A new dark age of dogma
a reaction to the challenges of the new science and principles of uncertainty
The challenges of a new 'musicalised' science incorporating movement, rhythm, interactivity, uncertainty, development, simultaneous validity of opposites and continuous questioning is causing many to take refuge in a resurgent religious fundamentalism affecting the major Abrahamic religions.
A new dark age of dogma as a reaction to the challenges of the new science and principles of uncertainty
The great discipline of science enlarging and widening its influence and applications through standardised observation, deduction induction, documentation, experimentation and creative synthesis of data acting and interacting within the incredible Crucible of the human brain/heart has been producing the most amazing wonders. Science and its applications with all the great achievements has taken us and itself from the arena of certainty and firm closed conclusions into a wonderful and frightening arena of openness, of doubt, probability, randomness and never ending questions and questioning.
This great leap forwards by science has created a space for pseudoscience! A lot of adventurer abusers of human need and fear, most of them quasi enlightened, poorly educated elements, have crept slowly or rapidly into the openness of the new science in an attempt, not to understand in depth the potential freedom and richness of understanding the capabilities and limitations of reason and logic and pure rationality - a noble and worthy quest- but to quickly fill in the areas of healthy doubt and newly discovered modesty and humility of the new science. The new potential freedom zones are to be quickly filled with a resurrected vision of religion/s as fixed a priori formulae encompassing all truth past present and future.
These fundamentalist dogmatist basking in certainty, use the modesty and humility and uncertainty of the new science to ridicule science and to ascertain that they are the only rightful owners and controllers of the "supernatural" areas beyond science or scientific understanding. This regenerated breed resurrected like unwanted ghosts from the pre-science dark ages, zealously promulgate their own dogmas to rapidly fill the vacuum, before humanity has time and space to contemplate the enormity and the beauty of the challenges posed by the new science. The new dogmas evolved to counter the fear generated by modern science, are mostly made up of a salad of morals, religious mythology and religious faiths revived in their rigid and dogmatic, literal form. All the better if the new pundits could add to the anti-science brew a touch of Eastern and esoteric religions which have the advantage that very few would or could really understand anything about them in depth. It is nearly impossible without being bred and brought up in the culture and being early linked to the processes of how these religious traditions were generated and developed, to reach anywhere near understanding the quintessence of the meaning the ‘great’ Eastern religions(including Christianity) intended to transmit. The learned and the erudite scientist finds himself surrounded by all these societies of "wise people" "knowledgeable people" who abuse the scientists’ newly acquired modesty to assert the supremacy of their hodgepodge mixture of ideas of great Eastern esoteric wisdom mixed with the three Abrahamic religions distorted and corrupted over the years and turned into powerful dogma perpetrators and generators of concepts and dynamics that go deeply against their own essences!
Whether they know it or not the same ‘religious’ groups or groupings are pulling the collective human consciousness into regression and denial of the importance of the revolution taking place in science. It is a revolution of great importance and has to do with the birth of uncertainty and probability and interactivity as a "scientific" demand! Superficially this seems to be a licence to abandon science and rush to the safer more ‘sure’ dogmas of the old religions taking refuge in a regressive fundamentalism as promulgated by the religious institutions or the dogmas of the new religious fundamentalists. If science as a system of absolute certainty is failing us by growing to cross the threshold into uncertainty, probability, pluralism, dynamism and interactivity principles, then other ‘safe’ god/s must be found at once! The old dogmas are becoming reasserted and re-rooted in fascist and fanatic ways which are much more comfortable than the terrifying new science. Rigid, fixed and absolute truths however simplistic and naive are much safer tha quantum theory and quarks and bosons and and expanding Universe in intense turmoil.
For the whole of humanity it is a great and potentially rich moment and a great breakthrough when modern science learns and teaches us of a new interactive dynamic model of self and of matter, energy time and the Universe, a new model for health sciences, sociology, history, politics and economics is created promising enormous dividends. It is a great breakthrough to understand the effect of the Observer on the observed. Whole new vistas of tolerance, careful listening to the other, pluralism, and harmony between opposites are opened, if only we choose to understand the sociopolitical and conceptual implications of the recent developments in science. Some perceive the leap as ‘the musicalisation of the new science’.
The real danger is to shun all that and to laugh at this "interactive relativistic" view of self and the world using the natural human fear of doubt and of unpredictability and fear of reserved judgment, as an excuse to regress or relapse into fundamentalism and dogma in a way that brings to mind the darkness of the dark ages. The irony is that this newly spreading darkness of fundamentalism and dogma is brandished by its followers and leaders as a formula of enlightenment and deeper knowledge and healthy religious, social and moral resurgence.
It is terrifying to think that in this creeping new/old dark age of pseudo-religious resurgence the protagonists/victims and their leaders are in their unitary, static, rigid pre-judged certainty, in possession of the most devastating weapons of mass impersonal destruction of all time! All sorts! They also possess ‘weapons’ of mass persuasion and subliminal education
Tarek Ali Hassan
