[This
is the “Epilogue” concluding Murphey’s book Understanding
the Modern Predicament.]
The
review I have just made of some of the specific historical consequences of the
immaturity and division within modern Western civilization certainly doesn't
exhaust the subject. We have just scratched the surface. Even so far as actual
events are concerned, we could go on discussing the consequences indefinitely.
It
seems to me, though, that the most pervasive and life-molding consequences of
the alienation and of our immaturity have been intellectual. In Chapter 1, I
pointed ahead to the fact that much of what I have called "the modern
predicament" consists of the strange social reality we have created out of
a mixture of fact and interpretation. We need to understand that no one
perceives social reality directly. Human beings can only mediate it through a
process of mental organization and selectivity. This means that we always
create our own social ontology. And when this process is affected by gigantic warping arising out of
immaturity and division, the result must be understood as being something that
is quite far from a straight look at the world. The interplay of the mediation
with the many forces I have sought to describe (and, to be sure, with many
others I have neither described nor thought of) has brought about the large contrasting systems of interpretation that we refer to
as the modern ideologies. These, in turn, are not only interpretations of
reality, but themselves become vastly important parts of our social reality,
affecting everything they touch. The main schools of thought -- such as
positivism, pragmatism, social Darwinism, legal realism and many others -- can
also be best understood in the context of this dynamic mediation and warping;
and, in fact, they bear a close relationship to the main ideologies.
These
patterns of perception react on policy and on the entire range of topical
issues that we face in the "agenda" of a society at a given time. The
ideas often even define what it is that we consider to be
an issue. If our ideas were different from what they are, many things that we
consider to be important issues would be dropped unceremoniously from the
agenda, and many other things that we don't even notice today would become
important to us. This molding of the political and social agenda of a given
society arises directly out of the fact that the issues are, in at least one of
their dimensions, the product of our interpretation of social reality. Ideas form
the fundamental parameters within which the practical world acts. Richard
Weaver was right on the mark when he said that "ideas do have
consequences."
What
I have done in the present book has been to spell out what I consider some of
the main ingredients in a sociology of modern thought.
It isn't a complete or exact sociology because the factors I have discussed
can't be quantified and because there are no doubt
many elements I haven't considered. (This admission separates my thinking from
the many dogmatic "philosophies of history" that allege to have
captured in a nutshell all processes leading into the future.) But it lays a
foundation that I have found essential to understanding why people hold the
ideas they do -- and especially to understanding why various ideas that are
outwardly disassociated are so often found linked together. The sociology of
the forces I have described gives us a way to see the common threads, and to
see them not so much in terms of a static "model building" analysis
(even though that is important in its place) as in terms of an on-going human
process in which much can, in fact, be explained.
It
will be in light of all of this that my ensuing books will consider each of the
major modern ideologies. The important thing to remember as I discuss them will
be that I see them in the context of this sociology. I won't be discussing them
just for their own sakes. They exist as vitally important extensions of the
factors I have discussed in this book.