The scam
A lot of people are convinced that, for a few centuries now, a fresh wave of arrogant science, crass materialism, and cold atheism has been trying to sweep away the noble edifice of a philosophical-religious tradition that has always existed, one that is, in a sense, innate to European culture. Maybe even to human nature. I'm obviously talking about all the schools of thought inspired by idealism, whether secular or religious.
Life, our own nature and the nature around us, the urge to fulfill ourselves in the world we discover all around us: this is the real starting point, the fixed foundation on which to build any cultural structure. And the drive to understand all of it is the kind of curiosity that has guided human activity for tens upon tens of thousands of years, since long before anyone talked about science, materialism, or atheism. That, for me, is the tradition that matters.
It was only a little over two thousand years ago that the ravings (beautiful and interesting ones too, mind you) of idealists and their various mystical-metaphysical spin-offs started catching on in Europe. It wasn't a single party but a family of ideas that blended together over the centuries and ended up telling us more or less the same thing. They told us that everything we see and hear isn't real; worse, it's filthy matter to steer clear of. The senses deceive us, and the universe has to be interpreted through storytelling, or even through science fiction. Higher ideas are all that counts. The idealized horse, which you will never see, matters more than the ones you've happened to see in real life: gorgeous, sure, but insignificant. And then the body is garbage, while the soul is sublime. The life we lead is contemptible, so it has to be lived in self-contempt, in guilt, repentance, and atonement, preferably somewhere near a cave, sneering at the assholes enjoying the shadow show on the back wall, while waiting for the sublime, true life that will come after death, which is therefore not the end but the beginning of real existence.
Older spiritual and anthropological outlooks (animistic, Dionysian, polytheistic) at least celebrated nature and life, with all their limits and all their fears. In Europe they were pushed aside, or bent into shape, by abstract ideas, demiurges, Manichaean entities. It's all cheap junk, and my mind (and not just mine) has its legitimate doubts about it. Those are doubts the bad teachers have never managed to dispel with honest arguments. They've always been forced to retreat into underhanded, absurd, and above all unfalsifiable answers, which makes them, for anyone who measures ideas that way, intellectually petty by definition: higher knowledge, holy spirits, faith, miracles, revelations, the kingdom of heaven, the Last Judgment.
Blaming science, atheism, and the rest is like looking at the finger instead of the moon it's pointing at. We've always seen the truth with our own eyes, heard it with our ears, touched it with our fingers, and breathed it in through our noses, long before that family of ideas tracing back to Plato and his heirs gained strength in Europe. And it's a gorgeous reality, not something to be wary of.
Anyone who rejects idealisms and their offshoots, religious or philosophical, is only trying to understand this reality. Questioning idealistic systems is a perfectly normal result of this noble, ancient, human activity.
Idealism wasn't the victim of a cowardly stab in the back. It was idealism that attacked human nature. And finally, with the arrival of the modern era, some people have started avenging it again.
The deception had already been dented by Galileo and other poor devils who were shunned, thrown in the slammer, or even burned at the stake. That wasn't because they were fighting "idealism" from an armchair, but because they dared to look and say what they saw. Later, Darwin with natural selection and Nietzsche with the transvaluation of values shook the edifice to its foundations. Popper, for his part, in a world more and more dominated by science, showed that what can't be falsified isn't science. None of them closed the file. They just made it harder to pretend that junk is still untouchable.
It's incredible how many people still slip on the sludge that's left of it.
Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.
