The Illusion of Human Power

How culture, ethics and science point to our powerlessness.

At a recent social event, I had a conversation with two Ph.D. students from India who were lamenting the lack of spice in American and British food. “When you ask the Brits why they conquered the world, they’ll say for the spices,” they said, “but they don’t even use them.” This was just one of a series of conversations with international students in which they wanted to know why America was such a weird country, and I, feeling a little like a foreigner myself, wanted to know why North Carolina grocery stores used so many plastic bags.

(Friedrich Heyser’s “Ophelia,” a.k.a., me trying to finish this at 2am)

When we take the time to interact with each other, we find that people from all cultures are very much the same and have simply adapted to different environments. Each of us wants to believe that our culture or experience is superior to someone else’s, but the reality is that each answered unique physical and emotional needs, each was specific to times and places, and thus each was equally important. This is as true today as it was in ancient times, though in the modern world we have come to identify more with the tradition itself than with the needs it originally represented.

Contention arises when we address the fact that certain cultures or people groups have historically been more powerful than others. In the modern era, for instance, we clamor about the white Europeans: did they gain power because of some superior philosophy or quality of their culture, as the right-wingers might say, or because they were vicious and exploitative, as the left-wingers might say?

Historically, the exchange of power between empires has had a lot more to do with chance than anything else. People talk of white colonialism or the brutality of the white man, but he is only the last of a line of conquering and war-mongering empires dating back to antiquity. The brutal white man was the end of an era; rather than being uniquely atrocious (there was no atrocity the white man committed that his predecessors did not), he was simply late. Europe’s rise to power was facilitated by a host of environmental factors and alignment of circumstances. They retained power because the world was already entering a new era: technology had advanced to the point that power took on new forms, and the old forms of brute force lost their efficacy. What ultimately pushed civilization out of an age of conquest and into an age of diplomacy was technology. More important than how to seize power was how to keep it, and this required subtler methods.

Any examination of history must assume the universality of human nature: that each of us is born with the same inclination to vice and that the limiting factor is opportunity. As Leo Tolstoy elegantly explained in the closing chapters of War and Peace, the rise to power and subsequent achievements of people like Napoleon was not because of unique or heroic characteristics of the people themselves, but because of the invisible hand of fate that gave them the opportunity to act upon natural human desires in situations in which ordinary actions had extraordinary consequences. Indeed, when we study great historical figures, we often begin by studying their personal lives from birth—their parentage, the kind of upbringing and education they had, and all the circumstances outside their control that shaped them and brought them to a position of recognition. In making such studies, we often discover that these heroes behaved with much less intelligence or virtue than we might have behaved in the same situations. Were they truly great, therefore, or simply in the right place at the right time?

As the Preacher says:

“I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.” Ecclesiastes 9:11, NKJV

Without diving too deeply into the tangled discussion of free will, I feel confident in asserting that human behavior throughout history is so predictable because our actions, as well as the circumstances that provoke them, are governed by natural laws. We are governed by a whole host of biological, environmental, social and circumstantial factors over which we have no control. If we argue that we have control over our reactions, we discover that reasonable reactions are governed by laws of logic and virtue that have been not invented, but discovered, by humans over time. And even unreasonable reactions are governed by external factors: if we do not consciously arrange circumstances according to the laws of reason, they will arrange themselves around us according to their own laws.

Thus, we find that our actions, even our thoughts, are governed by natural laws and that we can predict, with startling accuracy, how a human being will react to a situation given personal history and circumstances. Ironically, those we hail as heroes for governing their circumstances are those who have followed the laws of reason and virtue more closely than anyone else. Thus, the illusion of power is achieved by the very submission to natural laws: the more closely we align ourselves to the highest laws of the universe, the better our lives tend to be.

This recognition of human powerlessness is part and parcel of religious submission to a divinity. In primitive cultures in which people were daily reminded of their powerlessness by the cruelty of natural disasters, disease and so forth, submission was offered readily without any particular alignment to a law. People lived and died by the power of the sun or of the sea, so to these they offered their prayers and sacrifices, but without alignment to a natural law, these religions failed to appease the powers to which they were directed. The true appeasement came through the technology the people developed to harness the power of the sun or of the sea to their advantage.

As technology advanced in every sector of life, there was less to fear and thus less to worship, and humans gained the illusion of power by submitting themselves to the same laws as the forces they sought to control. As philosophy advanced in tandem, it became apparent that certain virtues and certain applications of human intelligence were more individually and socially beneficial than others.

The discipline of philosophy did not invent, but discovered, the laws of virtue and reason, just as the laws of the physical universe were not invented but discovered. By understanding these laws, we are no less governed by them; indeed, we have prospered as a society precisely because we have submitted to physical laws, in the development of technology, and to moral laws, in the development of ethics. The laws of the universe are unconquerable: we can fall in line with them and prosper, as the modern man, or we can fail to understand or submit to them and struggle, as the primitive man.

As technology has advanced, the idols and polytheism of early civilizations have mostly died out. But, even in a highly educated and technologically advanced civilization, monotheism persists. There may be many reasons for this (not the least of which is the profound influence of Christianity in the early centuries A.D.), but what is most noteworthy about monotheistic religions is the assertion that the universe is governed by a single Law promulgated by one divine being and that human beings are better off the more closely they align themselves to this Law.

When we consider the laws and patterns of virtue, of reason, and of the physical world, we are prompted to consider the alignment of all things to a Perfection. Descartes pointed to this in his Discourse on Method when he endeavored to prove the existence of God. To build upon anything, we must have a point of reference; recognizing the patterns in the world around us, real or perceived, necessitates the recognition of an ideal case. The assumption of the ideal case is integral to science and mathematics, thus it is not surprising to discover that many early mathematicians and analytical philosophers were deeply religious. In modern science, we are building on the framework of these early philosophers, and thus science has become more immediate and we have less cause to think about the Ideal Case in its abstract form. It is in recent generations, then, that new philosophies have arisen. The tipping point was most succinctly noted by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882:

“God is dead…and we have killed him.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

The death of God in the modern world is related to scientific progress, but not in the way most people think it is. We believe that God is dead, because we no longer have any reason to think about Him. We have moved from “what is x?” to “if x = y, then….” We have exchanged a belief in God for a belief in ideal assumptions, neatly phrased by early analytical philosophers. This works well enough in the physical world—we have advanced to the point that thinking about abstract first principles is more often a hindrance than a help—but in metaphysics and moral philosophy, the death of God was a serious blow. The philosophers who announced it did not exult, but despaired, in the revelation. It was the same cry of despair uttered by the Preacher centuries ago: “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.”

Advances in technology (including social technology) gave people the illusion of control, which made God seem unnecessary. But in embracing this illusion, man was faced with the absurdity of it, though we could not put a proper name to it: what is reality, we asked, but a construct of our own madness? Thus, some of the most influential philosophies of the past two centuries hinge on the assumption that life has no meaning, as the nihilists assert, or that the meaning of life is defined by humans themselves, as the existentialists assert.

Modern philosophy often emphasizes reason as a human power, by which we control and imbue meaning to the world around us. But, again, the modern understanding of reason emerged as technology progressed to the point that abstract reason was less necessary. It is easy to think of reason as something concrete, something we control and understand, when we are given clear facts that have already been proven over time. But when we consider how those facts were proven in the first place, we discover the lowly position in which man is naturally placed: that it is not our reason that directs the universe, but the universe that directs our reason. Scientific discovery, in its most essential forms, has always been something of a revelation: by listening and watching, by humbling ourselves before a universe vastly more complex than we could ever understand, we begin to glimpse its rules and patterns and how we fit into them. Early scientists and philosophers understood that there was a mysticism to intelligence, that reason was a “divine light.”

Thus the power by which we believe we control our existence arises from a higher existence controlling us. As Immanuel Kant put it:

“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.”

- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

Reason emerges from the recognition that the universe, and thus we ourselves, are governed by certain laws. My favorite poem, “Paradox” by Clarence R. Wylie, Jr., puts it this way:

Not truth, nor certainty. These I foreswore
In my novitiate, as young men called
To holy orders must abjure the world.
"If… then…", this only I assert;
And my successes are but pretty chains
Linking twin doubts, for it is vain to ask
If what I postulate be justified,
Or what I prove possess the stamp of fact.

Yet bridges stand, and men no longer crawl
In two dimensions. And such triumphs stem
In no small measure from the power this game,
Played with the thrice-attenuated shades
Of things, has over their originals.
How frail the wand, but how profound the spell!

Thus man, through reason, retains not power itself, but a form of power. And even this form of power is only retained by submission to true power: to Law, to Perfection, to God. We are the image-bearers, and reason is our token of deity—but it is only a token, and we are only an image. The universe is governed by invisible powers, whose work we do not understand until it is already finished.

While we are quoting great philosophers and poets, let us not forget this scene from “Kung Fu Panda”:

Oogway: My friend, the panda will never fulfill his destiny, nor you yours, until you let go of the illusion of control. Look at this tree, Shifu. I cannot make it blossom when it suits me, nor make it bear fruit before its time.

Shifu: But there are things we can control. I can control when the fruit will fall! I can control where to plant the seed! That is no illusion, Master!

Oogway: Ah, yes. But no matter what you do, that seed will grow to be a peach tree. You may wish for an apple or an orange, but you will get a peach.

White Europeans don’t use spices and Americans prefer coffee over tea—in things as simple as these we discover our powerlessness. I guess a peach really can defeat Tai Lung.