By J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.
January 31, 2021
Three weeks ago Tom Hook spoke about “Imagination,” the topic this month from Soul Matters, with today the last of the month. While he mentioned a dark side to imagination, he mostly focused on its positive aspect, providing visions of better futures that may be achieved with proper hope and effort. Today we shall be more concerned with the dark side, people imagining things that are simply unreal and are not going to be real, with their belief in such unrealities possibly leading to bad outcomes.
We have such a situation now with a large portion of the American population seriously believing a Big Lie, that the presidential election of November 3, 2020 was rigged and marked by widespread fraud that resulted in the wrong person being declared winner. Obviously the spread of this inspired the attack on the Capitol on January 6, and this belief looks to persist among many people, even though the new president has been inaugurated. This is a serious problem, a manifestation of the dark side of imagination.
Some of the believers in the Big Lie have changed their minds. A particularly dramatic sub-group among the Big Lie believers has been those who have followed the QAnon conspiracy theory. Increasingly influential with a follower now in Congress, with its people among the leaders of the assault on the Capitol, including the woman killed while trying to break into the House of Representatives, their moment of truth came on Inauguration Day, when supposedly the president was going to order the military to arrest mass numbers of enemies who would be executed or sent to Gitmo, the prophesied “Storm.” The failure of this to happen led some to abandon the theory, with the apparent Q himself, a man named Watkins, declaring that “It is over” and encouraging people to “go back to your normal lives.” Indeed Q had not issued any messages since early December, just before December 8 when by certifying their results states could guarantee that their electoral college votes could not be challenged by Congress.
This resembles The Great Disappointment experienced in 1844 by a cult known as the Millerites. In 1831 a lay Baptist preacher in northeastern New York state named William Miller decided based on reading a prophecy in the Book of Daniel that the world would end around 1843, which he called the Second Advent. In 1834 he wrote a 64-page booklet on this that he then began to spread around. His prophecy caught on and spread to become a popular movement, with others making money by pushing it. Eventually followers began to demand a date for the End of the World. As 1843 arrived various dates were proposed, although Miller himself refused to be pinned down to one. Finally after several failed dates, October 22, 1844 emerged from lower level followers, with the various leaders following the followers to sign onto that date. People were to quit their jobs, sell their property, and gather on hills near where they lived. The failure of the world led to the Great Disappointment. Some were disillusioned and went back to their former religions. But others tried to revise the prophecy and continue. They would become the modern Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. We shall have to see what the still-believing QAnons become.
So let us get to the matter of what’s really real. Philosophers call this the study of ontology. Closely related, and what we shall be really be discussing is epistemology, how do we know what we know that is really real. But for theologians The Ontological Question is “Does God Exist?” which led to all sorts of attempted “arguments” over time to “prove” this. An example is the First Cause argument, favored by Saint Thomas Aquinas, which said that everything is caused by something else, but there must be a First Cause, which must be God, even though it is not clear that there really is a First Cause if indeed everything is caused by something else. The philosophy of logical positivism sought to define what is a positive scientific statement as something that can be falsified by the use of objective or logical scientific methods studying real data and was largely motivated in doing this to clarify that the question of the existence of God is not a scientific question, but a matter strictly of personal belief.
The person who most fundamentally posed the more general ontological question while worrying about how we know it, the epistemological one, was 17th century philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes (no we are not going to put de cart before de horse). He recognized that we may not be able to trust our perceptions of sensual inputs, so the only thing we really know is really real is our own consciousness, that we think means we exist and are really real, “cogito ergo sum.” Thinking about this led for decades to late night dormitory speculations about “Are we just brains in vats living a dream of another being,” which eventually would lead to the Matrix movie sequence in which whole bodies are in tubes with their consciousnesses programmed to believe they are in Chicago in the 1990s, while reality is an awful post-apocalyptic future controlled by the great ruling computer program.
Getting ourselves out of Cartesian solipsism suggests that there may be a hierarchy involved in this matter of what’s really real, with some things realer than others. Even though one can doubt one’s sense perceptions, things we know directly through them are clearly next most believable after the existence of our own consciousness. And another reality that is very real are those other consciousnesses that we encounter, especially those close to us, the people close to us. They are really real more than almost everything. As we move beyond the people and things close to us personally, the believability of things declines. Certainly things that seem to be supported by scientifically determined facts are more believable than other things, but the reality is that for most of us most of the time we did not do the scientific studies ourselves. We learn these things by reading or hearing about them from various authority figures. As things get further from us personally the reliability of their reality weakens.
Furthermore, some raise questions about how we may be led astray even in dealing with scientific information by the frames or reference we use to think about it. In 1962 Thomas Kuhn wrote the The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in which he posed the concept of the “paradigm,” a broader structure of thought, a weltenschaaung, which powerfully affects how we think about a scientific question. His main example was the struggle between the Ptolemaic view that the sun goes around the earth versus the Copernican view that the earth goes around the sun. The struggle over this indeed involved the Church and religion, with eventually the simplicity and clarity of the Copernican view winning out. For Kuhn most science does not involve paradigmatic issues and proceeds in the standard “normal” way. But when a paradigm is involved, it becomes a matter of belief, with as Max Planck noting that “science progresses one funeral at a time.”
While Kuhn always believed in science eventually finding the real reality, despite the difficulties raised by the clashes of competing paradigms, followers of his pushed these ideas further, such as Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerband. These doubts fit in with further developments in parts of philosophy and in certain humanities such as literary studies, with this leading to subjectivist ideas that our frames of reference are the real realities. What we think is real. This became post-modernism, which probably peaked in the early 1990s before a physicist, William Sokal, wrote a fake paper based on pomo mumbo jumbo and revealed he had done that after getting it published in an academic journal. Curiously now this episode has led some, including conservative columnist George Will recently in the Washington Post, to blame post-modernism for the current Big Lie situation we are dealing with. The believers in the Big Lie basically think that what they think is real, with competing information being “fake news.”
A further issue in all this is that indeed much of our social reality is really in our heads, existing because of mass social belief. Thus that there is a nation of the United States of America is a mass social belief as is our election system. If we stopped believing that they are real, they would cease to be. Such things are also true in economics. Money is only real because people believe other people believe it is real and will accept it. Prices in stock markets are what they are because of mass social beliefs. If lots of people think the price of Gamestop will go up, it will as a self-fulfilling prophecy, at least for awhile.
Which brings us back to what’s really real. I would say that beyond our own consciousness the most important reality is other people, especially those close to us. The 18th century father of economics, Adam Smith, who famously wrote The Wealth of Nations about how people pursuing their self-interest in markets bring about social order. But he also wrote a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In that book he posed sympathy as profoundly important along with our consciences. But he argued that we are more sympathetic to those closest to us. We are more upset about a family member having a finger cut off than we are about a hundred people dying in an earthquake on the other side of the world. Maybe this is not a totally good thing, but it is the real thing. What is most really real is the existence and condition of those other people closest to us, the people we love.