It’s interesting that Lehi joins Schopenhauer, Margulis and Sagan in recognizing the category of “purposefulness” or “will” that seems to be connected to the condition of life. He speaks of creation being full of “things to act and things to be acted upon” (verses 13 and 14). In doing so he makes the same kind of distinction Margulis and Sagan make between living and non-living matter. It is a side note, however, for he is not really concerned in his final message to his son Jacob with the state of all organisms. The freedom he wishes to discuss is the freedom that Man experiences, and Lehi’s discussion of this category of freedom begins with the moral law—
“And men are instructed sufficiently that they know good from evil. And the law is given unto men…” (v. 5).
The normal, universal state of mortality (the world of “men”) involves being able to perceive (“know”) that some things are right and some things are wrong. That knowledge is, to some degree at least, dependent upon “instruction,” but mortality is so structured that for everyone who is in a normal, mortal experience, the instruction available to him is “sufficient” and he finds himself existing in a moral universe, bounded by “good” and “evil.”
For Lehi, the distinction between these two types of freedom is absolutely fundamental. So much so that he spends some time trying to imagine the implications of Man existing in a world where “freedom” just meant “purposefulness” or “will” without the existence of an objective moral law and its attending imperatives and consequences (verses 11-15). He finds himself trying to imagine a universe “created for a thing of naught” because “there would have been no purpose in the end of creation” (v. 12). Such a situation he recognizes implies the absence of a God who possesses wisdom or purpose, much less power or mercy or justice (v. 13). He finds it impossible to believe in the real possibility of a creation without such a creator (v. 13), but concludes that if it did exist, many of the distinctions we human beings find most important would cease to make much sense. Such a world view, he intuits, quickly empties such concepts as Morality (with its opposing conceptions of “good” and “evil”), Justice (with its principles of “righteousness/happiness” and “wickedness/punishment”), Consciousness (along with its divide between “sense” and “insensibility”), and even Life of their meaning because the distinctions (“oppositions”) we make in defining them cease to be true in any fundamental or ultimate sense. The resulting conceptual muddle makes everything just a “compound in one,” where it is impossible to make clear distinctions in any of those things that matter most to human beings with any degree of certainty or authority (v.11). With eerie precision he anticipates the intellectual climate of post-modernity where the central concerns of human existence (Freedom, Love, Beauty, Truth, Meaning and Consciousness) become evolutionary epiphenomena. Such a climate indeed tends to drain the life out of a culture. It becomes “as dead” (v.11), because all of its tendencies flow in the opposite direction of “God’s eternal purposes in the ends of man” (v. 15).
The modern cult of “scientism” has the tendency to create just such a world-- a world that exists without a creator (“universes happen…”); life that arose without any goal, intention or purpose (remarkable since the scientific underpinnings of such an assertion haven’t progressed much further than Darwin’s original attempt to imagine “a warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity etc.,” with “a protein compound… chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes…”); a race of men who are nothing more than the fortuitous result of natural selection on the random variations of genetic material; and a mind whose moral “laws” are simply a small subset of his randomly created instinctual responses that turned out (so far) to have tended towards the improved survivability of one’s progeny. And as Lehi suggests, there IS something about a world view that reduces all things to material and mechanical properties, that takes all the tools of human thought and experience and subordinates them all to just one of them (the scientific method) that tends to deaden and empty life of much of its vitality.
Here I am going to use as an example a quote much pooh-poohed by Mormon intellectuals, but I’m sorry, I think it illustrates the point quite adequately. It’s the quote from Charles Darwin’s Autobiography that Elder Packer used in “The Law and the Light.”
“I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music.—Music generally set me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did.”
“This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes, depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organized or better constituted than mine, would not I suppose have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
You can actually read Margulis and Sagan’s work as an attempt to reinfuse a scientific view of life with some of the values and qualities mankind began to lose when it embraced a materialistic/mechanical outlook on phenomena. From the outside I’m afraid that emphasizing symbiosis, biophilia, and planetary autopoiesis seems to be woefully inadequate for the task they wish to accomplish. I sincerely applaud their groping towards “something more,” but I am fairly certain that spiritual values are going to continue to be problematic for those who continue to deny the spirit.
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