EVOLUTION & THE NEW GNOSIS
by Don Cruse (CANADA)
Owen Barfield's 'Great Tabu'
The principal thesis of my book Evolution and the New Gnosis: Anti-establishment Essays on Knowledge, Science, Religion and Causal Logic, is that because of its inherent contradiction the philosophical dualism of Descartes in both its conscious and unconscious manifestations, will become progressively less and less acceptable as we move on into the third millennium, and that as a result a confrontation is in the making between the two opposite monisms that hitherto have combined to form this dualism.
This will mean that the currently dominant Monism of matter will find itself confronted, at every level of human thought and action, with its exact opposite, a Monism of Mind or thought. This confrontation, I contend, is prefigured in the work of Owen Barfield, and in that of his mentor Rudolf Steiner, and that a first salvo in this coming confrontation was fired by Owen Barfield, when in his work Speaker’s Meaning he proposed the existence of what he termed the "great tabu" with the following words:
The old tabus are dead or dying... whereas the one I shall be infringing is very much alive; and a wise man thinks twice before laying sacrilegious hands on the Lord’s annointed.
He then defines the tabu as consisting of two presuppositions: first, that “‘inwardness’ subjectivity of any sort...is always the product of a stimulated organism” and, second, that “in the history of the universe...‘matter’ preceded ‘mind’”. Barfield argues that scientists (and philosophers of science) who do not abide by these presuppositions risk the extreme displeasure of their colleagues, and that this places an irrational limitation on much of modern thought.
Irrationality is a principal characteristic of any tabu, and because of this it perpetuates itself primarily through fear—mostly I think through a fear of the unknown. This particular tabu is no exception, it works to perpetuate the dogma of philosophic and scientific materialism, and its continuing effects are succinctly described by the remarkable eighty-four-year-old-scientist Barry Commoner, in a recent article entitled “Unraveling The DNA Myth: The spurious foundation of genetic engineering,” published in the February 2002 edition of Harper's Magazine. The "central dogma" mentioned in the quote below, is the widely accepted but "false" belief that DNA is the sole and only necessary repository of information required to construct an organism:
Why, then, has the central dogma continued to stand? To some degree the theory has been protected from criticism by a device more common to religion than science: dissent, or merely the discovery of a discordant fact, is a punishable offence, a heresy that might easily lead to professional ostracism. Much of this bias can be attributed to institutional inertia, a failure of rigor, but there are other, more insidious, reasons why molecular geneticists might be satisfied with the status quo; the central dogma has given them such a satisfying, seductively simplistic explanation of heredity that it seemed sacrilegious to entertain doubts. The central dogma was simply too good not to be true. (italics mine)
Perhaps it is Barry Commoner's great age, and his honesty, that make him immune to the tabu's workings, but he is still among the relative few who are.
This is a very serious issue, not one to be lightly dealt with, and I have tried to do this in an even-handed way in the above book, which was written with the help of Robert Zimmer. The work consists of 22 essays and 7 appendices, most if not all of which deal with this question and with a few of its many and far-reaching consequences. I do not expect my work to ever become a best seller, the issue is too controversial for that, but I hope that in due time it may become necessary reading for many who sincerely value the truth.
Don Cruse
PS: I have just received a very positive letter about the book from Prof. John Polanyi, a Nobel Laureate whose father's work figures strongly in it.
Available from Barnes & Noble.com
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Machines That Cannot
Fail
notes from a personal odyssey, by Don
Cruse
While still a young man, serving with the British army in Egypt, I was put in charge of daytime maintenance at the Fayid transmitter station on the Suez canal. It contained more than 50 medium and high power short-wave radio transmitters, used by the army to keep in contact with its bases in England and in other parts of the world. The reason I was given the job, was that I had demonstrated a certain knack. I knew how to get defective transmitters operating again quickly, and back on the air with minimum delay. For some reason this came naturally to me, but not to quite a few others with similar training, and I remember asking myself why this was the case. What was it that prevented certain technicians from finding defects that seemed to me fairly obvious?
The answer came to me one day while watching someone experiencing this kind of difficulty. It was that the technician in question clearly did not fully understand the function or purpose of parts that he was trying to repair, and so could not go straight to the heart of the problem. Instead he played a game of trial and error, which took a great deal of time and often did more damage than good.
I do not think that I was special in this regard. Every good technician or repairman needs first a thorough grasp of the function that the equipment they are working on was intended to perform by its original designer. Not to have this can be a serious impediment, one can neither repair nor improve upon something that one has not first understood. What was different for me was that in later years I came to formulate this into a kind of philosophic principle, which can be simply stated as follows: a machine can fail only in relation to its purpose, i.e. when it no can longer do the job for which it was designed.
Machines that cannot fail
After my stint in Egypt I returned to England, and then emigrated to Canada. Here I established my own business as a radio, TV and electronics technician, and also took up the part-time study of philosophy at the University of Alberta, where I recall how with growing puzzlement I gradually became aware that what was so obvious to me as a technician, that a machine can fail only in relation to its purpose, was for some reason not obvious to the great minds whose works I studied. They wrote, for example, of 'random mutations' occurring in a purposeless but mechanistic universe.
At first I was sure that I had missed something important; everyone I talked to about it thought that I was wrong, but no one seemed able to tell me why. As the years went by and my studies continued and deepened, the conviction began to grow on me that something was indeed very seriously wrong in the abstract realm of modern philosophy. Because scientific materialism, that most influential of modern world views, had made use of the word 'mechanism' in a manner that contradicted all that experience had taught me, and had even turned this into a dictionary definition, i.e. that "mechanism = materialism." Materialism denies the possibility that 'ideas' are at work in the natural world (excepting, strangely enough, in human thought), and for purposes to exist in nature there would have to be ideas at work there also. Where science is concerned, to attribute purpose to any natural phenomena is to embrace teleology, a theological concept the overcoming of which had been an essential step in its own emancipation from religion. Imagine my state of mind, therefore, when faced with the following conundrum: If natural machines (organisms) have no purpose, then how can they ever be said to malfunction, because failure to function is possible only in relation to a purpose, i.e. in relation to an indwelling idea like that undeniably present in any man-made machine?
That organisms do fail is self-evident, death and illness are all around us in nature, but I soon discovered that philosophers have explained this consciously, not as a failure in the sense that a machine fails, i.e. when caused by internal defects, but as a kind of cessation, such as we often see in the inorganic realm when the energy source that drives a given natural process becomes exhausted. This means—subject to appeal—that in materialistic philosophy no distinction whatever was being made between what happens when a natural organism develops an internal defect, and when it simply runs out of fuel. This is like failing to observe the essential difference between a car that won't run because its ignition switch is off, or its gas tank empty, and another with a broken crankshaft. Or a radio that is switched off, compared with one that has an internal short-circuit. In either case a technician who could not quickly discern the difference, would justifiably be fired on the spot. Yet philosophy, which normally thrives upon subtle distinctions, has yet to explore this one—how so?
This is the essence of the problem that has troubled me now for many years: How is it possible that so vital a distinction, essential to any true understanding of man-made machinery, has not become the focus of intense interest and scrutiny in the discussion of so-called 'mechanistic' philosophy (materialism)? The reason for this, I have discovered, is as simple as its ramifications are profound. It is that the word 'mechanism' always carries the concept of purpose with it, it cannot help but do this because it is essential to its real meaning; and when left unexamined it helps greatly to make materialist philosophy appear plausible. The claim of 'purposelessness' can only be maintained if we ignore this word's subtle but undeniably powerful role in illegitimately importing the concept of purpose into materialism's explanatory equation, although it does this in an almost entirely unconscious manner. As matters now stand, the concept of purpose, for the reasons described above, is an anathema to materialistic and scientific thought; but because of the non-critical use of the word 'mechanism'.it is unconsciously active there, despite its claimed prohibition.
To maintain this unconscious error, we must neglect to observe or to consider the evidence that points to the existence in nature of the kind of failure which can only occur in relation to a purpose. So we have uncritically substituted 'cessation.' I am not claiming that this was a deliberate deception. I suspect that at first it was an entirely unconscious one, required perhaps by the forces at work in the background of human understanding, but a mistake it clearly was, and a truly monumental one.
Anyone who has had the opportunity to read my book Evolution and the New Gnosis will be aware that this question has opened for me a veritable Pandora's box, filled with consequences of almost unimaginable magnitude for both philosophy and science. If I am right in what I am saying, then the entire philosophic and scientific community has been deceiving itself now for centuries, and especially since the advent of Darwinism, into believing (1) that such things as purposeless and Designer-less organisms can exist; and (2) that we may explain their failure to go on working indefinitely, by unconsciously comparing their malfunctioning to that of a humanly designed and constructed machine, while neglecting to observe that real machines can fail only in relation to their purpose. Starting from the prior and unproven assumption that organisms do not embody either internal or external purposes, materialism then believes them to fail just as man-made machinery fails. Clearly this is a complete impossibility!
In my book, written with the aid of my friend Robert Zimmer, this question is examined and discussed in some detail. The book is respectfully dedicated to Charles Darwin, who unwittingly built his entire theory upon this error, but it is also a tribute to the work of my own mentor, Owen Barfield, who has led the way in uncovering it. To crudely sum up what I am saying, I argue in the book that the word 'mechanism' has been unconsciously hi-jacked and wrongly employed by materialistic thought for centuries now, and that without this step materialism as a critical world view could never have appeared plausible. I also argue that we really needed the stepping-stone of materialism, but for reasons I shall not go into here, this need has come to an end.
Historically speaking, science did away with God the Designer but kept the language of design, and used it in trying to materialistically explain nature's workings. This resulted in an erroneous use of language, an error historically spearheaded by the misapplication of the word 'mechanism.' There is now a growing awareness of the outright contradiction that results from this misapplication, and once this is well established both Darwinism and materialism will be recognized for what they have been all along, i.e. interesting and even necessary but logically false world views.
That is the way that I see it, and so far no one has been able to show me where my argument goes astray, even though I have appealed to many good and even great minds, asking them repeatedly to correct me if I'm wrong, but none have yet done so.
To my knowledge, Michael Polanyi is virtually alone among modern philosophers of science, in that he has clearly identified the very serious logical error that I am pointing to. However, he does this in language that is just a little bit opaque. He calls the structure or design of a machine "a boundary condition," and states that in understanding machines two factors must be taken into account, not just one. Science has long claimed that organisms are single-factor entities, and as such, they would be unable to either to work or stop working, i.e. they would behave like minerals. What Polanyi does not make clear, no doubt because of the academic climate of his time, is that the second-factor is and can only be, an 'idea,' a fact which places Polanyi squarely in the long-neglected tradition of the medieval scholastic Realist, who claimed that ideas, then termed 'universals,' were an essential part of the world's reality—its spiritual part.
Materialism wants to believe, and wants us to believe, that only one creative force is at work in nature, 'natural law,' but natural law as it is now understood is by definition non-mental and immutable, and so completely failure-proof. Alone, therefore, it cannot lead to the internal breakdown of either an organism or a machine—except and unless their functioning is seen to be the result of that vital second factor. It is the clear and conscious recognition in science and philosophy of the existence of that second factor, which has been and still is being thwarted by what Owen Barfield called "the great tabu," which will be the subject of a future work by Robert and myself.
I cannot stress enough, that this problem only exists for philosophic or scientific materialism, which assumes, but does not always overtly claim, the existence of a Monism of matter. The moment we add any spiritual dimension whatever to our world picture, we must then choose between a Cartesian dualism and a Monism of Mind. In either case the second factor becomes logically valid. In dualism, however, it is only seen to be valid within the context of the miraculous. To my mind the Cartesian contradiction causes dualism itself to be a profoundly defective world view, and so we are, as rational beings, left only with a Monism of Mind or thought. A new realm of scientific enquiry then legitimately opens before us, one in which the vast works of Owen Barfield's mentor, Rudolf Steiner, are undeniably paramount.
When I think back, I realize that I have carried this problem now for forty years, since my first meeting with Owen Barfield in his London office in 1962, and perhaps even longer, if I take into account the preparatory experiences mentioned above. It is no doubt highly presumptuous of me, as a complete academic nonentity, to say and write the things I have, both here and in my book; yet in doing so I am also carrying on a respected tradition, that of the 'outsider.' Perhaps because academic philosophy does not have an exacting discipline imposed upon it, as a mechanic does, for example, by the need to make a machine function properly (i,e. an objective way of determining the truth) it can find itself very seriously at odds with the truth. And when that happens, it becomes very difficult for anyone within academia, even if they know the answers, to say the things that need to be said without serious personal consequences. Owen Barfield, a London solicitor, stood within the outsider tradition, which oddly enough may have helped people to take him seriously—for sometimes the impulse for radical change has to come from without. For myself, though I respect the role of academia, I am also certain that what I now do and say is both right and necessary—though doubtless others more knowledgeable than I could have handled it much better.