The First Prophets
I’ve been reading H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World and I came to the chapter about the Jewish people. Wells says that what set the Jews apart from other peoples of the time was that they wrote down their history, their customs, their myths into what eventually became the Hebrew Bible. He says,
“It is not so much the Jews who made the Bible as the Bible which made the Jews. Running through this Bible were certain ideas, different from the ideas of the people about them, very stimulating and sustaining ideas, to which they were destined to cling through five and twenty centuries of hardship, adventure and oppression.”
Wells claims that the most important of these ideas was that their God was invisible and didn’t reside in a temple. All other cultures/religions at that time were based around temples and cults of gods which resided in cities. When those cities were conquered, the old temples were destroyed and new ones erected in their place. The people had no ways of continuing their old customs and had to adopt the new religion of their conquerors.
By making their god invisible and codifying their customs in the Bible, they made it impossible to destroy their religion. Their nominal capital was in Jerusalem, which was destroyed multiple times, but “their real city was this book of books.” He says,
“The Jews were a new thing, a people without a king and presently without a temple… held together and consolidated out of heterogeneous elements by nothing but the power of the written word.”
Then he mentions the prophets as “a new sort of man” who did not give allegiance to anyone except the invisible god who was everywhere. They questioned the established hierarchies and encouraged the masses to use their conscience to make decisions and not blindly follow the norms. They talked about wealth inequality and social reform. He accepts that not all prophets spoke like this and there is hate, prejudice and propaganda in much of what they say. But he also wants us to note that,
“Nevertheless, it is the Hebrew Prophets of the period round and about the Babylonian captivity who mark the appearance of a new power in the world, the power of individual moral appeal, of an appeal to the free conscience of mankind against the fetish sacrifices and slavish loyalties that had hitherto bridled and harnessed our race.”
In the footnotes to the chapter an interesting point is noted that Wells thought that writers, thinkers, political activists, poets, artists etc. were the same sort of man as the prophets. And he hoped that modern humans of the world would be able to create a similar text to the Bible with,
“a constantly updated wet of texts which would set out a consensus view of our core knowledge and ideas, supplying a ‘framework for the thoughts and imaginations of every citizen in the world’.”
This is pretty much a description of the enlightenment project. And behind it lies the desire that some people seem to have to save the world. The fact that it became predominant in the West is not surprising as it seems to be a continuation of the same project, albeit in a secular form, that started with the Hebrew Bible to spread ‘righteousness’ around the world.
Proto-Philosophers
This description of the evolution of human thought, irrespective of how accurate it is, still provides a good understanding of how humans came to do philosophy. What the prophets were doing is insourced sensemaking and meaning-making. Before that, meaning-making and sensemaking were outsourced to the group. The prophets put the responsibility on the individuals, in the form of their conscience, to make their own decisions instead of blindly following the existing norms.
However, this is not yet philosophy proper. We can think of these prophets as proto-philosophers. They engaged with doubt but only towards the existing meaning systems. They did not apply the same doubt to their own thinking. So instead of philosophy, they created another religion.
Another interesting point is that Wells talks about a ‘constantly updating’ collection of texts. This is very similar to my iterative development idea. When the Bible was being collected, it was iterative in nature. Then it became dogmatic because any faith based system, by definition, requires people to have and defend their faith.
Philosophy began when such thinkers began doubting their own thinking as well. That’s when they built tools to check their own thinking and developed philosophy.
Parallels to My Philosophy
Reading this description of the enlightenment project was uncanny for me because it mirrors my own philosophical project so well. The first version of my philosophy is another attempt at this same project. The only difference was that I was willing to accept that there can’t be a single consensus worldview. But I did not fully understand what this meant.
In a way I was being philosophically passive aggressive by saying that everyone is entitled to their own worldview and life-philosophy but if you want to be rational then you should check out my provisional worldview. I was implicitly still implying that my worldview was the most rational one, even though I wasn’t calling it the best one. It was incredibly condescending.
Luckily, I caught this mistake before developing that first version too much. What I was saying was that the enlightenment failed because they tried to do philosophy like science and discover the logical best worldview. The way science works is that once a truth about the world is discovered and logically proven and experimentally verified, then no one in the world, irrespective of their ideological or religious affiliation, can deny it. To deny a scientific fact is to admit that you’re not a rational person.
The enlightenment thinkers were hoping that a similar thing could be done with questions like what political or economic system is the best. Of course, they couldn’t do it and got stuck because such questions don’t have an objectively true answer to begin with.
My solution was to not do philosophy like science and be looser with it. I said that instead of pursuing truth, we should settle for approaching-truths. Instead of trying to find the final solution directly, we should find the minimum viable solution and then iterate it forever to keep up with the changing environment. That what we need is not to understand the truth about the world but build a better map of the world. And that the test of our maps should be their utility in the real world. If it works, then it is true enough for our purposes. When it stops working, we iterate further.
I believed that in this way, we can do enlightenment 2.0. We can come up with a provisional minimum viable rational worldview based on science. It can be accepted by those who care about being rational more than anything else. And we have to be more tolerant of those who choose other things such as meaning or inspiration or love or spirituality, over reason.
The Turning Point
Eventually, I faced the realization that was staring me in the face. My worldview will be built on the basis of “what works”. But who defines “what works”? To work means to help people achieve their goals. Which means goals have to exist before the worldview. And goals can’t exist without values. So, values also have to exist before the worldview. Different people have different personalities and value different things and prioritize different values and so what works for one person will not be the same as what works for another.
So, it is not that a consensus worldview is impossible because there are too many stupid people in the world who’ll never want to be rational. It is impossible because there are more than one type of people in the world. We can cluster them into a few types of personalities and at best we might be able to get a rough worldview that fits each personality type, but it is technically impossible to there be one best worldview and one best way to live life.
No philosopher who wants to be transparent and honest can claim to have the best worldview. At most they can say that they have the best worldview for a certain personality type in a certain life situation. I don’t even say that anymore. My project has changed significantly.
How to Maybe Make the World a Bit Better
(While Practicing Non-Attachment to the Result)
What we need now is not that single consensus worldview or that new Bible for every citizen of the world. We need a way to help people develop their own worldviews. We need to teach people how to do their own sensemaking, how to check their own thinking, and the thinking of the people who try to influence them.
Then we need a system for multiple worldviews to coexist peacefully. We need systems that incentivize finding common ground and make it expensive to disagree violently. So, enlightenment 2.0 is more about structural engineering of conceptual tools than about grand narratives and worldviews.
Of course, since philosophers are also human beings, they will have a subjective worldview as well. And since they are free humans, they should be able to share it with others. But they should not be trying to convince others, especially using rhetorical tricks. And they should definitely not make claims that their worldview is the right or best one.
In 2012, I wrote and self-published a short eBook called How to Save the World. I know this desire very well because I have it too. But what I’ve understood through philosophy is that we shouldn’t be trying to save the world at all. Be wary of anyone who says they’re trying to save the world.
The only thing we can do is try to make it a little bit better in our own way without being too attached to the result. We can put our ideas out there and then it’s up to the emergent intelligence of humanity how it uses our ideas, if at all. Being attached to the result is arrogant and can open the door for dangerous rationalization. Our focus instead should be towards improving our own lived experience and that’s about as much as any single human can hope to do.
Rudya Aditya 
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