Page 172 of
Print EditionPART THREE

Conclusion

The Role of Science and the Mechanistic/Objective Approach

NOW THAT THE CONFLICT between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is resolved it is possible to clearly explain the different roles mechanists and holists played as humanity developed through its adolescence.

There have been two ways of approaching knowledge, objectively and subjectively. Objectivity employed experimentation to establish what was correct while subjectivity or introspection employed our soul’s conscience to know what was right.

Through our conscience we have always known the absolute truth or ideal of integrative meaning. The problem has been that without explanation/justification/reason for our divisiveness — for our anger, aggression, competitiveness and selfishness, our apparent inhumanity — this integrative/selfless ideal was impossible to live with, which left us no choice but to evade/repress/block-out any awareness of its existence. We had to find understanding of why we were divisive before we could confront integrative meaning/God. We had to defend ourselvesPage 173 of
Print Edition before we could confront God. We have been evasive or God-fearing.

To understand/explain ourselves we would need to understand our world that produced us. For instance, we would have to discover how the genetic and mind-based learning systems worked. The extremely difficult task was to do all this while evading integrative meaning because all understandings related to and led to integrative meaning since all development was a product of integrativeness.

Of the two ways of finding knowledge only the objective/ mechanistic approach allowed us to be evasive. Subjectivity/ introspection involved using the guidance of our conscience’s orientation to integrativeness which meant living with integrative meaning which we could not do. Our instinctive, genetically based conscience could recognise what was and was not integrative or Godly but relying on it to do so entailed confronting integrative meaning. Introspection or subjectivity used the conscience to sieve out any understandings which were inconsistent with integrativeness. It worked downwards from the absolute truth to the particular. Living with the absolute truth of integrativeness, as subjective inquiry did, was hurtful and thus dangerous. So we had to be mechanistic rather than holistic. (As has been mentioned before ‘holism’ is defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as ‘tendency in nature to form wholes . . .’. So holism involved recognising integrative order or wholeness, which we could not do.) It was only objectivity that allowed us to work from the particular, such as the mechanisms of change in our world, up towards an understanding of the absolute truths. Mechanistic inquiry was reductionist. It started from or reduced everything to the particular and worked up from there, while introspection worked down from the whole to the particular.

For two million years all humans have been alienated, to varying degrees. Our alienation was established in two stages. In the first we were born into a world instinctively expecting to encounter the sort of treatment and environment to which ourPage 174 of
Print Edition original instinctive self or soul had become accustomed during its ten million years of indoctrination in love. But ever since humans first became upset two million years ago as a consequence of setting out in search of understanding it has not been possible to have our expectations met. To varying degrees infants have not received as much love as their souls expected and as children they have not been reinforced as much as their souls expected. In general we have not been able to grow up surrounded by non-egotistical, non-angry, non-arguing, non-alienated and non-superficial people in a natural environment in line with that expected by our souls. Reaching adulthood after such a childhood we were faced with bringing a new generation into the world without being able to defend/explain and thus give these new children any more understanding than we had received ourselves to cope with the apparent ‘mistreatments’ of our soul. And so on, generation after generation. As children the only device we could employ to cope was block-out or repression of the upsets, the hurt, the ‘mistreatments’ of our soul. We could not hopelessly keep on trying to confront the pain — the ‘wrongness’ of what had happened. This blocking out of, estrangement from, our true situation and thus true self — and the consequent partitioning of all the truths that our soul could guide our thinking towards — was the first stage in the establishment of our alienation.

Not being able to defend our alienated state, we have not been able to admit too clearly what alienation was. The immensely differing degrees of upset we each experienced as infants and children and the extreme sensitivity and vulnerability of our souls to ‘mistreatment’ when we were so young are subjects we have had to evade. For example, the more exhausted adults became searching for understanding the more they had to live with a conscience unfairly criticising their behaviour the more they needed to be told they were ‘good’ and not ‘bad’ the more unjust any reinforcement and admiration of others, especially innocents, seemed. But children came into the world expecting to find adults capable of admiring their efforts. Since parents werePage 175 of
Print Edition unable to explain their embattled state children could only interpret this lack of reinforcement as implying they were not deserving of admiration which made them die inside themselves. lf you ‘walk into a room full of people who are starving [in this case bereft of self-esteem] you can’t expect to be fed’ but children weren’t able to be told ‘the room was full of starving people’. Quite the reverse happened. Adults pretended there was nothing wrong. They laughed, joked and played and said ‘what a wonderful day it is’! The truth is our adult world was a mad place, a nightmare to a child. Today’s children are born somewhat adapted to (selected to cope with) this mad world of adults but this only hides the extent of the madness of it and thus a child’s vulnerability to it.

Now that we can defend our battle-weary state it is possible to look at the extreme vulnerability of our soul and the immense differences between people according to their degree of alienation. When we do, we will be shocked at the depth of the upsets within us and at the immense difference in alienation between people. While we haven’t been able to admit it until now, alienation was the real difference that existed between people, was the reason for our different personalities as it was the real difference between races and cultures. This threat of exposure to the differing degrees of alienation can make the more alienated among us afraid of exposure/revelation/‘judgement’ day unless there is sufficient counselling available to explain and bring us to an understanding of our misunderstandings/insecurities/worries.

The second stage of our alienation was a product of the first. Unable to defend/explain the upset alienated state and its accompanying ‘corrupted/distorted’ behaviour brought about by our imperfect childhoods, we again had to resort to blocking out in order to cope when we became aware adolescents. As adolescents and adults we had to block-out or evade the criticism such partial truths as integrative meaning made of us. We each blocked-out or hid from these hurtful partial truths to different degrees, according to how alienated we had become during ourPage 176 of
Print Edition early upbringing. We lived at a distance from them commensurate with our particular degree of alienation, using differing degrees of false argument to defend our ‘corrupted’, non-‘ideal’ state. The greater truth actually was that we were always committed to integration even though we appeared to be divisive, but until we understood the truth and found the explanation for our divisiveness we had no choice but to be evasive, which added to the alienation we acquired in our infancy and childhood.

So the amount of truth one human could confront was different to the amount another could confront. This made collective introspection particularly dangerous since it would involve confronting many people with more truth than they could cope with. Therefore, as a community or collectively, in order to be safe and not expose anyone beyond their capacity for exposure, subjective/introspective inquiry had to be avoided rather than cultivated. For this reason, we were unable to establish the sorts of centres, such as universities, for introspection that we established for objective inquiry. It also meant that our communal vehicle for inquiry, science, had to be mechanistic rather than holistic/vitalistic. As a community we could not afford to recognise the vital force implicit in the tendency in nature to form ever larger and more stable wholes.

The great benefit of evasive mechanistic science was that it allowed us to work towards finding our freedom (from criticism) while avoiding criticism or hurtful exposure. It was the one way we could live while we carried out the search that would bring us our freedom. The alternative of subjective inquiry was too dangerous to pursue collectively. So science got on with the job of investigating the particulars or mechanisms of existence while avoiding the whole or overview. It was the only safe, non-threatening approach to understanding available to us.

Ultimately, by learning to understand ourselves and our world, we would learn why we had been divisive and, with this understanding, we could at last live with and acknowledge the fact of integrativeness — we could at last confront God. ThePage 177 of
Print Edition great task of investigating the mechanism of existence was the role of science. Its responsibility was to be evasive.