36. Under the Street Lamp (1)

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In the traditional folk tales of Central Asia, we find a collection of witty and whimsical teachings that all rely upon a central figure whose foibles and follies reveal an inexhaustible well of wisdom. I am referring, of course, to the fictional character of Nasrud-Din, on whom are hung a great variety of humorous and profound anecdotes revealing the state of humanity in all its absurdity. Here is one that perfectly captures our modern condition:

A man was going home one night when he saw Nasrud-Din bent over and shuffling around a lamp post. “Did you lose something?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied Nasrud-Din. “My ring.”

Being a good friend and neighbour, the passerby joined in the quest, poking in the sand and dirt and squinting as he tried to locate the lost item.

After several minutes of fruitless searching, the man straightened up and asked, “Tell me – where exactly do you think it fell?”

“Just outside my house,” said Nasrud-Din. “But the light here is so much better.”

This story has the ring of truth to it because it so succinctly illustrates the wishful thinking that underlies the professional pursuit of knowledge. We investigate what is clear and easy for us, and then filter out the dark, vague, distant, and immeasurable as unworthy of our search. In this way, knowledge becomes a matter of what we see rather than what is there. (Rolf Dobelli in The Art of Thinking Clearly¹ has termed this the “availability bias”.) And that, in short, is what makes materialism so irresistibly popular. The lost ring – the initial reason for our quest – is soon forgotten, and consequently every glint and sparkle from the dirt directly under the lamp becomes a discovery and a vindication.

The Qur’an has its own way of expressing this all-so-human tendency to reduce reality to visibility.

In English, we would say “made his wishes his god”, reversing the Qur’anic order of “god” and “wishes”, just as we would mention what we think is near before what we believe is farther off in saying “make his dreams come true” or “make money his goal in life”. But in the Qur’an, a god is always the one closest to the self, either as his Lord or his alter ego; we fail to recognize GOD by associating Him with something that is actually more distant, even if we hold it as dear to us as our own desires. In the same way, the lost ring of truth is “just outside” our home, but we associate it with the light in the street because we want it to be there, where the search is easy and the results are clear.

Matter is the epitome of outward show, what we see and think of first when we speak of feminine beauty (the skin, the hair, the figure), masculine power symbols (the house, the car, the mass of soldiers), or simple reality (like Samuel Johnson kicking a stone to disprove Berkeley’s idealism – “I refute it thus!”). What we truly value is the beauty, the power, or the reality, all of which are immaterial and immeasurable, but because we cannot see them under the lamp of our short-sighted minds, we take their material surfaces as adequate substitutes. And thus is scientism born.

Materialism or physicalism is the default version of reality nowadays because it offers everything we want reality to have: simplicity, clarity, a consistent structure of interlocking hypotheses, a claim that it explains everything we see, hear, or feel, falsifiability (implicitly valuing the provable over the unprovable), an alliance with the prestige of science, a narrative of past progress, a prospect of future greatness, a justification for moral relativism or the irrelevance of morals, and a wide-open ethical vacuum for exploitative capitalism to expand into.

I am not denying the explanatory power and beauty of physicalism within its proper domain. But we need to realize that when people say, as so many do nowadays, that ‘I believe in science’, they are accepting the encroachment of materialism into their lives, minds, and spirits quite some way outside of that proper domain. How has that happened?²

¹ Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly, p. 31.

² See the Prologue in Sheldrake, Science Set Free, for a brief summary.

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