The New Age - Part 1

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Dear All,

 

Here commences Bede Griffiths' " The New Age " .

 

Enjoy,

 

violet

 

 

 

The New Age - Part 1

 

(p.276) There is a general feeling today that we are at the end of an age, an

age which began three centuries ago with the discoveries of Galileo and Newton

and resulted in the gradual development of a materialist philosophy and a

mechanistic model of the universe. This has in the course of time affected our

whole society. The present industrial system and modern technology are the

direct result of this mechanistic concept of the universe. The whole social,

political and economic system of the West is governed by it, and even art,

morality and religion are affected by it. So we live in a world which came into

being in the last three centuries, and has come to a head only in the last

century.

 

The basic principle of this world is its materialistic philosophy. This

materialism is explicit in Marxism but it is implicit practically everywhere and

it governs people's attitudes of mind and behaviour. Its basic principle is

reductionism; it is the reduction of everything to certain material principles

and to its material base. To take a simple example, all music can be reduced to

vibrations on strings or in a pipe, mere vibrations in the air, and those

vibrations may then be treated as being what music is, without concern for any

other value which belongs to it. Fritjof Capra has shown convincingly in 'The

Turning Point' (1982) how this mechanistic system has come to dominate every

aspect of science and of practical life today. He shows how modern physics was

at first an attempt to explain everything in terms of atoms, where everything

was reduced to material particles which obeyed mechanical laws and could be

known by mathematical calculations. (p.277) So the whole physical world came to

be reduced to a machine. In biology the attempt still continues to explain all

life in terms of physics and chemistry, and to believe that living beings are

simply more complicated machines. More seriously for practical purposes, in

medicine the human body is conceived from a biological point of view as a

mechanical system obeying physical and chemical laws, and to be treated simply

as a physical entity and manipulated by genetic engineering, without relation to

the psyche or to the whole human person.

 

Psychology is obviously less amenable to reductionism than medicine.

Nevertheless many of its methods are conspicuously reductionistic. Behaviourism,

for instance, is a serious attempt to reduce the human psyche to the status of a

machine by analysing it only in terms of external behaviour. Another example is

the psychoanalysis of Freud and the tremendously influential method based on his

work, where the attempt is made to explain the whole human personality in the

light of the unconscious, which is seen in terms of repressed appetites,

instincts and desires. In Freudian psychology all the higher levels of

consciousness, the motives of the heart, morality and religion are explained in

terms of the unconscious. This is typical of the whole method. It is an attempt

to explain the higher in terms of the lower and to reduce the higher to the

level of the lower, so that, to take a glaring example, religion is regarded as

repressed sex.

 

In sociology the attempt is made to reduce society to individual persons who are

either left free to seek their own advantage or have to be organised by the

state. From this arises capitalism and communism, in both of which systems

society is reduced to a multitude of individuals. Finally, in economics this

principle is most obvious where the whole aim is to conceive society simply in

terms of production and distribution. (p.278) In Marxism society is deliberately

reduced to the economic base, which is conceived as determining the whole. In

capitalism society is judged in terms of monetary value so that the prosperity

of a nation is evaluated in terms of its gross national product, by the money

which is being circulated in it and the way it is being used.

 

This is a drastic system by which everything is reduced to the material level,

and it has had extraordinary success. Scientifically it has led to great

discoveries being made and it has undoubtedly produced an impressive system of

technology. On a social scale it has produced states with tremendous power

building up influence all over the world. But at the same time it is gradually

producing inevitable evil effects, rapidly exhausting material resources,

polluting the environment and leading to the build-up of armaments which

threatens to lead to a nuclear war capable of destroying our entire civilisation

and the whole planet. All this is the result of three centuries of materialism

building up to its height in the first part of this century.

 

In the second part of this century we have begun to discover what has been

taking place and in what we are involved, and a new movement has begun which is

the opposite of all this. We are beginning now to be able to replace the

mechanistic system and mechanistic model of the universe with an organic model.

This is the beginning of a return to the traditional wisdom, the wisdom by which

human beings have lived over thousands and thousands of years and with which the

great societies of the past have been built up. In this ancient traditional

wisdom the order of the universe is seen always to be three-fold, consisting not

only of a physical dimension but also of a psychological and a spiritual world.

The three worlds were always seen as interrelated and interdependent. This

understanding of the three orders of being and of their interdependence is what

is known as the perennial philosophy.

 

A New Vision of Reality (Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and

Christian Faith) Chapter 13, p.276-278

Bede Griffiths

Templegate Publishers - Springfield, Illinois

ISBN 0-87243-180-0