Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future by Neil Postman

Author:Neil Postman [Postman, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79728-5
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2011-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

Is this the story Freud hoped humanity’s maturity would lead us to? Can we believe in such a story? I suppose we can in some corner of our brain, but it is the sort of belief we can do nothing with, and which does nothing for us—like some overheated postmodernist “believing” that blood circulating through the body is a mere social construction, or some philosopher of science “believing” that there is no logical basis for inferring that the sun will rise tomorrow, or some relic of Stoicism “believing” that nothing that moves will arrive at its destination. There is “truth” in such believing, but it is unusable. To do its work, a narrative does not have to be “true” in a scientific sense. There are many enduring narratives whose details include things that are not susceptible to verification. The purpose of a narrative is to give meaning to the world, not to describe it scientifically. The measure of a narrative’s “truth” is in its consequences. Does it provide a sense of hope, ideals, personal identity, a basis for moral conduct, explanations of that which cannot be known? Albert Einstein knew as well as anyone that in the end all is buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins. But it is not the story he used to give meaning to his life. He found another story, in, as he said, “a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”4 This is as good a summary of what God tells Job as we are likely to find.

I do not say that Einstein believed in a god as the source of the moral beliefs of human beings. His references to God in other places (“God does not play dice with the Universe”; “God is mysterious but not malicious”) may be taken to mean the “superior intelligence” he refers to in the sentence quoted above. Superior intelligence? What could he have meant? Perhaps he meant what Bertrand Russell meant when he said that if God exists, it is a differential equation. I rather think he did not, since his anthropomorphic reference to the order of the universe as reflecting a superior intelligence implies a kind of purpose that Russell’s remark does not. In any case, I call attention to Einstein because he is such a clear twentieth-century exemplar of Enlightenment thought. And I connect him to John Stuart Mill, who is such a clear nineteenth-century exemplar of Enlightenment thought. Mill said: “The essence of religion is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires toward an ideal object, recognized as of the highest excellence, and as rightfully paramount over all selfish objects of desire.”5

What we may learn from these two great philosophes, Einstein and Mill, is what they learned from their predecessors—that it is necessary to live as if there is a transcendent authority. “One

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