Reductionists and Enlargers: Two Forms of Intelligence, and What Happens When One Wins

Atheist Fundamentalism and Single-Track Thinking

Two Forms of Intelligence

by Claude-Gérard Sarrazin, writer, trainer and lecturer.

There are human beings open to spirituality and to mystical experience, and human beings centred on reflection, on rational logic, on “sensible experience”. The first often judge the second impenetrable and narrow-minded; the second often judge the first dreamers and utopians; simplifying labels are frequently thrown at one another: archaising thought or reductionist thought, infantile nostalgia for impossible dreams or the stubbornness of the blind man making of his blindness a superior virtue; projection of the desire to survive oneself or masochistic mentality.

Simplifying to the extreme, confining ourselves to the domain of thought (neglecting the other levels of the self), we could divide human beings into two great categories: the reductionists and the enlargers (the author has retained this particular acceptation in his writings since 1977); the other nuances (abstract or concrete intelligence, sensory or rational, generalising or particularising, analytic or synthetic, etc.) do not concern our subject.

The materialists (in the philosophical sense of the term and not in the common acceptation) reduce reality in its entirety to matter alone and explain all vital, mental and conscious phenomena by tenuous modifications of matter and molecular or atomic arrangements. Atheists and rationalists are found in this category of beings. By contrast, the spiritualists admit the reality of one or several non-physical universes. They form part of the second category, called enlargers for want of a more general term. The enlargers tend to consider the reductionists as handicapped in consciousness (a whole side of reality is said to escape them, just as the world of visual realities escapes the blind), and the reductionists (generally materialists, in the philosophical sense of the term) tend to consider the enlargers as handicapped in reason (potential schizophrenics).

The enlargers most often consider the reductionists as blind men waving their white sticks before their uncertain steps in order to decode a reality they imagine without seeing it; the second see the first as waking dreamers who superimpose their fantasies on realistic perceptions which they distort or interpret as they please. One cannot even speak of a “dialogue of the deaf” but rather of “different frequencies” that one and the same receiver cannot pick up at the same time.

For the empiricists, the rationalists and the reductionists in general, the universe, man included, was born by chance, evolves by chance and dies by chance; it is not a microbe like man who can claim to modify anything whatever in the laws of Nature. For these consciousnesses limited to the physical plane, man dies because he wears out like any machine, after having aged; such is the law; the mystics are from then on only dreamers, and those who listen to them dreaming aloud are only stragglers of evolution, prisoners of their archaic thought.

For an enlarging mentality, Manifestation (which is too often called Creation) is not limited to the physical world alone, even extended to all the galaxies; other planes exist, and man’s consciousness can have access to them and draw from them data and energies capable of modifying his destiny and his limited nature.

One can nevertheless discuss and exchange points of view between reductionists and enlargers, but, with rare exceptions, one does not convince, one does not “reverse the steam”. The two worlds seem separated by a sort of ontological frontier. Let us return to everyday reality.

Disquiet

Single-track thinking generally leads to dictatorship. Whether it be the Inquisition, Nazism, Bolshevism, Fascism and other tyrannies, all the fundamentalisms, the “saviours of the people” always begin by “defending the rights of the people”, overthrow the opponents of this “liberation” and install a flawless dictatorship. It is to be noted that “the good people” go blithely “along with the scheme” and realise their alienation only belatedly; the resistants, conscious from the outset, are denounced, muzzled or eliminated.

Now, the question must indeed be posed: why, at the beginning of the 21st century, must the enlargers (in the particular acceptation retained in the present chapter) defend themselves against ever more numerous attacks on the part of the reductionists? The reductionists began by demanding the right to difference by advocating freedom of conscience; that was progress; religious hegemony was finally to share the monopoly of “the Truth”. Science was able to flourish.

It seems, however, that a certain overflow is in gestation: in order not to cut himself off from the “serious world”, a researcher cannot publish his work and his reflections in recognised journals unless he keeps to absolute materialism. Theological publications and religious reflections are accepted (condescension), but any attempt at demonstration concerning other realities, subtle universes and spiritual experiences is refused.

How is one to go deeply into the religious fact or the use of “powers” while keeping to the phenomenological or anthropological approach?

Everything had nevertheless begun well: the Encyclopédistes, in the “century of the enlightenment”, fought for freedom of conscience and respect for difference.

Laws were voted and the secular school, for example, was born. Would these pioneers recognise their successors?

The holders of free thought won their battle because they insisted on the fact that single-track thinking was retrograde; certainly the vocabulary was different, but the idea was the same. Faced with the imperialism of the religions in place, scientific thought first and then atheism demanded their right to dissidence. They were right. Single-track thinking, let us insist, generally leads to the Inquisition, to absolute dictatorship (“liberation of Russia from the tsars” in order to replace imperial power with a dictatorship far more coercive, which cost the country decades), to fascism, to Nazism, to fundamentalism. “I alone possess THE Truth and the opponents are traitors to the cause”; one never calls oneself into doubt and “the cause” is never clearly defined; it is always beribboned.

The “free-thinkers” were therefore right.

BUT it seems that an underground movement recalls that a pendulum rarely stops at the vertical; it continues its movement…

Rationalists, materialists and atheists have multiplied crusades against the religions, particularly Catholicism, which seemed to them the best structured. “Names” serve the just cause of atheism and daub the enlargers with their “definitive demonstrations”.

The religions have not known how to modify their language and still teach the same catechism for children, without transmitting the sacred heritage of the great mystics and the great thinkers. The rationalists have no difficulty in dismantling theological arguments, in ridiculing the Scriptures, which they obviously read at the first level… The religions in place still and always publish their Scriptures in translations at the first level of reading, giving to understand that it is these banalities that the Founders were determined to spread.

The “free-thinkers” have therefore felt stronger.

Science (or rather, a brotherhood of reductionist scientists) has followed suit and refuses any datum that could lead to the intrusion of a dimension other than the material space-time continuum.

Might the heirs of the “century of the enlightenment” today be taking over from the fundamentalists of old?

Those religious fundamentalists, in former times and here, burned, destroyed, muzzled, delayed; today and elsewhere, they kill, destroy, muzzle. The fundamentalist rationalists are attempting, here, today, to take up the torch by forbidding the enlargers to express their point of view and, one day that they hope is not too far off, quite simply forbidding them to live according to their conscience.

Freedom of conscience and the right to difference are preparing to be flouted.

Not long ago, one could still remind a reductionist that an enlarger could be as intelligent as he. I have several times crossed swords in public or in private with obstinate people and I spoke to them of Mensa and of its numerous members interested in these taboo subjects, vehemently condemned by materialist Science. The fundamentalist rationalists have finally found a riposte: intelligence tests, they assert, do not express the whole personality (which is perfectly exact) and, moreover, they measure nothing at all (which is perfectly ridiculous). Thus, one can “scientifically” practise ostracism and curtail the right to freedom of conscience and to difference. Difference is accepted if it concerns ethnic groups come from elsewhere, but not that of the recalcitrant, who cling to their “archaic” and “irrational” thought.

A scarcely honourable inheritance

Would one imagine monks ransacking the chapel of their monastery or that of the neighbouring monastery? Would one imagine a knight of old fleeing before the enemy? A Christian of the first times denying his faith to escape torture? Would one imagine a schoolteacher of the beginnings of the secular school encouraging in his class the signs of religious affiliation and the battles between children of different confession? A Resistance fighter delivering to the enemy the secrets of the network in order to escape torture?

What is the common denominator? The system of values.

One lives by or for values. What values does our society transmit?

The religions, with exceptions, withdraw into themselves and, if they meddle with the social, keep to the analyses of past centuries without taking account of progressive transformations. The School contents itself with teaching (when it manages it) intellectual data and does not often concern itself with transmitting collective or individual values.

Implicit transmission is generally more effective and deeper than explicit transmission… A materialist society (in every sense of the term), perfectly egocentric, cynical, and what else?

One of the fundamental causes is of a metaphysical order. We are paying for a century of materialist indoctrination: scientific reason, the refusal of any “irrational sentimentality”, in a word, “self-evident” or aggressive atheism. The certainty of final failure (one must die totally), the certainty of the non-existence of immanent justice: everything is transmitted implicitly to the young generations, who grow up and transmit implicitly at first, then more and more aggressively and explicitly.

The School

At its beginnings, the secular School perfectly fulfilled its mission: to unite the different confessions in a common ideal.

The ideal of the founders of the secular School has been extinguished. Formerly, respect for difference was lived elsewhere than in class and all went well: common values.

The School will be able to weld “the communities” together again by returning to the principle: to transcend differences by proposing a superior goal. But if the teaching body is contaminated by the reductionist mentality, it is hopeless. Nothing “logical” can bar the way to racism and violence. Materialist theories (the social contract) are fine for educated adults, for conscious thinkers, but without attraction for young minds.

What is to be done?

Those nostalgic for the old order wish to return to the good old days, “a return to the sources”… They forget, in their data, that the old sources produced today’s fruits. Error is generally a truth of the past that refuses to evolve. Let us insist, let us repeat: Evolution does not go backwards. Time is not reversible. A new society must be built.

Certainly, it is easier to paint a very dark picture than to propose solutions; it is likewise easier to suggest solutions than to put them into practice. Still, attention had to be drawn.

Man must be given back his spiritual dimension; a century of materialism has amputated an essential part of his being. If the religions in place opened their teachings to the new data, if they united with the initiatory Orders and the Schools of Mysteries… As Alain Pozarnik very rightly says (on the subject of Freemasonry, but we can generalise for all the Orders),

“man must first be transformed, because an ordinary man will be able to create only ordinary and disappointing things in a society that is itself disappointing.”

(Article-interview, Sud-Ouest, 15 February 2000)

It is these goodwills that will serve as catalyst and, perhaps, reverse the process of destruction. Everything is still possible. One can be an atheist and conscious of one’s acts; one can be a rationalist and not live solely for profit. The reductionists could, justly, reproach me with not having insisted at length in my writings on the excesses and the slippages of the religions of old (without forgetting the lamentable religious wars of today) and of today’s self-initiates, slippages that would seem to condemn enlarging thought. If tons of books have been published by the rationalists on these excesses, almost nothing has yet been published to shake the materialist fortress; and neither the guilty religions nor the self-initiates (often founders of cults) are inspired by enlarging thought: they are, in their way, reductionists. The religions are “recyclable”; they can go back to the true sources, change their discourse, read and have their Scriptures read at a higher level, apply the teachings of their respective Founders. Only the fundamentalists ought to be stigmatised and isolated.

Does one ask a surgeon to build a bridge, or an engineer to operate on an open heart? Does one ask an astronomer to study the mutations of bacteria, or a biologist to study black holes?

These self-evidences are so only in science, in the marked-out domains. As soon as it is a matter of subtle universes, of immaterial realities, of faith or of mystical experience, competence is self-proclaimed. This or that physicist (competent in physics) condemns, better than the Inquisition whose misdeeds he recalls in “self-evident” texts, underlines all the frauds of the charlatans and takes good care not to note the patent, disturbing facts. For these “authorities”, for certain fanatical (fundamentalist) reductionists, the believer is a backward creature. And if…

“In September 1971, Wernher von Braun […] declared in an interview on American television: ‘For myself, I do not have to “prove” God to myself, I can say that I see him, that I in some way experience his presence, for the sole reason that it seems to me inconceivable to think that one could make calculations and scientific predictions as precise and as complex as those we have had to make, if this cosmic universe were not subject to precise and constant laws which alone can permit them. There has never, as far as I know, been any law without a legislator… God is for me that supreme legislator whom the worlds obey.’ […]

‘I manage to understand that it may be possible to look at the earth and be an atheist; but I do not understand how one can raise one’s eyes to the sky at night and say that there is no God’, said Abraham Lincoln.”

(Théo, Nouvelle encyclopédie catholique, Droguet-Arant/Fayard, 1989).