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A Clash of Pantheisms
How to preserve morality after nature’s re-enchantment
Could the Buddha, Jesus, or Muhammad have imagined that they were founding religions that would flourish for centuries?
Suppose Jesus was an historical person who delivered something like the sermon on the Mount of Olives. When he spoke on that occasion, wouldn’t he had to have been maniacally deluded to have predicted that those words would one day be revered by hundreds of millions of people?
Of course, followers of these religions see no mystery here since they regard the founders as divine beings or as specially inspired by God. But to outsiders, these origin stories seem more like flukes. Even if the founders were spiritual geniuses, there must be other geniuses whose teachings happen to leave no historical impact.
I observe as much only to point out that for decades, since the New Age seekers of the 1960s and the speculations of the Theosophical Society, there have been doubts as to whether the prevailing religions in the West are up to the task set by modern conditions, namely by liberalism, capitalism, democracy, automated industry, and technoscientific progress. There’s talk of the need for new religions that would be more compatible with what we’ve discovered about ourselves and the universe over the last few centuries.
The old religions seem archaic (especially Western monotheisms), but how could a religion be deliberately started? Again, wouldn’t that require immense vanity on the part of the founders, and shouldn’t the matter be left up to chance as ideas compete and we go where the wind takes us?
Azarian’s Humanistic and Evolutionary Pantheism
Along with Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and in line with certain Eastern religious traditions, I’ve argued elsewhere that pantheism seems like a promising basis for a late-modern religion.
The cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian comes to the same conclusion in The Romance of Reality. In an article summarizing his book, he presents pantheism in naturalistic, Hegelian, or process-oriented terms, and shows how this outlook supports a humanistic imperative to cooperate to bring about a glorious act of divine self-awareness.
As he says,
Rather than steadily drifting toward a more disordered and lifeless state, the universe is undergoing a transformative evolutionary process that began before biology and goes far beyond. Through a series of hierarchical emergences — a nested sequence of parts coming together to form ever-greater wholes — the universe is undergoing a majestic self-organizing process. In other words, nature’s simplest parts organize themselves into wholes, which become the building blocks for the next level of complexity…
This means that cosmic evolution is multi-level self-organization that includes physical, chemical, biological, cultural, and technological evolution. Life, mind, society, culture, science, art, and technology are manifestations of a single evolutionary process. Since this natural process produces consciousness, cosmic evolution is literally the inanimate world waking up.
Azarian quotes Carl Sagan as a source of that adage that human consciousness is how the universe becomes self-aware. But the adage is more like a perennial mystical koan, shifting our perspective from egoism to nature’s viewpoint, as it were, and redescribing in pantheistic terms the ancient religious conviction that we’re each headed towards a theophany, a vision of God.
The point is also teleological: the universe isn’t just an immense series of accidents, and the necessity of natural laws has an awesome end point virtually in view. There’s no transcendent intelligent designer of this cosmic evolution, but nature nevertheless unfolds according to a virtual plan, to a plan that might as well have been intended, given the profundity of what’s at stake.
Far from being in conflict, then, for Azarian science requires a spiritual perspective to appreciate the meaning of the universe’s complexification, given that “Spirituality simply refers to a sense of connection to something larger than oneself”:
If life is a natural manifestation of physical law rather than an improbable fluke, then the new cosmic narrative has spiritual implications. We are not a cosmic accident; we are a cosmic imperative. The universe is self-organizing and self-actualizing, but it cannot achieve such aims on its own. Curiously, it needs the help of humble mortals. This gives humanity a collective purpose: to assist the universe in its great awakening by ensuring that life persists.
In speaking there of our imperative to facilitate this process, Azarian taps into the Zoroastrian myth that we must choose sides in a titanic struggle between good and evil that will be resolved at the end of time. We must help the universe defeat evil and fulfill its divine potential. For Azarian, though, our part in this drama requires us to form a functioning global brain, and thus to cooperate as humanists who appreciate the big picture:
But to fully realize this transformation, society must become aware of the cosmic self-organizing process we are a critical part of. Knowing that we form the nervous system of a developing superorganism — the evolving biosphere — will force us to think about the larger consequences of our actions and the urgent need to coordinate them, so that we may foster global sustainability and promote progress for humanity as a whole. This is required for the planetary brain to find its optimal configuration for the long-term persistence of life.
Our primary collective goal should be hyperconnection…By working collectively to facilitate a global consciousness from the global brain, we will make the superorganism (which we call the biosphere) more robust through new modes of self-correction, and new levels of control and causal power.
Monistic Pantheism
I appreciate how Azarian aims to tie humanism into this naturalistic process theology, but I’d like to contrast two kinds of pantheism, Azarian’s monistic version and the dualistic one I prefer.
First, I’ll define these terms for my purposes. Put paradoxically, pantheism identifies Creation with the Creator. Whereas the theist says the universe is the product of a transcendent creator, the pantheist says there’s no such distinction, and the universe itself is plainly divine. By creating itself from nothing and developing itself before our eyes, as science explains, in effect, the universe is the supreme creative power.
“Monism” means that there’s fundamentally (metaphysically) only one thing or one type of thing. “Dualism” means there’s fundamentally two. And “humanism” means our species is capable of progressing, especially when we adopt an existential perspective on what we have in common as humans, as opposed to losing ourselves in relatively petty, tribal, or egoistic conflicts.
What strikes me about Azarian’s way of re-enchanting nature, then, is that he emphasizes our role in the larger creative process. We’re supposed to serve as neurons in a global brain to enable nature to awaken to itself. That’s our meaning or function in life, for Azarian. We’re part of nature, and if we fail to serve in that capacity, another species will eventually take our place because nature’s will must be done. Just as there’s no arguing with God, there’s nothing to oppose nature since nature’s all there is.
(Azarian is explicit on this point: “If we do not become cognizant that the only way to overcome existential challenges is by working together, then human civilization will fail, and those that come after us will get their chance.”)
We can think of this scenario as monistic since even if we can distinguish between nature’s various levels and phenomena, such as the microscopic from the macrocosmic, or stars from interstellar space, monistic pantheism unites them all by positing a cosmic telos, a divine goal that everything’s supposed to be achieving. We can also think of this as neo-Aristotelian teleology since Aristotle, too, posited a First Cause as the source of every instantiation of natural order and purpose, a kind of divine magnet to which all things are drawn.
Pantheism and Humanism
The problem I see with this is that monistic pantheism conflicts with humanism.
Suppose we ask what’s supposed to happen once we fulfill our role and nature recognizes itself through our consciousness and cognitive powers. As a global brain, our species learns the truth about nature. And what then? What does nature do with that self-understanding? What ultimately does nature do with us, with that evolved mechanism of cosmic self-awareness?
Whatever the answer’s supposed to be, the purpose would have to be natural and inhuman. Maybe nature is disgusted by the reckoning and disposes of our species as the bearer of bad news. Maybe nature is only experimenting with intelligence and prefers to be ignorant, in which case the evolution of life isn’t the ultimate purpose after all but is only a way of confirming that nonlife is superior to life.
However that may be, humanism is morality from the human perspective, not from nature’s. The end of human progress is human centered because this kind of morality is atheistic, meaning that it’s based on a recognition that we’re the only source of value. Theistic humanism makes little sense because God’s existence would turn us into slaves to be disposed of on the whim of an all-seeing tyrant. A monistic pantheist’s humanism would be just as unsustainable since the purposes of mindless nature at large would have to be inhuman, from the standpoint of our species that evolved to use its knowledge to preserve itself at all costs.
Perhaps, then, this emphasis on what nature does through us is only a verbal trick. We may be a part of nature, on some level of analysis, but we’re the part that works systematically against nature in so far as nature is a wild (amoral, indifferent, absurd) place that threatens all evolved complexifications with dissolution via entropy. That primordial antagonism between parasitic, predatory, vain, or acquisitive life and its indifferent, amoral environment calls for a duality.
Without that duality, we’d have to ask whether the cooperation Azarian has in mind, in his picture of our species as a global brain would amount, rather, to a condition of anti-humanistic totalitarianism. We can imagine this “cooperation” in a generalized North Korea, in a cultlike collectivist society in which the individual bows to the state’s greater “good.” Rather than emphasizing the human, existential rights of each member of our species, we’d be functionaries in nature’s prior, inhuman process of organizing itself.
In laying the groundwork for anyone’s self-sacrifice for the global brain’s benefit, the Azarian morality here would be the opposite of humanism.
Nature’s Absurdity as the Root of Intelligent Life’s Revolt
Of course, Azarian would likely dispute these negative characterizations of nature. He says, for example, that “problems create progress,” and that “The engine of progress is the need to find solutions to our survival problems. Life does this by constantly adapting and learning.” This amounts to a pantheistic theodicy.
But are we adopting nature’s standpoint when we speak of this progressive instrumentalism or are we projecting our optimism onto wild, physical patterns? Is nature trying to improve by forcing itself to sort through the messes it creates? Or is it that we’re bound to see natural developments from our humanistic, self-centered standpoint? We perceive evolution as leading progressively to us, to the emergence of intelligent self-awareness because we haven’t abandoned our primitive preoccupations at all. We’re not seeing things through nature’s eyes here, as it were, but are substituting our preference for meaning and value, for nature’s inherent absurdity.
We should note, for example, the shakiness of Aristotle’s naturalistic teleology. His entire scheme for building purpose into nature rests on a gratuitous analogy between natural products and human artifacts. The metaphysical distinction between potentiality and actuality doesn’t dictate which possibilities are excellent and which are beside the point. Only an intelligent designer decides, among all the possible uses of a hammer, for example, which are best, and which are counterproductive or irrelevant. Without that designer, there’s no objective answer as to which natural developments are best or proper.
The teleology in question is a subjective way of coping with the irony of science’s re-enchantment of nature. What I mean here is that the pantheist seeks to build a religion from science rather than from so-called theological revelations. And science objectifies everything it touches. Consequently, science and philosophy kill the theist’s gods, as Nietzsche observed. And the godless objectivity of natural causality makes all real changes zombie-like in their unknowing shuffling, and thus the stuff of a horror story.
Here we have an apparently designed order in the universe — comprising molecular complexifications, the galaxies, solar systems, and the evolution of life — with no intelligent designer. The order designs itself, by evolving ways in which natural forces and elements work and by discarding those that don’t. The ways that nature doesn’t work are those that fall outside the scope of scientific models or that violate the ceteris paribus conditions.
According to scientific objectifications, then, natural developments are as grotesque as the dead body that gets up and starts to moan and shuffle, as depicted in your standard fictional zombie apocalypse. Objective nature is a living-dead nightmare which is perfectly absurd (paradoxical and horrific) from a humanistic standpoint.
Dualistic Pantheism
Let’s turn, therefore, to dualistic pantheism. If pantheism entails that everything is divine, how could part of God turn against the rest of God, as it were? Wouldn’t humanistic, anthropocentric ethics contradict the pantheist’s all-embracing metaphysics?
Not really, because as divine or godlike as everything in nature might be as a self-organizing whole, understanding that process requires scientific objectification, which means the positing of layers, systems, orders, processes, cycles, elements, forces, and so on. Those divisions leave room for the dichotomy between life and nonlife.
What’s so special about that dichotomy, though, or why should we emphasize it in a dualistic version of pantheism? The answer encompasses Azarian’s point about the universe waking up to itself through the evolution of intelligent life. But there’s a gestalt switch between saying that nature works thusly through us and saying that we turn on nature because of that recognition through our objectification of the universe.
Azarian wants to credit the entire universe for establishing the conditions for the evolution of our species, rather like how the Christian credits God’s grace for everything good that happens to flawed creatures. Yet we could just as easily emphasize our freedom in this process, and our Faustian, rather Luciferian reaction to what we find when nature equips us to know the essence of the outer wilderness as an inhuman self-assembling — and self-unwinding — system.
The point is that humanistic morality makes sense as part of that reaction, which in turn calls for a dualistic form of pantheism. We react to knowing what natural reality is like by filling the absurd cosmos with human-centered meaning, and thus by replacing the wilderness as such by the artificial, self-serving domains we prefer to inhabit.
Our species, or intelligent life more broadly is nature’s wreaking ball and recreator.
Pantheology and Morality
Another way of drawing out the contrast is to ask whether divine nature is good or bad. If nature’s self-organizing complexifications are redemptive and if we can understand and approve of their ultimate results, we could submit to our natural function without fearing we’ve betrayed our sense of right and wrong.
This is what Azarian’s monistic pantheism and the New Agey, feel-good deifications of nature ask us to do. Nietzsche’s Dionysian construal of nature, too, entails as much. On this view we should play our part, whether as a global brain, as benighted consumer slaves in a neoliberal dominance hierarchy, or as wills to power.
On Schopenhauer’s pantheism, as on the Eastern ones on which it’s based, which promote ascetic renunciation of nature, nature is far from good, so we shouldn’t automatically submit to what the universe would have us do. When combined with scientific objectification of nature, existentialism likewise implies that submitting to our natural role, which is to say our function in the wilderness would be dehumanizing. We’d have to surrender our personhood and behave as wild animals, as things or functionaries rather than as autonomous beings.
You can see, then, how humanism can be reconstructed within dualistic pantheism. If natural processes meet with our highest standards of approval, those standards don’t set us apart from nature, so practically speaking, there’s no distinction between nature and people. We’d think of ourselves as servants of natural creativity, and we’d be adopting nature’s standards of behaviour, as it were.
But if there’s no deep understanding of nature without horror, disgust, angst, and alienation, or if nature is fundamentally inhuman whereas we ought to honour the emergence of personhood (of rational, self-aware, autonomous, creative, social life), we’d be divided from nature as soon as we’d develop that humanistic sensibility.
We shouldn’t confuse, then, theology with morality. Just because natural creativity is awesome and should be revered, doesn’t mean pantheism is necessarily consistent with humanistic morality. Gods or mighty forces might be revered not because they act like benevolent parental figures, but because they’re fearsome.
The Protestant gambit of promoting Christian faith as part of a family-values personal relationship with Jesus shouldn’t mislead us into thinking that religious perspectives generally are so tame. The authentic love of God is an ecstatic love that overlaps with terror, as in Rudolph Otto’s definition of “holiness” as something which is both terrifying and fascinating.
Likewise, the appreciation of nature’s sublime powers and scope needn’t be whitewashed and domesticated in a hackneyed or muddle-headed Hippie manner. Better to remember there’s been at least as much pain as pleasure in the evolution of life, and that nature’s dynamism is headless and as grotesque as any horde of shambling zombies.
