The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  “I told you so.”

  So had Aristotle.50

  * * *

  * Archives show that in 1937 and 1938 alone, Stalin’s secret police arrested more than 1.75 million persons. Of those, more than 85 percent would be sentenced to the Gulag; more than half of those would be executed.

  † Curiously, Popper gives Rousseau little mention. The main reason may have been that the iconoclast from Geneva was an intellectual lightweight compared with the other two. In addition, his influence on German thought, including that of Kant, was never as manifestly malign as Plato’s modern successors Hegel and Marx.

  ‡ Or latterly, by their class or race or gender. Hegel stands as the original mentor of multiculturalism as well as deconstruction—that is, the idea that all meaning, like human nature, is relativized.

  § That was one reason Wilson was untroubled with passing legislation enforcing segregation against blacks. Like many other Progressives, he believed history was on the side of the white race, not its colored inferiors—an attitude he would later express by supporting national self-determination at the Versailles conferences for whites, but not nonwhites, in Europe’s colonies.

  ‖ Useless, that is, from the point of view of exercising control. From the point of view of providing data that help individuals make their own forecasts of what to do next, Hegel recognized that number crunching in economics can be extremely useful.

  Conclusion

  FROM THE CAVE TO THE LIGHT

  If all were of one mind, the cosmos would stand still.

  —Alexander the Great

  Just a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, three events set the compass for the twenty-first century.

  The first, and most spectacular, was the attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, which killed three thousand people and triggered a global war on terror that has transformed the West’s relations with the Middle East and the Muslim world. As of this writing, it shows no sign of abating.

  The second attracted less attention but marked a watershed in the future of science. This was the completion in 2003 of the Human Genome Project, the successful mapping and identification of the 25,000 or so genes that make up the human species. The molecular backbone of the human gene, DNA—which is the molecular basis of all life—had been identified back in 1958. But now for the first time all the possible sequences of DNA’s chemical base pairings were laid bare—the equivalent of cracking the master code of living nature.1 The project not only finally opened the door to finding the genetic causes of diseases like cancer; it offered the heady vision of an ability to reorganize the biochemical structure of all life.

  The third event was the 2008 global financial meltdown, which pushed the world’s economies to the brink of bankruptcy and rammed home the fact that interconnectivity through the Internet, satellite communication, and globalized markets can be a source of frightening vulnerability as well as productive power.

  Three events, each opening an entirely new horizon for the future—or so it seems. The post–Cold War era, far from representing the “end of history,” as a RAND Corporation analyst named Francis Fukuyama once wrote, has only opened new vistas of dilemmas and dangers. What possible relevance can two philosophers who’ve been dead for more than twenty-five hundred years have for figuring out what’s happening and where we’re going?

  It turns out, a lot.

  Take the war on terror, which turns out to be closely linked to the intellectual fate of Islam since the Middle Ages. From the twelfth century onward, Islamic texts and scholars were the West’s principal source for the wisdom of the Greeks, including the works of Plato and Aristotle. Thanks to Muslim scholars like Averroës and Avicennes, for a few precious decades the Muslim and Christian outlooks on the world, especially the natural world, were virtually the same.*

  Then for various reasons, the Islamic mind turned its back on Plato. Averroës, for example, made it his task in his commentaries to systematically purge Aristotle’s writings of any Neoplatonist taint. Other Arabs followed his lead. So instead of the constant creative tension between speculation and science that arose in the Christian West, Islamic Platonism retreated to the religious sidelines of Sufism, where it contemplated the mystical and divine and little else.

  In short, “what went wrong” with Muslim culture, then and later, was that it wound up getting too much Aristotle too soon, which deprived it of growth and dynamism. Aristotle’s scientific and logical treatises became the basis of a fossilized orthodoxy in Arab culture, dry and lifeless and unchanging over the centuries. (They are still used as textbooks at Shia seminaries like Qom in Iran.) Aristotle’s more humanistic works like the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics dropped from sight in the Islamic world, since the debate with Plato, of which they were an essential part, had been cut short.

  So Islam and the West found themselves set on separate and divergent paths. It was not until the 1700s that Islamic scholars, confronting an aggressive Europe intruding on their home turf, woke up to what had happened.2 They realized that the West had stolen a march on them, but they could not understand why. The backlash and resentment that resulted—first in Wahabism and then in other “back to the Koran” reactionary movements—would grow and gather force, as the West and Islamic world continued to diverge—only to collide together once again, horribly, on September 11, 2001.

  In the case of the human genome, what the project really revealed was that everything does indeed begin with biology, as Aristotle thought—but not as he imagined. The genome isn’t a seed or a substance but a sequential unfolding inside the DNA molecule of a protein chain whose links can number in the millions. Yet each chain link is individually coded by one of four letters in a simple “alphabet” of protein base pairs,† which special enzymes “read” and copy as they split each base pair when cells divide. The DNA molecule is, in short, a minicomputer, whose digital codes are read in sequence in order to give every cell its structure, behavior, and character.3

  Now, the information that the DNA computer provides, like that of the modern electronic computer, isn’t only something to be manipulated and analyzed. As Einstein realized with the quantum, it forms the very structure of perception and reality—just as the quantum “exists” only as a moment of probabilities in a field of information. Biological life, it turns out, is about information—just as physical matter turned out to be.

  And so is economics. As Friedrich von Hayek and his colleagues realized, markets are more than just a means of conveying physical goods and services. They are fields of information in which—as with the quantum—the moment we perceive the information it conveys (time to buy, time to sell), we also alter its nature and direction. Werner Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty proves as valid in international financial markets as it does in the realm of physics—and with about the same results.4

  The upshot is soberingly clear. The inability of governments and large, centralizing institutions to keep up with the information needed to make the right economic decisions (an inability that Hayek identified more than eighty years ago) grows exponentially with the growth of those global markets—just as the destructive consequences of making the wrong decision expand exponentially as well.

  The result is financial collapse.5 Collapses like that in 1929, which inspired Hayek’s original insight, and like that in 2008. Collapses that governments have proven largely incapable of fixing but which individuals, acting together over time, do. “Because uncertainty about the future is fundamental,” writes one distinguished economist regarding the history of financial meltdowns, “financial mistakes will continue to be made.” As Karl Popper would put it, economics are as impervious to prediction or guidance as societies are. Yet “on average over time, the trend is for greater and greater overall economic well-being. While bubbles and crises continue, we cycle in a rising trend”—at least in societies where free markets, along with creativity, are allowed to flourish.6

  And here Ar
istotle suddenly hovers at our shoulder. Human beings build their lives around the future, not the past. They forget the mistakes of the past because they must; otherwise they would become powerless to act. Our rational nature is geared toward energeia, creative engagement in the world as individuals, not cogs in the collectivity. Perhaps it’s our DNA sequences that program us that way—just as some claim they program us with a “God gene.”

  That prints to a final irony: what if what makes us natural Aristotelians turns out to be embedded in Plato’s sacred geometry after all?

  So the struggle between Plato and Aristotle, which has always given the West its historical dynamism, is far from over. And if we want to sense where it may be going, we need to revisit Plato’s cave—not in the pages of the Republic but in real life.

  When Plato first dreamed up his allegory, he very probably had in mind an actual cave, which we can still visit today. It’s on the island of Eleusis, where it served as the entrance to the sanctuary dedicated to the goddess Demeter. Some fifteen feet deep and forty feet wide, it marked the starting point of the famous Eleusinian mystery rites performed every year by Athenians (very likely including Plato himself) and others from all over Greece, in which initiates made a ritual journey into the underworld and then back again.

  Since the Stone Age, every civilization and culture has treated the cave as a place packed with symbolic power, a place for rites of passage and sacred initiation. (In Chinese, for example, the word for cave, tong, comes to mean “mysterious, profound, transcendent.”) The cave symbolized the primordial womb of Mother Earth into which initiates descended, torches in hand and reciting magic spells, in order to reemerge purified and transformed.7

  Archaeologists tell us8 that it was from the cave on Eleusis that initiates passed from the experience of utter darkness—and a sense of fear and even terror, according to the ancient author Plutarch—into a nearby inner sanctuary, where they would suddenly encounter a female figure bearing a torch and casting a blinding dazzling light into the inky blackness. “Happy is he among men upon earth who has seen these mysteries,” reads an Eleusinian cult hymn, “but he who is uninitiate … is [lost], down in the darkness and gloom.”9

  The cave and the light. Plato’s insight was to turn the Eleusinian cave experience from an allegory of death and rebirth into an allegory of the mind’s journey from ignorance to truth. For Plato, the answer to the cave’s uncertainties lies not with esoteric rituals or magic spells but within ourselves, thanks to our reason: what his teacher Socrates described as the gift of the soul. A properly cultivated mind leads us to the light of truth and knowledge, because in the end they share the same divine nature. Like Socrates in his prison cell, we escape from the shackles of darkness and illusion by turning toward the inner light of the soul, which burns and illuminates until death. “And this state of the soul,” Socrates had said, “we call Wisdom”—and Plato agreed.

  As we have seen, Aristotle saw things differently. The cave isn’t all gloom and darkness and terror. There’s an underlying rational plan to this cave, he insisted, which is called nature. It’s a plan men can and should observe and follow, in order to organize their individual and communal lives. As he says in the Metaphysics, “All men by nature desire to know and the proof is the delight we take in our senses.” The light of truth, Aristotle argued, doesn’t come at the end of our journey, in a sudden burst of illumination. Nor does it belong to a select handful of initiates, the philosophers. We can all find it if we look hard enough, all along the way.

  Aristotle declared that we arrive at the truth through the analysis of the material world—much as the modern scientist does. By contrast, Plato becomes Western civilization’s spokesman for a quest for truth and knowledge outside and beyond our immediate material reality—a reality that Plato taught was really a source of limitation. Truth always lies beyond our conventional limits—those limits imposed by our own mortal nature.

  Thanks to that insight, Plato became the godfather of the religious, artistic, intuitive, and mystical side of the Western personality. But he also turns out to have put his finger on the truth of modern quantum physics. Our perception of a world of material solids turns out to be an illusion—there are only bursts and clumps of energy, quanta, in various ordered and disordered states. Pythagoras’s notion that number is the language of nature isn’t so far off, either.

  Cave, steps in rear.

  Mirthless rock, as seen from rear opening in cave.

  Cave, rear opening.

  Is this cave on the island of Eleusis the real cave in Plato’s Republic?

  Aristotle, in turn, became spokesman for the West’s utilitarian scientific side. Reason exists in order to unlock the secrets of nature, not to dismiss them as irrelevant or a distraction. For Aristotle, the life of reason is a constantly unfolding process of inquiry and analysis that serves to reinforce our place as part of a larger natural order. There are no final answers, only more questions and explorations. This makes Aristotle the progenitor not only of sending rockets to the moon but of democratic individualism and free markets.

  History shows that too much Plato brings a rigid dogmatism and an elitist arrogance—which, as Karl Popper pointed out and as the world saw in the age of Hitler and Stalin and Mao, easily slides into totalitarianism.‡ The twentieth-century successors to Aristotle, the voices of enlightened liberal Europe, forgot how to defend themselves and allowed the totalitarians, with their passionate intensity and contempt for debate, to goose-step into power. The catastrophes of the twentieth century arose not because men argued too much but because they gave up arguing at all.

  Such are the perils of too much Plato. Too much Aristotle, on the other hand, ends in the narrow-minded sterility that dominated the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, in which everything is reduced to rote formulae and habit and individual creativity is stamped out. A complacent behaviorist calculus begins to govern social and political relationships; fellow human beings become abstract unknowable ciphers to be manipulated at will.

  In this Pavlovian moral universe, avoiding pain and maximizing pleasure become the only valid measures of right and wrong: “If it feels good, do it.” Aristotle, the brilliant doctor’s son, the great Peripatetic who tried to teach his students that the life of virtue is the highest good, would be horrified that his legacy could be reduced to such an empty slogan. However, we recognize it when we enter the credit card culture of the shopaholic and the megamall, of the Kardashians and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

  The Enlightenment virtues of affluence can decay into a mindless consumerism devoid of any deeper meaning or spiritual connection to life. Nothing is permanent, including relationships. Everything has returned to the Heraclitean flux; there is no basis for a lasting identity. Human beings become, as Edmund Burke puts it, “flies of a summer” in which “no generation can link with another.”10 The result is a constant, restless boredom. A wildly vacillating self-esteem drifts from one unsatisfying outlet to the next with the click of a mouse or a thumb-flick of an X-Box. The only face that appears when we peer into the pool of self-reflection belongs to Narcissus.11

  It is the balance between living in the material and adhering to the spiritual that sustains any society’s cultural health. Other civilizations and religions—India, Egypt, China, Buddhism, and Islam—have confronted these same issues throughout their histories. They erected their own cultural edifices to deal with them. The problem has been that the West’s material drive and dynamism—the product of the same creative tension described in this book—has tended to reach out and pull down those older, more stable edifices, the traditional guarantees for social and psychological survival.

  This, far more than any financial meltdown, is the real enduring crisis of the modern global system. As in the title of Chinua Achebe’s marvelous novel about life in Nigeria under European colonialism, Things Fall Apart, the meaning of things and institutions drains away, and people find themselves adrift. They have been left aba
ndoned in the cave.

  Some societies have struggled to overcome this problem, with some success. Japan confronted the issue from the very beginning of its contact with the West. Its rulers sought a top-down solution with their Meiji Restoration, self-consciously fitting Western technology into Japan’s traditional political, social, and religious structure. The results have been erratic. When it works, it works—as witness downtown Tokyo. When it doesn’t, as during Japan’s brutal imperial advance, which led to World War II, the result was catastrophic to its neighbors and deadly to its own people and the rest of the world. The same happened under Mao Zedong in China, with even more horrific results.

  Yet people do search out their balance, if only instinctively. With the emergence of a capitalist China since the 1990s, the explosion of dynamic material affluence has triggered a resurgence of traditional Confucianism, which has managed to push itself up like a resilient plant from under the rubble of Maoism and Communist corruption—as well as, even more amazingly, a discovery of Christianity. When Mao took over in 1949, there were perhaps 5 to 6 million Chinese Christians. Today the number is closer to 100 million.

  Visiting one of the hubs of the world’s technological revolution, Bangalore, India, means being surrounded by landmarks left by Aristotle and his technological and entrepreneurial Western offspring. It is a world of computer engineers and technicians making money, building networks, and opening up channels of communication around the planet.

  Still, many of those same engineers are also devout Hindus. They go home to worship at Hindu shrines, participate in traditional festivals, and practice, in the temple of the Hindu god Shiva, some of the oldest surviving religious rites in the world. They will go on to marry and die according to those same ancient rites. These reflections of the Platonist dimension of the human personality are as vital and important to the lives of modern Indians as the Aristotelian side that appears on their computer screens.