David Ray Griffin and the Crisis of Modernity—Part 1
Naturally I kept the letter, dated 1999. The eminent theologian and philosopher David Ray Griffin wrote to say that he read my first book,1 thought it brought up some important questions, and would like to organize a conference exploring them! Wow! Up to that point this book had garnered no public attention apart from a couple of tepid formal reviews, despite having found a well-regarded academic publisher. I can summarize it as my initial, groping statement of a challenge to the standard modern outlook in physics and philosophy of science, one that claims to open a fresh prospect of understanding physical reality. I had nursed a faint hope that my argument might set off some discussion in influential circles at some point, though it was plain that it faced a formidable obstacle in the reigning academic-scientific mindset. The book did around that time gain at least one enthusiastic fan (more below), which can be quite heartening, but there had been scant feedback beyond this. With Dr. Griffin’s communication there was tangible cause for optimism. He wrote that he knew of a few people who had similar or related ideas, and he would try to bring us together on a panel. Each would present a paper. Could this be my “big break”? In any case it was gratifying that someone of scholarly and philosophical repute had felt the force of what I was trying to say to this extent.
An experienced organizer of conferences, Dr. Griffin was well-versed in contemporary ideas in philosophy and the sciences and an accomplished scholar of the work of A. N. Whitehead, whose early-period interpretation of modern physics is at the center of my own interests. Some years earlier Griffin had put together a conference, and edited the follow-up book, highlighting the work of some prominent physicists of a philosophical bent and discussing how their ideas might connect with Whitehead's thought;2 I had checked this book out of the library more than once. I imagine that David had at any given time a lot to think about and work on just with his writing projects spanning theology, the mind-body problem, how to bring religion and science together in an encompassing account of the world, and, as I was to learn later, a history project on American imperialism. In view of this it is not surprising that I did not hear more from him about the proposed conference until 2003, when he e-mailed me to say that he still intended to put it on, but that there was something important that needed doing first. This priority project was not his book on the history of American imperialism; though already in process, this book's completion and publication would be delayed for many more years. What demanded his immediate attention was work on The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11. This book would turn out to be an actual bestseller, and would lead to speaking engagements involving considerable travelling, as much as he would prefer to stay home and work on his books.
One of these engagements was in my city. It was Summer 2004. The event was well attended; people filled a large conference room on the ground floor of a hotel. He began his talk by saying that The 9/11 Commission Report had been out for about a week, and that he had begun work on a book analyzing its claims to determine whether or not it answered the questions he raised in The New Pearl Harbor. The lecture consisted of a preliminary draft of what became Part 2 of the book,3 containing detailed accounts of the four flights and the responses they elicited, times of takeoff and impact, when the information about flights off course, possible in-flight emergencies, and confirmed hijackings was transmitted among the responsible departments of government, when and if planes were sent to intercept, etc. We heard that the Report tells a drastically different story from the one the military maintained for close to three years. The new story, if it is to be believed, takes the blame off the military for the failures to scramble planes in time to intercept the hijacked airliners. The old story, under analysis of times, distances, and velocities, seemed to show a degree of failure of due response on the part of the military that to some suggested complicity in the form of a stand-down. However, the new story, which blames the Federal Aviation Administration for failure to communicate, is in direct conflict with first-hand testimonies, besides portraying people at FAA as implausibly incompetent with regularly practiced procedures. This and other things give the impression that the objective of the Report, in this aspect, was to provide a less troubling story, one that rescues the military and the White House from the suspicion that they knowingly allowed the attack to go forward (or worse), rather than to get at the truth. But if the new story is false, this brings into question the authenticity of the purported newly surfaced recordings of communications on which it is allegedly based. Could these tapes have been doctored? If the new story is true, then all this time the military had maintained a false timeline of events that made them look bad! How are we to make sense of this? Far from laying all questions to rest...
It was a lot of detailed material and went on for quite a while, and the question period seemed endless, but I needed to stay to the end and speak with him. Finally his wife Ann Jaqua called a halt to it, we met up, and I followed them into a small private room. He told me that he was planning the conference for Fall of the following year. We spoke briefly about music, my orchestra work as a violinist, how he played the trumpet but had not picked it up for quite a while. And he had a proposition for me: Would I be interested in proofreading a draft of his book about the 9/11 Commission Report, help speed up the process, clean it up before sending it to the publisher? It felt like an honor, and certainly would be interesting, so I agreed. By that point they were both exhausted; we said our goodbyes and they went up to their room.
I would end up helping out on some, though not all, of the dozen or so 9/11 books that David would end up writing—mostly just correcting typos and other mechanical mistakes; it was always thoroughly organized and thought out. For some of the books another person took over, and I had a “break” from it. This other reader (among others, no doubt) was Tod Fletcher, whom I had earlier come to know (by correspondence only) as another person who responded positively to my first book, but in a much more played-out way, not just to say that it raised important or interesting questions but more like he actually thought I was on track toward the right answers. It was a nice thing, an actual serious student and promoter of one’s work; in addition he was broadly erudite and quite a good writer. He and his wife Susan actually formed a discussion group centering on my book!
It helped that Tod’s way was to think independently and be skeptical of settled views held by putative authorities, even and particularly in the natural sciences (which are not invulnerable to groupthink as history shows; see note 32). In keeping with this proclivity, Tod was, to my knowledge, among the earliest to question the official account of the 9/11 attacks, probably some time before Griffin was urged by colleagues to look into it (Griffin was at first resistant: “Surely even the Bush Administration would not do that”). My wife and I were completely naive on this, having had no acquaintance with skepticism about the government’s 9/11 story, and were shocked when we learned of Tod’s alternative view from a newsletter that he mailed us, self-published under a pseudonym. “He seems to think the government did this or let it happen on purpose! And here we thought he was so analytical and level-headed!” Todurged me to read certain history books and memoirs that would contextualize his view. These books tend to dispel any sanguine assumptions about US government truthfulness or moral restraint, being about secret operations, for example, government-sponsored false-flag4 violence, whether executed or merely planned, aimed at providing pretexts for, say, suppressing radical political movements in a Cold War context, or regime-change operations that the public otherwise would not support; startlingly to us at the time, Tod suspected that the 9/11 attacks fell in this category. At the very least, he thought, they knew about it in advance and allowed it to go forward in order to provide a pretext to ramp up military actions abroad and suspend civil liberties at home. And in fact it was exploited in precisely these ways, whatever the truth about it.
Despite being somewhat taken aback (at the time) by some of Tod’s views—his “anarchism,” or more accurately his opposition to current governmental order as well as capitalist economic order in favor of a radically decentralized democratic order, struck my social-democrat sensibility as impractical—I maintained faith in his critical reading abilities. I would sometimes send him drafts of papers or ideas for written works and he would reliably come back with constructive suggestions. At one point I wrote to David Griffin, whom I figured was always working on at least one book: “If you need a really good reviewer, you should ask Tod Fletcher. He’s an excellent writer and knows everything.” This selfless act released me temporarily from an unpaid though otherwise rewarding job, but I did help out with some of the later 9/11 books, as well as books on theology, foreign policy, and climate change. I was unable to attend, but there was a confab some years later celebrating Griffin and his work—would that everyone could have such celebrations before they die!—and Tod was the speaker assigned to the topic of the 9/11 research. More on the 9/11 books in Part 4.
Continuing with the more widely and acutely controversial aspects of Griffin’s work—diving right into the deep end as it were—one of his areas of interest was psychic or paranormal phenomena. This refers to things like clairvoyance (perceiving and knowing without reliance on the organs of sense, which includes “mental telepathy”) and psychokinesis (the conscious or subliminal mind acting at a distance to move objects around, say); in general it is about alleged powers of mind not constrained by the limitations of the physical organism and ordinary physical causality. His most extensive treatment of this topic is Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration (1997).His inclination was to accept the better-attested evidence for paranormal occurrences for what it appeared to be, given that such occurrences might be fully accounted for within a Whiteheadian general theory of the world (discussed in Part 3), a broader understanding in principle than what is covered by the natural sciences. It would be, then, due to a too-limited conception of the world that people deem such things impossible “a priori,” i.e., regardless of any purported evidence.
A book from late in his life, which I was privileged to help out on, is titled James and Whitehead on Life After Death. “James” of course refers to William James, the American psychologist, sometime psychic investigator, and philosopher who was an important influence on Whitehead. The argument begins by affirming James’s principle of “radical empiricism,” which calls for keeping the mind open to the full range of evidence in shaping our understanding of the world rather than excluding classes of fact that do not fit with background beliefs or theories (about the nature of reality, say). The evidence cited for continuance of the person in some sense beyond bodily death includes the Ian Stevenson studies of apparent reincarnations in children and reports of near-death out-of-body experiences. Also he touches on an episode with organized psychic research in the early twentieth century known as the “cross-correspondences,” which some regard as strong or even decisive evidence.5
Needless to say, this idea of spirit-survival is widely dismissed out of hand today as “unscientific,” as are paranormal claims generally. For Griffin, to put it in my own words, the mainstream dismissive stance stems from unquestioned assumptions about what falls under the scope of “reality,” i.e., what really and factually takes place or exists as opposed to being fictions and false notions. People think that an educated view of the world holds that what is real and factual, leaving aside religious belief, consists exclusively of the subjects of the objective sciences. Under this assumption paranormal phenomena do not actually occur and the entire tradition of “psychic science” since the 1870s is an exercise in folly. But this background objectivist (my term) assumption is refuted by the everyday facts of awareness or consciousness of ourselves and of a world, perception (of a world), and free decision and action which are not described or accounted for in objective terms. However, not everyone is on board with this claim for mental facts as a distinct order of facts not under the reign of physical laws and physical causality. Indeed, what is called the reductive materialist account of mind, which says there is nothing real besides brain processes such as a physiologist might describe (and most likely denies freedom of the will), is, I surmise, widely adopted by scientists and academics today. But its whole strategy is simply to deny, without argument, that distinctively mental facts exist (the popular “epiphenomenalist”6 form of materialism only pretends to be an improvement in this regard). People forget that science (as we use the term today) is not in the business of determining what constitutes “reality” or “being,” what makes a real thing versus a not-real thing; instead it operates on unexamined though time-tested (on the practical side of things!) ontological assumptions. The objective-scientific purview can speak only of electrical and chemical processes of the brain and so can in principle provide no account of what philosophers call intentionality, being of or about something (as with a thought), in general “directedness toward” (something) as with attention or perception.
People say that to believe in the paranormal is “unscientific,” as if it were like believing that the sun orbits the earth. But going by the anti-reductionist position on mind and the mind-body relation, in reality the question of the paranormal is outside the scope of natural science as is the topic of mind generally. That is, science (as we usually think of it) makes no determinations regarding claims of this sort. Whether one believes in the possibility of paranormal facts or dismisses it out of hand is purely a matter of philosophical inclinations, assumptions, and arguments.
Moreover, David would want to add, there are problems not addressed by the objectivist outlook having to do with the ontological status of abstract and mathematical entities.
Again, Griffin seeks to contextualize, that is, make basic, background sense of, the possibility of paranormal facts and of the mind-nature connection through a metaphysical (exceeding the purview of natural science) or synoptic account of the world, discussed in Part 3.
To round out the story that began this Part, the “conference on my ideas” as I had wishfully represented it to myself—and I am fairly sure it was originally inspired by my writing (note this well)—did take place. Somewhat disappointingly, the proceedings were mostly pulled in directions other than where I wanted to go. Griffin and I were in opposing camps on one of the main issues, as explained in Part 3; his talk was, of course, especially well-attended, and required a larger room. It was all quite interesting and stimulating, of course. I had nursed hope that this Whitehead-oriented audience would be quite intrigued by my argument that a range of well-known persistently baffling findings of “quantum” physics can be explained by applying the ideas of Whitehead’s earlier naturalistic period, without turning to metaphysics. What happened was that I presented my paper, there was some light discussion, and that was largely it for any group consideration of these core claims; other people's ideas drew most of the attention.
One problem was that I had not fully appreciated how unprepared people were for my argument due simply to the effective obscurity of the physics/nature-period work even among Whitehead scholars, let alone scientists and the general public. It seems odd to the outsider, but people who get the idea of interpreting the perplexities of quantum physics with the help of Whitehead are almost always thinking in terms of the metaphysical rather than the (earlier) physical writings.7 The only other advocate for physics-period Whitehead on the panel was my friend Hank Keeton; others touting Whitehead wanted to connect conventional physics in one way or another with the ideas of the later metaphysical period. This appears curiously errant from my perspective,8 because as I see it, the findings of quantum physics as a whole from 1900 onward can quite arguably be read as confirmation of Whitehead’s physical proposals circa 1920 on several fronts, from Max Planck's “atom of action” to literal vacuum energy to nonlocal connection. It all depends, however, on being able to accept as thinkable and viable his basic ontological-conceptual shift from given space, time, and matter to “events” and “process” as a shift taking place within a naturalistic understanding, as discussed in Part 3.
But the main challenge for my argument then and now is that what I say is not in keeping with the implicit messages coming down from the putative scientific authorities—and me a mere non-scientist philosopher! Against the established renunciationist outlook, as I call it, which emanates from physics and deeply affects modern culture, I argue for sweeping naturalistic explainability. Moreover, I promote Whitehead’s interpretation of modern physics in the face of its complete non-acceptance by the profession! Probably I did not adequately address these cultural sources of resistance; I was fixated on the innocent project of laying out as clearly as possible how, as I see it, a small set of “quantum” phenomena, those most accessible to the layperson, are collectively explained if Whitehead's proposed “concept of nature” circa 1920 is adopted and applied.
I will wrap up this Part with two amusing and perhaps enlightening anecdotes from the conference:
(1) A panelist was conveying his views informally. He brought up the Crookes tube or cathode-ray tube, a vacuum chamber in which electrons, it is usually said, are emitted at one end and detected at the other. Likely in response to something I said—I tended to ask things like, What is actually going on with the electron?—he asserted in passing thatas to the question about what is in or going on in the chamber prior to the observable event at the detection screen, in his view the answer was “nothing,”9 whereupon he started to move on to something else. Not wanting this interestingdisclosure to slip by so easily—after all it seems to contradict talk of beams of propagating electrons—I stopped him and requested clarification: “Are you saying that there is nothing going on prior to what we call the detection-event?” “Yes.” This alerted Griffin and John Cobb, the two elder statesmen of Whitehead studies on the panel, to what was actually being said, and they piped up: “Now wait; that’s un-Whiteheadian.” “Whitehead believed in a plenum of[actual] occasions.” Chalk one up for our team!
(2) As is usually done, the conference was followed up with a book compiling the presented papers, ideally including also something of the ensuing discussions (which in this case were, I believe, recorded)—a big editing job for somebody, probably minimally if at all remunerated, and the search for a publisher can be equally trying. Over the years it went through different versions in different editorial hands, and a few publishers were solicited unsuccessfully.Finally an outfit was found that agreed to publish it—on condition that the Athearn contribution be taken out as not in keeping with the rest of the book! Maybe I should be indignant, but instead I thank the forces-that-be for this bit of keen irony and source of amusement.
What I want to do in this series is convey how the nature of David Ray Griffin’s work, his unflagging quest for rationalunderstanding and truth regardless of forces arrayed against it, spotlights by contrast and contradiction the establishedobscurantist mindset, which pigeonholes knowledge and inquiry in specialties, downgrades and negates philosophy in its contemporary relevance, and leads to the dethroning of reason itself and of the whole idea that a quest for truth canlead to some “privileged” result, whereupon we are in the “post-truth” era as it is said. I once again cite MauriceMerleau-Ponty’s notation of 1959, intended as the opening thought of the Introduction to a planned large-scale work that death cut short: “Our state of non-philosophy—never has the crisis been so radical—.”10 The crisis has onlydeepened since, as it seems to me.
1. Scientific Nihilism: On the Loss and Recovery of Scientific Explanation, SUNY Press, 1994.
2. Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time: Bohm, Prigogine, and Process Philosophy, SUNY Press, Albany, 1986.
3. The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, Olive Branch Press, 2005.
4. Violent acts falsely attributed to an adversary. A related strategy, serving the same kind of purpose, is that of “letting it happen.” In something known as the strategy of tension, the CIA and NATO are said to have staged terrorist bombings across Europe to blame on communists and anarchists so as to solidify Europe as a Cold War bastion. Operation Northwoods was a plan to either shoot down an airliner or sink a ship, in either case killing Americans, or somehow to fake such an incident, blame it on Cuba, and then ride popular outrage to a military ouster of Castro. It was nixed by President Kennedy.
5. For a concise account see H. F. Saltmarsh, Evidence for Personal Survival from Cross-Correspondences.
6. Mind as distinctively real but only as sheer effect with no causal power.
7. “With only a few exceptions, when Whitehead’s work is applied to matters of science, it is his metaphysics that is invoked, and almost exclusively in the context of quantum mechanics.” Randall Auxier and Gary Herstein, The Quantum of Explanation, Routledge, 2017, 209. I think I may be one of these exceptions, since the book cites one of my articles in a favorably discursive endnote.
8. I discuss this in my article. “Physics and Whitehead: An Alternative Approach,” Process Studies volume 40.1, Spring-Summer, 2011, 80-90.
9. The idea is that one can speak of the antecedent physical condition of an observation in terms of a pure potential in keeping with the chosen language of physicists, that is, understand these conditions as not anything actual, thus precluding the problem of how to answer the question, What is it? Thus reality or actuality is identified with the observable, affirming the Positivist outlook adopted by physics (which Whitehead found appalling). The idea dates to Werner Heisenberg’s reflections on the possible relevance of metaphysics to physics. Physicist Henry Stapp promoted it in his article “Quantum Collapse and the Emergence of Actuality from Potentiality,” Process Studies volume 38.2, Fall-Winter 2009, 319-339.
10. The Visible and the Invisible/Working Notes, Northwestern U Press, 1968, 165.