Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Tom Wolfe, in his 2004 novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, explores the connection between the mind-brain reductionism of contemporary neuroscience and sociobiology and the moral depravity rampant on contemporary college and university campuses. Philosophical materialists who reviewed the book were, by and large, unimpressed by the idea that mind-brain reductionism should lead to the libertinism endemic to contemporary campus life.

But Wolfe, who is generally more prescient regarding the culture than those purely literary types who review his books, was simply expressing a sense of a connection that honest philosophers since the time of Socrates have recognized as their vocation to articulate. Namely, it is impossible that there should be such a thing as objective moral goodness if reality is nothing more than matter in motion.

Philosophical materialism is the underlying metaphysical presupposition of the contemporary academy. It is a metaphysical position that is thought, by many, to have been put on an unshakable foundation by the findings of modern neuroscience. All experiences and thoughts are capable of being measured in the brain, so it is said by materialists, and we have proven this by our successes in mapping experiences and thoughts to their neural correlates. Certain neural regions, when stimulated, give rise to experiences and thoughts. Many take this to mean that the brain must be wholly causal of psychological phenomena, and this is taken to mean, at least implicitly, that the human person is reducible to his brain. We truly are (on this view), to borrow an image from Descartes, brains in a vat, though the vat in question is simply the rest of the human body. Much of the effort in neuroscience is directed to finding the neural correlates of psychic experience.

Perhaps the best book written on the subject of the relationship of the mind and the brain remains Stanley Jaki’s Brain, Mind and Computers. The book was originally published in 1969, with a second and expanded edition in 1989. Jaki, as many may know, is a Catholic priest, theologian, and perhaps the most important historian and philosopher of science in the past 40 years. In this book, he defends the existence of the soul, whose existence alone, he argues, makes human understanding possible. He makes this defense, in a masterful blend of historical scholarship and philosophical argumentation, against the reigning philosophies that underlie modern neuroscience and especially against those who think that mental processes are reducible to computer models. Jaki considers the relationship of the brain to experience and thought, and he levels a devastating critique of those who champion the existence of “artificial intelligence,” those, that is, who equate understanding with the physical manipulation by pre-established rules of purely formal systems. Especially valuable is chapter V of the book, which Jaki added to the second edition and which gives a very suggestive phenomenology of language.

The book is worth considering in detail, but there is one point that Jaki makes near the end of it that I wish to bring out here, and that gets me to the point of this post. Jaki gives several suggestions, toward the end of chapter 5, for defenders of the existence of the soul to consider in regard to the contemporary debate on the mind and the brain, inasmuch as there is such a debate. One of his suggestions is that defenders of the soul should have the courage to call a spade a spade. By this he means that philosophers who recognize fully the dignity of the human person must be brave enough to stand athwart efforts by neuroscientists, sociobiologists, proponents of artificial intelligence, and the like, to reshape human society according to their valueless science. Jaki explains:

… [society] merrily marches down the road to anarchy. The march is to the brass bands composed of academics who have been busy trumpeting that exclusive attention to quanitatively specificable patterns is the only posture with intellectual respectability. Such a pattern is on hand whenever a behavior, no matter how queer, is acted upon in a statistically significant number. From there it is but a short step to claims to legal recognition and protection, as on the basis of mere patterns, so many pure formalizations, everything becomes a mere machinery, with no allowance for distinctions between the morally good and the morally evil. Hence the steady erosion of sensitivity for hallowed principles, as if they were so many words, and the growing readiness to grant social respectability to any behavior, provided it establishes itself as a pattern. (Brain, Mind and Computers p. 295)

Jaki wrote these words in 1989, and there is little doubt that he did not have the concept of “gay marriage” on his mind at that time. But the basic principle that he brings out here is at play in the ever-greater social acceptance of “gay marriage.”

What he means in this passage is that there are those who hold that behavior is entirely determined by biology. The biological dimension of beings is, in turn, thought to be capable of being mathematically measured. Indeed, the establishment of a mathematical measure to things is the ultimate goal of science. The ultimate reality of things is, on the view of many, that which is quantifiable. Given the advances of twentieth century physics, mathematical science has tended to rest in statistical analysis, especially so in regard to “biological systems.” The statistical is therefore thought to be the real. Statistical significance is the only significance. There is no good or bad, in the traditional moral sense. There are only, for these reductionists, statistically significant occurrences of behavior.

Jaki confines his attention to unmasking the pretensions of proponents of artificial intelligence. They think only in terms of statistical significance. They have no other basis then statistical analysis to uphold or deny moral norms. But, going beyond Jaki’s analysis, it must be recognized that the philosophical position of these reductionists goes hand-in-glove with utilitarianism, which reduces the rational assessment of human action to a calculus of pleasure.

The upshot of this type of moral reasoning is that there can be no standard of moral goodness that transcends comfort and demographic consensus. If a person’s behavior is thought to contribute to his comfort and pleasure then his behavior is acceptable, on the condition that the statistically-verified, consensus opinion of his society is amenable to his behavior.

Of course, this type of reasoning goes against the virtue ethic of the Catholic tradition, for which actions or behaviors are good or bad by their very nature. In regard to the discussion of “gay marriage,” the gap between the Church’s virtue ethic and the materialistic ethos of the wider culture makes it very difficult at present for genuinely Catholic opinion to penetrate public opinion. On the analysis of the Church, it is in the nature of things that male and female are sexually oriented to one another, as is evidenced by their bodily complementarity. It is for the ultimate good of a society that it should encourage a stable ordering of this orientation of one to the other in the socially privileged institution of monogamous marriage.

Scriptural revelation unveils the profoundest depths of the ordering of male and female to one another. Marriage is revealed in scripture in its sacramental profundity. The union of man and woman in the Church, as Saint Paul realized, gives to marriage its full significance as both sign and instantiation of the entire Church’s nuptial relationship to Christ the Bridegroom. Naturally, the Church cannot force civil society to accept the sacramental meaning of marriage. But the revealed meaning of marriage is a perfection of its natural meaning, and it is the Church’s duty to defend this natural meaning even in the civil order.

Ultimately, mind-brain reductionism devalues the body as much as it denies the existence of the mind. The form of the body is of little consequence to an analysis of human action for reductionists. For the virtue ethic of the Church, the sexual act is good inasmuch as it is ordered to the union of husband and wife and the openness to procreation that seals their love most fully. The form of the body and the experience of married love reveal to natural experience the soundness of this teaching. But reductionists cannot see in the form of the body anything that is of its essence, just as they cannot see in concrete experience anything that connects to reality. Male, female, or some combination of the two: it makes no difference. Matter and its statistically analyzed motion is the only reality for reductionists, not the “shape” of the body, not its concrete existence as we experience it. Reality, for reductionists, is ultimately a homogeneous mass of matter/energy in space-time. The things we experience in our everyday life, the basis for the Church’s virtue ethic, are denied reality.

So, the upshot of the cultural dominance of mind-brain reductionism, as Tom Wolfe realized, is the situation of poor Charlotte Simmons, an innocent college co-ed at a prestigious university, who is left to figure out her life in an environment where anything goes. What difference does it make, as long as almost everyone is comfortable and having a good time? In the end, you are only your brain. When it dies, there is nothing left. Why, then, should we not have a culture formed by the ethos of “Girls Gone Wild,” or “Boys Gone Wild,” or “The Jerry Springer Show?”

How do we, as faithful and hopeful Catholics, transform this cultural situation? It can only come through the Church. As the Holy Father himself realizes, it starts with the reform of the Church’s liturgy, where bodily form and symbol have to be valued once again after several decades of anti-religious leveling of the symbols in the Church. And Catholic institutions of higher education have to have the boldness, as Fr. Jaki says, to call a spade a spade. Moral reasoning is impotent if it is based upon the idea that the mind is reducible to the brain. The Church’s intellectual class needs to state it plainly: there can be no such a thing as objective goodness or of “values” that transcend cultural norms if the mind is reducible to the brain. Luckily, we are seeing more and more bishops who are stating the matter plainly, and we must all support them.

A careful reading of Catholic philosophers and theologians in the Thomist tradition, such as Stanly Jaki, has much to teach us as well, and Catholic universities should get back to this tradition of thought. A first pedagogical step would be to teach a sound epistemology to students: one that recognizes that each and every act of understanding transcends the material domain. The brain cannot understand. Computers cannot understand. These cannot understand because material systems cannot, as Thomists have always understood, abstract universals from concrete particulars. And it is only by abstracting the universal meaning of things that any particular thing – whether it be a word, or a symbol, or an animal, or a tree, or a molecule – is understood. Brains and computers are only concrete particulars, or collects of concrete particulars, and only act within the concrete moment. They cannot transcend the concrete moment of space-time because they exist entirely within it. It takes spirit, which is not confined to space-time, in order to abstract the universal from the concrete. It takes spirit in order to understand, for instance, what it means to be a person, or to be this particular person, or to understand any particular thing or general concept that persons communicate. Of course, I mean by spirit, at least for humans as opposed to angels and God, that which is, in the soul, truly united to the body (as the soul was not for Descartes), even though the soul is not reducible to the body. This sound epistemology, which is also the only basis for a sound ontology, is the starting point for a genuinely Catholic and Christian educational perspective. It should be expanded and brought out on many different levels. It is the basis of true philosophy and theology. It is only in recognizing the existence of the soul and the body (both of which are done away with by mind-body reductionism), and their unity, that a truly humanistic form of moral reasoning can be articulated.