The Kali Yuga

The Introduction to my book The Great Transformation: How Contemporary Science Harmonizes with the Spiritual Life, available at Amazon.com.

Like you, I was born in the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of Hindu mythology, when all the great religious faiths of the world are on the wane.

The secular faith in the Nation-State, in grand schemes to institute Paradise on Earth, and in placing transcendent hope in human institutions has been destroyed by history. No theoretical arguments are necessary to show that the goal of a Heaven on Earth is perverse and that the pursuit of such a goal leads to untold death and destruction, to a Hell on Earth for tens of millions.[1] The sight of the rubble of Hiroshima, the smell of burning bodies in Auschwitz, and the sound of frozen corpses thrown on sledges in the Gulag destroyed secular faith. A technological utopia, a Master Race, and a classless society are nightmares from the past, only believable to a handful of science-fiction writers, to a few crazy ideologues blind to history, and perhaps to one or two drunks in bars near Harvard and M.I.T.

Secular faith is dead, and religious faith is stumbling toward the graveyard. Pope Benedict XVI, in the first year of his pontificate, lamented the weakening of churches in Europe, Australia, and the United States. “There’s no longer evidence for a need of God, even less of Christ,” he told a meeting of clergy in the Italian Alps. “The so-called traditional churches look like they are dying.”^[2] Capitalism focused attention on material prosperity, on the good life in this world, away from eternal salvation, so that few Christians today see themselves as pilgrims journeying through this Earthly life, shunning the attachment to worldly things and avoiding the snares set by Satan.

Not surprisingly, the buried stream of nihilism running for a century or more beneath Modernity surfaced in the twentieth century and is now a swift river, carrying many away into moral and intellectual chaos. Music, poetry, philosophy, religion, and morality are believed to be mere expressions of personal opinions, individual perceptions, or particular cultural viewpoints.

In America, the authority of every institution over the last fifty years weakened to nonexistence. The Church does not command respect, nor does the United States Congress, so neither religious truths nor a common good can serve as the basis for an argument. In addition, custom eroded to the point that anything is permitted provided no innocent bystander is injured. Under the increased sway of democratic equality, schools and colleges no longer inculcate values or even social etiquette.

Traditionally, for some people, philosophy furnished universal truths about the human being, but those happy days disappeared years ago. Martin Heidegger, probably the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, declared in a posthumously published interview with Der Spiegel, “Philosophy is at an end.”^[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, of course, was there first. In an 1873, unpublished essay, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” he asked, “What is truth?” and answered, “A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.”^[4]

In his book Consequences of Pragmatism, philosopher Richard Rorty envisages a post-philosophical culture, where the search for ruling principles, immovable centers, and fixed structures is abandoned. According to Rorty, historians, literary theorists, and philosophers in the future will accept that no escape from culture exists and that all intellectuals can do is ride the “literary-historical-anthropological-political merry-go-round,” chasing one intellectual fad after another. In a world without maps, in a culture without fixed reckoning points, “there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.”^[5]

The only intellectual discipline that a thinker can draw upon is science, for in our chaotic times, science is still widely believed to be the only path to truth, a belief that killed theology, philosophy, and poetry. We must not be so naive to believe that science exists in some pure land. When a scientist steps into the laboratory or sits down at a desk to theo­rize, he or she is not suddenly transported to an ethereal region, high above the rest of humankind. The scientist, just like the poet, the artist, and the philosopher, is reared in a community with a specific understanding of the world and thus brings to science hidden cultural assumptions about mind, matter, and what constitutes knowledge. Culture often poses the questions we ask, the facts we seek, and the kind of answers we accept. Consequently, the results of modern science are habitually interpreted through culture.

Nevertheless, science often transcends culture to universal truths. In contrast to Western civilization’s descent into political and intellectual chaos in the twentieth century, science underwent an unexpected and welcoming revolution that stripped away the cultural blinders of materialism and threw open the door to the nonmaterial with the breath-taking vision that the spiritual life could be supported by empirical science. The Great Transformation uncovers our spiritual nature by first clearing away the cultural obstacles on our only path to truth and then laying out how in contemporary science the cosmos is composed of two elements, mind and matter, neither reducible to the other.

Main image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Endnotes

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[1] A partial, conservative catalog of the political murders of the twentieth century is mind-boggling, unbelievable, but sadly undeniable. Deaths: World War I (military only): 9,700,000; Russian Revolution and Civil War: 9,000,000; forced col­lectivization: 3,000,000 Ukrainian peasants; Russian gulag: 1,000,000 political prisoners; Spanish Civil War: 1,200,000; World War II (military and civilian): 51,000,000; Nazi camps: 6,000,000 Jews and 6,000,000 Slavs, Gypsies, and political prisoners; Japanese Rape of Nanking: 300,000 Chinese; Allied bombing of Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne, and Dresden: 500,000 German civilians; Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 140,000 Japanese civilians; Vietnam War (military and civilian): 5,000,000; Chinese Great Leap Forward: 30,000,000. These numbers are low estimates. For the difficulty of estimating mass political murders, see Lewis M. Simons, “Genocide and the Science of Proof,” National Geographic Magazine (January 2006): 28-35 and Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” The New York Review of Books (July 16, 2009).

[2] Benedict XVI, reported by L’Osservatore Romano (July 2005).

[3] Martin Heidegger, The Spiegel Interview (1966), Only a God Save Us.

[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche,trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 46.

[5] Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980 (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 1982), Introduction.my