Broken

The world is fractured. It is made of too many fractions, too many pieces, too many interactions; they diverge in a way the Victorian world presaged but never envisaged, they multiply in a way the Centralised State could never deal with. Seven kinds of theories arise, dealing with things of this broken world. The theories look superficially similar, but are worlds apart - literally.

These are the seven Cs, the seven riders of our post-modern non-apocalypse: the theories of chaos, catastrophe, crisis, contagion, choice, criticality and complexity.

Together, they ensure that we will never ever be able to comprehend the universe around us. As I've told many of my students, to varying degrees and kinds of response, "We can apprehend much of it; we can comprehend almost nothing about it." There are no theories of comprehension which have not been broken in this modern age. And the ironic thing about it is that we did it to ourselves; for every theory and model which unifies fact and hypothesis and imagination, there is a a counter-theory coupled with a need to falsify. Karl Popper started it: the only good scientific theories are those to which a certain 'No' can be found, thus falsifying them.

And so we have banished all models which cannot be falsified. What does that leave us with? Our seven Cs have done away with an eighth C – certainty. Post-modernists think this is good. But you cannot define even 'good' with the new system of the world. In fact, no definition is secure; no definition or model or structure or logos will stand against the tide of anarchy.

For if in the beginning was no Logos, then there continues to be none, and mankind has no meaning save the pitiful scraps it gathers for itself – the unified theories which everyone seeks but which everyone at the same time denies by their pattern of thought.

There is only one remedy for a broken world. The proof is simple: if there were more than one, we could never know how many more – in that sense, all other numbers are the same in promoting uncertainty. If there were less than one, there would be none. One is a very special number. The answer is: One.

Missing

Too often I have seen the structures of knowledge fail for lack of contemplation. I watch the teeming masses of termite science students building Babel through unjudging hypothesis or the prejudice that results from having an hypothesis.

How can one require an hypothesis before one knows anything? To even form an hypothesis is to say what one wishes a thing to be or not be. The formation of a traditional scientific hypothesis requires that one divides the world, whether one ought to or not, into two worlds - one in which the hypothesis is rejected and one in which it meanders on for lack of disproof.

How can one build a house of data-bricks lacking plan or framework? And yet, one needs to know the 'houseness' of things - either by apprehension of some Platonic archetype (or architect?) or by reference to desired function (a house must shelter, first of all - and after that, it shelters people) - before a house can be planned or built.

And that is why the core of all things is the Logos. Not logic, that tiny lackey of the tunnel-visioned; not the word, that halting or intemperate rebel of the tongue; but structure, as if from the mind of God - meaning in its infinite but succinct and beautiful perfection of variety. It is in the Logos that we live and move and have our being; all else must join the queue of lesser priorities and peripheral angels.