown of the lies on which the Establishment’s religions are built, they had to shift to a new justification for ruling people. The new justification is the exact opposite of the old justification. You are not a spiritual being at all, you are a machine. You are a tiny cog in a random universe. You cannot hope to make sense of the machine in which you are embedded… a machine which was not created for you or your happiness. So, there’s no point trying to understand it and there’s no point trying to be happy. There’s no point acting purposefully because you have no purpose. Do not try to listen to your consciousness because you do not even have a consciousness… you are just so many whirling gears and levers.
I believe we are on the cusp of a scientific revolution. Our cosmology is shot to pieces. There are some recent discoveries that threaten to shake modern physics right back to the foundations of Newton. As Manly P. Hall says in the first link in this post, “man searching for these [spiritual] causes instinctively turned his attention to this tremendous vaulted mystery that seemed to enclose the world as man knew it.” The modernist’s conception of the Universe is anti-humanistic, isolationistic and deflationary. By contrast, the older conception of the Universe was anthropocentric, interconnected and attributed cosmic importance to man’s ends and consciousness. It’s time to break out.
Clayton -