A young Chinese girl sits down in a chair nearby, reaches into her purse and pulls out a small plastic object. It is a telephone. She flips it open, stabs at it with her finger and puts it to her ear. Yawn. Why mention such a commonplace scene? Well, for one thing, it wasn't that long ago that it wasn't so commonplace, in fact would be a scene in a science fiction novel. When I was a boy regular telephones were only common in cities and well-populated areas. The telephone on my uncle's farm was bigger than a shoebox and hung on the wall. Powered by a car battery, it was slightly in advance of some phones that had to be cranked, but quite behind the private line we had in the city. In the countryside telephone lines and exchanges were expensive and had to be shared, as in the Hank Williams song:
"The woman on the party line's a nosy thing
She picks up the receiver when she knows it's my ring,"
But it's not my intention to provide a history of telephony here, except to note how a new set of possibilities opens up whenever a paradigm shift takes place. Please don't confuse this idea with Marshall MacLuhan's Medium is the Message meme. MacLuhan was fully a child of his time and believed that we were all passive receivers of the environment, as if we were not much different than Pavlov's salivating dogs. As it turns out, dogs are much more complex than Pavlov suspected. In my model all living things are very much active participants. When a paradigm shifts the rules of the game change, just as in cards, and when the rules change not only human beings but life itself makes adjustments. We are as quick to explore and probe what we can do under the new dispensation as any puppy sniffing out a new home.
It may seem irrelevant to mention the sex and ethnicity of the person who prompted the opening paragraph, but consider. At the same time my uncle was picking up the receiver to listen in on his neighbours' conversations, this girl's grandparents were experiencing the opening phases of the most lethal regime that has ever set out to murder its own citizenry. One of the reasons it was possible to exercise control of the vast Chinese population was because of inventions like the telephone. Instant communication undermined the localism that had persisted in China for at least three thousand years regardless of who the overlords might be. But now that telephones have escaped the tyranny of centralized telephone exchanges, China is swarming with girls like her, girls who no longer pay attention to their elders who control the Party. Could this mean the end of thousands of years of Confucian deference to the patriarch of the family? If so, tremendous changes are in store for a land that absorbed all previous invaders. No longer subject to the dictates of an authoritarian father or a remote state, she can think for herself. Her knowledge of the world is no longer limited to what information is presented to her at home or at state run schools. Furthermore, what she learns through her own experience doesn't stop with her but is shared with her friends who may live back in China or who may be studying physics at Berkeley.
That isn't what the inventors of cell phone technology intended to do. It was the farthest thing from their minds. In any case, the chances are that the girl chattering on her flip phone is entirely ignorant of cell phone technology and probably profoundly uninterested. The inventors laid the groundwork for a new technology, and if they were interested in Chinese philosophy it had nothing to do with the problem of transmitting a conversation over long distances without wires. Manufacturers were interested in knowing if this was an opportunity to benefit their shareholders. Chinese history didn't enter into it. And so on down the line. The girl and millions like her were only interested in talking to each other from far away or across the street, or sending and messages. The girl with the flip phone doesn't know the researcher, the researcher doesn't know the girl. They are pursuing their independent interests. So we now have Twitter, Face Time, and a host of personal messaging services, that facilitate their wishes by adding a new layer of meaning to wireless transmission. Wherever, whenever. The circumference of the earth, time zones, physical separation, are no longer barriers to communication. Those barriers have collapsed. These things didn't just happen, they came about through an interplay among many actors, none of whom had any thought of Confucianism. And yet the subsequent history of the planet may be affected. Nothing in the microcosmic events could be used to predict the direction of this change. It's still in progress.
I'm reading Aquinas' Shorter Summa at the moment- I lack the fortitude to tackle the full version. Medieval (Christian) philosophers have a bad rap as far as I'm concerned. Far from being supercilious and petty, I think they were enormously subtle and penetrating. Thomas lived in a period when Europe was rediscovering the intellectual heritage it had nearly lost when Roman order collapsed. Aristotle was being read again and to some he was a disturbing challenge to the painstakingly constructed philosophical edifice theologians had built since the Dark Ages. It was Aquinas' goal to reconcile Greece with Jerusalem, reason with faith by using reason to justify faith. Atheists routinely deny the validity of faith. But what is faith except an acceptance of a set of premises. Christians accept the premise that there was a man/god named Jesus who came to earth so he could experience suffering and death and lead us to everlasting life. Mohammedans accept the premise that Mohammed wrote the words of god into the Koran. Scientific atheists accept the premise that reality consists solely of matter and energy and that there is nothing to be found outside those parameters.
In fact it is impossible to prove any of these premises. That kind of proof is in an eerie way, a very eerie way, unavailable to us. The religious articles of faith are inaccessible to us because we can't go back in time to verify the facts. The best we can do is search for records and archeological evidence. The scientific criticism is structurally unprovable. If there is another existence separate from the space time structure we experience, and if our faculties of knowing are confined to this space time structure then it would be impossible for us to know about it through the methods science employs. Although it seems as if mathematics is one tool that can carry us somewhat beyond what is usually knowable, the results cannot be demonstrated through the experimental method.
It goes without saying then, that the claims of religious people for the existence of a supernatural realm, of an immaterial and immortal soul, and of a Supreme Being are beyond proof in the scientific, demonstrable sense. Or are they? In the 20th century, before really powerful reflector telescopes were built the existence of Pluto was unsuspected. Nevertheless was studying the movements of the known planets and noticed that they didn't quite follow the orbits predicted by theory. He was able to infer from his calculations that another presence, of a certain mass, must be in orbit outside the orbit of Neptune. Pluto is no longer considered a planet but that hardly matters. What does matter is that an undetectable object was hypothesized on the basis of its effects on other objects in the solar system.
The discoverer was quickly vindicated as optical technology improved, but an earlier astronomical theory was completely demolished by a few late medieval philosophers- Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, who solved the problem of planetary orbits through the use of mathematical models. Galileo with his telescope was able to bring observation in line with the new theory. The older theory, current since the Classical period, assumed that all the heavenly bodies revolved around a stationary earth. The mathematics worked pretty well with regard to the stars, but the planets were different. The interesting thing about Copernicus was that he wasn't trying to overturn 1000 years of accepted science. He was only trying to make the calendar more accurate so the Church could be sure of when to celebrate Easter.
So maybe it's possible to infer the existence of a force, a dynamic, or something that impinges on our universe but which isn't really part of the universe. And just as the Ptolemaic cosmology could not explain the movements of the planets without a veritable tangle of special pleading, neither can science as it is now understood explain the processes of life. Darwinian theory is a bad joke. Quantum theory makes no sense and can't be reconciled with relativity. Every few years somebody comes up with a new idea of how to solve the conundrum but none have succeeded.
We usually think that the reason the ancients thought the sun and the stars revolved around the earth is because it satisfies common sense. Look at the sky. We are at the centre. The sun and the stars rise in the east and set the west. I think that implies a serious underestimation of the intelligence of the ancient thinkers. In fact, the original problem that led the philosophers of the Ptolemaic era to construct their theory remains today, and can be summarized by this well known formulation: Why is there something rather than nothing? In general, the ancients had an answer- God. The trick was to figure out how we could possibly come to understand anything about the kind of Being God would have to be in order to be the Creator of all.
