https://www.unz.com/acrooke/the-mechanistic-fallacy-why-the-west-so-often-fails-at-geo-politics/
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A good article. I saw it a couple of days ago and was going to blog about it. It echoes my old concerns when teaching mediaeval history and mediaeval philosophy and trying to make it understandable: how does one do it in the more-secular-than-thou attitudes championed by the modern quackademy?
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The Industrial Revolution, with it’s preceding and attendant philosophies of science, emanated out of an origin complex of fear, need for control, motivation to profit financially or in temporal power due to anxiety and inability to handle ambiguity or even chaos, though arguably the latter was and remains perceived as a strategy for conquest.
Nature and humanity I think were ditched due to an inability, or allergy for their unpredictability which was always magnitudes larger than their respective predictable elements/aspects. It was the extrapolation with interpolation of the latter into nature and humanity that led to erroneous, fear based and largely ignorant “scientific” conclusions.
The hints were and remain everywhere, and maybe that was a driving factor for the fears and anxieties of the time and tcontemporary elites. Hints of the ineffable, unpredictable, and inspiring well sources of creativity and the panopoly of creative forces within the totality of nature and humanity.
For instance, irrational numbers, music , artand its emanating from and acting upon the depth of consciousness underlines the continuing failure to explain or locate it as expressed in “hard problem”.; the absence of any “spiritual” or even altruistic motivation for its own sake; obsfuscates understanding of nature and humanity is why this has not been achieved.
To extent that one may believe or accept that there is Divinity involved, means a poor capture of the problem set, the solution set and the iteratively failing outcomes. All met by the faults with Darwinian philosophy of science, and the notion that universe must understood as being mechanical and ordered. A colonial mindset if ever evidence was needed for same. The forsaking of knowledge by experience for the measurement of knowledge for its categorisation. These are a distant from each a the farmer is from the Dept. of Agriculture Administrative Officer.
And since those influences remain even unto the present, effectively remain the established paradigm or given wisdom for a philosophy of science and power. We see this in Mearsheimer’s take on “political realism”, which may partially assist, if the powers that be were more essentially understanding or philanthropic, but they are not, and Mearsheimer approach cannot apply. Just as Game Theory will have similar flaws in the design and operation of its “logic”. Which plan survives it intended battle experience?
So, interventions, efforts and initiatives, proceed rather like taking a hammer to flatten the surface of a container-full or indeed a large body of water, if you happen to be part of the Western Elite such as a President Trump, Von Der Lyen or Merz or Macron whose only option will almost always be a short term and gaslighting one.
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The only small point of refutation I’d make with the author of the piece (which IIUC is Alistaire Crooke and not Ron Unz, as I’d originally thought) is that, painting the Western mindset as “secular mechanistic” is only slightly accurate, if one considers the full array of philosophy and doctrine espoused by the diverse segments of the “West” under consideration here.
The core ideological belief systems in play across “the West” couldn’t be more out of phase, considering the entrenched power players in the White House (i.e the Trump Family which is really to say Kushner, Suzie Wild, and the donor class that financially animates the current administration), versus the coalition of Christian fundamentalists mainly focused in the Congressional ranks and supportive apparatchiks in the media, versus finally perhaps the true “secular mechanistic” policy thinkers alluded to by Crookes, for instance, your Paul Craig Roberts and the Paul family and the traditionally grounded conservative actors that are the most unsettled among the factions of foreign policy commentators.
From an eschatological perspective, the characterization of the Zionist regime as “messianic” True Believers actively pursuing a man-made Armageddon is precisely the same description one can apply to their fundamentalist Christian Zionists counterparts in the United States. It’s oddly fascinating to observe such a strange alliance in the Zionist camp. aligning both sets of fanatical religious cults that, while they may both be fervently devoted to hastening the “End Times”, have wildly different visions of who exactly will usher in this post-apocalyptic era!
… also see on this topic
The Mechanization of The World Picture by Dijksterhuis, E.J.
… sometime around the 13th century Realism lost out to Nominalism. Given the sway that Nominalism has held since it difficult to believe that the basis of the World View of the “Western Mindset” is anything but “secular mechanistic”.
My only criticism here is not so much about the deleterious effects of Nominalism, but rather that I would move its beginning much further back into the fourth century and specifically the theological formulations of Augustine of Hippo’s De Trinitate. There is a clear nominalism/reductionism at work in his “logic” that sets up so many of the difficulties later. In short, I think the scholarship of the west itself avoids looking at the real roots when treating of it only as a scholastic problem. One could argue that its roots are even deeper than Augustine but rather lie with Plotinus. But anyway, this is still a good article and I’m glad to see it has provoked a discusion.
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… for a different conception of the History of Philosophy see John Deely’s Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. If you haven’t seen this tome (760 pps. or so) you might enjoy the 100 pps. or so on Aquinas. Also you might find in it some support to move back the timeline on the ascendancy of Nominalism as you suggest. Another thing that might be of interest is Deely’s suggestion that applied semiotics be used as a tool for the analysis of cultural production and output,
I also have some sympathy for the view / argument that there was in fact no such thing as “Scholasticism”. Part of this would be that the term “scholastic” was simply an “artificial” means of bracketing a period of time so that conventional Philosophy of History could take what was going on during the period, create an account, deal with it and move on. Along these lines see Johann Beukes et al.
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