History as a Science

As a memory is to a person, so history is to a people, but before the Greek discovery of mind and so critical control of meaning, history was an admixture of myth and fact relating the people to the Gods or God, to nature, to other peoples. Origins shape potentiality so the myth that Chinese people have that they are descended from maggots needs to be thoroughly dispelled before they can care for a democratic or a human rights ideal.

Plato though thought we should go gently with myths, because they contain some element of truth, and so maggots may express mortality or that the majority of people may be ruled by dictatorship. Also myths may be so important that they account for conduct, and help account for the fury of the Amazons or the Empire of the English. Pareto thought religion mythical but essential to express sentiments. Perhaps too, myth belongs to our thinking about large groups of people. In battle the enemy tend to be thought of as subhuman Huns say, or one might think all Americans subhuman and greedy, or all Middle Eastern people except the Jews as prone to oriental despotism. Sir Alex Douglas Hume when Foreign Secretary had all the countries of the world simply classified as pro or anticommunist.

It is a sort of mythical mentality that for each people history should be the history of their own country. The real story of things is more complex. If Newton was English, Galilee and Copernicus were not but they are part of the same emerging story. Naturalism is a powerful myth which can galvanise a people for independence or war.

Lonergan’s view of history is rather more abstract, or perhaps one should say concrete! He sees that there is a tendency to progress through man’s understanding, judgement, and application. The discovery of how to grow wheat or how to make bread is not confined to one tribe or one people. An insight normally is not tied to the first language in which it is expressed. The insight is pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic, even though it is normally through language and through concepts that we come to discover and share in the insights of others. There is then a progressive movement forward about history, for one discovery leads to a situation in which further discoveries can be made. Weeding I suppose was done by hand before the hoe was invented. Dating things is a matter of fact when it is possible – but it gives rise to a situation where there is an emergent probability of a further discovery. Such a history is not necessarily just about technical things – so people discovered the importance of the Sabbath for the spiritual life. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Progress then can be spiritual as well as technical. The implementation of the Sabbath might lead to such quotations as “What should we do about the children” and so reading, writing and storytelling take a leap forward. The fact that progress can be spiritual as well as technical gives God (and the demons) a chance to come in on the act. So we Christians have the idea of an epoch of Revelation, starting with Adam in one way and with Abraham in another way and culminating in the death of the last apostle who was St John and whose last recorded words were “My little children, love one another.

We find then a double dynamism of progress in history – man gets to know the natural world he lives in better and better and God Himself can come to be known and even reveal himself. Everything moves forward.

The complicating factor is sin. From the beginning man turned from God, experienced the distress of mortality, and was darkened in intellect and weakened in will. The distress of mortality is a huge factor setting a context of pessimism and scepticism. Man is deeply used to a hopeless situation. So, ensconced on the dung heap he makes the most of hopelessness, making something enjoyable or even noble from the ruination which is existence. Wit, pleasure, even absolute concern for justice, might occupy him. Voltaire and Malthus are bedfellows here, but so too I suspect, those many scientists who so support the global warming thesis that they are prepared to support measures which will support the impoverishment and the discomfort of the multitude. Air conditioning for Africa – certainly not!

I think this pessimism about human existence – I recall the title of Malraux’s book “Call No Man Happy” – is not expressed by Sartres rather brilliant “It is absurd to be born, it is absurd to live, it is absurd to die”. Sartre here is in no way in love and aware of the meaning, the non-absurdity of love, and of existence in love. The pessimism i write of draws from the pathos of doomed livingness. i recall the 1950s and ‘60s where it dawned on us rather drastically that the probability was we were to be destroyed in a nuclear war. Here was a factor in permissiveness for a long term future for man seemed pie in the sky.

The pessimistic humanist living in an absurd universe feels bound to save what he can by slowing down the exuberance and carelessness of human living. The reversal of the Resurrection places man’s meaning in a Providential and Eternal context but brings a wider and deeper sense of duty.

For Lonergan, the drive forward in history of attention, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility improving situations meets the fault in man from the Fall – his darkness of intellect, his weakness of will – in the four biases, dramatic, egoistic, group and general. A bias is not a total blindness, just a blindness to some aspect of things which may be relatively unimportant or extremely serious. So Caiaphas has it that one man should die for the people but is blind to the importance of this man or any man. He is blind to the sort of people you make if you do not defend each man. His blindness gives him more energy about the things he does see.

Let us run through the biases. Dramatic bias censors in and censors out certain sorts of images, feelings, insights. Egoistic bias prevents my share of the washing up. Group bias collaborates with one group but ignores or oppresses another. It sets up a cyclical motion whereby the oppressed get their chance. General bias ignores and disparages established values in order to solve practical problems – so the monasteries get dissolved and the army gets equipped.

History then is the scene of genuine progress where a people with their leaders act authentically and reading the situation carefully, deal with emerging problems constructively. It is the scene of decline and chaos, resentment and anger where issues are not faced squarely. Retributive justice adds to the spiral of violence. So the situation gives scope for healing, redemptive love which dissolves the frontiers, for hope which overrides determinisms and for faith which breaks down the arguments ideology has constructed. Love reveals values and shows what could be done and makes man capable of great efforts and even self sacrifice. Progress, decline and redemption from decline provide different areas of history.

Lonergan also writes of different plateaus of history, the practical giving rise to cities, the theoretical giving rise to science, history, art, and religion, and a third plateau in which through self-appropriation man becomes aware of the ways forward emerging from his or her own self. A first plateau situation can be taken forward by people from the second plateau. Second plateau people can be taken forward towards personal self appropriation and creative living – “we are God’s work of art” – by third plateau minds who realise that choice belongs to man in his freedom, overriding values express what he cares for and that divine love works to bring a new order on the face of the earth.
Choice belongs to man in a radical way for what he comes to know is not just a matter of scientific handing down but a matter of personal discovery. We might in post war Britain imagine that economic growth is the only sort of progress that matters, especially today (2009) when we face recession and slump, but progress in fact, undergirded by the economy as a matter of personal formation, personal maturity, personal output, a question of loving deeds as well as material output.

Growth today has got to face and appropriate anew the achievement of self appropriation, with a recognition of differentiations of consciousness in science, history, religion and art. It has to address decline in the practical plateau so that the economy is productive and frees itself from debt. It can prevent the theoretical plateau from being the mere mastery of past discoveries. It can open the third plateau against “blocks” – the insistence that all meaning can be expressed in ordinary language; the insistence that man’s only knowledge is through empirical science; the insistence that sociology and history should be “value free”; the insistence by humanists that while there may be the self transcendence of knowledge and human love, divine love is an illusion.

All development involves the purification of tradition by an appropriate revision. The appropriate revision may restore concern for what is good in the tradition. So there has been, in warfare, a development from wholesale slaughter to respect for innocent human life. Through, I think, the Red Cross, there was the abandonment of dum-dum bullets in the First War. There emerges a concern for humanity even in the heat of battle. I suspect chivalry anticipated this concern. Respect for the sanctity of innocent human life in war but also respect for combatant life both need to be restored. Here is a point where present culture is engaged at once in pragmatic decline but also elements in development.