Machan's Musings - On Two Terrible Disconnects
by Tibor R. Machan
It’s not the first, second, or third time I have reflected on this subject, but each time there is just a slight difference in focus. So there is now. I am talking about the terrible disconnects between how the bulk of the official intellectual community, versus most ordinary folks, see two aspects of human affairs. First, I am talking about how most people accept, as a perfectly normal aspect of human life, that individuals can make basic choices between right and wrong conduct and that they do this all of the time. It infuses our ordinary understanding of politics, history, crime, child-raising, marriage, romance, professional conduct, war, friendship—you name it, it occupies virtual center stage. Just read any decent novel, be it a classic or some best-selling pulp fiction.
I have recently been reading through works produced by Daniel Silva, but have also just finished The Jury, a legal thriller by Steve Martini. But I am also working through Karl May’s In the Desert, a classic European tale published back in 1912. The themes of human moral choice, of responsibility, guilt, desert, triumph or negligence are all central to these, as they are to the daily news about young women being murdered, or about business professionals or politicians or doctors being brought to trial for malpractice. Fiction or non-fiction, crime, diplomacy, history, education or politics—all are simply replete with unending stories about how men and women have done either the right or the wrong thing or some combination of the two, and about how others are treating them in consequence of that.
At the very same time, however, intellectuals everywhere are churning out massively researched works, in physics, biochemistry, molecular and evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology, economics, political science, and philosophy, propounding the very different theory that everything we believe and do is the result of forces that operate upon us—our brains, emotions, minds, memories, what have you. If these works are to be believed, we are all merely highly complicated machines that produce behavior that we have absolutely no personal control over. Of course, the behavior is, in fact, ours, but no more so than the behavior of a dog biting the child is the behavior of that dog. Yet no one thinks that dog is guilty, morally responsible or whatever—the dog just does what it must, given the forces impelling it. And that is just what the bulk of the educated world now thinks about what you and I and the rest of us do and have done all throughout the long course of human history.
This, I contend, is a terrible disconnect, a chasm that is wreaking massive confusion upon us and our various institutions, wherever human affairs are addressed. It is a colossal mess and, oddly, very few forums in the media host any discussion of it.
There is also another such disconnect afoot, one that’s of similar scope and produces comparably great confusion, this one about values. On the one hand, most people in the world believe that there really are some standards of right conduct that hold for everyone. That is how they raise their kids, how they view the history of their own community and its leaders as well as ordinary citizens—soldiers, doctors, scientists, and everyone else. Some have run afoul of those standards, some have excelled in terms of them, and many others have fallen somewhere in between. There is little doubt that, as they live their lives, read novels, and watch television programs or movies, most ordinary folks think this way, even as they give some lip service to "it’s all relative," "different cultures have different standards," etc. But they do not follow these canards for a moment in their day-to-day conduct.
In contrast, again, the world of academe, the scholarly community, the erudite among us tend, in the main, to scoff at all this. The bulk of intellectuals are skeptics from the word "go." For most of them values are either complete fabrications of primitive people or charlatans, or the inventions of communities or religious leaders, myths through and through. Or, if there is anything substantive to them, they are all over the map, and none are applicable to all of us or have relevance beyond some community or region of the world or a period of history. It’s all relative or culturally based for most such folks (which is why even ordinary persons buy into this when they wax theoretic now and then—they get it mostly from their teachers).
All of this, too, has terrible consequences for how people think, how they handle personal, community, or world affairs, and how they address problems of human life in every possible area. Are all the ills we witness concoctions? Are they ills at all or just ills for some and not others? Can no one be right about any of it? It’s just a mess. Yet once again the forums throughout the media hardly focus on any of it, but instead carry on as if no such disconnect existed.
All I am doing here is making an observation. I do know many of us try to address the matter but it’s lamentable that so few prominent and visible people make any attempt to deal with it up front, before the reading and viewing general public.
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