Andrew Sullivan takes off with a long-ish item today taking-up why he considers himself a conservative but will have nothing to do with the Republican Party. I can relate; I quit calling myself a Republican after the Schiavo soap opera.
He locates his objections in contemporary politics, though, and I don’t think that’s quite right. What is going on is an epochal fight for humanity’s future.
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with a “theory of reality,” with space, with time, with how we perceive reality, and with everything else. The oldest and still-dominant metaphysical theory is … magic, e.g., “There is a wizard who lives in the sky and makes stuff happen, good stuff and bad stuff, because that’s what he feels like doing.”
But Isaac Newton came along in the 1500s and changed that. A portion of the world adopted a metaphysics, or theory of reality, which is mechanical, which strives to isolate causes and their effects, which believes the proper instrument for apprehending reality is the abstractions of a disciplined mind.
What is really going on, worldwide, is that those metaphysical theories are in mortal combat and the outcome is very much up for grabs; the good guys, the Newtonians, don’t have to win. Recall that Epicurus had improved Democritus’ theory of atoms, articulated an early version of Newton’s First Law of Motion, and set out an early version of evolution of by natural selection by 300 B.C. — and it lay dormant for nearly 2-millennia because the Catholic Church succeeded in suppressing it.
Remember that the Dark Ages were a Western, Christian, not global, phenomenon. Islamic scholars were busy inventing algebra as Europe lay comatose under Roman Catholic rule, and the Chinese were busy mapping the cosmos. We are unlikely to see a reprise so awful as that, but the West — and the United States, in particular — are unarguably losing global influence before the onslaught of fundamentalism, and that is the only possible end-point of the anti-intellectualism of the evangelical right, of its insanely literal interpretation of the Bible, and like movements afoot today in the Islamic world.
It is not merely contemporary politics which drive this fight; it is the underlying theory of reality, and the modern Republican Party is on the wrong, backward-looking side.
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