The American Crisis: Defined
Journal Entry #14
You are what you know. Fifteenth-century Europeans ‘knew’ that the sky was made of closed concentric crystal spheres, rotating around a central earth and carrying the stars and planets. That ‘knowledge’ structured everything they did and thought, because it told them the truth. Then Galileo’s telescope changed the truth.

As a result, a hundred years later everybody ‘knew’ that the universe was open and infinite, working like a giant clock. Architecture, music, literature, science, economics, art, politics- everything- changed, mirroring the new view created by the change in the knowledge.

Today we live according to the latest version of how the universe functions. This view affects our behaviour and thought, just as previous versions affected those who lived with them. Like the people of the past, we disregard phenomena which do not fit our view because they are ‘wrong’ or outdated. Like our ancestors, we know the real truth…

Somebody once observed to the eminent philosopher Wittgenstein how stupid medieval Europeans living before the time of Copernicus must have been that they could have looked at the sky and thought that the sun was circling the earth. Surely a modicum of astronomical good sense would have told them that the reverse was true. Wittgenstein is said to have replied: ‘I agree. But I wonder what it would have looked like if the sun had been circling the earth.’

The point is that it would look exactly the same. When we observe nature we see what we want to see, according to what we believe we know about it at the time. Nature is disordered, powerful and chaotic, and through fear of the chaos we impose system on it…We need to have an overall explanation of what the universe is and how it functions…we develop explanatory theories which will give structure to natural phenomena: we classify nature into a coherent system which appears to do what we say it does.

This view of the universe permeates all aspects of our life. All communities in all places at all times manifest their own view of reality in what they do. The entire culture reflects the contemporary model of reality. We are what we know. And when the body of knowledge changes, so do we. – James Burke, Preface and Chapter 1, “The Way We Are”, 1985; The Day The Universe Changed

With keen insight and unadorned eloquence James Burke- the esteemed historian of science, technology and innovation- has at once provided the reader a basic understanding of human thought as the dynamic of history, together with a secure footing upon which to analyze and appraise the subsequent philosophical threat now confronting Western Civilization, and American FREEDOM particularly.

As we proceed, we are once again reminded of the gist of my thesis, generally reflected throughout this journal: Without intellectual FREEDOM, there can be no societal FREEDOM, economic FREEDOM nor political FREEDOM. That free institutions and a stable society will become impossible to maintain as FREEDOM of thought is diminished. And that this very situation, this diminution of intellectual FREEDOM, is now at work in our country and in our civilization by our own choice and effort- not by government decree, as many would claim.

James Burke’s award-winning book and PBS television series, The Day The Universe Changed, interestingly observes the human tendency in history to formulate explanations about the content and operation of the natural world, according to what is already ‘known’. This ‘knowledge’ serves to structure everything that is done and thought in society, because it conveys the truth.

With a change in the truth comes a change in ‘knowledge’. For example, when Galileo’s telescope revealed in 1609 and 1610 the satellites circling Jupiter and the imperfections and irregularities of the moon’s surface, the ‘knowledge’ of an earth-centered universe and perfect planetary spheres began to change. And with the change in knowledge came a change in architecture, music, literature, art, science, economics and politics- that is, in civilization.

In the roughly two centuries that separated the naturalist John Ray’s (a member in the Royal Society with Isaac Newton) The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691), and the naturalist Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871), the truth of God’s static creation increasingly gave way to naturalism and evolutionary views of nature.

As Benjamin Wiker aptly describes it in his book The Darwin Myth, “We entered the nineteenth century with Christian assumptions for the most part intact: that we were fallen but redeemable creatures made in the image of God. We exited in a Godless cosmos, as mere animals who had managed, through much luck and struggle, to climb from unimaginably low origins to a little above the apes.”

Professor John C. Greene perceptively observes in his book The Death of Adam; Evolution And Its Impact On Western Thought; “As faith in the stability and wise design of the structures of nature declined, there was a compensating effort to find in the idea of progress a new world view which would give meaning to science and direction to human history.”

The question we need to ask ourselves is whether it is possible that a change in the truth- which directly affects what we ‘know’- can be ill-conceived and erroneously established?