Of Myths & Men
James Lindsay's Search for Love & Meaning Without God
An important book in my life journey in the Catholic faith has been Thomas Howard's Chance or the Dance? A Critique of Modern Secularism. What follows, however, is not a review of that title but a partial explication of James Lindsay's Life in Light of Death (Pitchstone Publishing, 2016) in light of Howard's book, as I believe that Lindsay proves Howard's thesis. In Chance or the Dance, Howard states:
When, under the fluorescent glare of the laboratory lights, the old myth [that everything means everything] died and the new myth (that nothing means anything) took over, men, without realizing what they were doing, kept on behaving and speaking of their experience as though everything meant everything. That is, their new myth told them that things are impersonal and abstract. They don't mean anything; they are. The method that led to the new myth was called the scientific method. . . . [W]e modern men have accepted the sovereignty of the new myth. We bow to the edict (Science Is All) and then believe it. But, all the while, all unaware, we keep the old myth alive. (emphases in original)
Lindsay, the author of Dot Dot Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly (2013) and Everybody Is Wrong About God (2015) as well as Life in Light of Death, is a self-described post-theist who holds degrees in physics and mathematics, with a doctorate in the latter. He is a modern man whose sovereign is not God, certainly not a God who, according to the old myth, has imbued the world with meaning, which is ours to discover and in which to take delight. Rather, his sovereigns are math and science—although he might not acknowledge them as such—yet, all unaware, as is evident throughout Life in Light of Death, he keeps the old myth alive.
Glorious Correspondences
One way in which man reveals his continued belief in the old myth is by using his imagination, which Howard defines as
the image-making faculty . . . by which we organize the content of our experience into some form, and thus apprehend it as significant. . . . [As] the imagination is in the first place a synthetic faculty . . . its tendency is from the abstract toward the concrete. It takes vague or difficult or elusive things and seeks a concrete embodiment of what it wants to say about them.
Poetry and metaphor are two ways of saying something concrete about abstract things, such as when we call the lion the king of beasts. Howard notes that while
the sovereignty of the new myth ought to have slain the image-making inclination of man, since there is no reason at all to suppose, under the new, that one thing suggests another (lions suggesting kings who themselves suggest the King); no reason, that is, except fancy, for the laboratory has no equipment for chasing and tracing these orbiting and glorious correspondences in which the lion and the king appear as images . . . [we continue to] handle all the data of experience as though they were images—cases in point, that is, of each other and of the way things are.
In other words, we give credence to the old myth while cloaking ourselves in the mantle of the new myth. With Lindsay, this is most evident in how he treats the matter of death, and life in light of it.
The Real Nature of Death
Brian Dunne is a former elementary/middle school teacher of 22 years, the first 15 in public schools, the last 7 in Catholic schools. He holds an MA in Catholic Thought and Life from St. Meinrad School of Theology, and an MA in counseling psychology from Boston College. For the past four years he has worked for a major online retailer, and he is currently working on a script for a satirical movie about science, technology, and medicine.
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