Episode #025 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

So, have you guys ever been to one of those really bizarre, dark places on the internet? Like, let’s say you’re watching a video, and then you click on a related video. And you keep clicking on the next related video and the next one. Smash cut to you six hours later, and you’re just watching Nyan Cat on a four-hour loop. Well, deep inside the bowels of the internet in one of these really weird places, there’s a war being fought. It’s the YouTube video and comment war between fundamentalist Christians and science. Really, the best way to describe it is a warzone. I mean, seriously, you guys should see some of these comments. They’re some of the most destructive, hateful things I’ve ever seen in my life. Each one of these YouTube videos is its own unique, crazy battlefield.

Now, this battlefield is obviously an extreme caricature of what actually exists in reality. But you have to acknowledge that the dynamic that exists in an extreme form on these YouTube videos isn’t completely unfounded. You wouldn’t say that there’s a war between science and religion today, but you definitely have to acknowledge that the two don’t agree on many things. You certainly wouldn’t consider science and religion friends in today’s landscape. Well, today’s episode is going to take you back to a time long before this war on the internet when science and religion were friends. They didn’t hate each other. But what we’re going to talk about today is the beginning of that rift that we would identify in modern times between the two of them. This is the moment when science and religion both kind of liked the same girl at school, and then science took her to the school dance. And although religion pretended like everything was cool and he said he’s happy for both of them, the seeds of hatred were planted, and things were going to change forever.

Now, I could spend a long time talking about the history of the time period and the whirlwind of ideas and political events that led to somebody like Francis Bacon being able to exist at all. But to be honest, volumes of work have been written on it, and it all isn’t crucially important when trying to understand Francis Bacon and what his contributions were. What I will say is that it was a complete mess at the time: centuries-old political troubles, centuries-old ways of thinking colliding with new ways of thinking, different methods of trying to maintain order and get everybody on the same page. But if you were an outsider looking in on Europe at the time, the one thing you’d be certain of is that these people were confused, alright? There have been few instances throughout human history where people have been more confused than these people are now.

For a long time, the church had coexisted with science. But because of the insecurity brought on in the church by the humanistic movement and all these new interpretations of Christianity, the church turned away from science, seeing it as a hostile alternative to the way that they explain things. In response to this confusion, the world headed into what we now know as the Scientific Revolution. People like Francis Bacon thought that science and religion served two completely different functions and that science shouldn’t be seen as something that’s threatening Christianity, threatening to overthrow it. In fact, he was religious himself. Science should be seen as something used as a catalyst for human prosperity, completely separate from religion.

Francis Bacon must have felt like an alien dropped onto planet earth and forced to live among the people. He looked around him and thought that people had been thinking about things wrong for a long time. Not only did he have a vision of what the ideal society would look like; he had what he thought was a solution to all of humanity’s problems. Not only did he know where humanity needed to go, but he knew how to get there. But let me start here. With so much ambiguity about what the truth was, Europeans of the time period increasingly looked for knowledge of all sorts.

Bacon talks in one of his works about the fact that people seem to, by nature, desire to know things. It seems to be something about humans. He says they want to know things for a myriad of different reasons, usually completely selfish reasons. Like, they want to be the guy that knows the most about everything at the party that they’re going to that weekend, or for personal ambition or glory, or he even says just to distract themselves away from their personal life. In fact, when we think of acquiring knowledge in modern times, we think of, I mean, going to some place like the library, getting some giant, dusty tome, slamming it on the desk, and reading through it laboriously for hours. But the pursuit of knowledge to people in the time of Francis Bacon was a little more broad. They thought of knowledge differently. Knowledge meant any act or behavior that was delving into uncharted territory in some way.

See, to them, Columbus was seen as a seeker of knowledge among all the other titles that he had, because he was sailing his ship into uncharted territory and gaining knowledge. Certain interpreters of theology at the time were seen as seekers of knowledge for the very same reason. We wouldn’t see those people as seekers of knowledge by today’s standards, but they were considered as such in the time of Francis Bacon. And when he looked at the people of his time that were known as knowledge seekers, he thought they had it all wrong. Not only were they looking for knowledge in the wrong way, but they were looking for knowledge for all the wrong reasons.

He actually writes a lot about this. He breaks down all the different types of people in his day that were pursuers of knowledge in all their different forms and fields. One of the most obvious ones are people that he refers to as the reasoners. And he has a couple other names for them but, above all else, they were philosophers. We would think of them as rationalists. They were people that thought to find knowledge you used reason. And we know from studying former rationalists that this sort of knowledge always comes by way of them having arguments with each other or having some sort of verbal altercation that sort of conjures up knowledge from within.

There was no experiment that they performed that offered a new insight that they were talking about. There was no external stuff happening at all. They looked within their own minds. They argued with each other about the contents. And they arrived at what they thought was knowledge. Now, if you look at it from their perspective, you can definitely see how they might have thought that knowledge didn’t really require any sort of reading from the physical world to arrive at it. In fact, if you remember, this was the basis used by Plato to make the case for why he thought we were born into this world with total knowledge, with a complete Wikipedia of the world in our head at birth and that acquiring knowledge was just the process of remembering it, of conjuring it up.

Well, another prevalent type of person that was a seeker of knowledge that Bacon talks about are the ones of the superstitious variety. These people weren’t just the various faith-based thinkers of his time. They extended all the way to people like magicians and chemists and people that would put on a show for a crowd on a street corner, people that seemingly heal ailments in the people in the crowd with their magic potion. Now, because this magical realm was so little understood at the time, these people were seen as seekers of knowledge because they were doing things that people really couldn’t explain, and they were delving into that uncharted territory. They were seen as men and women, weird as they may be, that were harnessing the power of nature in some way for the betterment of man.

And this is actually a very important part of the thinking of the time period for many reasons. But the most important part is—look, as humans, we’ve learned to do a lot of things. We’ve learned to till the soil and plant seeds inside of it and then collect an inordinate amount of food at harvest time. We’ve learned to domesticate animals for our benefit. We’ve learned to redirect rivers and streams to our benefit. If we can learn to harness the power of nature for the betterment of man in all these ways, maybe there’s a way for humans to be complete masters of nature, to be in control of nature rather than the other way around. Well, these magicians and reasoners were seen as people that were going on the quest of mastering nature.

Francis Bacon thought that three inventions have changed the world, and a lot of man along with it, more than anything else throughout human history: the compass, the printing press, and gunpowder. And all these things were arrived at through a harnessing of nature in some way. This is part of what Bacon saw as the ultimate task of science. He actually gives a great metaphor in one of his works. He says that the superstitious seekers of knowledge are kind of like ants because they just wander around in a line, and they collect things from the physical world to build their world, to build their colony. The reasoners are kind of like spiders because they just sit around all day, and they spin these overly intricate webs made out of nothing but what is inside of them.

Now, both these methods, to Francis Bacon, are flawed. The true pursuit of knowledge should be more like what a bee does. It shouldn’t rely solely on the powers of the mind or rely solely on material from the natural world. It should be sort of a middle path between the two of them. Like a bee, it should gather evidence through experiments from flowers in the fields. But then it takes that material and uses its own skills to digest it and transform it into something that benefits more than just the bee itself. The bee does this in the form of honey, and he builds the colony. The pursuer of knowledge should do this in the form of discovering something beneficial to all of mankind, not just the person that found the knowledge.

See, that’s the problem with these magicians and these glorified high school debate team coaches, to Francis Bacon. See, at best, when someone has, like, a bad back and they approach the alchemist or the magician, and there’s a crowd around; and he mixes them a potion made from the elements of nature that he’s masterfully blended together and thereby harnessed the power of—when that potion works, the only thing that happens is the magician gets a little bit more well-known among the people; he gets a little bit more liked, and he makes a little bit more money. But how does that benefit society as a whole? Especially considering that when it doesn’t work what these people always said was, “Well, I guess my powers are weak today. I guess I’m not a steward of nature as I typically am. But that’s just today. Tomorrow it’s probably going to work again.” But how is that controllable? How can we know what’s working or not working if we always have to consider how many mana potions the guy has had in the last 24 hours?

Bacon had a better way of looking for knowledge. He thought that we should look for negative instances in things. Let’s say for example, instead of doing ten experiments where you give different plants different levels of sunlight, and then from all that work you draw the conclusion that all plants need sunlight to grow—instead of doing that, you should look for instances where plants don’t need sunlight. It’s a much better approach. And it may seem confusing. Like, shouldn’t we take this seriously considering the huge benefit humanity stands to gain from finding all this knowledge? Well, let’s not project our times onto their times.

This certainly seems very obvious today, but it truly wasn’t back in the time of Francis Bacon. I mean, even just a couple decades before, we have Montaigne. We talked about it last time, talking about how searching for these overarching rules and generalities about the world might ultimately just be a waste of time because it seems like they’re always going to be replaced by a different one eventually. And look, we can understand why a lot of people may have felt that way, including Montaigne, especially Montaigne. I mean, after all, it’s very easy to look at the metaphysics of the philosophers that Montaigne was reading and most influenced by; it’s clear they’re arguing based on conjecture. Is the world made only of water or only of fire? Is this rock I’m holding made of a combination of earth and fire or earth and water? Maybe all three! How can you really know? Maybe there’s a fiery substance that pervades all things that brings them life, you know? I mean, you could see how this stuff could be viewed as a complete waste of time that was never going to yield any practical benefits.

But this was the genius of Francis Bacon: not only to realize that it could benefit all of humanity, but to recognize the various faults in the way that people think about things that prevent them from arriving at that knowledge. Because of the selfish motives that typically underlie why people seek knowledge in the first place, Bacon thought that science shouldn’t be something that’s relegated to one guy performing a magic trick on a street corner; it should be a collaborative effort. In fact, he thought it should be financed by the government. Bacon thought there was nothing better to spend tax dollars on. I mean, after all, what could possibly improve the lives of a state’s citizens more than scientific progress? And should we really rely on personal ambition to improve people’s lives?

Bacon thought it was really scary to think about the fact that somebody could just find the cure to cancer or some other very valuable piece of information like that and then just sit on it for years, reveling in all the glory and fame that would come with something like that. In theory, if instead the government discovered the cure to cancer, it wouldn’t be something that people could profit from either monetarily or emotionally. It would be public domain. And there are all kinds of other examples. We can think of a million of them.

So, how about the fact that from the 1930s we’ve had solar powered and electrical cars around in some sort of makeshift sense, but they’re just never sold? Now, in today’s world, we have an energy crisis. Every president since Ronald Reagan has vowed to remove our dependence on foreign oil. But for some reason, there still aren’t any mass-market, feasible, purely solar-powered or electrical cars. Why is that? Now this could be just the nature of the technology. But in an alternate universe, couldn’t it also be what Bacon was scared of? In this alternate universe, someone could have patented the technology to make these things feasible a long time ago and then sold those patents to the companies that stand to benefit from these trillion barrels of oil still in the ground.

Now, I’m not going Alex Jones on everybody here. What I’m saying is, this is the sort of thing that Bacon was trying to prevent with state-subsidized research. But this wasn’t the only vision that Bacon had for society or for the government. He actually wrote a book called the New Atlantis. It’s a classic. He outlines what he sees as a utopian society, the perfect society. This was actually very common among thinkers. Now, listeners of this show will remember back when we talked about Plato’s Republic where Plato outlined the ideal form of government. Well, a lot of subsequent thinkers tried to do just that too. They thought they had a better way: people like Saint Augustine, people like Thomas Moore, who was a friend of Erasmus that we talked about. Well, Francis Bacon’s utopian society makes science their chief priority. He details out how all of it would work. He gives fascinating accounts of how science would eventually solve all of humanity’s problems if we just let it. One of my favorite concepts that he talks about, just because it’s so different from all the other ways philosophers have approached the subject in the past, is when he talks about human excess.

Now, typically philosophers have all arrived at the conclusion that things go downhill pretty quick when humans have free reign over a finite amount of resources. Let’s say that there’s only so much food around to feed a group of people. Then some big guy comes in and eats half of it, and now there’s not enough food for the rest of the group. Humans should be temperate so that that sort of thing doesn’t happen. We should regulate ourself. Let’s say some sheep need to be protected in the pasture, and some kid keeps lying about a wolf coming around and eating all the sheep. Eventually the wolf does come around. Some sheep get eaten, and everybody’s mad at him. Humans should be honest.

Well, these are the sorts of things that virtue aims to prevent—restriction from certain behavior. Well, Bacon’s approach goes the complete opposite direction. He says that science is going to solve the problem of human excess because it’s going to make human excess an obsolete thing. Eventually, science will make it so that there’s so much food that people don’t need to regulate how much they eat because there’s more than anybody could possibly eat. Eventually, science will make something like a lie detector so that it doesn’t matter if that kid’s lying about a wolf coming around or not. We’ll be able to tell whether he’s being honest or not. Science makes the pursuit of virtue practically obsolete. Such a unique approach to this problem that so many philosophers have tried to solve.

But it’s important to note, Francis Bacon realized that this utopian society that he was envisioning was a long, long way away. There was a mountain to climb first if we were ever going to get to his vision. And it was going to be a tough road. To fight this uphill battle, for humans to think in a way that’s unbiased enough to yield these sorts of benefits for humanity, we needed to circumvent tendencies in the very brains we’re using to find knowledge.

Bacon thought that all humans have four types of biases that prevent them from thinking in a scientific way. And we should all strive to eliminate them. He says, “There is yet a much more important and profound kind of fallacies in the mind of man, which I find not observed or inquired at all, and think good to place here, as that which of all others appertaineth most to rectify judgment, the force whereof is such as it doth not dazzle or snare the understanding in some particulars, but doth more generally and inwardly infect and corrupt the state thereof. For the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidents; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced. For this purpose, let us consider the false appearances that are imposed upon us by the general nature of the mind.”

Let’s try to think about the four idols of the mind that Francis Bacon lays out in terms of how we might use them today to make our lives better. Let’s try to create a scientific method for our lives. The first one is the least exciting of the four. It’s probably the most obvious, and it’s probably the one that’s least in our control. But we should acknowledge it. The first idol is what Bacon refers to as the idols of the tribe. What Francis Bacon was referring to is the flawed way in which we perceive the world around us. He talks about human understanding as being like a cracked mirror that distorts the reflections that we see in it, like an oar put into the water where it looks bent because of the way our eyes perceive light, but it’s actually straight.

Now, the significance of this is that just because we see things or hear things or smell things in a certain way doesn’t necessarily mean that our perception is based entirely in reality. Now, the obvious example that we’ve touched on many times in the past is that the world is comprised of mostly empty space. It’s made up of atoms that are 99% empty. Now, we don’t see it that way. We have senses that create a representation of the world that’s useful to us. That representation is made up of solid objects. It just wouldn’t be useful for us to see all the empty space. But that map of the world is based on a lot of assumptions, and Bacon would say that those assumptions can get us into a lot of trouble if we’re trying to view reality on reality’s terms.

Let’s think of a modern example. Let’s say you’re digging through a trashcan for some reason looking for something. And then you take that same hand, and you give a sponge bath to a very sick hospital patient. And then you look at your hands, and it looks like they’re perfectly clean. Your senses are telling you that it’s perfectly okay to eat this giant bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and then lick the powdered cheese residue off of your fingers, right? Seems like everything’s fine.

Well, Francis Bacon wouldn’t have endorsed that behavior, well, for two reasons. One, it’s completely disgusting. Just use a napkin, for God’s sakes. And second, because your hands aren’t actually clean. They have germs all over them. You’re going to get sick. Millions of people died for what they thought were unexplainable reasons before germ theory was developed in the 1800s and they knew why they died. And it took this long because people trusted that biased map that their senses gave them way too much. What we should do is be mindful of this limitation in our own lives.

The second idol is what Bacon calls the idols of the cave. Now, this is an allusion to Plato’s allegory of the cave, and it refers to our ways of thinking about the world that we’ve been conditioned to believe based on our own individual education or customs. There may not actually be evidence to support this knowledge that we have, but it is what we believe.

Now, the examples in this category are endless. You guys can probably think of a thousand. But just for the sake of clarification, one that everybody might be able to relate to is the way that a lot of modern Americans think about their diet. For the last few decades, brilliant marketers have conditioned people to believe things like a low-carb diet is healthy or a low-fat diet is healthy. They say this stuff as though 90% of your calories should come from protein exclusively. Low-calorie equals healthy, and high-calorie equals unhealthy. Well, that’s nowhere near what reality is, right? Your body needs carbohydrates, or you’re going to constantly feel lethargic. Your body needs fats, or you’re not going to digest things properly. Your brain won’t function correctly, etc.

If we’re talking about what a healthy diet is as far as what percentage of your calories comes from each of the three—proteins, carbs, and fats—that’s completely dependent on your lifestyle, just like the total number of calories you eat in a day is dependent on your lifestyle. Sure, a low-carb diet is healthier than eating at Taco Bell three times a day and being massively overweight. And yeah, these diets help those types of people to think of food in terms of something other than how they can treat themselves to something right now. But these fad diets have also created a group of dogmatic people that oversimplify nutrition and what being healthy really is. Francis Bacon would definitely put these sorts of beliefs into the idols of the cave.

The third idol is that’s called the idols of the marketplace. Now, this is the most interesting one to me. It has to do with the preconceived biases we hold regarding what we envision when we communicate with each other. For example, I can say that I’m recording this podcast, and I’m talking into a microphone. Now, each person listening to the show has an image in their head of what that microphone looks like, alright? Just picture it right now. That image comes from the sum total of every microphone you’ve ever seen in your life combined with what you think my microphone may look like. Now, what if I said, instead of a microphone, what if I said I’m talking into a transmitter to record the show? What if I said I’m talking into a recording device?

These different words bring up different images in everybody’s head of what’s being described, but the actual thing that I’m describing hasn’t changed a single bit. Bacon recognized this, and he realized that these individual biases that we hold about the connotations behind words could prevent us from seeing reality on reality’s terms. This is a huge flaw in human thinking, and it’s honestly exploited by people all the time in today’s world. The fact is, each and every one of us would benefit greatly if we could just find out when we’re being exploited.

For example, newspapers or news networks will commonly use certain words when describing something that make you feel a certain way that’s in their best interest. They’ll direct and manipulate what you think about what they’re telling you about. One really good example that I recently read—and I can’t remember where I read it—but it had to do with the current debate on health insurance in the United States. Now, certain news outlets that want you to like the current bill that’s going to be passed will describe it as health care reform, because there’s a positive connotation associated with the word “reform.” That word implies that there is some current flawed mechanism that’s in need of being fixed. For you to be against health care reform, you need to be against reform in general.

Now, on the opposite side of the isle, they’ll describe it as socialized medicine. Now, the thinking there is that they’re going to strike a negative chord with a lot of Americans that have an aversion to socialism. “That’s not what ‘Merica’s all about!” Now, the thing they’re describing hasn’t changed at all. But the way that people perceive it has changed quite a bit. It's gone from a bill that’s our savior that’s saving us from a damaged system all the way to a hostile takeover of our American way of life. Bacon would point out that the reality of what it is got lost somewhere in the middle, somewhere in the connotation of the words.

The final idol Francis Bacon talks about is what he called the idols of the theater. The theater implies that the world is a stage, a stage on which many acts have already been performed that shape the way we currently think about things. Now, when he said this, Francis Bacon was referring to long-accepted doctrines of thought or philosophical systems, things that might shade the way we view the world. Now, he considers these philosophical systems as theater because they’re kind of like fictional plays where we create a setting that isn’t real at all, and we act it out as though it is.

We can see this kind of things in droves in modern times all around us. But let’s think about how much is at stake here: being born into the world, being conditioned into a philosophical approach to life, and then not questioning it. Look, the reason why as a society we deeply admire people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, is because they questioned the philosophical systems underlying the world that they were born into. I mean, how many women were born before the 1920s in the United States that were told that simply because of their gender they were inferior to men, and therefore not allowed to do everything that men could do? And how many of those women just accepted that? There were millions of them that just thought, “I guess this is just the way that it is. I’m a woman. I’m just not capable of doing certain things well enough to be trusted with them.” Well, was that based in reality? Of course it wasn’t.

What Francis Bacon urges us to do is to not allow ourselves to fall into a biased way of thinking simply because we’re born into it and it’s easy just to go along with it.