I believe that I live without myth, so I start with that anecdotal contradiction.
Myths, in the broad sense, are simply subjective narratives that underpin our cultures, value systems and that explain why things are the the way they are and what future outcomes are desirable.
You seem to be advocating some form of scientistic meliorism, a version of the core Enlightenment myth of The Idea of Progress.
How would you describe your worldview though?
‘Religion’ whether it started with Animism or Shamanism, was born in ignorance. Once created, however, it became integrated into culture, passed down through indoctrination to subsequent generations. Modern human rights became necessary as the size of our societies grew. That social needs become codified in religious doctrine is not new. Suffice it to say that it is a complex symbiosis. Absent a literal god sitting in judgement, we human beings ourselves have been compelled to create the rules and social morays that allow us to exist in larger and larger groups. That this is done under the auspices of religion is understandable but not a requirement.
It was born in the human need to make meaning, and secularising the world doesn't remove this human need.
We would have to explore further what you consider a secular myth.
Any secular ideology.
Even basic things like the idea we belong to something called 'Humanity' the members of which have 'inalienable rights' and who we have some kind of obligation towards.
But we do not have to teach our children human exceptionalism. This is learned, socialized behavior. Perhaps it is natural, in a primitive state, in ignorance, for man to have initially assumed human exceptionalism, however, we are well beyond that now. Now we just have to break the cycle of our mythical inheritance.
Without human exceptionalism, you can't even sustain the idea that killing a human is worse than killing some other sentient being.
I'm not even sure it is possible to build a civilisation that doesn't accept this axiom.
Here you are re-asserting the assumption that myth and illusion are “simply an inescapable part of human nature”, and again, I say we cannot make that definitive assumption. Absent a controlled experiment, whereby we raise a statistically significant number of children in an environment that models behaviors that are comfortable handling un-answerable questions, that models a clear boundary between what is real and what is imaginary(certainly doesn’t indoctrinate belief in the reality of Santa Claus and Tooth Fairy, etc), and then see what happens, whether they are just fine without myth, or it becomes apparent that myth is required for a healthy psyche, until that experiment is run, your assertion has not value. And as all behavior expresses itself in a spectrum across a population, there may be some percentage, that from birth, do require reassuring myth. But if that percentage is small, must we condemn the whole to share that need?
Humans don't think in terms of isolated, objective facts empirically validated and a purely transactional approach to interpersonal relations.
Human cognition is based around narrative as we have to 'make sense' of things, these narratives are necessarily subjective and biased as that is the way our brains work.
We have to organise societies based around building coalitions, that requires us to communicate with others and bring around to our way of thinking. We do this via narrative: explaining the kind of world we want to live in and why it is preferable to something else.
Beyond small coalitions founded on personal relationships, we need to create bonds of fictive kinship (nationality, religion, race, political ideology, Humanity, etc.) which unite members of the in-group and separate us from out-groups. Our sense of identity derives from both what we think we are and also what we think we are not and we develop an emotional attachment to our coalitions and thus desire to signal to others that we are 'good' coalition members.
These coalitions gain origin and historical myths, myths of superiority, etc. which are continually developed and expanded upon over time.
Coalitions that are unable to produce strong internal bonds tend not to last in the long term as they lose out to competing groups who can.
The problem about thinking we can build coalitions around 'facts' is explained by the evolutionary psychologist John Tooby:
Coalition-mindedness makes everyone, including scientists, far stupider in coalitional collectivities than as individuals. Paradoxically, a political party united by supernatural beliefs can revise its beliefs about economics or climate without revisers being bad coalition members. But people whose coalitional membership is constituted by their shared adherence to “rational,” scientific propositions have a problem when—as is generally the case—new information arises which requires belief revision. To question or disagree with coalitional precepts, even for rational reasons, makes one a bad and immoral coalition member—at risk of losing job offers, one's friends, and one's cherished group identity. This freezes belief revision.
Forming coalitions around scientific or factual questions is disastrous, because it pits our urge for scientific truth-seeking against the nearly insuperable human appetite to be a good coalition member. Once scientific propositions are moralized, the scientific process is wounded, often fatally.
Edge.org
Empirical evidence isn't the problem, human beings are the problem. That human beings are different in innumerable ways is a fact. We have to accept that reality and come to intersubjective agreement on how best to accommodate this fact.
I agree human beings are the problem, as their hardwired cognition means that while they can be rational at times, they are necessarily emotional, irrational and biased at other times.
There is endless scientific evidence that demonstrates this.
Moreover, human society will necessarily be fragmented into different coalitions with competing experiences, interests, desires, beliefs and ideologies.
As such the degree to which intersubjective agreement is possible will always be limited, and competition and conflict will always be present on both the personal and group level.
This is a consequence of our biological makeup, not simply 'learned behaviour'.
Why include this quote? Are you saying that Science = Rationalism? Or more specifically, Science = Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism?
Rationalism, whatever it may be, is simply the belief, opinion, of Rationalist Philosophers. Rationalism is not Science.
The point was about the importance of 'practical knowledge' in many activities, and how this form of knowledge is not really possible to test scientifically as it is largely beyond verbal explanation and relies on experience, insight and intuition.
You seem to be arguing that unless it is science, then it is not knowledge and should be chucked in the bin.
We do not throw up our hands and say the problem is too hard, too complex, instead we keep plugging away. You cannot abandon quality control in the face of complexity. You seem to have a bias that science can only work in a very narrow range of methodology. This could not be further from the truth. Scientific method is about adaptability and discovery, finding the methodology that will overcome the complexity.
It can work with many, but there are still many areas of existence in which scientific methods do not produce reliable knowledge (or cannot tell us anything).
If we ever find these methodologies then great, but until then 'scientific knowledge' that is wrong is often worse than no knowledge at all, let alone our preexisting ideas gained from experience.
Please … insight, intuition and particularly experience are part of the scientific process. Science simply tests and verifies. Infinitely better than simply plodding along with unchecked inherited generational ignorance.
That scientists may use intuition, insight and experience doesn't make the use of intuition, insight and experience science though.
Also the idea that anything 'not science' must be 'ignorance' seems quite hubristic to me.
While it is not always the case, discarding things that have worked effectively over centuries for whatever the latest contemporary fad is does not have a great track record. Time, while not necessarily filtering for what is 'true', is certainly a great filter of what does not work in practice, so we should at least be wary about replacing that which has stood the test of time.
Much of science is necessarily faddish as findings are often wrong and 'best practice' are updated all of the time. In the meantime, they are not necessarily doing good in the world, scientific racialism, eugenics, etc.
To say “elevating everything to 'science' makes us overestimate our own rationality”, I find incredible. It is Classic Philosophy that relies solely on conceptual rationalism, derived from the egotism and arrogance of a lone Philosopher. Scientific inquiry humbly acknowledges the fallibility of the investigator and takes necessary steps to mitigate it. I think you have things quite reversed.
Philosophy is not limited to the ancient Greeks though.
And even if normative science 'humbly acknowledges' fallibility, scientistic ideologies that reject the value of the totality of human knowledge outside that which can be empirically validated via the experiments of contemporary scientists are certainly not.
Humans have always overestimated their ability to understand and control the wold around them, but we never learn from experience. That is one thing the ancient Greeks got right in the myths at least.
Unless we educate each generation on how to accept the unanswerable, unknowable questions.
We are more threatened by questions we can (mostly) answer than those we can't.
We are a bunch of atoms that became sentient by chance and live a meaningless existence in an uncaring universe. Our world and species will be destroyed in the end so everting we do is ultimately futile.
That's not a great basis on which to run a complex civilisation with a long term focus which requires many people to sacrifice parts of their own good for the benefit of other people they have no tangible connection to.
Fortunately, it's pretty easy for us to get around this by creating our own sources of meaning which make the world a much richer and vibrant place. These are the myths you insist we can live without though.
