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FURTHER COMMENTS:
Over thousands of years the major
world cultures built upon our natural human language skills, to add first
literacy, then formalized logic, and now a highly critical self-awareness.
The long histories of both science and religious thought illustrate this
process of development and show us how we have come to think as we do.
We need to understand these histories to recognize where cultures think
alike and where not, so that we can deal with our differences constructively.
This is especially so in the current context where religious thought is
driving major turmoil and tensions.
In the struggle to remain free from domination by scientific rationality,
religious thinkers have stressed the differences between religion and science.
But the history of religious thought and science shows that they
have shared in the same sequence of thought styles, at least in several
great world cultures, East and West.. One implication of this history is
that scientific rationality is not a peculiarly Western mode of thought.
Another is that religious thought became more sophisticated and less primitive
precisely by sharing in the stages of thought that have led also to modern
science. We are the inheritors of this long developmental history
of modes of thought. By studying this history, we can better make
sense of ourselves, including both our science and our religious thought
and their ongoing relation to each other.
The thesis of Stages of Thought
is controversial. The book supports a suspicion voiced long ago by
Piaget that cultural processes may echo some aspects of individual cognitive
development. Many theories of the evolution of culture have a deservedly
bad reputation because they implied that the people of some cultures are
naturally or innately inferior to those of others. The same theories
often used modern European moral and religious standards rather uncritically,
blithely judging some cultures to be inherently inferior, failing to appreciate
some of the seemingly exotic but well-functioning practices of these cultures.
As antidotes to these failings, anthropologists and then others also in
academia, have argue vigorously that cultures determine the ideas and values
of people so thoroughly that the ideas of the people of one culture cannot
successfully compared with those of another culture. Anthropologists argue that developmental theories of culture are particularly offensive
because such theories imply a ranking of cultures along a line of lesser
or greater development. Out of an admirable sympathy for all peoples,
including those of illiterate hunter-gathering societies, ‘postmodern'
and anti-colonialist thought refuse to acknowledge similar developmental
stages in various cultural histories, lest that imply that some cultures
are less developed than others. The motives behind this refusal
are good; the conclusions are not.. There is a clear evidence of a developmental
pattern in cultural histories. Knowledge of this pattern can provide
useful guidance for interactions among different peoples.
Stages of Thought is also
controversial in that it challenges theories about the social construction
of reality. The "strong" social construction theories, as they are
called, say that every society constructs its own picture of reality, as
well as its own criteria for judging what is real or not. This is
taken to imply that truth
therefore varies from culture to culture, and there is no universally valid
objective set of criteria to judge which culture is right or not. Stages
of Thought presents a historical case that shows the same kinds of
criteria for truth appearing across major cultures, East and West, as though
we human beings do indeed have some universally valid criteria for truth.
This same historical analysis makes sense of the demonstrated effectiveness
and universal applicability of modern scientific method.
Page last edited May 4, 2004. |
