THE CULT OF CONSUMERISM - MORALLY NEUTRAL OR HIGHLY DESTRUCTIVE?

Mark Clavier thinks the insights of sociology have been largely untapped in theological discussions compared to the influence of modern philosophy and the life sciences.  In particular, the popular notion of ‘postmodernism’ is often just consumerism ‘dressed up in posh, philosophical clothes’.  His reading in sociological discussions of consumerism has led him to wonder whether consumer culture, partly because it makes the same claims on identity, is 'best understood as a religion – a highly destructive one, too – that needs to be better understood and challenged.’

In a recent book he says consumerism is not morally neutral, as some have claimed, but is more like a global movement that has many of the same characteristics as the great religions.  Christianity and Islam offer the nearest historical parallels, both international movements that ‘either eclipse or transform local cultures’.

One of the ways that religions transcend local culture is by connecting with people at the important moments and stages of their lives and situating those events in a larger narrative. Almost all religions have rites of passage and other rituals meant to provide meaning …

Drawing comparisons with the ‘sacraments’ in Christianity (baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, marriage, etc) he devotes the first part of his book to demonstrating how consumerism is a global religion, by mapping out ‘a consumer’s life according to a sacramental grid’.  Thus chapter 2 is entitled, Initiation into consumerism, and chapter 3, The consumer rites of adulthood. 

As well as criticising the churches for conforming to consumer culture, Clavier goes on to draw attention to just how much damage consumerism is causing to 'culture, societies and the planet'.  It’s not just environmental degradation, of which we all become ever more conscious, but also the fact that we can only enjoy the fruits of consumerism because the vast majority of the world’s population cannot.

Ultimately the enjoyment in wealthy nations of maximised choice, self-actualisation and ready access to goods and services is based on profound inequality. … [W]e are only free to be who we want to be because almost everybody else is not. 

Anyone is welcome to join the discussion at Wychwood Library on Sunday, May 7th at 7pm.  A retiring collection will be taken to cover costs. 

HAVE WE ALL - EVEN THE CHURCH - BEEN INFECTED BY CONSUMER CULTURE?

KANT: MAKING SPACE AND TIME FOR GOD?

The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant - introduced by Stephen Pickering 

IMMANUEL KANT (1724 -1804) is regarded by many as one of the three great Western philosopher alongside Plato and Aristotle.  By all accounts Kant was a popular lecturer, and he also published extensively establishing an international reputation. At first he taught the well-established philosophy of Leibniz, but became increasingly dissatisfied with it, and in 1781 published his master work, the Critique of Pure Reason. A second edition was published in 1787, followed by the Critique of Practical Reason (moral philosophy) and the Critique of Judgement (aesthetics) in 1788 and 1790 respectively.

What does Kant’s Critical Philosophy aim to do?

The aims of Kant’s critical philosophy can best be understand from their historical context, which is the Enlightenment. Kant invented the slogan ‘Dare to know!’ to describe the Enlightenment. Enlightenment therefore meant rejecting dogmatic claims to knowledge, in particular religious dogma, and dogmatic or speculative philosophy. But what should replace dogma? There were two contenders: rationalism and empiricism.

Rationalism and empiricism are competing and mutually exclusive theories of knowledge. Rationalists believe that our understanding of the world should be based on reason alone; empiricists, that it should be based on observation and experience. The rationalist school (Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz) and empiricist school (Locke, Berkeley and Hume) had been in competition over a hundred years. Kant’s greatest claim to fame was to unite them – thus ending the war among the philosophers – while at the same time leaving room for religious belief as well, thus also ending the war between science and religion. This unification needed a revolution in philosophical thinking.

What can we know?

Kant starts his revolution quietly enough by first distinguishing between knowledge derived from experience, in particular scientific or empirical knowledge, from other knowledge. That other knowledge mainly comprises Euclid’s geometry and Aristotle’s syllogistic logic. That knowledge is over two thousand years old and has never needed revision. It is the surest knowledge we have. Moreover, it is completely independent of the way the world is. It is knowledge we can claim to have before we begin a scientific investigation. For that reason Kant calls it  a priori knowledge, to distinguish it from experiential or scientific knowledge, which he called  a posteriori knowledge. And it is about a posteriori knowledge that Kant holds a remarkable and revolutionary view.

Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’

Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ was to see space and time not as features of the external physical world, as Newton imagined, but rather they are an internal feature of our faculty of perception If space and time are mental entities, then we do not experience reality directly. Indeed, reality does not exist in space or time at all.  The world of objects that we experience through the senses is a world of appearances. However, these appearances exhibit regularities that can be studied and described by the laws of physics. In that sense, the world of appearances is empirically real. And because, unlike dreams, there is regularity and order in the world of appearance, we can be sure that there is some underlying deeper level of reality which is causing the appearances. Kant calls the underlying reality the noumenal world (in contrast to the phenomenal world of experience). All we can say about the noumenal world is that it is not spatio-temporal. And because reason and the categories exist for understanding the phenomenal world, their use to speculate about the noumenal world is questionable and probably invalid. We cannot therefore know anything about the noumenal reality that underlies appearances. Rational arguments aimed at proving (or disproving) the existence of God  therefore fail because reason is being used outside its domain of validity. We may choose to believe such arguments as a matter of faith, but we are constitutionally incapable of knowing the truth of such matters. But that also means that religious beliefs are beyond the remit of scientific investigation, and thus science and religion can coexist without contradiction.

Was Kant ultimately successful?

Kant made a great impression on his contemporaries, but he stressed that his work only laid the foundations for a philosophical system because he had merely shown the limits of reason, and that it would be for others to complete it. Philosophers took up the challenge with enthusiasm. Unfortunately they all went their own divergent ways leading not to one unified system but to a diversity of systems that persists to this day. But it is for just this reason that he remains an pervasive influence in modern western philosophy.

Join us if you can at Wychwood Library on Sunday April 2nd at 7.00pm for Stephen's introduction and discussion of Kant's philosophy.  No prior knowledge required - but you might be glad to have read this post before you come! 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF IMMANUEL KANT

SPIRITUAL BUT NOT RELIGIOUS

PLATO AND FREUD AND OTHERS

Mark Vernon is a writer and psychotherapist and as such has written much of interest – not just books about Ancient Philosophy, but numerous articles which cover Socrates and Plato, Freud and the unconscious, spirituality and the soul, faith and transcendence, wonder and well-being, and the big question: God.  He was ordained in the Church of England, but later left the priesthood and the church, and then – from what one reads – went from theism to atheism and on to agnosticism.  An obvious guest to invite to Wychwood Circle, then, where we question everything, whatever our world view.  We look forward to hearing much more from him in person on February 5th.

Faith and the unconscious

Dipping - in anticipation - into a book on Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience (by Meissner, pub 1984) provided the following quotations about Freud and religion, though the author went on to place Freud himself on the couch, so to speak – also an illuminating exercise:

All religious behaviour and belief is a form of obsessive-compulsive neurosis … an exercise in passivity, compliance, and dependence – essentially a feminine preoccupation… Freud could not conceive of religion on other than emotional grounds…

Mark Vernon will surely not have ducked such claims in making his own journey and in an article celebrating the 100th anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s “The Unconscious” in 2015 he concluded thus:

The founder of psychoanalysis is not often thought of as a friend of religion.  But read him more closely: his curiosity concerning the dynamics of the human soul produces reasons for confidence in, as well as the development of, the insights of generations of people of faith.

A way of reaching towards the unknown

Vernon's 2011 book How To Be An Agnostic includes chapter headings such as Cosmic Religion: How Science Does God; How To Be Human: Science and Ethics; and Socrates or Buddha? On Being Spiritual But Not Religious.  In chapter 7, Following Socrates: A Way of Life, Vernon has some interesting things to say that may illuminate where he is coming from, which makes it even more intriguing to know where he has got to in 2017:

Religion is not just a set of beliefs or a moral code.  It is a way of seeing the world and a way of approaching what is unknown. …

This also adds to why, although I lost my faith, I found atheism unsatisfying.  Atheism is not a practice but a principle. You can no more believe in atheism than you can in science: the whole point is that you don’t believe; you know. … We need something bigger than ourselves to be ourselves. My religious imagination demanded this something else. …

Agnosticism as a way of reaching towards the unknown reaches back before Christianity. It rest on the shoulders of Socrates.  And he can provide a complementary resource to the Christian one.

Elsewhere he has noted that spirituality has become 'a kind of taboo': serious people are embarrassed by it, rather like Victorians felt the need to cover up piano legs!  But we are depriving ourselves (and our souls?) of making certain essential connections and this lack of perspective may be one reason why 'we find ourselves so frequently to be ethically and personally at sea'.

Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and then Theology? 

The conclusion of Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience, by the way, is that psychoanalysis only goes so far: it is very useful in negative terms for studying the ‘impeding psychic forces’ which we need to be released from, but then theology needs to take over where psychoanalysis leaves off.  And then the theology also needs an anthropology which benefits from psychoanalytic input...

So if we are to understand ourselves and our human needs it seems we need three or more disciplines to interact. Mark Vernon will be able to provide insights from at least two of them and maybe persuade us that 'secular enlightenment ... is not enough'. 

Dr MARK VERNON joins us at Wychwood Library on Sunday, February 5th at 7pm. 
On Sunday, March 5th at the same time and place, our guest speaker is Canon BRIAN MOUNTFORD, author of Christian Atheist - Belonging without Believing (2011) and formerly vicar of the University Church in Oxford, whose topic is Spiritual but not religious. 

Anyone is welcome. Entry is free and donations are requested at the end. 

REASON'S GREATEST CAPACITY IS TO CONTEMPLATE EVER WIDER HORIZONS

'The classics hold a surprising fascination for we 21st-century moderns,' says Mark Vernon, commenting on the way Greek philosophy and classical history often feature on primetime TV and radio:

'Yet contemporary presentations of the ancient legacy commonly miss an element that was fundamental to figures such as Plato and Aristotle, Zeno and Hypatia: the quest to know the transcendent. Without that vertical striving, they judged a philosophy rootless, or aimless.'

Mark Vernon goes on to relate the 'loss of this crucial dynamic' to much that is of concern to us today, 'from mental health to climate change'.  As he points out, our modern narrative tends to exclude anything which doesn't fit with a secular view of things. The ancients developed human reason but not in order to shut down any sense of wonder or contemplation of a greater reality which might exceed our understanding.

'Reason's greatest capacity is to contemplate ever wider horizons, as Iris Murdoch put it; to open on to transcendent vistas on which the soul can gaze and feed.'

A year ago at Wychwood Circle we were welcoming Oxford psychologist Professor Mark Willliams who has done so much to recommend the practice of mindfulness to the modern world, from the classroom to the houses of parliament.  Mark Vernon would not be alone in saying that this is the sort of practice which has long been part of religious traditions such as Christianity, as well of course as Buddhism. We shall be discussing again in March (with Brian Mountford) what it is to be 'spiritual' and there is no doubt a difference between secular and spiritual mindfulness. In a 2014 collection of essays entitled After Mindfulness a distinction is made between 'problem-solving' and 'spiritual' mindfulness. The latter might be said to address 'the questions with which our culture as a whole is struggling - in particular, the nature of the self and our relationship to the divine', says Mark Vernon.

Dr Vernon is a psychotherapist and he has pointed out that (evidence shows) the now quite common Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) - originally inspired by Stoicism! - has not always delivered on what it promised.  'The bigger picture held by the ancient philosophers could help explain why', he says. 'If you cut out the divine element, as the secular censor does, the therapy loses its efficacy and ground.'  Well, at Wychwood Circle, we only cut out the censor, and whatever our point of view as we come to Wychwood Library on February 5th we shall learn a lot that we probably ought to know about reason and contemplation and doubtless a bit more about mind and mindfulness.


WHY WE NEED BOTH PLATO AND FREUD IN THE 21st CENTURY - a talk and discussion by Dr Mark Vernon at Wychwood Library at 7pm on Sunday 5th February. Open to all. Retiring collection.